No Coffeeshop for Old Men

I’ve been a coffee addict since college, and a frequent caffeiner of coffeeshops since my first stay in Seattle a few years before they started appearing here on the Atlantic coast.

Here in Newburyport, with a preference for the independents and the fresh pastry they always offer, I sit and sip in Cafe Chococoa so often–and at times for so long–that they should charge me rent instead of having me pay per cup.

Downtown has other coffeeshops, of course, one of which is so conveniently within steps of the laundromat, that I can’t resist taking whatever book I’m reading at the time and going there for the dry cycle.

Last Monday, I went in for a cup of coffee while there were three young women behind the counter. One was sorting out and counting money while another was packing pastry into boxes. The third woman was alternately engaged in talk with one or both of them while also taking the order of two customers who walked in ahead of me.

Those two customers had many questions about options for their orders, which the woman waiting on them answered–while also continuing to talk with her co-workers. Meanwhile, I stood there, knowing exactly what I wanted–a hot coffee, black, which would have taken less than a minute to serve–waiting for one of the other two to take my order. Never happened. After at least five minutes, I turned without saying a word, went out the door, and walked around the corner to Abraham’s Bagels.

Thinking that management might want to know about this, I sent a message via the shop’s website to “Whom It Concerns” describing what had happened. Because I have lately noticed things like this in retail settings, I wondered if my complaint was generational. And so I added this to my message:

Decades ago, I was hired as a delicatessen clerk, my very first job. Among the most vivid memories I have of that first day is the very first instruction: Never leave a customer waiting for any reason other than waiting on another customer. Any other task was to be put aside.

I’m not writing to complain about your staff, but to let you know how it reflects on your business…

Seemed impossibly silly, but I just could not shake a nagging feeing that what I had been taught sixty years ago is today as much an anachronism in the retail setting as counting back change.

Outside the retail setting, the list goes on: Blaming yourself for not watching your step when you trip over something rather than immediately asking, “Who can I sue?” (sic) Or looking both ways and making eye-contact with drivers before crossing a street rather than expecting everyone to halt as soon as you start to cross paying attention to nothing other than your cellphone.

I tried to reassure myself that any answer would surely concede that one of the baristas should have at least acknowledged my presence with a cheery, “Be right with you.” Oddly, the response says almost everything but that:

I understand the principle you were taught decades ago, but unfortunately, the idea of never leaving a customer waiting is not always practical in a small café with a small team and limited space.

There are many essential tasks that need to happen throughout the day: restocking food and cups, cleaning, rebrewing coffee, and preparing for the next rush. If we only did these things when there were no customers in the café, many of them simply would never get done. We would quickly run out of things, and the overall experience for everyone would suffer. Sometimes, a customer will need to wait a little while so that we can keep the café running properly.

I would also like to clarify that seeing several people behind the counter does not necessarily mean that several employees are actively working. Our baristas are welcome to come in and enjoy coffee whenever they like, even when they are not working. One of the things they appreciate about working at _____ is this relaxed environment. They often voluntarily offer to help the person on shift with small tasks, which I appreciate and encourage. I could also have been one of the people you saw that day. When I am at the café, it is usually to take care of a specific task rather than to work a regular shift.

We also currently have several baristas in training, and simply being present behind the counter does not necessarily mean someone is yet able to take orders or perform every task independently.

Finally, while I appreciate that you knew exactly what you wanted, we cannot control how many questions the customers ahead of you may have. We want everyone to feel welcome asking questions and taking the time they need to make their choices, even if that occasionally means someone else has to wait a little longer.

If you are in a hurry and would prefer not to wait in line, you are also always welcome to place an order online ahead of time for pickup.

Thank you again for taking the time to share your feedback.

Warmly,

“Warmly” is such a nice touch. Surely the writer did not intend to insult me, but how else could I take that after an oddly AI-generated-sounding blizzard of excuses for making a customer standing patiently in their shop feel that he is not worth their attention? And the suggestion to “order online”? Now that is no coffeeshop for old men!

Silly as it seemed, my hunch was right, it is the business, not the employees, that will neglect a customer for the sake of its own policy & procedure. Toto, we are not in the 20th Century anymore.

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Now this is my cup of coffee. Here I am looking at a place where I would be welcome, Edward Hopper’s *Nighthawks*, in a place where I was and would still be welcome, Chicago’s Museum of Art, back in 2008. Photo by Michael Boer: https://www.flickr.com/photos/onewe/

Can I Get an Eyewitness?

In the aftermath of the ICE raid of a nail salon here in Newburyport, something unfolded on social media as revealing of what America has become as the raid itself.

According to terrorized employees and customers, masked agents entered the shop, guns drawn. The scene, all said, was one of terror still felt after the shop owner was taken away.

