The Appendix Historical Society

I probably enjoyed this part of the writing as much as any. For whatever reason I found this part particularly fun. Maybe I was glad to take a break from Quin (who really was  a bit of a drag to write about at times, and maybe I was also glad to be done with baseball for a bit)...

The second day of classes fell on the same day as the quarterly meeting of the Appendix Historical Preservation Society. The society consisted of five members all now in their early eighties. Three were female and two were males. All were life long residents of Appendix, who had been in their formative years when Arnie Wondermaker had begun his failed Ferris Wheel business and who had been teenagers when he began his successful carnival freak-fests.

While all of their parents had strongly disapproved of the happenings on the outskirts of town, they had been drawn to the assortment of odd-folk that gathered to make noise and have a hilarious time. To them the gatherings had been magical, giving faint hints of a life beyond farming, manufacturing and ice cream socials on Sunday after church. Without a doubt much of the appeal had been their parent’s disapproval. So at one point or another each of the members of the Appendix Historical Preservation Society, when they were teenagers, had slipped into the freak-fest and had had loud, hilarious times. The memory of these times could to this day stir their old blood, the many years and the true decadence of the youth of today making the memories more magical and more innocent than they actually were. It was the golden time of their life and it was sixty-five years ago.

The Society had formed twenty-five years ago when they were in their fifties and were old enough to be disappointed with how their lives had turned out and how their children had turned out. They would occasionally bump into one another at the local grill, The Caboose and there they would lament the current state of affairs in their life and in their town. They complained most strenuously during the annual Carney-fest, because it was certainly not what it was when they were in their youth. They would commiserate over the miserable state of the world around them, and talk of the golden past and it would become even more golden.