BETTER THAN HEARSAY Bedraggled and Beloved

By Michael Ryan

WILLARD - Growing up in a little town in western New York, looking out my bedroom window in winter at night, a streetlight lighted falling snow.

I would listen for the sound but it was too far away. Silence surrounded the snowflakes deepening and gathering on nearby pine tree branches.

In the summer, those branches would interfere with me trying to catch flyballs hit by my father in what was our backyard.

The yard was big enough for a baseball field that, when I see it now, returning to my childhood haunts, was no Yankee Stadium.

It served the purpose, though, even with its bad-hop infield where my dad tested me, whacking what he loved to call “worm burners.”

I don’t remember that streetlight very much in July and August, when the days were long and sunny and hot and the only time I was in bed was when my eyes were closing.

There was another lamp, though, where I would start praying whenever I wound up walking home from my best friend’s house in the dark.

Thinking back, I didn’t forget it would be pitch black. It simply didn’t seem to matter until I was out there among the massive pines that were lurking everywhere. Young boy devouring creatures.

It wasn’t the trees that were the scary part. It was what - or who - might be hiding in the twisted branches or behind the thick trunks.

The little town I grew up in was Willard which is on the National Registry of Historic Places because I spent the first 17 years of my life there.

My old house now is a museum. A retelling of my early years is chronicled in heavy books with yellowed pages, the edges well worn from being frequently read, and fading ink.

Some of that is true. Willard is on the National Registry and my old house is a museum that, in actuality, tells what otherwise might be the forgotten story of the now-defunct “Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane.”

My dad was the chief engineer at Willard State Hospital, a sprawling set of weathered and moldy green brick buildings that never seemed to fully dry from the summer rain and winter snow, shrouded in pines.

One of those pines was the last well-lighted place between my friend’s house and my streetlight, a sinister stretch of road that had seen the vanishing of many a youthful lad.

At least that’s what my big brother told me and what I believed with all my young boy beating heart, gazing at my streetlight and all the dismal shadows between it and me.

The poor souls who wound up in the Asylum for the Chronic Insane were known in town as “patients.” It wasn’t much of a town.

One dead end road going in and out, the residents of Willard on one side (mostly the workers at the asylum), and the asylum on the other side, behind metal fencing that had sharp tops.

My house was the lone house behind the fence, on the asylum grounds, an easy mark for escaped patients on the prowl, their brains squirming like toads, waiting in the pines for a young boy’s beating heart.

At least that’s what my big brother told me, along with lots of other terrifying stuff, and there was plenty of reason to take it as gospel.

The brick buildings where the patients lived had bars on the windows. The men and women in Willard were locked in most of the time.

Unhuman noises came through the windows sometimes when I wandered past so it made perfect sense, staring at the miles between me and the next streetlight, that my young boy beating heart would turn to prayer.

I promised God I’d go to church every Sunday and never be bad again, and meant it, if He got me through that valley of the shadow of death.

Strange now, how when I go back to that spot, all I can do is laugh, seeing the short span that separated me from vile villainy and safe-keeping.

As it stands today, I’m not much of a church-goer, hoping the Man Upstairs lets it pass or is too busy to notice, finally straightening things out down here on bedraggled and beloved planet Earth.

And inexplicably, or perhaps perfectly understandably, the quiet of falling snow in that streetlight is what sticks with me most indelibly.

Merry Christmas (and a thank-you to my big brother for being that and to Doors frontman Jim Morrison for the borrowed words).