Penny Deposit, No Return

By this time every year, my taxes are done and in the mail, if only so I can forget about them ASAP.

Whether I’ll need to write and send a check–one about ten years back was just over $1,600–or I’ll expect a check doesn’t matter. I just want it done and in the mail, with my own copies buried back in some drawer. And so it happens on the first weekend of this month, usually complete by sundown, Saturday.

But here we are about to enter February’s third weekend, and I am sitting with an assortment of six W-2s and 1099s, for which my chaotic life calls, ready to record on federal and state forms that remain blank. Problem is: I need seven.

You may be wondering just how impossibly wealthy I am if I can boast of seven sources of income. In truth, I have eight, but the New Hampshire Dept. of Corrections apparently takes care of any money that a convict owes you. All I know is that NHDC has never sent me a tax statement since they started bleeding the wayward cousin who stiffed me for $2,000 back in 2000. Apparently, she only pays when she’s back in chronic custody, so I get a check for $70 literally about once in a blue moon.

Of the statements that I do have is one for royalties from Amazon which sells my three books on demand, and which, as I understand it, lets people view a few pages for as little as two cents. Pay the Piper!, my memoir of life as a street-musician, is now, gulp, twelve years old, and even the most recent, Once Upon an Attention Span, is four, so sales have faded, and the statement is just over $11.

Another statement arrived unexpectedly. This summer I took advantage of an offer of $300 to open a checking account in a bank nearby after my bank of 25 years merged with another and shut down the local branch. Never occurred to me that the $300 would be taxed, and this will be the first time I can recall putting anything but zero on a 1040 line for interest.

Add that $311 to the combined $6K of two seasonal musical gigs, and you can begin to see why I have so many. Of those remaining, both part-time, one ended in July and the other is but a day a week. Combine those totals, which I am not going to divulge, to those on the aforementioned $6,311, and it is still less than the amount on the missing form.

Shouldn’t take too much reading between the lines here to figure out that, despite the number of these endeavors, the time they require is minimal. Yes, although it is my misfortune to have those two musical gigs, as fortunate as they are, happen at the same time of year. Put it this way, my life is a nine-month vacation interrupted just one day (Wednesday) each week. In September and October, I am full-court press, and in November I am basket case.

By now you have no doubt figured out that the one delinquent form is, of all things, my “Social Security Benefit Statement.” Worth noting here is that many Americans do not realize that Social Security allotments are taxed. And for good reason. Logic should tell us that, if the federal government has determined a sum you should have, why allot more than that sum, and then withhold a portion–in turn, causing the recipient through an annual course of mathematical hoops and hurdles to determine how much more the government should send out or have sent back?

As envisioned during Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, logic ruled. It was all done in one step, and it worked very well until the 1980s when Pres. Ronald Reagan initiated the bill to tax it. As I recall, “added revenue” was the stated reason, but as always with Republicans, it was part of an overall scheme to cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans who tend to contribute to Republican campaigns. This is what they call “Trickle Down Economics,” but by now only the most gullible among us believes that it is anything other than “trickle up,” or maybe “tinkle down.”

Call it political poetry: the same US Treasury that requires me to submit its form back to it, withholds it, preventing me from meeting its own requirement. Don’t the folks there know they are supposed to withhold only the money as an estimate to offset a fair share determined by April 15? And that both refunds and bills are issued when the paperwork is done?

Instead of half a weekend doing forms, I’ve spent half this past week on-line and on the phone trying to get through to an actual person. Instead, I get new passwords that get me to a window asking for a “passcode.” No idea what they are, where they are, and certainly unable to fathom why they are, I give up. The phone menus are impenetrable, referring me back to the site, which refers me back to the same phone numbers.

So aggravating that I went to bed last night resolved to email a request for assistance to the office of my US Congressman, Seth Moulton. Oh, how I hate to bother those good people with such a mundane matter when they are trying to hold the GOP (Guardians of Pedophiles) to account. But congressional offices seem to be the only federal offices of any kind where you can connect to a fellow human being without suffering the interminable, insulting, and paralyzing algorithms of AI.

And so it was that, as soon as I downed the last bite of eggs fiesta and poured myself another French press, I was on this Lenovo letting my rep’s staff know the agony and frustration of an old man wanting only to perform his civic duty of paying taxes–or at least making sure I’ve paid my fair share. And, as I am often prone to do, I started with such detail that I just kept going. And now here I am inflicting it on you.

Apologies for this ordeal, but I may make it up to you with some comic relief:

Royalties from Amazon are directly deposited into my checking account, and so I learn of them on about the 17th or 18th of each month when my bank statement arrives. When my books first appeared, I might see entries for $120, and then it would gradually decrease a few months, to maybe $40 in the fifth month and then disappear. Most months would then not have it, while others had a small amount, including one for just seven cents. I’ve been joking about it ever since.

A few days ago, I pulled a bank statement from my mailbox, opened it right there in broad daylight at the foot of my driveway, and laughed as hard as I’ve ever laughed. Amazon deposited a royalty of one cent.

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Cooking on Planet Kitchen

A few nights back, I attended a talk on climate change, the extent of it, and how we might yet bail ourselves out from the inevitable disaster that awaits if we don’t change our wasteful ways.

Sponsoring the event was the Union of Concerned Scientists, a group that during any other period in American history would be viewed as non-partisan. That, they still are, except that the federal government is now run by an administration that is openly and aggressively anti-science. That leaves scientists no choice but to contradict the federal agencies that, under any other president, would have depended on them. By default, that allies them with the only nationally viable political party that has not turned itself into a cult of personality.

