Visited Quarropas, New York, in early June. Hadn’t been back to my hometown since relocating to Las Vegas, Nevada, 12 years ago.

I figured now was the time because shortly every reason to return may be gone. I still have a few best buddies there. But this year they turn 65. I have no idea what their financial situations are and didn’t ask. However, I suspect each has one foot out the door for Florida.

No way I can express how terrific it was to see people who knew me as I was becoming who I am, and seeing those who I knew when they were on the way to becoming the adults they are. Seeing how we’ve transformed might’ve astounded us then. Ah, probably not.

I will not be seeing them in the Gator State.

It’s possible both will toil until their full retirement ages. 67. And that should be it. If not, one must ask, “How much longer will you chase? And why?”

I sort of followed in the steps of my parents. They gladly dropped their burdens at 62. Of course, they enjoyed pensions and also had company-sponsored health benefits that bridged into Medicare.

I needed to wait until 65, when Medicare kicked in. Before then, I depended on my employer-sponsored health plan. When my parents worked, the notion that their jobs wouldn’t have provided health coverage would’ve been unthinkable. It would’ve been enough for the rank and file to strike.

These days during my working Las Vegas years, I needed to have contributed to my own health plan. At least the company picked up half. In too many jobs now, if the employee isn’t catching his or her health benefits, he or she runs the risk of an accident or health malady impoverishing them for the rest of their lives.

Now, hourly and salaried employees are so whipped, no, disjointed, the thought of a job action promoting just conditions might have them frightening themselves worse than any boss’ threat ever could.

That image makes me smirk.

Father was a union man back when unions labored diligently to improve working conditions, benefits, and pay. Why not? Postwar/Cold War America was prosperous in ways younger adults of today might hear as fairy tales.

Forget life being inexpensive. Pay was commensurate with circumstances. For the vast majority of laboring Americans, one job sufficed. It did so because housing, consumer goods, and comestibles hadn’t bounded miles ahead of inflation as it has today. Greed was less pernicious then. Moreover, the generation which had endured the Depression then went out and won World War II refused to return to an America which believed they’d be happy to kneel peacefully after so much tumult home and abroad. They had earned better lives. They were going to provide themselves and their children better lives. Unlike the generations inheriting our nation today, those people weren’t docile. They strove.

Skip picketing. That past generation thought nothing of smashing windows and rolling cars. Mannerliness only goes so far. Nothing like a little personal loss to make the other side lose its arrogance and bargain honestly.

So, sometimes unions called job actions that paralyzed assembly lines and steel mills and coal mines and railroads. The intent wasn’t to break the owners but get fair shares of the profits workers’ labor created.

That is such a radical concept for today. Espousal of it might be mistaken as a step towards dissolving American civilization. Which is how hysterical right-wingers advocating more for the wealthy and as little as possible for those who prop them up will regard it. Looking around this atrophying America these last eight months, our society has let it slip into autopilot. It is well on that backward flightpath.

My parents and those of my Boomer generation who they enriched and prepared to excel lived at the right time. The UAW backed father. Mother’s employer didn’t want unions in the building. So, it tamped down employees’ urge for collective bargaining by being “generous.”

Although my full retirement age isn’t until February of 2026, I decided in March ’24 when Medicare availed itself to me that was it. Sure, I miss the additional money working at least part time would’ve brought in until reaching FRA, but I would’ve resented working. February 2026 never could’ve come soon enough.

At 65, I’d had enough. I’d contributed plenty to our nation’s prosperity. Let younger generations continue to compile the wealth of others.

There was no itinerary or urgency in Quarropas. Nothing other than visiting my parents’ gravesite, goofing off with some lifelong friends still residing there, and lolling in the old neighborhoods.

About the first, I also intended to visit my grandmother’s grave but I couldn’t find it. That problem did not exist with my parents. I found theirs so easily one might’ve thought I’d just stood over it a week before. With Memorial Day having been commemorated so recently, cemetery staff had freshened up veterans’ markers. Many of the rest still had cut grass obscuring who laid beneath the stones or plaques.

Probably why I couldn’t find my grandmother’s plot.

I don’t know how common blue-slate sidewalks are. They certainly paved established Quarropas neighborhoods sidewalks. The thing about them is those flagstones are susceptible to groundswells brought on by expanding tree trunks and roots. In Quarropas those would be maples and elms. During summers, their green canopies generously shaded our streets.

