A Puzzle Best Left Unsolved

Weeks ago, I learned that a friend here in Newburyport, in a previous life, worked for 3M.

Whenever I’ve mentioned 3M in conversation, I’ve almost always learned that the listener does not know what the three Ms are, so let me fill in those who may yet be wondering: Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing.

In truth, it’s been at least twenty, maybe thirty, possibly forty years since I’ve mentioned my own former employer in any conversation. It was a summer job, barely ten weeks if that, while I made ends meet during my stint as a graduate student at South Dakota State University.

While my Newburyport friend was based in St. Paul, in sales or some such, the expanding company needed a new warehouse. To avoid the taxes of a state in which the Democratic Party still calls itself the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party, 3M bought land just 16 miles over the border in Business Uber Alles South Dakota.

Location was just a third of the reason. With a name like 3M, shouldn’t we expect two more? Yes, and here they are: The place was immediately off an interstate interchange, and Brookings is a college town offering an ample labor pool.

I was there at ground level. Or, more exactly, at floor level. When I joined, the building was up, and perhaps half full. But a space larger than a basketball court lay vacant in the center except for piles of metal rods to assemble scaffolding that warehouses use as shelves as high as three- and four-story ceilings.

They hired a team of eight. The other seven, all male, were undergrads, carefree and goofy, except for one who had the demeanor you’d expect of a person showing up for a new job. As a graduate assistant, I taught freshman classes and had already formed a habit of gauging on day one who would be a good student and who would be a challenging headache based on eye-contact and clarity of speech. One out of seven was about the going rate.

As luck would have it, we were instructed to form pairs. The placement of vertical scaffolding required a pair of hands down low and another up high. With verticals in place, each of us would shoulder an end of a beam and climb ladders that distance apart to place the horizontals into the verticals. Should note here that these beams, though ten or twelve feet long, were light enough that the ladders never seemed hazardous.

Before I could turn to Jerry, the non-goofy, no-Excedrin-needed guy, he turned to me, and we donned our hard hats and thick gloves and went to work. The others did the same. For a while, the supervisor circled us, offered some pointers, and reminded us of the sequence of going up or going side to side.

Before long he was gone, and moments later, one by one, or rather two-by-two, the six goofies were seated on a pile of metal beams, yukking it up and joking around. At times, a pair would fit another level into place. This, I soon realized, was to provide places where, upon spotting a supervisor, they could look busy on a moment’s notice. Jerry didn’t seem to notice, and I figured it wasn’t difficult or dirty work, and anyway, what else would I do?

Jerry and I kept at it, and the others milled around until the supervisor came into view at a distant corner. Suddenly they were all back to the stacks they had started and getting to the second level quick enough to give the impression that each pair was working equally, that Jerry and I just happened to be putting the finishing touches on the first completed section, a truly collaborative effort all around.

Supervisor satisfied, and gone, the goofies were back on their seats. When we descended from the top level, Jerry motioned that he wanted us to get back on the ladders and fit the top shelves of a section the others had started. Why not? By the time the supervisor rolled around, we were once again high up while the others, after a long desultory rest, were starting other sections.

After a few rounds of this, I finally called over to Jerry, who looked up with his broad Germanic grin. With a glance below: “Doesn’t that bother you?”

His grin widened, which might have been maddening in itself if not for his answer: “No. What else are we going to do here? You wouldn’t rather be just sitting there, would you?”

Me: “Ah, no, not at all.”

Jerry: “It’s not a bad job, and it’s going smoothly.”

Me: “Well, yes, but still-“

Jerry, with an impossibly wide smile: “Why would I be one of them when I can be one of us?”

In retrospect, I wonder why I didn’t fall from the ladder when he said that. As it was, I nodded, “Ya, you’re right,” and I looked down and banged my mallet into the end of a beam, sinking it into the opening of a cross beam.

Next day, we were a team, such as it was, of six. By week’s end we were four, and the last two goofies were gone by week three. Whether they quit or management put them on other jobs where they could be watched, I never knew.