Granted, the Reagan Administration dismissed solar power and the electric car, favoring an economy that favored Republican donors. However, the debate was always open, and scientists were not publicly demonized as anti-American and “woke.” Moreover, medical and other scientific research funds were not slashed as they were last year. Back then, the label “conservative” and the concept of “conservation” were as compatible as the words themselves. It was the Nixon Administration, after all, that initiated the Environmental Protection Agency following a State of the Union Address that included this:

We have been too tolerant [i.e. careless] of our surroundings and too willing to leave it to others to clean up our environment. It is time for those who make massive demands on society to make some minimal demands on themselves.

Sounds like a call for regulation to me, and the early ’70s were noted by the UCS speaker as a hopeful time for environmentalists. Beaches at lakes across America were reopened for swimming, including Lake Erie that had been declared dead in what may have been network television’s first expose. Ugly orange-brown clouds disappeared from cities from New York to Denver and to the West Coast where Jimmy Buffett “spent four lonely days in a brown LA haze.”

Before us the other night, tracking the advances and set-backs of the environmental movement since the first “Earth Day” in 1970 was Erika Spanger, UCS’s Director of Strategic Climate Analytics. I knew her before she was born, and now there she is with slightly graying hair atop her tall, elegant posture, telling me and an audience more my age than hers about a crisis that her kids and my grandkids will be left to solve.

Amazing how she resembles both of her parents. Both friends of mine back at Salem State, they were likely in the gathering with me when that first Earth Day was observed in the year of her birth, as they were in various anti-war demonstrations. And it was likely the next summer that she was with several of us on a camping trip up by Mount Chocorua, carried along in a picnic basket as we moved between lake and campground. Her dad and I challenged each other to a race up a tree, the same tree, the two of us on opposite sides. Erika’s mom and my girlfriend looked up in horror, while between them the little face in the wicker basket grew smaller and smaller. Chuck and I didn’t stop until we remembered that we were already high.

The talk was as informative as it was sobering. She spoke of a 2030 deadline for a significant reduction in emissions, but that was already established when we still had ten years left to meet it. Little has happened to help the cause. To the contrary, the anti-science government of the USA has taken us out of the Paris Accords and gutted most all regulations of the energy industry. Now, she holds out hope for a strategy ironically called “overshoot,” but she realizes that we are stuck, for at least another year, with a government that will not shoot at all.*

My apologies for the lack of quotes, but the swoon of nostalgia didn’t allow me to take notes. Whitman famously wandered out of a talk on astronomy to behold the night sky’s stars; my mind wandered from a talk on our future to go living in the past. Not just Erika standing before me, but her uncle seated next to me, a ringer for his late-brother, and my cousin’s high school basketball coach at Pentucket High School where he also taught Earth Sciences. Could say that stewardship of the Earth runs in the Spanger family.

But I can offer a good idea of her talk by quoting last July’s entry in her UCS-endorsed blog, “The Equation,” in which she declares:

“If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen” loses its bite when the whole planet is the kitchen, and we’re just starting to cook.

Yes, she’s one of those writers I’d much rather plagiarize than quote, but science, her long suit, is nowhere in my hand, so here’s the conclusion of her blog which serves as a fair summary of her talk last week, a conclusion titled, “If you can’t take the heat, organize the kitchen”:

What can we do? The list is long and—let’s be clear—needs to be part of a longer-term transformation of our society and economy. But there are things we can do today:

Practice heat safety for yourself and those around you.
Protect vulnerable people by pushing Congress to pass legislation to protect workers from dangerous heat.
Defend and restore federal climate science by holding members of Congress accountable…
Stop the climate gaslighting. We are already struggling to cope with climate change. When people with power deny and downplay the dangers of climate change—while we’re suffering from those very dangers—don’t let them get away with it. Don’t refute the bogus science that they point to, that only gives their bogus science attention. Just point out what they’re trying to do: distract, deny, delay, and keep on profiting.

We’ll obviously need to get ourselves some worthy, qualified leaders first chance we get, lean hard into mitigating and building resilience to climate change, and do more, better, faster.

Ah, there’s that attempt at impartiality when it just isn’t possible to be impartial. Those who are undoing all of our climate agreements and regulations for clean air and water are on one side of the Congressional aisle. They call themselves “the Republican Party,” but they are far from anything that ever included Lincoln, Eisenhower, or either George Bush–nor are they a party, but a cult.

If by “worthy” and “qualified” she means those willing to consider the Green New Deal in whole or even in part, and if the verb “need to get” means candidates who have a chance to win elections, then that leaves the one remaining, viable, national party.

Am I not “impartial” enough to forecast what we need after we get through what will likely be yet another record-breaking hot summer? We’ll see. As Erika Spanger writes:

In the meantime, try to stay cool.

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*A Primer on “overshoot”:

A *USA Today* report from 2019 of school walkouts around the globe. This photo was taken in Vienna.
https://www.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/news/world/2019/03/15/friday-future-students-protest-global-warming-inaction/3178535002/

Treats of Minneapolis

Bruce Springsteen’s just released “Streets of Minnesota” appears to be galvanizing for most every friend I have. For me the song is nostalgic. In a previous life, Minneapolis was my weekend getaway of choice.

These were the Carter years when our vice-president was a low-key, affable Minnesotan, and when A Prairie Home Companion began airing every Saturday night across the river in St. Paul. I was across the state’s western border in Dakota–first South, then North, then South again–listening in, always eager to trek to the Twin Cities. Back then, hitchhiking was easy. All that flat farmland and everyone going some distance. Your thumb was an offer of someone to talk to. And I enjoyed making shaded cardboard signs with the “l” in “Mpls” turned into an arrow pointing ahead on US. 14.

Minneapolis was a cultural wonderland: As You Like It, Measure for Measure, Twelfth Night, and an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice at the Guthrie, Jean-Pierre Rampal and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra at Orchestra Hall, Jethro Tull in some civic arena, the Flamin Os with their South Dakota keyboardist who got us in as their roadies, Schmitt Music Company with a sheet for Maurice Ravel’s “Gaspard de la Nuit” blown up as a mural on its brick wall facing a parking lot, the Twins versus the White Sox at the old Metrodome, a speech at the university by Eugene McCarthy, and how many dinners and Hamm’s lagers at Estaban’s down on Nicollet, or was it Hennipen?

