Saying goodbye: thank you for your stories

We got our first real string of thunderstorms late last Wednesday afternoon and, in the evening, I sat out on my back porch to enjoy the clear air and soft light.

I could see a great misty cloud rising from around the Ludlowville Falls and I thought, “I should go down there to see what it’s like after a rainstorm, and talk to some people about it, and see if I can get a column out of it.”

But I can’t, or rather I won’t, because after 325 columns for this and that other paper, I am setting down my pen.

I regret missing that story and some others, like the Lansing Rod and Gun Club’s plans to move their trap-shooting range to try to keep the peace with their neighbors, the high school’s plans to manage a prom in a pandemic and the CRS Barn Studio’s upcoming world premiere of two chamber pieces (June 13 and 14 at 7 p.m., see http://triphammer.org/ for more information).

Everyone has a story, and they will tell it to you if you will listen. So, I am very glad to have listened to the stories of Lansing people like fisherman Gus Isaac, coach Jeff Boles, hotelier Eileen Stout, musician Bob Keefe, race car driver Tommy Collins, marathoner Isabelle Schweitzer, hiker Diane Beckwith, a-bomb delivery man and gardener Dennis Osika and Christmas light aficionado Glenda Long.

This is not to mention stories about Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner Roald Hoffman, enslaved Lansing settler Peter Wheeler, priest Ed Herzog, sisters Mary Benson and Jacoba Baker, quarterback Kevin Snyder, Virgil Bernero (the mayor of that other Lansing), ice cream man Nick Pidlychak, Martian weatherman Don Banfield, manurist Amber Jackson, dowser Larry Roe, doctor Brendan Barrett, combiner Ray Sill, and Orpheus (actually an osprey) and his fellow fishermen on opening day of trout season.

I loved writing about the people who made the musicals happen, the teachers and administrators and students working through the pandemic, the Lansing Lunchbox folks, the pre-K playground crowd, the Thanksgiving feasts at the elementary school, the duck hunters, the fly fishermen, the coaches and their athletes, the dairy farmers, the firemen, the snowplowers, the guys at the Lake Ridge Hunt Club, the high school Shakespeare reciters, the Fourth of July and the last Sunday of the summer.

And of course, my mom, Carolyn Montague, who wrote 571 columns about Lansing herself.

I need to thank everyone who ever talked to me, explained things to me until I got it and didn’t hang up when I said “now I know this is kind of a stupid question but…” And I need to especially thank Louise Bement for answering all my emails, providing sources at the drop of a hat, filling in for me when I went on vacation, and taking me on a wonderful cemetery tour one sunny Sunday afternoon.

I mark the distance from my porch by the first fence line, the hedgerow, the far bank of Salmon Creek and the far shore of Cayuga Lake. If you take that radius and scribe a circle, you will encompass our town and about 11,000 people and probably 100,000 stories.

Mom and I only got to 900 of them. But when I told Karen Yahn that I was quitting my column, she said “it’s good to have a beginning and an end,” and she is right.

So, this is the end.