As Jerry would say, it didn’t matter what they did or where they went. As a result, he and I spent 40 hours a week right through August filling the basketball court. I, and no doubt he, returned to classes in September with enough in the bank to get us through two more semesters.

Never saw him except for crossing paths on campus three or four times. Always the smile and with an added laugh, which proved infectious. Can’t help but wonder if that laugh was because he and I got the best of the deal–if it was his way of ribbing me: See! I told you so!

But I never stopped to ask. To me, he was a puzzle best left unsolved.

As I told my friend here in Newburyport who triggered the memory, that one line from Jerry, an undergraduate co-worker on a summer job–the only hard-hat job I ever held–was as educationally valuable as anything else I ever heard in or out of any classroom.

Why would I be one of them when I can be one of us?

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No idea where this is, but that’s the right height, and the scaffolding looks looks the same. Ominously enough, the photo is uncredited on a website that explains the rules and regulations of the Occupational Safety & Health Administration.

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Imagine picking up a book of American history and finding one of our presidents and all that happened during his term omitted.

Pick your omit: No Jefferson and Louisiana Purchase. No Polk and Mexican War. No FDR and New Deal.

Or pick up a dictionary and imagine all words beginning with one of the 26 letters left out. Cancel L. Suppress S. X X. Bleep U.

How about a map of North America with no Great Lakes? Just five oddly shaped, unexplained blank spots.

Imagine one of those and you might approximate the sensation that shook me in the Newbury Public Library when the young woman at the desk responded to my inquiry by turning to her laptop:

“Let me see if this library carries books by that author.”*

Had I been hit by a bullet I could not have been more stunned. She looked up in alarm when I voiced a spontaneous reaction:

“This is an American public library! ‘That author‘ is Herman Melville. Herman Melville! Unless he has suddenly become very popular and is flying off the shelves, how can he not be here, not a single book?”

She turned back to her laptop and hurriedly repeated the same answer. Verbatim.

Something made me take a few backward steps, and I waved a hand back toward her: “No, no, forget it, I’m sorry.” And I quickly reeled out the door.

That something, in retrospect, had to be the realization that we now have people graduating from American colleges with degrees in Library Science who do not recognize the names of writers whose books helped shape American ideals and values.

Yes, I have already noticed and written of “weeding” in public libraries. Columns in the local paper last summer and the summer before both drew considerable responses from library patrons who had also noticed the trend. One told me it had happened in the periodical section where scholarly magazines are also giving way to fan ‘zines and pop culture. Another informs me of the weeding of classical music from the CD collection at the Jones Public Library in Amherst, Mass.

In the past year, I’ve visited eight public libraries I drive by in the course of a week and taken counts in the shelves. The number of volumes for classic authors such as Melville, Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis, and even John Steinbeck have hovered in the two to six range. East and west of Steinbeck, those of Danielle Steel and Jacqueline Susann range from the sixties well into the eighties every time.

All the while, I have swallowed hard and held my tongue at endless kudos posted on social media for many public libraries that display and encourage the circulation of books, mostly contemporary, being banned in schools in Florida and other parts of the country. Glad they do it, but isn’t weeding just as much a dumbing down?

Librarians at two stops tell me weeding is a national trend. Friends around the state in Lowell, Northampton (where it is called “deaccessioning”), and Wareham have noticed it, as have others as far away as Santa Rosa and Seattle on the west coast. Last summer, in Harper’s August issue, Joyce Carol Oates described weeding without using the word in “The Return,” a short story set in New Jersey.

According to one librarian, computer programs now tell librarians how much a book circulates each month. Those that gather dust and once were dusted are now tossed with no regard for who wrote them, much less than for any obscure places they might have in American history.

“Obscure places”? Melville’s Moby-Dick may retain prominence, especially with a recent US president so eerily comparable to a captain bent on revenge and willing to take his ship down with him.

But how many Americans know that his previous book, White-Jacket, was an expose of the US Navy that led to many reforms, including a ban on the practice of flogging?