And then there was the time that three rather young women mistook me for Cat Stevens in a lounge at the Minneapolis Airport as I awaited a connection to home to Bismarck. Back then, I had long black hair, a pony tail, and I traveled with a dulcimer which, in its case, seen at certain angles, is easily mistaken for a guitar. Next day I would learn that he played Orchestra Hall that very night. Since then, I’ve spent four decades wishing I told them that I was instead of that I wasn’t.

Leaving a performance of Measure for Measure, a busload of South Dakota State English majors, grad students, and faculty walked past the Post Office building that filled a block. Past 11:00 pm, postal workers were in the streets to receive tax filings from motorists needing to beat the deadline. Handed out the car windows, no need to park, just keep the line moving.

Leaving Orchestra Hall after hearing Rampal, two of us–and I think everyone else–could sense that something had gone wrong while we were all mesmerized by one of history’s finest flautists–a man who 40 years earlier was part of the French resistance. We heard it as we stepped out into the January night: Hubert Humphrey had died after a long bout with cancer in a hospital just around the corner. The feeling was palpable. Even the few cars that rolled by seemed to be in the sorrowful pace of a funeral.

Humphrey was actually a native of Huron, South Dakota, but he attended the U. of Minnesota and made an impression on the Democrat Farm Labor Party. Not long out of college, he was Minneapolis’ mayor who gained a national reputation when he sided with Civil Rights leaders against landlords and businesses that preferred segregation. While other American cities suffered unrest from Black soldiers returning from Europe, Minneapolis became a model of fairness. That propelled Humphrey into the senate, the vice-presidency, and to a presidential nomination.

No one knew it the time, nor would it be known for another 15 years, but also at that hospital to spend an afternoon reminiscing with Humphrey was Richard Nixon who flew in from California when he heard his former rival had taken a turn for the worse. Their battles were over. It was a time to heal, a time to die. No mention of it in the 48-page pull-out section of the Minneapolis Star & Tribune that I bought as a souvenir for my father the next day, but they had prepared in advance, just as the city had prepared in advance.

Minneapolis was then as it is now, unified.

In a life even more previous, I was a student at Salem State eager to attend every anti-war demonstration, including Mayday in 1971 in DC where I was one of 14,000 protesters arrested for blocking traffic. These were the Johnson and Nixon years when protests were almost exclusively attended by young people fueled, not by any lust for confrontation, but by music.

Several songs served as anthems, starting with The Chambers Brothers’ “Time Has Come Today” and the Young Rascals’ “People Got to Be Free,” as diverse as Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On?” and Jefferson Airplane’s “Volunteers,” and as piercing as Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.” What a field day for the heat…

Most compelling of all was Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Ohio,” often called by the last line of the chorus that is repeated as a one-line refrain as the song fades out, “Four dead in Ohio.” The reference is to the National Guard shootings at Kent State on May 4, 1970.

Difference between this and the other songs I just mentioned is that it dramatizes a specific incident. So, too, is “Streets of Minneapolis” a response to state-sponsored murder. From CSNY’s “tin soldiers and Nixon” to “King Trump’s private army,” from “Soldiers are cutting us down” to “Here in our home, they killed and and roamed,” Springsteen has given us a full-blooded anthem, combining defiance with hope and turning the tables of patriotism away from those who only mouth the words of our National Anthem toward those willing to give it life:

Against smoke and rubber bullets
In the dawn’s early light
Citizens stood for justice
Their voices ringing through the night

All he needed to counter the glaring lie of “domestic terrorist” was to state the glaring truth of “federal thugs.” And as always from Springsteen, an irresistible beat gives it an attitude that could not be more potent.

Personally, I could thank The Boss for this trip down memory lane. (Or is it LaSalle Ave?) Best of all, his anthem reassures me that Minneapolis is now as it was then, unified.

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https://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WM3FX0_Schmitt_Music_Mural_Minneapolis_MN

E Pluribus Resistance

Earlier today I received an email from the fellow who organizes events in Ipswich, including the No Kings rallies which I often attend on Saturdays. He added an item that struck a chord:

WBZ-CBS is airing commercials for ICE, threatening immigrants. I saw this while watching the news tonight and immediately contacted a friend who had worked at the station.They said to contact the Station Manager, Chris Ruggeri to complain. His email is cpruggeri@cbs.com. Phone 617-746-7140.

I’ve been seeing these for weeks during football games, college and pro, on various stations. I even mused at the idea of joining, grabbing the $50K signing bonus, then quitting to use that bonus to help defeat Republican candidates for the US House and Senate. Turns out, as my friend Woonsocket let me know, those bonuses are to given only after five years of terrorizing service, by which time, the gig will be up, and the masked suckers who joined will go empty-handed.

Then came the double-homicide in Minneapolis, soon followed by a name, a position, and an edress. Within seconds I zapped off this under the subject line, “In the Service of Hate”:

To Station Manager Chris Ruggeri: What is it like to profit from a terror campaign that has just murdered two people in cold blood? Will you show the videos of those murders with the commercials? What’s it like to be in the service of hate? Jack Garvey Plum Island

In just as little if not less time, my inbox had this:

Thank you for taking the time to contact us and share your feedback.

We understand that viewers sometimes have questions or concerns about national CBS News programming. While we value hearing from our audience, our local station does not produce or control the editorial content of CBS News’ national broadcasts.

To ensure your comments are reviewed by the appropriate team, we encourage you to direct any feedback regarding national CBS News programming to the CBS News Ombudsman at the link below:

https://ombudsman.cbsnews.com/

Thank you again for reaching out and for watching CBS.

