By Scott Sullivan
Editor
50th Reunion, Part 2
It was assuring knowing I would die lacking nothing. The nurse and druggist had denied me insulin. Blood sugar played Bach’s Toccata and Fugue on my organs.
“I’d considered going,” I said.
“To your 50th reunion?” asked neither.
“It was over before it started.”
I had clicked an invite link to a video of a West Lafayette/Purdue/Lafayette drive-through shot through a windshield and risen into a stupor.
I recalled Merou Grotto potlucks downhill from Happy Hollow Park. The Masonic hall on the Wabash River had a dance floor with folding tables proffering Wonder Bread sacks, sliced ham, roast beef and turkey disks, squeeze-out condiments and napkins.
A 2019 newsclip showed the Grotto being leveled but the Mystic Order of Veiled Prophets of the Enchanted Realm now met across the river, I learned. Monarch Steve Keep was shown flanked by old white male peers wearing ZZ Top beards and fezzes.
Covenant Presbyterian Church had a roof dent meant to make it look like a fish, sign of the covenant Rev. James Tozer preached. From the entry it narrowed at the narthex, rose above pews and peaked at the pulpit. Stained glass let in light from both sides.
A new worship video showed a teen cellist tackling Bach. In filed the congregation. We would be fishers of men, per Tertullian (circa 155-220 A.D.) “little fishes, after the image of our Ichthys, Jesus Christ, born in water.”
God bless YouTube. “Life at West Lafayette, Indiana” showed an Indian & International Grocery on “Seegamore” Parkway, said the narrator. “Sagamore” for some Native American tribes (different Indians) was a chief. What we’d called the 52 Bypass even then was hideous.
The video panned the asphalt lot next door in front of a Subway restaurant and swung across speeding traffic on the strip to a “landmark Mc-D,” said the narrator — welcome to America — KFC and Wendy’s.” Mr. Justin showed off his shop’s new white cinderblock walls, concrete floors and shelves sporting shrines and foods.
The Bypass wrapped north-south east of Lafayette, then east-west across West Lafayette, cutting off the north side, where I grew up, from old town Chauncey Village and the Purdue campus.
Under the river bridge traffic thundered. Deeper down the grade laid Mummy’s Mansion, a concrete viaduct we could stoop through that echoed and trickled water.
In Happy Hollow you felt glad when empty. It had blazing wooded fall trails where you could take puffs or make out privately. A Sunday reunion sendoff there offered coffee, donuts and boxed lunches.
Saturday’s main event — a reception, dinner, music, cash bar amd dancing — would be at Coyote Crossings Golf Club northeast of the Pottawatomi Trail of Death.
I got out as soon as I could post-college, likomg Michigan skies, lakes and contours better. I’d drive back when my parents lived there straight south on U.S. 421 … forever descending phone lines, flat fields dotted with barns, silos, railroad tracks and irrigation ditches where bad weed patches were planted furtively hidden by wildflowers, far as I could see. Through Otis, Westville, Wanatah, LaCrosse, Radioville …
There in 1932 ham radio operator Henry Ulrich proposed a model city based on diathermy, a therapy he’d invented using heat from condensed radio waves to relieve bone and muscle ailments. Radio ads would make it explode. Guys met after tilling fields at Bud Schroeder’s Countryside Lanes to bowl, tilt cans and lay plans to be land barons as the sun dropped looking out over all that thatness.
Monon had a speed trap. At Reynolds, 421 turned east toward Monticello: picture Jefferson at Indiana Beach, a dammed river amusement park nearby it.
43 south passed through Battle Grouind near Prophet’s Rock. Chief Tecumseh’s brother “The Prophet” sang from atop it Nov. 7, 1811, to inspire his braves in the Battle of Tippecanoe, which went over like Radioville. They were slaughtered.
William Henry Harrison’s army claimed Rattlesnake Den, he became ninth U.S. president, caught pneumonia talking two hours during his inaugural and died three weeks later. “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” Veep John Tyler stepped up and saw Whigs rebel but fail to impeach him. He died a Confederate slavehoder during the Civil War.
The road dipped to West Lafayette where the river and roll began.
After my parents moved I stopped going. All their friends were dying. Driving home today from Lake Michigan I see a private jet rising and glinting through blue sky till gone.