CAPE COD REPORTS, 2003These 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.
February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December
JANUARY 3 January 2003 I’ve never cared much for my name, but I’ve gotten used to it, and it seems a small cross to bear. I was named Russell Martin after my father in order to avoid an impending family squabble. My father was named Russell Martin after his biological parent Martin von Engle and my grandmother’s once and future boyfriend Paul Russell Chenoweth. You can imagine…. Martin deserted Lulu when my father was two. Paul was a poor stepfather to Martin. So it goes. Names can be cleansed. John and Sara both have Martin as a middle name, after my father, who considered himself the first-of-his-line. The short story “Arcadia” is fantasy and science fiction. The conceit is that at a future time there are arcades where you can take a realistic virtual vacation, (a bit like those dumb machines that cluttered the malls for a while in which you got, I suppose, wrap-around sound and picture at a seat that bumped, only much advanced and fed directly into the brain). It’s a psychedelic computer produced experience, including Macy and Philadelphia. But Rolly’s machine is infected with the Klezmer Virus. Macy is damaged or freed by the virus or perhaps is the virus. At the museum they descend into the hardware or software itself and threaten the illusion. The Universal Bootery restores (re-boots) the program. Norton Utilities is anti-virus software. – I think most of this would be understood by the average computer user, though maybe not.
We like to talk about different things, so we have to be generous. I’m a socialist in theory, although I don’t want to be the first and only citizen to give up in the public interest such minor perks as I’ve accumulated. As to activism, as the Sage of Baltimore used to say, “If I knew what was right and good (other than vaguely supporting the Nazi’s in his case) I’d support it to the tune of bugle blasts.” An easy out I suppose. – In Finland 52 out of 100,000 citizens are in a very pleasant jail. In the US 780 per 100,000 are in corrupt prisons. But of course all Finns look alike and are so shy they have to talk by cell phone. Plus it’s dark all winter. I thought Times articles on two new books were interesting. David Sloan Wilson’s DARWIN’S CATHEDRAL, and Daniel Wegner’s THE ILLUSION OF CONSCIOUS WILL. They’re completely reductionist, and they convince me. I used those same arguments against Free Will when I was 17, but it never stopped me from putting one foot in front of another, or at least taking cheerful note of my progress. And, if I were God, and I wanted to create humans, would I simply wave my wand or would I do it the logical way, grow them from scratch? And, if I created us that way, why not make our religion in the same way? The notion of God in the holes in our knowledge is silly. We can have both all of science and, should we want it, all of faith. What could be nobler than rolling our own? God should be pleased While we're on cheap, I again recommend my Cheap Bean Soup. I use one 15oz can of Goya (or any other) black beans or small white beans (or any other). Cook 1/2 to 3/4 cup of chopped onions with a little chopped carrot and a very little chopped green pepper in olive oil until soft. Add herbs if you like. Add 1/4 cup water and simmer a few minutes. Add the can of beans. Mash 1/3 of the beans against the side of the pot with a spoon until you get a thickness you like. Add more water if you want it thinner. Heat and serve. It makes a nice lunch for two. I particularly like the small white beans. It's vegan too. I love to talk, (and even to listen a bit), but I've pretty much read for myself over the years. I'll read something fascinating and get so excited that I have to walk around the room thinking it over. I'm sorry now that I didn't make more effort to talk seriously with all the bright people I worked with at Penn. Les and I talked some, and Ed and I, and a few others, about things other than work I mean. I don't know why Bob and I didn't, or David. Still, I can see why too. Al and I didn't really become friends until we met again on the Cape. I talk a lot with Nancy of course. She has a better brain than I, although she's interested in other things. She enjoys the book group, where we read novels and biography as I did at Penn, and she has a good memory and goes to the heart of the matter. She read some of the Metaphysical Club, particularly about Holmes and Dewey, and said it inspired her to re-read Yankee From Olympus. What I particularly like about William James is that he doesn't make firm distinctions among literary, philosophical, and scientific ideas. He and Henry were quite different in many ways, but they loved and respected one another and believed they were both dealing in the same realities I do have people to talk to here, more than ever before, an odd bunch, but aren't we all. There's Harry the philosopher fireman, although he's been sick lately, a permanent hazard in a retirement community. I always have good talks at the Fellowship meetings. I have weekly hour long telephone conversations with Art, who's a mere 72 and read the Metaphysical Club before I did. Art's a fan of Howard Zinn and particularly interested in American cultural history. I talk quite a bit with Rhoda, a frighteningly cultured and wickedly witty artist/poet with broad interests. She's taken it upon herself to criticize my poetry, which is a good thing, as otherwise I wouldn't take it seriously. I totally failed to comprehend one of her poems until she explained that it alluded to a Janet Joplin song. (Janis? Oh dear. Well, you see.) We go to lunch Sunday with Stan the author of several short story collections who wrote for the Atlantic. He also wrote Caregiver, the story of 10 years of caring for his wife who had Alzheimers and who died a few days after our first lunch with him. It's a wonderful book and a beautiful love story. (And uncharacteristic reading for me.) Nancy took it out, and I picked it up to look at and put it down 40 pages later when we had to go to the store.) Bill, the former head of computer systems at the LC will talk with anyone about corporate corruption. Paul, a former manufacturer, is delighted to bash Bush by the hour. Barry, Lella, Lois, and Ailsa from the Writers Group and some of the book group are friends too. So you see. Orleans and below (or 'above' in Yankee-speak) are more the country club set, though not exclusively, Eastham to P'town attracts the oddballs, a sort of a brain drain where we slosh together before the last flush. It's not a social whirl. We spend a lot of time quietly at home. 7 Jan 03 I hope you have all plunged satisfactorily into the New Year. I guess I have . I’m watching the squirrel twins chase one another through the spindly branches of a scrub oak. Very comical. Some animals have to work all the time. Others sleep the winter away under the mud. Squirrels seem to have plenty of time to play. A successful animal. We bought a 2 lb loaf of day-old Ecce Panis pane rustico. It’s great stuff. It seems to be indestructible, and it’s delicious straight, dipped in herbed Columela, or brushed with oil and toasted. Good bread is certainly one of the better things. We did the salmon with soy and ginger last night, without the clam juice. (‘Juice’ is what it says on the bottle, but it never sounds quite right. You don’t actually squeeze the clams.). It was terrific, but the next time I’ll use ¼ cup less soy and ¼ cup more vermouth, as the broth was pretty salty. I found two perfect brackets for the futon at the dump. I had to bring home a whole headboard to get them off. Nancy suggests that I get a little obsessive about the dump at times. I prefer to think of it as a pleasant addiction. I almost always find something of value at the scrap metal pile, the construction debris pile, or the Stock Exchange. The futon frame is back in the basement, sanded and waiting the installation of paneling and an above 50’s day for undercoating. We brought up the ‘medieval’ chest and put it by the front window, where it looks good. I’m continuing to enjoy Fernand Braudel’s Memory and the Mediterranean. It seems that chariots were invented around 4000 B.C.E., but riding horseback became common only around 1200 B.C.E., with very important consequences. I find that amazing. The constant movement and land and sea communications that Braudel describes is also interesting. I’m afraid I’ve had in mind far more stable and isolated civilizations. Why couldn’t the old testament have been taught in seminary with all this wonderful background? Why do I need to ask? I’m to meet Stan at the Hole-In-One for coffee and doughnuts tomorrow at 8:00. Stan has his ways of doing things, which I suppose at 91 is understandable. Thursday may be one of my last stints as secretary of the Friends of the Library, and I’m giving treasurer of the Fellowship to Vernon as soon as he gets the signature cards signed. It was fun, but I won’t mind passing it on. I’ve talked with George about volunteering a bit at the historical museum this summer. So it goes. This morning a sky like boiling slate sails low over a rice paper dusting of fine snow on scattered pine needles. This afternoon the weather will change, and tomorrow the snow will be gone. The tide has been over the boardwalk on the path to Coast Guard Beach and left tons of soggy salt hay. The waves are still huge in a mean green sea and visible above the dunes for the whole length of the beach south of the station. There are no surfers for once and not even an LPG tanker on the horizon. It will rain all night. We can’t wait to see the Red Maple Swamp. 2003 already! Holy cow. My father hoped to see the 21st century and the new millennium. I don’t think he expected marvels as he was rarely optimistic about human activity, but he enjoyed his own life and considered even symbolic milestones to be worth noting. I wanted to make it too, partly to go on being handy around the house but also out of curiosity. I’m always optimistic, although things seem to be getting worse for the moment. The spirit of James Watt roars down the highways consuming resources before the Second Coming catches us being good stewards. Ugh. I remember reading that 1955 would be the best year in the century to see mars and thinking it was too far in the future to care. Now it’s half a century behind, and we’ve had a brief but thrilling encounter with the red planet. I hope we’ll discover life there in a few years. It would be nice too to get a friendly message from elsewhere in the universe in my lifetime. I don’t think we will, but I haven’t given up. I don’t know why it matters so much to me. We were asked to write about New Year’s Resolutions at Common Time. Most of the resolutions the kids wrote had to do with their friends. Peers are everything at 11 to 13. I haven’t made resolutions in decades, and so far as anything gets done by me, I “just do it.” There was an interesting article in the Times a day or two ago, “More Than Good Intentions: Holding Fast to Faith in Free Will,” by John Horgan. He’s writing about new books by Daniel M. Wegner, a Harvard psychologist, “The Illusion of Conscious Will”, and “The Meme Machine,” by Susan Blackmore. The titles say it all. Free will, the self, and a belief in personal identity are occult concepts, epiphenomena. Will is not a force but a feeling, an “intention invention” that follows rather than precedes action. I remember using similar arguments against free will in a long running discussion with a Catholic friend at the age of 17. Of course none of this makes much difference. Our feet do their stuff, and we cheerfully take note of our progress. If I were God, and out of the bounty or emptiness of my heart I wanted companions to share the good of life, I think I’d let it happen by the replication of protein molecules, and I’d watch it unroll through the invention of religion and the fragile emotions of free will and responsibility. Then I might feel like I had a friend and not a pet rock. The Times reviews a book about that too, “Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society,” by David Sloan Wilson. Sounds interesting. 22 Jan 2003 We had our book group yesterday. I enjoy this. I enjoyed 15 years of a book group at the Penn Library, also all women except for me. I didn’t mind this, although I would prefer mixed company. Some men seem to be timid about books, among women anyway. I gather that there’s an all male group in the Nauset Newcomers. Do they read war histories? I like those too. At Penn we did a lot of contemporary women authors. The Cape group reads classics and biographies. Nancy led the discussion yesterday of Katherine Drinker Bowen’s Yankee from Olympus; Justice Holmes and his Family. Everyone loved it. It was rather inspiring and full of great quotes which I will probably pass along to my long-suffering children. The ladies complained that not enough was said about his decisions on the Court, which was true. I marveled at the ca. 1900 quote from Frederick Townsend Martin, “We are the rich. We own America; we got it, God knows how, but we intend to keep it if we can by throwing all the tremendous weight of our support, our influence, our money, our political connections, our purchased Senators, our hungry congressmen, our public-speaking demagogues into the scale against any legislature, any political platform, any Presidential campaign that threatens the integrity of our estate.” -- We need Teddy Roosevelt, and we have Teddy Kennedy. –- I’ve also been enjoying Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Stel; the fates of human societies, which proposes that the rise and advance of civilizations was determined by geography and not racial differences. He uses the descriptive term ‘kleptocracy,’ which I hadn’t heard before. -- I learn from the evolutionary biologists that we all have the same brain, which was developed to serve the needs of hunter/gatherers 50,000 years ago. I enjoy our visits to Philadelphia, seeing the children more or less prospering in their native habitat and then retiring to the safety of our bland hotel room. It’s a large motel actually, high on a hill overlooking the incredible juncture of the PA Turnpike with the Blue Route as well as two large shopping centers. I like going down early to the free continental breakfast and pretending I’m on a business trip. Perhaps we wouldn’t have chosen the coldest day of the year, but we’ll pack arctic gear in the trunk and hope for the best. We are enjoying watching the sea ice pile up. One of the women yesterday said, “I like extreme weather.” We agree, although we’d prefer no casualties and would exclude extreme heat. There have been some lovely big waves at Coast Guard Beach lately. We walked out there on Saturday to see the Marconi exhibits at the Coast Guard Station. It was interesting, if obscure. It brought back to me my youthful impression that folks involved in amateur radio were generally on the scruffy side. Just an observation. I lean to the scruffy myself.
