Tag: Word of the Day Challenge

Posted on

By Rail

At one time in New England history, to be on the map as a community meant being incorporated into the region’s rail network. The iron rail coiled, twined, and netted the region, and from the New York border with Connecticut to Maine; we had modern ( for 1900) and replete public transportation.
Beyond the railroad, there were the interurban street car lines. Using those, you could almost span New England on the cost of a ticket and transfers. I was told of one man who worked in Waltham, Massachusetts, and came home to suburban Portland for weekends.

I’m not sure I’d like his commute, but I marvel at how you could meander about the landscape of the cities and countryside without a car.

This transportation infrastructure was largely abandoned by the end of the twentieth century. Formal abandonments allowed the remaining railroads to pull up rails and turn away from communities. Abandoned factories, grass growing over old tracks; all this formed a sort of pathological appearance to a post industrial New England where the bones of history was left in place, and never removed. So, the old transportation corridors remained, grown up in weeds, and eventually reverting to woodlands, marsh, and meadows.

Eventually, groups came together to convert these abandoned lines into rail trails. Many of these exist in my area, and my wife and I have regularly hiked them. Last year this was part of my physical therapy before my hip surgery. Soon, walking them will become part of my post-operative physical therapy as I recondition my body to move with the new replacement hip.

The old railroads measured and laid out their routes for the greatest energy economy possible. Grades were the enemy; you consumed fuel, fuel costs money, and money spent meant less profit. As a result, while they meander, most rail trails are either level, in cuts, or on elevations that keep the grade gradual. Perfect for walking and biking.

This fall, I’ll hit the trail for leaf peeping. I’ll snowshoe across meadows in winter, and in spring, I’ll hunt early wildflowers along old embankments—all within seven miles of where I live. And in the trail left by the old steel rails of the railroad.

Posted on

Booksales

I admit to visiting library and church book sales. Among the browsers, some look for romances, some for history, cookbooks, and how to do. Of course, I am interested in those rare finds that fit my maritime, carving, arts, and sci-fi interests. Since the prices are so reasonable, there is plenty of opportunities to satisfy a passing whim. Of course, we wouldn’t pay full price for it at a retail book store, but there is little to hinder an experimental purchase for a dollar or two. I have some beautiful art books on my shelves that I couldn’t have afforded retail when they were first published.

There is one section of these sales that generally seem to get ignored. They’re not off in a dark corner, but people tend to brush by their offerings and go on to more select topics. These are not old classics from the 1930-s or so. Many get bought to go to cottages and camps as shelf reading material.
Nope, the ones I am talking about are much more recent than those. I understand that these books are most likely to be pulped, composted, or just dumped at the end of the sale. Here you will find the last national administration’s tell-all scandal books, biographies of easily forgotten politicians, and ghost-written books by or on the giants of enterprise or technology. This last category seems targeted at convincing us that these little people stand in the same ranks as the Salks, Einsteins, and Lincolns. This area also includes the forgettable recent celebrity bios and kiss-and-tell jobs on movie and television personalities.

I’m not sure I understand the economics of publishing many of these books. They must make a quick profit for their publishers within weeks because within months, they begin to appear heavily discounted on tables at booksellers. It then seems to be a short jump to the church or Library book sale.

It would be interesting to analyze sales patterns for second-hand books because I think some topics seem very durable, while others lose widespread approval rapidly.

Posted on

Not So Little Mermaid

So…yes, this isn’t carved, but as this fiberglass concoction hangs, so also hangs a tale of carving. 

I had booths at many boat shows during my stint as a maritime carver. My display of eagles, quarter boards, billet heads, and boat portraits received lots of attention. But, inevitably, not all of it was of a sort I really wanted. Alcohol complicated sales and display. Sloshed beer was a cleanup problem. Show attendees who were inebriated rarely bought. But, frequently caused problems.
At some point, a man would walk up and ask me how much It’d cost to carve a figurehead of his wife. “Like this (putting his hands behind his head). But bustier.”

After the first couple of polite replies, I grew tired of these requests for explicit work. So I developed a method of handling them.
a.) say sure, and the name a flagrantly outrageous price;
b.) then I’d ask for a signed consent form from his wife. Agreeing to this
c.) for the genuinely incorrigible, I’d refer them to a place in Newport where the exact model pictured here was available for about $150 in fiberglass.

I actually printed up a consent form for those who purported to be serious about this but never got one back signed…I wonder why?

This beauty hung in the Oldies Marketplace (Newburyport, MA) for several months among all the fabulous bijoux before it was snapped up. The last time I was there, it had been replaced by one equally well endowed. Thereby proving, I guess, that there was a market for them and probably that I contributed to it.

