Dr. Metablog

Fly Swatters

For many years, we've had to make do with this inferior fly-swatter:

It's made of molded plastic and extruded metal wire. It's not handsome -- a ghastly inappropriate pink-purple color for the flapper and a small gauge white-coated wire for the handle. Is there a name fpr this  styleless style, other than dime-store cheap. Mid-century modern in its least attractive manifestation. Not only unbeautiful, it leaves much to be desired in function. The flapper is inflexible and rigid, which makes it difficult to kill the fly without splattering it. Moreover, the wire handle lacks integrity and offers an uncomfortable grip.

Now feast your eyes on this newly-acquired fly-swatter. It's a thing of beauty.

Notice the turned hardwood handle (maple, I believe, or possibly birch), perfectly suited to the human hand. The heavy gauge shaft leading to a genuine metal screen flapper. It's a fly-swatter to savor;  a classic. Many a graceful swat in it.

An anniversary or a birthday in the offing? Nothing says "I love you" more than a fly-swatter of distinction. It's also unsurpassed as a wedding present. If you're in a generous mood, "his" and "hers" fly swatters will get that marriage off to a great start.

Our Visit to Beardstown, Illinois

We visited Beardstown, in southwestern Illinois, because it was the birthplace, in 1845, of one of Lynn's maternal great-grandmothers, Mary St. John DeHaven. Even though it's Lincoln country, we had no idea what to expect, the AAA entry being so scant, but we soon discovered that Beardstown is a place that had its moment of glory sometime in the nineteenth century, but which has allowed history to pass it by. While it's not entirely derelict, it's not even slightly prosperous -- nor has it achieved quaintness. The industry of note nowadays is the JBS meat-packing plant out on the Arenzville Road; most of its employees come from south of the border, which is why the only indication that Beardstown might someday be rejuvenated is the dozen or so new downtown taquerias and iglesias.

Our first stop in Beardstown was a decaying, rather pathetic 200-foot long peeling boardwalk along the sandy Illinois River, a waterway which in the years before the Civil War had been a thriving commercial thoroughfare. There we watched a solitary tug struggle to free a barge that had somehow run itself aground. Perhaps the boardwalk had once welcomed visitors and tourists, but during our stay the only spectator beside ourselves was a very frayed out-of-work fellow who arrived on a beaten-up bicycle, and who seemed entirely out of his depth when we asked if there was a place in Beardstown to purchase a cup of coffee. To me, he seemed addled; I suspected meth or opioids.

After gazing at the sluggish river for half an hour (remembering Abraham Lincoln's enthusiasm for river transport), we toured the few blocks of the old downtown, in which fewer storefronts were occupied than were vacant. We looked in at an antique store -- actually less "antique" than "junque" (unless a flashy bejewelled Elvis Presley doll was a revered artifact of a prior civilization). Lynn purchased an owl-decorated piece of blue porcelain for $5.00. We inquired of the proprietor, Mrs. White, if there were a coffee shop in Beardstown. Patricia White, we soon learned, was a recently retired public school music teacher and a lively lady knowledgeable about all things Beardstownian. I asked her about the intriguing storefront adjacent to hers, which proclaimed itself to be a Grand Opera House. I was skeptical that any sort of grandeur could be found in such dreary town, but I was wrong. Mrs. White generously offered us a tour of the old theater. She warned us that it was in deep disrepair but she said that she and others, led by the local chiropractor, were working diligently towards its restoration. So up a flight of dark stairs we went, and there, lo and behold, was revealed to us the picturesque ruins of what had once been a remarkable structure. Here's a photograph of the remains of its ornate frescoed ceiling and 20-foot-high windows:

The theatre had a well-proportioned stage and had once (before the balcony was pulled down) been able to seat several hundred people. In the littered backstage were the remnants of nineteenth-century traveling shows, including a large painted backdrop of Venetian gondolas, left behind by a company from St. Louis. But the building, though its bones were good, was a wreck: leaks in the roof had caused the ceiling to deteriorate. The auditorium itself had served as a storage area for the overflow merchandise of decades of store owners. It would take a dozen roll-offs and weeks of work just to remove the trash and find the floor. Nevertheless, the Grand Opera House offered us an insight into what Beardstown had been when it was a thriving community. I was so impressed by the theater that I decided to donate my bit to its reconstruction. I had determined on $100 until I noticed that Mrs. White had donned a red white and blue Trump 2020 face mask. And so arose a moral dilemma: I want to support the arts, and I would love to help return the Grand Opera House to its former glory. Opera and music should be beyond politics -- but yet I was deeply repelled by Mrs. White's Trumpism. So I split the difference and donated $60 to the cause. A sensible compromise to a vexing problem?? I don't know. But it's what I did. I wanted to ask Mrs. White what Donald Trump's ignorance, bigotry, authoritarian predilections and corrupt, vacant life had to offer to a cheerful retired teacher in a decaying midwestern town, but I saw no reason to provoke a controversy.  

