Franklin Crawford

Tiny Town, USA – I was too busy playing newspaper to catch the moment, so a buddy had to point it out to me: Mark Sammo had just said a prayer for Bernie Milton. His band, The Dixie Kats, had completed their set as part of the celebration for the Commons rebuilding launch on Monday, April 8. Mark wanted people to remember the space for having served as the site for so much live entertainment, since its inception in 1974, when the Commons was built. There will be a new Bernie Milton Pavilion, but that will be another space, in another time.

Then it hit me: What was Mark doing out in public? Or rather -- how ...

And this is the saddest thing: In March, Mark's sweetheart, Donna Dennis, traveled to Fairview, Montana, to help her ailing mother.

I didn't know Donna Dennis; but Mark is as familiar to me as the wooded hills flanking this town.

Last month I learned that Donna died during her trip in Montana, March 22.

Not even a month ago.

And there on a Monday April 8 was Mark Sammo, belting out the blues New Orleans-style, with his band, the last group to perform on that spot, forever. And in the end, he prayed for that space and for what it has meant to Ithaca.

When we spoke a while later that Monday, he invited me to share this information:

On Sunday, April 14, at the Oasis Dance Club, there will be a Memory Celebration for Donna Dennis. Mark says it will be handled New Orleans-style, with a funeral march and dirge, followed by a lot of music and dance.

I want to extend my sincere condolences to all relations of Donna Dennis, and especially to Mark, who, by honoring his love of music and continuing to perform through his shock and grief, teaches me more than I can express about how a man might move through this life with courage and grace. Thank you, Mark.

– franklin crawford

Donna Dennis. Image provided by Mark Sammo.

Below is an obituary composed in Donna's memory that Mark has shared with us, only slightly edited.

Donna Dennis, a school bus aide serving the Ithaca City School System, died on March 22, following an automobile accident in Montana. She was 57.

Ms. Dennis was born on Oct. 22, 1955 at Ft. Benning, GA, the daughter of George and Elsie (Lester) Dennis. She worked as an entrepreneurial freight broker for the Sunteck Transport Group until her death. In 2011, Donna moved to Ithaca, where she worked for the Ithaca City School's transport system.

Ms. Dennis was in Fairview, MT, caring for her ailing mother at the time of her death.

Ms. Dennis is survived by her two sons, Richard (Kari) Reidle, Trenton, N.D.; and, Elijah (Kelsey Johnson) Reidle, Fairview, MT; her daughter, Kelsey (Michael) Cochran, McDonough, GA; her mother and step-father, Elsie and Ernest Carstens, Fairview, MT; her brother, Perry (Patty) Dennis, Mission, TX; her sister, Cheryl (Ed) Yadon, Fairview, MT; two treasured grandchildren and several nieces and nephews; and, Mr. Sammo, Ithaca, N.Y., her beloved partner.

She was preceded in death by her father, George Perry “Pete” Dennis and her infant brother, James Mark Dennis.

Funeral services were held for Donna Dennis, in Sidney, MT, on April 2, 2013.

Mr. Sammo asks that all who would care to celebrate the life of Donna Dennis and the love he shared with her to please join him and friends for the event described above, at Oasis Dance Club.

The gentle weather today inspired a hike in the woods south of Tiny Town, part of it the Danby Forest where the Finger Lakes Trail snakes toward a certain junction in the Catskills and there, if you wanted, you could board the great Appalachian Trail and follow Sherman's March to the sea.

I don't know if I'll ever get that far. I'm surprised that anyone gets anywhere at all. The primal urge to make it or die trying is in us all, although lately in myself, to a lesser degree. Getting old means being humbled by the things only my mind can see.