Or that Redburn, the one before that, offers a first hand look at waves of immigrants boarding a ship in Liverpool and making the trans-Atlantic passage to America?

More to the point, how many might find such books? All of them—by Cather, Lewis, Steinbeck, and the rest—reveal people and places that may be historically obscure but which are endlessly relevant.

That’s why we call it literature.

Today, the logic, both practical and legal, of Melville’s comprehensive analysis of flogging could strengthen any case made for the regulation of automatic weapons.

Likewise, his account of desperate immigrants hoping for a new life may help nail a convincing, pro-active plank into the platform offered by the Democratic National Convention this summer.

I can say it “may” because I sent a summary to a delegate from my district who says she has forwarded it to the rest of the Massachusetts delegation.

Good to know, as there’s little chance of finding it on the shelves of what’s left of America’s public libraries.

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*When I related this story to a friend over pints of Guinness, he stopped me here and insisted, “That is a canned response!” I realized right away that it was the identical Let-me-see-if… line that we always hear from customer service reps in person, on the phone, and on those on-line chats that utility and other companies have on their websites. Just fill in the blanks: this library and that author. I also knew what she said next, and told him so: “And I’m about to prove you right!”

First reason always given for weeding is that more shelf space is needed. This pic was taken about a year ago at the Newburyport Public Library, a year after my first newspaper column on the subject. But it could just as easily have been taken in Newbury, Rowley, Topsfield, Methuen and elsewhere, including Ipswich where entire rows were empty last fall. Still could, although since then, many of those blank spaces now contain a book on display, propped up on a small stand, facing out and angled to eye-level. These are the books shown by algorithms to be most popular. As one approving librarian puts it: “Less is more.” Photo by Ann O’Nimmis.

No Matter Our Past Cross-Purpose

By far the loudest and longest cheers and applause of the day erupted with calls for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza, and a two-state solution.

US Rep. Jim McGovern was the first to make the call, and Massachusetts US senators Ed Markey and Liz Warren both amplified it in barn-burning speeches.

Warren ramped it up: “Netanyahu cannot bomb his way to peace!” Riding the roar of the crowd, she raised her voice yet more: “Donald Trump & Benjamin Netanyahu cannot be anywhere near leadership positions!”

Massachusetts Democrats called it a state convention, but with a single nomination to make and one unopposed candidate to choose, it was a rally.

Coincidentally, it was a rally on the same Saturday that saw many Pride rallies and parades across the nation, and those folks were well-represented on Worcester’s DCN stage, first by Democratic Party Chair Steven Kerrigan, later by Gov. Maura Healy, and my guess is by others, but why would I keep count? Diversity, equity, and inclusion were emphasized by all speakers regardless of preference.

My employers back in Newburyport marched in a Pride parade and were joined by, of all people, my landlords for a “The Screening Room” contingent bearing a rainbow flag. They and a few other mutual friends all posed for smiling photos. Conspicuous in his absence was the old geezer who has projected films there since 1998.

Only because I was among the seven delegates sent to Worcester by the town of Newbury where we joined over 2,000 others.

Planning on the breakfast hosted by Sen. Warren and the AFL-CIO, I arrived as soon as the doors opened in hopes of mingling with people from around the state for as long as I could. A fellow with an “Azorean Maritime Heritage Society” t-shirt, turned out to be an annual reader in the Portuguese version of the Moby-Dick marathon in New Bedford.

Three women from Mansfield and Foxboro were amused by my endorsement of the almond croissants at White’s Bakery, but their talk of the previous day’s news proved they were more concerned with counts than with calories. Their listing of a few of the 34 lit a bulb, and I spilled out the light:

The reason that individual counts are never mentioned is that none of his supporters claim he’s innocent of anything, just that he’s immune.

One replied immediately:

Right! That he’s above the law without using the phrase ‘above the law”-

Another:

Or admitting to it!

The third:

That’s why it’s no exaggeration when we say democracy is on the ballot.

Me:

But I still want to know if those croissants are legal!