Please, no mermaid requests without a signed consent form!

Posted on

Grammer

I have been known to blunder my way through the English Language. Being English is my first language, I don’t have the excuse for my solecisms that people who might be learning our language do.

I have caused much mayhem with editors who have accused me of doing it deliberately. Now with a computer program that frequently doesn’t catch all of them, I can write with passion and verve without causing an adult to fall into fits of anxiety and anguish. I haven’t broken the machine yet, But every day I seem to be striking out into new territory in abuse of a dumb machine.

Unlike a part-time human editor, the program can’t send me a passionate email describing how wonderful it feels not to endlessly try to reason with me over my love of the outre. Instead, I get comments from the program on my passive voice, poor use of ellipses, coma misplacement, overuse of the word “that,” strange grammatical constructions, slang, and obscure words not in the dictionary. It’s very liberating. I can tell the computer to go to perdition and not have it be offended.

This is wonderful as far as it goes, but something is missing when you can no longer feel the simmering heat of an offended English B.A. on the phone or receive the angry “You are F@#*ing impossible, I refuse to work with you again!” something is missing.

I think it’s that beautiful feeling of human contact that an emoji can’t replace.

Posted on

Aspirations

If you have read many of my earlier posts, you might have guessed that I not only engaged in louche lifestyles, I fully embraced them. Rake, yes, morally questionable, check, and not of reputable taste and decadent, absolutely. Sometimes it took great willpower to maintain it all. After all, I lacked the financial wherewithal to make it shine. I was too poor to wear the threads that bespoke elegantly seedy. I was poor man chic.

Sometimes I would fall into fits of pique that my aspirations were frustrated.

Eventually, despite my tremendous willpower, I slipped into more conventional modes of attire and behavior. I knew that I had humongous potential but could not fulfill my dreams. 

It brought to mind the Robert Browning quote: “…a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”

Posted on

Good Question

Years ago, I was told the reason looking out over a forested landscape was so resting was the variegation of greens. All the different shades mingled. To me, it seemed a sort of pattern of no pattern. I observed that if you add the slight air movement through the leaves, you get an even more complex view. This disturbed the person who’d informed me that the wide variety of greens was resting.
It seemed that he had a more paint-by-the-numbers view of things. Looking at the movement was vaguely disturbing, like a mass of caterpillars writhing on the mountainside below us.
Over the years, I’ve seen this as a sort of stasis versus change view of reality. It’s easy to view things as going merrily along in their established track until, well, until they don’t. Then all hell breaks loose because you never suspected that Jane would walk out on John, that the car would seize up, or that you look in the mirror one day and see a parent gazing at you.
I’m not moralizing now that I’m superior to others because I don’t do this; of course, I do. Generally, you have abundant information that at least some of these changes are in the works. For example, John’s frequent orations on domestic management, the missed oil changes, or the wrinkles slowly overtaking your smile. We just conveniently replace reason with complacency.

As a species, we seem wired to dream of stasis when change is always around us. The other day I was talking about replacing some windows with someone at work. The seal had broken, and several now had vapor between the twin pains of glass.
Somehow old fashioned storm windows came up. The huge heavy ones clipped over particular hinges at the top and sealed tightly with felt caulk, hook, and eye bolts. My coworker is much younger than I am, he looked oddly at me as I described how they all had to be marked carefully for the window they belonged to, or you’d get a hopeless mess of mismatched windows. Then, I remembered that in Maine, we used Roman numerals with letters indicating where storm windows went. On the old house, there had to be thirty windows, and putting up and taking down storm windows were sure reminders of the change of seasons.
He looked at me as though I had taken leave of my senses. “why weren’t windows designed like they are now?”
Rather than go into a long and pointless discussion of how a process of technological change resulted in the modern window, I surrendered to the ahistorical tendencies of a world in which history was what you saw on TV, unwrapped another Caramel from the candy dish, and replied, ” good question.”

Posted on

What You See

One of the forms of torture the US Navy inflicted on recruits was a series of swimming tests. So, of course, you’d expect the Navy to want minimum floatation abilities, right? The final test, you could not graduate from Basic Training without passing it, was a challenging one for me.

 Fully dressed, you climbed to the top of a tall diving platform and jumped ( no diving allowed) into the large pool. Once in the swimming pool, you stripped off your work dungarees and, in a practiced move, swung the sopping wet clothing over your head to make an improvised flotation device. Next, you used your gob hat ( the white sailors’ hat) to improvise flotation. After this, you had to tread water for several minutes until told your time was up, and you could swim to the edge of the pool and get out of the water.