Sincerely, Your CBS Boston team

Passing the buck with a form letter! I may have been in triple digits on the Celsius Scale. Oh, I’ll contact the CBS ombudsman, but not without adding my response to the “CBS Boston team”:

Does the name Pontius Pilate ring a bell? Or are you playing Lady Macbeth? Speak now or plead for mercy at Nuremberg… Jack

This drew no response, automated or otherwise. Now that at least four hours have passed, I might even wonder if I’ve been reported to Trump’s heavily-financed-by-taxpayers goon squad as a domestic terrorist?

Surely, my two emails today were more combative and insulting than anything they heard from Renee Good or Alex Pretti. And, look, I have something in my hand that, when I click it, even before I click it, could accurately be called a threat, not just to ICE, but to the Reign of Hate that has unleashed it on us.

At least I hope it’s a threat. Why else would I spend any time with it?

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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/08/02/ice-recruiting-signing-bonus-incentives-immigration-officers/85478464007/

A Winter Margaritaville

Stock up and hunker down was my plan from Sunday all the way to Wednesday if necessary. And so here I am watching the snowflakes fly every which way out my panoramic window overlooking the whiteness that blankets the marsh before it becomes one with a white sky over a distant horizon.

Barely an hour since the first flakes fell, so plows have yet to make their island rounds. Tire tracks left by a few brave or careless motorists are quickly covered. Honestly, I don’t care if the plows take today and tomorrow off. As for Tuesday, I’ll miss my weekly coffee klatch in Cafe Chococoa for a chance to tell my guitarist friends that Song Sung Blue is about much more than Neil Diamond and well worth seeing. Then again, I now have plenty of time to put that in an email.

By wild coincidence, on a 2026 appointment calendar that is almost entirely blank, Tuesday is marked for an annual check-up with my dermatologist before the klatch, and a bi-annual check up with my primary care physician soon after it. Yesterday, I left messages on two phones that I wanted to “cancel as a precaution, but if I can get my car out of the driveway, I’ll show up anyway in case the time is still open.” The “precaution,” of course, is to avoid the fee one is charged for failing to show up.

For now, I sit awaiting the start of a football game in Denver where the forecast is sunny, at least at kickoff. With my modest flat-screen propped against that window, I look forward to a surrealistic combination of colorful picture in a massive dull frame. Picasso surrounded by, say, the architectural plans for almost any structure built in America these last 40 years…

Wait! What is this coming into view? Five of them, all with stocking caps pulled down and scarves wrapped around their face and tucked into thick parkas. If they had guns and were chasing Somali-Americans, I’d be watching more than one ice-storm. (A Somalian connection, you ask? Other than votes cast blue, just what else do you think Minnesota and Maine have in common?)

But I ingress… Kickoff is at 3:00. I’m tempted to wait until 3:15 to avoid the National Anthem. Used to be that I always tuned in early to hear it. Not only that, but I wrote letters of complaint to the Boston Red Sox, to WEEI, to one sponsor, and to both Boston dailies during a year when it was omitted from the radio broadcast. When that failed, I contacted the Massachusetts Attorney General on the grounds of false advertising, as WEEI returned from a commercial break saying, “the National Anthem was brought to you by…” even though they never aired it. At gatherings of friends and family to watch games, I’d ask for silence before it played.

Now, however, the Trump Administration has turned “land of the free” into a glaring lie. And the Republican Party has turned “home of the brave” into a sick joke. Why should I stand for that? On the other hand, it has been NFL–and NBA–players and coaches that have made the loudest statements against the rise of racist authoritarianism starting back in Trump’s first term. That includes the refusal of entire teams–the Golden State Warriors and the Philadelphia Eagles–to accept the traditional invitation to celebrate their championships with the president in the White House. Last night, the Minnesota Timberwolves postponed their game with the Warriors in honor of the nurse murdered by ICE that morning.

While I wouldn’t bet on any kind of statement being made this afternoon in Denver or tonight in Seattle, reports suggest that the Superbowl’s halftime show with Latino star Bad Bunny may yet prove that Colin Kaepernick did not lose his career in vain.

Whatever does or does not happen, and no matter who wins, both games will serve as consolation for what has not happened on social media today. No one is sending me any message hoping that I’m safe, telling me to stay safe, worrying for my safety, offering me safety on the mainland. For years, I’d receive at least a dozen such alarms, and at first, I simply reassured those who worried. But not long after the serial deluge began, I began making fun of them, and so, I just now realize, they have forgotten me.

As the concluding line puts it in what has to be the most popular summertime beach song ever sung, “It was my own damn fault!”

All the more reason to wrap this up, log out, tune in to the pre-game show, and find that lost shaker of salt.

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The Shoebox during Snowmageddon–as well as the Snowpocalypse and Snowzilla–of 2015. Photo by Kim O’Rourke

From a Broken Heartland

Well, it’s been a loud week in Minnesota, not far from where I once lived out there on the edge of the prairie.

In a previous life, I would have been snug in my trailer barely a dozen miles from the state’s border on a winter weekend. On an early Saturday evening, I’d have been tuning into Minnesota Public Radio to hear A Prairie Home Companion. Listened to it here in my coastal home for over three decades before it ran its course.

What would today’s “News from Lake Wobegon” sound like?

That question was on my mind when I left a No Kings rally in Ipswich, and I might try to answer it except that Garrison Keillor is about to begin a US tour on Jan. 31.* He can and will speak for himself. Quite a coincidence that the closest the tour comes to me will be on April 16 in Portsmouth N.H.–right across the Piscataqua River from Maine where ICE began its second state invasion just days ago.

Remember all those indignant Republican invocations of the 10th Amendment–a.k.a. “States Rights”–during the Obama years? No doubt a PHC show this week would include a skit on memory loss. Would Guy Noir try to find it?

