tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-54809525617636262662024-03-13T14:31:38.784-07:00Aunt StanburyLittle if anything here is topical. Most of the pieces are stories, as faithful to my memory of those events as I can make them. You can think of them as being told to grandchildren or the staff at the retirement community, when they have the time and patience to listen.Aunt Stanburyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16426109401028665557noreply@blogger.comBlogger113125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5480952561763626266.post-64074247767634666152016-10-06T18:45:00.001-07:002016-10-07T21:01:09.555-07:00MOTOR VEHICLE TWO-STEP<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Late this summer, nephew Jeff bought my motorcycle. He sent me a check; I sent him a signed bill of sale and some notes explaining why we don't need a title; and then we waited for a man with a truck to collect the bike and carry it off to Florida. After a week and a couple of postponements the truck appeared. I've dealt with enough motorcycle guys that I didn't expect promptitude.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The departure of the Beamer reminded me of nephew Brian's adoption of my father's string bass. It was a bit sad to see it leave -- it had been in the house all my life to that point and then some -- but it was going to a good home. To my surprise, both Brian and his son have some idea how to extract music from such a thing.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The day the motorcycle arrived at Jeff's, he posted a picture of it on Facebook. It looked better than I remembered, its informalities discretely blurred. In fact, the motorcycle guy with the truck enthused about what (comparatively) good shape it was in -- in comparison, that is, with some of the near-basket cases he has driven around. He also explained that the term "basket case" arises from motorcycle parlance and refers to a bike that arrives in baskets. My cousin Bruce bought one of those once; but that's another story. So my bike also has gone to a good home and was soon seen on Facebook in pieces in Jeff's garage.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Then one fine day on Route 2 in Fitchburg, my car began emitting vapor from under the hood; the temperature indicator established itself in the red zone, and the engine light went on. The car eventually came to rest at TJ & Sons Auto Repair in Gardner, where Tommy diagnosed a blown head gasket and implied that it wasn't fixable. Of course, anything can be fixed; but a blown head gasket is major surgery, and I had already spent too much on repairs to that car. Tommy agreed to deal with the car in exchange for the towing fee. Unable to think of a better option, I agreed. Paula and I cleared out the car and we left with a promise to drop off the title at my leisure.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It seems that Paula, too, was working on replacing her car. We went to some classy-looking dealership in Greenfield that had about one used something-or-other that I might have considered buying. But it was priced higher than I had hoped; and although low in mileage, it had had three previous owners, the first of which was described as "commercial." That, the salesman admitted, probably means that it had been a rental car. Paula's then-current car had a stint as a rental on its résumé, and she had had major trouble with it: "You don't know that somebody didn't put a boat on top of it and drive it up Mount Whitcomb," she pointed out. Anyway, the car in Greenfield looked huge -- after my little Civic I suppose most cars would -- and the ugly gun-metal-gray color made it look even bigger. Paula didn't find anything she liked the looks of either. So much for Greenfield.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Over the next few days, Paula drove all over central and western Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire looking at cars. I enlisted my daughter-in-law: "Car stuff is her job," said Justin about division of labor in their household, the day Amanda related on Facebook that she had changed a tire in 90o heat, including chiseling out a corroded fastener on the tire compartment. She credited her father with teaching her well in such matters. "I enjoyed teaching my daughters manly things," Tim posted back.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Amanda and I went car-shopping; Justin was sick and not at work, so the kids stayed with him. I never can get over how readily other people's young kids can be left largely on their own, with distant adult supervision. Justin at the 4/5½ that his kids are now would have been on top of the refrigerator the next time anyone checked on him.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The first dealer Amanda and I tried had one possible car, which turned out to be another reincarnated rental. That Wouldn't Do. We proceeded to an establishment in Walpole that seems to specialize, though not exclusively, in second-hand Priuses. They remembered Amanda from when she and Justin bought one of their Priuses there and were, as she thought they would be, inclined to please a satisfied customer with another prospective buyer under her wing. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">After some driving and dithering, I eliminated a rather elegant-looking dark-maroon Honda hybrid (another vehicle with low mileage and a history of rental-car employment) and settled on a red 2011 Prius. When Amanda mentioned that its brakes were vibrating unhealthily, the dealer gave it new brakes all around. -- saving me, she estimates, at least $600 in future trouble. Paula helped me to collect my purchase a few days later in the Subaru hatchback she had settled on.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Meanwhile, the Civic was still languishing at TJ's. Justin and Amanda wouldn't hear of abandoning it for a $60 towing fee. So a day or two later, Amanda, who had business in western Massachusetts later in the day, met me at Enterprise Rent-A-Car in Gardner and proceeded to TJ's with intent that we should drive the Civic home. </span></span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">We set off for Otter River in tandem, me and the Civic in front, Amanda and the kids following.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">We almost made it. Just over the railroad bridge, with the engine firmly in the red and making noise and the engine light flashing, I oozed to the side of the road and stopped.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">"But you're so close!" Amanda objected. I reported on the car's behavior and reminded her of the hill up from the paper mill. She told me to let the engine cool for five minutes. I gave it exactly five minutes, and tried again.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Again, it was close. A couple of hundred yards from the house I turned right and then left (I have never understood what was meant by that attempt at a rotary in Otter River; if I had ignored it and gone straight, we might have arrived triumphantly at our destination; then again, we might have found ourselves stranded in the few yards of asphalt that is One Way and been creamed by the next car that came through too fast). As it was, the car ground to a halt in the mouth of the Old Winchendon Road.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I sat there looking stupid, while Amanda sailed into the Winchendon Road, parked car & kids, and dashed over, followed by two guys who had stopped to see what was wrong. One of them verified that we had a car problem but that no one was hurt, and went his way. The other stayed to help.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Meanwhile -- this was a complicated few seconds -- Amanda called directions at me to put it in neutral and steer to the curb, there actually being a curb in that spot, which isn't to be taken for granted in Otter River. She flung herself at the back of the car and pushed without waiting for the remaining guy, who came around and joined the party. Amanda, with her artist'</span></span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">s eye for clothing and color, was wearing a very becoming medium-green dress and, of course, shoes not ideal for car-pushing. She is a tall, strong young woman; but pushing even a Civic uphill, even slightly, is a tall order. She must have been glad of the offer of help. We got the car out of the intersection, thanked the guy, piled me into Amanda's car (where the children were waiting patiently, presumably watching through the window).</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Amanda left me and the kids at home and set off on foot with a gallon of water to pour on the engine of the Civic (turned out she didn't use it, the engine having cooled enough that she was able to persuade it to start) and pulled up the driveway in solitary splendor. She then took pictures of the car for the benefit of eBay, where the car sold in a day or two for $300.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As Amanda explained to a suitably impressed audience consisting of my mother, Mother's home health aide, the kids and, of course, me, "I grew up with mechanics and worked at a parts store." We will hope that the kids watching from the windows have added "car stuff" to their understanding of what women do in the world.</span></span>Aunt Stanburyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16426109401028665557noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5480952561763626266.post-65841234424917641842016-07-29T20:04:00.002-07:002016-07-29T20:05:14.623-07:00THE PEOPLE'S PARK<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Strolling idly through YouTube the other day, I clicked on something purporting to be The Best Hippie Songs of All Time, “from this historic era of freedom, expression and rebellion.” Included, of course, was Buffalo Springfield’s counterculture anthem <i>For What It’s Worth</i>. I first heard that haunting “Stop, hey, what’s that sound” from the radio of a convertible parked on a curb in Berkeley. I lost track of it after that until Justin told me a few years ago what it was, adding that every movie that has anything to do with hippies or the Sixties uses it.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The images that accompany “For What It’s Worth”: begin with the 1970 photo of the girl at Kent State kneeling beside the body of a slain protester. Do I remember correctly that at the time the powers that were congratulated themselves on having taught these protesters a lesson, maintaining that now that they know they can get killed they’ll stop demonstrating and otherwise making trouble?</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Other familiar photographs follow: the Vietnamese villagers with the naked, badly burned 11-year-old girl in the center; young people facing National Guardsmen and spiking their guns with flowers; psychedelic buses and improbable pyramids of riders on trailers; and the obligatory naked young people with flowers in their hair smoking dope.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A minute and a quarter into the song a video shows a group of motorcycles leading off a crowd of demonstrators, followed by a view of a street packed with marchers ("A thousand people in the street/Singing songs and carrying signs"). A later photo showed a crowd of people outside a high chain link fence looking through it at a bare patch of ground littered with bits of paper; another featured young people in the street apparently replacing a piece of pavement with grass. That, it occurred to me, had to be the People's Park March in Berkeley in 1969. I gleefully emailed it to my son and his wife: "Natalie and I were there." Amanda pronounced that to be cool.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As I remember it at this distance, the People's Park was a small lot south of campus. It belonged to the University, but it may have been vacant and have functioned as an informal neighborhood playground, rather like the Junkyard in West Medford where Justin and other neighborhood kids had their adventures. The University announced plans to use the space for a parking lot; but before the plan got started, people in the neighborhood took it over and built a park there. The University fenced off and padlocked the lot, and bulldozed the park. There was some kind of sit-in, and at least one demonstrator was killed. (A professor commented that during the events leading up to and including the Free Speech Movement, a year or two before I came to Berkeley, the students kept doing these provocative things and the University invariably reacted in the worst possible way, perpetuating and deepening the crisis.)</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The pro-park forces organized a mass demonstration. For days beforehand, rumors flew: tear gas would be used, the National Guard would be posted on buildings with orders to shoot to kill, other scary things I don't remember. Our intrepid group at Kip's and the Rathskeller declared that they would have nothing to do with the march Natalie and I went by ourselves. She told me that if we were gassed, to close my eyes and stay with her since, like Nydia, Bulwer-Lytton's blind flower-seller who guides her friends out of Pompeii through blinding and suffocating fumes and volcanic ash, she would have no difficulty finding her way home (Natalie also read Victorian fiction; she may also have had Nydia in mind).</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The march was led off by a motley group of motorcycles and scooters: Hell's Angels, some news sources said. My impression of those vehicles was that no self-respecting Angel would be caught dead on any of them. One effect of my years in Berkeley was a firm sense that news sources aren't necessarily to be trusted. Among the marchers, I remember seeing Vincent Duckles, the professor of musicology who taught the course in Music Reference and Research that I took in library school. Natalie and I joined the parade somewhere toward the end. I remember a great deal of standing around as all those people threaded themselves into the narrow city streets.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The march began west and perhaps a bit north of the university, as I remember, and made its way southward past the campus, where it turned east up the hill and ended at the chain link fence where the park had been. It was a day of bright sunshine, hot and dry, and a festive air prevailed. Along the route, people watched from windows and roofs, often wielding stereo systems: "This Is the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius" poured from the rooftops of Berkeley in the blazing California sun.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Somewhere along the way I was startled to hear from behind me the trilling double-whistle that I associate with my father; turning around, I identified the whistler as a woman (somewhat, irrationally, to my relief). Toward the end of the march a young man with a black beard and a decent voice started to sing: "Do-na no-bis pa-cem, pacem/Do---na no-bis pa---cem." Others in our vicinity picked it up and sang in harmony, and I joined in. Natalie didn't; she said she felt as though she were in the midst of a bunch of religious fanatics. I have since had a fondness for <i>Dona Nobis Pacem </i>because of the circumstances under which I learned it.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">When we got to the park there was a movement in the direction of damaging the fence or digging up the street. Some group had brought shovels and picks for the latter purpose and Natalie wanted to join in; but I had a plane ticket for Boston at home and wasn't up for getting arrested. I'm not sure I remember seeing any armed <i>gendarmerie</i>, although I rather think that was the march where young women came up to some armed persons and put flowers into the muzzles of their guns. There was no tear gas, and no one got shot.