Afterward, we found some lunch up the street at Sally's Bistro. The bistro did not live up to "bistro" expectations, and could more honestly be called Sally's Diner, but it did make a good BLT and almost-decent coffee. We did not try the "alligator bits" for which it is famous, even though Sally assured us that the bits were much better than the usual alligator tail. (Beardstown has an alligator farm but we didn't tour it.)

Mrs. White had also told us about the "old cemetery" so on a lark we went off to investigate. We wandered about, not expecting much, until we stumbled upon a gravestone which revealed that the late Henry Foster married the late Mary McKeever DeHaven. Lynn doesn't know precisely who these people are, but there are so many of her family names on the marker -- that of her grandfather, George Foster Massey, her uncle, McKeever Massey, her second cousin, Katherine DeHaven Milligan -- that they must  be long-departed members of her extended ancestry. Certainly cousins of some degree.

We googled Henry T. (for True) Foster and found that he was a pillar of the frontier community of Beardstown. He had immigrated from Maine; Mary from Philadelphia. We were gratified by this unexpected find. 

On the return trip from Beardstown to Jacksonville, we stopped at Griggsville, which, we were astonished to discover, is the "purple martin capitol of the nation" and the location of the world's largest purple martin skyscraper. Skeptical?  Here's the proof:

So altogether a most rewarding day.

Words of my Life: Slouch

When I was a boy, I was regularly reprimanded with these words (or some variation of them): "Don't slouch." "You're slouching! "You're slouching again!" "Why are you slouching?" 

Apparently I was a natural sloucher.  

It was a difficult criticism to absorb or to counter. I wasn't entirely sure what the word "slouch" meant but I sure knew that it wasn't anything good. In my mother's eyes, I believe, "slouching" was not only a physical but a moral lapse. But to be accused of something of which my body, not me in my own person as I knew myself, was guilty -- well, that was surely puzzling.

To slouch is to "sit or stand in a casual, lazy, drooping, or improper posture." "Lazy?" -- I was definitely lazy. "Improper? -- I'm not so sure. Nor do I know why being repeatedly accused of "slouching" was going to turn me into an upright proper person.

The most famous sloucher in literature is the villainous Orlick in Great Expectations, who was "always slouching. He never even seemed to come to his work on purpose, but would slouch in as if by mere accident...  and when he went ...away at night, he would slouch out.... He lodged at a sluice-keeper's out on the marshes, and on working-days would come slouching from his hermitage." Slouching is unquestionably a marker of evil for Dickens. Was it so for my mom?

Then there's Yeat's "rough beast... slouching toward Bethlehem to be born." A second coming of sorts, and not at all a good one.

So there you have three slouchers: the "rough beast," Orlick, and me.

About James Perry Jr.

From our part of Vermont comes some ghastly news. In a paranoid fit, James Perry Jr. shot and killed Karina, his 38-year-old daughter.

According to the Vermont Digger, our internet newspaper, Perry had been holing up in his home, convinced that "bad guys with guns" were after him. Here's part of the newspaper account: "Perry said he shot his daughter... as she stood on a landing outside his residence. He told police he was concerned that unknown people were playing 'gun games' with him and he asked his daughter not to come to his residence.... He was concerned Karina was being used as a “ploy” by unknown individuals.... For the past couple weeks he has been unable to sleep.... He was sitting on his couch when he saw his daughter at the door. He picked up his 12-gauge shotgun, and could see Karina holding cookies, waving, and trying to open the locked door. ‘I’m just so nervous… and I didn’t want her to come in, and I didn’t want the cookies. I ordered her to stop, and I just, I guess I, pulled the trigger. And then I pulled it more, and then I cut her neck.'" Perry said he believed he used a pocket knife to stab her.

Could there be a more horrific tragedy? A man goes crazy and kills his own daughter.

But yet there's worse -- in the details that don't appear in the newspaper. Karina, Jim's older daughter by his second wife, Phyllis, is divorced and is the mother of four children, who are now left motherless. And Phyllis, Karina's mother, is ill with a very bad cancer -- so she had to learn, in this last phase of her life, that her ex-husband shot and killed one of their children. 

Here's a picture of James Perry Jr. as it appeared in the Digger. He looks like a guy who's just been cast as a maniac in a chainsaw massacre movie.

He certainly does not look at all like the Jimmy Perry whom I've known for 45 years. Except for the bright blue eyes, he's unrecognizable.

I remember Jim when he was in his twenties -- a normal guy. Actually he was quite handsome, strong, energetic, well-liked, already skilled with wood and bricks and stones. He built the chimney in our new house and he was a more-than-competent carpenter.  

How could the Jimmy Perry that I knew and admired in the 1970s turn into a man who shoots and kills his own daughter?

