CAPE COD REPORTS, 2009 These Cape Reports were originally letters to friends and family. They were meant to follow the sound email policy of never saying anything you wouldn't want the world to read, but if you see something here that offends you, let me know. No offense was intended, and I apologize. Many last names have been suppressed, so as not to intrude in friend’s lives. You’ll have to sort out the characters by context, if you care. JANUARY February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December Many of our friends are Friends of the National Seashore, but we have been mostly lovers and takers. My offer to volunteer to trail-clear when we first moved here resulted in a request to help with their computer system, which I did. When they put out a request for trail workers a year or two ago I decided that I was a little too far over the hill. I've been vaguely aware of OPAC structure over the decades. From structure comes possibility. Our first commercial, as opposed to home-grown, system was NOTIS, which sacrificed everything in the name of efficient storage. We looked at other systems that worked beautifully but weren't robust enough for our 4 million books. Nowadays when your serial box wristwatch comes with a terabite of memory it's a whole new game, mostly I gather of front ends. Is any front end really better than the possibility of a complex Boolian statement? The list of things I have not predicted is as long as the list of things I don't know, but I did call the importance of email. I first saw it as an in-house system at Bobst during a field trip in the early 80's (11 floors must have been an incentive!). I said, "This is going to be big!" My colleagues said, "Where shall we go for lunch?" We librarians all latched on to the web at about the same rate, but I was almost alone in thinking ebooks would be the real deal. They fizzled a decade ago because the hardware was inadequate, but I still think they're the future, and the hardware is catching up. Digital text is a stage in the production of any book. Digtizing printed text becomes easier and cheaper, and once done the cost of maintaining it indefinitely is negligible. Text and audio are interchangeable even with today's technology. Images become searchable. All of which produces the situation where the distinction between bibliographic information and content/media of all sorts becomes fuzzy. How do OPACs respond? Is Google a competitor? I use Google to find books, but what I'm looking for is usually recent. As we constantly told ourselves "on the job," what the customer wants is not a process but an answer. Our students preferred untrustworthy web sources over scholarly books because they were quick and easy. I gather they still do, and I go to the web first myself and use Wikipedia and all sorts of interested-party data and trust my common sense to compare, judge, and weed. But, of course, my needs are largely recreational. As to group identity, almost 50 years ago Dr. Norris told me I was an Aristotelian and not a Platonist, existence before essence. I see ourselves as much the same, wavering melodic lines connecting nearly random thoughts. But I hope you will continue to do as M suggests with the Wikipedia article assignment, critique, challenge, and test your thesis in every way possible. There may be (like intelligent life in the universe there almost certainly are) acts/facts and structures within the makeup of any group that are still unknown, even unsuspected. Could Newton have envisaged sub-atomic physics or Pasteur the genome? Race may be entirely conventional; I doubt that gender is. Complex molecules may have formed by chance in Hadean seas; I doubt that groups do. But what do I know. I'd be very interested to know what my former classmates and colleagues think about the world. We are much encouraged by Obama's election, but the problems he, and we, will have to deal with seem to increase in size and number almost daily. We read a lot and have our opinions, but we don't have the answers and fear that no one does. We ourselves should be okay, barring megacatastrophe, but even here on Cape Cod we see unemployment, poverty, and homelessness increasing rapidly. Sure, lets build infrastructure, regulate the financial industry, control medical costs, support education, and solve world problems through diplomacy. -- We've thought the consumer society was nuts for some years. -- We'd like to see two states in Palestine. The Israelis aren't always helpful, but it seems to us the chief problem remains the Arab and Muslim leadership. -- We'd like to see single-payer national health care. -- Get out of Iraq and help Afghanistan wisely and only as part of a convincing coalition. -- We do our best to live "green". Its small effects are as helpful as its theortical large ones, and it's kind of fun. Everyone on Cape Cod is an "environmentalist." -- We're gratified to see that our 4 children all seem to have their heads on straight and their hearts in the right place, but they have to work too hard to do much about the problems of the world themselves. About religion, alas, it seems to cause as much pain as it relieves. As I've said, N and I are constant students of religion and great admirers of the admirable. We like the Unitarians anthough we find them a bit undynamic. I felt the presence of God in our daughter's synagogue, despite my unbelief. My son went to a Quaker school and continues his interest, and good for him. We heard a wonderful sermon by the Bishop of Edinburgh in St. Mary's Scottish Cathedral last spring, but when we went to the coffee hour afterwards we had to be the ones to start conversations; they were about as dead as any Episcopal congregation of our long experience. At least that doesn't happen in our Unitarian Fellowship. But the larger Unitarian Churches are as institutional as any other main line denomination. My sister tried a large Unitarian church in California. She liked the ministers, but no one every seemed to remember her name. How's the church? Sounds more conservative than I remember. We get various Episcopal church publications which seem pretty dreary. But so do Unitarian publications. So do synagogue publications. Just humans trying to get through life. We cheer them on but can't work up much enthusiasm. We went to the the local Episcopal church the first Sunday after we moved to the Cape. The sermon was dumb, the liturgy was condescending (I wouldn't have believed that possible but it was), and we were literally "handed" out the door. Were we unfair? Maybe we were looking for an excuse not to go back. At the Chapel in the PInes, U/U we were warmly embraced without any strings or requirements. A welcome that's hard to beat. N has her personal religious beliefs, but I can speak for my own. I tell folks I'm a Humanist, which is true. I believe we humans can create meaning and value. I say I'm an agnostic, which is true in the sense of "don't know" not "can't know," but I think that applies to everyone. At least I've never met anyone who I thought actually "knew" the truth. But when I really want people to pay attention I might say I'm a qualified athiest. The qualifications are important. An unqualified atheist is someone who has made the leap of unfaith that there is no God; that's sort of nuts. I just don't know, although what I see when I look at the world is the massive, inexcusable, and unacceptable suffering of the innocent. I can imagine no satisfactory explanation and am reluctant to accept this as a "mystery". But I leave the door open. Why not? The Cape is a great place. Tell us if you'll be in the neighborhood. -- We walk the trails daily in all weather, read, write, listen to the classical music station, do our various civic duties, travel abroad a bit, visit our kids, go to a French group, a book group, cook, talk, fuss with the house, try to say healthy. Fills the day. 2 January 2009 We did get to our New Year's Eve supper and had a very nice time. A and J can talk about anything, including classical music. We declared Midnight at 10 PM and blasted our way through the drifts the plows had pushed up in front of their driveway on Herringbrook. We had no trouble getting home (only half a dozen blocks), but it was spooky out, just a few private plow trucks circling like scavengers. Ten degrees the next morning, with 8 inches of snow and 30 to 40 mph gusts of wind. We suited up and did the Nauset Marsh trail with our ski poles. Not bad at all. Someone had already been out and trampled a trail. It's fun to be first through the new snow but more work. Twenty degrees this morning, with a promise of further warming. I had to get a toner cartridge for my Brother laser printer. $79 at Staples. The printer cost $80. I guess they lacked the nerve to charge more for the cartridge. While there, we looked at wireless netbooks for N, for email and web searching from her living room Command Center. One had a 120G hard drive, another 10G solid state storage, which sounds reliable and adequate. XP, not Vista. Just looking for now. Notebooks start around $600 and have larger screens and far more capability, but what does one really need? I finished my coffee-table music book, as much as one ever finishes a computer project. Portraits, bio-comments and main works, sound clip, and brief offstage spiel for 25 classical composers and performers, including the Beatles and maybe Joan Baez. It was hard to make the choices. It won't be needed before February, so I will probably mess with it. I still can't make a RealPlayer presentation start in html. I've moved on to Judaism. I have about 100 pages of notes and captured text. It will probably go to quitea bit more, then back to 30 or so as the source of an hour's talk. A nice leisurely project that should take months, icluding a search for illustrations. I plan to ask Rabbi Panitz for a few reading suggestions after I'm a bit further into it. N has been doing the reading as well and finds several books particularly fascinating. Ari L. Goldman, "Being Jewish, the spiritual and cultural practice of Judaism today." NY, Simon and Schuster, 2000. A Times reporter, Goldman is Orthodox but believes Judaism can and should be variously celebrated. A rare pluralist Orthodox.. And, David , "A Heart of Many Rooms; celebrating the many voices within Judaism." Woodstock, Vt. Jewish Lights, 1999. Prof at Hebrew University, Jerusalem. A more schoarly and theoretical work. The wireless mouse works fine. An odd concept though. We have had, alas, to remove from the house, with considerable prejudice, more than one wireless mouse after finding their droppings in kitchen drawers. I did have a moment of panic when I installed it. It thought a moment and than began to work, but IT WORKED BACKWARDS! A move tor the right sent the cursor to the left. Oh, no, I thought, I'll never be able to rewire my brain to handle this! Three seconds later good sense returned and I reoriented the mouse 180 degrees and all was well. Phew. -- Snapping the receiver into the bottom of the mouse to turn it off (as suggested in accompanying literature in 16 languages) make sense for traveling, but is a drag for daily use. Why no switch to turn it off? The meso-American frog sits happily on the CD case by the front door. We have little exhibition space in this house. I will screw the case to the wall and wire the frog to the case. We have earthquakes here in the northeast, although big ones come only every few trhousand years. The morning News? A loss of 6 trillion in stock wealth? But it was only an illusion that it ever existed, right? -- A suicide bombing in Iraq? It sounds exactly Dexter Filkins new book about his time in Iraq. I'm glad he wrote it so that we can know, but personally I find his almost suicidal activities kind of an affort to humanity. Isn't a newspaper reporter supposed to be among the sane and civilized? Perhaps not. -- 1100 cars burned in Paris's ghetto quarters, like Halloween in Devil's night in Detroit. Some apparently by their owners for insurance. Clashes with my Disney World vision of Paris. -- N and I listen to Diane Rehm from 10 to 11 or 12 many mornings (while we do other stuff too). Not everyone likes Diane, but we find her sensible. Friday morning is the week's roundup, with 3 or 4 reporters, not battling ideologues. -- The steel industry wants a $1 trillion bailout? I didn't think we still had a steel industry. I guess for a trillion, folks will be willing to invent one. I've saved the article to a file and promise to read it later. Probably not all the comments though. A quick skim suggests that it expresses the sort of viewpoint that inspired my two Palestine Chronology presentations. I saw Tom Friedman on Morning Joe today. As he put it, Palestine, Gaza included, could have been Singapore today, but their leaders chose, (presumably because that was more where their talents lay!), to be Hell instead. As I said to JR, there have always been espansionist Zionists/Israelis, but they have been, and remain, a minority. The Arabs' de facto (whatever may be said) refusal to accept the right of Israel to exist has continuously empowered the expansionists and hawks and undermined Israeli doves. Israel should evacuate the West Bank, but they did leave Gaza and got rockets as thanks. Should they end the blockage of Gaza, allow Hamas to import larger and more powerful missiles, go deeper underground as missiles strike farther and farther into Israel, and just pray? What practical course would you suggest for Israel? Do you think unilaterally withwrawing from the West Bank would bring them peace? A tough sell under the circumstances, but I believe many Israelis would be willing to try it, if they got some encouragement from the other side. It all goes back to the question I asked at the beginning of my talks. Do you think Israel has the right to exist in Palestine, within the 1967 borders, the 1948 borders, any borders at all? I did read the Cole article, and it doesn't reflect my understanding of the situation, past or present. I could be wrong, but I've put a lot of effort into trying to understand it. It's hard to tell whether Mr. Cole wants peace or something more sinister. I'm reminded of the probably apocryphal sign on a cage at the Paris zoo, "This animal is dangerous; if attacked it will defend itself." Back in the 1950's, the Arab world, meeting in Egypt, announced publicly that they meant to carry out a permanent war of attrition against the state of Israel until it was totally destroyed. Israel knew it couldn't win a war of attrition against an enemy that outnumbered them 100 to 1, and for that reason their response to attacks has always been, wisely or not, "asymmetrical." One can always hope that reasonable heads will prevail over extremists on all sides and that the middle east will flower, preferably more like the old Lebanon than like Singapore. 10 January 2009 I joined Facebook out of curiousity when I saw that various family and friends belonged. I don't yet understand what it's about, nor evidently do some other faces who express puzzlement. I've looked for and found a few names. At my age I already know where most of my old friends are, or rather where they aren't. Anything that links people seems to me good. The C.I.A. probably agrees. Once again my liberal friends grumble about Israel. My dear departed prosessor Rubinstein said the people who know best about Israel's security are the Israelis. 'Best' may not be all that good, but who could know better? Fie on the Hamas leaders who use their citizens as pawns. I continue to have great hopes for Obama, but it does seem like many of our problems are caused by our leaders for their own purposes. Does China really care about Tibet and Taiwan, Muslim extremists about Palestine, the religious right about abortion and gay marriage, Putin about the Ukraine, Bush about democracy? What seems to be most important to most world leaders is their own importance. I hear that Elvis was inspired in 1960, after his military sojourn in Europe on a base quite near to mine, to incorporate some reworked Italian opera into his repertoire. I've never sufficiently appreciated Elvis, although I tend to have fellow feeling about people my age like Elvis, Woody Allen, Diane Rehm, Mary Oliver, Calvin Trillin, and the Dalai Lama. Some people anyway. No need to defend Diane, she has lots of listeners, but I muse on why we like her. We avoided her for years, the weird voice (the result of a stroke some years ago). She's just my age and quite attractive (for someone my age.) She does have a few weak spots. She's dog lover and has far too many programs about dogs. I'm a dog liker. The slow speach doesn't bother me, except the back-to-back reruns of interviews with Toni Morrison and Maya Angelo. I love all three of these characters, but each can sound like they're orating at 3 words per minute rather than having a conversation. Diane needs a normal foil. The Friday news roundup is the best program, two hours with a variet of newspeople with their own viewpoints but not hacks spouting the party line. She's a good interviewer, actually moderating the conversation, asking the common sense questions, and taking no nonsense. The program yesterday was a lovefest about libraries, and I was so excited I sent an appreciateive email, and got an immediate non-computer-generated reply. -- It's unfortunate in hard economic times that libraries are especially needed but are always the first public services to be cut. I picked up a bag of 4 yesterday's half-price gourmet sandwich rolls on speculation. Then I found a recipe for fried fish on the web that purported to resemble MacDonalds' Filet-O-Fish, our regular though infrequent Mac fare. We, I actually, tried it with a piece of haddock, but without the cheese, and it was pretty good. Next time I'd like to try ocean catfish. I puzzled for some time about how to use my router to cut circles. On the web I found expensive pieces of apparatus to cut circles up to 8 feet in diameter. Not really helpful. Then I looked for "small circles" and of course the answer was there. One extra drill hole in the bottom plate of the router to use as a fulcrum and it worked fine. Circles to follow. We'll have a speaker Sunday from IFAW (International Fund for Animal Welfare) world headquartered in an ugly new building in Yarmouthport. I wonder what PETA thinks of IFAW, and vice-versa. Yesterday's weather report included the news that "pieces of frozen ice" were falling in the Worcester area. I've almost finished an hilarious book, The Anglo Files, a field guide to the British, by Sarah Lyall, a London correspondent for the NYT, an american married to writer Robert McCrum, mother of two schoolgirls, and dozen-year inhabitant of England. -- "I realized it had gone too far when I gently fell against the wall of a crowded train that had suddenly lurched as it neared the station. "Sorry," I said to the wall. "Sorry," said a lady standing several feet away." It's funny and very irreverant, but I don't feel it demeans the Brits. They might. 17 January 2008 We had two inches of snow overnight a few days ago, with a bit of cartoonish snow still falling in the morning, largish flakes, widely separated, coming straight down. We planned to take our walk, using the ski poles we found at the dump. Lots of skis get left at the Eastham Stock Exchange! Along with the weights, treadmills, exercise bikes, etc., a graveyard of good intentions. These are in part exercise walks, in part nature walks. The snow is pretty, but unfortunately we have to spend most of our time watching our footing. -- We did, walk and watch our footing. It was pretty at Salt Pond. We admired the view from in front of the Visitor's Center then tramped through the empty building to the parking lot, carrying our ski poles and nodding to the surprised Duty Staff. The talk Sunday by Melanie Powers of the International Fund for Animal Welfare was interesting. She's the CFO, not a regular speaker, but she (and her husband and son) did a good job. I'm all for IFAW. We should be kind to animals: for themselves, as a symbol ("show me how a nation treats it animals, and...."), and because we can. Being kind to humans is harder. We talked afterwards and mentioned our daughter worked for PETA. A "different focus" she said. I asked if they were vegans. She said no. -- A good crowd too, several visitors. It goes on. Tomorrow Bill O. talks on "Why (or possibly 'How') I became an atheist." I wonder what takes an hour to tell. I tell people I'm a humanist. I think we all are, except maybe for a few misanthropes and some really grouchy Calvinists who don't believe humans can create anything at all of meaning and value. And an agnostic, but everyone is agnostic as well, whether they know it or not. No one knows. And sometimes a pantheist as my father claimed to be, mostly for fun. Few people admit to being atheists, it's not a popular position, and you can't be elected president! But there are more useful things to say about this: 1) We don't know; how could we? 2) There are just too many people who are highly intelligent, brilliantly educated, kind and useful who believe in God. And surely everyone prays, for peace, for the kids, whatever. 3) If the issue is that there seems to be little or no evidence of God's presence in a world full of suffering and injustice, lack of evidence has never stopped anyone from believing anything. What would we expect God's creation to look like? If I were God, why would I create anything? Not being God I have to look for human reasons. I suppose it would be because I wanted a friend, someone to talk with who isn't me. A talking Barbi doll wouldn't do. My friend would have to be genuine, as independent as I. So, I would send out a small bit of...myself? matter/energy? into the void. Something technical along those lines. And then I'd wait. Thirteen billion years is nothing to me. And eventually along would come homo sapiens trailing strands of DNA, not perfect but able to talk back. In this scenario things might look pretty much they way they do now. The chief problem with it is that it seems to involve a massive amount of suffering. Almost every lifeform that ever was seems to have had a nasty, brutal, and short existence ending in pain. Here we are, and clearly we should feel obligated to try to live good lives, but are our lives really worth the suffering of a single innocent child? Not a question I can answer. N and R read about religion all the time and visit churches and cathedrals whenever they can. By instinct, I think, more than by conviction. -- It will be interesting to hear what Bill has to say. I spotted an old bookcase at the dump. N said, most generously, "Might be some good wood in that." So I stuffed it in the truck and tied the trunk lid down with a bit of cord I keep for just that purpose. The bookcase was in good shape, 3' by 3', and now props up the 4 shelf bookcase in the computer room, 3 more shelves, and absolutely the last possible space in the house. From now on each now book will have to replace an old one. This will be a challenge. I was supposed to go with Barry Thursday night to supper at O'Shay's and a Poetry Open Mic, but it was 15 degrees and snowing. Thankfully Barry decided to call it off and we made a date for a poetry lunch instead. I hadn't wanted to go out in the snow, but I didn't want to spoil his evening. Nancy was relieved. Lois too. She said, "There's a reason women live longer than men!" I saw x at the Swap Shop. She volunteers there every Sunday, in part I think to get the first pick. "I wonder why no one's taken this bathroom scale?" she said. "Well, it is a little scruffy," I suggested, pointing to the torn plastic cover. "We can fix that," she said, and ripped it the rest of the way off. The Book Group will be here on Monday, in a last minute swap. "Ladies of Liberty," was N's choice, by Cokie Roberts, about the wives of presidents Madison, Monroe, and J.G. Adams, and their friends. Interesting: strong women, lots of kids, lots of travel, to Europe, Russia, in stage coaches on muddy roads. With interludes of high society, dresses, fine wines, gossip, theatre, infidelities, etc. Plus ca change. Unless it snows too much. If they do come, we'll have a fire in the fireplace. We haven't had one this winter. January 22, 2009 Wasn't that great. We watched it, all of it, for hours, and it never disappointed. Rick Warren kept it pretty clean, I loved the Reverend Joseph Lowrey's benediction, the right note of humor, (and gay New hampshire Bishop Robinson was on the bill the day before). We thought the quartet was great. Itzhak Perleman is one of our heroes. How I'd love to be a musically talented youngster and go to his summer music camp! (Talk about multiple fantasies.) Someone pointed out how multicultural the group was, and we hadn't seen that at all, which I think says a lot. The President's speech was just right we thought (criticized for being not poetic enough and being not detailed enough!) Most folks I've spoken with said it was about halfway through the Address that they realized what a politely powerful endictment of the past it was. -- So, we're ready to pitch in, not sure how, but we'll try. We feel like we want to get out there and raise barns, or something. Hope you all feel that way. I've always felt, and always told people, that we could solve all our problems, including ones we don't even know we have, if we could only work together. A dream, but a worthy one. Bill O's talk was good, a spiritual biography from his beginnings in a poor but very religious family in Kansas to a hyperactive retirement on Cape Cod with his wife Nina Emerson (direct descendent of Ralph Waldo)on . Bill's father was a guard at Levenworth. His intelligence was noted by an Episcopal minister who helped him to go to an elite prep school in New England and to Harvard. He went to the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge and spent most of his life as an Episcopal clergyman, although he usually got in trouble either with some bishop or with his congregation for one strong opinion or another. I like Bill a lot, but I can see he might not be everyone's cup of tea. John DeJong took a course in Chinese cooking from him at their church in Connecticut and found him arrogant. Bill made an interesting point. Atheism is a "leap of faith," but it may a necessary one if we want to take full resopnsibility for our actions as human beings. Ultimately I didn't agree, though. I think theists and non-theists of all sorts can take responsibility for their actions. Have to in fact, it's not something you can give up. Bill says he generally calls himself a secular humanist. Something which I think the Pope could claim to be if he wanted to (although I'm sure he wouldn't.) It's where we all start. Sort of like "Ich bin ein Berliner." N and I have both read David Hartman, A Heart of Many Rooms; celebrating the Many Voices within Judaism. Woodstock, Vt., Jewish Lights, 1999. 