FEBRUARY We’re enjoying winter too. It’s nice to be able to enjoy weather rather than struggle with it. On the other hand, it’s nice to have a little weather, which I gather one doesn’t in Southern California. A week in the teens froze the ponds and the edge of the bay. We love to watch the bay pretend to be the Arctic Ocean, with miniature ice floes and ridges that rise and fall and crack and with the tides. Geese and black ducks gather in the few open pools but fly off when we approach. It’s still hunting season. Yes, children disperse. We’re glad that ours are still in Philadelphia for the moment. -- The Penn Library Cafe! Good Lord, I’d forgotten all about that plan. An entire class has come and gone. Well, better late… I’m sure a superior coffee was selected. It’s a somewhat mysterious business. The best cup of coffee I ever had was, remarkably, at a coffee shop in Liberty Place, the next at the railroad station in Florence (It’ly), the third boiled coffee at my French Composition and Conversation final at Professor Turner’s shack in the N.J. pine barrons in 1956. We’re nearly halfway through our fourth year on Cape Cod, and it has been truly the best of times. If it’s an ivory tower (or a sand castle) it seems to us no less purposeful or more confused than the rest of the world. I’ve been pigging out this week with a book about World War II in North Africa. It’s amazing how often in the first months of our involvement the American generals sent troops into battle without adequate preparation, knowledge of the terrain, or even scouts to see where the enemy really was. We found out but at a price. We’re still doing it, blundering aimlessly about our country and the world, unprepared and dumb despite our vast resources and sophisticated technology. Iraq like Waco is a problem that needs solving, but we have no patience and little understanding of how to respond effectively. – There’s the added complication that our President appears to believe that God has put him on this earth to see that we all do what he thinks best. -- A steady stream of letters and emails flows from Cape Cod (where in our town over 60 percent of the population is retired) to state and federal congresspersons, asking that we avoid war and support the poor and the sick, and (of course) the elderly. I was particularly disturbed by an article in today’s Times by Bob Herbert about massive unemployment among young men. I still enjoy military histories, but as I get older the accounts of thousands of young men dying, often so unnecessarily, become increasingly distressing. I note that the old generals are rarely hawks. They even had to shut up Stormin’ Norman. We had a nice visit with our children in Philadelphia. We almost enjoy the drive as it becomes routine. We have 135,000 miles on our Honda, but it gets regular checkups, and we hope for the best. A friend’s Honda “died”. It needed a power steering rack and four new tires, a $1000 expense. I think people just lose their nerve after a while, but we’ll see. We’d like to keep ours indefinitely, or at least until we can replace it with a car that runs on hydrogen, or sand. – We had a good dinner at John and Megan’s center city apartment, a pleasant evening, and a peek at Saturday night live in Philly. A good lunch and chat at Sara’s was followed by an interesting visit to the Sedgwick Cultural Center in an old movie palace in Mt. Airy and the nifty new coffee shop next store. The theatre itself is used as a warehouse, but the foyer and amphitheater are so huge that they serve for now. I would love to help restore its grandeur, but I understand there are many layers of difficulty. For the present it’s a tattered but still impressive venue. Mt. Airy is one of the most successful multicultural neighborhoods in the country (and maybe the world). Our government should study and support it! Quelle blague, as the French say. We watched about 5 minutes of the Superbowl on the hotel TV. I guess it failed to capture our interest. We look forward to our visit to Florida in March. I don’t care for air travel, but I don’t see it as more dangerous now than it has ever been. It’s probably safer. A train trip would be nice. I remember Pullman cars in the 1940’s with great pleasure. Getting there was truly half the fun, reading, dining, and meditating on the passing scene. Someday perhaps it will be practical again. -- I’m a sucker for space travel and hope eventually to hear from the little green men, but surely we can take our time. Unmanned missions seem more sensible for now. Nancy is having the “church ladies” to lunch. She will offer them Sara’s delicious chocolate pudding cake and a printout of my cousin’s thoughtful comments on Iraq for discussion. A good group, Nancy says, a bit livelier than when their spouses get together for men’s group. (men’s? I guess that’s right; it looked funny. The rest rooms at the Stop and Shop are labeled ‘WOMENS’ and ‘MENS’. I’m reminded of a drill sergeant saying, “I want all you mens to pick up on your steel pots.”). I handed over the last of my responsibilities as Fellowship Treasurer. It was interesting, but two years is plenty. The writing group continues at low speed. I’m also attending a 6 week free poetry workshop. It requires me to write poetry, something which I enjoy but don’t do naturally. The French conversation hour has decided to prolong itself even without our charming Belgian leader. I will participate, and see what happens. This is another interesting bunch with varied backgrounds, although mostly teaching and international business, a German woman, the wife of a retired NYC policeman, a Canadian artist, a cartoonist for the local paper, a woman just retired from teaching French in the Lower Merion schools. Most are more fluent than I, but I hang in and improve. At least my accent is good. It was snowing this morning, but I made my 8:30 date with Stan for coffee and doughnuts at the Orleans Hole-in-One. He’s 90 and going strong, so I guess I’d better try to keep going as well The futon, which was functionally complete for Christmas, is now finished except for painting. This will have to wait for warmer weather, as the undercoat is toxic. Tonight I am to cook Portuguese catfish, or rather catfish a la Portuguese. The catfish are their own. So it goes. 16 Feb 03 We’ve had a pot load of splendid snow, maybe 18 inches in the last couple weeks. Nothing has melted, but some has evaporated in the cold dry air. Four degrees this morning. Still, when Nancy and I walked around Nauset Marsh two days ago we floundered in 3 foot drifts. All quite lovely, and we have taken far too many pictures. I hope some of them come out. I’m going to try Rhoda’s writing group in Chatham next week. It’s supposedly a hard-nosed one. We shall see. My series of short stories about Morris the retired gangster seems to keep growing. The Saturday group revived this week, with Lella, Marion, Ailsa, Rick and I. Rick is a roofer in his forties. He read the chapter of Glen where Glen gets to Vietnam. We were very surprised to learn that Rick had never been there or even in the Army,as the story was gripping. His experience is of Africa which is the last and longest section of his novel. Ailsa read some new writing about her childhood in Argentina which I said (honestly) sounded like Proust. The French conversation group will continue for now. I understand more each time. Mac had copies of Courrier Internationale, a weekly French version of World Press Review. I borrowed one and read the whole thing. I’ll borrow more. The French practice is good, and the view of world opinion is fascinating. I wish I had decided decades ago to swot up my French. It hasn’t been that hard to get going. It’s amazing to me that words I learned nearly 50 years ago and couldn’t possibly have used since are still there. Context helps. We often have to write a few sentences in Common Time about “what if..” (you had three wishes, superpowers, etc., etc.) I have trouble with this. I’m very reluctant to think beyond what I think is possible for me. It seems wasteful, foolish, cheating life, the way I feel about drugs, thrill sports, and gambling. -- But it does occur to me that it would be nice to be rich enough to pay for grad school for you children. Alas, you’ll have to manage on your own, but I hope you all can if you will. You have the minds, and learning is surely the greatest and most thrilling adventure imaginable. Book group Monday, a book by Fannie Flagg (the Fried Green Tomatoes lady). It’s in part about a boy who was 11 in 1946 in a small town in Missouri! Sound familiar? But alas it didn’t seem all that familiar to me. It was sort of simplistically surrealistic. Doesn’t matter. We always enjoy the sessions anyway. I recommend book groups. Don’t be put off by the presence of seniors. They have much to contribute. – I note that since Greenspan questions the President’s deficit spending he is suddenly too old and has to go. Feb 23 2003 Our roof didn’t collapse under the weight of 20 inches of rain sodden snow. Perhaps it never would have, or perhaps it helped enough that I’d cleaned off about half from the top of a ladder. I don’t think this sort of thing happens very often. If it does, I’ll have to get myself a New England snow rake. The Red Maple Swamp not surprisingly is very wet, with larges stretches of standing water and water up to the surface of the boardwalk in places. The bull brier, cat brier, and raspberry has been flattened. I’m sure it will spring back in the spring. The sweet pepperbush might be a bit damaged. We took a long stroll south on Coast Guard Beach on Saturday, with quite a few other winter walkers. It’s lovely cold or hot. We walked the bay beach from Campground to Thumpertown. Big bulldozers have dumped and smoothed sand between the cliff and the icepack. It’s ugly, but the tide will smooth it out. Sand is better than boulders. The wooden tide fences have taken a tremendous battering. We are all waiting around whistling until the first new trophy home plunges into the bay. I looked at the AAVS site. Very nice, though slow to load through my telephone connection. Maybe everyone is moving to cable. I note no staff names are listed. I hope you guys don’t feel threatened. I suppose that’s possible. I see the Sedgwick site is in transition. Looks good too. Penn has a new site, which Ellen says they have wrangled over for two years. Talk about many cooks. It’s okay, but I don’t see how it’s better than the old one. I note the perennial prominence of Alumnae and Special collections. I don’t suppose I have to explain that to you guys! http://newsite.library.upenn.edu/ I’ve put up a Fellowship site on my page. We may link a history page and a few other things, but it’s not a complicated story to tell: http://snow.prohosting.com/nauset/fellowship.htm All I had to do was add the /fellowship.htm to my own address. It was fun to get back into this for a little. I found JMC through Google for Sedgewick and contribution to graves database! RMC is still there for Shadow Walkers and Penn. I not sure the Penn stuff is actually available through the Library web site. Maybe it just lives in limbo on their computer. There is no electronic immortality. Thanks for the various odd links you’ve sent. Some I pass along to others. In addition to the 5x7 covered back stoop, Nancy has suggested bumping out my lavatory to include a shower and laundry facilities. She’s planning for the day when she doesn’t want to climb the basement stairs. Actually I think she would always have preferred not to have to enter a basement. That’s my realm. Those should keep me busy for a while. I’ll try Rhoda’s writing group tomorrow. I have a couple more short stories to put up on the web. They come out of the woodwork. I don’t know which is more depressing, the international or the national news. Bush rushes to war despite huge world opposition and the obvious fact that our only real security against terrorism is international agreement based on justice and mercy. Bush ravages domestic social services, health care, civil rights, criminal justice, financial probity, and the environment. Nixon’s crimes were personal and minor; Clinton’s were ludicrous. Reagan’s were significant, if he was aware of them, but he was loved anyway. George W’s havoc is monumental, but so what evidently. Arrrrgh. MARCH March 17 2003 Grandmother seems in good spirits. She plays pinochle and bridge, and gets out in the world a couple days a week. . She enjoys letters. They can be brief. The picnic was nice. The park is a couple of miles west of Regency Oaks on Tampa Bay, well shaded with live Oaks, palms, pines and various plantings and centering on a 50 foot tall Indian mound. I didn’t know they had these in Florida. Grandmother went back on the first bus. Nancy and I stayed another hour and explored. There has been plenty of rain. Everything is green, and all the flowers are blooming. It was 70’s to 80, partly sunny, not too hot though almost. I felt the slight claustrophobia I always feel in Florida, everything flat (except the mound) and completely manicured. Lunch Saturday at Bon Appetit with Clare was excellent. At the risk of sounding like a 67 year old man, I had a delicious broiled snook sandwich. Snook is a fish, but is it a particular fish or just a piece of any fish, as scrod is? Anyway good. We admired the boats and the pelicans. Afterward Nancy and I walked in Dunedin, which has attempted with modest success to go arty. One restaurant had a big table outdoors where 15-20 “young” people (20’s and 30’s) stood around large pitchers of beer being noisy at 2:00 in the afternoon. It didn’t look particularly Dionysian. Clare is 90 and not well, but is lively, smart, and kind. She has been everywhere, including China and Antarctica, and fairly recently too. Why would you want to go to Antarctica, my mother asked, genuinely puzzled. Clare explained. The return flight was on time, and my seat mate was of normal size and was reading a book I had seen reviewed in the Times. He didn’t chat, so neither did I. We did listen to several announcements at the airport about ‘lost’ flight attendants. Nancy asked, “if you were a airline would you make a public announcement that you had lost track of 3 flight attendants?” How about the mechanics, the engines? They came in on a delayed flight apparently, and we were told that too. Sporadic disclosure. Security wasn’t at all onerous. Some people had to remove their shoes, but we didn’t. Who can say if it is effective, but the flight was uneventful. We look forward to San Francisco, but not to getting there. The joys of air travel are wasted on the aging. If we were fabulously wealthy we’d take the train. We were delighted to get back to the Cape, which looks marvelous, even soggy with old snow. Apparently only 5 people in the world want a war. Unfortunately it seems that they can have one.
APRIL 2 April 03 Now that April’s here, it’s raining like fury. I threw a raincoat over my head yesterday morning, and went out to the garage to get an umbrella from the car before I went to retrieve the Sunday Times from the driveway. I left the garage door open. We just started closing it the night before to keep the squirrels from nesting there. When we came out at 10 to go to the Fellowship, a squirrel had already begun stuffing neatly shredded newspaper in the rafters. I hounded it out and closed the door. Have we artificially speeded squirrel evolution? A coolie hat and a one-foot stovepipe kept them off the birdfeeders last year, but a new batch of smartsquirrels defeated us this spring. I’ve now used a 2 foot stovepipe, but I have no confidence they won’t break that barrier as well. To be honest, I’m glad that battle isn’t over. How could anyone see a squirrel give him a beady stare through the picture window and then zip past his defenses with an arrogant flip of the tail and still think the Lord gave us dominion over all the beasts of the field? – Today it’s snowing. The other battle is less amusing. I’m reluctant to turn on the TV in the morning, but I always do. Nearly everyone, reporters, commentators, soldiers, politicians, and citizens, seems puzzled, awkward, embarrassed, as well we might. We were very much against the war, for all the usual reasons but particularly because the only hope for a safe and sane world these days seems to be international agreement based on economic and social justice, and the war does major damage to that possibility. However, as neither Saddam nor George is likely to quit, I hope that we “win” it as quickly and painlessly as possible. It’s annoying of the Iraqis not to see it this way. I’m also disturbed by the open religious fanaticism of the Bush administration and by the evidence that they are deliberately trying to destroy our social support system by large tax cuts and deficit spending. Is this really what slightly less than a majority of the voters wanted? -- What do you think? Our brief visit to Florida was pleasant. The flowers were all in bloom, the lizards quick, and the live oaks healthy. Among the delights were a wonderfully high-fat hot dog and a delicious snook sandwich. (The spell checker suggests: shook, spook, snoop, snood, and nook, but I remember fishermen catching snook 60 years ago.) Nancy is busy with her school volunteering and is involved in a committee to support the after school programs, for which I think we are to help out at (and buy tickets to) a Chinese dinner cooked by Bill Opel. I expect to be a cowbird before a large audience for Common Time. The Tuesday afternoon French conversation hour remains active, and continues to attract strangely interesting francophones. I highly recommend the Courrier Internationale. I made a web site for the Fellowship at snow.prohosting.com/nauset/fellowship (but today I can’t update it for April). My new writing group is great. It’s in Chatham, a half hour drive, but worth it. It’s more men than women (just an observation), all business, and very harsh. But, if you’re willing to pick up and reassemble the surviving bits, you have a better piece of work. We look forward to San Francisco in a couple of weeks. Maybe the plane won’t be too crowded. I’m always glad to hear from everyone. Judging from airports and shopping malls one would suppose we all lived identical lives, but I know that isn’t so. 7 April 03 I just wrote a letter to grandmother and decided to send you a “real” one too. I know the electrons get the message across, but it isn’t quite the same. And I can include the clip. Was Genetic Adam’s wife Mitochondrial Eve? I can see a Farside here. Paleontology, to be sure, but with implications for archeology and anthropology, and everything else. Pinker remains my book of the month, although maybe the chapter on the arts is too obvious. If the evolutionary biologists are right, which seems likely to me, their theories affect everything from criminology to the arts but do little damage to common sense. The fact that identical twins raised separately seem to correlate closely in intelligence, personality, and social, political, and aesthetic views says rather a lot. [NB: Bush ’41 and Bush ’43 have much in common, but their minor differences could be enough to destroy the world.] The motto of the 1851 Boston Public Library, maybe quoting Madison or someone, is roughly that a democracy requires an educated populace. At the time I doubt they had science in mind. Now one must. As it gets still more hairy, we will need still better interpreters. Fortunately Pinker writes well. Doane Road is being worked on, so we were alone at Coast Guard Beach yesterday