Dr. Metablog

Octogenarian Locomotion

Well into my ninth decade, I no longer sprint. Neither do I run. Or trot. Or jog. Or even lope. There is no necessity to stride. Instead, I prefer to walk, with dignity, though frankly, I'm oftentimes content to stroll. Nor do I rush, hustle, hasten, zoom, or (heavens forfend!) scurry.

 

Nowadays, I do not jump, leap, vault, spring, hop, bound, dart, or skip. Nor do I caper, prance, frisk, or cavort. If I frolic, I do so only in my imagination. I do not gambol or hurtle. I do, however, sometimes saunter and there are periods in which I will amble.

 

I do not, as a rule, climb. I may climb a set of stairs, with a banister or two in hand, but I no longer climb a ladder. I can envision no occasion in which I would be tempted to climb a wall or fence. If I must negotiate an upslope, I do not mount or scale or clamber or scamper or shinny. I ascend.

Novels Set in Brooklyn: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

My new reading project: novels set in Brooklyn. There are, I've already discovered, tons of them. I wonder how long I will last at this endeavor. Will it be a sterile or a fruitful exercise?

How is it that I never read, until this very week, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn?  It's certainly the best known novel with the noun "Brooklyn" in its title. I've known about it all my life and just never got around to looking at a single page. Did my parents, always tentative about sex, warn me off because the novel has a few frank passages. Or was it anti-Brooklyn snobbery?  As a young person, I wanted to read about far off places -- Pitcairn Island, nomadic central Asia, and the Africa of Rider Haggard, -- certainly not familiar grimy Brooklyn. At the McDonald Avenue branch of the public library, there were many well-worn copies of of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn sitting on the shelf -- which I ignored and, if I remember correctly, disdained.  

What did I miss?  Tree is not much in the way of a fiction. There's nothing like a plot, only a series of loosely-related episodes, and except for the central figure, not much character development. It's a barely-disguised autobiography. Francie Nolan, tracked from birth through her escape to, believe it or not, Michigan!!, comes from a grindingly poor family ("food insecure" before the term was invented). Much of the first few hundred pages is the barebones account of the struggle for sustenance (and lodging). There is so much emphasis on overcoming lack that Tree almost seems to fetishize or celebrate poverty. 

So much scrabbling for the next meal is hard to bear, painful to read. It's especially painful for me, because Betty Smith, born in 1896 in Williamsburg, preceded my father, also a native of Williamsburg (born in 1904) by only a few years. He came from an immigrant family as poor as poor can be, and some of the stories that he told me about the impoverishment of his youth echo and sometimes exceed Smith's. The essence, therefore, of this "novel," is familiar to me, perhaps entirely too familiar.

One blot upon the novel is its casual bigotry. Irish characters sometimes go to "Jewtown" for clothes or food. Jewish characters are gross stereotypes. But what can be expected from a popular novel of the 1940s, when the radio offered us, day after day,  large doses of Amos and Andy, Life with Luigi, The Goldbergs. How we guffawed at ethnic "humor" in those unenlightened days!  

Nor was I happy about the novel's Brooklyn chauvinism. For example: 

""There's no other place like it," Francie said.

"Like what?"

"Brooklyn. It's a magic city."

"It's just like any other place."

"It isn't. It's mysterious here in Brooklyn. It's like -- yes -- a dream. The houses and streets don't seem real. Neither do the people."

I wish the novel offered some corroboration for the claim of Brooklyn's magic and mystery. If it was there, I didn't find it in this grim novel, nor at the corner of Newkirk and Coney Island Avenues where I first came to awareness.

The "tree that grows in Brooklyn" is the so-called 'tree of heaven," ailanthus altissima. Smith has chosen it as a symbol of resilience, for the tree of heaven can thrive under the most inauspicious circumstances. I, for one, can remember playing on the roof of one of those six story apartment houses so common in our neighborhood, and noticing an ailanthus growing right out of the asphalt. I was astonished. But I wish that Betty Smith had chosen a different tree to invest with meaning, because the ailanthus is, frankly, a "trash tree."  It's generally considered a noxious weed, an invasive species. It grows rapidly but is short-lived. Its wood is soft and useless. It suckers vigorously and eternally, pours forth strong alleopathic chemicals upon its neighbors, invades subterranean sewers and pipes, is extremely fecund, and stinks. It is known to gardeners and foresters not as the "tree of heaven" but as the "tree of hell." It's not a tree that often finds itself celebrated in fiction. Nor in pastoral. Brooklyn, my Brooklyn, was a city of magnificent oaks, maples, sycamores and elms. My people, my fellow Brooklynites, deserve a more distinguished avatar than the tree of of so-called heaven.

Some will remember that T. S. Eliot once referred to the tree that grows in Brooklyn as the "rank ailanthus."

A Cinematic Dream

I was in the midst of the usual noir "can't-find-my-way" dream when all at once, without warning, the scene and the genre changed. Suddenly I was in technicolor John Ford territory, holding on for dear life to the cow-catcher of an 1880s railroad engine. Three central-casting bad guys -- all whiskers and black hats --were shooting at me with their pistols. Familiar with what's expected such films, I responded by drawing my own Colt 45-- and plugged two of them. But the third kept coming, zombie-style, even though I nailed him several times. I was scared.  

Apparently I was rattling around, because just as I decided that I'd better shoot him between the eyes and be done with it, my faithful bedmate woke me up.  End of dream; what a relief.  

I must be watching too many Westerns.

It's fascinating that the material of this dream is not drawn from the events of my "real life," but rather from fiction (in this case, the movies). Have I incorporated such fictions into the deepest layers of my unconscious, from which dreams are supposedly drawn?  

On the other hand, my watching and absorbing a film is a "real life" event.  

I can't remember any film in which a character clings to the cow-catcher. Did I invent such an event?  Or just extrapolate it from various western films?

I should mention that I experienced the dream not in ordinary colors but in the brilliant artificial color of old-fashioned garish Technicolor.

Words of my Life: Spatchcock

I first heard the word "spatchcock" at a Thanksgiving celebration some four or five years ago. The turkey, I was told, had been "spatchcocked." To be absolutely honest, I thought someone was pulling my leg. To my pure and undefiled ears, the word "spatchcock" sounded more than a little obscene. Certainly not something that a civilized person would do to a turkey. Or even to a fellow human being. I admit that I was puzzled: what sort of perverse activity is implied by "spatchcock." And just who would be the spatchcocker and who the spatchcockee?