297p. Hartman is an Orthodox Rabbi, a philosopher, a social activist, and Professor Emeritus at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. This is a really good book, about the breadth and openness of Judaism, not something non-Jews would necessarily realize. I finished Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, on the tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 2008. 496p. A ridiculous title, how did he ever let them call it that, but a really good book. It's a reprise of his Great Railway Bazaaar from 33 years ago, roughly the same route from Europe through south asia, east asia and returning by the Trans-Siberian Railway, but he's much mellower than in the previous book. He met many kind and helpful people along the way and saw some splendid sights, but he isn't optimistic about the future of most of these countries: violent and corrupt like the former Russian republics, overcrowed and with increasing disparity of wealth like India. Pleasant but moribund like some south east asian countries, materialistic, rude, and crowded like China, over-controlled like Singapore and Japan, and chaotic like Russia. By and large I'm glad I don't have to go to any of them. Qadaffi's Times op ed on Palestine was interesting (for being there at all!). I don't think a one-state solution is possible, but he sounded amazingly rational. I wonder who wrote it. -- If, as Barack would say, all the grownups could now get together.... N said, if we get a new TV you'll have to clear some space in the bookcase. "I can get rid of books," I said. She laughed. "Bring it on! The macho librarian!" See below the infamous bookcase. The top 4 shelves I assembled when we first moved in, the botton 3 were from the dump last week. Most of the books are from the dump (and the lamp too). Odd but not bad. The matryoshka was bought by my father in Leningrad in 1972, the jade was on my parents' mantel and I don't know where it's from (other than China), the Don Quixote carving my father bought in Madrid in 1966. The Isle of Lewis Celtic Chess pieces were gifts to me. Pleasant baubles. Jan 09 "For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus - and non-believers." -- President Barack Obama, Inauguration Address. Next thing you know they'll be electing a non-believe president. "Ashtabulah! (unclear..)father always wanted to see Ashtabulah. He thought it was a funny name." -- "Really? Sounds more like something my father would say. There was this little town in Illinois..." -- "That's what I said, your father wanted to see Ashtabulah." -- "Oh, I thought you said your father wanted to see Ashtabulah, and I thought, that's odd, that doesn't sound at all like something your father would say." -- "It's not, it's something your father said." And so he did. Nice poetical lunch with Barry. Breakfast actually, H&K now serves breakfast all day although after 5:00pm only the more expensive ones. We had sausage and eggs. Heavenly. N was wanted more snow, and this morning we got an inch of lovely white stuff plastered on everything. We are sometimes a little too enthusiastic about our enthusiasm around folks who have to go out in it. Off the Record: I like "PASTEL" a lot. I can hear your voice. I suppose that gets to be a hazzard. Would I have understood what was going on if I didn't already understand? I think so, but might it be clearer with a title like: "HOUSE BY THE RIVER. PASTEL." It's quite poingnant. I'm reminded of N's Aunt E. She raised 4 kids, in a house owned by her parents, on her husband's modest income as a commercial photographer. And yet they bought a nice lot on a lake in the Poconos, which they picknicked camped on for years. (They offered it to us as a camp site, but we aren't campers!) N's mother was incensed about the lot. She wanted a vacation home, too, but N's father, who earned a good salary as an actuary but supported his parents and mother-in-law said they couldn't afford one. Aunt E and Uncle H eventually built a lovely little cabin on their lot, to which they retired to write poetry, make braided rugs, and entertain friends and family. They knew how to live. Most of my poems for decades were for N, who presumably knows how I feel about her. There's the one unsatisfactory poem about my father's death, and a whole novel, "Newhouse". My mother gets killed off in Newhouse, but only out of practicality. She gets killed off in the short story "Over Easy," with a bit more good-natured malice, and she takes her vulturish care-giver with her. I could never write a poem about our kids. It's an odd business. I certainly loved my father, and I'm sure he knew that. J. and I went to a free concert in Philadelphia the afternoon of the day he died in Florida. The Concerto Soloists were the worst preening peacocks you could imagine, but they played like angels. I wished I could have had a recording of the concert in my father's memory (he who was tone deaf and refererred to Mozart as "that jiggly stuff.") I never doubted that I loved my mother, although we had totally different personalities. It was only after her death that I learned how unremittingly cruel she could be to some. It still blows my mind that I didn't know. Your site looks very nice and works well. Your choice and use of format seems just right. Nice pics! I, as usual in photos, look like a particularly dissolute paedophile, but as Nancy's grandmother used to quote: "My face, I don't mind it, because I am behind it, it's the fellow in front that I jar." She was no beauty but a delightful woman in her way. Tell me about it! I've been an addict since I took a computer programming course in 1980 at the Moore School at Penn (where we say the computer was invented). I'd be turned on simply by the smell (of PCB's?) in the basement of the Moore school where the terminals were located. When a program ran successfully I'd feel weightless for a moment, my hair standing on end. The thrill never quite ended. I've probably spent months of my life programming. I loved it and spent hours at a time at work and at home debugging and refining software. I could think in Pascal and Perl (i.e. write runable programs without consulting a manual). I realize now what a blessing it probably was that Penn decided, after considerable hemming, not to have me telecommute after I retired. Free at last! Enjoy. I've always considered constructive computer work to be mind-stimulating, rather than mind-numbing like TV and video games. -- Like poems, computer programs can "work" but be clunky, or they can work and be "elegant," the computer wonk's highest praise. A photo of Phillipe Kahn, my idol at one point. He invented Turbo Pascal, woked only at night, and lived on Twinkies. I believe he began sleeping at night and took up sailing after he made his fortune. ___________ I wish we could have talked more about your view of the "stimulus package" and what should be done in the country and the world. We, of course, being semi-Euro-socialists, think we pay little enough tax as it is. About Israel, I continue to think there is hope of a Two-State Solution. The only way I can see it happening, however, is for the U.S. to put pressure on Israel to evacuate its West Bank settlements and end the blockade of Gaza, while at the same time pledging a guarantee of Israel's survival and well-being, in a way that will be convincing to both the Israelis and the Palestinians and their supporters. If we don't support Israel, they will surely be attacked again, and if they feel threatened with destruction I believe they will use their nuclear weapons, regardless of whether Iran also has nuclear weapons. What other choice would they have? I think the Israelis mean it when they say, "Never again." The result is likely to be nuclear destruction of both Israel and the major Muslim and Arab cities, and for all we know the end of the world! I think we might want to try to avoid this! ----- When we first moved to the Cape in 1999 I tried to get in touch with you, thinking now that we are fairly close geographically we might get together. The Church was unhelpful. I eventually concluded that you had passed on. Clearly you haven't! What a pleasant surprise. How are you and yuor family? I'd be very interested to know what you think about the world. We are much encouraged by Obama's election, but the problems he, and we, will have to deal with seem to increase in size and number almost daily. We read a lot and have our opinions, but we don't have the answers and fear that no one does. We ourselves should be okay, barring mega-catastrophe, but even here on Cape Cod we see unemployment, poverty, and homelessness increasing rapidly. Sure, lets build infrastructure, regulate the financial industry, control medical costs, support education, and solve world problems through diplomacy. -- We've thought the consumer society was nuts for some years. -- We'd like to see two states in Palestine. The Israelis aren't always helpful, but it seems to us the chief problem remains the Arab and Muslim leadership. -- We'd like to see single-payer national health care. -- Get out of Iraq and help Afghanistan wisely and only as part of a convincing coalition. -- We do our best to live "green". Its small effects are as helpful as its theortical large ones, and it's kind of fun. Everyone on Cape Cod is an "environmentalist." -- We're gratified to see that our 4 children all seem to have their heads on straight and their hearts in the right place, but they have to work too hard just to support themselves to do very much about the problems of the world. About religion, alas, it seems to cause as much pain as it relieves. Nancy and I are constant students of religion and great admirers of the admirable. We like the Unitarians anthough we find them a bit undynamic. I felt the presence of God in our daughter's synagogue, despite my unbelief. My son went to a Quaker school and continues his interest, and good for him. We heard a wonderful sermon by the Bishop of Edinburgh in St. Mary's Scottish Cathedral last spring, but when we went to the coffee hour afterwards we had to be the ones to start conversations; they were about as dead as any Episcopal congregation of our long experience. At least that doesn't happen in our Unitarian Fellowship. But the larger Unitarian Churches are as institutional as any other main line denomination. My sister tried a large Unitarian church in California. She liked the ministers, but no one every seemed to remember her name. She is admitedly a bit shy, but that doesn't excuse the congregation. How's the church? Sounds more conservative than I remember. We get various Episcopal church publications which seem pretty dreary. But so do Unitarian publications. So do synagogue publications. Just humans trying to get through life. We cheer them on but can't work up much enthusiasm. We went to the the local Episcopal church the first Sunday after we moved to the Cape. The sermon was dumb, the liturgy was condescending (I wouldn't have believed that possible but it was), and we were literally "handed" out the door. Were we unfair? Maybe we were looking for an excuse not to go back. At the Chapel in the Pines, U/U we were warmly embraced without any strings or requirements. A welcome that's hard to beat. Nancy has her personal religious beliefs, but I can speak for my own. I tell folks I'm a Humanist, which is true. I believe we humans can create meaning and value. What I see when I look at the world is the massive, inexcusable, and unacceptable suffering of the innocent. I can imagine no satisfactory explanation and refuse to accept this as a "mystery". But I leave the door open, I think. The Cape is a great place. Tell us if you'll be in the neighborhood. -- We walk the trails daily in all weather, read, write, listen to the classical music station, do our various civic duties, travel abroad a bit, visit our kids, go to a French group, a book group, cook, talk, fuss with the house, try to say healthy. Fills the day. FEBRUARY 15 Feb 2009 We went out in the dark! Went with Barry and Lois to O'Shay's Irish Pub for the Poetry Open Mic. Had a good supper and a pint of Cape Cod Red, a local brew that's a little bitter but quite good. Barry was the featured poet and did a wonderful job. Much I hadn't heard, a lot of it very funny but always with an edge. Some other good readers too. So many points of view, N says, so many amazing minds. I just finished reading Stanley Karnow, "Vietnam, a history; the first complete account of Vietnam at War." NY, Viking, 1983. 740p. Good book, a bit of ancient history, then details since the French colonization, but discouraging. Sounded just like Iraq and Afghanistan. We (and the French) were completely ignorant of the country and never did figure it out. We lied and disembled for politcal and personal reasons. Everything we tried failed, but we never admitted it. This was written in '83, long before Macnamara's admission, but it's all clear enough. Wasn't clear to me at the time though. I thought it was like Korea. I was in the inactive reserve by 1967 then, busy with work and family and not going back in the Army. We also read Reginald Hill's latest Dalziel and Pascoe Yorkshire mystery, long and very amusing. We reccomend these but you should read them in order, although the later are better than the first. My reading from "Newhouse" Sunday at the Chapel went very well. I was a bit surprised (and even made up a pot of regular coffee for those who didn't wish to doze off). They seemed to like it a lot. No accounting for tastes. The newest Alexander McCall Smith 'Isabel Dalhousie' novel, "The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday" is delightful. "Endearing...Offers tantalizing glimpses of Edinburgh's complex character and a nice long look into the beautiful mind of a thinking woman," says the NYTBR. We heartily reccommend the series and also his 44 Scotland Street books as amausing, restful, charming. Can't get into the African "Ladies Detective Bureau" books. -- Knowing the places a bit, York and Edinburgh, adds to the pleasure. I'm deep in Paul Johnson's big 1987 "A History of the Jews." Seems good. I plan to give a talk in the fall. Hope you folks are all doing well in these troubled times. MARCH 4 Mar 2009 N got her wish for more snow although not as much as she wanted, just a few inches. We'll suit up and go walk somewhere with our ski poles. On our last walk we made the first tracks in the snow, always a good feeling. Few around here seem to share our enthusiasm. Most speak of Spring, which is a long time coming on the Cape. The Book Group dicsussion of "China Road" was a good one. Our discussions are always good even if no one like the book. An intelligent, courteous, and self-confident bunch who seem to have no ego problems. I don't suppose anyone would want us to run the world? The living room book case is refurbished with mouldings made in the basement with the router, and a shelf added to hold the HDTV, which will probably be delayed a bit now owing to the world financial picture. Any thoughts on that one? As liberal democrats, (approaching Euro-Socialism), we have no trouble with billions for a new New Deal or a reversal of the re-distribution of wealth from poor to rich back to rich to poor, and moderately higher (but progressive) taxes. We're particularly enthusiastic about big bucks for education, health care, the environment, and alternative energy. We don't really comprehend the overall financial situation or its proposed remedies, but not for want of listening to and reading the experts. -- I guess in general we'd like to see more aggessive action by the government, but with even more transparency. We doubt that national medical care can really work if it isn't non-profit, cost controlled, and single payer, but we'll hope for the best. How do we pay for this? It looks to us not that all difficult if we reduced the national propensity for greed. Dream on. I'm not sure of N's position come to think of it, but I think we should confine our foreign adventures to those in which we have reasonable international support and assistance. Including full support of our European allies when they act responsibly, Afghanistan as a project for the world, and full support of Israel within adjusted pre-1967 borders. No one seems to be much influenced by our opinions, however. At Barry's initial suggestion (but without his participation) we hope to start a new "informal, low key, and supportive" writing group at Marion's house on March 26th. I look forward to it. I have lots of raw prose and poetry to expose. The daily round continues to please: NTY, French news, German news (now remarkably well understood, considering), note-taking on Judaism, writing and editing. The writing waxes and wanes from week to week, mostly confined to The Pig, Newhouse, poetry, and the occasional short story. We shop when needed, walk, lunch on cheap soup (whenever there is a buck a can sale on Progresso at Stop & Shop we stock up). Sometimes get creative for dinner. We get a kick out of Rep. Burrus, who seems to be one of the least of evils these days, also Gov. Jindal and Senator Limbaugh. For the past few weeks I've been fiddling with a Fellowship presentation for Sunday March 22d, "The Faces of Music," images and sound clip of composers and performers. The version I'll do on Sunday morning will be just a selection from these with live commentary. See what you think, and please suggest other key players if you like, or sand a brief sound clip. It's online but not publicly linked for now: http://www.nfuu.org/CpFacesOfMusic.htm I've cut some of the clips pretty short in hopes of not attracting the music police in case they care. 18 March 2009 We had a great visit to Virginia. It rained the whole time, but that didn't really matter. Aryn is delightful, very animated and smiley. I've attached one of your mother's digital pics. Good vegan cookery and a visit to Norfolk's excellent Chrysler Museum. It's good to be home too. It's a long familiar road, but it used to be we enjoyed in mostly one way, to the Cape. Now we enjoy it both ways! It got warmer and sunnier the farther north we went. Very strange. We got only 45 mpg, but they say you get less in the winter. So back to our small doings. Men's group tomorrow. We never have an agenda, just get togehter and walk about whatever, but Dave Eagles though we should each have a true story to tell. It weems to me that's what we always do, though my stories are smaller and less interesting than theirs. My current projects are to finish preparing the 1st floor laundry (although we have no plans to get the machines for several years, I thought I should finish the prep while I'm still reasonably heartY) and to do the wiring for the ceiling fan in the bedroom. Also a picture of our new TV corner, with the old TV. I know this President wants us to shop too, but we never rush into things. March 25 We never used to listen to Presidential news conferences, even before Bush, but we seem to be hooked on Obama. We watched last night and thought he was great as always. It's so annoying to hear the pointy talking heads belittle him the next morning. Invest money in education, energy, and health care! What a dreadful idea! I had a nice poetry lunch with Barry. Poetry breakfast really, we both have sausage and eggs now that the H&K serves breakfast all day. I had 5 new poems, which he liked. He thought I had moved to more story-telling and personal poems. If so, it was accidental. I write what comes into my head. I plan to read a few at the Open Mic at the Fellowship in a month. It gets good attendance. -- A woman just called me who is interested in starting what sounds like a French Empire on the Cape, groups for all ages, a center, etc. She'll send me something by email, and I'll see how we can contribute. -- Our new writing group starts this afternoon. This will be good, as I haven't been in one for several years. There must be thousands of writing, painting, book, and discussion groups on the Cape. A message there. Faces of Music went well last Sunday. Enjoyment, laughter, and even tears. Music is strong stuff. It took a bit of fiddling, and 20 feet of cable from Radio Shack, but I got the Chapel's excellent sound system to play the music. TR's new laptop wouldn't work for this, so I had to drag in my mainframe, but it worked. N wanted to me to send her 1st four excellent pictures, so they are attached. Hope you are all well and thriving. APRIL Exciting wildlife sightings: We saw the back of a hairy creature swimming away rapidly in the Red Maple Swamp. A rat, suggested N? Surely not. Why would a rat be swimming in the swamp? A water rat? No they're fictitious. Ratty in Wind in the Willows was an English vole. We dismissed an otter as too big and settled on a muskrat. We'll never know. -- Then at Audubon we saw a golden squirrel. We saw a picture of one taken in Orleans on the BB at Birdwatchers. Just a color variation, very pretty. We saw mostly the blond tail. Got a good picture of a red squirrel though.-- Lying in bed reading the other night I heard a very fake sounding owl: "who, who, who." Humph, I said. Then a few minutes later N came in the room and said she'd heard the strangest thing, it sounded like someone blowing across the mouth of a beer bottle. I actually got up and turned on the outside lights to see if there were alien invaders communication by bird calls. We eventually concluded, after consulting the bird books, that it was a Great Horned Owl. Gordon Major spoke at the Fellowship: "Notes of a Christian Believer." Gordon gives Christians a good name. His very sweet daughter came, a teacher looking for work, anywhere. In the afternoon we went to the reception at the new Orleans Medical Center and saw lots of people we knew. Said hi to Andrea and Tim, toured the building, had a snack, chatted, listened to a few short speeches and left. It's a very Green building, but they couldn't afford LEEP status. We looked at the complex climate control machinery in the attic and marveled. -- A reception at your doctor's office? Hey, this is the Cape. The ceiling fan is installed in our bedroom. N decided she didn't want wires sticking out of her bedroom ceiling for another couple of months. So we're all set, just a little early. It's still 40 degrees outside and likely will be until June. Spring can be pretty on the Cape, but it's not touristy. The writing group went well, six came, a good number. Marion writes a wonderful journal. This entry was about her teenage job at a drugstone owned by old Mr. Inch. Sid and Cheryl, from Common Time, were there. Sid's short story was about a con man conned. He has much experience to draw on. A long retired lawyer, he says 20% of his law school class has been in jail. I've been enjoying "The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1791-1997," the book that is, by Piers Brendon (one of those name that sound more likley the other way around), a Fellow of Churchill College Cambridge. Not a pretty picture as he paints it. Power busily justifiying itself as it corrupts all in its path, an old story. We just listened to Obama's town hall meeting in Strasbourg, France. He's really something. -- I remember Strassbourg from the Army, a neat place with a fantatstic cathedral. N and I were there in '65. We saw a Miss Marple movie dubbed in French. We enjoyed Megans pictures of death valley. Especially Fresh Jerky! I remember in the mid-80's, flying to California, John and I looked out the window at the desert and marveled at the emptiness. Good to know the emptiness is still there. 