A TALE OF JACK AND HIS JILL
COINCIDENCE—OR OUR DESTINY?
Does fate set us up, deliberately arrange the chain of events that are our lives? Is it manipulation by the fates or or is it coincidence?
It was 1938. North-eastern Long Island. Two young people—we will call them Jack and Jill. Those are not their real names, but they work for this story.
Jill, sixteen, and Jack, nineteen, had briefly met once before, but by the end of the day of their second meetng their lives would be forever entwined.
It was summer. A lazy Sunday. Six teenage friends were going to visit one of the boy’s vacation home. The island is a long, narrow strip of land, running north and south. It jutted out into the Atlantic Ocean, east of New York City. On the map it looks like a stretched fish, its tale splitting at the junction of the Township of Riverhead on the north, and the town of West Hampton Beach on the south.
The house Jack and Jill and friends visited was in the part of the island a few scant miles west of the north fork of the fishtail, in the tiny town of Rocky Point. It sat on the bluff overlooking Long Island Sound.
Less than twenty miles south lay the town of Yaphank, which housed Camp Upton. The camp had been there since before 1917, in use during the first World War. It was there the famous songwriter, Irving Berlin, wrote Gee How I Hate To Get Up In The Morning because, as the story goes, he hated the bugler for waking him. The song later became part of a play and then a movie.
But this is the tale of Jack and Jill. Neither of them yet knew the significance Camp Upton was to play in their lives.
The six young people spent the day swimming in the Sound, eating everything in sight, doing all the things teens do on a day in the country.
And, on that first real date, Jack fell in love with Jill.
The feeling was mutual. In the three years following, few evenings passed without seeing one another. But both had school to finish. They had things to do before they settled down. There was lots of time. They were young.
On December 7th, 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Over Jack’s little radio they heard President Roosevelt say, “… this is a day that will live in infamy…” The United States declared war on Japan and Germany.
In February, 1942, two months after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Jack found himself drafted into the Army. At twenty-two, the handsome six-foot tall young man, in love with his nineteen year old, five-foot-two Jill, asked her to marry him before he left.
She was heartbroken he was leaving—she would write every day—she would wait for him—but no, she didn’t want to marry. She was too young, she argued. How could she even think of marriage. Besides, she had promised herself she would not marry before she was twenty-three, at least.
Jack kissed her a sad goodbye, boarded a bus, then a train to Camp Upton. He was off to war.
The thing about being in the Army for Jack was, he was willing and ready to do his absolute best for the war effort, as it was called. But he didn’t want to be anything more than a private, do his best to conqure the enemy, and return home. His entire life had been regimented. In boarding school he wore a uniform, played the drums in the school’s marching band, and spent each Saturday of the school year on the parade grounds. One week they marched as soldiers, carrying rifles. The following week they were sailors, brandishing swords.
At eighteen, before starting college, he decided to spend six months in the mountains and woods of California in the Civilian Conservation Corps. He thought of it as an adventure before settling down to civilian life. Luck and life played the tune another way. Before he could finish school, marry the girl he loved, and live the good ol’ American dream, he found himself drafted into WW II—The Great War.
The first camp he was sent to was in the town of Yaphank. Rocky Point, where he and Jill had their first date, was a few minutes drive from the camp. Back then, one had only to cross Route 25A from Rocky Point, and be on Army property. That part of the island, south of 25A, in the town of Upton, was U.S. Army camp grounds.
Being in Upton brought a flood of memories to Jack. He recalled his first date with Jill, and their ride in the rumble seat of Jo’s car. They kissed all the way home. Young, sweet, sentimental kisses. He was nineteen, when he said to her, ‘I more than like you.’ A boy’s declaration of love.
During the week Jack was stationed at Upton, the troops went on a hike through a large area of woods adjacent to the camp. The region was wild, untouched, but for the rhythmical thumping of heavy boots. The air hung still.
As they single-filed along a narrow muddy, snowy trail, Jack, glancing to his right, caught a glint of sun hitting sparkling water, and what looked to be a large lake. When the company stopped to rest, he left the trail, stepping through growths of tall scrub oak, its brown leaves making jagged patterns against an ice-blue winter sky. Something glittered on the ground, and he stopped to pick up an arrowhead laying half buried in the snow and dirt. After examining it, rolling it in his hand, he grinned and put it in his pocket. Indians had hunted here, he deduced.