One detail right up Keillor’s alley is the name that ICE has given its second Confederate attack on yet another state of the Union disdained by its authoritarian master: Operation Catch of the Day. So clever that we shouldn’t be surprised if someone with a sense of humor urges either Noem or Trump to claim the name is a sincere attempt to advertise Maine’s seafood industry.

As a satirist, Keillor might have a hard time trying to make fun of an operation that appears to satirize itself. “Catch,” is here intended as a double-entendre: We catch “aliens” where you catch fish. And when you’re out in your little boat hauling in cod or lobster, you have to preserve them, and so what do you need for all the time it takes to bring them to market? Along Commercial Street in Portland, tubs of it surround you in fish markets as the clerks take fish atop them to weigh on scales, and then throw more fish on the tubs, straight off the docks just steps from their back doors.

ICE! The name must have seemed fitting enough in Minnesota. Don’t know about records in Wobegon or Minneapolis, or even Lake Benton where I went on dates, but I recall hearing a radio report of minus-35 temps in International Falls. Reports tell us that thousands of Minnesotans braved sub-zero wind chills yesterday to protest the cold-blooded murder of a 37-year-old mother–only to witness the cold-blooded murder of a 37-year-old nurse whose only crime was taking a video of what he saw.

Included in those numbers were 100 members of the Twin City’s clergy at the Minneapolis Airport as they tried to convince airlines to stop serving ICE. In Ipswich today, signs with the outline of the K-shaped state seemed to replace the Greenland flags of last week. When I mentioned this to a woman who asked what “Mpls” stood for, I added that I long ago met two Methodist ministers in Minneapolis and wondered if they were there. She looked around: “I wonder if any of them are here.”

What would be the sermon at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility if the young Father Wilmer delivered it? And would the semi-retired Father Emil approve? And what would the staid Lutheran Pastor Ingqvist say? Or the lively Pastor Liz? Or Max and Georgiana, lively characters as I recall, who both laughed when I told them, “There’s Methodism to your madness”?

What of the rest of us? Are we perpetually responsible? Are we responsible at all? Would those questions be considered at The Chatterbox Cafe, Cafe Boeuf, or The Sidetrack Tap? What would Harold Star opine in his Herald Star?

If Lake Wobegon was “a little town that time forgot,” time has caught up to it now. Today it is very much a part of a nation that appears determined to be one that “the decades cannot improve.” It’s as if we have forsaken The Enlightenment for the Dark Ages, a repudiation that was actually called for by a candidate for president in the Republican primaries of 2012. Her name was Michele Bachmann, and she was elected to the US House from 2007 to 2015 by the northern suburbs of, ah, um, yes, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

And that’s the news from Lake America, where the land is no longer free, where people at home beg senators and representatives in DC to be brave, and where children are used as bait to bring adults with dark complexions within reach of masked goons eager to fill quotas that are as apparently open to murder as to deportation.

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A stencil on a wall in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

*About the Garrison Keillor Tour:

https://www.stubhub.com/garrison-keillor-tickets/performer/8288

More than Whaling in Mind

Running 40 minutes behind schedule, the 30th Annual Moby-Dick Marathon dives past midnight into Sunday’s wee hours. So sorry if I’m keeping you up waiting for me to breach on the livestream.

Here at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, no one appears at all bothered by it. The twenty readers following me, all the way to 3:30, are all smiles when they take to the podium and when they leave. While up there, expressions change to capture Ishmael’s excitement, Ahab’s rage, Queequeg’s resolve, Starbuck’s meditation, Stubb’s flippancy, Flask’s complacence, Pipp’s innocence.

Yes, that’s all in the present tense, as I now have a seat outside the auditorium in a room just off the lobby where coffee is here for the taking. Only chowder cups remain from which to drink it, but caffeine is caffeine. There’s a large screen with the livestream a few feet from where I sit, and the sound, frankly, is louder and more clear than in the auditorium.

Only because I glanced at the screen do I realize that viewers may have noticed an odd bit of drama when I took my seat. Indeed, when I checked messages before starting this report, I learned that a friend had patiently waited those 40 minutes before writing: “I’m here. Where are you?” And then:

There you are… what? That guy just took your book and kept it? You are such a gentleman.

Don’t know about the “gentleman” part, but I need to describe the Marathon’s format to explain what happened:

On the auditorium stage are two podiums and one chair. The dual podiums work like a relay race to keep transitions up to speed. Each has a microphone, and so the reader on deck, so to speak, is ready to start as soon as the one reading is finished. Two monitors are seated in the front row facing us, and one will say “Thank You” at the end of a paragraph nearest our allotted time. The reader who is finished leaves the stage, and the reader waiting in the seat goes to the vacant podium. Since we wear numbers on lanyards around our necks, it is very easy to see when we should leave the audience and take that vacated chair.

So it was that when 128 finished, 129 started, and 130 went from chair to podium. At that moment, I, 131, took the chair. And then it happened. Stepping back toward me, in a whisper, 130 seemed in distress and said something. I thought he had lost his place and wanted me to point it out. Already following along, I held my book up and pointed to the paragraph that 129 was then reading.

130 took the book! I was surprised, but he soon brought it back, saying he was still lost. I’m quite familiar with those ten or so chapters (that’s why I always choose the “midnight watch”), so I was able to point to it. Again, he took it to the podium, and got ready to read from it.

This time I was stunned. How could he not have his own? And they have a stack right there from which anyone can borrow. One of the monitors, perceiving what happened, and knowing that I had to be following along as 130 read, gave me one of those books, open to the page.

As if to add insult to injury, 130 got “The Dart,” the chapter I hope to get every year. For one, it’s an op-ed column written 70 years before newspapers began carrying such things, and 120 years before the term was coined. Other chapters in Moby-Dick fit the description, but, just as the best op-eds end with “kickers,” this one ends with a metaphor showing that Melville had a lot more than whaling in mind.