8 April 09 N decided that Thursday was such a lovely day we should take a picnic to P'town. -- A picnic is tuna salad sandwiches and, in this case, juice drink left over from the Women's Meeting. A small group of women this time, so there was also leftover chocolate pudding cake. Not left for long! -- We walked to race point. There were few signs of spring and yet it felt like spring. Very quiet, no cars and no airplanes taking off or landing. The economy? We meant to eat at the Visitors' Center, but found someone practicing his trumpet at the amphitheater. Not Winton Marsalis either, so we went to the Beech Forest for our picnic, where it was just us and the ducks. Writing group that afternoon was also poorly atended, so I read a chapter and some poems. The others are writing memoirs, quite good ones. Many people have interesting lives, although some of the most interesting don't, or can't, write about them. Tomorrow is the Easter Brunch. Neither N nor I has ever cared much for Easter, we're Christmas Christians at best, so a brunch is welcome, although N doesn't eat much. I make up for it. We usually bring baked beans (from a can) and fruit. I have no building projects at the moment or in the offing. I don't think N really wants the refrigerator sunk into the wall. I suppose I could finish the plumbing for the first floor laundry, but t's mostly done, and the new frontloading machines aren't even on the horizon. Gardening doesn't begin until the end of May (and ends shortly thereafter). I work on the Judaism talk, Newhouse Part 2, poems, readying The Chaplain and the Pig for writing group, etc. But I don't like to spend too much time at the computer. The book group book this month is "Loving Frank" by Nancy Horan, the fictional but evidently quite accurate story of Frank Lloyd Wright's affair with Mamah Borthwick Cheney. N and I can't decide which we like least, Frank or Mahah (pron. May-ma.) I resist judging other's lives, but both are very self-centered, and deserting between them a total of 8 young children seems to me to qualify them as full-blown shits. Some interesting stuff about architecture and women's liberation, but surely one can serve both, even in early 20th century, without creating so much mayhem. I guess I'd vote for Frank as the most self-deluding, egotistical, irresponsible, and cheap. He built some nice houses and gardens though, particulary in Oak Park, Ilinois, where he and Mamah and spouses both lived, not far from Edgar Rice Burroughs' house and that of Paul, Lulu, Russell, and Norman Chenoweth in 1917. I've added a little to the family histories. New crumbs turn up on the web from time to time. The Word docs are on my web site, though not publically listed. I mean to make CDs someday, but I keep waiting because nothing is ever finished. If you're interested you might want to download the histories for your own archives. Addresses below. -- I also added some photos, see the "2009 Show", and a few more illustrated recipes. 16 April 09 Lovely night sky last night, N tells me. We have a lot of that here, almost as good as Oklahoma and New Mexico 50 years ago and despite all the pollution blowing over from the mainland. I find it amazing that every morning from February to may the temperature at around 7 AM is 40 degrees. Not 38 or 42, but 40. It goes up or down later in the day. Tomorrow it's supposed to go up to 60. We walked the White Cedar Swamp trail at Marconi yesterday. It feels like spring, N says, but it doesn't look like it. The swamp itself was full of water and resembled a smaller version of the swamp in Virginia Beach, without the Spanish moss. Showers are predicted for the Boston Marathon on Monday. We aren't really Boston people and rarely go there except to the airport. We'd watch Philadelphia news if we could, not because we're hung up on Philadelphia, just a more familiar context. We're surprised to find so many of the old newspeople on TV during our stops at Mt. Laurel. Croissants for breakfast this morning. About once a month the Stop & Shop sells a box of 4 store-baked croissants at half price and we buy a box. They freeze, and thawed and warmed weeks later taste as good as any in France. The expensive excitement this week was a new water heater. The 10 year old one sprang a leak in the heating coils. Not good. The new one is forty gallons (I said to N, now we can invite everyone to take 20 minute showers. No we can't, she said.), stainless steel, and with a lifetime guarantee. One always wonders whose lifetime. While in the basement we tried to find stuff for the Fellowship Tag Sale next month. We didn't find much except the school desk that used to sit under the TV, strange innerds from our new refrigerator whose use we never figured out, vacuum cleaner accessories which belong to the chapel anyway as they came from the new vacuum we bought for the, and the silver sherbet cups we received as a white elephant one Christmas and have been reluctant to unload so as not to offend the known donor. There is still plenty of worthless junk in our basement, but one or the other of us is reluctant to part with it. N thinks evereything in the garage is worthless, no matter how many times I point out the uses to which similar junk has been put. I've added more nails on which to hang coils of rope retrieved from the beach, etc. It is a minor work of accidental art. I'm going through all my father's old letters and writings again. I had sort of dismissed them, but looked at closely they are full of gems which I will try to incorporate into "Newhouse", which after long trial and error I've decided to continue as fiction based on organic ingrediants. 19 April 09 N enjoyed watching Cleveland beat the Yankees 22 to 4. I guess the Yankees could eventually earn underdog status, but probably not with N. After thinking about it for quite a while, I've bought a 19" HD widescreen monitor from Dell. The price was right, and I'd wanted to be able to have two pages open at the same times, or a page of text and a web page, as in the more-or-less good-old-days at work. It's nice (see picture below) and does what I wanted. Although I'd specifically asked about compatibility they didn't tell me that 1024 x 768 would be the best resolution I could get with my Dimension 4500S and Integrated Video Card and not the advertised 1440 x 900. Oh, well. The program last Sunday was on "The Most Important Fish in the Sea". I'd thought this was a metaphor, but it was about the Atlantic menhaden (aka pogy, alewife, shad, mossbunker, etc.) As in the gift-wrapped alewives we gave Maury's maids of honor some years ago. They are evidently a very important link in the ocean food chain as they are filter feeders and eat phytoplankton and are food themselves for all larger fish, and (when a school is torn apart by rampaging blues) food for gulls, crabs, etc. But one company Omega Protein (out of Houston, wouldn't you know) vacuums up millions of tons of them every year, and they are becoming scarce. As Alan Greenspan would say, I thought sure they would be self-regulating out of self-interest. Dream on, Alan. -- It was very interesting. Well, interesting to me. N was sitting across the room and trying valiently to prop her eyes open. There are many things like that in this world, very important but not necessarily interesting to everyone. Tomorrow is the Poetry Opec Mic. I will participate. See below some info about Gustavus Swift. The historical society doesn't seem to know much about his Eastham slaughterhouse. I guess it's an episode in Eastham history they'd rather not celebrate. Still and all.... You could call this an Eastham success story, sort of. It is even less required reading that the rest of my letter, especially for vegetarians and vegans. Cheers, R ----------- Gustavus Franklin Swift (June 24, 1839 – March 29, 1903) founded a meat-packing empire in the Midwest during the late 19th century, over which he presided until his death. He is credited with the development of the first practical ice-cooled railroad car which allowed his company to ship dressed meats to all parts of the country and even abroad, which ushered in the "era of cheap beef." Swift pioneered the use of animal by-products for the manufacture of soap, glue, fertilizer, various types of sundries, even medical products. Swift was born on June 24, 1839, near Sandwich [clearly, hot pastrami was in his stars], on Massachusetts's Cape Cod Bay. Swift was the second of three boys born to William Swift and Sally Crowell, descendants of British settlers who went to New England in the 17th century. The family (which included Gustavus’ brothers Noble and Edwin [and presumably many sisters]) lived and worked on a farm in the Cape Cod town of West Sandwich (present-day Sagamore), where they raised and slaughtered cattle, sheep, and hogs. He was one of 12 children and was educated at a local school. Swift took little interest in his studies and consequently left the country school after only eight years at the age of 14. During that period he was employed in a number of odd jobs, finally finding full-time work in his elder brother Noble's butcher shop. But he was unhappy with the lack of prospects for advancement. At 16, he decided to move to Boston, but his father loaned him $25 as an inducement to stay. Swift used $19 of it to buy a heifer from a local farmer, slaughtered it, and sold the beef door to door. He made a $10 profit and from then on went weekly to the local cattle market in the town of Brighton. In 1855, he opened his own cattle and pork butchering business with the help of small loans from his family. Swift purchased livestock at the market in Brighton and drove them to Eastham, a ten-day journey. A shrewd businessman, he purportedly followed the somewhat common practice of denying his herds water during the last miles of the trip so that they would drink large quantities of liquid once they reached their final destination, effectively boosting their weights. [Not at all nice, but you may recall that your great, great grandmother Jenneman used to stuff grain in her geese before she took them to market. They were hard times.] Around 1859 he opened his own butcher shop in Eastham and hired another brother to run it while he set up a second shop in Barnstable. Swift married Annie Maria Higgins of North Eastham in 1861. Over the years Annie gave birth to a total of eleven children, nine of whom reached adulthood. In 1862, Swift and his new bride opened a small butcher shop and slaughterhouse in Eastham. Seven years later Gustavus and Annie moved the family to Brighton (near Boston), where in 1872 Swift became partner in a new venture, Hathaway and Swift. Swift and partner James A. Hathaway (a renowned Boston meat dealer) initially relocated the company to Albany, then almost immediately thereafter to Buffalo. An astute cattle-buyer, Swift followed the market steadily westward. On his recommendation, Hathaway and Swift moved once more in 1875, this time to join the influx of meat packers setting up shop in Chicago's sprawling Union Stock Yards. Swift established himself as one of the dominant figures of "The Yards", and his distinctive delivery wagons became familiar fixtures on Chicago's streets. In 1878 his partnership with Hathaway dissolved and Swift Bros and Company was formed in partnership with younger brother Edwin. The company became a driving force in the Chicago meat packing industry, and was incorporated in 1885 as Swift & Co. with $300,000 in capital stock and Gustavus Swift as president. It is from this position that Swift led the way in revolutionizing how meat was processed, delivered, and sold. The Swift-Daley House in Eastham is located on Route 6 next to the Post Office. Built in 1741 by Joshua Knowles, its bowed roof is typical of early houses built by ship's carpenters. The wide board floors, deep kitchen fireplace and narrow stairways are other features of 18th century houses. In 1859 Nathaniel Swift occupied the house but, with his brother Gustavus of North Eastham, soon moved to Chicago and founded the Swift meat packing empire. The second part of its present name comes from Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Daley who purchased the house in 1939 and restored it to its original condition. Mrs. Daley generously donated the house to the Eastham Historical Society in 1974. -- The narrtive seems a little confused, but who was to know the Swifts would become famous. We twice rented a summer cottage on Swift Road in North Eastham (the sort of modernistic one). Not sure of the connection. No old bones lying around. 30 April 2009 We had the Poetry Open MIC at the chapel last Sunday morning, and 75 came! Poetry is hot these days. I read four poems to modest acclaim, so I feel particularly good about it. This is the 6th POM I've been to, 3 at the chapel and 3 at O'Shay's Bar. Very different atmospheres but many of the same people. Christine, a six foot Amazonian performance artist, has been to all of them I think. She came last fall hugely pregnant and came this time with the baby. She recited (she memorizes) an amazing poem about new motherhood, all the mothers nodding their heads. She gave N a copy to send to Sara. -- Some of the poetry is a little pedestrian, but there are always surprises, and usually one or two poems that could produce a tear. I think some must come for the emotion, to give or to take. For good and ill, it can be very revealing. The new writing group hosted by Marion is going well. We have six members which is a good number and lets each of us read for fifteen minutes or so. Plus coffee and cookies, which I never got at any other writing group! I'll have to bring something, and maybe not my usual bargain $1.00 iced-spiced, which I happen to like. I investigated the display cards that the Dell tech recommended. The monitor cost $120, the cards cost $140, so I think I'll just wait a couple more years and get a new computer. The monitor is fine. I like the width for editing and for reading the Times, etc. -- N and I enjoyed back-to-back TV programs about France, the other day, by Burt Wolfe and Rick Steves. Eventually we'll get our HDTV and watch travelogues in high definition. There are a few more trips I'd like to take if we can, to France and Germany, Italy and Israel, but good travelogues are very satisfying and much less effort and expense. Perhaps it's rationalisation, but neither N nor I has the desire that many of our friends seem to have to see China, Greece, Japan, Latin American, the Balkans, Scandinavia, Australia, India, etc., etc. To really see a place (like Paris, London, or Edinburgh) is a great deal of work. N and I worked in the yard this week I do this for 3 or 4 hours a year, N for maybe 20 minutes, but it doesn't take much to whip our 90% "natural" yard into shape. The compost heap has actually produced a lot this year. Even oak leaves break down eventually. It may help that we've been adding our compostable kitchen waste for the past year or so. Rick the Roofer is back from Seattle. His elderly parents and his house are there, but he has work here again he says. He's collecting his Seattle stories. While he was out there he tried to peddle his novel. It has in part a Seattle setting. Someone who bought and read a copy talked to me about Rick's convincing Vietnam chapters. I thought hard and decided it was best to tell him that Rick had never been to Vietnam but had a friend who told him about it. He's just a good writer. He has been to Africa with the Peace Corps, and that part is good too. -- It's a hot bed of creativity around here. I wish I'd learned to play the violin. Even Bill Smith, the tough guy partner to E.J. Rozan's Lydia Chin in her excellent New York City mysteries, plays classical piano. I found something neat on the web. http://www.france24.com/fr/category/tags-emissions/lecons-lavenir?page=1 These are 15 "Lessons for the Future," about economic history, with full text and illustrations. An easy way to learn some new vocabulary. I'm halfway through "Pakistan, in the shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan," but Mary Anne Weaver. I hope our leaders have read this and similar books. Afpak seems to be uniquely difficult and complex. We've played it badly in the past. We just finished "Overture" by Yael Goldstein, about mothers, daughters, musical genius, love, etc. It's our book group book for May. Perhaps a "womans' book." We both found it quite complelling. I said to N that I hardly knew how I felt about these people. "Maybe envy." "Well, of course," she said. The attached article "Genius - Modern style" by David Brooks. Is interesting. A little late for all of us perhaps, though later for me. N and I shared the experience that when very young we got the message that if something was difficult for you, you should avoid it. Also, that if you do have a skill, talent, or genius, you'd know it. -- It's a bit self-exculpatory, but we both feel now that this false wisdom served us badly. Sure natural ability is real, but desire and effort are even more important. The sooner the better, but evidently one can learn some French and write some poetry even starting in one's seventies. -- If there's something you've always want to do, do it. MAY 14 May 2009 I suppose it's a combination of our being older and of air travel being harder, but that part wasn't really fun. Maybe it never was, although it seemed more exciting once and not so tedious and exhausting. We got there, nonetheless, and found California delightful and then got back again and found the Cape having early spring in a haze of little pale green leaves. The weather all eight days was absolutely perfect. Does California have a spring or fall? We don't remember seeing many deciduous trees. -- I said to N that the P&B bus to Barnstable was more comfortable than the airplane. She agreeed that she certainly got more sleep on the bus. We spent a pleasant day with Maury in Gilroy, faintly smelling the garlic, met her cheerful dog Zepher, and saw the park where she does some of her talks on Indian lore. We had dinner Monday night at Blake and Travis's attractive ranchero in sight of Blake's Peak. We met her 6 enthusiastic dogs, two horses, and two goats. Travis does most of the cooking and is an expert, particularly at barbeque. Yum! The drive to Mariposa with Maury took us over the spare Diablo Range. The scattered live oaks reminded me of the cork tree under which Ferdinand fecklessly smelled the flowers. We did in fact see a few cows resting in the shade of the trees. We drove through the San Joaquin Valley past huge irrigated fields and into the Sierras. We checked in at our hotel, had lunch at the Happy Burger ("largest menu in the Sierras") and drove the 40 very high but not particularly scary miles into the park. My $10 lifetime senior pass did the trick at the gate. Those of you who have seen Yosemite don't need a description, and for those who haven't none would do the job. It was of course only 2/3 the relative size it was when I was twelve but still very impressive. The weather sixtyish, bright and sunny, the park green, glaringly stoney, and quite lovely. The river was furiously full and the waterfalls roaring. There were lots of other seniors about, some in short pants with alpenstocks. The train ride and proposed streetcar trip to Mari's were a challenge. No signs at all pointed one to the station in San Jose and not even the Sherrif's office knew where it was. Blake and Travis's directions got us there in the end, but the station was so well hidden we finally happened on it by accident. In San Francisco, a handsomely uniformed railroad policeman sent us in the wrong direction for the N-Judah line. Everyone is very pleasant here, very laid back, but perhaps not fully informed. Mari rescued us in her Mini Cooper. Shrader Street was delightful as always, welcoming, quiet and elegant, the backyard lush with strange foliage. We ate well and took long walks in Goldengate Park. We visited the De Jong Museum, saw their permanent collection for the first time, and had an excellent sandwich in the gourmet cafe. We passed up the Science Museum as a little pricy even for seniors, and rather crowded. Morning coffee and the newspaper in Mari and Gloria's sunny kitchen is particularly nice. -- It was in the Sunday NYT that I read a brief article about childhood alergies that began with an anecdote. The groom was standing on a porch chatting with a friend when a small child came running past abd sailed right off the end of the porch. Conversation stopped dead as they waited for the fall, the screams, the dammage, but the boy hit the ground running and continued on. "Has anyone told you about this part of having children?" The friend asked. "The incredible fear that enters your life?" -- It's true, and all one can say is that we float on its surface and go on. I think, through, that we all have fears regardless, of something, for something or someone. It's the human condition. J and M took us on a splendid wine-tasting jaunt into the Sonoma and Napa valleys. Some very fine wines indeed, but Livingston Cellars Burgandy (Modesto, CA - and "much to be modest about" as Churchill once said of a colleague) seems well enough suited to our undiscerning palatte. We crossed the Maya Camas Mountains from Sonoma to Napa by way of Trinity Road. Looking on the web for the name of the mountains, I came across some amusing chatter about the joys and perils of Trinity Road. Fortunately we met no speeding gravel trucks. One winery recommended that it be bypassed after a day of strenuous wine-tasting. We thought the Napa Valley was particularly beautiful with its sparingly treed green hills, cattle, sheep, manicured vinyards and large and prosperous wineries. Then back to Oakland, a heaven on earth of ethnic restaurants and coffee shops. Our Chinese takeout was notably excellent. It was very good to see our family. We hope to see you all variously in June and at Christmas. 20 May 2009 The last time we came back to the Cape from London in May there were still no leaves on our trees. This time spring had come while we were in California. Two and a half inches of rain can be very encouraging to Cape flora. I've planted lettuce and beans in our garden, and we plan to get our tomato plants next week. Maybe we'll plant zucchini. I don't suppose we'll have crops when you come. We chat with neighbors on the corner of Herringbrook and Edgewood who are always working on their garden. Forty more bags of mulch! they said. -- We make our own mulch. -- We tell them we appreciate all their efforts and enjoy their garden, as we do. Several of our book group members have large and lovely gardens which they have planted and cultivated with their own hands, surrounding their multi-million dollar homes. Gardening is big around here. Our contribution is to admire the results. Everyone liked the Book Group book, Overture, by Yeal Goldstein, although no one really liked the characters. It was about musical genius and mothers and daughters, always a popular topic. Next month is the book selection meeting, at our house. Any suggestions? Mary Z presented a video last Sunday, "Making white visible," about racism. Preaching to the choir, but it was quite good, and she was nice. I was tempted to point out that we have a black president and that although the U.S. is far from perfect, we are probably more successfully multi-cultural that most other countries in the world, in maybe be a third of which at any one time one group is literally at the throat of another. I think of Sarajevo, Sri Lanka, Kashmir, the "Holy Land," such pretty places. It's hard to be successfully human. I was tempted, as I said, to say something, but for just once, as we say in Philly, I dint. The big TAG SALE is this Saturday. We'll contribute some junk, collect some from others, help set up and take down, and I'll buy a doughnut and coffee on Saturday. As N says, by the end of the day the tables will look exactly the same as they did at the beginning, and we'll have made $1000. Strange. -- Boy, is there a lot of junk, and we have to go get more tomorrow. It's fun though. But we need some younger members. I'm tired of being the kid. Judy and Bob T came back a bit early from wintering in Mexico. Most of the violence is among the drug gangs, they said, but some spills over onto the "innocent," (i.e. American tourists), a little robbery, kidnapping, murder, etc.. The world economic situation doesn't help. -- As you travel in the triste tropics, do check the Department of State Travel Warnings on the web. N and I have both been enjoying Chaim Potok's big book "Wanderings, a history of the Jews," except that N says it's too heavy to hold on her lap. Reading is hard work. Look what we found at the DeJong Museum. Hopper's "Portrait of Orleans." (see below)! N was pointing at it when the guard asked us politely to step back a foot. N explained that we lived near Orleans and pointed out the few buildings that were left. We talked, and the guard said he had a degree in criminal justice and could earn more as a cop in Oakland but he liked being a Museum Guard. A pleasant chap, but when I thought about it afterwards I decided that in his place I'd rather be a cop in Oakland. To be good, life has to move, at least a little. 