All of this was in the Newburyport Police report and a statement based on it issued by the mayor. All of that was on the Daily News’ website and all over social media within hours of the event.

For all it’s faults, social media offers an chance to draw attention to inner details often lost in a sensational event.

For instance, the Chinese national arrested by ICE was not their primary target. If he was, then any law enforcement agents would have entered the shop without guns drawn.

ICE’s prime targets are never people sought and arrested or killed. It’s those who witness the drawn guns, and if ICE has the least pretext, the gunfire. Immediately following that, it’s the people who will hear of it, the neighborhood, the town or city, and with a murder or two, the state, perhaps every state.

Deportation is ICE’s secondary purpose. Foremost is the terrorization of populations that do not conform to MAGA’s agenda.

ICE’s indirection is much like that of the censorship of American history in schools. The real purpose is not to protect (white) children from being uncomfortable, but to prevent them from knowing what their ancestors have done–and, White God forbid, possibly identifying with white folks who aided the Underground Railroad or joined the Abolitionist cause.

Any discomfort is felt by the parents wanting to bury their family past. Unable to admit that, they cite their kids, using them as shields.

But that shows how a guns-drawn ICE raid is part of a much bigger picture we keep seeing in bits and pieces, including those who cheer ICE on and enthusiastically support America’s transition into an authoritarian regime because they perceive that it favors them over those under direct attack.

To borrow an old adage, Trumpism is in the details.

One social media post complained that, lacking any video, there was no evidence of ICE entering with guns drawn. I couldn’t help myself: “What part of the word ‘eyewitness’ do you not understand?”

No matter what I or others said, a few folks insisted that only a video could establish proof. Said one, “I can say I’m an eyewitness and make up anything.”

Trying with phenomenal effort to sound matter-of-fact, I pointed out that, one, you had to be present to be an eyewitness, and, two, the several who were there all told the same story. To which someone teased, “No video, no guns.”

The exchange went on for awhile with other commenters on both sides of an argument that would have dumbfounded every Republican and Democrat alike before 2016: Whether or not eyewitness accounts can serve as evidence.

To say no is willful ignorance on steroids. If applied to history, America would have a lot to correct. How do we know John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln? Was Lincoln assassinated?

And how many court cases would be overturned? Is there a video of Dred Scott in a free state? No? Well, then, every American court must overturn every decision made before the invention of the camera.

Of course, the Supreme Court we have now would be happy to overturn “Right vs. Wrong.”

This recent exchange fits a pattern that the Trump Administration has culled from a book written following World War II to show the details of how authoritarianism begins, grows, and takes hold.

“Don’t believe your own eyes and ears,” is a tenet of George Orwell’s 1984, a book intended as a warning but now serving as a blueprint. Trump himself said exactly that, to a gathering of veterans no less, early in his first term.

It’s an extension of constant slurs against the press–and historians and scientists–but, as Orwell along with Hannah Arendt reasoned, it is not to convince us of anything, but to make us doubt everything.

Where’s the video?

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Murder by Another Name

Americans from here to Honolulu heard of ICE’s recent murder of an innocent man in Biddeford, Maine, an immigrant well on the path to citizenship who worked, supported a family, and paid taxes, the virtues of citizenship that we hold highest.

As always, ICE quickly accused him of trying to run them down with his car. As always, videos showed that to be a lie.

Then, ICE hid behind the excuse of “mistaken identity,” which reeks of denial of their foremost concern which, from the start, has been to fill quotas. Accuracy be damned. Just keep repeating the words murderers, rapists, criminals, and drug dealers, and enough of the American public will think that your target can’t be big enough.

And with so many of them on the loose, there’s bound to be some “honest” mistakes. Or should “mistakes” be the word put in quotes?

Just 60 miles north of us, Biddeford was the scene of protests and vigils that Newburyporters have joined. So, too, has an ICE detention center in nearby Scarborough, Maine. As anyone from here to Honolulu might guess, the murder–by an agent with a history of domestic abuse and threats of violence–was a hot topic of conversation, newspaper opinion pages, barroom and coffeeshop conversation in this Massachusetts seaport city two state borders away.

Meanwhile, a very different story regarding the Dept. of Homeland Security broke in Gloucester, Mass., out on the tip of Cape Ann, well north of Boston, but south of us by just half the driving distance of Biddeford, and half that as the gull glides.

Doubtful that anyone other than those who monitor DHS has heard of it, as I find over and again that people right here in Newburyport are both surprised and shocked when I tell them. If not for two friends from Rockport, the town adjacent Gloucester, telling me, I’d have missed it.