And then my bad luck turned to gold. They cut the book thief before the last paragraph, which I know by heart, so I was able to look up into the audience and camera, and deliver it as the kicker it is:

To insure the greatest efficiency of the dart, the harpooneers of this world must start to their feet out of idleness, and not from out of toil.

Gave it two beats to sink in before buoyantly announcing “Chapter 63, The Crotch” and putting on my glasses. Grateful that no one snickered at the name of the fixture that holds harpoons in place on the boats that give chase, I then read the chapter’s delightfully calm, organic opening line:

Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters.

The audience laughed, and for the first time, despite having read Moby-Dick five times, I heard Melville’s anticipation of critics who would complain that he attempted too much. As he writes in a later chapter, “I try all things; I achieve what I can.”

Not sure if it was that realization, or kicking of “The Dart” with point and purpose, or both that took my mind off the book thief and animated me like a child on a boogie board riding the waves of a playful surf through Ishmael’s provocative prose.

Yes, I’m sorry if I kept you waiting, but not at all for what you got while you waited. Nor would I apologize for any of the 25 hours these marathons average, with or without an extra 40 minutes this year.

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No screenshots awaiting me this year, as those prone to send them sent them in previous years. This may be from two years ago, before the event was moved into the auditorium. I won’t know if my opening recitation had the desired effect until I see the video, which the museum usually posts about two weeks after the event. Judging from the message from Woonsocket, the affair of the book makes an impression. I’ll post it in a blog as soon as I can:

Home

All for a Bird on My Roof

Sunday after Christmas: When I awake, I sense commotion out my window and across the street.

Two cars are parked, the second with two people opening doors and getting out as a third car stops behind them. With a camera the size of a bazooka, the third driver also steps out.

Counting the driver of the first car, I soon have four photographers aiming weapons of mass illustration at me. Because I live atop a slight hill, they aim upward.

Keeping away from the window, I rub my uncaffeinated eyes, and quickly throw a shirt on. It’s doubtful they can see this far through the window, especially with a glaring morning sun facing them. And if they did, it would be from just the neck up.

Without coffee, and necessarily concerned more about urination than illustration at that moment, I leave them to their own devices. In the bathroom, I resolve to stop being so specific in my Daily News columns about where I live, and my expansive view over the marsh next to this wildlife sanctuary that serves as a bi-annual pit-stop for migrating birds.

While walking in the sanctuary, I’ve seen how cars converge on a spot to photograph a red-tail hawk, a peregrine falcon, a snowy owl, an occasional bald eagle, a rare king eider. Happens on the one and only road across the marsh connecting us to the mainland, a causeway absurdly called a “turnpike.”

While walking the road in the sanctuary, I’ve chatted with them, learned something of their MO, and have been treated to their cameras’ views that can make a blue heron a half mile away look like it’s on the other side of a card table ready to take you on in a game of cribbage.

Birders–call them “bird watchers” at your own peril!–have an app on their phones which they can use to alert others of a sighting. Since most all of them frequent Plum Island with license plates from all over New England any given day, a quick gathering of three or more cars with perhaps five or seven birders is common.

Fans of Moby-Dick might be reminded of the “gam.” When two whaling ships sighted each other on the high seas, they would pause the hunt and join side-to-side to exchange information. The captain of one ship would board the other while the first mate of the other would board the first. Never occurred to me to ask birders if they have a specific word for their impromptu gatherings. And might it be possible that that word is “gam”?

Happens along the causeway. I have no idea how anyone in a passing car one day could have noticed the falcon at least fifty feet away, slightly down from the higher road, and in the tall marsh grass. But that’s why birders tend to travel at least two to a vehicle. By the time I was on my way home, five cars were in the breakdown lane, and the birders lined one side like a baseball team from home to first following introductions.

This morning, in the bathroom long enough to heat water for a full French press of a Tanzanian dark-roast, I throw on my gym shorts just in case my own personal paparazzi is still trying to capture my sorry posterior for posterity. A few sips is all it takes to see that their cameras are aimed not at my window, but up to my roof, and to the roof next door.

Do I throw on more clothes and a pair of shoes to get out and look up? Nah! It’s 16 degrees, and whatever it is or they are, I’ve seen them before and will see them again.

Better to settle here on my posterior and record the story for posterity even if it does reveal that I’m so vain, I positively thought that gam was about me.

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You can tell where the road is by the bottoms of the telephone poles. This pic was taken by a friend, or a friend of a friend, on a summertime sunset cruise. Sorry I cannot recall who that was.

A Long Scarf ’round My Neck

Christmas Day: Before driving south some 70 miles to join family for dinner and an exchange of presents, I stopped at a convenience store to pick up a gift for a friend who has spent the entire month and will likely spend another in a rehabilitation center.

No, no addiction, but Parkinson’s Disease at a stage where he can do little more than read between meals that are served on his bed-tray or in the dining room at the end of the hall where a wheelchair with someone to push it will take him.

And read he does, always asking for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, a dual habit he has sustained for as long as I’ve known him going back to the Reagan years.

WSJ does not run on holidays, so I settled for the NYT only to be startled by the large over-the front-page-fold photo. Did the Gray Lady really put a painting of the three wise men on its cover? There was no headline above to give it away. My glasses, hurriedly applied, showed that I was looking at three donkeys, not camels, and the caption described people fleeing the war in Sudan, seeking refuge in Chad.

Still, the choice of image for December 25 could not be mere coincidence. Or am I just haunted by an uncanny thread in what might seem like a seasonal scarf around my own neck? Began three weeks ago when I prepared a Christmas column for the Daily News, a feel-good story about a package delivered to the wrong address due to a wrong turn called by Siri. As a spoof of the carol, I used “App of Wonder, App of Night” as the headline.

