Incident At Monticello Read online

Incident at Monticello

  Written by Scott D Wagner

  Copyright 2011 by Scott D Wagner

  Cover by Kane Woodward

  ‘Oh so good to be oh so young.’

  “Apparitions. The boy has apparitions.” I remember my Father saying this to my Mother.

  “His name is Daniel.” More memorable, my Mother correcting him. Correcting him, and not just for this misname, she did more often than he liked. My first remembrance of the-boy-having-apparitions, was when I was a child of six. Or so I’ve been saying for decades.

  Apparition was an adult word and I didn’t have a clue. I didn’t know what it meant, but I did know it must be important. Why else would my Dad define the word to my Mom. “Apparition: A supernatural appearance of a person or a thing.” Since husbands in the mid-twentieth century were known to be much smarter than their wives, Dad had to define it to Mom. And I did know that my Dad was just about the smartest man ever. With his definition, I didn’t think my Mom thought him so smart. I don’t know… there was just something in her look.

  What my Dad was brilliantly defining, what my Mom wished he wasn’t, and what I was so very young indifferent to, was that something happening within me was atypical of… well, of all normal kids. And this atypical didn’t figure itself out with adulthood.

  This ‘something’ I grew up with. I heard hushed hints that it was abnormal. But it all seemed mostly good to me. I mean there was some bad. As I aged into and through adulthood, others struggled with it. For me it was quite easy. My near half decade had made this ‘something’ just another daily task. As simple as waking, walking, and talking. Though I did at times have issues with waking walking and talking, but it wasn’t always because of ‘something’.

  In fact the abnormal was at times very good to me. A Business major by education, and a Corporate Chef by task, I had successfully written and published two Historical books. I gave a special acknowledgement to ‘something’ in the jacket of my second book.

  So… Until just recently when Rojer asked me to visit him at Monticello, it was all good. It was there, at the home of our third President, high upon a rural Virginia mountaintop, did it all unravel. ‘Something’, turned into something!

  ‘Girls are Icky.’

  This tale is about history. More so, it is the mystery of this history. It wasn’t history yet as it was all just beginning in the small town of Sparta New Jersey. Small then, now… well you’ll see. We were living just up the road from Upper Lake Mohawk.  Along with my parents Gordon and Suzanne, there were three brothers and four sisters.  We the Rengaws lived in a two story colonial at 21 Sagamore trail.  This dead-end road was my field of glory and failure until the age of fifteen.

  It was the spring of 1969. A brown paneled truck pulled into the sloping driveway.  As a nine year old, I watched from atop The Boulder. The Boulder, one of those monuments that children set as a meeting place, was large in our front yard.  The Boulder was painfully important to me then, and need-to-know for you now. It was the same rock that a year earlier I had broken my right wrist on. Or off, as the case is. I snapped both my Ulna and Radius.  Fellow nine year old Lisa Zambrano convinced me that if I jumped off I could fly like Superman.  I did not.  Thus my mystery of girls began. A mystery that I still have not solved.

  I impatiently watched as the driver unloaded three large boxes.  Wheeling the three questions into the house and receiving a John Hancock from Mom, the bearer of gifts departed.  Standing it no longer I leapt off of the rock; not breaking my arm.  I ran into the front room hoping to see what gifts had been bestowed upon the Rengaws.

  Being more impatient than most nine year olds, I continually got; “Daniel, you drive me crazy!” I never understood her words; I was too young to drive. I’ll tell you what made her crazy. It was having eight children.

  Receiving the cursory; “Calm down Daniel!”  Daniel meant business. Good Daniel was Danny; bad Daniel was Daniel.  A philosophy of speech that she passed onto my wife the day of our wedding.

  What I discovered in the boxes aided my life on a historical path mapped out by providence. At this point it was providence. What I perceived as the ultimate collection of all knowledge bequeathed unto mankind, was brought into my life; the 1969 World Book Encyclopedia. (I didn’t really talk like that. I was only nine.)

  Most importantly to me, included was the 1968 Year in Review.  The single Mile Stone that marked my year-long travel of historical knowledge gained. The 1968 Year in Review reinforced me.  I read it cover to cover and placed all the great pictures next to the stories. From the pages dripped all of the stories of the year. All of the triumphs, many of the failures, some of the famous births, and horrifically the infamous deaths.  Namely, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.

  But the stories of the Apollo Astronauts were the magnetic field that held my fingers to the book.  I read them as if I was there with them. I was fascinated by the technology and the men. Those super-humans that were risking their lives to make President Kennedy’s dream come true.

  I watched from the floor of my parent’s den as Apollo 11 was forever slowly descending closer and closer to the lunar landscape.  With unbroken attention I watched as the Lunar Lander Eagle dropped into The Sea of Tranquility.  “The Eagle has landed,” with less than 30 seconds of useable fuel left.  A few hours later, Neal Armstrong stepped off the landing pad onto the face of the moon.  “One small step for man.  One giant leap for mankind.” Although some dispute those as his exact words, I know what I heard. And they will always be chosen words to me.