Father Benjamin Okwy Madu, a native Nigerian, arrived in the American melting pot in his 20s, newly ordained by the Catholic Church and eventually assigned to two churches in Gloucester and a third in Rockport. He was known simply as “Father Ben.”

Not just by his congregations, but by residents of assisted living and rehab centers which he frequented, and by patients in Salem Hospital where he served as chaplain. By all accounts he was tireless, always present, encouraging, and cheerful or consoling as the occasion warranted.

In a word, he was beloved by Catholics in a city heavy with a population of Portuguese descent. For years, all was well with the Catholic congregations of Rockport and Gloucester.

Until a few months ago when Father Ben received notice from the DHS that, after thirty years in this self-proclaimed “greatest country in the world,” his visa would not be renewed.

Of course, he appealed. So did Massachusetts’ governor, lieutenant governor, two US senators, the US Rep from the Sixth District, and the state legislators who represent Cape Ann, all of whom were flooded with letters, emails, and phone calls on Father Ben’s behalf. In addition to the unanimous testimony to his value to his community, petitions from the pols no doubt mentioned the persecution–murders and kidnappings–of Catholic priests in Nigeria.

DHS did not bend. Instead, it set a deadline: July 3. On July 2, Father Ben was found dead in a church rectory. He was 54.

Suicide? All the elements are there, including an impassioned letter of farewell and gratitude to his parishioners. Stress? Ditto. But there’s no need to choose. In this case, either one is murder by another name.

Yes, it made local news through the weekend in which “the land of the free and the home of the brave” celebrated 250 years of “liberty,” but the story, as they say in newsrooms, “had no legs”–possibly because we were at the time so busy waving flags and celebrating what a just, generous, and glorious nation we are.

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https://www.msn.com/en-us/public-safety-and-emergencies/general/massachusetts-devastated-after-priest-dies-as-he-s-forced-to-leave-us-over-visa-issue/ar-AA28goT1

A Credit that Fools Only Fools

Celebrating Newburyport as a place where old folk thrive, a new film has wowed Screening Room audiences.

A Force for Good welcomes us to hear a dozen local seniors sketch their arrival–or childhood–here, and what they’ve since done related to civic life. Emphasis is on the city and all that is here to engage retired people with time to give, skills to share, company and conversation to offer.

Newburyport has a lot. In the museums, the schools, the Firehouse, Anna Jacques and elsewhere are opportunities to volunteer. Elderly volunteers in the library’s once-vibrant, now-stagnant Archival Center seem to have found places to remain active after they were “terminated” for no honest reason.

City Hall’s blunders aside, much of what the city offers happens at the Senior Center: arts, crafts, games, talks, workshops, assistance with tax forms and other paperwork, and more. A nice building with a few large rooms open to all kinds of civic events for people of all ages, all of it easily accessible.

Every now and then, a van will pull up to the door, and off go a gaggle of geezers on a field trip. (Hold your heat! I am one, so I can use that word.)

So it’s both predictable and natural that the Senior Center helped make A Force for Good possible, and the center is well-credited when the thank-yous roll.

On the very week the film aired at the Screening Room, a letter from the Senior Center’s Ann Freeman appeared in the Daily News. Like the film’s end-credits, it, too, was a litany of thank-yous to countless people, both individuals and groups, with and for whom she had worked until her position was, to use a euphemism that fools only fools, “not renewed.”

By title and assignment, Freeman was the “Council on Aging Outreach Specialist,” and her job description might be summed up by saying that she offered assistance and encouragement to everyone who went to her, and they were plenty, all of them aged and aging.

By all accounts she was energetic, upbeat, and committed to do all she could for men and women who are often frustrated by the time they seek help and expect nothing more than more frustration. All bear witness to how often she put people at ease and helped them solve problems.

So why the farewell?

Just weeks before A Force for Change played at the Screening Room, Mayor Sean Reardon cut her position from the city’s budget. One might assume that this is a cost savings measure, a cover-all reason impossible to argue with.

Impossible until you add the context of the rest of the budget, specifically the $3.5 million to be poured into the Frog Pond. While some attention to the pond is necessary and expensive, preparation for recreational boating is only one of those two things, and it sure ain’t necessary.

Please try to picture “recreational” boats on a body of water so small. On the Plum Island marsh, recreational boats are what we see cruising the channel. On the Frog Pond? They’d be like golf-carts on a miniature course.

Like the DC reflecting pool fiasco, this is a vanity project. More to the point, if that one line item is any more than 1/60th of the $3.5m package, then it by itself tops the annual salary of an Outreach Specialist.

Ah, no matter. Few people ever look at a city budget. Fewer yet bother with line items. And even less will hear the testimony of ten seniors at one City Hall meeting fervently asking to keep Ann Freeman where she does so much impossibly good work.