Barely two weeks ago I joined a No Kings rally of about one hundred brave-the-cold souls on a small town green where they usually have a drum circle. Just two drummers showed up, but that was enough. Improvising to their beat, I played all the standard Christmas carols I knew except for one I just could not find, and not for lack of trying: “We Three Kings.” That kind of irony is a blog that writes itself, though the headline was its best joke: “The We Three No Kings Band.”

While I was writing that blog, a friend of Middle Eastern descent posted an editorial cartoon:

The image arrested me as emphatically as that wall halts the kings. If we were to be honest about Christmas in America, 2025, it would be available as a greeting card, and I’d have sent it. Instead, it prompted a column headlined “Merry Exclusivity!” which has yet to hit print–likely next week, after which it will become a blog, available to all.

As always, I was last-minute getting cards to send out. For at least forty years, I always picked out large cards with images of the Archangel Gabriel and his trumpet or, if unavailable, of any wind-musicians or wind-instruments. The reason for large cards is to stuff them with a newspaper column or blog or two or three I’ve written over the past 12 months I think the recipient will like.

By the time I arrived at Jabberwocky Bookshop, no Gabriels, no flutes, no piccolos, no group of carolers, no drummer boy, no brass, no chamber orchestras, no angels with harps were on the card racks to be had. But I spotted a card with the three kings which was perfect for the enclosure I had in mind, the “No Kings” blog. You’ve heard the saying, “Sometimes the jokes just write themselves”? In this case, it was the card itself.

All that came to mind in the convenience store in the brief time it took to buy that newspaper. When I handed it to my friend in the rehab center, I said nothing of it, though I awaited his reaction. At first glance, he gave a start, but right away focused on the caption. His look told me that he noticed what I had noticed.

You’ve heard the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words”? In this case, it was worth a thousand to appear accommodating us with what we celebrate this day, and then a second thousand to remind us of what we actually have this day.

A Christmas card-turned-reality check. If you happen to have a copy of the Christmas Day NYT, hold onto it. You’ve heard the expression, “hiding in plain sight”? Unannounced messages in large publications tend to become collector’s items–especially when placed over the fold of a front page.

On screen, this is much brighter and clearer than in print. Try to imagine a darker look at a distance of three or four feet to approximate what I thought I saw.
The first ever screenshot I have done knowingly. According to the icons on my screen, I did one of Sinclair Lewis and Dorothy Thompson. That icon has been there for at least three years. I recall finding the photo and posting it, but I have no recollection at all of noticing the word “screenshot” while I did. Is it possible to do without knowing it?

And on the day before Christmas when I saw no newspaper:

Christmas eve, I awake at 11:00, finish breakfast at 1:00, and put off all last minute errands until Friday or even Monday. Snowflakes the size of silver dollars starting to pile here on the island. Always piles more on the mainland, so why cross the bridge? Why test Stick-It’s tires on my steep driveway on my return? There’s bound to be a gas station open between here and Boston tomorrow when I trek to the South Shore for a couple days. Nine IPAs are enough in my fridge till Saturday. And who needs cash when you have a credit card? Or those rosemary-sea salt rolls from the Italian bakery when you’re making pancakes, that great excuse to have maple syrup, for breakfast and will be having holiday feasts away from home?

I say “Merry Christmas” when I know someone shares my general background, and “Happy Holidays” when I do not, but in both cases what I really mean is “Feed Me!”

Bon Appetit to all! And to all, a good bite!

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The We Three No Kings Band

A ‘Tight’ of Passage

Every few months when I take my copy of Emblem from my mailbox, I immediately turn to the class notes and find my way to “Class of 1968.”

As usual, it is blank in this new issue of Central Catholic High School’s alumni magazine except for the name of one of my classmates back in those turbulent days and his edress for the rest of us to send him any news we would like to report. Apparently, we don’t have any.

Class of 1967, however, appears quite active, and it ended with an entry that caught my eye:

Teacher Joseph Madigan of Andover, Maine, continues to enlighten us and his local newspaper with his monthly poetry lyrics.

While immediately calculating that he must be in his late-80s, I pounced on my Rand McNally to find a town I’d never heard of despite having lived in three of the four corners of that raggedly rhomboidal-shaped state. Sure enough, Andover is in the fourth corner, way up near the borders of New Hampshire and Quebec.

Joe Madigan was the first person to tell me I could write. He was my English teacher in senior year when those of us who did well took two English classes, the other called “college prep,” or something like that.

That other class was taught by the legendary Warren Hayes whom we all had in junior year and were the better for it. Hayes was strict but dynamic, a combination that made us want to surpass the standards he set. Leaving literature to Madigan, Hayes’ college prep class was much more nuts and bolts, but even that Hayes taught with what one student eulogy in 2021 called “pep, rhythm, and vitality.”

Most memorable was “Vocaball,” a game played one day each week for which the class was separated into five teams of seven to define words, with synonyms, antonyms, etymology, roots, prefixes, suffixes, all in response to rapid-fire questions. By putting us in teams, he made us not want to let each other down. No doubt many CCHS grads who watched Dead Poets Society 35 years ago wondered how Robin Williams knew of Warren Hayes.

While Hayes was the wily veteran, Madigan joined Central while I was there. A few years later he would teach at the Essex County Training School for truants with behavioral problems. My father, a social worker there known for his rapport with the kids, noticed the trait in Madigan and befriended him. For that reason, my father took him into a rough neighborhood in Lynn when a kid ran away from the school and returned home. The two arrived at a house, and Madigan went to the rear while my father went to the front door. Don’t recall how many Lynn police arrived at that moment, but my father told me that two went to the back. Very soon, they returned with Madigan between them, securing both his arms. My father, according to his account, was so stunned that he couldn’t get the words out until Madigan begged him to speak.

Not long after that, Madigan taught at the Greater Lawrence Technical School where my CCHS ’68 classmate Dave Bodenrader had a career as a guidance counselor. When I learned that the two became friends, I couldn’t help but re-imagine my father’s story. If the Lawrence police had been called to the school to stop an altercation and arrested Dave by mistake, I don’t think Joe would have stopped them. I think he’d have smiled and enjoyed the show.