on a lovely cool but sunny afternoon. So many greens merging into so may blues! The surf sounded like the worlds longest freight train. We are expecting snow today. We don’t mind the cold but would like to see the tiny buds, leaves, and shoots feel safe enough to come out of hiding. – I did my spring cleanup in about 15 minutes this afternoon, raking a few leaves and adding a few fallen branches to the boma at the back of the yard (thus forcing the lions to come to the front door.) A technical question. I’ve found a nice web site where I can simultaneously read and hear real French. I’d like to record 3 to 5 minutes of the French, but there seems to be no way to do that except indirectly (with a tape recorder). My Dell has a sound recorder, which needs an external mike. I may look for one at Radio Shack. But, darn it, why can’t the web input be saved as a .wav file? I even got an XP manual from the Library, but it says nothing about this. -- Big files aren’t they? I recorded 1 minute of silence, and it made a 1 meg file. But I have a 40 gig hard drive, so I could record 5 minutes without a problem. Just a query. Odd thing. I had a “low battery power” message on boot the other day. So, I emailed Dell, and a day later a technician appeared at the house and replaced the battery. I half suspect this is a scam of sorts. I never had a battery problem in 20 years of plain-jane computers. Are they showing off their service contract so I’ll renew in June? The war, aaaargh. I’m glad we’re wining handily, and evidently even buying some hearts and minds. No, that’s too cynical; I do believe that life under Saddam must have been hellish. (Though a hard life is surely preferable to accidental death by friendly fire.) I agreed fully with the Euros that we shouldn’t have done it this way, but I am amused at their sudden interest in the spoils of peace, while the little red hen says, Hey, you didn’t help me bake the bread, why do you think you’re going to eat it? Rachmaninoff’s 3d piano concerto was the “evening classic” last night. It’s a cliché, but some music is indeed achingly beautiful. Listen if you haven’t lately. I gather he wrote it for a pianist friend, Joseph Hoffman, while coming off a long period of depression. Think about his mind imagining this music, the neurons and the interconnections! Gar. -- I know you have far broader musical interests than we, but classical music is an acquired taste, like caviar. Speaking of food, Millard tells me that Nancy Fairbanks Herndon has come out with a new food mystery, Chocolate Quake, set in San Francisco. I plan to ask her for SF suggestions. You too. What’s good to see, eat, whatever? – I think I sent our yellow split pea soup recipe, incredibly cheap and delicious. We tried it with one can of chicken broth and one can of vegetable broth (because we wanted to use up the vege broth) and it was just as good, maybe better. Changes in one’s life always seem to me to underline the importance of also having an independent and consistent life of the mind. Mine has been a bit too unfocused, but it’s been richer than not having one. – All changes are of course hard work. 14 April 2003 Neighborhoods: I've been reading about Paris, which is supposedly special for having a monumental center surrounded by many charming and friendly neighborhoods. Paris-on-the-Delaware has its nice points too. Eastham lacks city graces, but it is more like a village than Oreland, for us anyway. We've come to know so many people and find our lives interestingly intertwined. Rick, the guy who was telling me about San Francisco, is in my Eastham writing group and is working on a really good novel. He's a psychologist/roofer who replaced Harry and Edna's roof. So we recommended him to a friend from our book group. We went to a talk on "Democracy and Wealth" the other night, given by Bob K, who we now know, who taught poli sci at Bard College for years, and who was our neighbor when we rented the Rockwood cottage on Herringbrook Road, the one with the rope swing. Nancy is the corresponding secretary for the Eastham Children’s Something, which Bob's wife Min chairs. Cheryl from Common Time, which may move to the Orleans Elementary School next year, comes to the Eastham writer's group, and Cheryl and Her husband Sid are coming to our joint dinner with Am ha Yam in May, for which I have to repair one of the refectory tables. And so it goes. Rhoda wants me to join her Homeric Greek class, but I don't think I have the energy. -- Sounds like a comedy routine. What will happen in the Middle East? I hope for the best and fear the worst. Not too original, but what can you do. We'll write Teddy and urge him to push deferral to the UN. Fat chance. So, no vast stores of WMD's in Eye-rack? The inspections might have done the job? All those lives lost. I think I feel the worst about the pillaging of the National Museum. The oldest civilization on earth, destroyed thanks to the newest. Quite an accomplishment. I can image what the Revue de la Press will have to say about that. Pinker, which I’ve just finished, is my book of the month. If the evolutionary biologists are right, which seems likely to me, their theories affect everything from criminology to the arts but do little damage to common sense. The idea: our brains are a collection of modules, self-assembled by natural selection over many million years, to serve the needs of hunter-gatherer tribes of hominids. They haven’t had time to adapt to the new needs of the last 10,000 years, and particularly of the last thousand. We have a built–in apparatus for learning speech. (How about those isolated siblings who develop their own private languages? Or is that an urban legend. -- Legends are stories handed down; it seems to me that most UL’s are hoaxes.) But we have no mechanism for learning to write or calculate; hence the difficulty in learning. A quick review of the web doesn’t suggest to me that Chomsky has rejected innate language structures altogether. Tell me if I’m wrong. -- Nancy studied both Chomsky and Piaget in grad school but claims to have no lore to impart. Surely it’s a matter of degree. Chomsky and Piaget can’t believe in a true blank slate, and Pinker acknowledges lifelong brain development. The fact that identical twins raised separately seem to correlate closely in intelligence, personality, and social, political, and aesthetic views says rather a lot. This is not determinism per se. Bush ’41 and Bush ’43 have much in common, but their minor differences are enough to destroy the world. Why does half the nation choose to follow George W. down the rabbit hole ? Because our general political preferences are built in, and perhaps greed, violence, loyalty to the tribe, etc. were useful survival traits for hunter-gathers? If so, the good guys have an uphill battle, but they know that. Bob K (Wednesday night at the Eastham Town Hall) seems to feel we are ready for a leftward swing of the pendulum. I hope so. There was a grand old self-proclaimed socialist in attendance, a local sculptor. I told him I was glad to know there were a few of us around. California It's 6:55 Pacific Time, earlier your time and later according to my internal clock, and the sun is lighting up the top of the ornate Victorian across the street. We're doing fine, the drive to Boston was easy, the Holiday Inn okay, and its restaurant good. The flight was long, but uneventful, and we got a great view of the Sierra Nevada. Mari and Gloria were most welcoming, and their house is thoroughly nifty. California is looking green and terrific. Nancy and I walked in the park Friday, a cool and sunny morning, while M and G worked a half day. The Conservatory was being worked on, but we went to the Japanese Garden which was uncrowded and lovely. Nancy took lots of pictures. We wandered through the Botanical Gardens, noting the exotic plants, baby ducks, and many languages being spoken (not by the ducks). What got me most were the huge trees and the palm jungles. A fascinating neighborhood too. I'm amazed at how quiet it is here. You guys know all this of course. It's still here. We had a very pleasant dinner with G's sister, her husband Jeffrey and daughter Miranda, who is probably going to Penn Grad school in the Fall for architecture. I think you've met them. The daughter intelligent and quiet, the husband quiet and amusing, the sister not at all quiet, very sharp and great fun. Today we are going to a restaurant and Beach Blanket Bingo. An institution evidently, perhaps like The Mousetrap in London or that midnight movie in P'town? Will no doubt enjoy it. Tomorrow Easter, Church and the really BIG family dinner. We will offer to help, but they are so efficient. We do get to make our fish stew on Monday, picking up the ingredients on the way home, after a day downtown. Mari and Gloria are so nice to us. I know they are both overworked, but they live graciously and with verve. Maybe their daily runs keep them strong! Stay in touch. I get my email. -- Including one rather ghastly little piece of gossip. Ellen D. told me that the Head Librarian at Penn has been arrested for child pornography. Jane always disliked him. I disapproved of his monumentalism and insistence on promoting our services, and I avoided him as much as possible, but I didn't really dislike him. I feel bad for my old pals, and for Penn and the profession for that matter. But they'll all survive. I'm glad Patricia and Jane had moved on to Columbia and Princeton. So it goes, an imperfect world.-- I can barely think of Iraq's museums, libraries, and hospitals without grinding my teeth. Was this stupidity on the part of our administration, or, it just now occurs to me with horror, was it malevolence? Ah but the trees are so great here ! Saturday was another beautiful day in the Bay Area. Nancy and I walked around Mari's neighborhood in the morning, admiring the varied and beautiful houses and remarkable plantings. The strange foliage helps to achieve the Land of OZ effect. Of course the many BMW's, etc. underline the rather privileged nature of the population (in close proximity to the homeless hippies of Haight Street). The people seem friendly; they say a cheery hello, though it may be we Cape Codders who initiate this. After lunch, Mari and Gloria drove us across the Golden Gate and up the spooky mountain roads to the Point Bonita lighthouse. Wow, these are the sights I've seen only in movies. It was a lovely clear day, so we could see the city, the bridges, the tankers coming to harbor, millions of birds, the surf and rocks far below, and even a big seal or two. The sign says a half mile walk to the lighthouse, but there are half miles, and then there are half miles! I guess we're in better shape than we thought. We walked around North Beach later that afternoon and saw the various famous spots. It's an interesting and colorful neighborhood. We saw approximately where Gloria's grandparents' first house was. There was a Christian rock concert in the North Beach Park and lots of probably not too devout lollers. After excellent pizza in a very Italian restaurant, we were taken to Beach Blanket Babylon (I keep thinking it's Beach Blanket Bingo, but I have no idea where that came from.) It was quite a spectacle, and amusing although I had difficulty hearing the words. Nancy and I also missed some of the more contemporary pop references. Today, Sunday, we go to Church and hear Mari's choir, then rest and prepare for the big family dinner, and then have it! Lamb and ham. The table is set for 10, and the "children" (early 20's?) will be in the kitchen. Should be fun. I love San Francisco as much as on our last visit. It's gorgeous and gracious, and the quality of life looks inviting. Oddly though, this time I have no strong desire to live here (practicality aside!). We have been thoroughly captured by the Cape's slower pace and quieter beauty. Well, it is nice now and then to be where you want to be and to know it. Better yet, I suppose, is to value and enjoy wherever you happen to be. Always a tussle. -- Philadelphia is not quite OZ, but perhaps that isn't altogether a bad thing. It has it's own glories and challenges. (Hark, what's that! Oh yes, a skate board zipping past on the sidewalk at 50 mph.) There are few skate boards in Eastham. Few hills. Church at Holy Innocents was splendid. As I've said, I enjoy and value the Episcopal Church liturgy and music, and both were particularly well done at H.I. It's quite High Church, much chanting and processing, and even a bit of bells and incense, which I find pleasant and helpful if one doesn't take it too seriously, as no one seemed to (or perhaps one should say serious but not necessary or exclusive.) Communion was taken "in-the-round" around a free-standing altar. And why not? It's very much a congregation open to all sorts and conditions. I wish we had one like it on the Cape, though I would feel bad about disserting the Fellowship. (Am ha Yam, the Reconstructionist Jewish congregation is in many ways close to what suits my mind - a sort of respectful, even worshipful attitude towards reality.) I could hardly say I accepted all the theology implied by the words of the Episcopal liturgy, but who does or can? -- Bush and Rove and Franklin Graham (yech!) and company make one almost ashamed, and downright concerned, to be a Christian of any sort. -- The "coffee hour" afterward was good for lunch, with sandwiches and Champagne, a bit flossied up for Easter but not much we're told. The Fellowship would drink champagne if it were supplied. Bill Opel refused to put on his Chinese dinner for the ECEC at the Methodist Hall, as they wouldn't allow wine. Let me again recommend the UU 's, as providing companionship, support, intellectual stimulation, and contacts, and an acceptance of all non-exclusive beliefs. There may be, probably are, Episcopal, Friends, or other congregations of similar openness. It's really mostly a matter of getting together with more than one other person and saying, "here we all are in this strangely leaky craft; what do we make of it, and what do we do about it?" Nancy and I took another walk in the park in the afternoon, a very lively scene. We wandered through a vast (I would say "hippie") scene, including a large impromptu percussion concert. "We" (well, we offered to help) are now cooking dinner, guests expected to arrive within the hour. To be continued. The dinner was wonderful. You know many of the cast of characters, Aunt Rose, Jeffery, Louise, Miranda, et al. Miranda is definitely coming to Penn for the Architecture grad school and will be in Philadelphia starting in June. Mari will put you in touch. I found her calm, smart, and friendly. She's just 24, but I guess you met her. I had a long talk with Jeffrey about writing and poetry. He has a Ph.D. in English, writes poetry, and makes his living supervising writers of computer manuals. Louise is also a technical writer. -- Perhaps there's an interim field to explore. This morning Nancy and I are off to the city to explore the waterfront and on the way back to pick up the ingredients for a fish stew. And so we did. We took the N and the F lines, walked, and ate salad and Boudin bread, took the F and the N lines back to the supermarket and then home. We felt quite the city dwellers carrying a French batard on the street car. 28 April About Pinker’s THE BLANK SLATE: I read his stuff mostly out of curiosity, and for entertainment, but I always have to try to work everything I know into a tentative world view. Don’t we all? -- Pinker begins his book by saying that his colleagues asked him, “Why bother, when nobody nowadays believes in the blank slate, the ghost in the machine, or the noble savage?” But in one way or another many people do. Fifty years ago in sociology class I was taught how malleable infants were and how they could be socialized to be almost anything. In practical terms most people still believe this: spare the rod…, it’s the parent’s fault, it’s TV, it’s video games, give me a boy for his first 7 years; let’s have no Commie teachers or gay scoutmasters, change your behavior! Etc. I don’t understand why you think Pinker is a lightweight, or precisely what you disagree with in his writing. I’m sure he’s considered competent in neuro-physiology, particularly the biology of binocular vision. I understand from a friend that Harvard has just stolen him from MIT. If Pinker isn’t allowed to speculate outside of his field, who is? I read Orr’s February review of The Blank Slate in NYRB, Pinker’s reply, and Orr’s reply to that. It all seems niggling To recap what I generally get out of TBS: our brain is a collection of calculating modules, assembled by natural selection over a long time to serve the needs of hominid hunter-gatherers. It hasn’t had time to adapt to the needs of the last 10,000 years, and particularly of the last thousand. Almost everything that’s hard-wired is adaptive. Our lives and personalities are a mixture of heredity, peer pressure, and luck. A lot of our activity is adaptive, and some of it isn’t. Pinker, E.O. Wilson, Dennett, Rorty, and Darwin all struck a familiar chord for me. This, without the scientific detail, is what I’d always assumed, or at least found reasonable in whatever form I first heard it. Doesn’t it seem to you that we generate our beliefs, not vice-versa? Ancient Hindu philosophers and contemporary televangelists seem to me programmed from the start. There are probably thousands of Hitlers, Stalins, Maos, Einsteins, Schweitzers, and Mozarts, born every year, but few get to go on stage. If I were the sort of theist who conceives The Ground of Being as wanting companions, this is surely how I imagine he’d make them, with randy protein molecules, not fatwas. But I’m a pantheist, positivist, amateur scientist, determinist, dilettante, and seeker, and like Pinker, Wilson, Dennett, et al, (or William James, whose beliefs were similar). I love the ludicrous complexity of our origins and don’t believe this takes away the fun, the beauty, or the challenge of life. We insist anyway on trying to figure things out and to be good citizens, husbands and fathers, to take out the trash, to smell the roses. My father’s heroes were Tarzan and Jesus Christ. I’d add Camus’s Dr. Rieux, and maybe Charlie Brown. I found the following at the end of Jill Walsh’s A PRESUMPTION OF DEATH, a so so new Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane mystery. I imagine it’s from Prometheus Unbound, and of course it’s a bit much to put on your banner, but what do we have to lose?
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; My rats are more intelligent, more rational than humans but less imaginative. They know this. I try to write my rats simple. I try to write humans as I see them. You think Benefit of Clergy is a simple story? It’s 99% autobiographical and has no simpler ending. Your cuts are brilliant as always. Cut ‘God saving souls’; I need to say something else here. BUT people DON’T know this; they think clergy do save souls, or mean to, even some clergy think this. And of course they assume we have souls to save! – It’s VERY tempting to have Don stuff the $20 bill under Miss Adams’ door. I love it! I just can’t think why he’d do it. I didn’t much like the one Barbara Pym I read. I think I thought it was mean, but that was a while ago. Nancy likes Angella Thirkil, and Trollope. I don’t think I particularly liked Beatrice Potter, or Wind in the Willows. I like Charlotte’s Web, Tolkein, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, and Pooh. I could do a series of Green Pig books, but do I want to?