But many see films, and when it’s local with familiar faces on the big screen, most stay for the end credits. Judging by the smiles of viewers as they left the hall, few if any noticed that a film rooted in Newburyport’s Senior Center extended thanks to the very man who “not renewed” the center’s beloved staff member.

Yet another photo-op with a huge font in place of Mayor Reardon’s ever-blissful smile.

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Nothing but Cheap Camouflage

Still laughing at the absurd claim that the Town of Newbury wants to ban American flags? Beware the Pacific Legal Foundation!

The anti-environment, anti-consumer protection, anti-occupational safety national powerhouse was already here in 2015. That’s when the same handful of self-styled patriots cried for public help after an angry Atlantic damaged their waterfront homes.

They hoped to rebuild on the same sites compromised by erosion, only to meet resistance from geologists, ecologists, oceanographers, and state officials. For comic relief, I offered a Daily News column headlined, “Welcome to Dumb Island!” (Nov. 5, 2015)

My neighbors laughed for weeks, quoting phrases when we crossed island or mainland paths. Clearly, the name was for those looking for the state to not just offset their loss, but to make it possible for them to take the same risk.

Get a load of the opening line of PLF’s rebuttal:

“Gentle readers of The Daily News surely agree that it was at least impolite for a writer in this space to label all of his neighbors on Plum Island ‘dumb’.” (Nov. 30)

I guess “gentle readers” would be impolite to point out the gross distortion of the word “all.”

Such an exaggeration may appear right out of the playbook of Fox “News,” but PLF was formed at least a decade before Fox by California Reaganites who seemed to think of themselves as an ACLU for corporations.

At first they focussed on the newly-formed Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety & Health Administration, if not striking down regulations, at least buying time for pollution and hazardous workplaces until their clients found less detectable scams.

Eventually, they defended Big Tobacco against restrictions in advertising and Surgeon General’s warnings. Their tactics gained as much press as their suits. From my “Dumb” column:

Following their well-financed smear campaign against a leader of California’s main anti-smoking organization…, even the most public environmentalists are reluctant to take them on.

Some hapless college prof, as I recall, whose disgrace had nothing to do with either lung cancer or legal chicanery. As a college instructor myself, I had been warned.

Nowhere did these white collar thugs answer my implication that character assassination is PLF’s MO. Instead, they turned it on me, a street-musician (true, and hardly a secret) who “accosted” people for money downtown.

At best, this is an assumption possibly shared by folks who rarely go downtown. At length, it is false. Apart from signs on an open case or hat, street-musicians never verbally ask for donations, much less accost anyone. Any exceptions to this (called “passive hat” in the trade) do not last long.

PLF may be conflating us with acrobats, jugglers, and magicians who perform half-hour shows, and then ask for donations from a gathered and applauding crowd (“active hat”).

On the street, “hat” is an unwritten rule, but it does appear (active, passive, or no) on contracts issued by Renaissance faires

So disappointing! If only they unearthed my detention by the Secret Service in 1976, they could have painted me as a would-be assassin with an armed backpack stalking Jimmy Carter during the Oregon primary.

Leave out that it was a 15-minute interview, and imply that the backpack contained two pistols and a Communist Manifesto cleverly disguised as two wooden flutes and a Rand McNally Road Atlas.

Happy to give them another chance, I see that their initial online statement is headed by a photo that, just as on the Fox “News” site, shows a flag attached to a house, and therefore nowhere near the area restricted for the sake of plovers’ nests.

Perhaps the photo was slapped onto the site to cover any mention of what happened here in 2009. As local observer Jack Rybicki reports:

(T)hese property owners were the beneficiary of federal funds to replace sand that had washed out to sea in order to save 28 homes…

For that favor, they all signed documents obligating them to adhere to the town’s “beach management plan relative to the protection of endangered species.”

But here they are 17 years later, whining as if they never signed anything, using American flags as nothing but cheap camouflage for their own laughable absurdity.

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Other outlets of right-wing paranoia couldn’t resist this rich helping of red meat. Here’s *The Epoch Times*, a publication best known for impersonating the Bible with such claims as vaccines causing sterility. For their readers, that might be wishful thinking.
This shot could be anywhere on the beach, most likely not near the contested area, but if he has his hand over his heart, he must be sincere, right?
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/plum-island-residents-warned-against-flying-american-flags-ahead-of-july-4-post-6055629

This is Fox’s photo which appears on its site and ran with the story picked up by countless news outlets coast-to-coast. Here on Plum Island, and anywhere nearby, we all see immediately that this pic is from the street-side of the house, with the ocean and beach behind it. Therefore, no way it is part of the contested area. But Fox knows that all of its subscribers beyond, say, 50 miles, have no way of knowing that. This is from the site of a South Dakota radio station:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/plum-island-residents-warned-against-flying-american-flags-ahead-of-july-4-post-6055629

Privileged Communications

A senior citizen adverse to crowds, I avoid day-trips into Boston. I choose not to join the traffic in the streets or crowds in the subways.