Well, you have to lighten up now and then to keep things moving. The person I hoped to run into more than any other was Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll, former mayor of Salem. Wanted so much to ask her if she recalled a 2007 incident when a Salem busker got into a feud with the city police. She never involved herself personally, but did assign an assistant, one Jason Silva, to solve the issue amicably. He did what he could, but I’m pretty well convinced that the real solution came with phone calls from the ACLU to Salem City Hall. All I wanted to do yesterday was see the expression on her face when I told her I was that busker.

Instead, I turned around from getting a refill from the tank of coffee and came face to face with a former mayor of Newburyport. She gave me a huge smile and a hello as happy as a trip to Hawaii. Couldn’t have been more off-guard than if I had been suddenly face-to-face with Barack Obama. Couldn’t help but smile back and exchange the hello, before letting her and the folks with her, including a few faces I recognized, know that I was representing the town of Newbury after so many years of a tagline in the local paper that says I’m a resident of “Plum Island,” so that people would think I was a resident of Newburyport.

They liked the joke, and she resumed laughing. I walked away quite relieved and with a nagging feeling of guilt. From 2013 through 2017, I wrote at least a dozen columns savaging Mayor Donna Holaday. One began by declaring that Newburyport didn’t have a mayor, but a broker. She could have brokered my nose when I turned from the coffee tank, and I’d have deserved it. Instead, a warm smile, a huge greeting, and so I felt like a snake. Still do.

But life goes on, and our common purpose, no matter our past cross-purpose, was a focus on November. While an end to Netanyahu’s war on Gaza gained the loudest cheers, unions and jobs drew the most attention.

Chrissy Lynch of the AFL-CIO emphasied labor’s “big tent, but shared values.” Boasting of Biden’s best-ever record of job creation, “union jobs to rebuild the middle class,” and lowest unemployment rate in over 50 years, she noted how Republicans always harp on false choices such as taxing the rich or having corporate profits “trickle down.” She applied that to affordable housing and infrastructure. “America is not an either-or place,” she proclaimed to a rolling applause. “Corporate profits,” she insisted, “are the real reason for inflation.”

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu reinforced Lynch’s endorsement by telling us that every one of Biden’s cabinet secretaries, the First Lady, and Biden himself have visited Boston to plan for improvements in infrastructure, health, and education.

Education was another recurring theme. Especially the Republicans’ “2025 Report” which several speakers attacked as a “dangerous” descent back into the Dark Ages. Most representative was Worcester Mayor Joe Petty’s description of it an erasure of history for the purpose of repeating it. McGovern, Markey, and Warren nailed it just as forcefully.

After dancing onto the stage, State Treasurer Deb Goldberg pledged to fight corporations on the issue of climate change and their treatment of workers. As if answering Lynch’s “false choice” claim, Goldberg noted that there are many well-paying union jobs to be had in the field of clean energy.

Overall, one-liners from each speaker captured both the purpose and attitude of the event:

McGovern, after a roaring laugh when he described the futility of working with “MAGA morons”: “We don’t govern to win, we win to govern.” And, “We stand for something. Trump stands for nothing.”

Healy: “Republicans have anger, hatred, fear, and alternate reality. We have the truth.”

Attorney General Andrea Campbell making a case that empathy, while all-important, is useless without action: “This is the time to get political.”

Markey, citing the wrecking ball character of the Trump Administration, and the convicted felon’s pitch to oil companies that he will wipe out all regulations for billion dollar donations: “If he wins, he won’t appoint a cabinet, but a cartel.”

Later: “They say ‘Drill, Baby, Drill!’ but we say, ‘Plug in, Baby, Plug in.'” Then he added mention of his Green New Deal co-sponsored by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose name drew a huge cheer: “We have an American climate corps of 20,000 young people… We don’t agonize, we organize.”

And for a parting shot: “Donald Trump has 34 problems and being rich ain’t one of them.”