But further investigation revealed that "spatchcock" is not a dirty joke nor even a slangy neologism. The word has an eighteenth-century origin and it's not sexual but culinary: "to cut poultry along the spine and spread the halves apart for more even cooking when grilled." Moreover, the word "spatchcock," believe it or not, has a sibling of its own: "spitchcock": "to split an eel along the back and then broil it." So spatchcock and spitchcock, yet as far as I know, no "spotchcock" or "sputchcock"-- but why not?  Lots of other land and sea beasts out there to de-spine and roast over an open fire. Spatchcocking, the process, probably dates back to the neolithic, after the taming of fire and long before anyone thought to call it by such a silly name.   

Etymology?  Though there are theories, I'm going to stick with "origin unknown." The common answer is that the word is "shorthand  for 'dispatching the cock.'" An undocumented, out-of-left-field guess, in my opinion. If I were to propose a theory, I would say that the "cock" must be a version of  "cook." I'm not prepared to venture a guess about the spatch. A mystery, unrecoverable. Perhaps a humorous coinage?

I'd hypothesize that "cock" might be related to the second part of common surnames such as Hancock, Adcock, Babcock, Hitchcock or Wilcox. Some say that the cock in these names is a hypocoristic suffix "applied to a young lad who strutted proudly like a cock." I'm skeptical. More credible, once again, is "cook." Hancock is Johan the cook, Adcock is Adam the cook, Hitchcock is Richard (Rich, Hich) the cook, and so on.

The ever-unpredictable Urban Dictionary provides another meaning for "spatchcock": "when you intentionally rub your backpack on a nearby stranger's genitals in an effort to sexually arouse them." What can I say?  Only that I've lived a long life and have never given a single thought to the erotic potential of the backpack. Nor have I ever been spatchcocked either in the traditional culinary nor the speculative contemporary sexual sense of the word (thanks be to all the gods in the pantheon!)

Other words of my life:

slouch,

cishet,

yips

ramps

jot and tittle

worship

mucilage.

 

 

Max Oeschger (1938-2021)

Max had a long love affair with New Orleans, and he loved to initiate his friends into the city's splendors and secrets. We were beneficiaries of his generosity. It was because of "mad Max" that we enjoyed a series of winter visits to the crescent city. He was a splendid enthusiastic guide as well as a great character, with a touch of Falstaff about him: charm, flaws, girth.

For me, it was a late-onset friendship, but Lynn had known Max from the 60s, from her Baltimore days, when Max was a doctoral student in biology at Hopkins. The two of them reconnected five years ago when Max invited Lynn (and me) to stay for a month in an apartment in his rental house in the Garden District. How could we decline such an offer? His house, alas, turned out to be virtually uninhabitable, with holes in the walls and floors that let in the light, the wind and rain, and the critters. There was a pungent smell of decay and a tilted bathroom that seemed about to plunge deep into the earth. Lynn was not fazed: "I lived in Africa."  Max was only mildly apologetic. We made do.

In subsequent trips to New Orleans we took the precaution of renting a BNB.

But we often visited Max at his place in an apartment house on St. Charles. Max owned two adjacent apartments. He connected them by busting through the wallboard with a sledge hammer. Two kitchens, therefore, both, shall we say, far from immaculate.

A serious and knowledgeable cinephile, Max sponsored a monthly film series in his home. His screen had to be angled sharply to find a place amidst the clutter, distributed among which was an exquisite collection of contemporary American pottery. (Max was a widower; his sometime ladyfriend was a very accomplished potter). 

Max squired us about town, introducing us to both famous and out-of-the-way restaurants. He was quite a sight, squeezing his 5' 4" and 300 pound frame into a small sports car. He loved Adolfo's, right across the street from Snug, because the food was excellent and the portions were enormous.

As much as he loved his dinner, he also loved the south Louisiana vegetation; a walk with Max was a learned lecture on the local plant life.

Would we have discovered either Angelo Brocato's or the Creole Creamery without his guidance? 

I don't know what eventually killed him last August.  It could have been any one of his many ailments; he was not healthy and was often in pain. We'll miss him.

Max and I shared a birthday; he was exactly one year older than I. So his death is another memento mori. As if I needed another reminder.

What's On My Mind

Disease, dying and death, I'm afraid. During the last month or so, the cohort of friends with whom I've gone through life has been suffering major losses. BD, a friend of more than forty years standing, has just breathed his last. AM, whom I know from the PS 217 schoolyard, is suffering from cancer of the esophagus, now described as terminal. M has ALS and can no longer move or speak. LW suffered a bad stroke some while ago and is now in "assisted living." JP has gone from robust to frail in a few months and has been moved to a "memory care" unit. And others.

I've taken to reading the obits. Every week the name of a former colleague or a friend of a friend shows up. Inevitable, you say. But distressing nevertheless.

I'm healthy, but I'm old, long past my expiration date. I know that one of these days it will be my turn with the doctors and the hospitals. Too bad, because after some difficult years, I'm enjoying life to the full once again.

My grandmother, then in her upper 80s, said to youthful me, "I don't like being old. But what are my choices?"

Baseball Vocabulary

I grew up in a baseball-saturated world. The radio voices of Red Barber and Connie Desmond were the water in which I and my family and my neighbors swum. It was therefore natural that I early absorbed the vocabulary of baseball and that many words carried baseball meaning to me long before I recognized their alternative and larger existence.

For example, as a boy, I encountered the word "mound." It signified, and signified only, a pitcher's mound -- the ten inches of sand and clay from which a pitcher throws a ball. I had no idea that mounds could exist in nature or indeed, could exist anywhere outside of a stadium, there being no mounds on Coney Island Avenue, or, at least, none that I recognized as such.

And then there was the word "pitcher." If someone had said to me, in the 1940s, that "little pitchers had big ears," I might have thought of Preacher Roe, but I would have had no idea that there was such an object as a pitcher for water or other liquid. A pitcher was not jug, ewer, or crock -- it was a man standing on a rubber fooling a batter with a slow curve.

Standing on a "rubber?" Yet another word that had a specific baseball meaning, years before it became an eraser or a galosh or a condom.

Similarly, a "streak" was not a gash of color until many years after it was a winning streak or a losing streak or batting streak. A "dugout" was not a canoe, not in my corner of the universe.  Nor was a "rally" a political meeting or protest. A rally would never have led to a "strike" -- a word which I knew only as one of the allotted three. "Battery?" A team of pitcher and catcher, not something of military or electrical storage interest.

And then there were the plethora, the fountain of lovely words peculiar to baseball, like "shortstop" and "blooper." 