29 May 2009 Off to the Stop and Shop because our refrigerator is almost entirely empty. It's never very full, but today is an extreme case of empty shelves. I don't know why, but that seems to be how we live. Does anyone remember Aunt Elizabeth's refigerator? N and I had to clean it out once. It was phenomenal, a living organism. There must be reasons for differing refrigerator styles: psychological, culinary, practical? Not moral however. Clearly, good people can have bad refrigerators. We saw a half a dozen large fish leap fully into the air from Salt Pond the other day. Were they chasing insects, being pursued by even larger fish, brain damaged by pollution, or simply exercising their joie de vivre? We have no idea. Never saw anything like that before. Every day, something new from Mother Westwind. Our tomato and basil plants are in. The lettuce and bush beans are coming up, and the zucchini is planted. We are minimalist organic gardeners. It's come to our attention that we drive more slowly than most other people. We don't understand this, as the advantages of slower motion seem apparent. We started to drive at 55 a few oil-scares back and found that our milage jumped from 38 to 48 mpg (45 in the winter). We also found the driving to be a more pleasant experience in general and we arrive at our destimation less tired. We've never felt pushed on the highway. In fact we usually collect a tail of drivers who are pleased to ride behind us, and, if we're lucky, a forerunner as well, so that we can proceed as part of a caravan of the safe and sane. They say most serious accidents are caused by speed. My truck driver consultant says that at speeds up to 55 mph you still have some control, over that and you're in the hands of the highway gods. Hazards are many and factual: objects, people, animals, other drivers, slick or sandy roads, weather, mechanical failure, but ultimately they're incalcuable. Therefore, what seems sensible to us is to decide on a speed which seems safe under the conditions, then automatically rachet things down a notch or two to allow for the unforeseen. Driving is a group activity after all -- A side benefit is that driving more slowly reduces air and noise polution and "reliance on foreign oil.". A good idea in the same way that everything we should to to reduce global warming also something we should be doing anyway for other reasons. We finally did it! After years of discussion we replaced our 20 year old but still perfectly good TV with a 32" Samsung flat screen HDTV. Easy and well-priced at Best Buy. A few minor issues of course. A very nice picture, but two of our few watched stations, MSNBC and C-Span2, weren't available. N called Comcast who said we had to continue to use the old conversion box. (Which I thought was just to convert digital to analog.) That worked, but now we have to use both the old and the new remotes: the old one to turn on and off the conversion box and change the channels, the new one to turn on and off the TV and adjust the volume. It was taller than some TV's so I had to remove another shelf, leaving a large white square, which we have tentatively filled with the Lucky Palm. -- Still no DVD player and no immediate plans to get one. This isn't about flicks, it's about baseball! Has a pleasant poetic lunch with Barry. He has become a Cape poetry impressario. Considering that in earlier times poetry was the engine of culture, I asked Barry what he thought it's role was today. Too much just communication among poets he said. But I think it's more than that. I think it's a verion of what the Buddhists call "being aware," paying attention. Speaking of which, Barry mentioned an article he read about baboons and stress. There are lots of references on the web. E.g.: "Baboons are aggressive, mean-spirited and wild. And when it comes to stress, apparently they are just like humans. Neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky has been decoding the mysteries of stress by studying baboons from Kenya's plains, and he discovered that the animal's rank as a leader or a follower had a direct link to the level of stress." I.e., the baboons in charge, whether in the forest or in the office, expereince less stress (measured by blood tests) than those lower on the totem pole. Once again biology intrudes. Along the line of "being aware" you might find the following Times op-ed interesting. I think observations like: "...this feeling of existence, this sentiment of momentary self-sufficiency", "...eternal life is given to those who live in the present," and "..happiness is not in another place, but in this place." are all significant. But I also think personal salvation is a person's own business. I too once liked drifting aimlessly in a rowboat, it could well be a productive activity and I don't knock it. GFS knew and taught the value of quiet contemplation. But if one really, really wants to row across the atlantic or ski to the south pole, who am I to judge. -------------------- May 25, 2009, 9:46 pm Happy Like God By Simon Critchley What is happiness? How does one get a grip on this most elusive, intractable and perhaps unanswerable of questions? I teach philosophy for a living, so let me begin with a philosophical answer. For the philosophers of Antiquity, notably Aristotle, it was assumed that the goal of the philosophical life ”the good life,” was happiness and that the latter could be defined as the bios theoretikos, the solitary life of contemplation. Today, few people would seem to subscribe to this view. Our lives are filled with the endless distractions of cell phones, car alarms, commuter woes and the traffic in Bangalore. The rhythm of modern life is punctuated by beeps, bleeps and a generalized attention deficit disorder. But is the idea of happiness as an experience of contemplation really so ridiculous? Might there not be something in it? I am reminded of the following extraordinary passage from Rousseau's final book and his third (count them, he still beats Obama 3-to-2) autobiography, Reveries of a Solitary Walker: "If there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul." This is as close to a description of happiness as I can imagine. Rousseau is describing the experience of floating in a little rowing boat on the Lake of Bienne close to Neuchatel in his native Switzerland. He particularly loved visiting the Isle Saint Pierre, where he used to enjoy going for exploratory walks when the weather was fine and he could indulge in the great passion of his last years: botany. He would walk with a copy of Linneaus under his arm, happily identifying plants in areas of the deserted island that he had divided for this purpose into small squares. Our lives are filled with endless distractions, but is the idea of happiness as an experience of contemplation really so ridiculous? On the way to the island, he would pull in the oars and just let the boat drift where it wished, for hours at a time. Rousseau would lie down in the boat and plunge into a deep reverie. How does one describe the experience of reverie: one is awake, but half asleep, thinking, but not in an instrumental, calculative or ordered way, simply letting the thoughts happen, as they will. Happiness is not quantitative or measurable and it is not the object of any science, old or new. It cannot be gleaned from empirical surveys or programmed into individuals through a combination of behavioral therapy and anti-depressants. If it consists in anything, then I think that happiness is this feeling of existence, this sentiment of momentary self-sufficiency that is bound up with the experience of time Look at what Rousseau writes above: floating in a boat in fine weather, lying down with one's eyes open to the clouds and birds or closed in reverie, one feels neither the pull of the past nor does one reach into the future. Time is nothing, or rather time is nothing but the experience of the present through which one passes without hurry, but without regret. As Wittgenstein writes in what must be the most intriguing remark in the Tractatus,the eternal life is given to those who live in the present. Or ,as Whitman writes in Leaves of Grass: Happiness is not in another place, but in this place¦not for another hour¦but this hour. Rousseau asks, What is the source of our happiness in such a state? He answers that it is nothing external to us and nothing apart from our own existence. However frenetic our environment, such a feeling of existence can be achieved. He then goes on, amazingly, to conclude, as long as this state lasts we are self-sufficient like God. God-like, then. To which one might reply: Who? Me? Us? Like God? Dare we? But think about it: If anyone is happy, then one imagines that God is pretty happy, and to be happy is to be like God. But consider what this means, for it might not be as ludicrous, hybristic or heretical as one might imagine. To be like God is to be without time, or rather in time with no concern for time, free of the passions and troubles of the soul, experiencing something like calm in the face of things and of oneself. Why should happiness be bound up with the presence and movement of water? This is the case for Rousseau and I must confess that if I think back over those experiences of blissful reverie that are close to what Rousseau is describing then it is often in proximity to water, although usually saltwater rather than fresh. For me, it is not so much the stillness of a lake (I tend to see lakes as decaffeinated seas), but rather the never-ending drone of the surf, sitting by the sea in fair weather or foul and feeling time disappear into tide, into the endless pendulum of the tidal range. At moments like this, one can sink into deep reverie, a motionlessness that is not sleep, but where one is somehow held by the sound of the surf, lulled by the tidal movement. Is all happiness solitary? Of course not. But one can be happy alone and this might even be the key to being happy with others. Wordsworth wandered lonely as a cloud when walking with his sister. However, I think that one can also experience this feeling of existence in the experience of love, in being intimate with one's lover, feeling the world close around one and time slips away in its passing. Rousseau's rowing boat becomes the lovers™ bed and one bids the world farewell as one slides into the shared selfishness of intimacy. ¦And then it is over. Time passes, the reverie ends and the feeling for existence fades. The cell phone rings, the e-mail beeps and one is sucked back into the world's relentless hum and our accompanying anxiety. Simon Critchley is chair of philosophy at the New School for Social Research and the author several books, including his most recent, The Book of Dead Philosophers. -------------- JUNE 1 June 2009 "Odd about the fish. Nature is incomprehensible to me, I'm used to that (hell, humans are uncomprehensible, and I'm halfway to a PhD in trying to understand them). But it does make me wonder why I haven't seen more short stories where the protagonists are fish. Seems like there oughta be a good story in those leaps. -- I still object to your overreliance on biology as a justification for behavior. I know you're not a determinist or anything, but I object to the statement in the article on baboons as lacking evidence. Just as many baboons are mean-spirited as humans....at least, according to journalists. If they were so inclined, the could call the "iracible", or even "cautious and wise". Give me evidence. It's like saying "it's always sunny in California": a small sample of days, espically those between June and September, will "confirm" this theory, but I've gotten pleanty wet in CA. Some baboon might be stressed by power...it's more complex than we give it credit for, life is. All that said, i quite like the wisdom of "paying attention to life." If everybody did that, Anthropologists would be out of work!" JMC I think nature is relatively comprehensible to the experts to a certain level, but that does leave a vast hinterland of mystery for further profitable research. Who would have it any other way? As to humans, Jane Bryan once said that it was questionable whether communication was even possible among hnumans. I presume she'd been talking to me. -- I did say it was probably a miscommunication about biology. I had the impression that you pretty much rejected biology altogether as a factor in human behavior, which seemed a little extreme. On a common sense level it seems at least something to take into consideration, including the works of the evolutionary biologists unless you think they're all cranks. The 19th century may have thought we were nearer to the angels, but I say to the apes, and I would be happy to call some apes wise in their way. As to the baboons, what Barry saw was a PBS special. I've found references to an article but not the text. My impression was that it was a serious scientific study involving lots of baboons. (What fun!) But maybe not. -- And I am a determinist, although not by choice. :) I just don't see the locus or the mechanism of free will. I've read some of the arguments, and they seem to me both desperate and irrelevant. Irrelevant because most of us, in our own manner and degree, will continue to act as if life has meaning and value. What else can we do, and what difference would it make whether it truly does or not? And if it does, isn't it we who put it there? We're unlikely ever to know. -- It's sort of like merit pay. It comes up regularly, but I don't think it's really effective. People work hard and well because they like to. As with pinball, the biggest prize is that you get to play again. My guess is that an archeological "unit" is a piece of ground carefully marked off. I'm glad yours look promising. I find it amazing and marvelous that so much is still there after 200 years. Like the governor, I want to hear all about it when the telling's good. Good luck to you and your doughty crew. Nice about the cyber bar. We had a nice presentation on Sunday about Habitat for Humanity on Cape Cod, by a very energetic woman. -- You'd think I might have wanted to get involved in this with my building experience, but I'm afraid I like to build for myself, and at my own speed. N and I are not really team players, although we've both played at being one. I did very much enjoy my 3 years with Common Time and thought it useful. I was sorry when that ended, although I would probably have burnt out by now. -- The Habitat woman said, "and then we stopped for prayers.." She explained that Habitat is a "nonprofit, ecumenical Christian housing organization," which I never knew. "Unbelievers" (has there ever really been anyone with no beliefs at all?) are welcomed but are expected to stop hammering and sawing during prayers. Not an unreasonable request, but T.R., N and I all had the same reaction: why not let the work be the expression of love and the devotion? Is a pep talk or commercial really needed? If the universe is God's gift, and a nifty although somewhat ambiguous gift it is, perhaps he would like to see what we can make of it on our own? Next Sunday is a local UU minister (who also plays the guitar and sings) speaking on the "Law of Love". N and I would like to give it a miss, but I think my loyalty to the Fellowship won't let me. Why are we so negative about clergymen these days? We like Rabbi Panitz just fine. Maybe because he treats his fellow worshipers as equals and adults, something Christian clergy don't always do. I looked up jumping fish and found some of the arguments I'd thought of: catching insects, being chased by a bigger fish, and (although not maddened by poisons) perhaps suffocated by eutrophication. It seems that fish may jump to gulp a little air. Or courtship behavior! I should have guessed, what in life causes us to do more stupid things? -- Recendly a woman was killed when a 75 pound manta ray leaped into her boat to escape a shark. What a grim way to go. After we moved to Queens, my mother dreaded a notice in the Ferguson, Mo. Town Talk: "Former Ferguson woman killed by New York City Sanitation Truck." It was a lovely day on Monday, so we took tuna sandwiches and a thermos of coffee to the Beach Forest and afterwards walked in P'Town. Pretty peaceful. All the flowers in bloom and the shops tarted up but not many people. The restaurants were open, pricey, and empty, with people out on the sidewalks trying to snag customers. There must be a name for these folks, but I can't think of it. "Barker" doesn't quite do it. It worked on us once, in Paris. We'd just eaten but said we'd come back the next night, and we did, and it was excellent. The voles ate the bean seeds. I'm sure of it. Only a few came up. I'm planting some in pots for transplanting and wrapping others in nylon webbing. We'll see. I don't like voles; they're sneaky. I learned something interesting about Bob on Sunday. His mother, who came from Russia, was working at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company when they had the fire. She survived and went to another garment company, this one owned by Bob's father. Startling thought, without the fire there'd be no Bob. A mighty ill wind but a very nice guy. He also survived 4 island landings in the Pacific, is 83, suffers from most known diseases, and is cheerful and vital. -- The Triangle building is still there. We've seen it, and I think John had to visit some office in it. I just finished "With Wings like Eagles; a history of the Battle of Britain," by Michael Korda. It's quite good, if you like this sort of thing. One thing I learned is that there is a bronze plaque for Air Chief Marshall Sir Hugh Dowding at Bently Poriory, his wartime headquarters, stating: "To him the people of Britain and of the free world own largely the way of life and the liberties that they enjoy today." And it's true; he's largely responsible, against much internal opposition, for the men, material, and planning that won the Battle of Britain. I'm well into "This is My God; the Jewish Way of Life," by Herman Wouk. It's a wonderful book. We have a number of his excellent novels too: The Winds of War, War and Remembrance, The Hope. ---- Re Hopper's "Church in Eastham" cf a photo of same: The painting is from a slightly different angle, and the chapel is mostly a patch of color. The focus of the chapel roofline and the fence is the center of the canvas from which rises the light-pole/cross (?). The "Portrait of Orleans" also has a prominent light-pole/cross, but Hopper doesn't seem to have been formally religious. -- The photo doesn't compare with the painting, but I imagine a painter could do something with it: use the interesting roof lines, raise the view to include the full steeple, eliminate some trees and bushes. I had never noticed that the two gate posts are taller than the other posts, and they are! The sign is an interesting social commentary. There was probably none in 1950. ---------------------------------- Some Hopper snippits from the web: He was born in 1882, into a religious-minded middle-class Baptist family in Nyack on the Hudson river. Although the religion did not rub off, he was puritanical with right-wing leanings, a life-long conservative Republican His wife, Jo, said, “Sometimes talking to Eddie is just like dropping a stone in a well, except that it doesn’t thump when it hits bottom." Conservative in politics and social matters, he accepted things as they were and displayed a lack of idealism. Cultured and sophisticated, he was well-read, and many of his paintings show figures reading. He was generally good company and unperturbed by silences, though sometimes taciturn, grumpy or detached. He was always serious about his art and the art of others, and when asked would return frank opinions. In more general terms, Hopper stated “Great art is the outward expression of an inner life of the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world. The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm.” Though he claimed that he didn’t consciously embed psychological meaning in his paintings, he was deeply interested in Freud and the power of the subconscious mind. He wrote in 1939, “So much of every art is an expression of the subconscious that it seems to me most of all the important qualities are put there unconsciously, and little of importance by the conscious intellect.” Fiercely loyal to her husband, Jo felt in many respects oppressed by him. In particular, she felt that he did nothing to encourage her own development as a painter, but on the contrary did everything to frustrate it. 