But I could not resist a reading of a play-in-progress titled Privileged Communications, and I’ve longed to see The Embrace since it was unveiled on the Common in 2022.

https://thebostonsun.com/2023/01/19/the-embrace-memorial-unveiled-on-the-common-ahead-of-mlk-day/#google_vignette

Drove to Wonderland in Revere, last stop of the Blue Line, parked my Nissan in the lot, and looked up at a sign that said “PayByPhone.” I have no cellphone, another stress-preventing measure of the life I choose to live.

But the website was easy to remember, so I figured I’d tend to it online the next day.

Unable to find an email address or a phone number, I tapped into a “chat” with a bot cleverly named “Parker” that began by noting that I am “in North America.” It referred me to a phone number on the Wonderland sign. Unwilling to drive back, I asked the bot for it, only to then read:

PayByPhone does not offer a service to pay for parking retroactively or provide phone numbers for past parking sessions. Payments need to be made in real time to avoid any issues.

I thanked the bot for its mindless AI response, adding that it would serve as a document to prove I made a prompt effort to pay the fee.

But I now wonder: If we are so diligent in seeing that no one suffers discrimination due to their race, sex, faith, or gender preference, why does a de facto discrimination against those of us who choose to live free of ring-tones, algorithms, robots, trolls, memes, tracking devices, and AI go unnoticed?

If we can build ramps for those in wheelchairs, how can we not provide a simple phone number to those more inclined to make and take calls on a landline at home rather than on a mobile device under the summer sun in an unshaded parking lot?

At the commuter rail stop here in Newburyport, I found PayByPhone’s number on parking lot signs. An automated voice, which I could not get past, did not ask for my car’s registration. Instead, it asked me to “set up an account.”

Ah, yes, why not spend a good 15 minutes to type in name, address, DOB, SSN, and whatever else they need before asking you to create, confirm, and then use a password?

Why not? Because I don’t want an account. I just want to settle a one-time fee.

Bracing myself for word from the MBTA, I resolved that I would pay the fee for the seven hours my car sat at Wonderland, but not a cent for any fine. And I prepared to tell them that in a letter addressed to the Massachusetts Barbary Tribute Authority.

Would “Parker” have known the difference? Would it know American history? Would it relocate me into North Africa?

For two weeks I was ready to battle hi-tech “policy and procedure” with simple arithmetic and common sense. So eager was I to make the case that, after two weeks, I considered going back on-line and taunting the bot.

But my attention turned elsewhere, and seven weeks passed before a bill arrived in the box at the end of my driveway. So much for hi-tech.

And so much for any fine. An $8.00 balance is about what I would have paid. I saw mention of a $1.00 surcharge, but didn’t challenge it. So much for my Jeffersonian resolve.

Still, what does this do to others who, like me and many other seniors, choose to “live simply”? Do they worry for a week or two? Do they scrap their plans and drive off?

Many toll roads and bridges have signs telling us that, if we lack E-ZPass, we will be sent a bill. So easy they put it in upper case, EZ. And yet, for the parking lots, we are supposed to “set up an account.”

As for me, I went to see “Privileged Communications.” Little did I know I’d have to endure them.

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https://www.boston.com/news/wickedpedia/2023/05/31/how-did-wonderland-station-get-name/

With or Without the ‘Oxy’

Last week I went to the Fox “News” site to see how badly it distorted a story here on Plum Island. That, I guess, put me on the list for their so-called newsletter and promos including one just arrived for, as the subject line announced: “FOX News IQ Test.”

All I can think is that Fox has found some way to punish anyone who has an IQ.

Never, I thought, would I see anything more oxymoronic–with or without the “oxy”–than “Fox News IQ Challenge.” That belief exploded the very next day when, from my seat on an incumbent bike in the gym, I spotted a headline on the CNN crawl: “Trump to attend dignified transfer.”

Fox and IQ? Trump and dignified? Is this hot ice, or am I just having a Midsummer Nightmare?

That very night CNN would report that the Pentagon’s website reduced the number of fatalities–those being transferred–in his illegal war from 18 to 14. Reason? According to a Pentagon now run by an IQ-challenged Fox host, four service members died “after” Trump declared a cease-fire.

More like an unending nightmare.

When Lincoln was first elected in 1860, many young men in northern cities who supported him did not trust Southerners to allow the inauguration to happen. They converged on DC, and police, though glad to have their implied support, kept a wary eye on them. There were no incidents.