He pushed on past low berry bushes, tall pines, a bare maple tree, its snow-laden branches drooping. Before him lay a narrow path. About one- hundred-fifty-feet along, the trail ended at a bank some fifteen-feet above blue water. It lapped softly at a sandy shoreline. Overgrown skinny brown branches poked through the winter white on the small hill. Several yards farther out the water had glazed over to a frozen-gray color. Beyond that, the lake was solid ice. The sight was stunning. What a great spot for ice-skating, he thought.
The routine of Army life continued at a fast pace. After a week they went on to their next camp. Three months, more camps, and many letters later Jack got a pass. He was going to see his Jill.
Excitement built as he knocked on her kitchen door, his hat slanted slightly to one side, a grin filling his face.
Jill opened the door and stared up at him. “Yes,” she said, answring the question he had put to her three months earlier. One look at Jack in his uniform and she was hooked. He was the man for her.
August 8, 1942, several months before Jack shipped overseas, the two were married. “So much for that promise I wouldn’t marry young,” she whispered in his ear on a short honeymoon in Atlantic City.
Jack was sent to Africa, from there to cross the Mediterranean as part of an invasion on the shores of Sicily. The 45th had trained hard, but the Germans were waiting for them. A great many men on both sides were killed or wounded. Several days into the action, Jack was hit.
Within weeks Jill received a telegram from the government. We are sorry to inform you your husband has been seriously wounded in action.
Two days before the message arrived, Jill received a letter written by an army chaplain. Jack had dictated, “You are not to worry. I am all right. I will be home soon.”
The soon grew into months at various Army hospital stopovers in Italy and Africa. He was bedridden, his legs bandaged from his thighs to his feet, a sheet covering him during the hot days, freezing in the cold nights. Because of the pain, the wounds, he couldn’t eat, going from 180 lbs to 115 lbs. They put shots of whisky on his bed table, trying to induce him to an appetite. He gave the wiskey to his buddy in the next bed. Many times he wondered if he would live to get home. And he always wrote Jill saying he was okay, saying he would see her soon.
Months later, his legs hadn’t fully healed yet. He couldn’t walk. One requirement to board the hospital ships going home was to be ambulatory. One day, one doctor, at one hospital lied on Jack’s papers. The doctor had Jack in a wheel chair and snuck aboard a Navy Hospital Ship returning to the States. The sailors saw he got a lower bunk, tended to his needs, and brought him food. Without them he couldn’t have made the trip.
In the States he was sent to Ashford General Hospital, West Virginia. It boasted a famous golf course. Eventually, on crutches, Jack played that course several times. Later, he would say golf was for the handicapped. He never played the game again.
The first time Jill saw Jack in the hospital, he was on crutches. She ran to him, nearly knocking both of them over in her excitement.
After six months and two trips to West Virginia by Jill, Jack picked up his crutches, took the train from West Virginia to New York City, then the bus to Maspeth, and to his wife. He had the taxi driver take him directly to the place Jill worked, a few blocks from their home.
Many women remained at home and did war work while their men were off fighting. A year earlier, Jill learned that the shipyards needed workers. She obtained permission to leave her job as secretary to an attorney, and became an arc-welder. Her first job was on destroyer escorts in the Newark, New Jersey Federal shipyard. There she would climb a three-story ladder, dragging her line behind her, to weld sheets of metal together. Later, hearing of a place closer to home, she switched from destroyer escorts to landing barges. The building was long, one story, converted for war use. It was used to make the needed landing barges for that other invasion to come.
That wonderful day, Jack came in the door of the vast hall housing the barges being built. He spotted his tiny Jill, kneeling on the cement floor, torch aflame.
Jill looked up.
Jack stood there, uniform, crutches, and all.
She switched off her torch, laid it carefully aside, took off her suade shield and gloves and the huge helmet covering her face, and waved goodbye. “Please mail my check,” Jill said, smiling at the boss. She never returned. Jack was home. He needed her.
They slowly walked home the few short blocks. He wasn’t going back to the hospital, though he still had an open wound. If he chose not to go back, then he shouldn’t. She would tend to it. They would get his discharge papers in the mail.
He had received two purple hearts, a bronze star, Theatre of War, and other acknowledgments. They awarded him one hundred percent disability on the proviso he not go to work. When he healed, he refused to stay home. Rather, he went back to school, got a job, and lived as normal a life as he could. That was 1945.
