Three Days Of Darkness
"Take that, Satan's minion!" cried Moe.
CHAPTER I
Three Days of Darkness!
“Good grief!” exclaimed Moe Hardee as he perused the latest Parish Post. He ran his fingers through his blonde hair and cast a worried glance toward his brother, Hank. “It says here that Padre Pio has prophesied Three Days of Darkness!”
“Gee,” remarked Hank, dark-haired and one year older than seventeen-year-old Moe, “that will sure put a crimp in our boating plans!” Hank and Moe were the sons of famous detective Denton Hardee, and they had been looking forward to a weekend expedition on Bartlett Bay with their Mayport High chums. “Read me the details.”
“Well, according to Padre Pio, an enormous cross in the sky will signal the imminence of three days of darkness, during which the sun will not shine and demons will run loose throughout the streets.”
“Holy moly!” reacted Hank, whose customary reserve and lack of impulsiveness had been rattled by the startling news.
Hip Hop
The irrepressible Hop guides the trash truck home at the end of another day.
As a summer job, it wasn't bad. Working for my hometown's small parks and recreation department gave me a steady 40 hours a week with weekends off. Although it was for minimum wage ($3.35 an hour at the time), the full-time seasonal position allowed me to earn enough money for the textbooks and miscellaneous expenses of a further three quarters of undergraduate study. Furthermore, one's employment there made the prospect of being re-hired the following season likely, and so it was that my college experience was interspersed with a trio of summers spent keeping the parks beautiful.
The colorful characters I met there could have populated a lowbrow sitcom. Each day began and ended in a dingy office area within the maintenance garage, where assignments were given out in the morning and the same four regulars concluded each afternoon with a few rounds of euchre. Many of them had been working for the parks department for years, and the atmosphere was very casual and wisecracking. On my first day there, another "temp" and I were assigned to the most casual and wisecracking of them all, a small and rotund man who went by the nickname of Hop.
School’s Out
No more pencils, no more books...
I've always heard that a school of piranha can skeletonize a cow in mere minutes, a trivial tidbit that came to mind as I watched the students in my classroom remove everything attached to the walls in preparation for summer break. Dozens of educational elements, from large wall posters to tiny "word wall" words, were ravenously detached in a frenzy of activity. What had taken me hours to put up was taken down in minutes, and my students stepped back and surveyed the bare bones of our room with sighs of satisfaction.
For the kids, there is an almost painfully sweet quality to the approaching end of a school year. Each emptied desk and vacant bulletin board is a sure sign that freedom is tantalizingly near, yet the final dismissal seems ever-receding, like a desert mirage. This frustrating combination of heightened anticipation and delayed gratification is largely responsible for the June madness that tries the souls of students and teachers alike. You can't blame the children: when you're only nine or ten years old, a summer off is one long vacation.
Group Dynamics
The Beatles: indispensable leads, colorful supporting characters, and no extras?
Imagine the public outrage that would ensue if Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr were to announce their intention to reunite and tour as The Beatles. Though they would have no trouble selling tickets, a critical consensus would condemn the endeavor as false advertising, even though the deaths of John Lennon and George Harrison obviously would have prevented them from participating. Yet there is no hue and cry over Roger Daltry and Pete Townsend appearing as The Who in spite of the unavailability of late bandmates Keith Moon and John Entwistle. Why? The answer rests in the peculiarities of rock group dynamics, by which the members of most bands can be subdivided into indispensable leads, colorful supporting characters, and extras.
Now let us entertain an alternative history in which Lennon and McCartney are today's surviving Fab Two. They hold a press conference under a giant Beatles logo and announce a reunion tour. The world rejoices. Everyone laments the losses of Harrison and Starr, but few seem to mind Lennon and McCartney hiring session players and billing themselves as The Beatles. This is because within Beatle group dynamics, Lennon and McCartney were the indispensable leads. You can't have The Beatles without either of them, but you conceivably could have The Beatles with both of them and some hired hands.