These groups–some would say “gangs”–called themselves the “Wide-Awakes,” likely a rebuke to the pro-slavery, anti-immigrant, and anti-Catholic Know-Nothings.

Well, they couldn’t call themselves the “Know-It-Alls,” now could they?

Eight-score years later, gangs converged on DC not to ensure, but to stop the transfer of power. They went and still go by various names, and they condemn those who oppose them as “woke,” a malphemism for “awake.”

They also proclaimed a “Revolution,” but if being awake or aware is now a bad thing, wouldn’t “Devolution” be the word they’re looking for?

Malphemisms are a go-to Republican trick. The longest lasting example may be “abortion on demand,” but for immediate impact, I’d pick Sarah Palin’s characterization of Obamacare’s provision regarding the terminally ill for family and doctor consultations as “Death Panels.”

The term “Obamacare” itself was intended to make the Affordable Care Act sound bad, the definition of malphemism, but Obama himself embraced it, and the Democrats ran with it.

In case you’re ever playing Trivial Pursuit and asked what Obamacare has in common with Know-Nothings…

Another example of an insult welcomed as a name by the insulted is Mitch McConnell–speaking of the terminally ill, some would say already terminated. All those years as Senate leader he gleefully let proposed legislation die on his desk. Hundreds of them, so many that Democrats started calling him “The Grim Reaper.” He loved it, he boasted of it, and now he is face to face with it.

Or does he think he’s looking into a mirror?

My friend Binghampton asks if Mitch is on eternity leave. He may be onto something. Mitch does have a history of taking advantage of death. Following that of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, he effectively nullified the Constitutional right of a president to have a nominee for the Supreme Court considered by the Senate for approval.

Now, Grim Mitch is being used to prevent the Governor of Kentucky from exercising his right to appoint a replacement for an incapacitated member of the state’s congressional delegation.

The good news is that, as a cadaver (already or soon-to-be), Mitch is now among the least harmful of Senate Republicans. Unwanted: Dead or Alive.

Americans this weekend are flocking to cinemas to see the new adaptation of The Odyssey, about a Greek war hero (Odysseus, aka Ulysses) of long ago who can’t find his way home. Wouldn’t we be better off if we paid more attention to America’s own war hero prophetically named for the ancient Greek?

In 1875, near the end of his second term as our president, Ulysses S. Grant* told an audience of Union veterans:

If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.

Both sides are all over America’s enormous map. With or without that map, Revolution or Devolution, Death Panels or Eternity Leaves, malphemisms or euphemisms, oxys or prophesies, awake or woke, dead or alive, will we ever start connecting the dots that would lead to our way home?

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*His actual name was Hiram Ulysses Grant. His family addressed him as Ulysses from the start. To enter West Point, he needed the recommendation of his Illinois district’s US Rep who knew him only as Ulysses Grant. The application called for a middle name, and so the Rep, facing a deadline in faraway DC with neither phone nor internet, guessed and wrote in Ulysses’ mother’s family name, “Simpson,” a common practice on the western frontier. A biographer says Grant simply didn’t bother to change it, but I wonder if the young cadet was eager to have USG replace HUG as his initials.

No idea where this pic was taken, but if you want more like it: https://lazyspleen.blogspot.com/2012/12/just-for-fun-10-contradictory-road-signs.html

Putting the THE in THE Past

Not sure if this counts as “living in the past,” but I seem to be more and more in touch with my Salem State College (now University) friends the further I get from graduation.

In my case, I suppose the trend is more pronounced because I disappeared soon after the walk. First to Maine’s Canadian border for a few months, and then for a full Prodigal Son stint on the Dakota Prairie. Not just places where I knew no one, but where no one I knew would go.

That’s 53 years, so you’d think there’d be considerably less of us around. And you would be right. Come to think of it, that may well be why those of us still above ground are re-connecting.

Never gave this any thought until one who has been living on the West Coast several years, much of it in Southern California, wrote a blog reminiscing about a road we often took from Salem to Mt. Monadnock. His title: “the 114.”

He can keep it in lower-case all he wants, but I can’t help but chuckle at the use of the “the” in front of a route number. On the contemplative Pacific so long, he’s forgotten we don’t do that back here on the austere Atlantic.

My daughter, formerly of Southern Cal for most of her life, theorizes that in the early days, roads and trails all had Spanish names beginning with “El,” and so when the automobile and pavement arrived, the “El” went with the newly assigned numero. Sounds logical. Call it “Caught in Translation.”

Or, we could compare it to THE Ohio State University, a football and basketball powerhouse where everyone seems contractually obligated to not just use but emphasize the definite article as if it was the most significant of the four words in the name. (An OSU grad tells me it stems from an administrative feud with OU, but no one can figure out why.)