Inning was exclusively a baseballism. Not so "outing" which was in my childhood a pitcher's stint on the mound, and which only later became a picnic (or, even later, an involuntary revelation of someone's sexual inclinations). 

October 24:  How could I fail to include "pennant." When did I learn that a pennant was a kind of triangular flag?  Not in the 1940s (or even 50s).

I grew up in a baseball-saturated world. The radio voices of Red Barber and Connie Desmond were the water in which I and my family and my neighbors swum. It was therefore natural that I early absorbed the vocabulary of baseball and that many words carried baseball meaning to me long before I recognized their alternative and larger existence.

For example, as a boy, I encountered the word "mound." It signified, and signified only, a pitcher's mound -- the ten inches of sand and clay from which a pitcher throws a ball. I had no idea that mounds could exist in nature or indeed, could exist anywhere outside of a stadium, there being no mounds on Coney Island Avenue, or, at least, none that I recognized as such.

And then there was the word "pitcher." If someone had said to me, in the 1940s, that "little pitchers had big ears," I might have thought of Preacher Roe, but I would have had no idea that there was such an object as a pitcher for water or other liquid. A pitcher was not jug, ewer, or crock -- it was a man standing on a rubber fooling a batter with a slow curve.

Standing on a "rubber?" Yet another word that had a specific baseball meaning, years before it became an eraser or a galosh or a condom.

Similarly, a "streak" was not a gash of color until many years after it was a winning streak or a losing streak or batting streak. A "dugout" was not a canoe, not in my corner of the universe.  Nor was a "rally" a political meeting or protest. A rally would never have led to a "strike" -- a word which I knew only as one of the allotted three. "Battery?" A team of pitcher and catcher, not something of military or electrical storage interest.

And then there were the plethora, the fountain of lovely words peculiar to baseball, like "shortstop" and "blooper." 

Inning was exclusively a baseballism. Not so "outing" which was in my childhood a pitcher's stint on the mound, and which only later became a picnic (or, even later, an involuntary revelation of someone's sexual inclinations). 

October 24:  How could I fail to include "pennant." When did I learn that a pennant was a kind of triangular flag?  Not in the 1940s (or even 50s).

Best Garden Advice

I read a story in an "art of gardening" book many years ago that I will repeat here. A famous Japanese gardener, a "national treasure," was asked, "What's the secret of making a garden as beautiful as yours?" He didn't answer in words but lifted his arms and made a shearing or lopping motion. 

Many years ago, I asked Roy Huse, who had a most wonderful vegetable garden at the foot of South Road how he did it.  He said, and I quote verbatim, "you really got to put the shit to it."

And from my father: "it's all about preparing the bed before you plant."

So, don't skimp on getting the bed ready, add plenty of manure, and be ruthless about cutting things out.

And o yes, you'll need sun and water.

Revelatory Dream?

I entered a gloomy, dark, building, perhaps a derelict church. An older woman was sitting there, not exactly in a pew but in a large wooden chair. She said to me, "We help dying people."  Was she a nun or a sister of some sort?  I said, "Like hospice."  She was adamant. "No, not at all like hospice." I said, "Can you help me?" When I said those words I realized that I had frightened her. "Do you plan to murder me?"  I assured her that I was not a murderer. To make her more comfortable, I said, "Why don't we go outside where you will feel safer."  But just as we opened the heavy wooden door, a heavy, threatening man appeared.  I killed him without a weapon, with my bare hands. So I was a murderer after all. The woman whom I was trying to protect, said, "Now I know you're planning to murder me."  I objected: "I'll prove to you I'm not a habitual murderer. Go directly to your car and get in it and drive away. She did so (it was a blue Ford Focus). That's when the dream ended.

In real life, I'm a peaceful person. In my dream world, I'm occasionally (not often, but often enough) a killer. Why?  Is it some deeply suppressed inner anger that works its way to the surface during the night?  Or I am simply a member of a species (homo sapiens) that has a millennium-long habit of violence?

Or perhaps the dreams are meaningless? Just the flotsam of badly-wired synapses? If so, I wish they'd give it a rest.

Trees Old and New

When we arrived here 54 years ago, the land was heavily forested but with a limited pallet of northern conifers and deciduous trees. In the first category were pines both red and white, three kinds of spruce, balsam fir, larch and hemlock. Among the hardwoods were sugar maples and red maples, ash, beech, red oak, black cherry, white, yellow and gray birch, quaking and big tooth aspen, and alas butternut and elms, which have both now succumbed to plagues. Common in the area but absent from our particular property were red cedar, cottonwood, basswood, walnut, and black locust. In the 70s of the last millennium, I planted cedars and cottonwoods;  they are now mature and replicating themselves. The walnut that I planted fifteen years ago is now 25 feet tall and very handsome. I have only one basswood, which I found as a seedling and transplanted to to a prominent place;  I've been waiting all these years for its descendants. The black locusts that I grew from seeds harvested in Colorado are now starting to make an impression on the landscape. I've also added some trees that might be able to survive our warmer winters: a hickory (growing very nicely), a swamp white oak, a bur oak (and its lone offspring) and a sycamore (which has survived two winters).  I've also experimented and failed with some trees that grow just a bit south of us: catalpa, horse chestnut, "Crimson King" maple, little-leaved linden, and ginkgo. Perhaps I'll try again now that the weatherh as warmed. One of my neighbors has successfully reared a metasequoia; it's tempting to try but I think on the whole I'd rather stay with north American trees. On the other hand, we'll need some new trees to take the place of the ash, which are soon to be decimated. 

Genuine, Unedited, Unimproved Excerpt from a Conversation with my Brother

He:  Did you know that they are now playing seven-inning games?

Me:  Yeah, double-headers.  And that they're starting a runner on second base in extra inning games?

He:  Good thing Dad didn't know about this. It would have killed him on the spot.

Me: Yeah, sure would have. DH rule took a couple of years off his life.

Red Pines

This stand of magnificent trees is composed of red pines, pinus resinosa.

Each tree is between 60 and 65 feet tall and they are all exactly 51 years old. How can I be so sure about height and age? 

Height is easy to determine using  the Calloway 300 Pro Laser Range Finder. Age?  Here's the history. In 1970, some friend or acquaintance, I can't remember exactly who, acquired a hundred red pine seedlings for a forestry project. . He couldn't make use of all of them and so he gave us ten -- each one perhaps 4-6 inches long and the sum of their stems no thicker than a #2 pencil. I didn't know exactly what to do with these treasures, so i planted them in a row in the vegetable garden. Which is where they sat until 1972, when I decided to plant them on the dike of the newly constructed pond, where they remain.