In the summer of 1948, Jack drove Jill and their three-year-old son on a Sunday outing. He drove along Route 25. It was such a beautiful day he just kept driving farther east than he had before. They were two-thirds through Suffolk County when they passed a sign inviting passersby to visit a new development called Lake Panamoka. Jack glanced at Jill, nodded, and turned the car onto a dirt road. It was a lovely day to sightsee.
Jack drove the short distance to the realty office. As he went along, he glanced at the woods, at the trees and brush. They appeared familiar, but then, all woods look alike, he thought.
The realtor brought them around to the far side of Panamoka, where a new road crossed over a large body of water, a small pond to the left, the lake on the right.
And Jack remembered. They were now on the side of the lake Jack had seen back in 1942, when he was a new soldier at Camp Upton. The pine and oak were taller, and the narrow, two-car wide road around the lake was newly built. Mr. Alderman informed them Lakeside Trail continued north to 25A. Lake Panamoka was a private lake in a tiny town called Ridge.
In front of Jack was a sparkling lake, the one Jack visited on that hike six years earlier. Once a part of Camp Upton, the west and north acres of woods would remain pristine, untouched. Fifty-foot wide parcels of land on either side of the new road circling the lake was for sale. There were no homes on this side yet, but looking across the water a few small houses could be seen.
Jack and Jill, holding their little boy’s hands, left the car. The realtor leading, they walked the small dirt path through the maple and scrub oak and pine trees to the edge of the hill, just as Jack had done seven years earlier.
The water still lapped gently at the edge of the sandy shore, the air quiet, serene. It was summer this time. On the beach to their right some swans were lazily swimming in circles. Every year the birds came there to rest on their journey south.
That day, Jack and Jill purchased a parcel of lakefront land on the highest section of the hill. Jack figured it to be just about where he stood that day sixteen years earlier. They paid nineteen thousand dollars for it, a great deal of money in 1948. Jack bartered it down from twenty thousand. In today’s world it would be eighty thousand plus.
Five years later they built the first house on their side of the lake. Log cabins were the thing of the day here. Jack wanted it to be more than a vacation home, and he constructed a model to-scale, with a brick fireplace and a full basement, uncommon for summer homes in that area. It was built of strong split-cedar logs, and had a white roof. sloped. At the top of their hill, their land dropped several feet to the water below.
The rear of the basement was ground level, facing the water. Its door led to a brick path and twenty-six steps down to the sandy beach at the water’s edge. The house, ground level in front, had a brick path around to the back, where it opened from the kitchen to a long brick balcony. Jack built two curving stairways with iron railings, sixteen steps on each side of the balcony leading to the lower level. From there, a garden held the brick path to the steps going down to the lake. At lakeside, he built a wall and four steps into the water. When the water was high the steps went into the water, when the water was low the steps led to a sandy beach where the boats were docked. The water never went over the wall Jack built across the seventy-feet of his beach.
The drive from their home in Queens was two hours. They hated leaving Panamoka at the end of each weekend.
Five years after the house was built, Jack found his perfect job. On land that had once been Camp Upton, Brookhaven National Laboratory had been built. The same camp Jack was sent to when he was drafted in 1942, was now being used for Atomic Energy research. Ir was a ten minute drive from his house, and Jack worked there for sixteen years before he retired.
Jack and Jill and their children lived at the beautiful Lake Panamoka all year. Jack liked to come home for lunch and a swim, weather permitting.
The town of Ridge had a small post office that doubled as a grocery story. Ridge Elementary School had recently been built on Ridge Road. It was three miles west of Route 25, from their lake house. It would do nicely for their little girl of six and their son of ten. The nearest High School was in the town of Port Jefferson, an hour drive by school bus. Brian attended there for two years before Longwood High School was built. He completed his remaining two years in the brand new school, five minutes from Brookhaven Lab, fifteen minutes from home.
After the years, swimming and boating and ice skating and horseback riding and wandering the woods, the children graduated from Longwood High School and went on to college. After college, Susan was married in the garden of the lake house, overlooking beautiful Panamoka lake. Brian’s daughter was a flower girl at the wedding.
As an engineer, Jack worked at the lab until he was fifty-one, when he retired. He had stayed until both children finished college and were married before he called it a day, and stayed home to rest his wounded legs. Jill worked at Longwood High School for twenty-four years. Jack and Jill lived amid the pine trees at Lake Panamoka, in the town of Ridge, for thirty-five years.
They moved to Florida, to a new development called Pine Ridge.
COINCIDENCE? OR IS LIFE PLANNED led BY THE FATES?