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!" I wasn’t quite young enough to be a hippie, and always was much too sensible. I never expected that peace, love, sex, drugs and rock-n-roll would defeat the blue meanies, old Moneybags, and the military-industrial complex; but neither could I have imagined that, like Wordsworth’s French Revolution descending into the Terror, the dawning of the Age of Aquarius would disappear in the <i>Gotterdammerung</i> of Donald Trump.</span></span>Aunt Stanburyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16426109401028665557noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5480952561763626266.post-75552022605516165452016-05-06T17:30:00.000-07:002016-05-06T17:30:19.153-07:00APPLES<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If in my days as a struggling single mother I had been as destitute as I remember, I wouldn't have been buying apples at Lawson's farm on Route 2 in Lincoln in what must have been the fall of 1984. In addition to apples and cider and vegetables, Lawson's had on offer a row of glass knickknacks on a shelf in front of a south-facing window. The only one I paid attention to was a cobalt-glass apple about 3 inches in diameter. Cobalt glass with a light behind it is, in Sherry's phrase, one of the better ends of things. Starved for self-indulgence and frivolity, I longed for and lusted after that dark blue glass object, thinking rebelliously, "If I collected apples I'd have an excuse to buy that." I decided on the spot that as of that moment I did collect apples. I paid Lawson's $15 and triumphantly carried it off.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I have since acquired a number of apples and apple-related objects, most of them given to me. Katharine and especially Sherry frequent gift shops, yard sales and dusty little second-hand stores. Laurie kept an eye out for apples, producing over the years some quite nifty ones and a couple that are actually useful.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My favorite gift apple was from Justin the year he left home and accordingly patronized a lot of yard sales. He appeared bearing the only Mother's Day gift he has ever presented me with, for which he declared that he had paid 50¢: knowing how I feel about holidays that exist to feed the gift industry, he thought I would approve of a 50¢ apple.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's 7 inches in diameter (a bit wider at the top than at the bottom) and 7 inches high, made of 1/16" red plastic-coated wire wound horizontally 3/4 of an inch apart, and a green plastic stem and leaf. I hung it in the window of my Medford office and gazed at it fondly while typing. Later, someone gave me a wind chime featuring five melodious brass birds. I hung that in the window with the birds caged inside the apple.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In Otter River, I had a perfectly good bracket in front of the window opposite the chair in my office; but I couldn't quite picture how to re-hang the apple and birds and probably had an intimation that it would be harder than it looked. The apple and birds and the strings that suspended it sat for some time in an unsatisfactory heap on a bookshelf.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When I did gather up my courage for the attempt, my first thought was to lift up the whole thing as one piece and just hook it over the bracket. This approach turned out to be like an attempt in the nineteenth century to right one of the standing stones at Avebury: with all the resources of the nearby railroad at their disposal -- and Victorian machinery isn't to be dismissed lightly -- the engineers couldn't manage it and ultimately put the stone back up with levers and wooden supports, the same way their Neolithic predecessors did it.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I separated my birds from the apple; hung up the apple; and slipped the birds into it, as I had in Medford. It now hangs nicely in front of the window, as good as when not quite new.</span>Aunt Stanburyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16426109401028665557noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5480952561763626266.post-11831373927980926122016-04-28T18:50:00.000-07:002016-04-28T18:50:56.948-07:00OMNIA SOL TEMPERAT<div>
<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>"Omnia sol temperat," </i>I remarked on Facebook on the first warm day of last year after a long, cold and snowy winter. I added in parentheses, "It's about time" -- to the bewilderment of at least one Facebook Friend, who tried to make "It's about time" into a translation of the Latin phrase.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Omnia sol temperat </i>means "the sun warms everything." I thought that would be reasonably obvious to the audience in my head to which I direct such things (that would be my son and a couple of friends). It's the title of one of the songs in <i>Carmina Burana, </i>a 1935/1936 choral setting by Carl Orff of 11th-13th century poems written by students traveling between universities (admissions processes were a lot looser in the Middle Ages than at present); unfrocked clergy; and other more or less educated young men with, as a much later song has it, no particular place to go. Many of the <i>Carmina Burana</i> poems deal with the immemorial preoccupations of that demographic group -- drinking, gambling, and fornication -- but a good number, including <i>Omnia Sol Temperat</i>, celebrate the coming of spring.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>In Italy, Spain, Greece, and locales with similarly benign climates, spring gets a poetic nod from time to time but isn't hailed with quite the joy it inspires farther north. These wandering scholars -- who sometimes lived by begging and/or thieving and didn't reliably know where their next night's lodging was coming from -- must have wandered through latitudes where spring would have been more than welcome.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I generally take the weather as it comes; but last year I was almost as glad as a Medieval ne'er-do-well to find the sun warming the world at last.</span></span></div>
Aunt Stanburyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16426109401028665557noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5480952561763626266.post-49213333995311498532016-03-04T18:18:00.000-08:002016-03-04T18:18:12.365-08:00BLUE BUS<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There's a blue bus in the woods beside one of the roads into </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Phillipston. (A vague memory of mention of a blue bus in a 1960s </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">rock song, possibly by The Doors, proves not to have been a </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">retrospective hallucination but part of "The End"; but that's </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">neither here nor there since Jim Morrison's blue bus represents </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">something in particular that has nothing to do with the blue bus </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">in or near Phillipston.)</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That blue bus is adjacent to a house belonging, to judge </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">from the motor vehicles on the property, to a backyard mechanic. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A Phillipston resident refers to the "blue bus route" as one of </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">the ways between his house and the rest of the world -- a bit but </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">not quite like ”Swann's Way" and ”The Germantes Way," the two </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">directions of Proust's protagonist's walks from his childhood </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">home. (I tried to read <i>Remembrance of Things Past</i> a while back. I </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">didn't make much progress.)</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The blue bus appears not to be functional. Week after week </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and year after year it sits in its place in the woods in exactly </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">the same position. I would imagine that its owner got a once-in-a-lifetime bargain on it and drove (or more likely towed) it home </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">-- and from that day to this, there it has sat in the woods, a </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">useful landmark but rather a failure as a bus.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In places like Phillipston, a home mechanic can easily </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">assemble a collection of derelict automobiles. Katharine once </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">spent most of a week in Ackworth, New Hampshire, reducing her </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">brother's collection of dead and dying vehicles to the three that </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">the town had abruptly set as a limit to the number of </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">dysfunctional vehicles permissible on one property.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My father had a derelict vehicle at one point, purchased for </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">some purpose not clear to any of us, perhaps not even to him. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When Mother questioned its status he indicated an intention, </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">conceived at that moment I'm sure, to make it the nucleus of a </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">collection. We kids played on the truck until it came to be home </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">to a colony of wasps. The truck subsequently disappeared, </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">unlamented, when we weren't looking.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There is visible in our woods in Otter River -- once a </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">pasture but over my lifetime slowly reverting to its natural </span></span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">state -- some rusted auto parts, surrounded by trees and nearly </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">buried in leaves and pine needles. On closer examination it would </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">seem once to have been most of an automobile, conceivably </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">deposited in the pasture and left to itself while the forces of </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">nature had their way with it. Such, perha</span>p<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">s, will be the fate of </span></span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">the blue bus in Phillipston.</span>Aunt Stanburyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16426109401028665557noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5480952561763626266.post-18650893206523700792016-02-05T19:30:00.000-08:002016-02-05T19:30:07.515-08:00STREET THEATER<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In college at the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1960s, I worked for a small publisher whose primary product was lecture notes. Notetakers, by preference graduate students in the field, were dispatched to lecture courses at the University to take notes and write them up for sale by subscription. The notes were produced on a tight schedule; if they weren't in the office by 8:00 the next morning, the notetaker lost money for every hour they were late.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the afternoon, the notetaker would appear for an editorial conference and do penance for every unclear expression, dangling modifier, misplaced comma, misused relative pronoun -- the list went on and on, and was rigorously enforced. If you could write lecture notes for Tom Winnett you could be a professional writer. I wish someone had told me that at the time.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The photo offset printing process was much more sophisticated than the purple-ink mimeograph that we of a certain age remember, but it did require a stencil that couldn't be corrected. The typist explained that she was able to produce error-free copy because she knew she had to. It takes, as someone has observed, all kinds. That woman's nervous system was wired differently from mine, that's for sure.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The notes for the six or eight courses covered in a semester were available three days after the lecture; students bought the current notes as the course progressed.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">At the beginning of each semester, Tom would send his veteran notetakers to the first meetings of large classes to take notes and count potential enrollees; then he would decide whether or not to continue with the course. Checking out a class in drama, I sat in the auditorium with my pen and notebook, diligently scribbling and keeping an ear open for topic sentences for the required outline form.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The lecture began straightforwardly enough; but a page or two into the proceedings, I found increasing difficulty snagging possible outline material, or making sense of the lecture at all. I finally gave up and set my pen down and watched.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Two young women made their way onto the stage and took off the instructor's jacket and tie and, among other antics, roped his arms to his sides at the elbows. He continued speaking without missing a beat, the lecture deteriorating into utter nonsense. Finally, one of the girls led him off the stage; the other advised us, in the impassioned accents often heard at the time, to forget all this and "make theater in the streets."</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I reported my experience to Tom just as it happened. "If he's going to do that sort of thing," he stated, "I don't think we'll do this course." Understandable -- but disappointing.</span>Aunt Stanburyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16426109401028665557noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5480952561763626266.post-84312449465355013272016-01-25T17:47:00.002-08:002016-01-25T17:47:57.344-08:00ICKY, STICKY GOO<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's surprising how many people, even locally, don't know about the molasses flood in the North End in 1919. On Commercial Street in Boston, near the waterfront, a 50-foot-tall steel tank containing 2.3 million gallons of molasses had been leaking for some time; mothers in the neighborhood sent children with buckets to harvest the seepage. Then on January 15, the tank burst apart, turning tons of the thick, sticky stuff loose on Commercial Street.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Water is heavy by itself and can absorb twice its volume of dissolved sugar. According to King Arthur Flour's website, ¼ cup of molasses weighs 3 ounces; cookbooks tell us that the same amount of water weighs about 2 ounces. That couple of million of gallons of sugar syrup oozed along at 35 miles an hour, breaking and crushing everything in its path. People and animals drowned in it. It wouldn't be possible to swim in any such substance, and at some depth, running through it would become impossible. Getting out of it would be rather like escaping the Tar Baby.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">With a clear, open road ahead and a good long start you might outrun it. How many roads in the North End are open and runnable now? How many were then? If you saw this dark-brown mass surging toward you, how long would it take to figure out what it was and that it would be appropriate to run like hell in the opposite direction?</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Twenty-one people died in that catastrophe. Imagine going through life explaining that your husband or mother died in a molasses flood -- it sounds like a joke, horrible as it must have been.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It is said that in hot, wet weather some cellars in the North End still smell of molasses, the remnant of that dark tide.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"># # #</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If you don't believe the above, you may consult:</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">http://www.stephenpuleo.com/book/dark-tide-2/</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>Aunt Stanburyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16426109401028665557noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5480952561763626266.post-28182231555988288172015-12-08T17:33:00.000-08:002015-12-08T17:57:42.319-08:00ALCHEMY<div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">Musing idly, as I often do, I have wondered if, in this age of subatomic beasties and particle accelerators, we could in theory turn lead into gold. One day last summer, having nothing better to do than send frivolous emails to people who are busier than I am, I asked a few acquaintances who might be interested -- including the only physicist I know -- what they thought about it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">The physicist said:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><i><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span>I looked up images of the periodic table.</i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><i><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span>The gold nucleus has 79 protons and an average of (197-79=118) neutrons.</i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><i><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span>The lead nucleus has 82 protons and an average of (207-82=125) neutrons.</i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