In doing so i acted in defiance of the local wisdom, which is, never plant a tree on the dike. Why? Because the tree will eventually die, and the "water will follow the roots" and weaken the dam. I judged this reasoning to be faulty. In the first place, red pines, like all conifers, are shallow-rooted. The surface of the dike is fifteen feet above the level of the water in the pond, so when the pine eventually dies, its rootball is will still be above water level. Moreover, red pines are reported to live for centuries (some say four hundred years), and I just can't bring myself to worry about what's going to happen to a dike in the far distant future when, no doubt, the pond will long since have reverted to the thick swamp that it was before we dug it out.

But why red pines rather than white (pinus strobus) which is generally considered to be the much superior species? Because a), I had these red pine seedlings availablei in the garden, and b) because at that time many of the white pines in our neighborhood were suffering from a insect-borne disease that killed the leader shoot and therefore deformed the tree (leader shoot disease seems to be a thing of the past and now our young white pines are again growing up tall and straight). And red pines as consistently healthy.

For their first decade, the red pines made scarcely any impression on the landscape. Now they dominate. When I sit in their shade, I am pleased to recall their entire history, which allows me to tell them, proudly, "I knew you when you were just a sprout!"

 

 

 

Birches White and Yellow; Mutability

It may not be immediately obvious or dramatic, but the large tree in the middle of the picture is a white birch. It towers over the red maple and the beeches that are to its left. White birches do not often attain such size, nor are they long-lived, at least in our part of the world. This particular white birch is old and imposing and thriving and healthy. 

Yet a few years ago this birch appeared to be at death's door. It sported only a handful of yellow leaves on its thin senescent crown. 

Inasmuch as it was old tree (in white-birch years) we all assumed that it had come to the end of its natural days. There was a vigorous family debate on whether it should be submitted to the chain saw before it fell over -- perhaps dangerously -- of its own accord. The consensus was to give it another year. It was a good decision -- as can be plainly seen.

I have no idea what why the birch sprang from its hospital bed. Was it a victim of some nameless illness that it had overcome? Had it been merely listless and depressed? Had its local environment altered?  Perhaps some noxious insect pest had arrived, tried for a kill, failed,  and then decamped. I have no theory --it's a total mystery, as is so much in life. Nevertheless, I'm happy to welcome the birch back into our community. May it have many more happy years.

Meanwhile, just steps away, was a young vigorous yellow birch. Yellow birches are not as striking or famous as their white-barked cousins, but to my mind they are by far the better tree. They are, at least in our neck of the woods, larger, better shaped, longer-lived, and their wood is superior for either furniture or flooring or fuel. Their bark is a splendid glistening yellow gold. A tree to prize.

But, alas, not this particular yellow birch. Last summer it was a burgeoning adolescent, adding more than 18 inches of growth a season. This year, I'm sorry to report, dead as a doornail.

inge 

Not a single leaf. Not the slightest sign of life. This is an ex tree.

The yellow birch was in a perfect position and was one that I had counted on to live for at least a hundred years, perhaps two hundred.  A tree that should have lasted centuries and been an ornament to the property and a delight to grandchildren and great-grandchildren -- under whose spreading boughs picnics and  other rural pleasures would have been enacted far into the future.

But that's the inconstancy of life on earth. One tree, supposedly a short-lived one, springs to life while another, with a grand future, suddenly and inexplicably succumbs to the fate that awaits us all.

Mutability, they used to call it. Precarious, I'd say. "All is flux."

We are grateful that we had the yellow birch for as long as it lasted, and grateful also that the white birch has decided to stick around -- perhaps for another couple of decades.

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.

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. 

Signs of Spring

 

 

Pictured is a variety of daylily called the Charles Johnston. Looks good, doesn't it?  First introduced by Gates in 1981, it won an award of merit 1988 from the American daylily society. I ordered a couple from a nursery in Tennessee because they are VE (very early), tetraploid, fragrant, and reputed to be accomplished re-bloomers (although daylillies that rebloom in the upper south don't always do so in Vermont). It's the VE part that interests me because I don't have any early reds. "Rich burgundy blooms."  Sounds delicious. I think I'll put them in the vegetable garden temporarily, where the soil is, as LERM says, "like chocolate cake" and plant them out in the perfect place, yet to be determined. Somewhere where the large VE blooms can make a statement.

I wonder how my gardens survived my Covid 2020 absence. We'll find out in three weeks.

The Brown Corpus

Interviewing ten candidate a day for a couple of days can make a guy a little crazy. On the one hand, you owe each candidate your thoughtful attention, because careers are at stake. But conducting interviews is a tedious process and everyone who has ever done it knows that faces and voices and attitudes tend to blur into an indistinguishable lumpy mass. So much earnestness! So much contrived presentation of self!  

I remember one such endless day in a featureless room in a high floor of a pretentious modern hotel in Chicago, or Atlanta, or perhaps Houston. We were making an appointment to our budding "Writing Program" -- an academic innovation that I now believe to have been a total disaster. Writing Programs hired "writing specialists" -- experimentalist social scientists who believe in "theory" and who generally can't themselves write a lick. Or half a lick.

I remember one candidate with whom I had this remarkable exchange: 

Me:  "Could you remind me about the subject of your dissertation."

He:  "I worked with the Brown Corpus."

Me (astonished): "What the heck is the Brown Corpus."

He:  "It's a computer file of one million edited words drawn from magazines and newspapers. It was compiled at Brown University. The idea is to study the English language as it actually written."

(I interrupt this conversation to say that "Brown Corpus" may be the most injudiciously-named academic enterprise in history. To me, "brown corpus" might have something to do with decayed corpuscles, or a fecal mass, or someone or something a-mouldering in its grave. Not a phrase with much poetry to it. But let us proceed.)

Me: "That seems interesting. What exactly did you study in this corpus."

He: "I studied the use of the comma."

Me: "The comma. You studied the comma." (More astonishment). "What in the world did you learn about the comma?

He:  "I learned that the comma is used to link a sequence of nouns, or phrases, in a series."

I was already giddy and aghast when I heard this news and I had a sudden revelation, a flash. I saw myself picking up the candidate and throwing him through the plate glass window and watching as he plummeted painfully to the street below. But I controlled myself and thanked the candidate and, I believe, ended the interview politely. I didn't even indulge myself with something snarky, like, "do you intend to do any follow-up work on a more challenging mark of punctuation, as for example the exclamation point?"