'Ed,' she confided to her diary, 'is the very centre of my universe... If I'm on the point of being very happy, he sees to it that I'm not.' The couple often quarrelled fiercely (an early subject of contention was Jo's devotion to her cat Arthur, whom Hopper regarded as a rival for her attention). Sometimes their rows exploded into physical violence, and on one occasion, just before a trip to Mexico, Jo bit Hopper's hand to the bone. On the other hand, her presence was essential to his work, sometimes literally so, since she now modelled for all the female figures in his paintings, and was adept at enacting the various roles he required ----------------- from J: "Odd about the fish. Nature is incomprehensible to me, I'm used to that (hell, humans are uncomprehensible, and I'm halfway to a PhD in trying to understand them). But it does make me wonder why I haven't seen more short stories where the protagonists are fish. Seems like there oughta be a good story in those leaps. -- I still object to your overreliance on biology as a justification for behavior. I know you're not a determinist or anything, but I object to the statement in the article on baboons as lacking evidence. Just as many baboons are mean-spirited as humans....at least, according to journalists. If they were so inclined, the could call the "iracible", or even "cautious and wise". Give me evidence. It's like saying "it's always sunny in California": a small sample of days, espically those between June and September, will "confirm" this theory, but I've gotten pleanty wet in CA. Some baboon might be stressed by power...it's more complex than we give it credit for, life is. All that said, i quite like the wisdom of "paying attention to life." If everybody did that, Anthropologists would be out of work!" JMC I think nature is relatively comprehensible to the experts to a certain level, but that does leave a vast hinterland of mystery for further profitable research. Who would have it any other way? As to humans, Jane Bryan once said that it was questionable whether communication was even possible among hnumans. I presume she'd been talking to me. -- I did say it was probably a miscommunication about biology. I had the impression that you pretty much rejected biology altogether as a factor in human behavior, which seemed a little extreme. On a common sense level it seems at least something to take into consideration, including the works of the evolutionary biologists unless you think they're all cranks. The 19th century may have thought we were nearer to the angels, but I say to the apes, and I would be happy to call some apes wise in their way. As to the baboons, what Barry saw was a PBS special. I've found references to an article but not the text. My impression was that it was a serious scientific study involving lots of baboons. (What fun!) But maybe not. -- And I am a determinist, although not by choice. :) I just don't see the locus or the mechanism of free will. I've read some of the arguments, and they seem to me both desperate and irrelevant. Irrelevant because most of us, in our own manner and degree, will continue to act as if life has meaning and value. What else can we do, and what difference would it make whether it truly does or not? And if it does, isn't it we who put it there? We're unlikely ever to know. -- It's sort of like merit pay. It comes up regularly, but I don't think it's really effective. People work hard and well because they like to. As with pinball, the biggest prize is that you get to play again. June 2009 from M: I think I get tired of the knee-jerk reaction people in Berkeley have to the idea of organized Christianity, the thought that a clergy member could be anything but a deeply evil child molester. Makes me a little defensive and sensitive, I guess. I think I HAVE been lucky in the clergy I've known. Maybe it's where I've encountered them. Cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco seem to attract a more liberal breed, or at least they are easier to find. I'm very glad that's been your experience with the clergy. You're either more fortunate than I or more generous, or both. I was quite fond of some of my classmates at Berkeley Divinity School and PDS. I have no idea what kind of ministers they became. I also liked and admired several of my professors. Thinking back I actually haven't known many Episcopal clergy, probably not nearly as many as you. I liked the guy in Jackson Heights when I was in 7th grade, although my view of him was limited, and I liked Tom Edwards, and I think that's it. Honest. Kind of sad when you think of it. And the fact is, Mari, that I like most people and I'm not very judgmental. No, I'm sure rabbis have in general about the same track record as protestant clergymen. Remember the one in Jersey who contracted a hit on his wife? -- They do have in their favor that although they are supposed to be better educated in the Torah than other Jews, rabbis are not supposed to be holier. Still and all: I remember Maury's Roman Catholic date telling her how he would like to improve the RC Church. Maury said, "You've just described the Episcopal Church." My adjustments to Christianity could make it sound a lot like Judaism. While we were listening to Obama's excellent speach today, the thought occured to me that perhaps there is a God after all, and that he's the source (along with biology) of the sense of duty to our fellow men we seem to experience all around the world, at least when we're at our best. from M: I honestly don't know if there's an overarching God. I know I feel that I receive guidance and that I rely on that guidance, but it feels very personal, so is that God? I'd say yes, but I agree that if there is a God, he (it?) along with biology is the source of our impulse to care for each other. And that that provides us with moral direction. On another topic but, I hope, a related one, we have a wonderful associate priest at All Saints who, while she was a divinity student, preached the one of the best sermons about Genesis and the creation and the conflict between literalists and Darwinists. She reread the key passages about the six days of creation and pointed out that what they were describing was a God who had released a huge creative impulse and then let it develop as it would. The last thing this God seemed to have had in mind was controlling it! Go, he said, and live and prosper and propigate. She was saying what I've thought for years, but the way she said it was so affirming and so clear that I felt refreshed and supported by it. from J:It's funny, I see the same observation, that people will continue to live as if they have free will (as, perhaps, they are determined to do), as a good reason to not be a determinist. ------------ 11 June 2009 Our speaker Sunday gave a sermon, probably the first in the chapel in decades. N and I had shied at going but finally went out of loyalty and had to admit it was quite good. The speaker's very personal tale of his experience as a death penalty lawyer with his demonised client. The lawyer, a former Episcopalian, late in life went to Harvard Divinity School, became a Unitarian minister, and is now a local pastor. There was some oddness about it all. Did no one clue him in to our peculiar ethos? For one thing, he wore a great flowing colorful robe! Fortunately R and J, who are particularly anti-clerical, had stayed away on general principles. He was a musician and began by playing, quite well, a dirgy Scots folk tune on a concertina ("the home entertainment system of the late 19th century"). It reminded us of the background music for Ken Burns' Civil War TV special. (JC and I watched the first two episodes but were finally turned off by the countless bodies.) Turns out that the clergyman's wife is also a musician and played the piano background for the Burns' series! He ended his perhaps 25 minute talk with another dirge, and then, instead of inviting questions or comments as is customary with our talky crew, walked down the aisle and stood at the back of the room. No one seemed to know what to do, so I got up and shook his hand and told him it had been an eloquent presentation, which it had. A naked sermon is a strange affair nonetheless, as if Jesus had given his Sermon on the Mount to a riveted audience who afterwards wandered off to the market stalls without seeming to notice that they had been addressed by the Son of God. -- I chatted with him afterwards and sensed that he was a bit nonplussed. I suppose we in the fellowship are more used to creating our own context. We've had enough rain. Enough! I say. Our seeds are coming up. Yes! So now we need some sun. I took down a large oak limb that was starting to hang over the house. Very entertaining. N picked up Wouk's "This is My God; the Jewish Way of Life," which I've been reading, and read half of it without stopping. It is good, wonderfully written, light but serious. I don't believe I could become an Orthodox Jew this late in life, but he makes it appealing. From our readings it seems that contemporary Jews can disagree rather vociferously over what appear to outsiders as minor points of ceremonial actions such as what's kosher and what isn't, what's work on the Sabbath and what isn't, while largely respecting each other's views. Perhaps that's romanticizing. I think, hope, there's more generosity among Christian denominations these days than there used to be. -- I would like to learn biblical Hebrew. I wonder if there's a class around here. There are most things on Cape Cod, but not usually anywhere near where you are. In reply to recent comments: I can't quite see a personal God hanging over our shoulders. There's too much suffering. But I do see throughout the world, and feel in myself, a responsibility for others and for everything, that must come from somewhere. Perhaps it's a biological epiphenomenon, perhaps it's God, but so what. It's there. -- The only reason I can imagine (granting that my imagination is of the human sort) for a Creation would be God's desire to love and be loved and to have intellectual companionship. And the only way to have a genuine companion is to have him/her make himself from scratch, as indeed he/we have done to the best of our ability. As to free-will, to quote the omniscent web: "William James' views were ambivalent. While he believed in free will on ethical grounds, he did not believe that there was evidence for it on scientific ..." Quite so. There's lots to be said about this apparently, but I see no possibility of scientific evidence. (Sub-atomic indeterminancy would be even worse!) The chief arguments in favor of free will seem to involve this sense of responsibility, feelings of love, guilt, success, failure, beauty, joy, sorrow,etc, etc., which would make no sense in a determined environment. But, hello!, these are feelings, notoriously iffy phenomena. What is say is,. What's for lunch? What needs doing? Let's get going. Paradox R Us -- Of course there's more to say, an infinity, but another time. To each day its thoughts. nice note from Maury: From "Reading Partners Newsletter": "Juan is a bright, energetic and happy 6th grader. Every time he arrives with his tutor, Maury Denniston, into the reading center at Los Arboles Elementary School in San Jose, he is eager to begin the session. Juan loves to read, and has made amazing progress in the year he has been in the Reading Partners program. Juan is the only student at Los Arboles who completed the entire comprehension curriculum and then began the reading and interpretation of novels. This is a significant achievement. His tutor has said, "Juan is reading so much better than he was, he really enjoys it! He is interested in a lot of subjects - I tell him that if he reads about things he likes, he will learn a lot about them." Ms. Denniston began working as a tutor with Reading Partners with a primary-aged child. When she was approached by the Director of Programs to also consider working with an older child, she was at first hesitant, stating that she had limited experience with 6th grade children, and wasn't sure if it would be a good match for her. But she decided to give it a try, and by the end of their first session together, both Maury and Juan were laughing and enjoying each other; their bond continued to grow over the year. Juan says that the best thing about Reading Partners is the way his tutor helps him read the book. "She (Maury) also helps me with spelling and understanding what I read." When asked if there was something that Juan would like to change about Reading Partners, without hesitation he said, "I like it the way it is!" 16 June 2009 I hope you had a nice time in the BVI. You looked very relaxed in a chaise longue with a tall drink. What was it like there? Was it really hot? We find Florida in the summer quite unbelievable. Someone once said of Miami that it has two kinds of weather: unbareably hot and not unbareably hot. Neither appeals to me. Did your parents come in their RV? Did they enjoy the trip? It would have sounded like fun to me once, although Steinbeck may have picked the last really good time in Travels With Charlie. He stopped at the prep school in Connecticut where Nancy's Uncle Howard taught English, because one of his children was there. Howard was suitably thrilled. Everyone is here, safe and sound and in good fettle. Aryn is a riot, very lively, very funny. Unfortunately the weather is lousey. It doesn't bother us or Mari, we trudge the trails and the beaches in all weathers, but we hoped for sun for the others. None promised this week. At least he fish is good, bluefish, salmon, and swordfish. Yum. 26 June 2009 I cringe to tell you this, but Thursday was an ipsy pipsi day, sunny and seventy, what we like to call "Cape Cod Weather!" Karen and David went to First Encounter and even got in the water. Friday morning was pretty good too, and Saturday so nice we walked on the beach, but another week of rain is now forecast. Preferable to a heatwave! Sorry we couldn't do better for you in the weather department, but we loved seeing you all, and especially the charming young lady with so many tricks up her sleeve. Despite rain and threats of rain, Mari went with us on our walks at Bearberry Hill, Audubon, Red Maple, and Coast Guard and took a number of her own. -- Bev will be with us for a couple of days in July. I'll have to oil the bicycle. The laundry progresses in MY closet, much to N's satisfaction. It IS a better venue. Don't know why we didn't think of it before. Perhaps because we were still thinking of an addition. I think N is serious about this; she's tired of those basement stairs. Rick, Marion, and I read this Sunday. I'll read two short stories written last week for the occasion. Book chapters take a long time to write, as do poems to write and endlessly revise, but stories come all at once and whole, just for the writing down. They do enjoy being revised. I finished Practicing Catholic, by James Carroll. Carroll was a Catholic Priest for seven years and is now a prolific novelist and writer, married with children. He also wrote the excellent Constantine's Sword, about the Church's ghastly record of anti-semitism. The first and last chapters of Practicing Catholic were a little tedious, we can all make up our own theology, but the middle was fascinating. He certainly is down on our present polite but poisonous pope Benedict, who was John Paul II's gray emminence in undoing the work of John 23d and Vatican II. Grim reading. Karen and David left Saturday morning after a peaceful stay with little beach time. Karen enjoyed seeing lots of Wimbleton on a moderately big screen. We hope Andy and Sara finally got some sleep. It was not much of a vacation for them, but we loved seeing them, and they got to visit many friends and family along the way. And arrived home to a plumbing emergency. We expect finally John got home, by way of detours to all the major cities of the US, and after a long and successful field expedition. JULY 5 July 2009 We saw both a sunset and a sunrise for the first time in weeks! It was evidently clear enough Friday night for fireworks in Orleans. (I remember the ones we saw with Maury years ago that went off invisibly above the clouds.) We didn't go, but we could hear them. Orleans must have a little extra cash; lots of towns cancelled. It was sunny and 70 for the 4th and again today. We walked down to the bay. The beach wasn't crowded at 10:15, largely because the tide had just turned and there wasn't much beach. The woman at Kingsbury Beach won her suit and technically controls the beach in front of her property all the way to low tide. There is also a law which says any beach which has been treated as public for 20 years stays public, which the judge evidently ignored. It doesn't appear that she's trying to have the law enforced at this point. Massachusetts is the only state in the nation in which private property doesn't end at the high tide line. The law dates from colonial times when the Commonwealth wanted to encourage people to build warves. My guess is that none of us has to worry about access to the beach, for now at least. It's pretty crowded around here at the moment, and a little early in the season it seems to us. It's about as crowded as it was in Springfield Township year round. N went to the doctor for a checkup and found the place a madhouse, patients jammed in like sardines. Oddly, the waiting room in the new building is smaller than the old one. Perhaps they hoped to be more efficient. We heard a Diane Rehm discussion about medicine and the difficulties of general practice. GP's earn only around $200K. (Gosh that's tough.) But specialists all earn twice as much or more for less work and hassle. Barack's doing his best we guess, but it's going to be a tough fight to get sensible medicine in this country. Too many invested disinterests. The "laundry" progresses. There is now water in my closet. (Which makes it a water closet?) Next the drain, the electricity, and the shelves. And then the new compact machines, but there's no rush on them. I fixed up N's closet with a shoe rack, etc. Next paint. I'll send pics when it's all done. I plan another storage shelf in the basement stairwell. We are trying not to have to go to the basement for much except archives. -- All my projects seem to involve a hundred trips to the basement a day. I should really have a workshop on the first floor, but them we'd have to live in the basement. Only N and Maury would remember our nieghbors in Westfield, the T's. Ray and Blanche lived in their basement for some years while their elderly parents lived on the first floor. They'd fixed it up pretty nice. No, don't worry. The garden is doing well in the greenery department, but I'm not sure we'll ever get any vegetables. Most vetables are tropical in orgin we hear, so they're used to daily rain, but they also want sun and warmth, which we've had little of. My one-slug-at-a-time campaign seems to have been effective, none in the last few days. I felt a little bad about wacking them; they're so simple and innocent. But "catch and release" would seem to miss the point. Did I mention that there actually are several anti-slug/snail products: Slug-Go, and Escar-Go. Kid you not. There's no fellowship "gathering" tomorrow. Next week "The Art of Zen." The week after that, Barry's workshop on "Writing Poetry about Fathers." You just never know. At the end of the month I'll go with Barry to an evening Open Mic featuring Christine the mother goddess, who is terrific. Poetry is...the art of the proletariet? Well, give it a try sometime. Bev will visit for a couple of nights next week. I've oiled the bicycle and pumped up the tires. With a tire pump and a cell phone she'll be set to venture forth on one of her marathon rides. She's not a great fish eater, so we think pasta primavera, the closest we'll have gotten to spring this year. I've been reading Our Vietnam, the war 1954-1975, by A.J. Langguth, 2000. Reading history could make you think we'd be better off doing nothing ever. We can't really do that of course, and we need so much: good health care, clean energy, social justice, education, world peace, fresh bluefish. But these massive team efforts that get it so wrong are discouraging. I've churned out 4 short stories in the past week and half a dozen, probably bad, poems. That's the way it goes sometimes. I've also begun false start number four for Newhouse Part II, The Afterlife. I rewrite another chapter of The Chaplain and the Pig for the writing group every other week. It will be the first time the whole novel has been printed out. I had to replace the first two pages because of serious coffee stains. We hope M and G are having a nice time in Alaska. There will at least be an entertaining topic of conversation. 19 July 2009 A good day at the swamp! We saw the first frog of the year and the first turtle in 40 years. The turtle was about an inch and a half in diameter and just resting in the sun on a small branch. It slipped into the water in an instant as I tried to focus my camera. The big field at Fort Hill, mowed to the ground last winter, is up to 3 to six feet in places, with wonderful grass and wildflowers. Two very handsome turkey vultures flew lazy circles high above us. We had a splended "guest lecturer" at the French group, or at least that's how it turned out. This old woman (these things are relative) said she heard about us from Erika, our German friend who works in an art gallery in Chatham. She was born in Paris but lives in Cambridge, Mass., where I assume she may have had an academic career, as she talked about China, Japan, the ancient art of tatooing, Russian linguistics and many other subjects with great authority in fluent but highly understandable French. I think J was sightly annoyed that she so monopolized the hour, but I go to hear French, not to speak it. A wonderful old character. -- I think of my friend Al Rubinstein. Just when we begin to have a handle on life it's time to pack it in. We've enjoyed M and G's tee-shirted pictures of glacier hiking. Climate change is a better phrase than global warming. We still have had no summer here, down to 50 to 60 at night and no more than low 70's all day, in the middle of July! We have yet to use the bedroom ceiling fan I installed last winter. Must have been a swell Fourth of July in P'town. There was a giant sewer break in the middle of the parade, with raw sewage running down the middle of Commercial Street. They're still busy disinfecting, so we'll hold off visits for a while. The rumored cause: someone dropped a cell phone down a toilet. This is a two year old town sewer system. Guess there are a few kinks to iron out. I found four really great 800 page non-fiction books at the Snow Library while N had her hair cut. Some triage is called for. I've just about finished the book on Vietnam. It just gets worse and worse, pure politics and lies from beginning to end. -- I mentioned to some that I read Overnight Float, a so so 2000 mystery novel (of the academic cozy genre) by Jill Kerr Conroy (Road to Coorain), former president of Smith, and Elizabeth T. Kennan, former president of Mount Holyoke (and 4 other colleges) . I knew Kennan as Liz Topham in the St. Paul's Westfield Episcopal Youth Group, a really, really cute girl two years younger than I. Smart too! The drainage system is done for the upstairs laundry. Running pipes is one of life's more satisfying activities. We had a nice visit with Bev. Good weather so we walked at Bearberry Hill and Pilgrim Spring. Another day we walked on the flats. Next week she's off to China and India on business. Did anyone watch the All Star Game? The Prez dropped in and talked baseball for half an hour, just as cool as an old sportscaster. "He can talk baseball," N said. "So can you," I pointed out. "Well, yes," she agreed, "and I suppose George Bush can too." The first really hot and muggy day this year. We've been sleeping under the quilt until lasts week. Pleasant again today. Maybe yesterday was our summer. Okay with me. The garden is slow but coming along. Many 2 to 3 inch bush beans, small green tomatoes on every plant, zuccini flowers, even a few flowers in the stunted pepper plants. How 'bout that Aryn! You're right, it's a supportive community (or communities) that we want and need. I've pushed foreign languages, connecting with others, and finding a community in recent years, mainly because I failed in some measure to do all those things myself. I've made up for this a bit lately, but you can't undo the undones of a lifetime. The Unitarians, Society of Friends, Ethical Culture, and many other organizations have an ethos of mutual concern, the free exchange of ideas, and social responsibility, but, alas, the nature of any particular group really depends on its leadership and membership. In my experience, the majority of Episcopal congregations are fairly narrow-minded, but a precious few are wise, warm, and open communities. I doubt, though, that there are any ideal organizations or fool-proof recipes for a satisfactory life. You make it up as you go along, forgive your imperfect friends and colleagues, and accept that most of the satisfaction has to be internal. If I think of any more warm and wise things to say, I'll pass them along :) At the moment I'm sitting at the keyboard, hoping I've scrubbed away all the poison ivy after a morning spent clearing brush away from the red maples we planted two years ago. The trees look good. -- And there's a mitzvah for you, or at least an example of internal satisfaction: a bunch of septaganarians planting trees they'll never see get more than ten feet tall. Sort of like wishing your kids well. We had tons of family in Saint Louis, but it wasn't a farming community and I'm not sure how mutually supportive they all were. The internet is like cars, houses, clothes, food, a tool that can be used elegantly, profitably, and with pleasure but not a way of life. July 2009 Back in the Vietnam War days Peter Arnett famously quoted an American army major as saying, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." He wouldn't give the major's name to protect the poor dummy's career and was accused of making this up. It hardly matters if he did, as it was obviously true hundreds of times. We did it again in Iraq, this time destroying a whole county to save it from itself. Defeated enemies we send a Marshall Plan. Friends we abandon or charge and arm and a leg. All of which leads up to my saying I had to destroy the coffee grinder (well, coffee chopper) in order to save it. I kept carefully cutting into the case to locate the problem. I'd pretty much demolised it by the time I discovered that the fault was in the cord! Jeez. I've cobbled it back together, and it works just fine. I've always thought Louis Gates was a bit arrogant, but so are lots of us. The same thing happened to my friend B, trying to "break into" his own office in Western Massachusetts. The police arrived with drawn guns and weren't easily mollified, even by a clinical psychologist. It happened to me when I was putting furniture in N's folks garage. I reacted very politely, of course, and the officer was quickly satisfied. -- The upshot is, it may be dumb to bristle at the police, but it's not illegal, and it's the job of the police to keep a lid on things. -- As to calling the cops because of "supicious" behavior by a black guy, K, D, Bo, and President Obama know all about that. On the other hand, B and I were white guys on our own turf, and the police (and zealous neighbors) were just going their job. -- There was a good NYT editorial this morning by Brent Staples on Obama on Race. It annoys Obama that people talk up the "tough love" aspect of his speeches and ignore the "hey, we still have a serious problem" part. Also good NYT editorials on health care by the often critical Paul Krugman and the moderate conservative David Brooks. Write your congresspeople! Alas, we wonder if anything other than government run single payer health care with strong cost-control could ever work, but three cheers for anyone willing to try. I note from Google Earth that J in Boca del Toro fetched up again at what appears to be another tropical paradise. This is archaeological skill at its best. Not the best tourist season, of course. Sort of like the American Library Association Conventions in New Orleans in July and Duluth in January. Or does it matter? Maybe it's always tropical in the tropics? We've enjoyed the first fruits our our garden, one nice tomato and some long and elegant string beans for our minimalist salade nicoise. (No, eggs this time or (ever!) anchovies, and with an Asian rether than French dressing.) I'll ocasionaly get a can of anchovies to slip a few in my salad or pizza, but they've become too expensive, like a buck and a half for a 2 oz can. If you ever want a good non-fiction reading book, I recommend In Europe, travels through the twentieth century, by Geert Mak. Translated from the Dutch. 