MAY 1 May 03 My father took a morning walk for his health, but also because he enjoyed parading his tiny dog through the neighborhood of old “Florida” style houses near their condo, and because 7:00 am is the latest in the day you can do anything that strenuous in Florida. In Eastham I’m awake, my eyes blurry, by 6:30. By 7:00, I can observe herds of SUV’s and pick up beer cans and Cheeto bags with equanimity. I saw four identical monsters parked at one house. We test drove a Plymouth Voyager 20 years ago. Nancy felt it was too big and high off the ground, like a school bus. That was the idea, but around then we stopped having to cart all four children at once. We were delighted with Grampa’s Honda Civic. It’s startling to see so many New York license plates on high speed runs for morning coffee and doughnuts at the Hole-in-One. The very old man who returns from Florida each summer is out cultivating his garden. He’s wisely surrounded it with plastic construction fence to protect it from alligators. The birds are busy. I went to my writing group in Chatham Tuesday. It was a bright, cool summer morning, and the village was polished and humming at 10 am, with aging preppies in the crosswalks, dogs on leash, and heavy but polite traffic. A shiny ’56 Rolls was parked outside one of the breakfast bistros. (I was told the vintage by a groupee; I don’t know my Rolls that well.) What popped into my head was: “Disney World!” Did I mention Dana F.? I’d hung the sign on the Chapel, “Dana Franchetti, Classical Music.” He was asked to inaugurate our new digital piano. We wandered in Sunday morning and noticed a short, round, bearded street person. It took a while for me to realize he was our artist. I’d thought Dana was a “she”, as in “Ghost Busters.” He was great: funny, serious, informative, and good. He played some difficult Chopin and Brahms piano works with tremendous brio. Nancy said to him, “You really love it, don’t you?” Peter knows and likes him. He says he delivers papers for the Cape Codder and works as a naturalist for the Center for Coastal Studies. He gives many free concerts at the Wellfleet Library. The Cape is teeming with such characters. Emerson noted that because Thoreau hadn’t wasted his life at the needless toil of a steady job, he was the only really free person, “the only man of leisure in town.” Another era, alas, when our longevity was in the stars and health insurance well over the horizon. -- I asked Nancy if she’d like a keyboard. I sensed a weakening. Art asked if I would work up my tenor recorder for their group. It would probably be unwise. I’m short of both time and talent. Even retirees have to make choices. The Cape has its own nationally recognized murder mystery and book. Maria Flook’s INVISIBLE EDEN, on the Christa Worthington murder in Truro, is the East Coast’s answer to Lacey Peterson. My surfer dentist (who looked at the biography of Emerson and said, “I’m GOING to read a book this weekend, but not one that big.”), said he’d seen Flook and the Barnstable County DA tête-à-tête at a local restaurant. We live in a small town 60 miles long with a population in the hundreds of thousands. Or maybe it’s a small country. 7 May 03 R., I think your book and the three short stories you read to the group are terrific, but I don’t get these two at all. Lars is doing something mean, dumb, and probably unnecessary. Kate seems to be doing something pointless, unless it’s an acting exercise, but that isn’t really suggested. How have I gone wrong? No, I don’t know well any clergymen I particularly like, except Bill Opel and Gordon Major. But I don’t know many clergymen. I liked all my seminary classmates, but I presume they may have changed when they took the cloth. I liked the professors too, but they were more profs than clergy. I did very much like Tom Edwards, the rector at St. Pauls, Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia. I worked with him for seven years as a volunteer in the 1960’s and 70’s. He had a Ph.D. in medieval French from Harvard. He preached brilliant scholarly sermons. He was a masterly watercolorist. He had a nice, smart wife, played a wicked game of tennis, and was a thoroughly decent, kind, and helpful guy. If belief in God could do that for you, you’d want everybody to believe! The soul is a category error, a process taken for an object, but I don’t disdain religion, because I feel I have no firm hold on reality. Who does! “Benefit of Clergy” is a true story, although not over the course of a week, and not about a Roman Catholic priest. I first wrote is as a single day, and maybe that’s better. It seems a bit dilute over a week. Nancy and I were passing out leaflets last night at Town Meeting. I would say over and over, “the after-school program…at the elementary school; the after-school program…at the elementary school… And it suddenly came to me that this felt strangely familiar. Then I remembered: “the blood of Christ…the bread of heaven; the blood of Christ…the bread of heaven” I thought you’d be amused. John’s partner, Megan Manchester, wrote me the following. She was near the head of her class at Hamilton College. Has a B.A. in anthropological linguistics with an emphasis on Chinese. I thought you’d appreciate it: P.S. Steven Pinker also writes fat best sellers on linguistics that recklessly touch on language and culture and put linguistic anthropologists, whose work is not nearly as popular as his, in quite the tizzy. When I read The Language Instinct my freshman year, my anthropology adviser said, when I responded positively to it, "Well, just remember he's WRONG about language and culture." He does seem to spark his fair bit of vitriol. Just sharing. :) We had a wonderful visit to Philadelphia and thank you all. We look forward to the drive now and hope to continue to visit every 3 or 4 months. I hadn’t noticed until this time how symmetrical it was. We start at 7:00, by 9:00 we’ve gone 100 miles to Providence, by 11:00 another 100 to New Haven, having listened for an hour to Car Talk. At New Haven we pick up WQXR 93.6, which takes us to PA. By 1:00 we’ve gone the 3d 100 to North Jersey and eaten our sandwich in southern Connecticut. By 3:00 we’re at the hotel. Driving into and back out of late Spring was spectacular. It was like our long-ago trip to Florida when 2 year old Sara got out of the car in North Carolina and said, “I’m outside, in nothing at all!” No coat, that is. It was also the excellent trip when she learned to use a straw and declared, “Hey! I’m the boss of that cheese sandwich!” We split a “classic” cheese and turkey sub from the Flourtown Wawa for the return trip, with coffee in our carafe from the hotel’s continental breakfast. We have the routine down. – But why was there no oatmeal at breakfast on Sunday? A missed shipment, a money saving measure, the absence of the oatmeal cook? Was there a hastily called executive consultation? It reappeared on Monday. You see odd things along even the dullest roads. There is a surprising variety in construction cranes and sound barriers. Toll booth and EZ-Pass instructions vary confusingly from state to state. We followed a construction vehicle which had a large sign on its read saying, “Construction Vehicle; Do Not Follow.” We had few delays but mused on the 10 lane highways and discussed alternative methods, such as monorail blimps and car-carrying highway rail systems. Town names rang bells: Hackensack, Paramus, Lodi, Mahwah, and Ridgewood. My parents looked at a lovely old Victorian in Ridgewood on a beautiful fall day in 1947. I still regret that we couldn’t buy it, except that it would have changed all our lives most distressingly. I felt a strange nostalgia too for the tight, neat little neighborhoods around Bloomfield, New Jersey, where we never lived. 3-deckers well clad in aluminum siding, and car-lined streets. The comically crowded cemeteries fit in. Suburbia looked its spring best. Would life in suburbia have been richer if we had contributed more to it? Undoubtedly. I was intrigued by Sara’s observation that the many retired people in her building were very friendly. 60% over the age of 60 makes Eastham particularly friendly, and even here young people tend to pass us on the trails as if we didn’t’ exist. – I feel a strange nostalgia for old brick factory buildings, our version of the ruins of ancient Rome. It was good to find you all beginning or investigating interesting futures undaunted, (unstopped anyway; we’re all daunted a bit at times.) We named new car models. Dodge Insipid. Chevy Illusion. Chrysler Euphoria. Volkswagen Vegan (“The only V6 that runs on V8.”). I forget the others
JUNE 5 June 2003 Much change in the air. We hope your adventures are progressing nicely. Things are quiet here on the Cape. Common Time is over for the year, and we don’t know about next year. Nancy’s school is down to one day a week, but she will be greatly valued next year. My last Library meeting as Secretary will be this morning, and I don’t plan to re-up. I will talk on Emerson the last Sunday in August. After the fact, Jan Laine wanted me to combine this with a presentation by Emerson’s great granddaughter, whom she met in the supermarket, but I said thanks anyway. Emerson’s kid can get her own gig. The Tuesday writing and French groups prosper. Genevieve is having a party for Bruce before he goes off to spend the summer at his house in Provence (sounds like a practice sentence; la belle demoiselle qui passé la bas est la voisine de Jean a la classe de matematique de la capitale.) The Saturday writing group is dead. Annie Hall’s group is not yet born. The beans are coming up. We planted 4 tomato plants, impatiens, petunias, and another butterfly bush. The Siberian iris is lovely. The lettuce is a flop. In nearly 40 years on the trails (since ’64), we’ve seen one fox, one seal (at Salt Pond), 1 turtle, 20 frogs, 8 wild turkeys (in a line), and a few squirrels. But our yard swarms with squirrels, chipmunks, skunks, foxes, coyotes, raccoons, hawks, owls and other exotic birds, and the occasional cat. Why is this? Nancy suggests that Mother Westwind’s creatures prefer prepared foods (garbage, birdseed stuffed chipmunks, etc.) to organic fare. There was a good, and favorable, article on animal rights in the May 15, 2003 New York Review of Books. I have only the last two pages but will try to find the others and send them along, if you haven’t seen it. -- “So how have we done? Both the optimists and the cynics about human nature could see the results as confirming their views…..despite the generally favorable course of the philosophical debate about the moral status of animals, popular views are far from adopting the basic idea that the interests of all beings should be given equal consideration irrespective of their species.” I finished THE REACH OF ROME; A History of the Roman Imperial Frontier 1 st -5 th Centuries AD, by Derek Williams, St. Martin’s Pr., 1996. Based on Williams’ translations from the Greek and Latin and archaeological evidence, with a full scholarly apparatus, but quite readable. Says it took him 15 years and apologizes to Olive It seems one seed of the decline and fall was Augustus’s decision to send the legions to do perimeter defense at the far corners of the Empire and keep them out of mischief. I’m reading selectively in THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF ARCHEOLOGY, ed..by Nicholas Wade, Lyon’s Pr., 2000. It’s a collection of the archeology articles from the last 10 years of the Tuesday Science Times. It’s journalistic rather than scholarly but very entertaining and informative; the state of the art and the artists all over the map. There seems to be much overlap with history, anthropology, paleontology, etc. The University of Pa. Museum figures prominently. – One articles says horses were essential to the development of empire, but I gather that THE empire was won and guarded by foot soldiers and 2-mph ox carts. 9 June 2003 I stopped at the Eastham Historical Society’s book and plant sale on Saturday, on my way to spread mulch at the Library. It was such a successful venture that I think I’ll do more of this, and like a wise gambler, carry only what I can afford to spend. It was interesting. I lined up at the gate at 10 minutes of 9:00 with the other collectors, the commercial ones who own or represent the dozen or more used book stores on the Cape. No one ran exactly, most were too old, but several of us walked quickly. I made one fast circuit and saw nothing. I found all my books on the second slower look. There’s a lesson in there somewhere. Fortunately the Historical Society isn’t as sophisticated as the Library, which sells its best books on ebay and prices “trade paperbacks” higher than bodice rippers. I bought 6 almost new paperbacks for 50 cents apiece. My best find was Jacques Barzun’s FROM DAWN TO DECADENCE; 500 years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the present, a book I loved and wanted to own. I also found THE ILIAD, tr. By Richard Lattimore, THE SHORT STORIES OF HEMINGWAY, his best writing and a book we once owned two copies of but now none, A HISTORY OF ISRAEL from Alexander to Bar Kochba, by Jagersma, GREEK AND ROMAN ART by Battersby and Ruskin, with many color illustrations, and CITIES and PEOPLE, a social and architectural history, a quasi coffee-table book that looks quite interesting. As Nancy says, it’s a good thing you can build book cases. Will I read them all? Possibly. Perhaps it’s a subtle sign of aging. I’ve never been a collector before. It’s just as well. We couldn’t bring all our books to the Cape as it was. It seems a cheap, safe hobby, which keeps on giving. The mulch spreading went well, very jolly. Then I cut the grass at the Chapel in the Pines, between Am Ha Yam’s observance of a holy day and a late afternoon wedding. Have chapel, will deal. Nancy stayed home from the Fellowship on Sunday. It was a local leader talking about the health care crisis on the Cape. She felt she knew enough. She was right, although it was a good presentation. An upbeat session, as I said to someone, on a topic which is anything but. We all know the facts: we’re the only industrialized country without universal health care; 40% of the dollar of commercial medicine goes to overhead, vs 2% of the dollar spent on Medicare and 6% on Medicaid, so of course we want to get the government out of our lives! All those nasty entitlements, who needs them! -- The news, gar; how many times do we need to be knocked in the head? Many more evidently. Nancy read the entire Times Sunday Magazine, which is devoted to the economy and was not encouraged. What’s trickling down is the tax burden. Nothing on for today. Tomorrow a party for Bruce, at one of the Sparrows, before he goes off to Provence for the summer. Bruce really is our organizer and speaks fluent non-native French. Gen Sparrow is a native speaker who floats in and out of English without knowing it. Both Wednesday AND Thursday, Nancy has minor operations to remove a non-dangerous skin cancer. If the medical establishment can generate additional complexity, and revenue, it surely will. Friday, Art and I visit Bob who can’t get out these days, and we go to a pot luck at Barbara Jones, the widow of Elmer Rice, who has that wonderful collection of art and literature. Do you care about any of this? Perhaps it doesn’t matter. -- Grandmother is doing okay at Mease Manor Assisted Living. Nancy said in March how she appreciated that my parents had kept up with the family. “That was mostly your father,” said my mother, and indeed it was. There are plenty of people around here who are perhaps obsessively interested in the lives of their children and grandchildren, though really the Fellowship is pretty good about this, as am I. But I never mind listening to them. It gives people pleasure, and it’s actually interesting if you pay attention, like looking at someone else’s slides. -- Make connections and keep them, seek communities, never give up on your fellow human beings. It’s so much work, but it’s what there is. My point, or one of them, is that I will not, until my brains run out my ears, lose interest in my children and their doings. You will continue to hear from me, and I will always enjoy hearing from you (occasionally; as you have busy lives, which is a good thing.) The tomatoes are okay, and the beans are good. With a bit of luck, we’ll have beans for you fresh from the garden, with garlic and beurre noir. I never told you about the coyote I saw in Chatham. I was driving south on route 28 at 10 a.m., on my way to the writer’s group, when I saw a coyote trotting toward me along the edge of the highway, ignoring the cars but proceeding quite properly along the left side of the road, facing the traffic. I’m quite fond of coyotes, though not obsessed like Peter Trull, a local naturalist. I’m concerned though that if they become too blasé there might be a citizen’s backlash. Nancy was a bit unnerved by the pair who stood their ground and stared at us from the marsh a few weeks ago. 12 June 2003 We see that the employment picture continues grim nationally, but I’m sure with persistence you’ll both find what you need. You have a goal, a companion, and good wine and cheese. Omar could want no more. -- Penn is clearly best, but I’d think other schools in the area could supply languages, background, pre-requisites, etc. A Penn job could come along later. You’re in for the long haul. We had a great going-away (to Provence) party for Bruce at the Sparrows. It was to be drinks and nibbles at 3:30, but we were still sitting in a circle and talking at 6:30. A very interested, educated, and well-traveled bunch. We knew each other, of course, but as it were through a glass dimly. It was liberating to speak English just for once. –- It would seem that if we live long enough, most of us become fairly generous and liberal in our outlook, but perhaps that’s a Cape illusion. – A GIANT wild tom turkey showed up in the Sparrow’s back yard, which merges with the Seashore, and hung around for an hour, to be fed, admired? He was certainly admired. A man sitting next to me in a doctor’s waiting room remarked that he admired my reading, Richardson’s fat book on Emerson. He was a great fan, though he thought Thoreau was a nut. Thoreau WAS a nut, of course, of the best kind. I’ve got to get going seriously on Emerson, and have, but I hope you won’t mind, John, that I dipped briefly into your field, out of curiosity. It’s quite fascinating and far broader than I’d imagined. I hope I’ll be around long enough to hear about your eventual researches, etc. I finished reading the NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF ARCHAEOLOGY, rev. and exp, ed. Nicholas Wade, Guilford, Lyons Pr, 2000. 