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<i><span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span>I suppose the way to turn lead into gold is to knock 3 protons out of the lead nucleus, </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-size: 12.8px;">probably by bombarding lead with neutrons (which have no charge, so will not be </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-size: 12.8px;">repelled by the charged lead nucleus).</span></i></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><i><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span>As you can see, this process requires a source that emits neutrons. Pretty expensive.</i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><i><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span>I am not a nuclear physicist, so that is the best I can do.</i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">The most complete answer came from a software developer -- not a nuclear physicist either, but keenly interested in physics and possessed of a book that related to the subject. He explained how in theory lead could be converted to gold: You would take your lump of lead and bombard it with neutrons, and an atom here and there would trade its leaden identity for a second career as a different element.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">The name of the new element began with B. A search of my mental file of elements turned up six of that description. I know all the elements as of about 1960, thanks to Tom Lehrer's brilliant mnemonic <span style="font-size: 12.8px;">(</span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYW50F42ss8" style="color: #1155cc; font-size: 12.8px;" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/<wbr></wbr>watch?v=DYW50F42ss8</a>). In 1962 I thought this was the cleverest thing I had ever seen or heard of. I still think so.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">Bromine is a gas; beryllium and boron sound like minerals; barium is an alkaline earth metal (whatever that is); and berkelium must be one of those temporary manufactured elements that last three quarters of a second before decaying into something else. Bismuth, like gold and lead, is a metal (with 83 protons and 126 neutrons); it's also a decay product of lead. Lets go with bismuth, and thank you, Wikipedia.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">My son reminded me that converting one random atom at a time would produce a highly variegated lump of matter. With that in mind, you would bombard your piece of lead until you had a workable amount of bismuth with residual lead, assorted impurities, and presumably a bit of gold from atoms that got in the way twice. You would then refine it so as to have bismuth and not much else.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">The software developer's wife pointed out that the lump would be radioactive as hell. The gold, responded he, wouldn't be radioactive because gold doesn't do that; but, yes, the lead and bismuth and impurities would be dangerous to have around. Be that as it may - after refining your newly produced bismuth, you would</span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-size: 12.8px;"> bombard it again and refine it a second time. You would then have a small nugget of gold that you could display in a museum with a label explaining its origins.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-size: 12.8px;">I can't imagine who in this world would have the time and money to expend on any such piece of whimsy. I wonder how difficult it would be to explain to Paracelsus and the rest of them that we have at last achieved their age-old goal but that the process is so expensive it isn't worth doing. We might find ourselves, like Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee explaining basic economics to King Arthur's subjects, shouting across an insurmountable barrier of paradigm shifts.</span></div>
Aunt Stanburyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16426109401028665557noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5480952561763626266.post-20534627290787092042015-11-10T12:37:00.000-08:002015-11-10T12:37:41.030-08:00ONIONS<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I may not make onions this Thanksgiving. I added them to the menu mainly because Laurie and Aunt Berthe liked them, and continued on the strength of a vague perception that onions are a traditional and important component of Thanksgiving.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I enjoy the sauce that accompanies Thanksgiving onions: Béchamel, or white sauce, flavored with salt, pepper, clove and bay; the recipe also recommends a suggestion of onion, which seems redundant. I can take or leave the onions themselves.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Justin makes the rest of the vegetables -- squash, turnip and potatoes -- with great energy and dispatch, resulting in a tremendous mess in the kitchen (which he and Amanda clean up before they leave).</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He hasn't made onions. He might if I asked him, but without enthusiasm. He eats a couple of them when they're set in front of him, but as far as I know doesn't share my view of holiday tradition as embodied in Thanksgiving onions -- not enough to make the sauce, or peel a couple of dozen of those eye-stinging white ping-pong balls.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I usually eat about one onion, for the sauce. Mother accepts an onion or two. Justin's kids are still at an age where their tastes are malleable; they would probably partake, as would David. Sherry hates onions and has been heard to mutter about eyeballs in glue. But our two conspicuous lovers of onions are sadly no longer with us.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As usual, I will stuff and baste the turkey. Also as usual, I will intend to make a pumpkin pie if I have the time and energy, which I won't. None of my holiday functions get easier as I get older; Justin took me off gravy duty after the hissy fit I threw about it last year. With apologies to Laurie and Aunt Berthe, we may omit the onions. I'd rather have, and I'd rather make, pumpkin pie.</span>Aunt Stanburyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16426109401028665557noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5480952561763626266.post-81150924736822880762015-11-05T19:44:00.000-08:002015-11-05T19:44:30.669-08:00SQUAMPKINS<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Squampkin" (pronounced SKWUMP-kin) was Katharine's word for two vegetables of the squash kind that Justin harvested in his sister-in-law's back yard a few years ago. No one had planted or tended them, and no one else wanted them. They were about the size of a basketball, slightly pear-shaped, equipped with light-to-medium blue-green skin, with longitudinal lines or indentations running from top to bottom. The color was more or less that of a Blue Hubbard squash, but the smooth skin and the lines are characteristic of pumpkins. The shape was somewhere between the two.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Winter and summer squashes are closely related; gardening books sometimes caution against planting them too close together, lest some wayward bee cross-pollinate them. I once bought at a farm stand a yellow summer squash with a smooth, dark-yellow skin that turned out to be so tough and unpalatable that I wondered if it was a product of miscegenation with a butternut.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Justin shares my amusement with Blue Hubbard squashes. They're huge: an oval seed nearly an inch long produces a big, ungainly seedling which develops rapidly into the long, prickly stems and leaves of winter squashes, sprawling untidily over the landscape to the east of their starting point. The Hubbards I grew one year were about a foot long; you see them twice that size at farm stands. Light blue-green with a nubbly skin like a gourd, round and full of seeds at the flower end but tapering to a blunt point at the stem end, a Hubbard makes a marvelously ugly jack-o-lantern.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Botanically, I think a pumpkin isn't quite a squash; but they must be closely related enough to produce accidental hybrids. The more we saw of the large blue vegetables Justin brought home, the more they looked like a cross between a Blue Hubbard and a pumpkin.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One night I noticed green-ish squash peel in the wastebasket and found Justin eating from a prodigious bowl of yellow mashed vegetable. He reported having cooked and mashed one of the squampkins, and offered me a bite. We agreed that the vegetable was, in itself, rather bland, but satisfactory if seasoned liberally with pumpkin pie spices. It might have been more amusing, however, if before Halloween it had occurred to someone to turn one of the squampkins into a jack-o-lantern.</span>Aunt Stanburyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16426109401028665557noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5480952561763626266.post-33721708904540181692015-10-10T18:30:00.000-07:002015-10-10T18:30:02.272-07:00UPON A SUMMER'S DAY III<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I was aware of being six years old, around 7:00 AM on that lovely summer morning as I walked along the sidewalk -- a ribbon of asphalt wide enough to walk on at that point but eroded by grass from both edges and from cracks in the middle -- proudly conscious of having buttoned my red dress up the back by myself and enjoying the bright sunshine, the greenness of the grass and the trees, and the warmth of the air. "I wish this moment could last forever," I said to my small self.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The huge, rambling old house at the corner of the Old Winchendon Road, larger even than ours and with only a couple of feet of lawn between one corner and the sidewalk, was the home of my father's friend Chag (pronounced "Shag"), who was familiar to me and to everyone else in Otter River. The Old Winchendon Road was the farthest I was allowed to walk in that direction according to the limits set after my attempt, chronicled elsewhere, to walk with my sister to our grandmother's.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As I passed the house, an old guy standing on Chag's lawn observed and another agreed, "It's going to be a scorcher." I couldn't imagine what they were talking about, on such a pleasant morning. The old men must have proved right: they knew, as I didn't, that if it's lovely and comfortable at 7:00 AM, it probably will be hot later. I remember no more of that day than my puzzlement, my red dress, and the delightful weather at that early moment.</span>Aunt Stanburyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16426109401028665557noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5480952561763626266.post-25331998138089944402015-09-29T10:41:00.000-07:002015-09-29T10:41:57.971-07:00HOUSES<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A house whose upkeep isn't kept up quickly comes to look run down -- recalling Stephen Hawking's illustration of the concept of entropy as what happens if you stop making repairs on your house, and reminding me of a disorderly acquaintance who refers to his apartment as the "entropium." Driving past entropy-ridden houses, I feel sorry for them and hope that someone will take them in hand.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sometimes, someone does. There was a dejected specimen on Gray Street in Arlington whose sagging porch, peeling paint, and overgrown grounds spoke clearly of neglect until someone took hold of it and turned it around. It now sports icing-pink paint, dark blue shutters, white trim, and a tidy, straight porch.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Also in Arlington, on Pleasant Street, was a large white-ish house, paint and grounds in sorry shape. Something about it said, Old person or persons with scanty funds live here. A lighted tree that appeared in a large front window at Christmas did little to alleviate the overall impression of gloom; if anything, it highlighted it.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Then one fine day the lawyer I worked for gave me a Purchase and Sale Agreement for a condominium at that address. The house I had been passing and pitying had been spruced up and divided into two condominiums -- as, to my surprise, had the barn behind it, which I had barely noticed. Both had been quite respectably painted light yellow-ish beige with dark olive trim. I have to hope the old people, if old people they were, aren't languishing in some nursing home.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A third Arlington house, a mansion on Appleton Street built in the 1890s, with a <i>porte cochere </i>and a dizzying array of bow windows, turrets, corners, and other Victorian gingerbread, was long coated in dark-green shingles that couldn't have been prepossessing when new and were not at all new when the house came to my attention. One day a "For Sale" sign appeared. This augured ill, it seemed to me.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For some time I didn't have occasion to drive down Appleton Street. Then one day I did, and to my gratification the ugly green shingles had been replaced with decent light-colored paint, and a dimly-lit lobby with carpet and table and lamp was visible through a glass door. "For Sale" was still there; the house, like the one on Pleasant Street, was enjoying a second career as condominiums. An acquaintance in the real estate business told me of a condo she had sold there, occupying a turret at one of the corners of the building. Now, some years later, the paint is looking more than a bit tired. I hope the condominium association repaints it soon.