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The World Next Door

Brad Ferguson
September 15
Jess told me today his sugar beet crop seems to be doing pretty well.
Time was when nobody could get anything at all to grow, much less
something as tricky as sugar beets, so Jess deserves a lot of credit ... and
it'll be awful nice to have real table sugar again, the white, grainy stuff you
could buy at the store. (What was it called? Dominoes? Something like
that.) We're all sick of maple sugar, and the women say you can't cook
with it, except for ham тАФ and we don't have any pigs around here
anymore. It surprised me a little last spring, when the town decided it
wanted real sugar so bad, it allowed Jess to turn two acres over to it. Jess
raises some of the best corn in the county, and we need all we can get тАФ
the eating kind and the drinking kind, both. But sugar is calories, too.
More dreams last night, the crazy kind a lot of people around here have
been having. Didn't sleep all that well myself. Doc says it's more
wish-fulfillment stuff than anything else, like right after the war. I don't
know; these seem different. I remember them better, for one thing. I
hardly ever remember dreams at all; now I can remember whole bits of
them тАФ colors and smells, too. In fact, in last night's dream I was
watching color television, but I forget what was on.
September 18
A singer named Wanderin' Jake came through today; he's from the
Albany area. I wrote his news on the chalkboard at Town Hall, and the
mayor's wife fed him well. The news: There were floods in Glens Falls last
month, eleven people dead; there's a new provisional state government in
Rensselaer (that makes four that I know of, if that preacher in Buffalo
hasn't been assassinated yet); the governor in Rensselaer wants to send a
state delegation to next year's American Jubilee at Mount Thunder; and
there's been no word from an expedition that set out six months ago from
Schenectady, bound for the atomic power plant at Indian Point to see if it
can be made useful again. The party is presumed dead.
Wanderin' Jake led a sing-along in the square just after sunset tonight,
and we had a good time, even though there wasn't much on hand to picnic
with and won't be until we get the crops in. With this climate, we can't
harvest until maybe late October, and only then if we're lucky and there's
been no rain from the south.
Today I remembered that it was Domino sugar, singular. There was a
jingle about how grandmothers and mothers know the best sugar is
Domino, which is how I remembered it. It's strange how those jingles
come back to haunt you. Twenty-one great tobaccos make twenty
wonderful Kings. Let Hertz put you in the driver's seat. I like Ike, you like
Ike, everybody likes Ike. And you get a lot to like with a Marlboro.
September 25
The town got together tonight to discuss what, if anything, we're going
to do about the American Jubilee. No decision, of course тАФ we've only
talked it over once тАФ but the thrust of tonight's meeting was, the hell with
Rensselaer and the governor there, just like we said the hell with the
governors in Buffalo, Syracuse and Watertown. What if Rensselaer decides