Ash Wednesday by Chet Williamson, Neil Jackson Page B

here—in Stephen's Drugs, Byer's Book Store, the Friendly Gift Shoppe, and dozens of other one- to five-man businesses that ran up and down and across Market and High Street like marchers in a parade.
    That was the very image Jim used for his first fifteen-dollar column. It was shamelessly pro–small town and pro–small business, and he wrote it in a white-hot patriotic fervor that seemed strange to him even as he did it. "Good stuff," Gingrich said after reading it. "A little thick for my blood maybe, but everybody else'll eat it up." He looked at Jim a bit suspiciously from over the top of his glasses. "You really meant what you wrote here, didn't you?"
    Jim smiled.
    "Don't be embarrassed," said Gingrich. "Nothing to be ashamed of. I'm just a little surprised you feel this way.”
    “I like Merridale."
    "Yeah. I do too. Only reason I've stayed here so long." He leaned back and propped his feet on the desk top. "Got a lot of nice folks here. Got a lot of assholes too. Now the secret is that there are assholes everywhere you go. You can't escape them. But me, I've learned that I like the Merridale assholes better than the assholes anywhere else." He grinned. "They're Norman Rockwell assholes. I like Norman Rockwell. How about you?"
    "He's okay."
    "You'll weaken with time. Wait till you have your kid and he starts getting bigger. You'll love Norman Rockwell."
    Jim wasn't sure of that, but he was sure of his love for the town. It shone through his columns and even in "Around the Square." He discovered that people were not merely willing but anxious to report on the most pedestrian doings of their lives and organizations. It amused him and delighted him as well, for in a solipsistic way they were right: Don and Rachel Martin's trip to Vermont and the St. John's Chicken Corn Soup Supper were, in the universe of Don and Rachel Martin and the ladies of the church, far more important than the talks between Henry Kissinger and the representatives of Ho Chi Minh, or all this fuss in Washington about the burglary at that Watergate place, or the earthquakes in Nicaragua. No one from Merridale had ever been to Nicaragua, except for Pastor Craven and his wife, and that had been a good fifteen years earlier.
    Oh, yes, Jim thought and thought again, Merridale was as self-centered as a Broadway star on opening night. But was that such a flaw? After all, he was beginning to believe himself that the world revolved around the town. "All is dross that is not Merridale." When one lives their whole life in one place, doesn't that place become life itself? Life and death and birth.
    And in October 1973, as was his father, Terence John Callendar was born in Lansford General Hospital and taken home to Merridale, where he was shown off to sundry relatives and loved, Jim felt, as no baby had been before. Beth was an excellent mother and spent more time with Terry than Jim had ever expected her to. "I've got him for a year, all to myself," she told him, "before I have to go back to the school. So I'm really going to make it count." Jim wished that he had more time to spend with the two of them, but Linden stole his days, and the Messenger took most evenings and much of the weekend. It was far from an ideal situation in which to form a strong father-son bond, but he tried, writing after Terry had gone to sleep, and getting up early on Saturday mornings so that he could often finish his ad work by noon.
    Beth's attention paid off, for Terry was a bright, lively, healthy baby whose infectious spirit proved strong enough to reactivate even Jim's grandfather. Although speech never returned to Dan Foster, they were able to work out a simple yes-no code with eye squints.
    When his grandfather died peacefully in his sleep in the nursing home, Jim was in the hospital himself, about to undergo an operation. Beth, although she knew of Grandpa Foster's death, did not tell Jim. He was upset enough. He'd begun coughing in June, three months before. It was a dry