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">An old farmhouse just west of the Concord Rotary, trying to hide behind a high hedge too far in front to conceal it, has exhibited increasing wear and tear over many years. When it came to broken windows, I decided the poor old thing's days were numbered; buildings don't fare well when water gets into them. But then the State Police bought the property. High white fences appeared, and horses. The windows of the house were protected with boards and green paint (which is now chipping off). But the house is still there, and something may yet be done with it.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Another candidate for rehabilitation is on Elm Street in Concord, near the police station and opposite the prison. Judging from its family resemblance to others in the neighborhood, it must have been built to house prison staff. For years past and to date it has looked unwell. It needs paint. The garage is missing a door. The window shades are always down; I don't think I've seen curtains there. The lawn and shrubbery are mowed rarely and pruned not at all. Unkempt and sad as it has looked, though, it was clearly inhabited: there was a car in the garage, and flowers planted hopefully along the walk. Driving by one day, I saw an elderly woman in overalls holding a gardening implement and surveying the yard.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Then the car wasn't there; I haven't seen flowers in some time. I imagine that the elderly woman has died or been relocated to what her children consider a more manageable situation. Then, some weeks ago, a "For Sale" sign appeared. I am watching for developments.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Also in Concord, just off Route 2, at the eastern edge of that nightmare of construction that extends for a couple of miles along Route 2 from Bedford Road in Lincoln to a bit west of Sandy Pond Road in Concord, was an old, shabby house loosely associated with a horsy-looking barn. I don't think I have seen an actual horse on the premises, but there are pictures of them here and there. The house and horse farm, if that's what it is, had a guys-live-here look: horsy fences and stables, and assorted pickup trucks and other vaguely agricultural vehicles.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The house, a rectangular block too close to the road (as old houses can come to be), tried to be white, without signal success. It may have had shingles, in a dingy condition. There was a roof over the front porch, two stories up, supported originally by three tall uprights -- hardly describable as columns, they were more like 6 x 6 or 8 x 8 chunks of wood. I say originally three: as long as I have been aware of the house, the support at the eastern end has been conspicuous for its absence, imparting a corresponding sag to that end of the roof. I often reflected that if everyone who drove past the house could contribute $1 to the cause, enough money would quickly be raised to rehabilitate the porch roof. The place's only redeeming feature, and that very imperfect, was enough overgrown shrubbery that you couldn't see the house very well.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Then came the Lincoln/Concord construction project, which, among other things, does away with what we used to call the Infamous Intersection (because my husband was in a car accident there). Four roads met at not-very-right angles where Route 2 east turned right across from the Mobil station: www.openstreetmap.org calls it Crosby Corner (Google maps is incomprehensible to me; but that's another story).</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Route 2 is being widened for a good distance as well, beginning just west of Route 128. Like other houses along the route, the horse-farm house, which couldn't spare it, lost most of its front yard and, divested of its semi-concealing bushes, was revealed in all its unkempt ugliness. The front porch, which seemed to be made of brick and cement, had crumbled almost beyond recognition.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A "For Sale" sign appeared. Who, please, I asked myself rhetorically, is going to buy that?</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Improbably, it began to look as though someone had. Sometimes there would be a light in the attic -- left on for days or weeks on end, apparently. Sometimes there would be men on ladders. The remains of the porch roof disappeared, leaving a scar that didn't improve the house's appearance. Most telling of all, the dingy non-white shingles disappeared and were replaced with Tyvek paper. I had wondered all along if the (presumably) new owner would demolish the house and build something else on the (expensive) land. But no one Tyvek-papers a building if they intend to tear it down.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The house stayed that way all this past winter and spring and into the summer. Then one day it wasn't there. But out of the tail of my eye I thought I saw a building very like it some yards back from the road, down a small declivity, and apparently rotated about 90 degrees.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A few days later, driving east on Route 2 with a friend, I obtained her permission for a wild goose chase to try to find out what was going on. Bedford Road looked as though it might lead us to the house but failed to do so. We backtracked to the remains of the Infamous Intersection and turned sharply right and backward on what maps call the Cambridge Turnpike Cutoff. We had seen from Route 2 that Emerson Road was at least near the house, and the GPS found it.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">At the end of Emerson Road and to the left on a short and nameless piece of asphalt, was the house, Tyvek paper and all, back and down from the road. A second, closer look a couple of weeks later partly confirmed and partly corrected my previous impressions; for one thing, the rotation noted earlier proved to be a glanced-at-quickly illusion. I braved the possible displeasure of the owner of the black pickup truck in the front yard -- the fate of that property is, of course, no business of mine -- and the more than possible damage to the underpinnings of my little Honda (as I have occasion to remind myself from time to time, "Civic" means "stay on the pavement"). The house is still there, albeit hard to recognize on its crisp new cinder block foundation with its new light gray siding, fresh white trim, and new windows.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Between it and the road, closer to the house than I would have thought ideal, is a building of uncertain provenance. It also sits on a new foundation and is equipped with new beige siding. A sun porch or mini-greenhouse built onto the back faces the house (and faces north, come to think of it; why would anyone do that?). On the side fronting the road is a large sliding exterior door, the kind often seen on barns, recently painted blue, with a dark-ish red door just to the left of it. A little cupola sits atop the roof. I conclude that this building began life as a barn; it's hard to tell what it is now.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Although aware of the house with the crooked porch for decades, I've only seen it up close on those two occasions and have watched the unfolding destiny of the horse farm at the end of Emerson Road from Route 2 while trying to stay in my lane (wherever it may be this week) and avoid hitting any barrels or Jersey barriers. I will continue to monitor, mostly from Route 2, the continuance of what might be called The Building's Progress.</span>Aunt Stanburyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16426109401028665557noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5480952561763626266.post-1820983827249026262015-08-16T10:22:00.000-07:002015-08-16T10:22:40.864-07:00CELL PHONE BRIGADE<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Kay doesn't use her cell phone often but brings it along to avert or control mishaps and misunderstandings when she and Bob and Chris converge on Alewife Station on Monday afternoons.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One Monday, with everyone safely in Chris's small car, Kay undertook to call her home phone number and listen to messages. She couldn't figure out how to do it: escalating mutters over five minutes or so culminated in an admission that she had tried so many things that she had confused herself and the phone and wasn't sure it was on, or functioning.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Bob," to him in the back seat, "Will you call my phone so I can be sure it's working?"</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Sure." Bob fell to searching his pockets and the bag he was carrying, grumbling about how many different cell phones he has owned and why none of them to date suit him, interrupting himself from time to time with remarks like "Well, now, what did I do with that thing?"</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Chris, meanwhile, had whipped out her phone and flipped it open. Somewhere between the Contacts menu and Kay's number, a near miss with a parked car reminded her that her first priority was to drive. Bob found his phone and got through, and all was well.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">On another Monday, Kay wondered with annoyance why she had received a message within the last half hour but hadn't heard the phone ring.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Bob, would you call my phone? I want to hear what this thing does when it rings."</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Again, Chris whipped out her phone, this time handing it to Kay: "Here -- call yourself."</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">By the time Kay had begun to figure out the Contacts menu, Bob had produced his phone and elicited an appropriate jingle from Kay's -- accompanying himself again with a disquisition on the inadequacy and mendacity of cell phones and phone companies.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">All these people are over seventy. They grew up on big, heavy black telephones that stayed in one spot and announced a call with the <i>brrrrrring brrrrrring</i> that you hear in old movies. They knew about party lines and long-distance operators ("number, please"). In their day you couldn't buy a telephone but had to rent it from the phone company -- a monopoly that everybody hated. They remember pastel princess phones, and paying extra for any color but black. They have dealt with pay phones and cordless phones and extension telephones all over the house.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Fortunately, they have a collective sense of humor about it all. Both of the above episodes ended with gales of laughter as they pictured their three elderly selves in Chris's little car, trying to assert control of their technology.</span></span>Aunt Stanburyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16426109401028665557noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5480952561763626266.post-81738882045053821182015-07-29T11:20:00.000-07:002015-07-29T11:20:25.685-07:00RAINWATER SHAMPOO<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">In my mid-teens I decided that washing my hair outdoors in </span><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">the rain would be really cool. Like many of youth's romantic </span><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">notions, that one collided with reality.</span><br style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;" /><br style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;" /><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">To soak hair thoroughly -- young, thick hair, albeit quite </span><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">fine -- requires a pelting downpour, the kind that often doesn't </span><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">last long and is associated with thunderstorms. Having a </span><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">prejudice against being struck by lightning, I passed on those.</span><br style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;" /><br style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;" /><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">When proper hair-washing rain presented itself, the next </span><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">step was to change into my bathing suit: the two obvious alterna</span><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">tives -- nudity, and hair-washing fully dressed -- presented </span><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">difficulties. Even a July downpour is colder than one might </span><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">think, and soaking wet clothes are clammy and uncomfortable. The </span><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">back yard is isolated enough that nudity might have worked if no </span><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">family members happened by. I couldn't count on that, and my </span><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">parents would have been as firmly prejudiced against that as I </span><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">against electrocution. In any case, neither option occurred to </span><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">me that I can remember.</span><br style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;" /><br style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;" /><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;"> By the time I emerged into the back yard, shampoo in hand, </span><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">the rain had often diminished, and I had to finish washing my </span><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">hair in the shower, an ignominious defeat that always annoyed me. </span><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">I managed a full rainwater hair-wash maybe once.</span><br style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;" /><br style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;" /><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;"> After one summer, or possibly two, I concluded that washing </span><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">my hair in rainwater, like some of my childhood original ideas -- </span><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">taking possession of one of the chamber pots in the attic and </span><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">peeing in it instead of walking a few steps to the bathroom, or </span><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">jumping off the foundation of the old barn on </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;"> a windy day with </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">an umbrella for a parachute -- wasn't worth the trouble</span></span>Aunt Stanburyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16426109401028665557noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5480952561763626266.post-11472624783480148662015-06-09T19:56:00.002-07:002015-06-25T11:45:53.240-07:00GRAND CANYON SUITE (with apologies to Ferdé Grofe)<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">On a winter trip to the Grand Canyon in the mid-1970s, my </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">husband was determined to hike into the canyon and up again the </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">next day -- like climbing a mountain in reverse. I wasn't </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">interested in doing that; and by then he had been on enough hikes </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">with me to know that he would have a better wilderness experience </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">without me than with me. For my part, well into three weeks of </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">midwinter camping, I was happy to spend one night in a bed with a </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">bathroom and shower a few steps away and a restaurant downstairs.