269p. I enjoyed it, a quick journalistic survey of the field: earliest humans, cave art, Roman ships, Troy, the Iceman, DNA, etc. One quote, from an article about using magnetometers: “We hope that someday we’ll develop a sophisticated, non-intrusive archaeology that will permit us to learn about these civilizations without disturbing them.” I’m not surprised, although I expect we’d want to dig anyway. I’ve read some as well in THE OXFORD COMPANION TO ARCHAEOLOGY, ed. Brian Fagan, NY, OUP, 1996. 844p., two columns of small print, with 75 p. of maps and time lines. Fagan, a professor of archaeology at U.C. Santa Barbara, seems to be the great popularizer. Among the 4 other editors is Charlotte Beck, professor of anthropology at Hamilton! I presume you must know her, Megan, unless she left Hamilton. – Reading selected articles, you get a sense of the whole field, which seems to include not only archaeology per se, but anthropology, history, linguistics, sociology and every branch of the hard sciences. I’m also reading Fagan’s THE SCIENCE OF SACRED SITES; from Black Land to Fifth Sun. A semi-popular approach to the glitzy digs, but by a respected author and with plenty of general discussion of the work and side-bars on the science and techniques. I thought I’d ask Eastham ILL to get me a few more titles: Gamble, Clive. Archaeology : the basics. London, New York : Routledge, 2001. 239 p., to read, and Vollkommer, Rainer, Sternstunden der Archèaologie. Mèunchen : Beck, 2000. 231 p. , and Parrot, Andrâe. L'archâeologie. Paris : Payot, 1996. 173 p., to photocopy a few chapters to work on my academic French and German. I just learned that Erika has a large collection of translations of English pop and juvenile literature into German. Zane Grey was very popular! I may check that out. I do own “Treasure Island” if you’re ever interested, “Die Schatzinsel”. 14 June 03 How is Higher Education? Harold Bloom thinks it’s down the tubes, although evidently he’s content to stay on forever at Yale and NYU. I have a renewed interest, since John and Megan are contemplating graduate school. And how are you? I’m always interested. It’s wet here and has been all spring. The ponds are brimming, and the foliage is tropical. We won’t drown, as it seeps away quickly into the sand and drains into the bay, but our tomatoes would like some sun. Nancy has been busy, as corresponding secretary of the Eastham Committee on Early Childhood. All donors get one of her excellent photo thank you cards. She’s acknowledging that she’s still energetic, capable, and rather sociable. Her volunteering at Eastham Elementary is over for the year, but she’s badly wanted back, as plastic Mitt has cut school funding. We don’t know if Common Time will run either. Or anything else, for that matter. -- Let’s hear it for the greatest country in the world. I like my tough writing group in Chatham and the French conversation group in Eastham. I’m doing a presentation on Emerson at the Chapel in August. I wish there were more hours in the day, but I find I get tired! What a bummer. The kids have been busy. Karen left the Transactional Work Corporation to be an independent case administrator for various Delaware County agencies. It should be more money and more independence. She plans to go to Temple for another degree. Her biggest news is getting together with her 10 year old half-sister, her mother’s second daughter, a whiz kid and musician who’s favorite composer is Bach, as is Karen’s, and who wanted a big sister long before she knew she had one. Evidently the unbending grandmother died, and now all is possible. I think of her mother as 19, and of course she’s 50. Sara has left AAVS to be administrative assistant to Ingrid Newkirk, the president of PETA, in Norfolk, Va. See the long article on Newkirk (entitled “The Extremist”) in the April 14, 2003 New Yorker. Interesting article and an interesting person, a fanatic certainly, but an amusing and fairly rational one. What a wild ride it’s going to be for Sara! We’re very happy for her, although we hope her role will be to bail the others out. Megan had a great time talking with you and thought you were terrific. Thanks again. She’s talked to John Weeks, Jennifer Baldwin, and a number of other people. Weeks was very enthusiastic about librarianship for her, but says when she gets her degrees, she should go back to upstate New York! Evidently that’s his “Cape Cod.” I gather Megan was glad enough to get out of the woods. She plans to speak with Roy Heinz. Some profession will get a live wire. She found someone to learn advanced MS Access from. -- How we just blundered through our early lives! John is working hard to get a Penn job. He has three part-time jobs now, one as the Development and Marketing Coordinator for the Prism Saxophone Quartet! Another for Philabundance’s Ben Franklin project. He’s serious about archaeology. I can’t think of a more fascinating field. Impractical to be sure, but what exactly is a practical life? 21 June 2003 A couple of gorgeous, fresh spring days, finally. And now it’s summer. It’s green heaven around here. The wild cherry, honeysuckle, locusts, salt spray rose, and a dozen other good-smelling plants are in bloom. The hard winter doesn’t seem to have decimated the wildlife. Chipmunks dash across the road in front of us, their bottle-brush tails raised and quivering. While I was on the phone to Grandmother yesterday, a fox raced through the front yard, but he didn’t catch anything. The book group discussed PLAINSONG, once again proving that we can rise above our material. The writing group liked “The Interview” which I stuck up on the web. The men’s group didn’t discuss septic tanks, but I forget what we did talk about. The French group did okay without Bruce; perhaps we’re all a little emboldened. Erika gave me a copy of “Der Spiegel,” and the dictionary and I hacked through an article, “Der Islam neigt zum Totalitaren,” (“Islam inclines to totalitarianism”), an interview between a Spiegel reporter and a Moroccan intellectual. He sees Islamic democracy as unlikely in the near future, though democracy and a secular state as the only hope for modernization. Perhaps the Administration should take note. -- I’ve remembered that, in French, the long, academic words are Latin, with English cognates. In German, they’re constructed by pasting together old Teutonic curse words. I had coffee and a doughnut with Stan at the Orleans Hole-in-One. We hope to get him together with Aunt Elizabeth when she and Beverly come on July 1. Stan has been writing poetry and submitting it to contests. His children don’t think he should live alone at 93, but he seems more than competent to me. After 45 minutes he said, “Well, I have to get back to work,” and off he went. We hear that Sara has much to do yet to get settled in Virginia Beach, getting the key to her mailbox for instance! But that the job is right and the atmosphere dynamic. Perhaps it’s significant that her old organizations had “anti” in its name, her new has “for”. I like PETA’s mission statement: “Animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment.” They are on earth to occupy themselves and for no other reason. What luck that we’re animals too! -- We still eat a few and benefit (one hopes) from medicines developed with their reluctant cooperation, but I’d hope to see both uses diminish. For all its fervor, PETA evidently believes in amelioration as well. It’s obvious that people do use animals for entertainment, and not just greyhounds and fighting bulls. I suppose that’s the reason for the “companion animal” designation. – WE are bona fide animals, of course, and are far from treating one another with respect. We hear that Karen’s work is progressing as hoped, and she’s talked with her sister. It’s been a long season. The harvest is richly deserved. -- John and Megan are busy living and exploring and doing all manner of interesting things. What energy! I’m halfway through Richardson’s EMERSON; The Mind on Fire. The first reading; there will have to be more. He seems to tie together all the intellectual forces of the mid nineteenth century: Kant, Herder, Goethe, de Stael, Coleridge, Carlyle, Thoreau, all of English and classical literature, Hinduism and Buddhism, Margeret Fuller, modern science, and Mary Moody Emerson. I have one hour on August 31. Emerson is “all quotes,” a piling on of great sentences, and meant to be so. Margaret Fuller is an interesting person, thought by some to have been the leading intellect of nineteenth century America. Too short a life alas. Thoreau was the emissary to mourn her at the shipwreck off Long Island. The account in CAPE COD was so reminiscent of the Pan Am crash. She was convinced that persistence and courage are the most womanly, no less than the most manly, qualities. We hope it doesn’t rain on Marion V.’s topping out ceremony this afternoon, to which we are invited. “The Topping Out of Marion V.,” a short story that I guess I won’t write. 24 June 2003 Aha, we see some sun this morning. We’ve enjoyed our rainy walks and liked the eternal cool, but it will be an interesting change. It’s slugs eating the bean plants. Yuck. Tin cans and tarpaper collars seem to help. I think slugs are essentially snails without shells, but you rarely see slugs in cartoons or on greeting cards. We went to a topping-out party on Saturday. Marion, a friend from the Fellowship and writing group, has just had a large addition put on her house on Perry Lane, and invited guests and a bagpiper to celebrate raising the whale weathervane. It’s a nice addition, big but doesn’t look it from outside. Zoning allows only 3 bedrooms, so they’re the biggest bedrooms you’ve ever seen. Surprising to us, we knew no one except Marion (a large family), but we talked with a few people. Over a certain age you can start a conversation with anyone (minors under controlled circumstances and ‘chicks’ with caution). We even did it on the subway in San Francisco. Probably wouldn’t try that NYC or Philly. Liberating though, and interesting. – She had lots of beer left over and brought us some yesterday. What a great hostess! On Sunday, the speaker was Candice Perry, a playwright speaking on “Spiritual Journeys”. Nancy almost didn’t go. She’s suspicious of things like that. She did, however, and it was good. I don’t know if Perry is famous anywhere but on the Cape. She was a pleasant and sensible middle-aged woman, who’d been raised a Roman Catholic and converted to Judaism for her first husband. They split up, but she stayed a Jew and raised her children as Jews. She co-started the very liberal Reconstructionist Jewish group on the Cape that we have pot lucks with every year and is pretty much a humanist now. She read from her memoir for 45 minutes. It was funny and very well done. She felt sorry for God in Sunday school, because all they talked about was Jesus, so she promised to be his friend. A good choice it seems to me. Always go to the top. Her point was that everyone has a story to tell (although few would tell it as well). We had a terrific discussion. Harry got to tell about the Buddhist monk who rode all over the country looking for his lost ox. (He was riding it.) And Art pointed out that Buddhism is called “the raft”. You ride it across the river of life, but you don’t then pick it up and carry it on your shoulders! [Unless you expect another river?] For some reason, there were few Fellowship members and lots of visitors. Evidently Unitarians are used to talking about values and ideas with strangers. -- As always, I recommend some such group, for friendship, stimulation, and networking. I talked with a guy who’s having an exhibit of his fishing boat photography in Provincetown next summer and plans to write a book about fishermen to go with it. Massachusetts fishermen are in trouble. They can fish only 65 days a year and must limit their catch severely (lest we run out of fish). His wife was an Episcopalian who misses the music and liturgy. We agreed we’d like an Episcopal church with class (like Mari’s in San Francisco) but an open theology. Emerson is going to be exhausting. I like him, and his wife and friends, but his intellectual interests are almost too broad to take in. He reads everything, take notes, writes compelling sentences, put lots of them together, and gives it a title. Many great quotes, which I will no doubt share ad nauseum.
28 June 2003 The season is on. Sirens sound all day. We go everywhere we can on back roads. The usual letters appear in the Cape Codder about inconsiderate motorists and noisy visitors. Either folks can’t their stress at home, or they feel they have to work as hard at having fun. There’s a boat with an aircraft engine going out of Rock Harbor these days. We hear it up at Campground Beach, but the Harbor Master says it isn’t against the law. Look at me, everybody! Where’s the Ombudsniper when we need him? Perhaps Kansas could be reserved as a vacation spot for folks who feel fettered by civility. The new Eastham Transfer Station is finished except for cosmetic details. It’s lovely, a neat row of mechanical bins for plastic, cans, bottles, paper, etc. For once, something looks like it was worth the million it cost. The “Stock Exchange” re-opens in July. I put my table on my “lawn” and sat out with my paper and coffee this morning. As if I were on summer vacation! The grass is still a bit sparse, but it’s more comfortable under bare feet than wood chips. I went to the Snow Library yesterday while Nancy was getting a haircut. I looked up slugs in a garden book and found that you’re supposed to go out at night with a flashlight and remove them from your beans by hand. But I found only two, and they were un-aggressive, sluggish in fact. Surely there are more somewhere. I bought a book at Snow’s book sale: Volume I of Jacquetta Hawkes’s THE WORLD OF THE PAST, a handsome anthology published in 1963 of great archeological writings from the 19 th and 20 th century. I’ll keep an eye out for Volume II, which deals with Rome, Europe, and the New World. I borrowed a biography of Einstein in Berlin which is also a social history of Germany from 1914-1933. Very interesting, although Einstein isn’t entirely appealing at this stage. He dumped his attractive and intelligent first wife and two kids for no obvious reason other than his being Einstein, which I don’t consider an excuse. He WAS one of the few prominent Germans who publicly opposed the first world war. I listen to Arianne Boisseau on the France Culture web most mornings. She talked about Orwell for two days. I can understand most of it, although I use the text as a prop. I’ve been reading a bit of German from DER STERN daily, too. A friend was going to give me something else, but she’s gone off to Germany for two months. Oh well, it will take me the summer to get through one issue. I’ve almost finished: “Wissen, wie der Geist funktioniert,” an interview with Eric Kandel, a Nobel Prize winning brain scientist who’s developing an anti-forgetfullness pill. Imagine! Would I suddenly remember all the names I immediately forgot? Would I want to? I’m afraid mice may be involved. Would a country-club style prison for convict brain research volunteers would be too Orwellian.? I made the cabbage and pasta dish last night. It was terrific. Strengthening words from Emerson (who faced his own challenges): “Success depends on the aims, not on the means. Look at the mark, not at your arrow.” [Journal] Sounds like Walt Stiver: “Watch the ball hit the ball.” -- No doubt true, although I think the situation was simpler in the 1830’s, and in baseball. “What you have learned and done is safe and fruitful. Work and learn in evil days, in insulted days, in days of debt and depression and calamity. Fight best in the shade of the cloud of arrows.” [Journals] -- Sounds good to me, probably less so to Custer. “The one thing we watch with pathetic interest in our children is the degree in which they possess recuperative force….if they have that degree of buoyancy and resistance that makes light of these mishaps…the fiber is all the tougher for the wound.” [Journals] – Parents never quite relax, but our children do seem resilient.