This is unimportant. What is important is that buried under deadfall and mounds of duff and leaves, one can find deep in the wooded hills here and there, the foundation stones of what once were shelters of a sort. In these fair woods on a gentle day, feeling nature close at hand, it is hard to understand that these forest lands are not primeval in the least, haven't been for a good 300 years or so and that there is nothing pristine anywhere near Tiny Town, much less anywhere in the United States or the world. People have had their way with the landscape here and there, over and over again. We are fast at work on the ocean floor and the sands of Mars to equal effect: trespass and plunder.

What depresses me about these stone foundations? Images of clear-cut hills, and grim-faced sons of Washington's Army working to make something of the hard-scabble lands, sick, forlorn Indians driven from their 10,000 year old home, Indians long gone ghosting the hillsides even so. My own faulty imagination on the blink and the present a reverse negative on a glass plate cracked; hold it up to the light and only dimness and obscurity prevail. I cannot fathom the life of an 18th or 19th century small time subsistence farmer or woodsman, okay? We say "they were a hardier folk." (To comfort ourselves, the way we are comforted when we hear someone died quietly "in their sleep.")

Well, maybe in a sense they were of tougher stock. That sense being they didn't expect much better and therefore the cold, the slow-growing orchards, the disease and the harsh life of raising some dairy cattle or just trying to get some food hauled in ... And then all the trees gone and the grasses for more and more farting cattle. Sexy, hmmf?

My imagination runs away from these little root cellars and failed stone walls ... I don't know want to know what they have to tell me. I am glad for the spoiled time I am born into, but only so glad. Because it is here only thanks to some bullying pioneers and slave-drivers and Indian killers who made it easy for the inventors and scientists to dream-up comforts that plowed the great mess of us right up to the end of our shelf-life (fiendishly clever, the impulse to self-destruct looking all the while like a method of discovery!). It won't ruin my next warm shower, let me be honest. Only when I see how the poor might have lived in those once denuded hills (and not so long ago, either!), tilling their reluctant glacial soil or managing it for some huge pre-industrial factory farm concern. The shabbiness of life!

And what I see on the hillsides now, these coniferous plantations and logging roads and none of it resembling anything of the land that once was ... Well. Just keep walking. Thoreau made a big deal of his "pristine" experience. What a fart in a nest of titmice he was! Half the critters of his time where already driven to extinction or on their way there when he got all dreamy about hauling water and chopping wood. And don't think he didn't nip off to his old crony's place for some meat and potatoes when his little experiment smacked of monotony and the bug bites drove him off to Emerson's place for some drink and ethereal chit-chat.

Never mind. After a dreadful winter, the air is good for me, the exercise necessary. Just keeping walking. Ignore the crumbling stone foundations, the abandoned root cellars and the chill that is always around those little places. There is always a grave nearby and some unnerving facts about living in close quarters. That was a hard life; this too, is a hard life.

I'll take this hard life for now, with its Newtowns, its Syria and its North Korea and our floundering President. I'll take it with a little dose of something to dull the senses, if you please don't mind, so, like others of my time, I may be comfortably numb. Or the off chance to imitate the young couple and their two kids who drove their BMW all the way up a muddy logging road for a view of a thing that isn't what it was at all but the outdoors some magazine editors fancied we all ought to fancy and but into, I might relax. Enjoy the scenic view.

Yes. Relax. Not think of some yankee consumptive having to get up and work the steep stony hills with a bum leg yolked to a pair of stubborn beasts of burden driving up daisies in a hailstorm.

It is not right to feel pained by things imagined because they are only imagined. The real matter is this: I do not know the reason for my being here at all, forced from one dark to another dark, with a whole universe expecting me to do something about it, make it better, be the eyes and ears of that cavernous beyond and maybe pipe a jaunty tune for some mute constellation. Fuck you, Taurus! Nope. Not me.

Those piles of stones know me somehow and cast a pall on an otherwise sweet atavistic hike on an ancient planet I really don't know a damn thing about, and am to this day, foreign to. But damned if I want to know any more about those tumbledown places or the lives they sheltered. Call me cruel. But do, call me.

– P. Cumulus, blames the mood on incipient tree allergies