In autumns before leaf blowers became loud ubiquitous conveniences, the fiery fallen leaves provided the impetus for cacophonies of rake tines often scraping hard surfaces. Until environmental regulations forbade leaf burning, the practice’s blue smoke carried the fondly remembered acrid fragrance indicating summer’s finale. But before this pyrrhic final bow, those leaves had been piled to serve as mountainous landing pads for vaulting adolescents.

Fun time over, the orange, ochre, red, and russet remnants got scooped into metal garbage cans. (At least by us and our neighbors.) There they were set aflame in farewells to bliss.

Enough tree growth makes sidewalks bulge and crack. This raises curb angles, as well as renders walking, bicycle riding, roller skating and skateboarding challenges. As if the expanding sidewalk had been one from a German Expressionist film.

Despite this the blue slates added to neighborhoods’ characters. And really nobody complained about them. In fact, they likely improved agility out of necessity.

Drove by our former house. In 2013, its then owners had chopped down the bushes and tree buffering the front. The exterior had also been painted in a pink garish enough to have been a house in the Barbie movie. Driving by 12 years later in June, it gladdened me to see remodeling had given our cozy former home a non-jarring brown and tan exterior with white trim. Moreover, eye-catching topiary had been planted at the front.

Since each drew his last breath inside, perverse me hopes the spirits of father and his eldest brother spooked those who’d desecrated their home. Maybe both brothers’ spirit had rattled those owners enough for them to sell to less gaudy owners. People with a sense of place. A family which exhibited modesty through muted tones better in keeping with that block’s character.

Away from the residential areas, Quarropas’ core had changed. It’d become unmistakably urbanized. Less humane than when I left in 2013. But the bedroom community I’d grown up in and what remained of it had already pretty much disappeared even before I left. Just walking and driving around in June made me glad I wasn’t growing up there now.

Busy, uh, hectic as we’ve let our modern lives become, surely there are still parents, relatives, friends, neighbors so ingrained into what Quarropas was before it evolved who can recognize others’ erroneous paths as during my boyhood there. Skip encouraging words. During my decades in suburban splendor, situations developed where “networks” often did what they could to deflect or outright prevent the worst results possible.

Too many “saviors” to name. Too many “saviors” who will never be known. People who practice circumspection don’t seek glory. Perhaps much of what many of today’s Americans are readily describing as “societal decay” derives from their own inability to be that “helping hand from above.”

Next to my last night in Quarropas I did a load of laundry. Felt this a prudent step. The airline schedule had been fracturing badly throughout the week. Got a sample of this on the flight leaving Las Vegas. Frequent gate changes and a two-hour flight delay. I’d booked a late return flight to Las Vegas through Dallas. I intuited plenty could’ve gone wrong with that. So, I did laundry in anticipation of a possible longer than desired layover in Texas. Found a laundromat on one of Quarropas’ main commercial drags.

I meandered circuitously from my hotel on a mild quiet midweek night. Empty sidewalks led past warmly-lighted but secretive houses. Once, I might’ve known a few who lived within them. But in 2025 …

My stroll along the shadowy sidewalks so quiet, I heard crickets. If I’d been around a few more days, maybe I would’ve seen fireflies, too.

Trust me. In Las Vegas, you hear and see plenty. But crickets or fireflies? No.

After doing laundry I skipped the roundabout way back to my lodging and went straight down a main avenue. It must’ve been sometime near 10 p.m. I passed a dance studio, one of the remnants of bedroom community Quarropas. The city before national franchises and malls erased our poky commerce district’s character by displacing family-owned businesses as well as department stores scaled for suburban shoppers.

Places where by chance one met relatives, friends, neighbors even. Since there was little hurry, we could stop and chat. An ever-diminishing social practice if not altogether lost art.

During my visit, plenty of “what used to be in that spot” memories occurred while walking. Even remembered which classmates supplemented their teen finances by part-timing in afterschool jobs inside long renovated addresses.

Along a street of otherwise dark storefronts, the dance studio was still open. A couple of instructors helped cure several students of their two left feet. No, rather a couple of instructors mentored several seekers looking to refine their style and elegance.

This was a warm vestige of my boyhood Quarropas.

Once I returned to Las Vegas, I wrote another former Quarropas resident who’d also relocated. I described my journey back. Different ages meant we had different experiences, yes. Nonetheless our city retained the same sort of closeness – closeness, not closed in – during our brackets there that let confidence build. Yet if efforts fell short or life took “that” turn could Quarropas also provide succor. Again, we thrived in an embrace of supportive community. Um, no. Attentive people. Some perhaps we didn’t know, and would never know, but nonetheless weren’t strangers.