</span><br style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;" /><br style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;" /><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">Instead of hiking I joined three other women and a cowboy </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">named Bill on a string of mules, and together we made our way </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">down, down, and down some more to a point called Indian Gardens </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">about halfway between the rim of the canyon and the Colorado </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">River at the bottom. One of the women was from Israel; another </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">from Australia; the third from a different far-away place. I, </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">from the San Francisco Bay Area, was a local by comparison. Bill </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">was a real cowboy: he told us that his previous job had been </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">punching cows in Wyoming. Herding tourists in Arizona must have </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">been easier than that.</span><br style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;" /><br style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;" /><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">On my first trip west, in 1965, I was struck by the presence </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">in the Greyhound terminal of a couple of genuine cowboys in </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">Levis, cowboy boots and hats, traveling with big duffel bags and </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">coils of rope (one of them was Asian, which somehow isn't what </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">one expects). At that time, at least, the West was still in </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">business at some of the old locations.</span><br style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;" /><br style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;" /><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">On the rim of the Grand Canyon on one of the January nights </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">that we were there, it was four or five degrees above zero. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">Perhaps my favorite memory of that trip was crawling out of the </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">tent at some small hour of the morning in quest of a bathroom </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">(trying not to step on or otherwise disturb my husband) and </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">looking up at the sky. In the cold, dry desert air six or seven </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">thousand feet above sea level, the stars looked close enough to </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">touch.</span><br style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;" /><br style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;" /><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">One of our mule-riding company had become separated from her </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">luggage and had only one glove. Recognizing that she would never </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">get this chance again, however, she boarded her mule and made the </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">trip, one hand on the reins and the other in her pocket.</span><br style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;" /><br style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;" /><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">Anybody can stay on a Grand Canyon mule; they don't require horsemanship. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">Down they plodded, saddles and harnesses creaking, </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">sure-footed as advertised. I watched in fascination as my mount, </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">rounding a switchback, perched at the outside edge with all four </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">feet planted together, nearly touching.</span><br style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;" /><br style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;" /><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">We stopped for lunch at Indian Gardens, a formation like a </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">peninsula projecting into thin air with the river far below. We </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">rested, looked around us, and marveled at finding ourselves in </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">such a place; then we re-mounted and plodded and squeaked back </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">up. Bill gave each of us a certificate attesting that we had made </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">the trip. We ladies drank hot chocolate at the restaurant, </span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">autographed each others' certificates, and parted cordially.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;" /><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">I have to say this for my then-husband: were it not for him </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">I surely would never have ridden a mule into the Grand Canyon.</span></span>Aunt Stanburyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16426109401028665557noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5480952561763626266.post-31394746676620644822015-05-25T19:57:00.002-07:002015-05-25T19:57:45.050-07:00...BUT I KNOW WHAT I LIKE<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A couple of fragments of television drama have stuck with </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">me, each between an aspiring young musician and a teacher of </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">theory or composition who is pointing out an error in the </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">student's work. The student rejects the correction as an </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">unwarranted incursion on his artistic voice; the teacher defends </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">the correction; and a clash ensues between the stuffy old </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">defender of rules for their own sake and the ardent young </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">spokesman for originality and artistic integrity (with whom </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">American audiences can be counted on to identify). I wasn't </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">interested enough in either of these shows to stick around and </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">find out how it all turned out. I suppose the student sticks to </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">his guns and ultimately triumphs in the teeth of The Rules.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It doesn't work that way. Within the context of any art or </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">genre there are things that work and things that don't, and rules </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and techniques that you ignore at your peril. While there </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">probably are teachers who can't see beyond the letter of the </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">rules and would allow themselves to be sucked into the kind of </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">altercation depicted in these TV shows, any teacher with his wits </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">about him would point out that the young musician can do anything </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">with his own music that he can get his band, friends, and rela</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">tions to go along with; but a passing grade in the class or a </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">degree from the institution presumes mastery of certain material. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A student who has learned those techniques can go beyond them, </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">but breaking a bunch of rules because one doesn't know any better </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">usually doesn't work well. An artist who is honest and genuinely </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">talented will recognize that it doesn't, and either give up or </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">re-invent a lot of wheels trying to fix the problem.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Thirty years or so ago some tune from <i>The Godfather </i>was </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">being played a lot. I always knew that it annoyed me, but I </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">didn't care enough to figure out why until, after hearing it one </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">time too many, I found myself humming it, to my dismay (Laurie </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and I had some satisfying Ain't It Awful moments on getting music </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">you don't like stuck in your head). Unable to rid myself of the </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Godfather</i> tune, I turned around and looked it in the eye and </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">noticed that it violated at least one rule of melodic writing </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">that has been in force in Western music since the days of Gregory </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">the Great in the seventh century: a wide upward leap in a melody </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">is usually followed by a more or less corresponding descent; if </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">such an interval is part of a continuing rising line, the effect </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">is awkward; and the longer the upward motion continues, the more </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">of a bad debt, so to speak, is created. The <i>Godfather</i> tune </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">exactly, unrepentently and repeatedly took some big upward leap </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and kept on going.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Another time, annoyed by the background music in a </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">restaurant, I asked Laurie, "What's the matter with this thing, </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">anyway?" "Oh, it's all parallel," he said in disgust. Centuries </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">ago, when Europe was figuring out how to manage music that </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">consisted of more than one pitch at a time, we discovered that in </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">most contexts we prefer the sound of contrary motion -- melodic </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">lines sounding simultaneously and moving in opposite directions </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">-- to parallelism, where lines move together the same distance </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">apart. Obviously, if there are more than two parts they can't </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">all move in different directions. We settled on keeping the bass </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">line as independent as can be managed, and eschewing parallel </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">octaves and fifths. Laurie was a sophisticated enough listener </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">to recognize the problem with the restaurant music as parallel </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">fifths. I just knew that I didn't like it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When you invoke rules in the arts, people roll their eyes </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and accuse you of pedantry; but it tends to work the other way </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">around. You don't think, Oh, god, parallel fifths, horrors, this</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">song must be terrible; you think, What is wrong with this thing?? </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and then notice the parallelism, if you can hear it. If you </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">can't, you may just go on liking that piece of music less and </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">less without knowing or much caring why. </span>Aunt Stanburyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16426109401028665557noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5480952561763626266.post-71804225590205325262015-04-02T13:15:00.001-07:002015-04-02T13:32:07.701-07:00A VOICE FROM THE PAST<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Looking through my late husband's effects for something to read, I came upon <i>The Glenn Gould Reader</i>, a 1984 collection of record jacket notes, articles for music and audio magazines, and other writings from the 1960s and 1970s by Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (1932-1982). Goul<wbr></wbr>d said that if he hadn't been a musician he would have been a writer. He wrote on music, recording and related subjects, cleverly and sometimes brilliantly; but his style, described in the introduction by Tim Page, is often "self-indulgent, puckish, and overly allusive." He was publishable because he was Glenn Gould. I'm not sure how far he'd have gotten on his writing alone.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />Gould's many eccentricities are the stuff of legend, to the point where they could obscure his merits as a musician. He loathed performing. He stopped giving concerts early in his career, predicting "that the public concert as we know it today [will] no longer exist a century hence, that its functions [will] have been entirely taken over by electronic media." He gives an intriguing account of the extent to which recordings of concert music are doctored and patched, cobbled together out of many takes, to produce the kind of musical experience that performers and listeners have come to expect.<br /><br />In <i>The Prospects of Recording </i>(1966) he explains how, as recording and editing skill and equipment become more widespread and sophisticated, listeners will be able to produce their own definitive recordings: "Let us say, for example, that you enjoy Bruno Walter's performance of the exposition and recapitulation from the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony but incline toward Klemperer's handling of the development section. . . . You could snip out these measures from the Klemperer edition and splice them into the Walter performance."<br /><br />Prophecy is a risky business. Presumably, music-loving audiophiles now have the equipment and the know-how to make the kind of edited recordings that Gould describes; but I have trouble picturing who would bother. I would think that hobbyists with that level of editing savvy would be more interested in generating projects of their own -- like Eduardo Antonello, who posts videos on YouTube of himself in quadruplicate playing sixteenth century dances on krummhorns. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OOvW3shNmI" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?