JULY July 9 2003 It’s been beastly hot. It’s hotter elsewhere I know, but I hope that by and large you have air-conditioning. We pretend it’s the olden days, when life simply slowed to a lemonade crawl in the summer heat. This morning was lovely. I walked around the block, enjoying the birds but picking up three nips, which always saddens me. The old are intoxicated by locust blossoms. The young require 100 proof peppermint schnapps. Gaak! I took coffee and a bagel to the table on the struggling lawn and read some Emerson. I have to tear myself away to go write. As Cecil Rhodes said on his deathbed, “..but I have too much to do!” At least my activities probably cause less fuss than his. We had Bobsie to tea last Thursday, and she and Aunt Elizabeth reminisced about the Hartridge School and Plainfield 70 years ago. They remembered all the names and recounted the subsequent fates. Bobsie is 87, Elizabeth a bit younger. Both still fascinated by life and confident that the world can be improved. Bobsie admired Elizabeth’s Amish walking stick. Bobsie has a space-age walker. Elizabeth drives Bev mad by stopping anywhere, everywhere, and kneeling, leaning, climbing to take pictures of a flower, a tree, a fence, a door. She makes cards of them like Nancy’s. It’s where Nancy got the idea. We went to the Orleans Parade on the Fourth. It was just about right. Small scale and friendly, with lots of American flags but few political statements. The one mask of Bush, with flags, got little applause. The mask was unattractive, so it wasn’t clear whether the statement was pro or con. A Republican Party float got four hands of loud clapping from behind us, and someone said, “I guess they’re mostly Democrats.” I’d doubt it, not in Orleans. I think it’s just weariness. No one knows what to think anymore -- except Bobsie and Elizabeth. -- The “Grand Marshals” were two young Gulf vets. We applauded heartily. They looked embarrassed. There was one much reduced first world war veteran. He’d certainly have to be over 100. There was no parking at Snows (a setup area for bands), but in ignorance we went behind and parked with the oil tankers in their almost empty lower lot and were undisturbed. Neither the Community of Jesus nor the Nauset High School Band marched. I suppose they got more lucrative offers elsewhere. Maybe next year Eastham could supply the whole parade for Orleans and save them the trouble, for a suitable price. We think of you all, doing scary and adventurous new things. Right on! Stay in touch. Bev and Elizabeth left Saturday, so we went to the Fireworks party at Adrienne’s daughter’s. We brought grapes. “I know you don’t like fireworks…,” Nancy says. “Not true,” I insist. “I like them fine, but I’m not drawn to them as a moth to the flames.” It’s like my uncontrollable reticence at football games. – It was quite pleasant in fact. Adrian’s house backs on the marsh, with a view to Rock Harbor and the strange cathedral. I think the house dates from an era when it was okay to clear cut to the edge of marsh. -- It was a warm but breezy and relatively bug-free evening. We had no trouble chatting for the two hours until blast off. One woman, a serious weaver, has a neighbor who combs her angora rabbits every three weeks and spins the fur into wool. This sounds fairly animal friendly. I would imagine rabbits like to be combed. Our dogs always did. I thought the fireworks were unusually spectacular. Nancy thought only normally so. Were any of you at the ceremonies when the sign fell on Mayor Street? That must have been a bit scary in today’s tense atmosphere. A right-wing conspiracy to remove Sandra Day O’Connor? I’d like to explore the historic district again. Perhaps in the fall. Sunday was a day off. No chapel or other commitments. A day of leisure. The big event was the arrival of the Sunday Times. It’s warm, but even we get a bit used to the heat, eventually. The flowers like it. We are slowly blossoming out. There are pots of petunias on either side of the back door, a tub of ageratum in front of the garage, a tub of impatiens by the front door, and a large, handsome Cro-Magnonware pot of impatiens, Elizabeth’s gift, in front besides squirrel stump #1. We have bean blossoms and small beans. Books! I spent Monday morning schlepping books for the Library books sale. That allowed me first crack at them. “I spent $6.00, I wailed on returning home.” “You’re entitled,” says Nancy. Neat books: John Russell’s PARIS, is a lovely, erudite, and rather famous 29.5 cm semi-coffee table book on Paris through the ages, illustrated with paintings and photographs. A new hardback B&N edition of LES MISERABLES, 1200 pages in English. Dr. McGovern, the old pathologist says Hugo is relatively easy to read in French. Fernand Braudel’s THE STRUCTURES OF EVERYDAY LIFE Civilization and Capitalism, 15-18 Century. Braudel is evidently the authority in the field. Brian Silver’s THE ASCENT OF SCIENCE, a fat readable 1998 history of science, seems promising. Perhaps I’ll read it before I rewrite The Green Pig and the Windmills. Hinds & Hathaway, WILDFLOWERS OF CAPE COD; and Matthews, FOSSILS, an introduction. The Library owns the Hinds book but as a reference book Nice illustrations. What a delight I also bought a handbook on fossils, because it was cheap and looked interesting. . I may need to build a new bookcase soon. 19 July 2003 We've had a couple of beautiful days. The tide was low in late morning, so we walked on the flats again. Yesterday we saw a few hundred people spread over the ten miles of beach, today far fewer, as it is Saturday, and visitors are all coming or going. Route 6 was solid when I walked down from the Superette to get the mail. It rained overnight, which is good for my tiny lawn. I won't water it with the hose but find various sources of innocent water to nurse it along. I went to the dump alone yesterday. I brought official garbage and recycling, but brought back more than I took, a dozen books and four 8 foot fence rails. The posts were rotted. I'll find something. The fence is to go behind the kitchen garden (2 butterfly bushes, 1 salt spray rose, 1 black-eyed susan, 2 non-fruiting tomatoes (Dave the gardener says his aren't either), and half a dozen lackadaisical bush beans. The bushes on the south side have produced enough beans for a salade compose. My book of the month, which I am only 100 pages into but feel confident of, is Bill Bryson's A SHORT HISTORY OF JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING. He writes well and amusingly about the history of science. I recommend it to everyone. We look forward to hearing of Mari and Gloria's trip. I mean to frame the card of Pitigliano, a place that looks truly out of this world, like a set in Star Wars. And more of Virginia Beach and the exploits of PETA, social work administration in the suburbs, and the Penn Library revisited! Wouldn't it be lovely if we had to go on our knees to the UN! Alas, I expect we will just eat dirt and say, “see what you made us do.” 26 July 2003 We had a lovely deluge overnight. The foliage looks drunk, beat up but happy. It’s supposed to rain more gently all day, which is good. The ponds are full, but the flora was beginning to look stressed. The water table has sunk out of sight in the swamp, drawn down by tourists taking long showers. My lawn may not recover, but there will be a few green tufts to suggest the idea. Lawns require watering on the Cape, which is why they’re bad apples, when larger than 15’ x 20’. I need another garbage can, to begin a series of water barrels, each slightly lower than the other to catch the runoff. The Humongous Buddleia, aka butterfly bush, has begun to bloom. Yesterday four butterflies appeared at once, brought by the sweet aroma from mysteriously distant Butterflyland. We’ve seen more in recent years, an encouraging sign. We can use all we can get, butterflies and encouraging signs. An old mattress has been in the garage for some months because I resist spending $10 to take it to the dump (sorry, Transfer Station). Finally I dismantled it, dumped the stuffing, for free, salvaged the wood, and plan to cut up the springs and donate them to the fascinating scrap metals pile. Whenever I can, I join the group of men who wander its perimeter, looking for something they need, or might someday need. On the way back from our walk the other day, I asked Nancy if she’d mind a quick stop to look for a piece of 5/8” rebar to hang my fence rails from. “What can I say?” she says. And lo, there it was, lying in front of the pile. It often works that way at the dump. -- I forgot that this was all leading up to my using the canvas mattress cover to reupholster my ottoman (footrest). There’s enough left to cover the new headrest as well. “Why not just get a Barcalounger?” Nancy asks. Let me count the ways! The headrest isn’t perfect, yet. -- The fence behind the garden looks like it’s been there forever. Yesterday at the dump I picked up a book, SOMMETS LITTERAIRES FRANCAIS, which is what it sounds like, an anthology from the middle ages to Camus. It dates from the 60’s and was once owned by a Sarah M. She’s marked up only a couple of entries in the whole 600 pages. I’ve read a brief section of Mme. de Stael’s DE L’ALLEMAGNE, which fascinated Emerson. French literature, she says, derives from chivalry, the middle ages, and Greek mythology and is read only by the educated. German literature stems from local legend and folklore and resonates with the people. She seems to think this is a good thing. I started on the Rabelais. I’d said that when I retired I was going to work up my French and German, but it’s taken me almost 4 years to get started. The Conversation Hour did it for French. I’ve started working on German too. At least 3 of the French group are native speakers of German. One brought her German conversation student, who also speaks fair French, to the group. The young woman, a painter who exhibits in Provincetown, has just graduated from Cooper Union and has a Fulbright to study art history in Vienna for a year. Sounds good to me! The Emerson project goes forward. There’s always a point at which I wish I hadn’t offered. I have more than enough to fill an hour, but I’ll spend the next month choosing and arranging. An interesting group: Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Holmes, Whitman, James, Fuller, Carlyle, etc. were friends and colleagues in varying degrees. They wrote thousands of letters, reporting millions of conversations. With natural good health and adequate money, it would have been a lovely time to live. (At least I think so. Counting our present blessings is not something we’re good at.) - We who live in the 21st century do have one great advantage over the old timers. Should we choose to, we can easily increase the hours we have to devote to serious pursuits, simply by watching less television! We’re taking a break this weekend. The Fellowship is having a storyteller Sunday and a folksinger (fundraiser) Monday night. It’s narrow of us, but we don’t do folksingers or storytellers. I continue to recommend Bill Bryson’s A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING as fascinating and instructive. I thought I had some notion of the complexity of the human cell. I didn’t. He does have disquieting things to say about the fragility of life on earth. Human life to be precise. It seems we’ve been a bit careless. I found an AP report in French on the PETA demonstration at a KFC in Paris last week. I’ll send it along fyi, as it is, to an amazing degree, composed of English cognates. AUGUST 11 Aug 03 We went home after breakfast and watched CBS Sunday morning. Then I went, alone, to the Pagan presentation and drumming seminar: several dear old pagan ladies and a nice crowd. I'm sure I'm a natural pagan, agreeing that all existence is more or less sacred. Certainly it’s as easy to believe in as a vast nothingness sparsely occupied by perishingly tiny ten-dimensional thrums of energy. The rituals seemed a bit superfluous. Mari’s church did numinous better. The “sounding” was rather nice, however. We all made sounds for a minute or two, I made low hoooms, like the Ents, and it blended pleasantly. Hot today! However iffy the weather for the past few days, you were spared real heat. -- I wonder if I could talk the lady into a brief fall foray into New Hampshire, to see the mountains and look for Thomas Frohock's grave? It sounds pleasantly cool. We'll take our beach walk, have tuna sandwiches for supper, and get back into our comfortable rut for a while. 16 August 03 I’m enjoying Graceful Simplicity, by Jerome Segal, a recent book about consuming less and taking time to enjoy life more. I think we may have carried that about as far as we care to in our own lives, but he means the working world. It seems to me our children and friends do manage to enjoy what they have without craving infinitely more and killing themselves to get it. The often empty pleasure dome/ trophy homes that continue to spring up around here like dubious mushrooms suggest another kind of emptiness. Alas, all such wisdom, including Robert Reich’s economics talk at town hall as reported in the Cape Codder (we couldn’t get in) and a recent WOMR symposium with Chomsky et al, are preaching to the choir. We and the Bushies listen to each other as well as the Israelis and the Palestinians. Day after day, Krugman, Kristof, and Dowd beat their drums in the Times op-ed, and we give two enthusiastic cheers. Speaking of mushrooms, long ago in Maine in August, forty kinds of dangerous and attractive looking fungi popped up among the white pines. Here on the Cape we seem limited to a few rather gross varieties. One of the more interesting is dull brown but with a bright yellow core that shows through where the tortoises have munched. We saw a big tom turkey, with wife and brood at the edge of Nauset Marsh yesterday. Franklin was right, it would have been a better national bird than the eagle, tough and wily, but family oriented and not a predator. I think it’s time we had grilled portabello sandwiches for supper. I believe we thank John for introducing us to these. We frequently enjoy Morningstar Grillers Prime as well, thanks to Sara. Our children are more adventurous eaters than we, but we’re not too old to try new tricks. The vegetable man at Stop and Shop recommended an expensive ginger flavored salad dressing, so we bought a ten cent ginger finger, and he’s right. Ginger is good added to a garlic, oil, and vinegar dressing. We can’t seem to sell anyone on our delicious yellow split pea soup, however. Paul Bunyon liked yellow pea soup, a lot. Sorry, not everyone is fixated on mushrooms. It’s the Tolkein does it. I don’t suppose you were affected by the blackout? The populace behaved well in general. I remember my few experiences of being stranded by SEPTA as a bit scary, though hardly as drastic. I’m not sure whether the whole event demonstrates our fragility or our toughness. Both perhaps. I’m sure the op-editors will tell us. The pendulum has been swinging too far towards laissez-faire lately; perhaps this will slow it just a little. I’m certainly sick of the rich NIMBY whining about the “giant industrial complex” (i.e. windfarm) proposed for Nantucket Sound. Kronkite and David McCullough have a spot ad about every 15 minutes on WFCC. I wouldn’t care to see 170 half inch high windmills on the horizon off Coastguard or First Encounter either, but it’s better than breathing polluted air or doing without electricity. I don’t imagine Walter would object to spoiling the pristine beauty off someone else’s beach. I note Ted Kennedy has muffled his original objections. – On a happier environmental note, the new transfer station is not only popular, and admired by other towns, it’s definitely encouraging more recycling, a big money saving to the town, as well as an aid to the environment. Also it’s cute, and a great place to chat with neighbors, if the wind is blowing the right way. 27 August 2003 I did the Emerson talk this morning, and it went well. Emerson’s a great guy and an important figure in U.S. intellectual history, but I think I’ve learned enough about him to last me the rest of my life. I’ll put the text on the web, in case you want a cheap intro to RWE. Next summer maybe William James. Karen asks what the shellfish lady said. Sandy McFarlane said chiefly that Orleans had begun putting in good storm drain sumps. They catch the first inch of rainfall and leach it into the ground, where the bacteria are taken care of. After that the water that runs into Town Cove is relatively clean. They’ve been seeding Town Cove and Nauset inlet with quahogs, because the clams help clean the marsh. Continued development in all the Cape towns will cause a crisis for the marshes however. Even a new Title V septic system takes care only of bacteria, not nitrogen. Nitrogen (in what compounds wasn't clear), running into the marshes and bay, causes eutrophication, rapid seaweed and algae growth and too little oxygen in the water for fish or shellfish. The Nausets, who plucked clams from the marsh when they wanted lunch, would be disappointed with us. We've established that Nancy sees snakes before I do because she goes first on the trails, but she also spotted the one in the living room. A black snake, five.... inches long, and with its yellow neckband about as cute as snakes get. She's tough on bugs, but she definitely wanted the snake removed humanely. The desire not to have mashed snake on the living room floor may have been involved. We coaxed it into a Tupperware and flung it into outer darkness. I hope a house-snake can survive in the wild. "They catch mice," I suggested. "Yes, Nancy agreed, "but that one looked like it might be at the wrong end of the food chain." I saw a bright green hummingbird at our butterfly bush. This is amazingly gratifying, like a touch of Mother Westwind's wand. I’d call it a "hummer," if that didn't bring to mind Schwartzkopf and Schwartzneger. We have numerous Hummers on the Cape as well. They look pretty silly parked in front of kitschy gift shops. We've been walking early, 8:30 a.m., when the tide is out at the Bay beach. It's lovely then, almost deserted, shadows emphasizing the sand patterns. We often see the beach patrol on his 4-wheeler, zapping early dog walkers. We wave. Why are only half a dozen people in ten miles out to see one of the most beautiful sights on the Cape? It's not as if it's hidden. I had a lunch date Friday with Barry. I was going to call him, but he called me. I've wondered how he's coming with his poetry. (And how one would one know with poetry?) Emerson said the poet records the experiences we all have but only a poet can express. I imagine that's true, but it doesn't help. Barry said his arthritis was interfering with his poetry. His partner Lois is still working 3 days a week as a psychotherapist. She wants to work less; her group wants her to work more. I thought everyone was supposed to be working 3-day weeks by now. Sara Pennypacker is a published author of children's books who has returned to the Chatham writing group to work on an adult novel (i.e. a novel for adults) about Jews in the Netherlands during WWII. It's good, but more to the point, she's good. She's the best critic I've known and generally sees what's good and bad about a whole of a piece of writing. I'm feeding the group chapters from Marshfield Manor, RiverQuest, and Newhouse, as well as an occasional short story. I wish it weren't on the same day as the French group. I'm exhausted when I get home at quarter to four after listening to fast French for an hour. Bruce is back with tales of heat in Provence. Few deaths in the south, where family life is still strong. He brought new copies of Courrier International. I read an article before bed every night. Last night I read one about the bordellos in Nevada, translated into French from a Polish newspaper. Odd. Erika should be back soon from a summer in Germany at her mother's house in Frankfurt. Josephine was there but is off to Vienna on her Fullbright next week. Marianne ("the conscience of Eastham") has been tutoring her in spoken German. Nice weather. Almost fallish. I’m afraid we really do need a new well. Arrrrrrgh. I suppose then we can stop admonishing people to take short showers. SEPTEMBER 25 September 2003 As I guess we said, Sara seems to have been among the 5% of Virginia Beachers who did NOT lose their electricity, and there was no damage to her building or car. Sometimes there’s a certain sameness to our lives, even in beautiful Eastham-by-the-Sea. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Isabel barely caused a ripple, despite our precaution of buying 3 gallons of cheap water and a 20 lb. bag of charcoal. Both will keep. We have radio, flashlights, batteries, candles, oil lamp, etc. but would rather not have to use them. We’ll keep our 25 gallon jugs of rain water for emergency toilet flushing. This business of homesteading is complex. We had a pleasant evening with Barry and Lois, the retired psychotherapists, talking of book and writing groups and Bush-bashing. We took time out to watch Washington Week in Review, our one must-see show, now Friday at 9:00, which provided more material for scoffing and snarling. Did anyone read Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men? I haven’t. He has a new book, I see: Dude, Where’s My Country. The title certainly resonates. Common Time lives again, this year at the Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School, a tougher act. All participants will be volunteers, so it should be okay. I agreed to talk about writing to a group of seventh graders. When I talked to John’s seventh grade every kid in class wanted to be a writer. I may also assist with a 5th grade writing project at Nancy’s school. We shall see. That’s enough. I don’t need too many activities. The wife of the editor of the Cape Codder stopped by yesterday morning so I could create tickets on the computer for “A CHINESE FEAST” dinner by Bill Opel, in support of the Eastham Committee on Early Childhood, of which Nancy is now the recording secretary and supplier of photographic greeting cards for sale. 90 were sold at Windmill Weekend. Peter was going to do this, but he was too busy with paid work. Wouldn’t the Codder have more resources than I? Nancy says ECEC doesn’t like to send his wife to bludgeon favors from another busy man. Good point. -- We are occupied, but in no way ‘busy.’ Dave the well digger comes a week from Monday and should finish the job in one day. Sure hope so! Even if everyone comes at once at Christmas, they should be able to take civilized showers. John and Nancy Jones come for dinner on October 1st. They will be 3/4 of the way through a 2 month road trip, to California, Maine, and back to Sanibel Island, with a stop at the Westfield High School 50th reunion. They’ll bring lots of pictures of people I won’t recognize. This will be the second time I’ve seen John in 50 years. In Clearwater in 95, or whenever it was, I found them very nice and John essentially unchanged. The persistence of personality through numerous changes of cell structure is wondrous. It makes one think that someday our minds might well be captured in a large database. Would that be a good thing? Who knows. What we do know is that if it can be done, it will be. We made photocopies of Boeuf a la Catalane at the hardware store, collected out junk mail, and dropped the copies off at Barry and Lois’s. We’re full-service hosts. On the way back we stopped at First Encounter and found it pretty and only slightly peopled, went up Pilgrim’s Path, where Speaker Finneran’s house is over-landscaped but at least professionally so, and to Cole Road Beach, which stunk to high heaven. The little herring run is blocked at the bay end and rotting. Why does no one unblock it? One of the seven sour mysteries of life. The marshes are quite lovely now, in their thoroughly indescribable way. The Virginia creeper and poison ivy are beginning to turn, and other foliage beginning to look a bit tired and ready for fall and winter.