Even back then, he drank too much. And used too much marijuana. Sometime in the 1980s, he worked in Wyoming as a roustabout on oil rigs. One day he fell into a vat of what he called "mud" but was a container for the strong chemicals used in the oil drilling process. He was burned neck to ankle and spent close to a year, if I remember correctly, in a hospital -- in severe pain for much of the time. I don't think he ever fully recovered. His body was a mass of scars. I'm sure that the beer and the drugs and the pain, and possibly the isolation caused by the pandemic, contributed to his derangement. But nothing explains what is fundamentally inexplicable.

I didn't see much of Jim in the last few years. I'd run into him in Hannaford's occasionally. He appeared to be many years older than his true age. He was emaciated, sickly-looking. Clearly someone who'd had a hard life. He told me that he didn't know how long he could continue "crawling on roofs." The last time I caught sight of him, I confess, I avoided him. I could see even from a distance that he was "off" and I didn't want to engage with him.  

I don't mean to excuse Jim. What he did was the worst. I wish that he hadn't had a shotgun in the house. If he had to be armed, I would have preferred that he shot himself. That would have been bad enough. I hope that he doesn't regain his sanity, because if he does so, he'll have to reckon with what he's done. The guilt will kill him twenty times over.

Jim was an ordinary man, not an evil one. The picture above doesn't tell the whole story. He was unlucky, and crazed, and something went horribly wrong in his brain. Those of us who are lucky and sane should thank our good fortune, because all of us are vulnerable.

Jim did a lot of work for me in 1978. In the summer of 1979, he came to visit and said that he had gone over his books and discovered that I had overpaid him for about a week of work. News to me -- I had no idea. He said that he couldn't reimburse the money he owed me, but he would take a few days and build me a nice stone wall -- even then, he was famous for his classy stonework. So together and with the help of my kids we poached a dozen truckloads of stone from some of our many crumbling walls. We picked out a site and he built us about fifty feet of handsome drystone. It's still there, an ornament to the property. The maker of that wall is the Jimmy Perry, an honest craftsman and a reliable friend, that I prefer to remember, even while I mourn the death of his daughter and regret the abysmal woe that he caused his family.  

Overton Mystery

Here's a a handsome old double-weave Jacquard coverlet in all its flowery glory, right there on our very own bed. Extraordinarily decorative, is it not?  Cotton and wool, and generous with the well-saturated indigo dye. State-of-the-art hand weaving.

I especially prize this particular coverlet because of its history. It was woven for Charity Maria Laws in 1835, as is plainly evident from the inscription on its "summer" side. I wish the weaver had identified himself as well as his client, but he hasn't. 

Who is Charity Maria Laws?  She was a native of a part of Long Island (New York) with which I'm very familiar and where I spent the best three summers of my childhood. She was born in 1822 in Ridge and died in Northport in 1894. Makamah Beach, home to as much fair seed-time for the soul as I experienced, is located within the Northport precincts. Charity Maria was presented with this coverlet when she was thirteen years old -- to keep her warm a'nights, no doubt, but also, as was the custom, to serve as the centerpiece of her trousseau. The coverlet worked its magic because in 1848 Charity Maria was wooed and won by John Gardiner Lewis of neighboring Crab Meadow and bore five children, all of them born in Northport or adjacent Huntington. I have no idea where the coverlet hid out between Maria's death until it made its re-appearance on ebay last year, but I'm happy to say that it was treated  very well during that time -- it's in splendid shape for a textile that's pushing two hundred. 

Imagine my surprise, when, a few days ago, a Jacquard coverlet in an identical style appeared on ebay. When I glanced at the pictures, I said, out loud but to no one in particular, I bet that one also hails from my part of Suffolk. It didn't take an S. Holmes to confirm my speculation.The evidence is as plain as the nose on your face: the exact same lettering, but this time, it's Harriet Sophia Overton.

This coverlet is not only inscribed -- It's dated, too. December 1, 1845. Harriet Sophia Overton herself is not easy to identify. There was a Harriet Sophia in the village or hamlet of Coram, in Suffolk, just a few miles from Northport, but she was born in 1815 and died in 1821 and therefore can't possibly be the recipient of a coverlet woven in 1845. There must be a second Harriet Sophia. And truly, so there is. The first Harriet Sophia had an older brother, Sheldon Roe Overton, who fathered a girl named after the departed six-year-old. Harriet Sophia Overton II was born in 1850 and died, unmarried, in 1868. Another dead end, alas, because HSO the second was born five years after the coverlet was woven.  

I am forced to speculate that there was still a third Harriet Sophia Overton who was born on December 1, 1845 and didn't live long enough to get a mention in the story or even earn a gravestone. Harriet Sophia Overton was an unlucky name. Hardly compensated for by the long-lived coverlet.  

Despite my love of Northport and environs -- of course I mean the Northport of my memory, the Northport of the 1840s -- I didn't bid on the Overton coverlet. But I would love to know its story, which I suspect is one of great sadness.