800 pages, it's about what the title suggests. He travels all around eastern and western Europe breezily discussing both today (1999) and 20th c. history. Reminds me a bit of old H.V. Morton travel books, not Morton's fusty, Victorian manner, but his melding of past and present. N loves the Slowskies (the turtles) in the Comcast ads. They are amusing. We have Comcast cable TV and internet and no beefs. It's said that their Help is terrible, but fortunately we haven't needed it. About Facebook. I look at it occasionally now, and it has inspired a few off-facebook exchanges. I still think of conversation as one-on-one or with a small group, not with the ether. I also think of my self as fairly aware of the world around me, from the latest scientific breakthroughs, through a sampling of contemporary literature, to the political and social news (in two and a half languages!). Although admittedly excluding movies (since Amadeus), TV series (since MASH), computer games, popular music, popular entertainers, celebraties, sports (except by osmosis from N, and her interests are largely restricted to baseball, football, and college basketball). Facebook opens up a whole other, somewhat intimidating and too easily rejectable, world. I will try to learn and will participate as so moved, but not, I think, on Facebook itself, which I find far too kalidoscopic for my aging mind. Hope that's okay. (Because as old xx used to say, that's the way it is.) Although, I suppose you could say that these letters, cleaned up, further anonymized, and transferred to my online Journal (frequently now, it's an easy backup)constitute a kind of one-way blog. I do it because: 1) I can 2) I search them occasionaly to retrieve bits of fading memory, and 3)If anyone else is ever interested, maybe in the next century, there they will be, or on CD anyway. Sort of like my father wanting to be buried, not cremated, so he'd be available for future paleontologists. It was discouraging to listen on our local news this morning to a stage full of white Cambridge police officers and union representatives, and one uncomfortable looking black gentleman, "completely justify" the actions of the officer who arrested Professor Gates. I understand that polls run heavily in favor of the officer and against the comments of the President. In fact, there has never been any valid justification offered for the arrest. Whatever heated words may have passed between Gates and the officer, it's the job of the police to defuse the situation. The department should admit its mistake and apologize to the professor. I support the police in most situations. They have a difficult and dangerous job, and I appreciate their efforts. I don't know what roles racism or police solidarity may have played here, but I think the more general reaction proves that the President is right, racism remains a serious problem in this country. But we knew that. 30 July 2009 Jon Loomis has written a couple of mysteries set in P'town that are funny, atmospheric, and entertaining. Reccomended, as they say. Our purple butterfly bush is ten feet tall this year and fully in bloom. We've yet to see a butterfly, but there was a humming bird sipping purple nectar a few days ago. Our window box lettuce crop has been contributing to our salads for weeks. We have had several helpings of slim and delish bush beans, two of our tomatoes are ripe and ready to eat with many more on the way if the tomato blight doesn't get them. Many zuchini flowers (hugh and orangy yellow) but not a hint of a zuchini. On Sunday, our friend G read some prose by Mary Oliver, about how she wanders around P'town and environs tripping over poems, which I thoroughly enjoyed. G's music selection was Wynton Marsalis playing some hot raw jazz trumpet from 30 years ago. It was great and very loud! The windows were open, and two people went by on bicycles lookng our way with big eyes and open mouths. -- The program with the two UU ministers was quite good also. I wouldn't mention that they were lesbians if they hadn't made rather a point of it. I wonder why they felt that necessary, especially around here? They had us sing, briefly. I at least sang, N, across the aisle and up a row, and who can sing, didn't. But she said she heard me! In tune? I asked, and she said yes. Amazing, the old dog a new tune. We did some silent meditation, which I used in the way I've always used sermon time, as an opportunity to plan some building project. She said one thing quite interesting. She supposed that probably not many of us felt we "worshipped." We mumbled out probable agreement. She spoke of the Greek origins of the word, but I don't remember what she said, and I don't find the following discussion of the Hebrew and Greek words for worship very helpful (see below; from the web). I'd like to think prostration went out with absolute monarchy and the public kissing of body parts was reserved for office politics. But I do think the English meaning, "ascribing worth", which she spoke about, is very helpful. This is something we all do constantly. I'm glad I can say that I worship a lot. [from the web] 1. The primary Hebrew word for worship. a. Shachah - "to depress, i.e. prostrate (in homage to royalty or God): bow (self) down, crouch, fall down (flat), humbly beseech, do (make) obeisance, do reverence, make to stoop, worship." 2. Three Greek words. a. Proskuneo - "meaning to kiss, like a dog licking his master's hand), to fawn or crouch to, homage (do reverence to, adore): worship." It occurs 59 times in the New Testament. It originally carried with it the idea of subjects falling down to kiss the ground before a king or kiss their feet. b. Sebomai - "to reverence, hold in awe." Used 10 times in the New Testament. c. Latreuo - "to render religious service of homage." Used 21 times in the New Testament. 3. The word in the English language. a. Literally means to ascribe worth to something. I've had a number of replies to my note on the Gates incident. One person, who knows Cambridge well, throughly damned their police as arrogant and corrupt bullies. -- Oh dear. -- Another, a lawyer who also knows Cambridge, pointed out that the Cambridge police receive higher pay and more training than most because there are so many high-profile residents, including for instance foreign royalty. So why, he says, didn't this experienced sergeant defuse the situation!!! And why did a Sergeant show up at all; as they rarely leave the office except to provide backup. Who knows? -- K had a lot of strong and wise things to say. -- More confusion regarding the content of the 911 call, I gather. It begins to sound more and more like what we all thought it was. -- I've attached a text file of the comments, for the interested. AUGUST 6 August 2009 Blankets again last night. Strange summer, we still haven't used the bedroom ceiling fan. We've been inundated with bush beans. See the stir fry recipe below. We also did a pasta primavera featuring beans. There are 50 good-sized green tomatoes on our plants, in no hurry to turn red. We've had a few, and they're quite tasty. The plum tomatoes look like candy corn, bright read on the bottom shading through yellow to green at the top. I gave N back her closet doors. They had to be cut narrower, but that turned out to be relatively easy. I discovered that our doors are stiffened inside by a honeycomb of corrogated cardboard! Who'd have thought it. Cheapo but it works and keeps them light. -- Moved the white butterfly bush. It was being buried by the purple one. Not a good season for this, but with lots of water it seems to be surviving. No butterflies this year (and few frogs; don't know about the canaries in the mine) but several humming birds have visited the bushes. I sent the following off to the Cape Codder, and they published it last week. It may be a little optimistic, but what's the alternative. Pessimistic, right? Anger is understandable and inevitable but only useful as a spur to action. Anger per se seems to beget more anger. ------- A STEP FORWARD I had an experience much like that of professor Gates. I was polite and cooperative, thanked the officer for his concern, and the incident ended amicably. The police have a difficult and dangerous job, and they need our help in doing it. Ultimately, though, it is they who are in the best position to defuse a tense situation. I rarely think about being white, but two of our children are adopted and of mixed race. They grew up confident in a largely white world, but they could tell you hundreds of stories of subtle racism, of being stopped while driving through their own neighborhood, of being followed in stores, of being doubted, underestimated, and patronized. Our daughter, an experienced social worker, assures me that true racism continues on a daily basis. We've come a long way in our wonderful country, but the job of being kind to one another never ends. It sounds like the President, the police, and the professor are ready to do their bit. --------- Did the best stir fry ever. Here it is: STRINGBEAN STIR FRY (1 dinner for two) 1/2 frozen cooked chicken breast, thawed and cut bite-sized two generous helpings fresh string beans 1 small zucchini, 1/4 inch slices 1 small or 1/2 medium onion, rough chopped 4 or 5 mushrooms 1/4 inch slices 1 small carrot, 1/8 inch slices 2-3 med-lg cloves garlic, chopped teaspoon of fresh ginger, chopped two helpings cooked Japanese rice (1/2 cup uncooked) 1 cup beef bouillion (cube) 1 tbsp oyster sauce soy sauce chow mein noodles 1-2 tbsp corn starch in vermouth stir fry one by one, in veg oil with a little sesame oil, until just al dente and set aside: onion, carrot, zucchini, mushrooms steam beans until al dente, then stir fry 30 seconds in a little sesame oil with part of the garlic and ginger and dash of soy sauce and set aside stir fry chicken 30 seconds in a little oil, garlic, ginger, and dash of soy and set aside stir fry remaining garlic and ginger in sesame oil for 20 seconds, add bouillion and oyster sauce, stir in corn starch until right thickness add vegetables and chicken and stir serve over rice, with optional soy sauce, chinese hot chili paste, sprinkling of chow mein noodles, chinese hot mustard Notes: The bumper bean crop from our garden was the instigation. The zucchini was mostly for N. The chicken is leftover from a 3-4 lb. store-bought barbequed chicken (eaten twice for supper, one breast saved and frozen for two stir fries, remaining carcus frozen for soup. Reducing the onion and eaving out the Hoisin sauce was a good idea. One of Barry's poems that I particularly like. A bit threatenting. What would you title it? The fisher cat kills completely: all you find in his den are the leather collars of small animals. Tonight he climbs the steps of my porch. and finds me sitting alone. He begins to circle— the way he does when searching for a quill-free place on the body of a porcupine. I keep my back to him: there’s no crevice or hollow tree, no hole in the ground where I can hide my face. 8 August 2009 We had one hot day, but it cooled off at night so we still haven't used the bedroom ceiling fan. Maybe we won't this year. The attic fan works fine. -- There'll be no air conditioners here until Hell freezes over! At our writing group on Thursday, C mentioned that her visiting brother was going to lead the Am ha Yam Sabbath service on friday night. He's an accountant who worked for some years in Israel and is now in New York and is also a musician and an expert on Jewish liturgical music. So we went and it was quite uplifting. C's brother had the quality of simultaneous lightness and seriousness that is so rare and valuable. As did the whole service, at which there was drumming and clapping and some folks danced the hora (but not we). When I was in seminary, a teacher remarked that those in the going-to-church business ought to like going to church. And I thought, oh dear, with the best of effort and intention I never had. With rare exceptions I still don't: Tom Edwards' brilliantly intellectual sermons at St. Paul's Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia, well-performed church music, a casually beautiful evening prayer service at York Minster, a cheerful Sunday mass at Saint Sulpice, and of course Temple Israel. In even the best Christian services there is often an off-puttig element of accusation and of life-denial. Perhaps when God becomes man it confuses things. It seems that N and I both had the same thought Friday night, that many of these same Hebrew prayers have been said and sung for thousands of years, often in difficult places and under dire circumstances, and have held together a people and perhaps in some ways all people. N also commented that everyone seemed so happy to be there! A nice evening Am ha Yam is a Chavurah btw -- Wikipedia: "A chavurah or havurah (Hebrew: "fellowship", plural chavuroth) is a small group of like-minded Jews who assemble for the purposes of facilitating Shabbat and holiday prayer services, sharing communal experiences such as lifecycle events, and Jewish learning. Chavuroth usually provide autonomous alternatives to established Jewish institutions and Jewish denominations." We walked in the Red Maple Swamp. It was lovely and jungley and green and cool, with little patches and broad stripes of sunlight everywhere. The Fort Hill field was bursting with wildflowers: flax, queen anne's lace, mullein, salt spray rose, daisys, goldenrod, and many we didn't recognize. I finished Geert Mak's In Europe. Again, a wonderful, informative and entertaining book, half history, half contemporary travel (1999), and half personal narratives (it's a really big book!). N was reading it and enjoyed the first part but said it got too grim. About a third of it concerns the years 1939-1946. I didn't plan to spend Saturday plumbing, but the copper pipe to the kitchen cold water tap sprang a pin-hole leak. So I replaced all the pipe from the 1 inch pipe to the sink with cpvc. Some day I have to replace the remaining 20 feet of 1 inch pipe too, but that requires a solder which always makes me nervous. How can I believe the solder will magically fill the cavity between the pipes, even though it (almost?) always does. I was reminded of J's quest for the nature of identity by an article in the Times about personal identity and by the recent group activities of brownshirt disrupters at health care forums, organized by industry and party paid agitators no doubt but enlisting genuinely confused lost souls, as did the Nazis and Fascists. All reinforced by the Am Ha Yam Sabbath service at the Chapel in the Pines, with much singing and dancing the hora. We didn't dance but we clapped. It occured to us that these same words and actions have helped define and preserve a group identity for 3000 years, often under dire circumstances. from NYT, Sunday 9 August. By BENEDICT CAREY "... A small group of brain scientists is now investigating misidentification syndromes, as the delusions are called, for clues to one of the most confounding problems in brain science: identity. How and where does the brain maintain the “self”? What researchers are finding is that there is no single “identity spot” in the brain. Instead, the brain uses several different neural regions, working closely together, to sustain and update the identities of self and others. Learning what makes identity, researchers say, will help doctors understand how some people preserve their identities in the face of creeping dementia, and how others, battling injuries, are sometimes able to reconstitute one. ... Now there’s an explosion of interest in these cases,” Dr. Feinberg said, “because of their relation to the self, to the neurobiology of identity — to what it means to be human.” ... It would seem to me that there has to be some relationship between group and personal identity. There appears to be great foofaraw among Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, et al. Who will do what with/to whom? How much of this is genuinely creative and how much merely defensive? -- I use Google constantly to get info and it rarely fails to produce something. I use it occasionally to get a handle on a book by its title, author, or subject. It often works for recent or better known books because the database is so enormous, but the info is often minimal. -- I, being incorrigibly restless, would be thinking of ways to expand the capabilities of my Automated Library System, had I one. One of our friends grows many very good tomatoes in strange self-contained commercially supplied boxes. You add water now and then down a spout (and maybe fertilize?). There is no doubt much science and many books on the subject of container gardening. My problem would be time and energy. Our tomatoes in ground seem to do better than those in pots. Our own technology is limited to recycling last year's leaves and organic kitchen trash and filling rain barrels. August 2009 It's really really hot and muggy for Cape Cod. It is August, but we hope it doesn't last too long, and we hope the weather is acceptable where you are. I learn from the web that owing to a paucity of bees we should have fertilized our own zucchini plants (directions on request). But a further problem seems to be that our plants produce only male flowers. Maybe they produced female flowers early on but lost interest when no bees buzzed. We can always buy zucchini. The program on Sunday was about creating a Spritual Will (i.e. "...a record of the beliefs and values you wish to pass on to those you love...". N and I agreed afterwards that it was more interesting than we'd expected. We'd said we hoped our lives, such as they were, represented out values well enough. But that works only for one generation. We have only the merest clues what our grandpartens thought, and before that nothing. -- There's a lot about spiritual wills on the web. Next week "Armageddon," video and discussion led by T. R. D. About all the nifty ways the world could end, asteroids, etc. A relaxing Sunday morning topic. Our digital converter box died, so we went to excahnge it at Comcast Headquarters in Orleans. It's a strange place, back in the woods near the big TV tower. One car in the parking lot. No one visible when we went in. An Emerald City quality about it. We found the man (substantial local lady in this case) behind the screen and made a cheery exchange. Hooked it up and called a magical mystery number and we were in business. I just finished "The Same Man, George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War, by David Lebedoff. Random House, 2008. Despite the clutzy title it's a good book. N read it too and enjoyed it. The author is a lawyer and author of five other non-fiction books, but this one is the result of a life-long affection for both authors. He's funny and perceptive and his subjects are characters indeed. A lot of great quotes, like this one from an essay on Dickens by Orwell, imaging the face that Dickens deserves: "Is is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry--in other words, of a nineteenth century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthododies which are now contending for our souls." A little discouraging about health care. When all is said and done it sounds like with any luck we might get about what we have now, only it will cost more. It is evidently not the American way to work together, except maybe sometimes to beat up on other people. Get your flu shots! August 28, 2009 The news you were waiting for! We've finally used our bedroom ceiling fan, and it works just swell. The slow speed is slower than the fan in the living room, maybe two revolutions per second, which is perfect just over our bed. Yes, it was hot and muggy for a few days, but it has cooled off again. We walked out to Coast Guard over the weekend to see the promised 20 foot waves. We love moderately wild weather. We'll check out the bay cliffs too, to see how the million dollar homes are hanging. -- We now await tropical storm Danny "Armageddon" was interesting, as in 'interesting times'. Only TR could make 10 possible ends of the world so entertaining. It isn't the end of the world that concerns me, though, but rather threats to our current 'quality of life' as heedless Americans. -- Next week Henry Lind, the just-retired town envirnonmental officer, talks about oysters. Yum. Ilsa, who volunteers every year, says good Welfleet Oysters are about $1.25 apiece at the Wellfleet Oyster Festival. So much for that. They hold the festival every summer, and around 15,000 people clog route 6 in Wellfleet. At least the Gilroy Garlic Festival can be approached by more than one road. It's held fairly need to Maury, but I gather she has found it underwhelming. We love garlic, but a festival? I guess you work with what you have. I enjoy my bi-weekly writing group very much. It includes two memoirists and three novelists. The memoirs and novels are all skillfully done and entertaining. We're close to the same age, so we operate on much the same wave length, which would perhaps not be ideal for a truly critical workshop, but we're more into eating and drinking, chatting, and mutual admiration. And don't knock it. Having read all the recent mysteries in two libraries, N picked up a 1986 William Taply 'Brady Coyne' mystery. These are pleasant, innofensive, and often amusing mysteries about the doings of a Boston lawyer. Sometime jokes are included: "The greatest thing ever invented has to be the Thermos bottle." "The Thermos bottle?" I said. "Easy. Hands down. No contest." "Okay, Charlie. How do you figure the Thermos bottle?" "Look," he said. "You put soup in it, the Thermos bottle keeps it hot. You put Martinis in it, it keeps them cold." I sighed. "So what, Charlie?" "Well, shit, man. How does it know?" I couldn't find another fat non-fiction "reading" book right way so I'm re-reading Jacques Barzun's wonderful From Dawn to Decadence, 1500 to the present. Highly recommended to fill an idle month. Poem inspired by the Sabbath service at the Chapel a few weeks ago: SABBATH AT THE CHAPEL A scattering of yarmulkes knit shirts slacks and skirts, chairs drawn into a ragged circle around a tall slim man so easily in polite command who leads the Hebrew prayers and songs, the drum and dance of thanks and praise, repeating word and phrase down thirty centuries in Israel and Judah, Babylon and Rome, in Minsk and Krakau and Berlin, in fear and joy and wondering, while keeping Jews a people still and making whole the world There's a nifty "street view" of Sara and Andy's house on the web on a real estate ad. John and Megan's apartment is just visible on Google "street view," as is our Paris Cafe Mondrian. Shrader Street wasn't the last time I looked but a few blocks away in SF was. Google Earth really can give you a weird feeling, watching the world turn as you plunge in on a spot in Eastham, Paris, London, California, Virginia, the BVI, the Caribbean. I tried the South Pole once, and guess what, it was all white! And the Amazon. It was green. Does this not ultimately lead to some sort of psychological paradigm shift, like the big blue marble? SEPTEMBER 3 September 2009 More Cape Cod Weather 60's and sunny. We think we'll go down-country to Truro today. Another smashing recipe, of the cheap and simple sort, Jagdschnitzel a la poulet. I ran across Jagdschnitzel in a novel and looked it up, a pork cutlet with a sauce that looked good. We did it with chicken, and it is good. We buy "Nature's Promise" organic meats when we can. I don't supposed they come from an all-volunteer barnyard of contented foul, but they certainly taste good. Pound two small chicken breasts to 1/4 inch thick cutlets. Dredge in egg and bread crumbs with a little salt and pepper and fry two minutes to a side in two tbsp cooking oil. Set aside in warm oven. Lightly brown 4 or 5 sliced mushrooms and 1/2 a small onion chopped, add 1/2 to 2/3 cup water and 1/2 beef bouillon cube. Simmer 5 minutes. Then stir in ca. 1 tsp cornstarch to thicken and swirl in a couple of tbsp sour cream. Serve sauce over the cutlets. Simple and very good. I asked N what she thought about Kennedy's funeral. We'd watched the whole thing together. She was impressed and moved, of course, but it made her sad, she said. She wondered how good his life had actually been that last year. A neighbor in Oreland and the husband of one of John's teachers had died of brain tumors, and she knew it hadn't been easy. She