OCTOBER 5 October 2003 Nancy has allowed as how she’d like someday to tour the New York Stock Exchange if one could somehow get past the New York part. Maybe we will. We did go out to lunch and had a spinach salad at the Hearth and Kettle while our well was being drilled. (includes bacon, hard boiled egg, and creamy French dressing, so is a little sexier than it sounds). The kids sound good. Up early on a lovely day to wait for Jenkins Well Drilling, 45 degrees, sunny and breezy, what we came for. I put the car in the street, and I guess we’d better plan to go out to lunch, as we’ll have no water for 7 hours. I recall that back when I was in seminary, my aunt Velma asked to have me pray for their plumbing. She was serious; I guess still is. I thought that might be considered frivolous, but I see no harm in hoping to goodness to hit water at 50 feet. -- They’re here. His wife helps him (or maybe he helps her). They’re cute. We had a very nice visit with John and Nancy Jones. (If you’ve forgotten, John invented the Changeable Hair Color Barbie and ran a Naval missile testing station in San Diego.) I hadn’t seen him in 40 years when we met in Florida in 1993. He was the first kid to come to our door with a ball and glove when we moved to Westfield in 1948. He also introduced me to classical music. They’ve aged a bit in ten years, as have we, but are unchanged otherwise and easy to talk to. They must have stamina. They’ve been on the road from Sanibel since August 17, visiting their children in Texas and California and friends in Minnesota and attending the 50th reunion of the Class of 1953 in Westfield. -- 8,000 miles so far! I find this unimaginable. -- John brought pictures on a CDR, but my Dell doesn’t read CDR’s. I wouldn’t have recognized them anyway. He’ll send me the picture of our old house at 550 Colonial, painted white again thank goodness! -- When John and I saw it (John C. that is; Nancy complains that all my old friends are named John), it was painted brown. Three-story Dutch Colonials can’t be anything but white. -- They spend a week at Bar Harbor before they head back to Sanibel. They say they don’t mind the heat, but they do mind the crowds and traffic from Christmas to April. Sanibel is like the Cape, only reversed. They were tired and left before I could ask them their opinions on the world. I like to ask Republicans how they think we’re doing. – I believe John is no longer developing commercial missile fuels. It was a thought provoking week. Our neighbor died. She was quite a nice lady. We talked a few times and she showed me her lovely garden. That was what they did, work on their magnificent house and garden. I once told Bob how much we had to do with our house, and he said that was a blessing. They’ve always been the picture of rosy good health and bubbling with enthusiasm. They have nine children, so there have been many cars parked across the street (and pickups and one gloriously ratty “Peacemobile”). . We wonder if Bob will stay in his big house. Many of our friends are widows in large houses, and while they have their times of sadness, they seem to carry on vigorous lives. The weaker sex, generally go first and are reported not to do as well alone. Stan Goldman though, and Jim Owens, keep putting along in their 80’s and 90’s, writing and drawing. It probably helps to have a craft. The speaker on Sunday, Helen Helfer, was quite good. She talked about her self-published book, “Footprints on the Land; stories of race in America.” This is something of a tradition on the Cape. Barb Steinau hawks her “Raising Peaceful Children” all over the country on long summer camping tours. Barb is a bit of an extremist, but her book is wise and excellent. Don Sparrow does very well with his two very funny books, which have the advantage of being set locally and sell well at the Superette. Helfer was married to a black man and has mixed-race children. She lived in Philadelphia for many years, where she was associated with some local race-relations organization. I’m afraid I’ve forgotten the name. Her chief point was that it‘s the responsibility of white people to combat racism. I agree, although I’d say it’s everyone’s. She talked about reparations. The sense of the Fellowship was that affirmative action was fine but that reparations which lifted one group of downtrodden while ignoring other equally downtrodden but differently colored groups wasn’t likely to work. We had a good discussion, aided by a drop-in vacationing couple from Brookline (they had read the newspaper listing), a black woman who had been a dean at Tufts and was now heading a charter high school in Boston, with her white, Jewish, retired NASA scientist husband. They have children. She did say that in 2003, prosperous, educated, well-spoken (and quite attractive) she still encountered a thousand racial reminders a day. Although Arnold’s apologies and the Attorney General’s investigation of the White House offer comic relief, the national and international news grows worse. Do George and Karl intend to destroy the environment and foment eternal religious war in order to bring on Armageddon and the Second Coming? I wish I were joking. 10 October 2003 So, now we have a real well instead of a pipe meandering down to the water table and a noisy pump in the basement. David and his partner were rather cute, he tall, slim, and slightly baby-faced, she small and slim with long blond hair. More remarkable is that they've been married 17 years and in the well business together for 18. How must they have looked back then! Who would have hired them? We watched our neighbor get a new well two years ago, on September 11th in fact. It took 4 large men and a foreman the entire day. Dave and his wife drilled us a neat well and installed a new, larger holding tank in the basement in just 5 hours, and for $500 less than anyone else. I asked Nancy if she wanted to go into the construction business with me. She smiled. Their new truck may have helped. It was the most beautiful truck I’d ever seen, and I said so. Dave explained it was only 3 weeks old, having taken 9 months to build at the factory. It was huge, shiny white and chrome, and bristling with more control panels, dials, valves, and hydraulic lines than a fire truck. I see it as an ideal Tonka toy, except perhaps for children living in an apartment. We have an above-ground wellhead too, one of those green nubbins you see in everyone's yard. The in-ground pump works splendidly, although it's hard to take continuous pleasure in the absence of noise. I doubt that I can change my frugal habits regarding water use, but that may be just as well. Enough about wells. Fall approaches with nippy days and subtly turning foliage. Hoards of tiny white asters have sprung up in the fields. Every year some new wildflower takes its turn in the spotlight. We walk on the beach, and our feet are cold. Speaking of entertainment, we thank our western contingent for the show. Perhaps other states will follow suit now and place their destinies in the hands of cartoon figures. I’m not a pessimist; I feel we are all quite as safe as ever in the hands of Almighty Chaos. But do take care. I finally had lunch with some of the writing group. Pleasant. Ever heard of “American Chop Suey?” A pile of hamburger and macaroni. No, I had a BLT with pickle and chips. Delicious! We must eat out more. Sara Pennypacker, published author of children’s books, had a son (or daughter?) graduate from Tisch two years ago. Rhoda mentioned the head-banging collision between two Red Sox as an example of the foolishness of spectator sports. I told her she’d made a tactical error: we talked baseball much of the lunch I don’t talk a lot, but I seem to be accepted as part of the group. I read something rather shocking to me the other day, in my father’s old notes and letters. He said that for the first 5 years after he retired, and despite my mother’s gregariousness and many dinners and cocktail parties, he lived almost as a hermit, in his “office” with his stamps and writings. Then he snapped out of it and spent his last 17 years schmoozing. I find it does take effort to be genuinely sociable, but in general it seems to be worth it. Early Medieval Italy by Chris Wickham has some good chapters on material culture and social organization, along with the dull doings of Lombard and Frankish kings. The Secret Life of the Seine, by Mort Rosenblum is a pleasant journey down the contemporary river. 16 Oct 2003 Monday we went up to Small’s Swamp, which was at its fall best, and decided to walk at the Audubon in the afternoon. No bears or warblers, but the same old stuff is different every day. Chilly, bright, and windy weather makes it all seem much wilder than it is. On land anyway; a couple of young kayakers were drowned off Chatham. Weren’t they wearing lifejackets? One had lost her brother in 9/11. Talk about unfair. -- The ocean was enraged today, no surfers for once. Do surfers actually exercise judgment? The talk Sunday, by a Jewish lawyer and feminist about Jewish feminism, was very interesting. I think she was pleased with the lively discussion that followed, the inevitable experience of speakers who don’t expect a bunch of old crocks to be listening. I hadn’t heard of the “Oral Torah”, an idea I like. Everything that isn’t the Torah is the Oral Torah. Sort of like Christian “General Revelation”, or, for some of us, Thursday. For a change of pace, I’m reading Mistress to an Age; a life of Madame de Stael (pronounced Stahl, with “a” as in father, I learn after 50 years of mispronouncing it.) What a character; talk about librated women. I knew she was a booster for German romanticism. I didn’t know what a major political role she played in the Revolution. Although rather plain, she was a great conqueror of hearts as well (to put it delicately), more evidence if needed that the mind is our sexiest feature. I read a sentence to the French group from her book De L’Allemagne. “In France, words are not merely, as they are in all other countries, a means to communicate ideas, feelings, and needs, but an instrument one likes to play and which revives the spirit, just as does music in some nations, and strong drink in others.” I bought two pieces of wood to start making our bedstead. That sounds old fashioned, but bedframe sounds to me like the metal thing you get free with the springs, and “bed”, which is what it’s called in the L.L.Bean catalog, is the thing you sleep on. Anyway, the head and foot boards. I think I can make them for about $50, which will be a saving of $950 over ordering from Bean. You won’t believe what I saw at the dump yesterday, sitting lonesome and perky next to the construction materials tip. A perfectly intact futon frame. I could have shed tears, except that I thoroughly enjoyed converting John’s bed to a futon, like having incorporated the past into the present, and am fond of the final result. So it goes. I’m still fussing with my talk to the seventh graders. Parkinson’s Law has an emotional corollary. If it ain’t one thing, it’s another. Goals are important, but I’m inclined to think putting one foot in front of another is just as important, and at my age maybe more so. I have lots of little goals which keep me going. I don’t suppose Einstein felt a failure because he didn’t discover the Theory of Everything. I look out the window. It’s Walt Dizzy’s enchanted forest in the morning sun. The chipmunks will be dancing quadrilles. 19 Oct 03 So, a bit of disappointment in the sports department. Nancy was looking forward to a Cubbies-Sox series. Faute de Phillies, she’s transferred part of her allegiance to Boston. It’s tough on fans these days; if you don’t move, your team does. One thing stays constant though; you can be a Yankee hater from anywhere. – A sign at the Birdwatcher’s General Store: “Security provided by Don Zimmer.” I’ve made two bed legs by gluing together 3/4 inch lumber, just like Norm Abrams. This is going to be a long process, but that seems to be partly the idea, an afternoon manual-arts fix, after which I get cleaned up for wine and cheese. Sunday’s Fellowship program was our friend Bea playing and singing her songs and talking about songwriting. She’s even better then we thought. Nancy was impressed. Well, I was too, but that’s not worth as much. Neither of us is very interested in songs, however, and I have musical inertia. I love classical music, but when the music stops, it’s gone. Nothing reverberates in my head. Nancy says she hears music in her head all the time. Ah, the human brain. Provided by Mother Nature to compensate for our lack of claws, it may eventually prove fatal to the universe. I thought my talk, and reading, to sixty 7th graders went well. Seventh graders are fun, especially when guarded by four teachers with cattle prods. In fact, I saw only the occasional whispered reminder to hold down the animal spirits. They had to take notes, so they listened and asked good questions. One young lady had a pet rat and was quite ecstatic. I always say never again, but I do vaguely understand the high which lures folks into, um, performance art. “Madame de Stael was among the first to reject the idea that the Middle Ages was a period of darkness and stagnation.” Madame was a smart lady. She and Napoleon sparred for years, and ultimately she won. A strange battle, both opponents highly intelligent and rather wry. -- I’m also reading The Seven Ages of Paris, by Alistair Horne. I’m not too far into it, but it seems quite good. It begins with myth and ends 400 pages later at the Pere Lachaise. Nancy has almost finished Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything and loves it. I’ve always said she’s the scientist in the family. It’s a great book, modern science with a smile. “Poultry in motion” indeed! I’ll use some this Sunday at our humor fest, along with my Halloween poem from a party last year. Nancy will probably give this Sunday a miss. We got our new down quilt from Bean and will replace the wool blankets on the futon with the polyester quilt. 30 Oct 03 I’ve been wondering why I hadn’t noticed how attractive poison ivy was before we moved to the Cape. But of course we didn’t see it as much, as it wasn’t particularly encouraged back in the world. Here, the woods are full of it, as both a high climbing vine and a tree-sized bush. Its leaves can be huge and are a bright waxy green in the summer, changing to yellow and many shades of red, from pink to deep cordovan, over the fall. Birds eat the white berries, and it keeps vacationers out of the woods. Does it discourage hunters? I went with Dave to see Bob yesterday. He’s going to a nursing home today. His wife is already there. What happens to the house and all his tools, he asks. We talked about it. No answer really. Dave has suggestions. “I don’t know if that was the right thing to say,” he told me later, “but Bob won’t remember.” Sad but true. Bob is a fantastic character. MIT Ph.D. scientist, humanist philosopher, and for 20 years a vintner. Gorgeous morning (all those dead leaves). We had to walk at nine and go to the store at ten, to be back by eleven for the annual termite check before Nancy went off to school at twelve and I at 2:45. It isn’t Vermont, but it really is colorful here. Understated elegance, subtle splendor. Walking at 9:00 instead of 2:00 and doing the Nauset Marsh trail in reverse provides the spice of life around here. The bed progresses. I bought a 4x4 sheet of 1/4 inch plywood for the panels. That will be enough for the headboard too. I haven’t decided whether to make rails or attach the head and foot boards to the mental frame. We shall see, which is how I build things. Sort of like Dorothy Sayers’ Mind of the Maker, in which she theorizes that God has a vague plot outline but lets the details fill themselves in. A pleasant thought if one could believe it. Two books said don’t glue the panels in, so I didn’t, and it looks great. It looks like a “real” bed, as the 7th graders would say. I talked with Maury in San Diego Her car is covered with soot from the fires, but the air is clearer today. I learned that our doctor, Tim, Andrea’s husband, has a master’s degree in French literature and once planned to be a linguistics professor. I admire doctors, especially good ones, but that wouldn’t be my choice. Along with “Poultry in motion,” safeguarding the President could be the Witless Protection Program. An amphibious assault is Toadal War.