COINCIDENCE—OR OUR DESTINY?
Does fate set us up, deliberately arrange the chain of events that are our lives? Is it manipulation by the fates or or is it coincidence?
It was 1938. North-eastern Long Island. Two young people—we will call them Jack and Jill. Those are not their real names, but they work for this story.
Jill, sixteen, and Jack, nineteen, had briefly met once before, but by the end of the day of their second meetng their lives would be forever entwined.
It was summer. A lazy Sunday. Six teenage friends were going to visit one of the boy’s vacation home. The island is a long, narrow strip of land, running north and south. It jutted out into the Atlantic Ocean, east of New York City. On the map it looks like a stretched fish, its tale splitting at the junction of the Township of Riverhead on the north, and the town of West Hampton Beach on the south.
The house Jack and Jill and friends visited was in the part of the island a few scant miles west of the north fork of the fishtail, in the tiny town of Rocky Point. It sat on the bluff overlooking Long Island Sound.
Less than twenty miles south lay the town of Yaphank, which housed Camp Upton. The camp had been there since before 1917, in use during the first World War. It was there the famous songwriter, Irving Berlin, wrote Gee How I Hate To Get Up In The Morning because, as the story goes, he hated the bugler for waking him. The song later became part of a play and then a movie.
But this is the tale of Jack and Jill. Neither of them yet knew the significance Camp Upton was to play in their lives.
The six young people spent the day swimming in the Sound, eating everything in sight, doing all the things teens do on a day in the country.
And, on that first real date, Jack fell in love with Jill.
The feeling was mutual. In the three years following, few evenings passed without seeing one another. But both had school to finish. They had things to do before they settled down. There was lots of time. They were young.
On December 7th, 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Over Jack’s little radio they heard President Roosevelt say, “… this is a day that will live in infamy…” The United States declared war on Japan and Germany.
In February, 1942, two months after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Jack found himself drafted into the Army. At twenty-two, the handsome six-foot tall young man, in love with his nineteen year old, five-foot-two Jill, asked her to marry him before he left.
She was heartbroken he was leaving—she would write every day—she would wait for him—but no, she didn’t want to marry. She was too young, she argued. How could she even think of marriage. Besides, she had promised herself she would not marry before she was twenty-three, at least.
Jack kissed her a sad goodbye, boarded a bus, then a train to Camp Upton. He was off to war.
The thing about being in the Army for Jack was, he was willing and ready to do his absolute best for the war effort, as it was called. But he didn’t want to be anything more than a private, do his best to conqure the enemy, and return home. His entire life had been regimented. In boarding school he wore a uniform, played the drums in the school’s marching band, and spent each Saturday of the school year on the parade grounds. One week they marched as soldiers, carrying rifles. The following week they were sailors, brandishing swords.
At eighteen, before starting college, he decided to spend six months in the mountains and woods of California in the Civilian Conservation Corps. He thought of it as an adventure before settling down to civilian life. Luck and life played the tune another way. Before he could finish school, marry the girl he loved, and live the good ol’ American dream, he found himself drafted into WW II—The Great War.
The first camp he was sent to was in the town of Yaphank. Rocky Point, where he and Jill had their first date, was a few minutes drive from the camp. Back then, one had only to cross Route 25A from Rocky Point, and be on Army property. That part of the island, south of 25A, in the town of Upton, was U.S. Army camp grounds.
Being in Upton brought a flood of memories to Jack. He recalled his first date with Jill, and their ride in the rumble seat of Jo’s car. They kissed all the way home. Young, sweet, sentimental kisses. He was nineteen, when he said to her, ‘I more than like you.’ A boy’s declaration of love.
During the week Jack was stationed at Upton, the troops went on a hike through a large area of woods adjacent to the camp. The region was wild, untouched, but for the rhythmical thumping of heavy boots. The air hung still.
As they single-filed along a narrow muddy, snowy trail, Jack, glancing to his right, caught a glint of sun hitting sparkling water, and what looked to be a large lake. When the company stopped to rest, he left the trail, stepping through growths of tall scrub oak, its brown leaves making jagged patterns against an ice-blue winter sky. Something glittered on the ground, and he stopped to pick up an arrowhead laying half buried in the snow and dirt. After examining it, rolling it in his hand, he grinned and put it in his pocket. Indians had hunted here, he deduced.