was very afraid we would miss his skill in the govenment. Who would take up his role, who could? And she wished she could be so sure as they all seemed to be, about meaning and reward and justice and meeting in an afterlife. But she wasn't. And how about me? Well, all that, too, but I had some positive reactions. They did seem so sure, and everyone played his role so well. It was elegant and human. Mostly, though, I was surprised at who Teddy Kennedy was. Maybe it was afterglow, but he emerged as such a very fine and very large man. Flawed but loveable and loved. After reading the nice article in the GFS Alumnae Mag N wrote Florence Battis Mini a congratulatory note. Florence wrote a nice note back. We assume the men in the picture are Seth, Michael Mini (good thing his parents didn't ame him Cooper) and a husband. We couldn't decide which girl (woman) was Mellisa and which was Anna. Henry Lind gave a good talk. He has just retired from many Eastham convervation and science posts, including shellfish warden, at 59! Good for him. He plans to stay in town and stay active in environmental issues. This was his only job for 35 years, just out of BC and Johns Hopkins. Meant to stay two years and spent his career. We agreed Eastham the best place in the world. -- One of the new French group members came to the Fellowship a second time. Interesting woman, a Parisian who has worked all over the world. They expect to be frequent visitors. Gary G. (just retired) and his wife also came. The beat goes on. We heard T.R. Reid, former Washington Post Bureau Chief in London and Tokyo, on Frontline. I think the program was "Sick around the World". Fascinating interview. Google: T.R. Reid Frontline. We hope Obama's adress next week will help with health care legislation. Some good editorials in the times. We have excellent health insurance. We don't worry much about our future but about younger folk and those who don't have insurance. A few more talking heads seem to tbe speaking up. We can hope. Wisdom from a shaman in a Phillip Craig mystery: 1) Railroad tracks are hard to walk on. 2) Things are not like you think. Both seem to be true, that latter a good maxim to keep in your pocket. It was good to hear from you and that all is well. Your projects and tutoring sound great. Thirteen hours is quite a bit, as tutoring must be a lot of work. Enjoyable too, I imagine. Working with the young was always satisfying. I'm sure you've heard about the summer John caught up with mathematics. Math was the one area that wasn't great at GFS, so the summer after he was out sick and missed a lot of school we had him tutored by the head of the math department at another Friends school. He went into the man's house looking grim the first time and came out smiling. "He explained things!" John said. At the the end of the summer the tutor said, "I don't know about you, John, but I've had a ball." -- I gather he's now a bit of a techy among the archaeologists. I've pretty much run out of building projects for the moment. The carpentry and plumbing is done for the upstairs laundry. We're in no rush to buy the expensive appliances, but have planned for fewer trips to the basement eventually. I'd like someday to make our living room window sort of a false bay. I've thought it through, but I don't think Nancy is convinced. We'll see. We do look forward to hearing about your trip. It's a little hard to imagine, but it sounds like it was quite enjoyable. Nancy's aunt and uncle did many similar camping trips around the country, with their four children and later without them. We were always impressed. No, I don't get Facebook either. It appears a bit shallow and pointless, particularlay for young people who already have very busy, highly social, and in our view nearly frenetic lives. But I'm sure many find it useful and satisfying. A generation gap no doubt. I check it now and then because it's a link with the kids, who are not great communicators by and large. -- That's okay. I send a message about our thoughts and small doings once a week, and they say they read it. What more can one ask. Actually, I signed up to Facebook in hopes of finding a few contemporaries. I did find several, but they don't seem much interested in corresponding. Oh, well. I have no idea how you feel about the health care issue. We have excellent health care insurance with Medicare and Blue Cross subsidized by Penn, but we feel strongly that our country should provide good health care for all its citizens. We watch the news and hope for the best. ---- I've sent this note to the CCNS, Mass DCR, and the Town of Eastham and two local papers in hope that they could do some more investigation and clarification. We have three questions: 1) On which side of the Cape Cod bike trails should pedestrians walk? 2) What should happen where the bike trail crosses a road? 3) Are the bike trails truly intended to be "mixed use?" I’m sure these issues have been talked to death, but obviously they haven’t been solved. We would be pleased to hear from anyone, to have answers posted on relevant web sites, and best of all to see some action on the ground. We are retired and have walked the roads, nature trails, and bike trails of Cape Cod almost daily for ten years. This has been a delight and a privilege. We are in no hurry and are glad to share the roads and trails. Most people are sensible and courteous most of the time. This is America not the Netherlands, we don’t like a lot of rules, but a little clarity wouldn’t hurt. 1) Pedestrians: I learned from the Boy Scouts Manual 60 years ago that, where they are no sidewalks, pedestrians should walk on the left side of the road, facing the traffic. This has always seemed to me to be sensible, but I assume it’s not a law, and I notice that at least half the pedestrians in Eastham either don’t know this or prefer to walk on the right anyway. Large families, with strollers, small children on bikes and dogs on or off leash fully trust their lives to the attention of drivers who may be very young, very old, talking on cell phones, or yelling at their kids. This seems unwise to us, and walkers going both ways on both sides of the road while cars try to pass in the middle is dangerous and a little nuts. Does anyone have the authority and the will to put up a few signs on frequently walked roads advising pedestrians to walk on the left?\ All of this seems to us to apply even more to the bike trails. We don’t dare turn our backs to racing cyclists and wobbly learners who only rarely call out "passing on your right/left" as they’re encouraged to. I gather from the web that there is general agreement across the country that pedestrians should walk on the left on bike trails but that there is far from unanimity. Could someone make a local decision and put up a few signs? 2) Bike crossings: The law is clear for drivers, as are the signs. We must stop for pedestrians in marked crosswalks. We are glad to do so, although we would like to see some crosswalks better marked, with paint on the pavement and signs in the road. There are Stop signs on the bike paths, and at least in Harwich signs saying, "Stop. Walk across. Do not ride." So far so good, but as we all know only 1 in 10 cyclists walks, 7 in 10 slow, look both ways, and ride across, and 2 breeze across at full speed without even seeming to look. I learn from the web that among the stated rules in the "Rules of the Trail" pamphlet that bike renter receive are: keep to the right, maintain a single file, alert others when passing and stop and dismount at all street crossings. "These are taken straight out of the state statute, and are given to everyone along with a free helmet." -- Is this the case? Are there State Statues governing these matters? One blogger says, "These have no force of law." It would be good to know which is true. What can be done? I don’t know, although we’d like at least to see "Stop. Walk across. Do not ride." signs at all bike crossings and occasional enforcement at major crossings like Main Street Orleans. Stop signs for motor traffic would probably be a good idea during the summer but would be pretty wasteful for much of the year. Barriers forcing cyclists to dismount would be fine with us, and probably safer, but we don’t ride bikes. 3) Mixed use: On the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation web site is the statement: "The trail has a wide unpaved shoulder on one side to accommodate horseback riding, walkers, and runners." Does this imply that pedestrians should walk on the shoulder? The trails don’t everywhere have a wide shoulder suitable for walking, at least not in the National Seashore, and, if they did, why would pedestrians not choose to walk on the much more comfortable pavement, as is presumably their right? We know a number of elderly people (even older than we) who walk on the bike trails because the footing is firm and they are safer than the roads. ---- 10 Sept 2009 Temperatures are in the 50's at night now. This couldn't come too soon for us, although we'd be glad to hold off running the furnace until December. The Red Maple Swamp looks tired but still green. Color change comes late and subdued but still pretty on the Cape. There seems to be a lot of difficult weather around the contry and the world. Even Massachusetts farmers want government help after a too cool and wet growing season. We're harvesting the last of the beans and tomatoes, which did well in July and August. We watched the President's speech. He was masterful as always and stronger than usual without being demogogic. We heard someone shout but not what they said. The designated heckler? We hope someone besides us listened and were encouraged or swayed. At least the Republicans showed up and with one exception were polite. Matthew Crawford was interviewed on The Diane Rehm show a day or two ago. I printed this from Amazon for Dave E. who was a shop teacher for many years and has a metal shop in his basement and for Mark M. who shares my interest in handicrafts. John and Andy get to combine concepts, technology, and "stuff" in their work. The closest I came at work was computer programming and literature design. But I did get to be a home handyman like my father. The Rabiners are now, of course, home-handypeople big time. Shop class as soulcraft: an inquiry into the value of work, by Crawford, Matthew B. NY, Penguin, 2009. Philosopher and motorcycle mechanic Crawford presents a fascinating, important analysis of the value of hard work and manufacturing. He reminds readers that in the 1990s vocational education (shop class) started to become a thing of the past as U.S. educators prepared students for the "knowledge revolution." Thus, an entire generation of American "thinkers" cannot, he says, do anything, and this is a threat to manufacturing, the fundamental backbone of economic development. Crawford makes real the experience of working with one's hands to make and fix things and the importance of skilled labor. His philosophical background is evident as he muses on how to live a pragmatic, concrete life in today's ever more abstract world and issues a clarion call for reviving trade and skill development classes in American preparatory schools. The result is inspired social criticism and deep personal exploration. Crawford's work will appeal to fans of Robert Pirsig's classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and should be required reading for all educational leaders. Highly recommended; Crawford's appreciation for various trades may intrigue readers with white collar jobs who wonder at the end of each day what they really accomplished. Library Journal. I've suddenly added 150 pages to Newhouse, both plot line and realia from RMC's writings, with only some names changed to protect the guilty. 17 September 2009 We helped set up the Arboretum Tent Saturday morning for Windmill Weekend. It rained furiously Saturday afternoon, but Sunday was a lovely day and the Green was mobbed. They sold a hundred of N's cards. "Oh, it's your wife who's the photographer?" Yes, indeed, I say. The theme of this year's Martha's Vinyard Film Festival is "Other Places." I hope the humor was intentional. I've been reading "Camus,a Romance," by Elizabeth Hawes. Hawes fell in love with Camus many years ago as a college student. I've always liked Camus, but there's too much of Hawes in this book. A strange genre, the intrusive biographer, sort of "Ben and Me." N loved Julie and Julia (the book) but that's a little different. For the book group a few years ago we read a biography of Elizabeth Stewart Gardner (in conjunction with a field trip to the Museum) that was awful. It seemed to be mostly about the biographer. -- Camus was killed in an auto accident January 5th, 1960 (he was not driving carefully!). I think I was in France at the time, in Strassbourg. We hear that "The Guiding Light", the soap, has ended after 72 years. I enjoyed listening to soap operas when I was home sick from grade school back in Ferguson, Missouri, but I sort of lost interest after that. Jane Bryan said her sister, a Ph.D. and Headmistress of the Madiera School in D.C. was addicted to soaps. Our generation seems to be passing swiftly. We've been here ten years this month. It doesn't seem that long. More houses, more people, a lot more bicycles, but the ocean and the bay are unchanged, and even the trophy homes usually leave a bit of woods and brush, so we've so far avoided suburban blandness. I'm about out of building projects for the moment, but there's plenty to keep me busy. We listened to the President's noon talk to Wall Street and thought it was excellent. He's always good, but I guess we're pretty much Obama groupies. How much we could do if we could all work together. "Oh, look!" said N, pointing to a lovely little 8-inch zucchini, the only one our three plants produced. We used it in a stir fried side-dish with the last of our bush beans. All of our crops finally came through, many bean feasts, lots of very tasty tomatoes, all the basil we could want and more, and one excellent zucchini. Can't wait until next growing season. The peppers were a bust, but they were an afterthought. We've never had luck with peppers. We were walking to the bay the other day when an SUV stopped and a young woman got out to let her dog relieve itself. "I'm glad I don't have a dog," N said. "I too am glad you don't have a dog," I said, "because if you did, I'd have one." In another of those after-74-years self-revelations I realized suddenly that I'd never wanted a pet. My parents always had dogs, and I was always kind and respectful to them but not particularly interested. N and I both loved Snoopy, but she was unique (if she was actually a dog at all). There are lots of big dogs here on the Cape, mostly black labs. A whole long aisle in the Stop and Shop is devoted to pet food. I've been watching TSR, Television Swiss Romande, 30 minute news reports and some hour long specials. The Swiss are huge gun people; who'd have thought it. I guess every family is supposed to own a military weapon for national defence, and now it's an assault rifle, not a blunderbus! The NRA must drool with envy (except that if everybody had one where's the thrill?) The TSR video is the best quality I've seen on the web. The Swiss speak good French, a little faster than the French but a little less mush-mouthed. All Swiss speak French, but you can usually tell who comes from Italian or German regions; even marginally second language speakers are always a little more precise and easier to understand. We improved an old recipe and enjoyed a splendid bruschetta for two with the last of our garden tomatoes. The Italian bread when lightly toasted makes a perfect base, light but firm. BRUSCHETTA (pronounced: "brusketta") Soft Italian bread cut into 4 3/4 inch rounds, crushed garlic and melted butter, two diced and drained tomatoes, chopped fresh basil, salt and pepper, 1 tbsp olive oil, 1 tsp Balsamic vinegar. [Use amounts as desired.] In a small bowl, mix tomato, basil, salt, pepper, a sm. clove garlic crushed, and oil and let marinate briefly. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place bread slices on baking sheet and toast 5 minutes. Spread garlic and melted butter on bread rounds and return to oven for another 3-5 minutes. Spread rounds with tomato/basil mixture. Place a slice of swiss or cheddar cheese on top of tomato/basil and melt under broiler. (This holds the Bruchetta together.) We hope you have all survived without harm the floods in VA and PA, fires in the Bay Area, and heat in Gilroy. Get your flu shots. 25 September 2009 A week of meetings and medical appointments. We're fine, just routine stuff. My friend Harry said eventually holding yourself together takes almost all your time, but fortunately we're far from that. The book group met, "No Great Mischief", about Scots immigrants to Nova Scotia. I found it interesting but depressing. I always enjoy the women, however. I've encouraged several husbands to join us, with no luck. Chicken. I wonder what they think of me. A few years ago a woman (no longer part of the group) said she didn't think she'd like having a man in the group, but I was "all right". Good to know. N's Arboretum Committee met. Her photo cards earn them money and publicity, and she can volunteer her husband for digging. The French group and writing group met. Two of the writing group members are also in a memoir writing class of 15 at the Snow Library. Just about everyone here is writing his or her (usually her) memoirs. I find them all interesting, but then I always enjoyed seeing other people slides too. Just about every one's life is interesting, if observed. It helps if you write well. We don't watch much evening TV, but we saw "The Jewish Americans" advertised and N figured out how to use the Menu and Schedule. It was the middle two hours, from the teens to the fifties, of a 2008 six hour special, and it was fascinating. We'll try to track down the other two parts. Ken Burn's special on the national parks is on this Sunday night and we plan to watch it. Scenery is really impressive on the new TV. We saw Ken Burns. He didn't look like we somehow had expected. A whispy fellow. We watched the President's address to the UN and were impressed as always. We do think some of the huffing and puffing is racist, and maybe classist: tall, handsome, brilliant, rich, successful, religious, and black! What next. A woman of course. This is the most aromatic and delicious dish we cook! BRAISED COUNTRY STYLE PORK RIBS 1/2 to 3/4 pound of country style pork ribs does nicely for two Marinade: 3 Tb lemon juice 3 TB olive oil parsley 1/4 tsp thyme 1 bay leaf 1 clove mashed garlic rub a little salt and pepper into meat marinate it for 2-3 hours at room temperature pour off marinade (save bay leaf and garlic) dry meat with paper towels brown meat in olive oil remove to casserole 1/4 cup vermouth to deglaze pan - add to casserole add 1 cup beef bouillon and bay leaf and garlic cook in covered casserole at 325 degrees for 2 hours OCTOBER 1 October 2009 I should have known better. We were looking forward to Ken Burns' National Parks series, but I realize that the only thing of his I've ever seen is the first two episodes of The Civil War. John and I watched it but got tired of black and white pictures of bodies. It was also, as I recall, pretentious and lugubrious. Which is what he does apparantly, but who would have thought anyone could make the National Parks pretentious and lugubrious. I'm afraid I was fooishly expecting something like a high class Rick Steves production, or better yet Burt Wolf. I suppose it's history and was billed as such, and yes, of course, there is always everywhere tentsion between our aquisitive and worshipful impulses, but why not just enjoyment this time? We are offered 24 hours a day of "entertainment" which isn't worth watching, but the national parks have to be presented as religion? Sure, we get religious feeling/inspiration from nature, but if you have to be told.... As well, I'm sounding like a geezer. Perhaps it's a blessing in disquise that will keep hoardes of Germans, Russians, and Japanese from invading the parks. I gather that Americans already avoid them except for Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the Great Smokies. I've been to Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Smokies, the Everglades, Acadia, the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, CCNS and assorted national monuments and historical sights and loved them all. Jefferson and Roosevelt should have gotten together and declared the whole place a park. We could live in Paris and go visit the Native Americans. I just finished "In the Graveyard of Empire, America's War in Afghanistan" by Seth G. Jones. It covers through this spring. Not an enthrawling read but probably should be required for our leaders. He presents a grim picture of a fragmented and corrupt society, missed opportunities, and inadequare efforts. My take for once is that we should probably stay the course for the benefit of everyone. It would be short-sighted to say the least to let al Queda take over in Pakistan, and it would seem pretty mean to abandon the Afghans to barbarism again, particularly the women and girls. However, neither I nor my young men are likely to have to fight. Half a million men for ten years might do it, and I think we'll need outside help. Lovely weather here. We saw 3 frogs in the swamp (N spotted them), the first we've seen all year. They looked sort of torpid, as well they might, but it's good to see them. How do frogs feel about being our canaries in the mine? Six bialys for a buck in the day-old bread bin is a definite morale booster. Off to get a tooth filled. Get your flu shots. Wear masks. Whatever. 4 October 2009 I thought I'd say Hi while I get the chance. We have a bit to do this week and are off to VA Thursday. I've dumped Mussolini's Italy as my fat non-fiction book for The Inheritance of Rome, illuminating the dark ages 400-1000, by Chris Wickham. NY, Viking, 2009. 650p. Wickham is an Oxford Prof. Academic history has gotten very sophisticated lately and is rightly suspicious of its sources. Also, archaeology seems to have made rapid advances in recent decades and is more and more relied on, particularly for the early middle ages where most of the written sources are already known and generally biased. It's good. I'll take it with me to VA. N carefully plans her travel reading too. I guess it's sort of a security blanket. Our neighbors lost their old water pump and had to hook a hose from their outdoor spiggot to ours over the weekend until they could get a new well dug. The hose worked like a charm and was no trouble. Atlantic Well Drilling suggested it. It never would have occured to me. The B's are very nice people. It's a second home. They live and work in New Hampshire but may retire here soon. They have a daughter who lives in Eastham. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows is a delghtful book, charming, amusing, a little sad but with a happy ending, as books should have. Highly recommended for reading purposes. It was N's book, but she thought I'd like it. Birdwatcher's General Store advertised Squirrel baffles on the radio. We defeated the squrrels long ago by trial and error. It wasn't easy. I've finished preparation for my talk on Judaism in November and will send it along one of these days. Now I can get back to the novels and poems. I feel bad for writers who find writing hard and grim. They may produce far better work than I, but I'd rather enjoy the process. 