Along with parents, these wily types contributed to the foundation upon we then in Quarropas raised ourselves upon into assured maturity. Has that assistance been continued? And if it must be asked, doesn’t the answer provide itself?

A second reason to finally go east before it was too late was curiosity. In 2011, the firm I’d spent 24 years at collapsed. Incompetence, ineptitude, and indifference shuttered that place. Or as the fatal malady is better known, “The Curse of the Third Generation.”

Grandpa establishes a business. His better educated son improves, expands the business. Here the son ought of bequeathed a thriving moneymaker to his children for them to continue, to further enlarge even. Instead, the succeeding generation is populated by drug-abusing, alcoholic deadbeats.

What happened was the father spent too much time and effort go-getting. He was the organization man in the white flannel suit seeking an executive suite. Being on the road as an insatiable hustler made him an inattentive parent to his two boys and three girls. Several years through either side put his progeny in my same age range.

Their father was often absent when his children were most impressionable. As substitute, he lavished plenty of things on them. So, materially they were set. Sailing lessons for the boys. Horse riding lessons for the girls. Fabulous vacations. Cars. The family enjoyed a membership in a Gold Coast Connecticut country club. At least for a time.

None of those daughters would ever be considered debutante material. Neither of his sons grew up to be “clubby types.”

Again, the father was stingy with his presence until it was way too late. By the time he could be “dad,” his children had already become who they were. He wasn’t there when he was required to act as their lives’ dominant male figure. Even into his issues’ adulthood he never attempted to make up for his absences that created holes in their lives. Without him those five ran roughshod over their mother.

As a New York Metropolitan area manufacturer, the old firm profited nicely by occupying a lot of niches. Or as I loved telling it, “We make weird stuff.”

And we did. That company’s handiwork was displayed throughout the region. Before everything went to hell, that place didn’t even bother advertising because word of mouth was just so good. The boss threw numbers against walls and clients just nodded their heads.

Neither of the owner’s sons would come in with him. It was akin to refusing ownership in a gold mine.

One son became a reprobate who eventually OD’ed in Denver. The other preferred striking out on his own. He made a living, yes. But nowhere what he could’ve achieved had he gone to any nearby Connecticut college, gutted out four years of business courses, then come aboard the firm ready to inherit as boss. Instead, he rather do just enough to make an easy living and went fishing every chance he got. And if the choice ever became between working and fishing, he exemplified the adage “A bad day of fishing is better than any day of work.”

Say this for the boss, he attracted good associates on the management side. Must wonder whether he strung them along by suggesting perhaps he’d give them pieces of the company. If so, such was their incentive to work like dogs. That place made money hand over fist. This they would’ve known best since they did much of the making.

Me? I was on the manufacturing side. Was nobody there but us chickens.

Let’s suppose after each associate decided it time he or she believed each had contributed plenty to the pot they’d seek then get their “deserved” piece. The boss had offered them a mirage. He would cut them cold. A lot of talent left that building in lickety-split huffs.

But the boss had a gift. For the longest, he could always find then string along other capable replacements.
Until the day came when he couldn’t. The magic was gone. That pool had been drained.

In hindsight, yeah, the boss should’ve recognized the future. It was unavoidable. He should’ve understood the survival of his enterprise depended on maintaining capable competent succession. It was beyond obvious none of his children would ever step up. For that business to continue prospering, it needed putting outsiders in charge. Once more, the boss should’ve relented. He needed to have parceled out percentages. Instead, in the biggest stooge-slapping gesture possible, he handed over operations to his two remaining daughters.

That third sister? Too much boozin’ and druggin’ killed her in 1998.

The surviving sisters were a pair of drug-addled, alcoholic nitwits who never could’ve formed one halfwit.

Both knew how to waste money. Each knew how to party. Neither knew anything about running a business. In less than five years under their direction, they’d crapped out a gold mine.

Here’s how it ended in October of 2011. On Friday afternoon, the business was solvent. When Monday morning rolled around, what greeted employees was a scene out of a farce. Had a line of creditors at the door. Each wanted either payment, repossession of wares they’d supplied, or threatened to cut off the utilities. Oh, and the landlord threatened to padlock the premises if rent wasn’t paid that instant.

It was a swell time to bail. So, I did. I entered the office and announced my adios. I expected after 24 years of diligence to have a nice tidy sum creasing my palm. No. The daughters had blown mine as well as what my colleagues ought of received. During the last several years, our money had kept the company afloat. That’s how deeply business had hemorrhaged. By the way, only then did we discover our medical coverage had lapsed three months earlier.