NOVEMBER 15 November 03 We had a lovely visit to Philadelphia. We were pleased to find the children all ticking along at their various excellent enterprises, with hope in their hearts as the songs say. We were lucky with the weather and enjoyed our walk along the Wissahickon from Rittenhouse Town on Sunday and the drive back on Monday despite its unexpected length owing to traffic. Life moves along, tomorrow Nancy has hair and dental appointments, and we serve at the ECEC’s Chinese Feast in the evening, at the Eastham Methodist Church. They sold all 110 tickets. Nancy’s cards and the ECEC mugs will be for sale. An oil painting will be raffled. Eastham rocks! The Chatham Library was closed for Patriots Day, so Rhoda arranged for the writing group to meet at the Chatham Bars Inn. This is a famous old place. Nancy and Mari ate lunch there 45 years ago, but service was so slow they got the message they weren’t really wanted. For whatever reason, we were welcomed and given a sumptuous sitting room off the huge Victorian main lobby, with paneled walls, gold ceiling, coffee table, couches and stuffed chairs. We were encouraged to help ourselves to coffee, tea, or cocoa. A uniformed minion came around to see if we were comfortable and turned on the gas fire in the fireplace. Even the men’s room was paneled in chestnut, with piped in classical music. It was fun, but I felt a little icky afterwards. Irrational, of course; to most of the world’s population, including the families that Karen sees daily, our home and life would seem as privileged as the manicured lawns of the CBI. It helped that the group liked the first 5 pages of “The Green Pig and the Windmills,” questioning only for whom it was written. The unhelpful answer is “for me.” We’re hacking away at The Art of Scandal; the life and times of Isabella Stewart Gardner, for next Monday’s book group (and a Dec 3 trip to the Gardner in Boston). It’s hard going. Gardner herself is a fascinating and largely admirable character, the Madame de Stael of the Back Bay, a brilliant and strong-minded art collector, amateur architect and designer, friend of oppressed minorities: homosexuals, Jews, Italians, Irish, people of color, and muse to the great and near great: James, Whistler, etc. The museum should be interesting: “That Gardner could so skillfully fuse Ruskin Gothic and American turn-of-the-century arts and crafts into an overall Venetian aesthetic that was itself a fusion of the medieval and the Renaissance shows her gift for architectural synthesis.” (Whew!) It seems Henry Mercer supplied the tiles. And we never went to see his tile works in Doylestown. Unfortunately, the author inserts himself shamelessly and continuously and seems to be using a biography of a feminist art collector as an ad hoc history of gays in the arts, for which there is surely a better venue. It strikes me (as it has obviously already struck everyone else) that historical archaeology must be much involved with art and architecture, as well as all the social and physical sciences. -- I have several thoughts on the past. One that it is where we live, or rather that we live in “the remembered present,” which seems close, but is technically just as past as Plato and the Roman Empire. And two, that everything, having happened, can never not have happened, despite the failure of memory and the coming and going of universes. It is eternity, infinity, and immortality all in one. Not necessarily consoling, maybe sobering, but still interesting, possibly cheering. Neither the good nor the bad is interred with our bones, but remains, always. What do you think? I like Christmas. Always did. I’m not a real Christmas buff. I don’t start making decorations out of pine comes and plastic peanuts the previous July, but I like the trappings. In Germany, in 1959 I was delighted to see the decorations appear in Darmstadt, not surprisingly in familiar form, as they mostly came from Germany by way of Charles Dickens. In this country, it’s a secular, commercial fete, with sentimental overtones and vaguely religious aspects, and is celebrated by all but the most narrowly focused people of all faiths or none. -- In our more orthodox days, Nancy and I found the Incarnation cheering and the Resurrection depressing and slightly preposterous. Osama is a religious fanatic; we have some in high office. The Green River killer is nuts; there are plenty of those around. The rest of us “battlers”, as the Aussies say, do our crumbling best. The only serious sinners are those who commit completely unnecessary crimes, like traffic violators and the wealthy CEO’s who steal from their stockholders. And all they have to do is stop. We’ll have our Thanksgiving at the Fellowship, generally two turkeys and a large and wildly miscellaneous collection of people. 20 Nov 03 I don’t think I mentioned the turkeys. We saw 20 big wild turkeys in the yard of that nice farmhouse on the south side of Nauset Road, halfway to Coast Guard. They were in a row and going somewhere. A pre-thanksgiving evasive action, a pre-emptive strike? We also saw a dozen seals frisking in the surf off Coast Guard. Lots of hawks. Otherwise the wildlife is about the same. The week moves along. I forget whether I’ve written about the ECEC Chinese Feast, but I don’t see it mentioned anywhere. It was excellent. Nancy and I were too busy to eat the chicken wing and pork pancake appetizers, but the main dishes were delicious: Hunan pork, chicken and cashews, Chinese vegetables, sweet and sour pork, and shrimp fried rice. Yum. We stayed to clean up, put away 110 chairs and twenty tables, and went home exhausted. I believe it was a financial success. -- Bill Opel and his three helpers, all in their late 60’s to mid-70’s must have been on their feet for 10 hours. The former publisher of the Cape Codder, helped put away tables and chairs. He didn’t seem entirely happy. -- I was inspired to write a short story about Chinese lunch trucks. Sunday we had two speakers on computer art, in this case layering digital photographs using Photoshop. Some interesting effects, but I prefer watercolors. I talked with Peter about his business. He says he’s building high performance computers for his customers, Pentium 4’s, with lots of cache memory for $700, but he needs a cheaper line to compete with Dell. I wouldn’t have occurred to me to compete with Dell. Hey, right on! I finished Seven Ages of Paris by Alistair Horne, a really good book if anyone is looking for a readable history of Paris from 1180-1969. I’ve started a new book by A. N. Wilson, The Victorians. It looks good and is at any rate thick. I hate to make the effort of starting a thin book. In the mail I received “Our Peers After 50 Years, 50th Reunion Yearbook, WHS Class of 1953.” They’re as bad as the Church, I’ve never been to a reunion and they won’t let me go. Original Year Book pictures of just the reunion attendees with comments on the last ten years. Remarkable similarities. Well, maybe not so remarkable. The dead and the unsuccessful didn’t attend, as well as those like me who tend to see 50 years ago as the past. All are retired, of course, most travel a great deal, play golf, and laud their grandchildren. Many speak of the wonderful years at WHS. I suspect the wonderful years are partly the creation of subsequent reunions. I remember WHS as the colorless heart of a colorless decade. Still, it could be good to have a corps of lifelong pals. Oyster stew tonight! This is a bit of a luxury, but one of our few. We’re bringing creamed onions to tomorrow’s Thanksgiving pot luck. Last year we went to the Hunan Gourmet on Thanksgiving Day, and it was closed. Not a problem. I bought the wood for the headboard of our bed and have begun assembling it. It’s a long process the way I do it. -- I’m getting better at understanding radio French. Saturday: the pot luck was fun and delicious. 20 Nov 03 “So where do you go to find a researcher who is intelligent, imaginative, skilled in the use of computers, devoted to discovering the truth, and knowledgeable about science, technology, history, and literature, and who usually works for dirt and gets credit for nothing? After lunch I drove to the city library on Main and asked the reference librarian to find what she could on Junior Crudup. She looked thoughtfully into space. She had a round face and wore glasses with pink frames and parted her hair down the middle.” from: James Lee Burke, Last Car to Elysian Fields 27 Nov 03 I note that M and I consult the Times online every morning. Sometimes I go no farther than the headlines, but often I read an article or two. I recommend this as free, easy, and informative. And quick unless something grabs your attention. The article Tuesday about Chimpanzees, for instance: “Fossil bones record the history of the human form but they say little about behavior. A richer source on the way human social behavior evolved may come from chimpanzees, with whom people shared a common ancestor as recently as five or six million years ago. ...From knowledge of chimp behavior, biologists can plausibly infer the social behavior of the shared human-chimp ancestor, and from that reconstruct the evolutionary history of human social behavior. .... A major surprise has been that chimps turn out to live in territories whose borders are aggressively defended by roving parties of males.... The males in each community are related to one another because they spend their lives where they were born, whereas the females usually migrate to neighboring communities soon after reaching puberty, a practice that avoids inbreeding. This patrilocal system, of a community based on male kin bonding, is unusual, but familiar to anthropologists because it is practiced by most hunter-gatherer societies.....Females have to have had flexibility and adaptability” – I’m attracted to the supposed lunatic fringe of evolutionary biologists, Pinker et al, but it’s none of it’s an article of faith. We’re not apes, and with that and a dollar you can buy the Times. The Times Thursday notes that: “Thanksgiving has of late become a celebration of triumph without adversity, as we have become a nation that refuses to admit the hardships we face, and the sacrifices required.” -- True, I guess, though we seem to vacillate between “morning in American” and “lusting in our hearts.” Sometimes a turkey is just a turkey. “The United States, long the safest place in the world to drive and still much better than average among industrialized nations, is being surpassed by other countries”. -- In theory, this should be the easiest of problems to solve. Slow down, enforce and obey the law. We don’t have to have 30,000 deaths and a quarter million injuries a year, not to speak of billions in property damage. But in theory too, it’s in the (narrowly interpreted) interest of only a few thousand very rich individuals to vote for George Bush. -- I’ve been much enjoying The Victorians, by A.N. Wilson, informative, funny, sad, grim, but most of all painfully familiar. These are the same people we are, the “nation of shopkeepers” who find common cause with the wealthy against the poor (and the Irish!) I’ve often thought of making a list of our favorite mystery writers, there are dozens of them. But there are published books of such things, and we don’t look at them. Still, Robert Heilbrun, son of Carolyn Heilbrun, author of the Amanda Cross mysteries has published a first novel that’s very good, Offer of Proof. I’d offer a list to anyone who wants it, but taste is so individual. Nancy and I share many, but not all, favorite authors. She edges off into English village manners, I to macho spy and war wallows. So it goes. The French press has had great fun with George Bush’s 2 hour trip to Iraq. “Dindon [turkey] Goes to Baghdad.” [Tintin, remember?] In the event, our Thanksgiving was very nice. We spent the morning watching Al Franken and Molly Ivans on C-Span, talking to large rooms full of like-minded people. Wonderful for the spirit. We walked at Bearberry Hill, all the way through the dunes to the beach. I could see a couple people a mile to the north and a couple more two miles to the south. We cooked [sorry] a delicious steak au poivre. Next, vegan chili.
DECEMBER 5 Dec 03 We saw a very large deer indeed at Audubon, up on Dennis Murley’s newly cleared heath. It was slightly annoyed to see us. Have I mentioned the Flicker’s Tongue? (Not the new novel by Umberto Eco.) We saw a giant flicker at the bird feeder and wondered what he thought he was doing. But he knew. He hung on the outside of the cage and sent in his 3-inch tongue after the seeds! A sight to make a bark bug shake in its boots. I thought these quotes from A.N. Wilson’s The Victorians were rather timeless: “Palmerston was adept at self-promotion. The peace-loving free-trader John Bright could complain that 50,000 men died [in the Crimean War] to make Palmerston prime minister, but with his eye to the populace, the war prime minister could make even this objection seem unpatriotic.” “Those...businessmen...who appeared to be so much at odds with the aristocrats...did not invariably establish themselves as democrats and men of the people. The tendency was that they aspired to use their money to send their children to the same schools as the aristocrats...” Another thing I remember Dennett saying on C-Span: Ask an audience of normal adults, if they would like to live to be 500, and 90% say no. Why? Because it would be “boring.” Ask an audience of academics, however, and all say yes, because there are so many things they want to know! I think of my friend Dr. John McGovern, in his 80’s and unwell. Live forever? He supposes not, but he’d like to return every 50 years to check on the progress of medicine! The trip to Boston to see The Isabella Stuart Gardiner Museum was easy (someone else drove) and pleasant. -- “You have to be 65 to get the senior ticket,” said the cashier. “That’s why I’m showing you my Medicare Card,” I said. “Oh,” she said. -- It was very interesting, but I think someone should break Gardiner’s will. The place needs better lighting, more labels, and sprucing up in general. Nothing major needs to be changed. It was a bit gloomy even on a bright day. -- Much great art, though mostly early and Renaissance Italian, and lots of ecclesiastical art. Bernard Berenson was her agent in Italy. -- A giant painting of a musicians playing in a Spanish café by Whistler, two Botticellis, a splendid portrait of a young man by Raphael, and two bronze busts by Benevenuto Cellini were worth the trip. The court too is fantastic. I could live there, reading in a rattan chair set on the Roman mosaic amid flowers and palms and Greek and Roman statuary, and surrounded by 4-story walls out of a Venetian palace. The table in the giant dining room was set for a small dinner party to include Whistler, Sara Bernhardt, Sara Orne Jewet, Henry and William James, etc. – The neighborhood (Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Fenway, Northeastern Univ., reminded me of Philadelphia. Pretty though quite cold. Remember “Make Way for Ducklings”? A line of 20 geese decided to cross the parkway and stopped traffic. We crossed with them. Why not? I’ve just read Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander. It’s good. As John says, it starts slowly (learning the names of all those ropes and sails!), but it certainly puts you into the time period. Not a time I’d choose to live without being rich and indestructively healthy, but interesting. I recommend also C.S. Forrester’s Captain Hornblower books from around the same time. Alistair MacLean’s gritty sea novels from the Second World War, and David Poyer’s contemporary high tech Navy thrillers. John and I both liked Howard Pease’s Tod Moran tramp steamer adventures. -- All of which have the effect of keeping me on dry land. Non-literary deep water, storms, steel, oil, heat, and cold: aaaaarrrgh. We own the really excellent historical novels by Kenneth Roberts which are set in colonial America and the U.S. from ca. 1750-1815. I finished our bed. It looks like a real bed, a real faux bed, as the spring and mattress continues to be firmly supported by the steel frame that came with it. But you can’t tell that. 15 Dec 03 We’ve had three lovely snow falls, and each was gone in a day. That’s Cape Cod: in New England but moderated by the surrounding water. The first morning is always the best part of a snow; eventually it can become an ugly bore. – There seem to be more robins this year, winter robins, Canadian robins that rush frenetically from tree to tree in large flocks. We ran into Ivan Ace on the trail. He told us that cedar waxwings join the robins for company. We’ll keep a lookout. – After the next storm, we must go to First Encounter Beach to see the pelagic birds that have come for shelter. Eight northern puffins were spotted there last week! Oh, to see a puffin. Did I ever quote you a poem I remember from my childhood? (No, not Captain Jinx of the Horse Marines.):
There once was a puffin I’m sure there’s more, and probably a sad ending as it’s a Victorian verse, but that’s all I remember. We’re off shortly to the Book Group Book Selection Meeting and Pot Luck Lunch. Nancy is suggesting autobiographies of Madeline Albright and Eleanor Holmes Norton (the latter written by the daughter of a Fellowship member). I’ll suggest My Name is Asher Lev, by Chaim Potok. -- Jari’s Christmas party is Friday. She always has a huge broiled salmon and filet of beef. It’s well attended! We bring our signature salad. -- We had Marion and Bob to supper last week. “Marion and Bob” forever refers to my godparents: my mother’s best friend from the age of 8, who tap-danced with her on a Buy Bonds float during the Great War. Bob was a Ph.D. for Monsanto, in the pre-jiggered-genetics days. I spent large stretches of my childhood reading in a hammock on their farm. -- The current Marion and Bob are classy companions in their 60’s or 70’s. Marion is a splendid bright and cheerful woman from my old writing group (“Cars of My Life.) Bob is a retired NASA engineer who in his youth sailed a sloop across the Pacific. “Terrifies me to think of it,” I said. “Me too,” he said. “I had no idea what I was doing.” “Ah, well then,” I said. “You had the quality Napoleon asked for in his generals: luck.” Bob agreed. As an indication of what idle hands can get up to, I replaced the small workbench in the basement with the larger one from the garage. It was a bit of a tussle, but it fits beautifully. I’d built that one first, with the best wood from the dump, in the days before the mad, bearded dozer driver began to empty the construction debris tip on an hourly basis, and good stuff became harder to find. – I’ve cleaned up our wiring as well, theoretically in preparation for putting in a 200amp service sometime after the first of the year. That will pretty much complete the mechanical overhaul of the house. I’m supposed to read Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales next Sunday. I want to slip in a couple of quotes from Thomas Hardy as well. A nice juxtaposition I think: “I have been looking for God for 50 years, and I think that if he had existed I should have discovered him.” and from “The Oxen”:
Yet I feel, Nice. There were many things about the Victorian Age that weren’t nice. 20 Dec 03 Lives of the mind: I’ve praised drama as the first art and noted that life is theater. Anthropology and archaeology reclaim the Past, which is Reality. The Remembered Present is surely the realm of information technology. The shadow of the guillotine sharpens the mind. The Common Time kids did a good job without Andrea, performing in three crowded 6th grad class rooms in twenty minutes. I don’t know if we got new recruits, which was the point of our mini-performances, but we had fun Sid and I just played our parts. We went to Jari’s party Friday night, always a big one with great eats. They’d come for the baked salmon alone. I had a long talk with a guy whose name I asked twice and still can’t remember. We even talked about Bruno Furst, who wrote books on how to remember things. (How come I remembered HIS name?) All these people turn out to have had multiple lives. I’ll save the Cape Codder on the “No room on the Green” controversy, i.e. the Nativity Scene on the Town Green. The news coverage and the letters to the editor were disturbing. Saturday night at Bill and Nina’s for Chinese. The “Coral and Jade” (shrimp and snow peas) was delicious. Three odd clergymen present. Sunday, as I’ve said, I was drafted to read Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” (Being Welsh, of course....) Helen gave me a cassette of Thomas reading it (long ago; he died in N.Y.C., in ’53, of alcohol poisoning.). He reads it in a “high” manner, with more expression than meaning, like Tennyson reading “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” It’s boring that way. I had to be more conversational. It went well. Met a guy who makes his living from his Eastham home as a Japanese translator. He says there are numerous Japanese speakers on the Cape. You start at a sushi bar. We had a great Christmas visit with some of the kids. Hope to see the rest in Philadelphia. It was a good year. |