<wbr></wbr>v=9OOvW3shNmI</a> Gould's scheme reminds me of the story where H.G.Wells has people of the future reading by lying on their backs and watching a stream of words go by on the ceiling. We could do that; but we don't.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><br /><span style="font-style: normal;">The evolution of harmony has been central to Western music since we began to invent polyphony around the turn of the tenth century. Gould describes how harmonic development culminated in the work of such turn-of-the-century post-romantics as Richard Strauss (1864-1949) and Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951): chromaticism and dissonance, he says, have expanded to the point where key orientation is no longer workable. While Strauss stuck to tonality, Schoenberg and the other atonalists, as Gould sees it, pointed the way to further development of music by avoiding tonality and "liberating" dissonance.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: normal;">This development has been greeted with a certain lack of enthusiasm in musical circles. In a mid-1970s conversation with a recorder player who worked in a music store, I mentioned a question from a musically naive individual who asked if "classical" music -- symphonies, string quartets, and the like -- was still being composed. "Oh, yeah," the recorder player said, "but hardly anybody likes it."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: normal;">Gould acknowledges with some reluctance that the "fundamental effect [of Schoenberg's works and ideas] has been to separate audience and composer. . . , shattering irreparably the compact between audience and composer, . . . separating their </span><span style="font-style: normal;">common bond of reference and creating between them a profound antagonism." In other words, hardly anybody likes atonalism.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: normal;">At one time I tried to figure out what all the post-tonality shouting was about and could find nothing attractive or interesting about that music. I would love to have an atonality </span><i>aficionado</i> explain to me, YouTube link in hand, just what one is supposed to hear in that mass of dissonance and strained, screaming sound. In the meantime, I stick to my suspicion that that particular emperor really isn't wearing any clothes.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: normal;">It is often assumed that innovators are ahead of their time and the public will eventually catch up; but the professor with whom I studied theory at DeAnza college in the mid-1970s - like Gould, a great admirer of Schoenberg -- pointed out that it had </span><span style="font-style: normal;">been nearly seventy years since Schoenberg's 1908 venture into atonality, and that if something is going to catch on it happens faster than that. I also heard in music school that radio stations know to a nicety for how many minutes their audience will sit still for an atonal piece (the number was in the single digits, as I remember) before changing the station. From 1908 through the 1960s and 1970s to the present time, the music-listening public hasn't taken to atonality.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: normal;">Gould, in a 1967 essay, was still waiting, expecting atonal music, you might say, to sneak in the back door: "If you really stop to listen to the music accompanying most of the grade-B horror movies that are coming out of Hollywood these days, or perhaps a TV show on space travel for children, you will be absolutely amazed at the amount of integration which the various idioms of atonality have undergone in these media." I've noticed that, actually. Gould goes on to express an expectation that scary movie music will accustom the public to the sound of atonality. Maybe -- but in the decades since Gould wrote, I haven't noticed any such effect.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: normal;">These two preoccupations -- the inevitability and rightness of atonality and the imminent replacement of concert performance with recordings -- intersect in ways that Gould seems not to have considered. He takes for granted the continued forward march of Western concert music; it seems not to have occurred to him that the listening public might respond to all that discordant shrieking by walking away altogether from the kind of music often called (erroneously) "classical."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: normal;">Neuroscience researcher Daniel Levitin (</span><i style="font-style: normal;">This Is Your Brain on Music</i><span style="font-style: normal;">) claims that concert or "classical" music hasn't been written since about 1950. His book emphasizes the psychology of rhythm and tone color (or timbre) and barely mentions harmony at all. I have known other rockers -- often with a defensive edge -- to refer to "classical" music as passe. The decline in concert attendance that Gould takes as evidence of the obsolescence of public performance applies to electronic music reproduction as well: the "classical" section of CD stores has </span></span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">shrunk steadily since </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">Gould</span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">'s time, and radio stations playing that kind of music are now few and far between. Meanwhile, rock concerts continue unabated. Something other than preference for recordings over live performance must be going on.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /><span style="font-style: normal;">Photography hasn't replaced painting but has become an art form in its own right. Film hasn't replaced stage drama. Similarly, electronic sound reproduction hasn't replaced acoustic public performance so much as spun off another kind of music </span><span style="font-style: normal;">altogether. I have been saying since the late 1960s (when anyone would listen, which has been seldom) that the possibilities of harmonic development seem to be played out; that the experimenters who have been trying to create electronic music for as long as electronics have been around have developed sounds and techniques that are interesting but not clearly music; and that the first efforts to come to my attention that are electronic and also undeniably music, would be the Beatles and others like them. (Paul McCartney was a fan of Karlheinz Stockhausen, an electronic music pioneer.) The Beatles weren't the first or the only ones to combine conventional sounds and techniques with electronic ones, but they must be the mostly widely-heard.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: normal;">My favorite Beatles song is </span><i style="font-style: normal;">Tomorrow Never Knows </i><span style="font-style: normal;">(Revolver, 1966), with its steady, insistent percussion (not produced electronically, as it probably would be now, but left to </span><span style="font-style: normal;">Ringo Starr's impeccable rhythmic sense) supporting what might be described as a collage of electronically generated sounds. </span><i style="font-style: normal;">Tomorrow Never Knows</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is studio music that in the 1960s couldn't be performed live, although Paul McCartney has said in an interview that it could be now.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />None of the above is at all what Gould had in mind. In a piece on Petula Clark (whom he detested), he takes a sideswipe at the Beatles, calling them "amateurish" and faulting their voice leading. I'm sure he would have been horrified at the suggestion that their productions were comparable to what he was doing with his own recordings. And the Beatles' studio pieces were far more innovative than Gould's endless picking over of historical works that were never meant to be handled that way. As little enthusiasm as I have for the decline of Western concert music, it rather amuses me to reflect while reading Gould's sarcastic putdown that the Beatles won: they beat Gould at his own game, and arguably the future of music rests more with them than with him.</span></div>
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Aunt Stanburyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16426109401028665557noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5480952561763626266.post-12625734678756445942014-09-12T15:33:00.001-07:002014-09-12T15:33:15.820-07:00ZAXEROPLASTEION<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When Justin was in school he and I often found ourselves on Lake Street between Route 2 and Massachusetts Avenue in Arlington. There, just as you turn left onto Mass Ave, is the Arlington Bakery, advertising Italian and Greek pastries.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Above the name on the sign is an intriguing Greek word: ZAXEROPLASTEION. Justin and I wondered idly on many occasions how to pronounce it, and what it meant. In the absence of any information on the subject, he blithely pronounced it phonetically: ZAX-ER-O-<b>PLAS</b>-TI-ON, the A’s as in “cat.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Then a day came when for once we weren’t in a huge rush to get home. The other issue had always been that having turned onto Mass Ave we were a bit too far up to stop at the bakery. This time, surrendering to curiosity, I turned up a side street and doubled back.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We bought some things that looked good, and weren’t disappointed. I would have looked for an exotic concoction that I hadn’t seen before; Justin probably opted for the kind of regrettable pastry that kids favor. I’ve patronized that bakery from time to time since, usually when driving west on Mass Ave and thus on its side of the street.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The proprietor explained that the word on the sign means “sugar store” and is pronounced ZA-CHER-O-PLAS-<b>TI</b>-O(N), A as in “father,” CH as in “Bach,” E as in “feta.” O(N) is the final nasal vowel that also occurs in Portuguese, as in “<u>Sa<b>o</b></u> Paulo.” I can’t reliably produce that sound in Portuguese or in Greek.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I have since tried to do justice to the Greek word and pronounce it as nearly correctly as I can. Justin has no patience with that and shamelessly sticks with ZAX-ER-O-<b>PLAS</b>-TI-ON.</span>Aunt Stanburyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16426109401028665557noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5480952561763626266.post-27069456803768322982014-08-21T17:06:00.000-07:002014-08-21T17:06:05.482-07:00HIPPOPOTAMUS (with apologies to Eugene Ionesco)<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Christmas when Justin was nine, Paula pulled in with a large wrapped package under her arm, intimating that I might not be pleased with what she was about to bestow on my son. I'm not </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">sure why she thought so, except that our condominium wasn't large and the object in question clearly was.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It proved to be a gray plush hippopotamus, four and a half feet long, a couple of feet high, and correspondingly bulky. She made it, of course. Paula makes many clever and intricate things.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Justin loved it. He established it in his room and lived with it day and night, using it as a pillow in childhood and beyond. He also vented his frustrations on it, wrestling with it and punching it. He had a lot of frustrations. A strong, energetic, active kid, he was in some sense, as he put it, under house arrest because his interactions with the neighborhood kids often brought grief on all of us. His father had stopped seeing him on weekends when I remarried. His stepfather yelled at him a lot; Justin was a kid who could get yelled at, but Laurie overdid it. My health wasn't reliable, which was hard on everybody. That's a lot for a nine-year-old to deal with.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Paula's sturdy and meticulous stitching held up remarkably well; but the hippopotamus could hardly have taken that kind of punishment indefinitely. Seams leaked, and then burst. Bits of hippopotamus stuffing appeared, and more bits, and bigger pieces, and once a small sofa pillow that Paula had shoved in when the batting was running low. By Justin's early twenties, the </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">hippopotamus was tattered and its stuffing scanty.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Justin brought this pathetic rag to Paula's attention and begged her to save it. Undaunted -- Paula raised three boys of her own -- she took it in hand. The head was held together with a lot of seams but had lost at least one eye and a bunch of stuffing and clung to the body by a few threads (I think it still had both projecting fangs). The body was no better. The only thing for it was to construct a second hippopotamus out of a sheet and line the original hide with it. In two or three places where the damage to the fabric was beyond help or hope, she stitched brightly-colored cotton patches over the holes.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The resurrection of the hippopotamus was complete by Christmas. Again, Justin was delighted with it; it was, he said, the best present he had ever received. He carried it home proudly on Christmas night, by way of a date with a young woman he had long been interested in. The young woman didn't work out, but it was reported that she thought the hippopotamus rather cool.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Paula doesn't remember what prompted her to select the hippopotamus pattern out of the offerings at the fabric store. Once in possession, she made half a dozen hippopotamuses (hippopotami?) for her grandchildren and two for her husband's nieces. At the baby shower anticipating Aurora's appearance, Paula arrived carrying a round-ish package a couple of feet long. Somebody said, "It's a little hippopotamus" -- Justin's having become modestly famous. Paula smiled enigmatically: "Open it and see." Sure enough, it was a purple plush hippopotamus about half the size of Justin's.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For Xavier's second birthday Paula produced a similar object, in bright red. Amanda commented, "I feel like I should have a hippopotamus, too." I had thought of that and suggested yellow; Amanda put in for orange. Paula mentioned having orange fabric that would just do among her bales of fabric, boxes of sewing notions, big cutting table, and, at one point, seven sewing machines. Amanda may get her orange hippopotamus yet.</span></div>