Dumb Luck

I can remember five near misses -- five times when through inattentive or incompetent driving I put my own and others' lives at risk. I give thanks that I avoided killing or mangling myself or the innocent victims of my failings. What wondrous life is this I lead -- how fortunate I have been!

The first: it was 1963. I was an inexperienced, overconfident driver, traveling westward, somewhere in southern Illinois. My first cross-country trip. A two-lane highway, a downpour, very wet pavement. I saw, or thought i saw, an oncoming car in my lane. There would have been plenty of time for him to pass and dive back, but I panicked and braked hard. My vehicle, an old Rambler, not a great handler in the best of times, swerved into the oncoming lane, then spun out of control and landed backward in a ditch on the right side of the road. We sat there, stunned, relieved, because I had been in the left oncoming lane long enough to have killed ourselves self and others. (Within a minute, a man pulled up in a truck, attached a chain to our car and winched us out. I'm perpetually grateful to this Samaritan.)

A second instance: an icy winter day in Boulder, early 1970s. Driving the old yellow Saab with my sister Phyllis (legally, sister-in-law) in the "death seat" east on Arapahoe, I hit a slick of black ice and made a bad situation worse by applying the brakes. The car spun out of control and eventually halted facing backwards in the oncoming lane. Once again, no one injured or even inconvenienced.

Another: driving across the USA alone in the clunky blue Camry, doing 80 in a 55 zone, I didn't quite fall asleep at the wheel but certainly lost focus, and didn't see a car stopped in the parking lane until I was just adjacent to it. If I had been a bit to the right or if there had been someone fixing a tire, I would have crippled myself and murdered an innocent. Here's another one, probably the most idiotic. Driving alone through Chicago in heavy traffic, on one of those horrible highways where there are eight lanes east and another eight west, I found myself in the third lane from the right and needed to exit right. Instead of playing it safe, and continuing on, I impulsively dove across two lanes and made it to the exit. Angry horns to the right of me, horns to the left of me. Why did I take such a risk? I don't know but I thank the drivers around me for being alert. What arrogance, what stupidity! The most recent event, and most inexcusable, happened just a few years ago. I was returning home from a very disturbing visit to the "memory care" facility. Somehow, in my grief, I ignored a prominent red light and sailed right through a busy intersection -- a gross violation of sense and law. But there was no crash and no police and I proceeded blithely on my way -- only, after a few moments, realizing with shock and horror that I had put my own life and that of others at completely unnecessary danger.

When people two hundred years from now look back on our "civilization" -- assuming that there will be people on this planet two hundred years from now, which is not a certainty -- they will wonder how was it possible that those people in our century were able to survive. Dashing 70 or 80 miles an hour in a tin can just six feet from a line of onrushing tin cans? Weaving among giant tandem trucks and buses and cement mixers -- and expecting to survive. What sort of brave or foolhardy individuals were these strange, death-defying people?

For myself, I'm astonished at the dumb luck that's allowed me to preserve my life and mobility to this advanced age. So far, that is. It's not over until it's over.  

My Life in Coffee

Although both my parents were dependent on their morning coffee

percolated out of a can like this one, I myself never touched the stuff until my first year at college. In the 1950s, coffee was 10 cents a cup and I drank gallons of it, morning, noon and night. It became essential to my well-being. Black, no sugar or milk, but in truth, not black but barely brown, weak by present standards. In the early 60s my hipper than I -- not much of a leap --  friend SDS introduced me to the coffee shop. Figaro in Greenwich Village, mighty sophisticated for a boy from Flatbush. I became addicted to coffee shops as well as coffee itself for many a year. I couldn't handle any routine paperwork, or indeed grade a tedious set of papers without infusions of caffeine. With the Starbuck's revolution, coffee became tastier and more luxurious. But, conservative as I was, I never succumbed to fancy drinks but kept to what had come to be known simply and condescendingly as "Americano."  

During these thirty-five or so years of pleasant coffee dependence, atrial fibrillation became an annoying feature of my life. Frequent bouts, longer and longer. Debilitating, possibly dangerous -- there's a strong association of fibrillation with strokes. Finally, a doctor suggested that I might consider giving up caffeine. So I stopped on a dime. It took six weeks to get the caffeine out of my blood and put an end to the longing for coffee -- but the atrial fibrillation came to a total halt. Ceased. Not a single episode these last two and a half decades. Astonishing. I had been poisoning myself -- or at least, compromising my well being.

Do I miss coffee? Yes, I'm afraid so, every morning. I still love the odor (which was always better than the taste). More than that, I miss the society of coffee cup and conversation. In those days, I loved to sit with a book in a nook, warming my palm with a bottomless cup. Once, only once, about two years ago, I did venture to order a medium Americano -- but I couldn't stomach more than a couple of sips. Coffee's an acquired taste, and one that I had I de-acquired. 

Tea? I haven't found one that is more than barely tolerable. Hot chocolate? Feels juvenile. Acceptable for breakfast but not for Peet's or Ozo or Starbuck's or the Trident.   

On the other hand, a heart that keeps to a regular rhythm and doesn't go creatively syncopated several times a week is also a pleasure.

Snobbery in the Verb

Sometime during the hippie period, say the early 1970s, I  was driving the big green Dodge station wagon solo from who knows where to somewhere else, and as was my custom in those turbulent days, I picked up a hitchhiker -- a mighty scrawny young guy. He seemed to be in bad shape -- underfed and dirty. I suspected "speed." Compassionately, I offered him a piece of my sandwich. He turned me down, saying, "I don't use white bread." 

What an effective sentence! In a mere five words,  he managed to claim complete moral superiority over me. I was now dismissed as a "user" of white bread. and therefore clearly an unenlightened conformist bourgeois -- probably a rabid supporter of the carpet bombing of Cambodia. He, on the other hand, was a butterfly, free and liberated and a dissenter from the Loathed Establishment.

But I don't think I would remember this incident if it weren't for his deployment of the word "use." "Use" asserts an equivalence between two habits -- between whatever cocktail of drugs that he might be injecting or snorting or dropping, and the white bread that I was consuming. It was also implied that my addiction was the worser one. My emaciated pal was, in his own mind, doing me a favor, enlightening me about the depravity of my bread habit. 