I had to take the test three times. I was a floatation-making champ, unafraid of the leap by attempt number three. My problem was 130 lean pounds; I lacked the fat my body needed to tread water without sinking like a stone. This did not matter to the people giving the test in a typical Navy manner. Regs stated that I must tread water for the regulation time, and that was it. Unwritten regs also ensured that if there were too many failures in a recruit company, someone would suffer the consequences. So during my final test, an examiner made gestures suggesting that I tread, float on my back, tread, do a dead man’s float, and then tread again. All the while not looking directly at me. If asked, he could look the lieutenant straight in the eye and say, ” I didn’t see that, sir!”

So I wasn’t out of Boot Camp yet but had learned the important lesson that most junior officers couldn’t distinguish between what you didn’t see and what you should have been aware of. Over time I realized that many continued up the chain of command without gaining this critical skill.

If I ever expected this to be different in civilian life, I found to my sorrow, that it was the same all over. Many people do not seem capable of noting the distinction, even when the nature of their jobs obliges them.

I think it’s why we need so many caution signs, three-ring binders with procedures, and flashing warning alerts asking, ” do you really want to do this?.”

Posted on

Britannica

When I was about ten, the owner of the building where my father was Super gifted me with a slightly obsolete but complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica, he’d replaced this older set with a brand new one for his children. So the Britannica soon was set up on shelves in a small basement room called my “laboratory.” I conducted mayhem, anatomical dissections on a chicken, and the like there. 

Already on the outs with the New York City Public School system for being noncooperative, I now plotted further acts of non-conformism by peppering my classes with vast newfound knowledge of the Reformation, Darwin, Edmund Burke, and Athenian democracy. To astound a history teacher, I dredged up the Defenestration of Prague as an example of what could happen to authority figures who get out of control. Since my gaze wandered to the window, he interpreted this as a threat. The principal called my father and advised him I was at it again.

Finding that just a little knowledge is dangerous and intoxicating, I dived deeper into Britannica. It was like knocking on the door of a vast storehouse of knowledge and having the portal swing open wide. My teachers disagreed. I would pepper classes with requests for further information on topics based on articles in the Britannica. My father was told I threatened the basis of the curriculum worked out by wiser heads than mine. One day I came home and found the door to the laboratory padlocked.

My history teacher looked especially smug in the following weeks. My father seemed relieved that he had no further requests to visit the school. I grew silent in class, which made the teacher happier.

My father was lax in the storage of his spare keys. A Super has many locks and needs spare keys for emergencies. Therefore, the spares need to be where they can easily be found. I located a spare key hanging from a stanchion about a week after he installed the lock. Waiting till my father was occupied, I quietly made my way in and returned to my studies. 

Having learned that people in authority liked to suppress inconvenient knowledge and control access to knowledge, I was careful in revealing what I knew. I also learned that authorities would use dupes to silence those who inconveniently threaten their lock on information. Finally, I also learned that all the above could be subverted; if you were careful.

Somebody once said that one of the benefits of a lousy education is the constant pleasure of discovery. But, of course, this only works if your joy of discovery survives the effort to destroy it.

Posted on

Fred

With some trepidation, I enlisted in the US Navy in late December. Even after I got on the train to Great Lakes Naval Training Station, I was worried that some FBI type would come marching down the train aisle, pull me off, and tell everyone that I was unworthy to be a seaman recruit.
Why? Well, it had a lot to do with Fred.

The reason I was so nervous had to do with a bookstore. But, of course, it wasn’t any bookstore. It was Mr. Lee’s New World Bookstore in Baltimore. Mr. Lee’s was where you went to buy your political literature if you harbored any political sentiment that was left of center in those days. Anarchists, Socialists, Communists, and probably Primitive Democrats gathered at Mr. Lee’s. Political discussions were subdued, and courtesy was the rule. Mr. Lee served a wide gamut and liked to encourage peaceful coexistence. Anarcho-Syndicalists abided peacefully with the occasional Trotskyite.

What was I doing there? I was with my anarchist friends and trying to hit on Liz, a staunch Socialist who would talk for hours about Tito’s “Independent Paths To Socialism.” I would listen to her while trying to get her to come to our apartment for a more comfortable place to converse.

But this isn’t about Liz, Socialism, Anarchism, or any other Ism. It’s about Fred. Fred is the name we assigned to one of the FBI watchers who regularly stood across the street snapping photos of us and making notes. How did we know that they were FBI? Their suits, ties, short haircuts, and evident interest in Mr. Lee’s to the exclusion of other things on the street were dead giveaways. A group of about five rotated camera and observation duty. There was nothing subtle going on. Walk around the block and down the street; there was a non-descript government-issue style car with off-duty cadre members sipping coffee and reading the Washington Post.