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Aunt Stanburyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16426109401028665557noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5480952561763626266.post-91922601272957770682014-07-26T07:09:00.001-07:002014-07-26T07:14:53.386-07:00THOSE EXCELLENT PONIES<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">Justin was five when we read The Hobbit. During most of one </span><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">rainy weekend, I sat in my chair in the corner and read while he </span><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">tore around the living room jumping off the furniture, working </span><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">off the energy that he couldn't release outside.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">I kept saying, "Look, Justin, we don't have to read this." </span><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">I would fold up the book with the idea of letting him play freely </span><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">-- but the next thing I knew he was back with this big, heavy </span><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">book in his five-year-old hands: "Wread it, Mummy." So I read, </span><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">until the jumping around reached a level that couldn't be </span><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">compatible with listening -- could it?</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">Finally I said, "Justin, what did I just read?" He </span><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">responded with a capable precis of the last paragraph, concluding </span><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">on a rising inflection with the phrase -- an important one in </span><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">context -- "those <b>excellent PONIES!</b>"</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">All right. He really can run around like a Tasmanian devil </span><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">and listen at the same time. I kept reading, ignoring the wild </span><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">rumpus at my feet, until we finished the book.</span></span>Aunt Stanburyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16426109401028665557noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5480952561763626266.post-8356912461434427502014-07-17T13:27:00.000-07:002014-07-17T13:27:48.519-07:00TOCCATA<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">I turned twenty-two that summer; Laurie was twenty-six. Our </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">lives were in chaos. A bright spot for both of us was making our </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">way to a back room up many stairs at M.Steinert's on Tremont </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">Street -- Laurie worked there and had access at all hours -- </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">where he would take his place at the piano that Sviatoslav </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">Richter and John Browning asked for when they came to town, and </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">play for me whatever he was working on at the time. </span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">One of these pieces was Prokofiev's <i>Toccata</i>, Opus 11, one of </span></span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Vladimir Horowitz's encores and a barn burner by any standard. </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When Laurie was first looking at the music and thinking about </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">learning it, someone he worked with said with a smirk, "You can't </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">play that." Having, as he gleefully put it in later life, "no brains,"</span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> he ground his teeth and settled down to learning the </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Toccata, just to prove that he could.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br style="color: #222222;" /><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">It begins with repeated sixteenth-notes on D, establishing a </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">driving rhythm that, except for one short lyrical section, </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">continues throughout the piece. It's percussive, chromatic, </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">dissonant, exciting, and great fun to watch. Laurie said the </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">Toccata is in sonata allegro form, like the first movement of a </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">symphony. I'll take his word for it. Laurie was big on struc</span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">ture; I've never been able to hear these things, or figure them </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">out. What I'm aware of structurally in the Toccata is the </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">ingenious way the themes develop and fit together.</span><br style="color: #222222;" /><br style="color: #222222;" /><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">Toward the end of the development section, it must be, </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">starting from the top and bottom of the keyboard respectively, </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">the performer's hands work their way towards each other in </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">contrary motion. The pattern in the left hand looks to me like </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">thinly disguised parallel fifths; the right hand plays chromatic </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">chords bristling with accidentals. At that point -- measure 77, </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">in the middle of page 27 -- to be sure of positioning his hands correctly, </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">Laurie would hesitate ever so slightly. Any interrup</span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">tion in the relentless sixteenth-note pulse is conspicuous; but I </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">always liked the effect of that slight hesitation, which gives </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">the listener a split-nanosecond to wonder what on earth is coming </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">next.</span><br style="color: #222222;" /><br style="color: #222222;" /><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">Before the coda, the momentum relaxes -- think of the train </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">slowing down at the beginning of <i>The Music Man</i> -- into repeated </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">D's that echo the introduction. Then, at the original tempo, </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">chromatic chords begin climbing the keyboard, louder and faster </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">as they go, until the main theme explodes in frantic octaves at </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">the top, twice as fast as anything that's happened yet. With a </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">dive into one of Prokofiev's signature glissandos, the piece </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">finishes fortissimo on a double open octave on D.</span><br style="color: #222222;" /><br style="color: #222222;" /><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">Laurie and I stayed in touch for the twenty-odd years </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">between the spring and summer of the back room at Steinert's and </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">our marriage in 1986 but weren't always aware of each other's </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">day-to-day issues. I didn't know that the Toccata had become </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">part of his repertoire. I was delighted when he announced his </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">intention of dusting it off and playing it at a concert at our </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">church. Hearing it in slow motion over many weeks, I came to </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">appreciate the interplay of the different themes, even though I </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">still didn't grasp the overall structure.</span><br style="color: #222222;" /><br style="color: #222222;" /><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">Discussing the concert with the choir director, Laurie told </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">her what he was going to play and asked if she knew the piece. </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">"Oh, yes," she said. Either she was thinking of a different </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">work, or that was one of these absent-minded remarks people make. </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">When she heard the Toccata at the concert, she was grafityingly </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">surprised and impressed. At her request he repeated it a few </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">years later. I think that was the concert that he left saying,</span><br style="color: #222222;" /><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">"Well, that's about as well as I can play."</span><br style="color: #222222;" /><br style="color: #222222;" /><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;"> As Laurie got older and less sure of himself, his playing </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">took on a heavy-handed do-or-die quality. Usually this is a </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">mistake -- sometimes a fatal one. With the Toccata, it works. </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">Laurie once played me a recording by a young pianist who rippled </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">through the piece, making it sound almost easy. That struck me </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">as wrong. I missed the fire and drama of Laurie's rather </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">desperate rendition. He began his relationship with the Toccata </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">trying to prove something, and struggled for four decades with </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">this powerful and rather angry piece that one biographer has </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">characterized as "nasty."</span><br style="color: #222222;" /><br style="color: #222222;" /><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">I have kept three or four pieces of Laurie's piano music, </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">including his 11 x 17 enlargement of the Toccata. For most </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">people who knew Laurie, his signature piece would be the Gershwin </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;"><i>Songbook</i> (which I have also kept), the second Prelude, or </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;"><i>Rhapsody in Blue</i>. When I remember Laurie at the keyboard, I </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;">think of the Toccata.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; color: #222222;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGlXRW7GLsY">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGlXRW7GLsY</a></span></span>Aunt Stanburyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16426109401028665557noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5480952561763626266.post-30109340790936935072014-04-03T19:20:00.003-07:002014-04-03T19:20:54.043-07:00THE YEAR OF THE CHICKEN<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">The pig was before my time, but I remember the chickens. My </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">sister and I sometimes helped my feed them grain and collect </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">eggs. As far as I know, no one in the family developed any </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">emotional connection to them, as owners of such things sometimes </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">do. We watched with interest as Dad beheaded one or more of </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">them, holding the body at arms length until it stopped flapping </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">and spraying blood around. (I once asked a doctor what method of </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">execution would be fastest and least painful, and he said </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">probably the guillotine would have been as humane as anything. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">On the basis of watching the chickens meet their end I have </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">wondered idly if guillotined French aristocrats flailed around </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">comparably; but there are things one doesn't have to know. I'm </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">glad, anyway, that the chickens and the aristocrats didn't </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">suffer, except in anticipation -- the aristocrats, of course; </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">Barbara Kingsolver says poultry on the threshold of eternity have </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">no idea what's coming.)</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">We loosened the feathers with boiling water and pulled them </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">out with tweezers. Dad sat at the kitchen table to clean the </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">birds with a pail at his feet to receive intestines and other </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">inedibles, and explained the internal organs to us as they came </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">out. He kept the liver, gizzard, and heart, which he enjoyed in </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">the fricassee that marked the chicken's final appearance on the </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">table.</span><br style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;" /><br style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;" /><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">On one of these occasions I picked up a chicken head from </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">beside the chopping block and examined it closely: reddish </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">feathers, yellow beak, wide-open beady little yellow-ringed black </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">eyes. I thought it was neat. I asked my mother if I could keep </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">it. She said I could not. She maintained that it would become </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">ugly and stinky very soon. I didn't believe her. I often </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">disbelieved things I hadn't experienced personally. At least, I </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">had to be able to visualize it as a direct result of what I had </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">witnessed. I had seen Mother's dire prognostications fail to </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">materialize. When no one was looking, I carried off the chicken </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">head and put it in the mailbox for safekeeping. I knew, of </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">course, that it couldn't stay there. I intended to retrieve it </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">at my leisure and hide it in my room.</span><br style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;" /><br style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;" /><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">As children will, I got sidetracked and forgot about the </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">chicken head in the mailbox. Mother found it when she went to </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">mail a letter. She was not pleased. Of course, there was no </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">possible question as to who was responsible. Even aside from my </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">earlier expression of interest in the object, bizarre occurrences </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">were routinely, and usually correctly, ascribed to me.