Central Catholic was likely Madigan’s first teaching gig. He ranged from lively to relaxed in front of a class, as if it was second-nature to him. He had a passion for American literature–for Poe and Melville, Hemingway and Steinbeck, and many writers among and between them. That passion was contagious, catching the curiosity of teenage boys far more inclined toward girls, cars, sports, and the shiniest new object of all at the time, rock-and-roll.

Not much older than my Class of ’68, Madigan had an instinct for making inroads with his hormonal audience. Most memorable was one of his descriptions of Romantic poetry. Though far from R-rated, his calling it “making love” years before we knew what the euphemism meant had us reading more by John Keats than the assignment called for. His mischievous smile while saying it was the suggestive sound of John Lennon’s “you know what I mean” in “When I Saw Her Standing There.” A nice echo came two decades later in Dead Poets Society when the teacher played by Williams–named John Keating–tells his all-male class that the purpose of poetry is “to woo women.”

My class at Central numbered 222, a number easy for me to recall only because I graduated 22nd. Call it deuces wild, and I was wild with classes that didn’t appeal to me. A few I loved, but English was never one of them. My interest was in Math, Geometry, Physics, Geography, and History. Anything with numbers, and I guess the endless dates allowed History to qualify.

We had perhaps ten out of 222 who excelled at everything. I was in the second tier of about 20 who excelled at a few. By the time we were halfway through sophomore year, there were never any surprises at who took the top awards in each subject. At least I don’t recall any until about six weeks into senior year when Joe Madigan held a lottery to match each of us, about 25 in that class, with 25 American novels, assigning a book report to each.

My luck was to draw the longest book in the lot, Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel. I made an effort with it, but couldn’t make sense of Wolfe’s stream of conscious narration or his mountainous Carolina setting. And so, by page 50 of about 500, I got myself a copy of Cliff Notes. To be fair to myself, I did not do any plagiarizing, but I did rely on the CN analysis before returning to the book and finding passages that applied to it. That was for the sake of a few quotes from the novel that made some point with which I agreed. Maybe I’m just rationalizing, but I didn’t dodge the assignment. I just made it easier.*

I turned in my 500-word report expecting to gain my usual B- or C+ for an essay. I figured Madigan would recognize that I skimmed it but would realize that some honest effort was made on a book as long as Of Mice and Men, For Whom the Bells Toll, Red Badge of Courage, and Billy Budd combined–meaning that I was to have done as much as four classmates combined. As we say today, I expected to catch a break.

Back in class after a long weekend, not only did I catch a break, I hit the jackpot. Madigan plopped the papers on his desk, snatched the top one off and held it in the air. He stepped toward us with a wild smile and said something like, Listen to this! This is how it’s done! and then, in a line I still hear, clenching a fist I still see, “This is tight!”

Despite that excitement, my mind drifted. No doubt it was on the next Red Sox World Series game against the St. Louis Cardinals when I realized that I was hearing my own words. Seems now that I had to be elated at the time, but I recall that I froze. There were at least six kids in that class who had been the best at this for three years, and I was not one of them. Was this encroachment? Would I pay a price in the schoolyard? On the other hand, I was, like many others in that class, wondering what I might do about the military draft and bothered by American casualties in Vietnam that had started hitting close to home. That day in that class was the first indication I had that there was something I could do, and do well.

Central Catholic did assign all of us, even as incoming freshmen, a reading list of seven or so books to read by Labor Day. In the summer of 1967, our senior list included James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963) and Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) set in apartheid South Africa. So you could say that my pump was primed for putting opinions in writing. Baldwin’s treatment of race was a model for my treatment of the draft, and later of the anti-war movement. But I still entered Salem State College as a math major looking forward to a lucrative career as an accountant.

That didn’t last long. By the start of second semester, I was an English major, and I had joined the staff of the student newspaper, The Log, an unlikely combination of upperclassers who couldn’t hide their amusement at my jacket and tie. Those didn’t last long either.

If Baldwin’s Fire pushed me in the direction my life took, it was Madigan’s “tight” that sent me down that road with confidence.

Twelve years later, I became a English teacher myself and spent the next 22 years channeling Madigan and Hayes, as well as Pat Gozemba–whom I still see at No Kings rallies–and the late Jay McHale at Salem State who both impressed upon me the need for critical thought, and Chuck Woodard at South Dakota State who steered me toward ironic vision. Every now and then, a student would tell me or write in an evaluation that my class recalled Dead Poets Society.

All that and I haven’t even mentioned what Joe Madigan in a poem calls “sweet music as I soon began to drift.”

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A note for those of you who live outside New England: “lewis-TUN” is Lewiston, about 50 miles southeast of Andover, and the closest city of any size.

Poem to accompany Dixfield Fuel Business Profile

Mar. 6, 2017

By Joe Madigan,
Andover, Maine

The heat had gone out
The water tank too
I called for some help
From a skeleton crew.

In snow-covered lanes
He made the long drive
Within a half hour
His van had arrived.
His fevered approach
Quickness and glee
Helped to alleviate
Worry in me.
With tool bag and light
He worked with a hum
Later he smiled and
Raised up his thumb.
I waved at his van
As he started to leave
With the heat coming on
And a propane reprieve.

On the left, Warren Hayes (1937?-2021) who retired in 2001 after 41 years of teaching. On the right, Chris Sullivan, recently retired President of CCHS and son of Mike Sullivan, one of my history teachers and manager of the school’s baseball team who did not select me for his roster.

Photos from the Central Catholic High School Class of 1968 Yearbook, courtesy of Dave Bodenrader, fellow CCHS Class of ’68.

From June, 2020, three months into the COVID shutdown:

Look Homeward, Devil