14 October 2009 There and back again. We had a very nice trip and are glad to be home in our house in the woods. The weather was great except for a 2 minute deluge while we ran from Trader Joe's to Sara's car and got wet despite carrying two large umbrellas. The clouds cleared and Andy and Sara went to a tailgate party and an Old Dominion football game (Fight On, Old Dominion!) with friends Saturday afternoon while N and I entertained Aryn. Or she entertained us, as she is very amusing. We all saw her walk for the first time, half a dozen steps, and then stand up on her own a number of times and walk even more. There will be no stopping her now. Time for us to beat a retreat and gird up for the next visit. It's a good thing her parents are both natural athletes. The new house is large and pretty and very comfortable. It will take a while for them to fill all the empty spaces and there are many projects to be done, but that should be fun. There's a big yard with nice planting and a number of quite large trees. The trees in the neighborhood seem much older than the houses. I reccomended composting, as they have a variety of deciduous trees. We took several long walks and saw inlets with boat docks in a number of places. An exotic place. Their neighbors on one side are German, working for NATO. Aryn, S, N, and I went to the Chrysler Museum Sunday afternoon, an excellent museum in a large new building not far from PETA headquarters. We had seen the first floor exhibits in the Spring. The second floor is all paintings and is a wonderfull collection from all ages. Aryn had a fine time testing the echo in each room with a loud "dah." An admiring young lady museum guard was greatly entertained. The museum has just gone free and is being very friendly to drum up membership. We were startled to see on the crawl at breakfast in Mt. Laurel on Thursday morning that the President had won the Nobel Peace Prize. Nothing was said on the news shows, so we thought maybe it was a hoax. I had to check the NYT on the hotel computer to find it was true. What jerks some people are not to be proud for him and for the country. As someone put it, he had the courage to run for president in a still racist nation, the skill to win, and the grace and vision to begin to change the tenor of the world. Also he could use a little more help than he's getting. -- Does anyone have an opinion on what we should do in Afghanistan and Pakistan? It seems to me that we have to see it through but will need more help from the Afghanis and the rest of the world. -- We thanked Olympia Snowe. Now what? -- Actually I suppose it's you folks who should be fussed, as we're short-timers who are not too worried about global warming sinking Cape Cod, but we know you're busy, which is undoubtedly a good thing. 24 October 09 It was an unusually social week, for us. On Saturday Barry and Lois came for beef burgandy, our most evily delicious dish. Then Monday we had the Book Group at our house to talk about the Elegance of the Hedgehog which everyone loved, almost. On Wednesday I had the men and served them home-made bluefish pate. You're smacking your lips! Well, one of you is. On thursday I went to the writing group and ate a modest amount of halloween candy. On friday N went to Andrea, our doctor's choriographer wife, to get her hair done and she did a superb job. Tomorrow is the Poetry Open Mic at the chapel. We're having a "featured poet", Christine, who's really good. "Angry and autobiographical," she says. Nancy likes her too. But that means we peons read only one poem each. I don't like to read a "serious" poem all by itself. Someone might get the wrong idea. Maybe something semi-serious. We'll see. It's good to hear that J is back from the land of Guinness and bangers with many photos and notes, and that M got in a trip to Yosemite, our true national cathedral. Our fall foliage is doing its usual trick, slipping away seruptitiously. There are maybe half a dozen pretty trees in town, but in general you have to go to Orleans and west to see much color. Connecticutt was pretty, coming back from Virginia. Even the Red Maple Swamp is a little dim this year, but nice. We had a long talk there with a couple from Houston (but long ago from Long Island) about the best walks on the Cape. We're not that big on summer tourists, but off season walkers are rightous folks we figure. N is resigned to our programmable thermostat. We thought we could turn off the progam feature, but no. If you don't progam it, it reverts to the default setting which is too warm. We set it to 65 in the daytime and 58 at night and forget about it. Actually, that's sort of nice. At 550 Colonial my parents had a wind-up programmable thermostat. You had to wind it every 7 days, but it worked just fine. And you could hear it go, zzzzzzzzz. Our neighbor had the Tree Fellers at his house for two solid days, with chain saws, chippers, and a cherry picker. His trees don't look any different to us, but I'm sure he's satisfied. We won't see him now until spring. We have a few leaves on our "lawn.". It's time for me to turn the compost heap. We bought a bag of snickers (N's choice). No one had come to our house for 8 years, until last fall. We're ready now, but I doubt anyone will come, and we'll have to eat them ourselves. Jari's fall pot luck will be next Friday. We're invited to come in costume. We think not. My parents went to a costume party once. My father wore a cummerbund and said he was a diplomat. Most people have no opinion on Afghanistan, or at least none that they're willing to share. The Men's Group leaned towards getting out. One said India would take care of Pakistan. Maybe so, though that sounds a bit like a wishful cop out. The Optician said we should stay, with a light footprint. Kristov seems to agree. Sounds good to me. I don't think we can just ignore the Taliban, al Queda, Pakistan, and the nukes, but maybe we'd get more help if we suggested to our allies that they give us a hand if they'd like us to stay interested. From M: Yikes! Where did you stumble across (I hope not) your woodland friend? Love the story of your father wearing a cumberbund and calling himself a diplomat. Years ago a friend invited me to her Christmas Eve dinner. Generally a highly secular event, but that year she decided everyone should come as an angel. This was after I had accepted. I refused to wear a costume, but when I got there, their house was unheated and I wanted to keep my coat, so I said I was an angel from the Wim Wenders film, Angels of Desire. This, by the way, is a brilliant movie. Made by a German director, shot in Berlin and elsewhere. Everyone is in modern dress, but slowly you realize that the figures in overcoats, unseen by the populace, are angels. They move among the people, listening to thoughts, giving encouragement by way of a gentle presence. It's quite marvelous. There is no "miracle," just a gradual shift of attitude. From hopeless to maybe it'll be all right. Peter Falk plays a man who used to be an angel and knows they're everywhere so he starts talking in space to whichever angels might be hanging around, and our hero, who has fallen in love and wants to join the human race, listens. Anyway, loved the cumberbund. Next week is John's b'day, they'll be coming for dinner with the surprise addition of the Manchesters. From M. 30 October 2009 I've unfairly maligned our fall folliage. There's a lot you can do with shades of tan and brown, patches of yellow, and hints of dark red. We took a sandwich to the Beech Forest yesterday. It was lovely and we had it pretty much to ourselves. Except for the chickadees, titmice, and cardinals that hung around within a few feet begging for handouts. This is done here, probably against park regs. We once came a cross a woman on the Beech Forest trail standing like a statue of St. Francis, arms outstretched with birdseed, and birds, in each palm. We don't hand out birdseed and the birds soon lose interest. We're reading our next Book Group book, The Commoner, by John Burnham Schwartz, a novel about the marriage of Emperor Hirohito's son to a commoner. These would be the parents of the current emperor. It's very well done, and to my surpirse I'm enjoying it. The result of hanging around with women for so many years. The Poetry Open Mic went well. All obeyed the two minute / one poem rule except D, an occasional Fellowship drop in. I know she's not a Republican. She must be an American. Christine was great. N got a copy of her poem about cheerios to send to S, with C's last minute changes in pen. Christine is 42 with a 9 month old baby, a 17 year old daughter ("going on 27",) and a nice sculpter husband. She an actor and performance artist, and, I think, a brilliant poet. Among others she did her "Fat-Assed Cancer Bitch, pt. 2" (what a neighbor called her when she returned the neighbor's dog's droppings to its own yard. C had erected a mental empire of FACB sweatshirts and bumper stickers when a year later the neighbor tearfully apologized ("you don't have a fat ass"), ruining everything. It's a little complicated, but you get the idea. My much simpler poem: THE SHOPKEEPER "Hey, don't get me wrong," he tells my back. "I'm an optimist. I think there's good in everyone." "We try," I say. He's a libertarian, a patriot, an ex-marine. I don't know his name, we just do business now and then. We talk about our kids, about honor abd respect and what to do in Afghanistan. He make more sense than any talking head. He thinks I'm some kind of fuzzy liberal, but we're okay. "Have a good day," he says. "You too, my friend." In the wind a few brave words, in the dark a wink of light. We went to get N's 10 year Massachusetts Picture Driver's Licence renewal on Monday. I got mine in August at the local office, which closed in September owing to the state's money problems. It took me 20 minutes door to door. We had to go to Yarmouth for N and it took all morning. We we stopped at the H&K on the way home for French onion soup (N) and 2 eggs over-easy with sausage and 7-grain toast (me). An indulgence we decided we deserved for braving the burocracy. There is talk about driver exams for the elderly. A good idea no doubt, but I can think of better ways to spend our retirement. We hope the California contingent, the birthday party goers, and BART have been able to cope with the failings of the Bay Bridge. SF is our favorite city (well, after Paris and London, and I have a soft spot for New York) but it does have its vulnerabilities. A soft spot for Philadelphia too, and Edinburgh, both seemingly livable cities. And a hard heart for Boston, which I've never quite understood, considering my heritage. Many of our acquaintances are Boston connected, of course, and think nothing of running up there for a concert or museum. It's 100 miles and every bit as difficult as running up to New York from Philadelphia. I want my TGV! But even in France I think it's rather pricy to ride. How does Garrison Kieler end his programs? Well you remember. Oh yes, and we understand you should go easy on the cell phones, unless you use a head set. NOVEMBER 5 November 2009 These last few days have been particularly beautiful, late fall but still cheerful and not beaten down by cold and snow. We went to Audubon yesterday. There are always cars at Audubon. Macrame classes? We should ask. But rarely many walkers on the trails. Yesterday there were none at all for the first time in ten years except in mid-winter. We stood at the edge of the marsh on the Goose Pond trail and listened. Nothing, just a light breeze and bird calls. Nothing moved from Great Island to the humpback bridge to Lieutenant Island. Claude Levi Strauss is dead at 100, French anthropologist and ethnologist, author of Triste Tropics, a "structuralist" which I gather has been generally replaced by more flexible notions of person and society. Maybe John will explain. Very influential. Was he like Freud, wrong in much but moved things along? We just read The Commoner for book group. Fascinating and scarily like the real thing I see from articles on the web. Except that the current Royal Princess and daughter are just sad and haven't run away. I wonder what the Japanese think of it. The Emperial enterprise make the British Royal disfunctionals seem almost folksy. Do we really understand one another any better than we understand the Japanese? MOST EXCELLENT BEEF STEW 1 1/2 lbs. chuck cut in 1 1/2 inch chunks a little olive oil for browning 1 cup water with 2 beef bouillon cubes 1/4 cup red wine 2 cloves garlic, crushed 1 14 1/2 oz. can diced tomatoes with liqued 1 bay leaf 1/2 tsp thyme 2 small to medium onions, quartered 4 stalks celery incl. tops, cut up 4 carrots, peeled and cut up 2 medium potatoes, quartered 1/2 turnip, peeled and cubed salt and pepper brown meat in a little olive oil in batches, set aside deglaze pot with bouillon, wine, and tomatoes add garlic, bay leaf, thyme add browned meat simmer 1/2 hour on stove top add onions and celery simmer 1 hour add carrots, potatoes, turnip, salt and pepper simmer 1 hour thicken with a roue of 2T melted butter and 2T flour 12 November 2009 We celebrated N's birthday with a walk at Bearberry Hill. It was a perfect day, in the 60's with no clouds, no people, no sounds except the ocean and the wind in the trees. The sun is low all day now, lighting everything dramatically from the side. We walked the sandy slope down to the beach and saw no one at all in the miles to the north and south. N wanted her scallops and ritz crackers cassarole for supper. We stopped at birdwatchers for seed before going to the fish market. Uncharacteristicly N mentioned her birthday and Mike O'Conner autographed a copy of his book and gave it to her as a present. The talk on Judaism went well. Not a talk really, a reading, as there was just too much detail. N said she was watching and after 30 seconds of somewhat repetitive klezmer music a few were looking like 'okay I've got the idea,', but then the scoll of names started and they were fascinated. I was surprised no one called me on Christopher Columbus, who is supposed to have had a Jewish mother. I didn't want to borrow a laptop so I had to bring my mainframe which is a bit of a drag, but I've got it down to a rough science. Several Am ha Yam members came and approved. Am ha Yam is a Havurah, sort of a gathering, and pretty easy going. After we read The Commoner, N decided she wanted to read Elizbeth Gray Vining's 1962 book Windows for the Crown Prince, about the several years right after the war when she tutored the Japanese royal children in English and life in America. These were two amazingly different views. Vining had a wonderful experience. She found the children delightful and thought very highly of the Emperor, Empress, and all the many attendants. Presumably they went out of their way to be nice to her. The Japanese were grateful to the occupying forces for being much nicer than they had been as occupiers. Vining did once mildly observe that the children would like to be together more and was politely told to mind her own business. The Commoner painted a grim picture. Perhaps the 'truth' wanders somewhere in the middle. Our kitchen counter top was a bit scuzzy. On the web it suggested a nylon brush, which I tried and found it worked. Why not on the bathroom linoleum! And it worked there too. Hopefully you haven't noticed how grimy the bathroom floor was, despite many washings. We did the food on Sunday too, and N brought her pumpkin bread. Several people wanted the recipe, so here it is if anyone else wants it. The recipe was from Sara some time ago, N uses it for Book Groups, etc. It sounds like there may be some mighty high water in Virginia Beach in the next couple of days. We hope not too high! PUMPKIN BREAD WITH STRUESEL TOPPING (from Vegetarian Pleasures ?) 1/2 cup vegetable oil 3/4 cup sugar 3/4 cup firmly packed light brown sugar 3 large eggs 1 t vanilla extract 1 15 oz can solid-packed pumpkin 2 1/2 cups unbleached flour 1 1/2 t baking powder 1 1/2 t baking soda 3/4 t salt 1 1/2 t cinnamon 1/2 t freshly grated nutmeg (otional) 1 cup finely chopped walnuts or pecans 2/3 cup raisins Streusel Topping 1/3 cup unbleached flour 1/3 cup sugar 4 T cold unsalted butter, cut into bits 1) Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter and flour two 9x5 inch (1 1/2-quart) loaf pans 2) In a large bowl, beat together the oil, sugars, eggs, and vanilla using an electric mixer. Beat in the pumpkin until thoroughly blended. Beat in the remaining bread ingredients until evenly moistened. Scrape into the prepared pans. 3) To make the topping: Combine the flour and sugar in a small bowl. With your fingers, rub the butter into the flour mixture until coarse crumbs are formed. Sprinkle the crumbs on top of each loaf. Bake 50 to 55 minutes, or until a knife inserted in the center of a loaf comes out clean. Cool on a wire rack 10 minutes before removing from the pans. Cool thoroughly before slicing. 20 Nov 09 A pleasantly busy week. Sunday was a talk by M's grandson, recently graduated from U Mass with a degree in landscape architecture and conservation and just home from five weeks volunteering at a game preserve near Kruger National Park in South Africa. Lots of great animal pictures and interesting lore. He looked so....young, but he did a good job. Quiet humor. Looking for work, like every other recent grad, but he'll do well. -- Tuesday Men's Group and a brief video of a female comedienne talking about the Mormons. A little unkind! -- Today, lunch with Barry, our monthly Full English Breakfast at noon treat and discussion of poetry. Very helpful. They'd let us sit there all afternoon, but we usually knock off by 2:00. -- Friday is the Thanksgiving pot luck, in which the Fellowship and friends who we are glad to see once a year destroy a 25 pound turkey. N does the creamed onions, as she has for the last ten years. Now that's tradition. Home Depot claims to have a Sharkbite 1" x 3/4" reducing coupling, which I will hope to pick up when N and I do the Fellowship's Adopt-a-Family Christmas shopping. I can finish the conversion of our plumbing to CPVC. Sunday is a "musician" who is a nice person but whose music is not ours (or probably yours either). We have to go, as N needs to collect the last of the Adopt-a-Family money, and I had long ago volunteered to read. I thought I'd read this, edited excerpt from Jaques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence. Two things to be thankful for: "Only one report about the United States from the middle of the 19th century was thorough and reliable: De Toqueville's Democracy in America. The first volume appeared in the 1830s after a concentrated study of not quite 18 months. It was descriptive and dispassionate. It showed the many admirable human traits that come with self-government and equality: the firm, upstanding character who shows servility to none; the ease of mind about local affairs, since they are discussed and acted openly, all concerned being present; in addition, a sense of freedom from the past and its compelling errors and injustices; a legitimate feeling of power used at will in setting up voluntary associations for good works. De Toqueville’s account of the Constitution and the federal government, local institutions, the press, and prevailing ideas and attitudes about each, amply proved that the United States was ruled by capable men. Everybody could be, and generally was, a responsible citizen, able to take part in policy-making. The picture was a vindication of Rousseau and Jefferson and of the spirit of the Enlightenment. ...Summing up the genuine achievements and prosperity of the American people and asking to what they should be mainly attributed, De Toqueville answers: “To the superiority of their women.” :) -- He may have been a little optimistic about democracy, but we definitely have superior women. I had told myself that after Judaism (which is online at nfuu.org) I wouldn't do any more of these "talks", but I should know better. I'm thinking of William James and Pragmatism and late 19th century classical music. The late Victorian Age would be interesting too, but too much. One of the many nifty features of Barzun's From Dwan to Decadence is its "the book to read" on nearly every page. I got Victorian England; Portrait of an Age, by G. M. Young from Brookline via the Virtual Catalog. I was a little disappointed when I saw it, only 164 pages. But I have never in my life read a book as densely packed. It's taken me a week to get through 100 pages. First published in 1935, a significant date, it has an almost Victorian feel. I take Barzun's word that it still has much to say in 2000. N says these shoes are past their prime. I say they've just hit their stride. Why wear out your better clothes and shoes at garden work, construction, etc. when old faithfuls are still serviceable? 27 November 2009 The Thanksgiving potluck was excellent. About 40 of us demolished a turkey, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, Eastham turnips, carrots, brussel sprouts, stuffing, green beans, and a vast array of desserts. -- Only one very small disappointment. I had hoped the brussell sprouts would be excellent so I could enveigle N into trying some. But they lacked a bit. I'm told we can get a few loose ones at Phoenix (the expensive indoor farmer's market we patronize sometimes). Boiled is good, but split and oven roasted sounds even better. DW, the singer was as expected. He himself suggests that gay bar torch singing at 10 AM on Sunday morning is a bit unusual, but that's his act. But he's a nice person. He sang a song (his own?), about rainbows and the future, etc., to the tune of Bach's Minuet in G, with reference to gay marriage. I talked with him afterwards and thanked him for the song. He is quite upset at the Massachusetts referendum which shot down the legislature's gay marriage bill. DW has been with his partner for 35 years. De Tocqueville was concerned about the 'tyranny of the majority', both in the ballot box and through social pressure. M asked N what we were doing on Thanksgiving, and in her usual straight-arrow way N said, "Nothing." Which, except for the time we surprised everyone by going to California, is what we usually do without the slightest regret. So we were very generously invited for Thursday 'lunch', a turkey and complete fixings (including more Eastham turnips, the queen of root vegetables) with a birthday cake, six pies and 10 of her family. (Four more were expected in the evening.) It couldn't have been more delightful, two charming daughters with husbands, a friend, 3 children, M and B, and us. One of the daughters is a great fan of the Trapp family, and N had given her an old but clean LP, probably of her mother's, that was autographed by M von T herself. We thought of our family, in its various locales, but felt for a brief spell part of this one. Good people are good in similar ways. -- Amusing (to me) incident: I talked with one son-in-law about retirement. He said gloomly that he had planned to retire but with the economy now must work on indefinitely. I asked what he did (only in American can you do this) and he said, "I'm a surgeon at Falmouth Hospital." He does have a very expensive hobby; he fishes (and releases) all over the world. I thought this quote might be of particular interest to John. From G.M. Young, Victorian England, portrait of an age. publ. 1935. "....For that matter, what is History about? The conclusion I reached was that the real, central theme of History is not what happened, but what people felt about it when it was happening". This is the brief history of an object, whatever anyone thought about it, and it has to be included somewhere in our family records. For the moment, here it is: The large T. Bailey painting of a three-masted sailing ship which now hangs in our living room in Eastham is a link with Oriana Walker, Maurice Frohock, and my father. It was painted in about 1890 by an artist of the Maine school of T. Bailey, which produced many such paintings. Oriana bought quite a number of them, of which this was the largest and best. It hung in the Walker’s Cove Acres estate in Damariscotta and was saved when the house burned in the 'teens or early twenties. It then hung in Maple Lodge in Bremen, Maine until Oriana gave it to her brother Maurice in 1929 to hang over the fireplace on Hereford Avenue in Ferguson, Mo. In 1932, Maurice increased the size of their living room to thirty feet. He could now practice his chip shots inside. The painting, which still hung over the fireplace, took a beating and eventually became quite dirty. After Maurice tried to scrub it with kitchen cleanser, the pitiful result went into the attic. My father found it there in the early 1940’s and after considerable study of marine paintings, repainted the parts that had been erased, especially the ropes and sails. It hung at Roberta Avenue in Ferguson for two years, and when Maurice and Emily moved to Florida in 1943, the Chenoweths moved to the house on Hereford and the painting again hung over the mantle. It went with them to Jackson Heights, N.Y. in 1947, to Harding Street in Westfield, N.J. in 1984, and then to Tice Place in 1953. It hung in the Colonial Avenue house in Westfield for 10 years and went to the Colony House Apartments in New Brunswick, then to Drake Road in Somerville. In 1969 it went to Tamarack-by-Sea, Pinellas County, Florida. A professional painter considered it at this point and said he would repaint it for $200. Once again my father cleaned and repainted portions. Since the 1960’s it had been washed occasionally with Woolite and was re-coated with varnish. Our well-digger (and his cute wife) came to replace the leaking pressure guage with a new 'liqued guage' guaranteed not to leak. This seems to be the way with plumbing. You buy a furnace or water heater and a few years later it starts to leak. The plumber tells you that, yes, alas, there have been problems with that model, but there is a new super stainless titaniam version that is guaranteed to last forever, or at least for the length of your (remaining) life. -- I now have all the parts for my own plumbing project, including the Sharkbite connector, and hope today to do the rest of the copper to cpvc replacement, if I can get up the energy and moral courage. DECEMBER