He pushed on past low berry bushes, tall pines, a bare maple tree, its snow-laden branches drooping. Before him lay a narrow path. About one- hundred-fifty-feet along, the trail ended at a bank some fifteen-feet above blue water. It lapped softly at a sandy shoreline. Overgrown skinny brown branches poked through the winter white on the small hill. Several yards farther out the water had glazed over to a frozen-gray color. Beyond that, the lake was solid ice. The sight was stunning. What a great spot for ice-skating, he thought.
The routine of Army life continued at a fast pace. After a week they went on to their next camp. Three months, more camps, and many letters later Jack got a pass. He was going to see his Jill.
Excitement built as he knocked on her kitchen door, his hat slanted slightly to one side, a grin filling his face.
Jill opened the door and stared up at him. “Yes,” she said, answring the question he had put to her three months earlier. One look at Jack in his uniform and she was hooked. He was the man for her.
August 8, 1942, several months before Jack shipped overseas, the two were married. “So much for that promise I wouldn’t marry young,” she whispered in his ear on a short honeymoon in Atlantic City.
Jack was sent to Africa, from there to cross the Mediterranean as part of an invasion on the shores of Sicily. The 45th had trained hard, but the Germans were waiting for them. A great many men on both sides were killed or wounded. Several days into the action, Jack was hit.
Within weeks Jill received a telegram from the government. We are sorry to inform you your husband has been seriously wounded in action.
Two days before the message arrived, Jill received a letter written by an army chaplain. Jack had dictated, “You are not to worry. I am all right. I will be home soon.”
The soon grew into months at various Army hospital stopovers in Italy and Africa. He was bedridden, his legs bandaged from his thighs to his feet, a sheet covering him during the hot days, freezing in the cold nights. Because of the pain, the wounds, he couldn’t eat, going from 180 lbs to 115 lbs. They put shots of whisky on his bed table, trying to induce him to an appetite. He gave the wiskey to his buddy in the next bed. Many times he wondered if he would live to get home. And he always wrote Jill saying he was okay, saying he would see her soon.
Months later, his legs hadn’t fully healed yet. He couldn’t walk. One requirement to board the hospital ships going home was to be ambulatory. One day, one doctor, at one hospital lied on Jack’s papers. The doctor had Jack in a wheel chair and snuck aboard a Navy Hospital Ship returning to the States. The sailors saw he got a lower bunk, tended to his needs, and brought him food. Without them he couldn’t have made the trip.
In the States he was sent to Ashford General Hospital, West Virginia. It boasted a famous golf course. Eventually, on crutches, Jack played that course several times. Later, he would say golf was for the handicapped. He never played the game again.
The first time Jill saw Jack in the hospital, he was on crutches. She ran to him, nearly knocking both of them over in her excitement.
After six months and two trips to West Virginia by Jill, Jack picked up his crutches, took the train from West Virginia to New York City, then the bus to Maspeth, and to his wife. He had the taxi driver take him directly to the place Jill worked, a few blocks from their home.
Many women remained at home and did war work while their men were off fighting. A year earlier, Jill learned that the shipyards needed workers. She obtained permission to leave her job as secretary to an attorney, and became an arc-welder. Her first job was on destroyer escorts in the Newark, New Jersey Federal shipyard. There she would climb a three-story ladder, dragging her line behind her, to weld sheets of metal together. Later, hearing of a place closer to home, she switched from destroyer escorts to landing barges. The building was long, one story, converted for war use. It was used to make the needed landing barges for that other invasion to come.
That wonderful day, Jack came in the door of the vast hall housing the barges being built. He spotted his tiny Jill, kneeling on the cement floor, torch aflame.
Jill looked up.
Jack stood there, uniform, crutches, and all.
She switched off her torch, laid it carefully aside, took off her suade shield and gloves and the huge helmet covering her face, and waved goodbye. “Please mail my check,” Jill said, smiling at the boss. She never returned. Jack was home. He needed her.
They slowly walked home the few short blocks. He wasn’t going back to the hospital, though he still had an open wound. If he chose not to go back, then he shouldn’t. She would tend to it. They would get his discharge papers in the mail.
He had received two purple hearts, a bronze star, Theatre of War, and other acknowledgments. They awarded him one hundred percent disability on the proviso he not go to work. When he healed, he refused to stay home. Rather, he went back to school, got a job, and lived as normal a life as he could. That was 1945.