But let me say a word in defense of the bread -- I don't "use" white bread in the sense of Silvercup or Wonder Bread -- at least not since I left Flatbush neighborhood of origin. The slices of bread in question might not have been made of steelcut handmilled wheat berries enhanced with millet and quinoa and baked in a hickory-fired furnace, but it would have been a perfectly respectable bread and one that should not have been denigrated by a skinny tie-dyed trust fund baby soon to shave his scraggly beard and rejoin his father's insurance business.

But I sure do admire his use of the verb "use."

Here's a more recent incident. On the semi-famous Boulder Mall, not long ago, a panhandler carrying a sign that said, "Anything Helps" held out his hand.  Compassionately, I gave him a quarter.  He returned it to me, announcing, "I don't take coins."

Well, everybody has to have standards. 

Once again, I've been put in my place by a verb. "I don't take coins."  

A third instance: I was in Boston and I wandered into a ragged antique store that sold old and truly ancient Chinese art. The place is a mess but I notice that the goods are museum-quality -- sculptures, mostly, but paintings and even a few bronze pieces -- Neolithic for all I know.  Way out of the range of my wallet or checkbook. Trying to appear knowledgeable, I ask the proprietor if he has any Green Fitzhugh. Peering over lunettes, he says, with aggrieved condescension, "I don't do export."  

Floored again. Put in my place by Mr. Hippie, Mr. Panhandler, and Mr. Antique Dealer -- all of them master practitioners who know how to make a simple monosyllabic verb do a heck of a lot of snobbish work. 

My Brain -- for my Grandchildren, etc.

(This entry is written for my grandchildren and any subsequent descendants, should there by any, who might like to know how and where their brain anomalies originated. Whether they will revere or curse me for what I've bequeathed them, I'll never know. Just as well. The further they are removed from me, the less they have to worry, for I'm only a one-fourth donor to my grandchildren, only an eighth to the greats. With progressive diminishment they have less and less reason to be concerned. But they'll never arrive at zero --there's no escape from me or from a genetic Zeno's Paradox.]

I've lived with this brain for 80-plus years now and have a pretty good idea of its strengths and weaknesses and peculiarities. I'll try be candid about the poor pink mass.

I have a very good memory but little capacity for synthesis or organization. I imagine that the contents of my brain look like the last scene of Citizen Kane. A warehouse of stuff strewn in heaps, nothing organized, everything disorderly and random. A great twisted miscellany of jumbled information. Nothing where it should be, everything a mess. I "know" lots of facts and data, but I've never had the capacity to make sense of them. When I read, for example, a well-organized book of history, I'm regularly dazzled by authors who are able to discover and explain patterns of change or to compare one century or one civilization with another. My brain can't do such things -- or anything remotely similar, even at a much lower order of achievement . 

I have almost no imagination or creativity. Over the year I've tried to write stories and poetry, but the stuff that emerges from my brain is piss poor. I'm only comfortable dealing with facts and evidence. When I'm asked to invent stuff, to make things up, I falter badly. I'm reminded that when I was a youth in college, many of my friends enrolled for courses in "Creative Writing." I couldn't take such a risk -- creative writing terrified me. I was conscious, even then, of my total want of invention or artistry. On the other hand, I'm quite a good detective. I can follow clues. I'm a good researcher. Strange to say, though I'm without imagination in real life, I experience spectacularly fanciful dreams. There's hardly a night goes by that I'm not transported to some vividly brilliant alternative world. Why can't I access my nighttime imagination during the waking hours?  I could have been a pillar of neo-surrealism. 

I'm good at arithmetic but a total bust at mathematics. I can do mental arithmetic much better than most -- add, subtract, multiply, or divide quickly and accurately without pen or paper. But once things become even the slightest bit abstract, I go blank. When there is something to count, I'm your man; when there's something to extrapolate or imagine, no go. 

I have a strong aesthetic sense, especially about visual beauty. Museums or gardens can move me almost to a swoon. I've even experienced Stendhal syndrome a few times. Majestic mountains and spacious landscapes move me less than a well-designed garden. Yet my delight in human artistic achievement does not cross over into anything that might be called spirituality (as it does for many people). I entirely lack what Charlotte Bronte called the "organ of veneration."

I have a woeful disabling case of directional dyslexia -- worse than anyone I've ever known except my younger brother. I can't follow directions and I get lost even in familiar territory. I believe that my inability with left right east west (I'm brilliant with up and down!) has contributed to my general lack of daring. Inasmuch as I've always been afraid to go a step too far in space, I became too cautious to strike out intellectually. Perhaps my inability with directions is also tied up with my sometimes disabling shyness -- but that's a guess. I do know that it's the reason that I am regularly bested a jigsaw puzzles by five-year-olds -- I can't deduce the relationship between pieces. 

I'm not prone to guilt but I'm devastated by shame. I suppose I would feel guilt if I killed or harmed someone, but I've never done much in the pure villainy line. Though largely guilt-free, I suffer dreadfully from embarrassment. I think that I've retained in my memory every foolish fatuous pretentious thing I've ever said or done. I live with a highly punishing shame superego -- which is good, because it limits the number of times in which I might make an egregious fool of myself, but it's bad because it's kept me from taking risks that might have been productive or liberating or just simply pleasurable.

I have a good sense of humor. I can occasionally be witty. I also appreciate the wit of others. I've learned, over the years, not to be witty at others' expense. I'm articulate and occasionally, but rarely, eloquent.

I'm observant. When I walk in the woods, or walk down the street, I see and interpret more clearly than most people. Sherlock said, "You see but you do not observe." I'm no Holmes, but I do observe. Perhaps it's false pride but I think that I "read" people pretty well. And I read relationships well. I'm curious about people and about things, which is why I am happier reading non-fiction rather than fiction. I'm more interested in the facts than in "make-believe."  An odd admission for a person who spent a lifetime teaching and studying literature.

I'm a good listener.

I love music but I have as inadequate a sense of rhythm as anyone on earth. My dancing is pathetic and ludicrous. My sense of rhythm is so bad that as a youth I could never learn to pump a swing -- even though in bat and ball games I was a passable schoolyard athlete. 

I'm impatient, easily bored. If I don't get it quickly, I'm liable to give up. But there have been times in my life when I worked with admirable perseverance and diligence. Not often enough.

I'm fascinated by language and know more than most people about the way languages are structured and how they work. I read foreign languages pretty well. At the same time, I have no ear for sound. My hearing is now very bad, except when I turn the apparatus up to 11, but even in my youth I didn't easily distinguish "t" from "d" or "v" from "b." I seem to have to see the word in my head before I can understand or translate it. I was good at the ancient languages because they made no demand on ear or tongue. French was a trial because the sounds were so distant from their spelling. In English, I'm an excellent speller.

