Some of you know Johnnybitches. I created him at a time when I had pretty much nobody else to talk to, so I started talking to a camera. Sometimes it’s me in the car, venting about whatever got under my skin that day. Sometimes it’s a walk-and-talk, pointing out the latest municipal construction failure. That guy is real, and he isn’t going anywhere. But life is about balance, and you can’t spend every day complaining, so yesterday I took a different kind of walk. I went across the Bridge of Flowers, through the village and down to the potholes, and talked about the good stuff. The video is in the comments. When YouTube picked a thumbnail out of thirty-four minutes of footage, it skipped the bridge, the river and my face and chose a lamp glowing in a shop window: a copper sphere with hands reaching out of it, lit up from inside. I’ll tell you about that lamp further down. For now I’ll just say I couldn’t have picked a better cover myself. This is the written companion, because some things come out better on the page than on the move.
People tell me to let it go, that it’s water under the bridge. I’ve lived next to that water, so I’ve thought about it a lot. The Deerfield above Salmon Falls isn’t a pond, even where the dam flattens it out and some people call it one. It’s a conveyor belt. Even on the slowest days, when you can barely see the leaves moving, everything is headed one direction, toward the ocean. During Hurricane Irene it was cows, propane tanks and advantageously disposed mattresses. For a few years I lived in a studio hanging over that river, and many mornings the sun bounced off the water and threw rippling light across the ceiling. I’ve never had a better alarm clock. I spent a lot of time out there in my rowboat, and the rowboat taught me the rest of the lesson. You can always point the bow upstream and pull against the current. You can go back for a while, back to the old neighborhood, the old hurts, the old names. Put your back into it and you’ll make real headway, and sometimes you need to, because there are things back there worth seeing again. But the river always wins in the end. Stop rowing for a minute and it takes hold of you, turns you around, and carries you back down to where you started and past it. I’ve decided that isn’t a defeat. It’s the river reminding you which way life runs. Row upstream when you need to remember. Then ship the oars, let the current turn you around, and enjoy the ride home.
So here’s some of what I rowed back to this week. I grew up on Kathryn Drive in Orchard Park, a dead-end road next to the high school. Some people called it the hell’s kitchen of the town, and maybe it was. But it was also a tribe. There were kids of every age on that street, and something was always going. We played softball in the vacant yard at the dead end, with street hockey and football in between. If you were eight and could hold a bat, you played with the eighteen-year-olds. Nobody checked your age at the edge of that lot. The big kids pitched to the little kids, the little kids chased down foul balls, and somehow everybody had a place in the lineup. A few times every summer, word went around the street that it was hide-and-seek night. By dusk everybody gathered at the Mountain Ash tree in my front yard, which was home base, and my dad had planted so many trees that our yard was the best hiding ground on the road. We had nicknames for everybody, some cruel, most just ours. The one I liked best was Honnie, because as a little kid I couldn’t say my J’s, so Johnny came out with an H. I never minded that one. Some of the same kids who played those games with me also called me names I wrote about earlier this week, and both things are true at once. Under the teasing there was a tribal heart. After that rant, a girl from the old street wrote to me out of nowhere, and we traded those names back and forth across forty years like no time had passed.
There were family summers too: the Adirondacks every year, and Crystal Beach across the border in Ontario, with its roller coasters, The Comet, the yellow monster, and the smell of the midway. That park is long gone now, which makes the memories worth more. There was our dog named George, a girl with a boy’s name, who taught me what dogs teach all of us. We had our strife, as every family does, but we were our own little tribe with our own collective memory. I don’t take for granted how lucky that made me. By the world’s standards we had a good deal, and all of us grew up to good lives.
Somehow that kid from Kathryn Drive ended up at Cornell, studying horticulture. Then he came to Massachusetts in 1989 for graduate school at UMass. Nearly everybody I’ve known since then has been new, people who met me as a grown man, not as a nickname. I built a residential landscape practice in the Valley, surrounded myself with good workers and good thinkers, and did the kind of work most people only daydream about. In the late nineties I put my first piece in public ground, Crossroads Salamander, a stone walkway and bench of urodele form in North Amherst. Ever since, I’ve looked for underused corners of the landscape and tried to bring them to life. There’s a ten-foot trout made of donated forks and spoons, and a sturgeon welded from more than seventeen hundred salvaged utensils. On the Bridge of Flowers, it started at a friend’s dinner table, where talk turned to an ugly plastic tub sitting on the bridge. We thought, let’s do something really cool, borrowing the idea of water flowing endlessly over stone from my friend Louis, who gets full credit. That became the fountain in 2011. Twenty feet away, three years later, came the bench. It was an invitational with two parties in the running, a local blacksmith family and me, and I won it. Props to them.
The best part of that work has never been the objects. It’s been the people. A woman who owns a shop in the village couldn’t pay for her bench all at once, so she paid me in hundred-dollar bills until it was covered, and threw in free cookies until it was paid off. I traded a bench for cookies, and I’d do it again. Then there’s the lamp. Years ago a Chinese woman who lived in town and made dolls gave me a set of hands. She carved them from scratch, made molds and cast them herself for her dolls. I set those hands into a copper sphere. Later my friend Mohammad, who came here from Jordan, and I turned that hand-ball into a lamp in my studio, with a pile of gears I had lying around. Today it sits in the front window of his shop on the river, the Bridge Street Bazaar, and every evening it lights up the glass for whoever walks by. That’s one lamp made by three people from three completely different cultures, none of whom would have predicted it. Three pairs of hands made those hands, and now they hold a light. That’s what I mean by care. Every living thing can care, people more than any other, but very few ever actually put it to work. Caring isn’t a feeling. It’s a bench, a meal, a lamp, a letter to someone you haven’t spoken to in twenty years.
I’ve been thinking about what lasts. Not long ago I was put under anesthesia twice in a week for a medical procedure, and it’s the closest I’ve come to imagining the end. You go out, and there’s nothing, no dream, no time passing, until someone says your name. It sharpens things. The citation lists, the commissions, even the sculptures that will outlast me aren’t what people carry of you. They carry the person. A nurse who had met me exactly once remembered me as the guy who goes all winter in Crocs and no socks. An old friend I found again this fall, after more than twenty years, spent five hours talking with me and then sent me a few lines of wisdom he thought I needed. A woman I know casually read my hardest post and answered with kindness. That’s the real ledger.
I know some of my videos show a man ranting about stuff nobody seems to care about, a man who looks unhinged. That’s raw emotion from a lot of bad experience I never should have had to go through, and I won’t pretend it isn’t part of me. But it isn’t all of me, and it isn’t the best of me. Johnnybitches gives off heat. That’s what he’s for. But heat isn’t the same as light, and lately I’ve been learning the difference. A lamp doesn’t argue with the dark. It just switches on and lets people find their way. We all have good times and bad times. I don’t think we should forget either. Weigh them on your own scale, and if you need a model for how to live, look at the dogs. There’s no judgment and no keeping score, just love that doesn’t quit. I’ve had a few of those dogs, and I’ll admit I’ve liked them better than most people. I’m working on closing the gap.
Come to Shelburne Falls sometime. Walk the bridge, look down at the potholes, watch the river head for the ocean. If you come by after dark, look for a copper ball full of hands glowing in a shop window by the river. That one’s mine, and Mohammad’s, and a doll maker’s. If you see a guy with no socks on a bench he built, say hello. And if you see an old rowboat tied up by the bank, it’s not for sale.
~ JohnnyBitches 10/27/2026