Be that as it may, all I can tell you is that, in 2012 on the front seat of an LAX shuttle bus with my daughter’s father-in-law, I went into a tirade about it, belting out “the” as often as possible as if it were a sledge-hammer. I had a fair portion of my daughter’s wedding party in stitches, as well as the guy behind the wheel who begged me to stop so he could drive.

Can’t recall their roads other than THE 5 and THE 405, so here’s a brief example prompted by my friend’s blog:

We took THE 114, Salem to Lawrence where we picked up either THE 110 or (more likely) THE 113 (or did we hasten the trip on THE 495?) to THE 119 in Groton and then on to THE Monadnock, a native word which means, “that which stands alone.” THE End!

Every Saturday of late I take THE 1A about 11 miles south to Ipswich where I join a No Kings rally, as they are called from coast to coast.

With the exception of my eight weekends in a Renaissance faire and little else, I’ve done this for most of the 17 months it has been held, joining about 130 folks each time. Among them, now and then, is another SSC classmate/activist and an SSC prof whose class, “Literature of Revolution,” I took in freshman year, spring semester, 1969.

The first was arrested with me at an anti-war demonstration 55 years ago and thrown into the same police wagon on THE Pennsylvania Avenue. The second, when she first saw me in Ipswich, smiled and exclaimed, “I can’t believe we’re doing this same shit!”

The first lives in Florida much of the year, but comes north in the summer to play cribbage with me. When I’m unavailable, she visits her kids and grandkids. The second, after having turned me, a Math major at the time, away from a cushy life as an accountant into this wreckage that I now am–THE fate that befalls most folks who pursue life in THE arts–says she is “proud” of me.

In recent weeks, yet another of my activist friends found me here on Plum Island. He enjoyed THE view so much that he surveyed my surroundings and has started work ridding them of a bittersweet vine threatening to kill, among other things, a pine tree.

Another activist, who volunteers in THE wildlife reserve in the summer, stops her white SUV if she sees me sitting out front, and call out hello. And a fellow from my German class looked me up and arrived on a hot day with two Italian subs. He was able to translate anything I said into German. For my part, I know only a dozen words auf Deutsch, but I used all twenty of them. “Danke for DER sub! Haben sie napkins?”

Two friends now married from THE Log, the student newspaper, passed through Newburyport and called from downtown where they treated me to lunch at THE Grog. I thought I was back in Bertini’s–or downstairs in Scarborough Fair.

And then there’s Chaz, a fellow flautist and former roommate, the only SSCer with whom I’ve been in touch all along, who arrives here twice or thrice a year. We listen to the same albums that we played over and over in our third-floor walk-up in the poor part of town, one of which is titled, “Living in THE Past.”

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Eggs Nostalgia

On the scale of misdemeanors, this has to be as harmless as it gets, but it’s still worth a word, perhaps a meal if you have the ingredients, and something to savor when you’ve had your fill.

Now that I sit to write of it, I’m surprised by how infrequently I see it. I’m in a supermarket at least once, often twice a week. I may not get much, but I take my time. That’s no doubt because, despite going in with a list, I keep an open eye and stop to consider items that catch it.

That makes me prone to change my mind about something I already have in my cart, which results in one of the very few temptations into petty evil that I have been able to resist all my life. In fact, and perhaps as atonement for many other petty crimes I do commit, I will take a box or jar or bag someone else has left with the bananas in a far corner of the store and return it myself to a shelf five aisles away.

Recently, I was pushing my cart down the aisle of paper towels, napkins, and toilet paper bulging from shelves on both sides. I was done shopping and was in the aisle only because it was empty and would quickly get me from the back of the store to the cash registers.

Ahead of me I spotted a blank space on one shelf about eye-high. How could I not look in? I hit the brakes. I was looking at a jar of salsa. Oh, the memories!

This Merrimack Valley boy from the Eisenhower years didn’t know what salsa was until he found his taste buds in a Mexican restaurant in downtown Minneapolis of all places. I was in my mid-twenties, and it took me another thirty years to discover it wasn’t just for snacks. That’s when I stopped at the Shawsheen Luncheonette in Andover for breakfast.

With a snug and most colorful interior, and with advice both whimsical and provoctive–The biggest danger to our future is apathy–served on small frames on the walls as food for thought, Shawsheen’s menu offers “Eggs Fiesta.”

Not the first time I ordered something just so I could say a name out loud. When it was “Beer-Battered Fish & Chips” at a Cambridge brew-pub long ago, I blasted those Bs like fists into a punching bag, and my embarrassed daughter hid under the table. But with fiesta, one can only smile.