At this point in my life I'm more conscious of the deficiencies of my brain than of its strengths. I feel fortunate that I had a strong memory, a feel for language, and a decent prose style, and that those few traits were enough to let me live a respectable life and make a decent living. But I also know that many people perform a multitude of tasks without strain that are a torment and a struggle for me. Which has kept me appropriately modest. 

My Life in Objects XIX -- Jacquard Coverlets

A coverlet is not a small cover. The "let" is not a diminutive -- it's let as in copire lectum (L) or "cuivre lit" (Fr).  A bedcover. Neither a blanket nor a bedspread, but both -- a decorative but warm item of bedclothes.

"Jacquard" refers to the Jacquard attachment, which was a series of punchcards (the ancestor of the IBM cards) that controlled the weaving and allowed a skilled workman to produce complicated patterns relatively inexpensively. Jacquard coverlets were produced in large quantities (about 700 craftsmen are known) in villages and small towns in the US between about 1820 and the coming of the Civil War. Weavers were mostly immigrants from the old country whose skills had already been rendered obsolete by factory-based manufacture. Weaving was a cottage industry -- many weavers wove in the winter, farmed in the summer.

This coverlet was woven by Benjamin Hausman of Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1842 -- it says so in the "corner block." It's in amazingly good shape for a weaving that's 180 years old. The colors, especially the madder red and indigo blue wool, are still vivid. The coverlet is impressive and beautiful and keeps us mighty toasty at night. 

Where I Lived --VIII

From August 1976 to summer 1977, we lived at this odd, modernistic house at 1 Leycroft Close in Canterbury, Kent. The small tree, something in the prunus line, wasn't there at the time so the house was more visible. The house wasn't suitable for a family of five, but we made it work, barely. Two blocks away was St. Stephen Protomartyr School, which the kids attended for a year. The boys learned to play soccer and the daughter learned how to speak with an English accent, which she forsook after two weeks back in the USA. The abandoned railroad embankment behind the house, loaded with blackberries and wild plums, afforded the kids much amusement.

Anadromous or Catadromous?

Until this last week, when I read Patrik Svensson's Book of Eels (2019), I had never encountered either of these lovely and mysterious adjectives. I'm delighted to add "anadromous" and
"catadromous," along with their cousin "diadromous" to my vocabulary, though when I'll be able to drop any of these words into my quotidian or even hebdomadal discourse is not immediately obvious, especially inasmuch as I'm not all that confident about their accentuation. Moreover, I rarely get into heart-to-hearts about icthyic migration. 

Anadromous fishes hatch and spend their first months in freshwater streams and rivers but then they migrate to the vasty deep, where they grow and mature. When they feel ready, they return to the streams in which they were spawned to deposit and fertilize their eggs. Salmons are famously anadromous (as well as romantic and celebrated), but equally so are less-heralded smelt, herring, and shad. Eels, on the other hand, are catadromous. They are hatched deep in the ocean and then drift and wander to freshwater streams and rivers. European eels may spend, according to Svensson, as many as fifteen years in the shallows until they get the urge for going. No one knows what calls to them, but they plain have to go. Then they set out for the dangerous Sargasso Sea in the mid-Atlantic. Eel reproduction has entirely evaded the eyes of human investigators.  Nor has a single eel egg ever been identified. Eels are modest, private, discreet. No one  knows if or how eels select their mates. Do they enact elaborate courtship rituals, or do the females simply lay their putative eggs amidst a cloud of eelish milt?

Eels are not kosher, but not because they are catadromous. The rules, as set out in Leviticus, are very clear: "Everything in the waters that has fins and scales, whether in the seas or in the rivers, you may eat. But anything in the seas or the rivers that has not fins and scales is detestable to you."  Why the Lord of Hosts set His face against shrimp and clams is unknowable -- but it worked, in the sense that the religion survived and, some say, prospered for lo these three thousand years. Food taboos are a common feature of religions -- they help to separate us from them. But shouldn't taboos be minimally consistent?  If the author or authors of Leviticus had said, don't eat eels, they're slimy, ugly and tasteless to boot -- well that would be a religious prohibition I could honor. But the scales thing, I don't know, because it's now clear that eels do have scales (as well as fins). Eel scales are very small. They are embedded in the skin, and they are smothered with eel slime. They are difficult to find, but they're definitely, unquestionably present. Yet the authorities continue to deride eels as treyf and have added the distinctly unBiblical gloss that the fish's scales must be visible and detachable without harming the skin. Unjust to eels, I say. I think they deserve a retrospective pass and a full rabbinical apology.  

My reasons for not eating eels are plain and sincere: eels are hideous beasts. Even Svensson, who loves eels and eel-fishing, admits that they are loathsome to any sensible palate. 

Query: my daughter was born and lived here in her home town until she was eighteen years old. Then she left for California, where she birthed and raised her two fine children. Now she's returned home to her native streams at last. So is she catadromous or anadromous?

More on the Old West Bradford Cemetery

In September of 2014 I wrote about a horrible tragedy that is commemorated in our cemetery -- the old West Bradford cemetery on Hackett Hill Road. Inasmuch as I've lived adjacent to it these last 52 years, I feel a strange proprietary connection to the people it houses. I've wandered in it, tended it, studied it, and cleaned up the trash left behind by visitors. I know that old burial ground very well.

Here's what I wrote seven years ago: 

"The old West Bradford cemetery, which is carved out of our land, is peopled by the Worthleys, Hacketts, Kidders, and Sleepers who first settled this part of Vermont. Some of them were long lived, some wandered through this thoroughfare of woe only briefly. There are o-so-many of those sad stone lozenges at the foot of a grave that represent infants who died too young to be christened.  

Our most disturbing gravestone, in my opinion, is the the one for Stanley Franklin Dwinell, M.D., born in 1920 and who died along with James Scott Dwinell (age 7), Peter Dewey Dwinell (age 6), and Jonathan Dwinell (age 2) all on the same day, December 11, 1952.  What a horror, I thought -- a man and his three young sons all gone at once. A tragedy. But what sort?  A plane crash?  A boating accident? House fire?  Perhaps even an infectious disease. 

An internet search came up empty-handed, so I enquired of our longer-tenured neighbors. Here's the local legend as it was reported to me. "Oh yes, the vet," I was told (although the tombstone distinctly says M. D., rather than D. V. M).  "He was driving along Route 5 in Fairlee one winter morning and it was an icy road and foggy and he went out of control and all four of them died instantly. His wife was at home drinking a cup of coffee when she got the phone call. She left the coffee half-finished on the kitchen table, left the house without a word, and was never seen again. Didn't even take her clothes. Just disappeared."    