In the summer of 1948, Jack drove Jill and their three-year-old son on a Sunday outing. He drove along Route 25. It was such a beautiful day he just kept driving farther east than he had before. They were two-thirds through Suffolk County when they passed a sign inviting passersby to visit a new development called Lake Panamoka. Jack glanced at Jill, nodded, and turned the car onto a dirt road. It was a lovely day to sightsee.
Jack drove the short distance to the realty office. As he went along, he glanced at the woods, at the trees and brush. They appeared familiar, but then, all woods look alike, he thought.
The realtor brought them around to the far side of Panamoka, where a new road crossed over a large body of water, a small pond to the left, the lake on the right.
And Jack remembered. They were now on the side of the lake Jack had seen back in 1942, when he was a new soldier at Camp Upton. The pine and oak were taller, and the narrow, two-car wide road around the lake was newly built. Mr. Alderman informed them Lakeside Trail continued north to 25A. Lake Panamoka was a private lake in a tiny town called Ridge.
In front of Jack was a sparkling lake, the one Jack visited on that hike six years earlier. Once a part of Camp Upton, the west and north acres of woods would remain pristine, untouched. Fifty-foot wide parcels of land on either side of the new road circling the lake was for sale. There were no homes on this side yet, but looking across the water a few small houses could be seen.
Jack and Jill, holding their little boy’s hands, left the car. The realtor leading, they walked the small dirt path through the maple and scrub oak and pine trees to the edge of the hill, just as Jack had done seven years earlier.
The water still lapped gently at the edge of the sandy shore, the air quiet, serene. It was summer this time. On the beach to their right some swans were lazily swimming in circles. Every year the birds came there to rest on their journey south.
That day, Jack and Jill purchased a parcel of lakefront land on the highest section of the hill. Jack figured it to be just about where he stood that day sixteen years earlier. They paid nineteen thousand dollars for it, a great deal of money in 1948. Jack bartered it down from twenty thousand. In today’s world it would be eighty thousand plus.
Five years later they built the first house on their side of the lake. Log cabins were the thing of the day here. Jack wanted it to be more than a vacation home, and he constructed a model to-scale, with a brick fireplace and a full basement, uncommon for summer homes in that area. It was built of strong split-cedar logs, and had a white roof. sloped. At the top of their hill, their land dropped several feet to the water below.
The rear of the basement was ground level, facing the water. Its door led to a brick path and twenty-six steps down to the sandy beach at the water’s edge. The house, ground level in front, had a brick path around to the back, where it opened from the kitchen to a long brick balcony. Jack built two curving stairways with iron railings, sixteen steps on each side of the balcony leading to the lower level. From there, a garden held the brick path to the steps going down to the lake. At lakeside, he built a wall and four steps into the water. When the water was high the steps went into the water, when the water was low the steps led to a sandy beach where the boats were docked. The water never went over the wall Jack built across the seventy-feet of his beach.
The drive from their home in Queens was two hours. They hated leaving Panamoka at the end of each weekend.
Five years after the house was built, Jack found his perfect job. On land that had once been Camp Upton, Brookhaven National Laboratory had been built. The same camp Jack was sent to when he was drafted in 1942, was now being used for Atomic Energy research. Ir was a ten minute drive from his house, and Jack worked there for sixteen years before he retired.
Jack and Jill and their children lived at the beautiful Lake Panamoka all year. Jack liked to come home for lunch and a swim, weather permitting.
The town of Ridge had a small post office that doubled as a grocery story. Ridge Elementary School had recently been built on Ridge Road. It was three miles west of Route 25, from their lake house. It would do nicely for their little girl of six and their son of ten. The nearest High School was in the town of Port Jefferson, an hour drive by school bus. Brian attended there for two years before Longwood High School was built. He completed his remaining two years in the brand new school, five minutes from Brookhaven Lab, fifteen minutes from home.
After the years, swimming and boating and ice skating and horseback riding and wandering the woods, the children graduated from Longwood High School and went on to college. After college, Susan was married in the garden of the lake house, overlooking beautiful Panamoka lake. Brian’s daughter was a flower girl at the wedding.
As an engineer, Jack worked at the lab until he was fifty-one, when he retired. He had stayed until both children finished college and were married before he called it a day, and stayed home to rest his wounded legs. Jill worked at Longwood High School for twenty-four years. Jack and Jill lived amid the pine trees at Lake Panamoka, in the town of Ridge, for thirty-five years.
They moved to Florida, to a new development called Pine Ridge.
COINCIDENCE? OR IS LIFE PLANNED led BY THE FATES?