Hash browns, topped with eggs as you like them (once-over for me), then topped with salsa, and toast (rye) on the side, it more than lived up to its name. Shawsheen became as frequent a stop as my ever-changing routes allowed, and I’d say I was there about once a month until about ten years ago. Always ordered before the menu arrived, but I’d take it to read for entertainment purposes only.

Maybe a year later, I wondered if I could try it at home. Hash-browns seem out of my culinary reach, but I guessed that the frozen potato patties might satisy as a substitute. They did. Eggs from a farm-stand always do, and I found a medium salsa, the same brand that I held in my hand in the scene that begins this flavorful story.

For a few years, it was what we would now call my “go-to” breakfast. Then came the Covid quarantine, and I indulged in labor-intensive potato pancakes. Since then, I’ve gone from lazy-boy cereal to sweet-tooth cantalope and cottage cheese to apple-cheddar omelets to Greek omelets to anything-about-to-expire-in-the-fridge omelets. Salsa was gone from the fridge and off my shopping list almost as soon as the toilet paper crisis left America in a mess.

Six years later, there it was surrounded by toilet paper in a space all its own. And then there it was in my hand. And then in my cart. Veered over to the aisle of cereal and returned the Cheerios, turned into the dairy section and found the frozen patties before going to check-out.

Eggs? No! Only at the farmstand.

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Red Meat Patriots

In these times that try our tempers, I thought I was doing everyone a favor by putting away the ax I so often grind and, instead, cracking jokes at the idiocies that dominate American news.

Right on cue, a few–a very few–Red Meat Patriots here on Plum Island publicly accused the Town of Newbury of trying to outlaw American flag displays over the 4th of July weekend.

Call it a joke that wrote itself. If this was a paying gig, I might send my Red Meat neighbors a royalty. And if they can get what I wrote onto the Fox News website as readily as they did their absurd claim, I’ll split Fox‘s payment 50/50.

Meanwhile, another cadre of Red Meaters hurled the same accusation against Provincetown out on the tip of Cape Cod–93 miles from us as the crow flies, 151 as the Jaguar drives.

These RMPs are everywhere. Also this weekend, another band in New York City accused Mayor Mamdani of “personally wrapping” one of NYC’s subways in the design of the Iranian flag. That brain-dead claim immediately went off the rails mostly because everyone in the city knew of the tribute to FIFA–48 subways each painted as the flag of one of the 48 nations competing for soccer’s World Cup.

And, speaking of jokes that write themselves, partly because it is impossible to picture one person, mayor or not, “personally wrapping” a train in anything. If anyone made a claim like that back in the Sixties, Donovan would have written a song about getting stoned in the dining car.

Very likely it was the same band of NYC RMPs who accused Mamdani of “coming to get” residents’ thermostats. During a brutal heat wave here on the east coast, that dud was bound to gain some traction before sober, adult, intelligent, rational, honest people started to speak up.

Thermostats! Now that’s a new one. In one of my first attempts to stop ax-grinding and start joke-cutting, I rattled off a list of things that RMPs have accused liberals of “coming to take away.”

Guns, of course, top the list, going all the way back to the Reagan years, and have been top priority of Red Meat people ever since–with Bibles soon to follow and maintaining a respectable second place.

In fact, it may have been the election of an environmentally-friendly President with a health-conscious First Lady that prompted RMPs to diversify their outrageous outrage.

Could be mistaken, but the “coming to take your fill-in-the-blank away” lunacy really accelerated in 2008: SUVs, S’mores, leaf-blowers, air conditioners, tan suits, “Merry Christmas,” and lately hamburgers, thermostats, and, of all things, the American flag itself.

What we perceive as the problem with “red meat,” RMPs use to their advantage. Just as the metaphor intends, the very sight of it held outside the cage drives the lion into a rage. There need be no explanation, justification, nor condition. The lion won’t hear it, and to RMPs, it merely adds to the rage. Worst of all, the effect is immediate.

We use the word “demonize” to describe what Fox News and other right-wing outlets have done hour after hour, almost minute by minute, for 30 years to politicians, news sources, non-white countries, liberal legislation, and blue states. Bill Clinton called it “creating caricatures” so they can then “avoid any issue by attacking the caricature.”

Accurate and useful both are, but they don’t account for the immediate effect of the mere mention of a single name–Obama, Warren, The New York Times, NPR, Boston, Seattle, Somalia, Haiti, Affirmative Action, and lately a few non-specific words such as diversity and inclusion.

As soon as Fox viewers hear just one name, they will stop you with dismissal that allows for no further word. Pocahontas! DEI hire! Oh, that bastion of objectivity!

Red meat, at its core, is an excuse not to think–which makes it irresistible to those who do not want to think. It’s as if, instead of talking to a person, you are waving red meat in front of Pavlov’s dog.

Ahhh! Just joking.

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