It's a dramatic, heartbreaking story that sounds like the plot of a short story by Alice Munro -- but I don't believe it, not a word of it. The same gravestone that records the four simultaneous deaths also asserts that Constance S. Dwinell, wife of Doctor Stanley Franklin Dwinell, died January 25, 1985, at age 65. 

I'm trying to imagine the remainder of poor Constance's life. It's hard to construct a scenario that isn't completely dreadful. Most likely, Constance returned, shattered, to the small town in New Hampshire, let us say, where she must have been born. She moved back into her parents' house and took a job as a town librarian, her life blighted by the tragedy. She never remarried.

But I prefer to imagine that after a period of intense mourning, she moved to Paris (she had majored in French at Wellesley, I'm guessing,) and never told a soul about her first family. There she was wooed and won by Baron Guy de Condorcet de Noialles but could never conceive a child. It was a long happy marriage. After Guy died, crashing his motorcycle on a winding Riviera road, she returned to the States a rich woman, and lived out her life in a Park Avenue apartment in New York. Friends and neighbors who had no idea of her first life were shocked when they read the will which specified that she be buried, along side Stanley and the children, right here in West Bradford. 

That's my story and I'm sticking with it though I would very much like to know the truth."  

Then a year later, I was contacted by Larry Coffin, president of the Bradford Historical Society. My local informant, it turns out, was all wrong about the circumstances of the accident. Mr Coffin wrote this: "I would like to correct your information on Dr. Stanley Dwinell. He and his three sons were killed in a collision with a train on a crossing in Newbury, VT as he was going to treat a patient at Woodsville (NH) Cottage Hospital. His father Dr. Franklin Dwinell was in a car following."  Mr. Coffin did not comment on the half-finished coffee cup.

[February 11, 2021.  I've now received the following communication from a correspondent who calls him/herself "R". He or she is a "descendant of Stanley's brother" and has sent me the link to this article In the Rutland Daily Herald.  How could I have missed it?

 

 

 

So that's a slightly different version of the horrible story. The details are different, but it's the same story in essence.

"R" also refers me to a letter in the Bradford Opinion by attorney Bud Otterman of Otterman and Allen. It offers other details from the prior accounts but it's no less tragic. "Franklin Dwinell was a a longtime doctor in Bradford when I opened my law office in 1951. His son, Dr. Stanley Dwinell, had come home from World War II and joined his father's practice.Their patients went to the old Cottage Hospital near the railroad tracks in Woodsville. One of the doctors would visit their patients each morning. When Stanley went, he would often take his three pre-school sons with him. They would play in the waiting room while their dad made his rounds. The morning of December 11, 1952 was overcast with cold rain and snow in the air. About 11:30 am Dr Franklin Dwinell was called to an accident at the grade crossing south of Newbury Village. When he arrived, he found his son and his three grandson dead as a result of a collision with a southbound train. There were no warning lights at the crossing."

"R" also says that Constance (Stanley's wife and the mother of Dwinell children) "wasn't alone after Stanley and the boys passed. They had an older daughter who was 7 and in school at the time of the accident. She's moved away from the area and is reportedly somewhere out west now."

The older daughter, Hannah Dwinell, would therefore be 76 years old, as I write this, if she is still alive. I feel for her. She had to overcome the loss of her father and three younger brothers. Such an event would leave an irremediable scar. I hope Hannah has had a good life. I wonder if she has ever returned to West Bradford. It would be most painful for her to do so. 

[I've also written about "my" cemetery here.]

Today Let Us Celebrate the Blanket

What an excellent invention! Imagine life without the blanket. At night, we'd still be keeping warm with hay and leaves. Yeesh, defective insulation. Hay and hayseeds in our noses and mouths. Leaves, leaflets, thick main ribs and petioles poking and imprinting our skin. Constant renewal problems: "Have remembered to fetch the hay for tonight yet?" Cleanliness problems -- small insects in the hay and leaves, however carefully processed. And then frequent trips to "Hay and Leaves" -- the chain of stores that dominates the market. "Do you know what they're asking this year for a half bale of leaves?"

When we pull that luxurious blanket over our shoulders, do we remember to thank the inventor or inventors of the cotton or woolen blanket?  Are we sufficiently appreciative of the luxury in which we live?

Coming soon: National Pillow Day.  

A Dream of Swordfish

I was on a rubber raft in the middle of an ocean.  Three or four swordfish surrounded me. They were about to spear my raft and drown me -- because they wanted my pension.

I wondered how I was to transfer my wealth to them -- could they take it out in small, edible fish?

And so my dreamatorium continues to exceed expectations.

[February 13.  Still another "I am lost" dream, but this one with an unusual feature. I am at a subway kiosk, trying to get a token or change for a $20 bill so I can board the train, and the attendant says to me, "do you want your change in money or in spaghetti?" Honest to Pete, that's what she said. I say, of course, "I'll have it in money, please," but nevertheless she hands me a pound of dry spaghetti, wrapped in cellophane or plastic, but already falling apart. I walk away with the pound of spaghetti and try to get rid of it by placing it on a window ledge, but a passer-by retrieves it and hands it back to me. "You forgot your spaghetti," he says. Soon after I find a garbage can and stow the spaghetti, and the dream continues in predictable channels.

I think the question, "Do you want your change in money or in spaghetti?" is one of the best sentences my dreamatorium has ever generated.]

Some Memorable Sentences That People Said to Me Long Years Ago

My mother: "Stop slouching."  "Stop moping."  "Don't be a melamed."  (A melamed is a pedant.)

My father: "If you lose your man, go directly to the front of the rim." "Keep your hand on the man you're guarding. Keep your eye on the ball."  "Never be embarrassed to accept a favor from a friend. Never omit an opportunity to do a favor for a friend." "Don't forget to wash behind your ears."  "Anyone can make money if they make it the sole business of their life to do so."  "When the stock market is going up, everyone's a genius."

L Y Kaplan: "Give her a chance."

Harry Wedeck, a teacher at Erasmus Hall: "Read biographies."

Clara Gerstner (librarian, dying of cancer): "Get the most out of life."

David Novarr (revered teacher at Cornell): "You have to outwork the competition."

B. J. Whiting (at my doctor's oral examination, after a discussion of the French sources of Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale): "What's a Flemish one?