On the manufacturing side, we worked with heavy industrial machinery. What would’ve happened, where might any injured party have been afterwards, had there have been a serious accident?

In the end, after 24 years in my case, and however many years in my co-workers’, we’d all be leaving with the same empty bags with which we’d arrived.

In June when I finally informed my Quarropas friends of the severe financial cramp indifferent management bequeathed in 2011, only then did they fully understand how Las Vegas eventually became my go-to. In my early-50s then, no way I’d have found a comparable replacement job that’d tide me over to 65. Not in the Northeast. Okay. Throughout America, you reach a certain age, regardless of skill, competence and experience, you’re obsolete.

Yet throughout this calamity there was an exchange one could laugh at. The boss offered to write me a letter of recommendation. As if somehow praise from a dope whose negligence let his own nameplate rot out from the inside would be an asset towards a new job.

Oh!? As an applicant, wouldn’t I have been seen as a prize!?

Couldn’t even yell at the boss or his worthless daughters. The effort wouldn’t have yielded one dollar or brought back one futilely expended day.

As far as suing, as far as getting “satisfaction,” my co-workers and I discussed it. We would’ve won an easy judgment. However, corporate obligations had been separated from personal possessions. We would’ve won nothing except more frustration.

I felt sorrier for my colleagues than myself. All I lost was money. Most of them had families, mortgages, and other big honking bills. Nobody was coming around with a magic wand to pay those.

That happened almost 14 years ago. Back East in June 2025, I decided to discover what resulted after I left. What happened was expected, not sad.

The boss got a convenient case of dementia. He finally slipped the coil in 2019.

A surviving daughter, the only one of all that family’s children who might’ve been somebody if she’d snorted mountains less coke and drank fewer vats of hooch, died five years ago. Looked her up before leaving for Quarropas. Found her obituary page online. It consisted of one line. Equaled by one farewell.

A dervish, she had lived out loud. It almost hurt seeing her so ignored and little mourned at the end.

The remaining daughter died last year. Learned she’d been last seen after attending a concert. Somebody thought enough of her or had a hunch to have had a welfare check performed. If she’d ever been a dancing queen, the final years towards her demise left her steps stilted and agonizing.

When everything collapsed in ‘11, the girls and their boyfriends joined their widower father at the family home. One can only imagine what a ratbag that house became. But it’s all any of them had left. A house they could all pile into, this property remaining untouchable.

The fellow who informed me of the missing years was another associate who struck out on his own. As had the parade who’d worked at the firm then left to form their own businesses, he’d done well as his own chief. Of course.

A long-time family acquaintance of our ex-employers, he’d kept in spotty contact with them. Until we caught up, I didn’t realize how much he was my junior. His possibility of retirement waits several years off yet.

We both wondered how pretty we might’ve been sitting in 2025 if our former employer had ever realized it better to have a percentage of something than 100% of nothing.

For one reason, the most important one, finding refuge in Las Vegas would not have been in my future.

As for the last son, he’s bumping along still, getting in as much fishing as possible. Must be wonderful to have reached one’s level early in life.

Don’t know when I’ll return East. Some event will get me back to Metropolitan New York. After all, it’s the city. I grew up there when it was continuously fabulous. Now? Not so much. Whatever eventually gets me back won’t involve any poignancy.

Those hours are done.

Through this visit I did learn firsthand why family members of mine who’d joined the great black American Migration stopped returning South for visits. Most, if not everyone they’d lived among when younger, had moved North like them, elsewhere altogether, or died. And without those figures present whatever appeal “home” once had must’ve vanished. Mother, father, the rest held memories tight without returning to nurturing scenery for cues.

To confirm that all one needed doing was listening to them recollect about their respective pasts. There’s much good to be said about reassembling as well as propagating the past orally. Probably the immediacy the teller can bring to the tale. The stories overheard during my Quarropas decades were as clear and as sharp as their present-day lives had been.

Next time I go to New York, there may be little need bothering to visit Quarropas. By that time who will be there to see? Then, I expect to be just another tourist enjoying himself in the five boroughs.

Making myself cozy while refamiliarizing what civilization has become.

This bookends a story presented on Valentine’s Day 2025. Sweet Green Hours. A sort of pastorale. A suburban pastorale. The premise being the unknowing last hours of playtime and easy living among childhood friends. From their being nearly inseparable to being on the cusps of entering divergence. Yes, I wrote it anticipating going back to Quarropas. I didn’t anticipate writing Foundation.

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