If they were to treat us as dangerous fifth column types, we would observe them as idiot neo-fascists. Since they felt free to photograph and watch us, we countered by taking photos of them. The black and white mug shots we hung inside the bookstore. At the bottom of each picture was the name we assigned to each of our shadows. After a while, we could recognize them individually.
They decided to penetrate the store and sent an agent to ask to use the bathroom. On the way out, he chanced upon the mug shots and had a major panic attack when he saw his name and photo. He cried out, “How did you find out my name?” as he rushed onto the street. It was the agent we had named Fred.
Having “made” Fred, we now worked on other detail members. Again, we threw aside caution for guile. During bad weather, we’d take coffee over. The horror on their faces was wildly amusing when they struggled to refuse the coffee and asked that we stop calling them by name.

We decided that we should attempt to ” turn” Fred. Yes, you are aware that we read way too many spy novels as a group. Being that I had exchanged a few words with Fred the day he accepted coffee from us ( “so one lump of sugar or two,” “just one, thanks”), I was chosen to entice Fred into our little plot to frustrate the FBI.

The following day I passed a coffee to Fred with a note taped to the side. ” The central coordinating committee wants to meet you—Druid Hill Park Saturday, ten AM, by the dead oak. Come alone.”

By Saturday, I was in Boston, having decided that my attempt to generate a relationship with Liz was going nowhere and hoping that in Boston, I might have a conversation with a woman that was not all about party doctrine. So, I was not there to watch the agents’ car unload, hunt through the many dead oaks, and search for the Central Coordinating Committee. Instead, my friends informed me by phone that a new group of agents had replaced the ones we had corrupted.

After his disgrace, I had always imagined that Fred had been relegated to the basement of some field office, sorting field reports and filing summaries. If he were like me, he’d be plotting revenge – seeking any mention of me, and selecting the right moment to arrest me for sedition. Animus is a wonderful thing.

And that’s why I had some guilty trepidation on enlistment. Somehow I knew that many photos of me giving agents the finger must exist somewhere and that the Druid Hill Park caper was recorded carefully in some ledger. Also, after doing penance, Fred must be seeking me out for revenge.

Just telling this story may put me in danger…if you don’t hear from me again, you’ll know what happened.

Posted on

It’s something you’ll recognize

I was always told that an anthropologist needs to be a good listener. So we note what is said, gather it together with other bits, observe, participate and then analyze. Eventually, you write a dissertation and then go into teaching or applied anthropology.

The standard expectation is that you go someplace exotic and foreign. But some like me stay at home and study “us.” I assure you that home can be different  in its quiet way.

Now the tricky part of working at home is that it’s easy to assume. And making assumptions without proof is not what you are supposed to do. It can be easy to assume, for instance, that in our American “society,” because the community you work in may speak English and has the usual assortment of churches, restaurants, insurance agencies, and such, most of the rest will also be the same. Bad assumption.

I discovered how subtle but critical the differences were in both coastal Maine and the urban ethnic communities in the greater Boston area. While I never discovered an entirely new system of kinship, I did find an interesting survival of an older form of kinship which had not previously been reported. While studying Saint’s societies, I learned much about social and religious ties that are invisible to the surroundings outside. Coastal Maine almost absorbed me, and I learned that the observer is not immune to the lure of what they study. 

So there it is. To be good at this game, you must be sympathetic, a good mimic, an observer, and interested in getting drawn in. In other words, you have to let your cultural immune system down. This means you might walk away permanently changed. Because culture is an infective virus.

As I said, Maine almost absorbed me; it gave me a trade and an attitude. My work with Saint’s societies changed my perspective on faith and relationships. Working with Italian, Polish, and Portuguese gardeners left my horticulture a hopeless blend of what I’d learned from them. I also learned my ethnobotany and some folk medicine from the gardeners. I don’t even try to make some accord between these bits and pieces; just accept them as part of me.

We are a sort of rebus, not in the form of words and symbols that spell out something, but in the sense that we are the results of the additive process of living an interesting life. So it may not be the sort of thing that is flashy and stands out with a chrome-like glare. Instead, it is a bit quieter. Less likely to get you all excited.

I’d never claim that my experiences were universal to my tribe ( anthropologists). But I’ve seen the look come into the eyes of colleagues as they talk about the Solomon Islands, India, Toronto, and even South Philly. It’s similar to that cast of eye you note in seamen who put a bit of roll in their step when discussing the African ports they visited or the sweet ships they crewed on.

It’s something you’ll recognize when you see it.