</span><br style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;" /><br style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;" /><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">Mother read me the riot act. The mailman, she declared, </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">would be within his rights in declining to deliver mail to people </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">who kept chicken heads in their mailbox. I don't remember </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">particularly </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">regretting the chicken head, beyond feeling rather </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">foolish for forgetting about it and incurring a scolding.</span></span>Aunt Stanburyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16426109401028665557noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5480952561763626266.post-14297532286715767752014-03-13T18:00:00.000-07:002014-07-17T13:30:22.462-07:00THE YEAR OF THE PIG<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">Early in their marriage, my parents kept a pig under the barn. I </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">never made its acquaintance, but I knew the space under the barn </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">as "the pig-hole," and I must have been told in terms I believed </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">that Little Girls Don't Go Into The Pig-Hole. To this day, I can </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">hardly bring myself to venture under the barn (not that there's </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">any reason to). I wish I could say the same for the colony of </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">woodchucks presently in residence there.</span><br style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;" /><br style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;" /><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">To return to 1941 and the errant pig -- I don't know how it got </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">out, but get out it did one fine day, and proceeded downstreet </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">toward the more densely populated part of Otter River. Mother saw </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">it leave and set out after it, armed with a bucket of potatoes </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">that was supposed to lure it back to its home.</span><br style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;" /><br style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;" /><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">It showed no interest in the potatoes, opting instead to root up </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">a lawn in the neighborhood. The lady of the house issued forth </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">and belabored the pig with a broom. The pig paid no more </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">attention to the broom than to the potatoes. The resulting </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">turmoil eventually caught the eye of some guys in a passing </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">truck, who stopped, captured the pig, loaded it into the truck, </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">and delivered it, presumably, to its pig-hole.</span><br style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;" /><br style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;" /><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">Mother, at her earliest convenience, put her foot down on Dad's </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">pig-keeping. The pig became ham and bacon, leaving only a me</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">mory </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">and a hole under the barn where little girls weren't allowed.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;"> </span></span>Aunt Stanburyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16426109401028665557noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5480952561763626266.post-9622506049553485432014-02-07T16:43:00.003-08:002014-02-07T16:43:43.296-08:00OPTICAL DELUSION<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">It comes into view from the eastbound lane of Route 2 near </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">the top of the hill in Harvard, just as you pass the closed rest </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">area on the other side of the road. When it first impinged on my </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">consciousness, looming up from the top of a wooded hillside, my </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">reaction was: <i>What is that?</i> At first glance it looked a </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">little like a white pine, but twice as tall as any of its </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">neighbors; and no white pine, or any Massachusetts tree, ever </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">grew like that. The top foot or so was about right, a </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">symmetrical cone of green needled branches much wider than it was </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">high; but from there to the line where the other trees hid its </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">base, it grew straight down, all the branches the same length. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">There was something vaguely tropical about the shape. Whatever </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">this thing was, I had never seen the like of it, either in the </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">Northeast or in California.</span><br style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;" /><br style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;" /><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">I wondered about it every Sunday as my husband and I plied </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">eastward on Route 2 (it wasn't visible from the other direction, </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">except in the rear view mirror on the way past the rest area), </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">wondering how it had managed to grow so high without coming to my </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">attention before. Then one Sunday, two things were different: </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">first, for once, we weren't on a schedule and thus had time for </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">side trips; and second, most of the tree's lower branches were </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">missing, apparently preparatory to cutting it down. If we were </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">going to investigate this odd specimen, it would have to be now.</span><br style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;" /><br style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;" /><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">We turned off at the next exit, Routes 110 and 111 in the </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">Harvard direction, and turned right onto a road that obligingly </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">led back along the highway, exactly the way we wanted to go. A </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">few twists and turns later, we came to what was obviously the </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">tree we had seen from the highway, boxed in by a chain link fence </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">a dozen feet each way on which was posted an unfriendly notice of </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">the don't-even-think-about-coming-</span><wbr style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;"></wbr><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">in-here kind.</span><br style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;" /><br style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;" /><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">The bark on the branchless trunk looked approximately normal </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">for a white pine, but wrong somehow -- too light in color, or a </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">different shade of brown. Apparently diseased or deformed, it </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">was subtly horrible, like something in a nightmare. I turned my </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">nearsighted attention to the branches piled on the ground outside </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">the fence. They had proper dark green white-pine needles, two or </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">three inches long and attached to the branches in bundles of </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">five; but, like the trunk, they were not quite right somehow.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><br style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;" /><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">I must have scrutinized this thing, trunk, branches and </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">needles, for all of a minute before I realized that I was looking </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">at a tree made of <i>plastic</i>. I explained this to my husband, who did</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">n't see well and was willfully ignorant of things botanical. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">He,a ham radio operator and electronics aficionado, then recog</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">nized the structure as an antenna -- probably, he suggested, a </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">cell phone tower -- made up to look like a tree.</span><br style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;" /><br style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;" /><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">I have lived all my life in a world of technological wonders </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">and plastic fakery. I knew from the first that this thing wasn't </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">any kind of white pine. It wasn't even meant to look enough like </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">one to fool anybody. The intent was to camouflage the antenna, </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">not to disguise it. But never having encountered such a thing, I </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">had no mental category other than "tree" to put it in. That it </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">took me as long as it did to figure out what I was seeing </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">confirms that we see what we already know about and can easily </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">misinterpret the unfamiliar.</span></span>Aunt Stanburyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16426109401028665557noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5480952561763626266.post-42678524338250139822013-12-05T12:51:00.001-08:002013-12-10T12:16:28.196-08:00DOWN IN THE VALLEY AND BACK THE SAME DAY<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In my youth the way to get a Christmas tree in Otter River was to hike along the logging road around Bell Hill, descend from there into the pathless wilderness of Christmas Tree Valley, select and cut a tree, and hike out with it. Bell Hill is part of the family property in Otter River; Christmas Tree Valley is an adjacent swamp. Such terrain is now called "wetland," but if you have any agenda there other than documenting flora and fauna or monitoring water levels, it's a swamp. In December, though, with a firm frozen footing and often a nice coating of snow on the trees, the swampiness of it isn't obvious. I'm not sure we ever went down there for any reason except to cut a tree, so "Christmas Tree Valley" it was.<br /><br />Most of Bell Hill is covered with beech and hemlock; the spruces for Christmas use seem to prefer the lowlands. At some late point, when we were no longer stalking Christmas trees in the wild, Dad compared notes with the owner of the abutting property and discovered that Christmas Tree Valley is not, in fact, on our land and that we had been stealing Christmas trees for years. No one was particularly concerned about it<br /><br />Dad always liked to cut a tree that was grouped closely with one or two others. If we take one of these, he said, the others will grow better. If ours has a flat spot, he continued, we'll put that side next to the window. Paula and I would lobby for a free-standing tree; but if Dad had already settled on one of a clump we were overruled. We were often further dismayed that he wanted such a small tree, until experience taught us that a tree in the living room is a lot bigger than the same tree in the woods.<br /><br />None of us but Dad knew exactly where Christmas Tree Valley was in relation to the rest of the world until the summer between my junior and senior years in high school when I was to be a counselor at the girl scout day camp on Bell Hill. (Ah, for those innocent days, when you could have a hundred or so of other people's kids running around your property for a couple of weeks, including swimming every day at the Otter River Pool, and ruin by personal injury lawsuit never occurred to anyone). I wanted to be able to take groups of campers on the modest hike that Dad used to do with us: along the logging road behind the hill to the end; up the hill to the right to another logging road; up that to the top; then forward to the front of the hill, which overlooks Route 68 and a good piece of Otter River. Dad walked me through that route and on the way pointed out the Horse Cemetery (deceased horses were buried there at one time) and Christmas Tree Valley. Being focused on learning and remembering where things were on Bell Hill, I then knew where Christmas trees were to be found.<br /><br />My best guess is that it was the Christmas of my senior year in high school that Paula and I, deciding that our father didn't look like providing us with a Christmas tree at all soon, undertook to handle it ourselves. Booted and hatted and gloved and armed with our choice of weapons, we walked down to Bell Hill after school one afternoon.<br /><br />We found the valley and selected and cut a tree without incident, but somehow, dragging this heavy and unwieldy object through the underbrush, we found ourselves unsure of the way out. The casting about that one does in the woods, hither and thither until something looks familiar, had limited appeal, burdened as we were, and we weren't eager to separate and chance losing each other. At some point I intersected with a fir-branch full of recent snow and coated my face, including my glasses. Whatever I was wearing included nothing dry and accessible enough to wipe eyeglasses on. So Paula, with her contact lenses, could see but didn't know the way, and I knew the way but couldn't see. Since we'd started sometime after three o'clock within a few days of the winter solstice, it wouldn't be long before neither of us could see much of anything.<br /><br />The way out had to be uphill. We picked a piece of hillside relatively free of brush and started to climb. To our vast relief we did come upon the logging road, a good deal farther toward the street than I was prepared for. Even in near-darkness we could hardly stray off the logging road. We trudged out of the woods and toward home in, by this time, complete darkness -- our mother must have been ready to call the National Guard -- and very glad we were to see the lights of the house ahead.</span>
Aunt Stanburyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16426109401028665557noreply@blogger.com0