Because she’s up for re-election, Warren closed the show, beginning with an acknowledgment of Trump’s two “signature accomplishments” as president: “An extremist Supreme Court to repeal Roe v. Wade and tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires.” Laughter turned to cheers when she added: “And you sent me to tax the rich!”

She repeated and re-enforced all of the above themes. One that she added, both when she addressed us during breakfast in the morning and in the last hurrah, was a call for statehood for the District of Columbia. Each time it was bare mention, but well-worth noting since it hasn’t been mentioned since before the pandemic. Even then it was deep down the Dems’ wish-list, but if Democrats hold the senate and flip the house for Biden, it may have a shot.

She also joined all other speakers in calling the November presidential election a choice between “the most union-friendly president in our history versus the most divisive and dangerous.”

She neglected to add the third choice of the guy who says he has a dead worm in his brain. Or is it a worm in his dead brain? None of the speakers mentioned him. Just as well, the constant references to “the convicted felon” provided as much humor as we needed to keep things moving.

When she asked us if we recalled how “every week was infrastructure week during the convicted felon’s four years in office,” she held up her a hand to each side and mimicked soundless yakking. Laughter was nearly as loud as the cheers for ending the war on Gaza.

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Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll displays a shirt for a Worcester High basketball team, lined up behind her, who just won a state championship. Gov. Maura Healy spins a ball on a fingertip. Both women played on their college teams. Photo: *Boston Herald*.

No idea who took this, but the Screening Room owners are Ben (with the rainbow placard) and Becca (leaning in from the top right) Fundis and their son Oscar in the middle. My neighbors to whom I give all the money that the Fundises give me are Michael (with the shades in the back) and Angela (kneeling with a sign in the front). The woman with the Milk sign I think is named Mimi, whom I’ve seen at the Screening Room over the years. That’s likely true of the other two, but I can’t tell from this photo.

Fool Me Twice

In the laundromat today, the back of a shirt worn by a fellow loading a washer caught my eye. At the top, in large letters, I read “Stop…”

Couldn’t see the object of that most demanding verb, but I thought I knew. Younger I would likely have confronted him, but futility appeals not to Older Me or to My preoccupied state of mind on laundry day, if not every day.

All I craved was to transfer my laundry from washer into a dryer so I could set up shop with Lenovo and a Costa Rican roast at the coffee shop next door. Maybe I’d write about the idiocy of the “Stop the Steal” movement, especially now that a Supreme Court justice is flying its flags. Or maybe I’d put it in my 2S2BW file–Too Stupid To Bother With.

In the coffee-shop, I went right to a recent blog awaiting its turn to appear on social media. My first film review in a couple of months with the headline, “Better Not to Dwell on It.” Couldn’t help but laugh out loud at how well that fit the laundromat scene I just described. In fact, I paused for a moment thinking I might find another headline and save it–only to realize that, in so doing, I would be dwelling on it.

So, onto the feed it went just above another post as arresting to my eye as the word “Stop” in the laundromat. Actually it was a re-post of a meme showing a smiling young woman, an Olympian, holding a medal she had won. The text began with a newspaper headline:

Wife of a Bears’ lineman wins bronze medal today in Rio Olympics.

Below that, the person who posted the meme added:

You spelled ‘3-time Olympian Corey Cogdell-Unrein wins second bronze medal today in Rio Olympics’ wrong.

Yes, having delved into sarcasm myself, I’m a sucker for it. At first, I was fooled and all in favor of the correction. Why should anyone’s identity depend on a relationship to someone else? But then I noticed the identity of the original poster at the top of the meme, just above the woman’s smile and medal and the text I just quoted:

The Chicago Tribune. How else could a headline or caption say “Bears” and let readers assume it is Chicago’s NFL team?

Quickly, in hopes of leaving the first comment (and perhaps convincing my friend to delete the post before it spread), I typed the Olympian’s name into a search engine. It was all I needed. Here’s the comment I left:

The newspaper is in Chicago. The Olympian is from Alaska. Her husband plays for a team based in Chicago. The editor needs a “hook” (i.e. a connection) between the bronze medal and the readers (residents of Chicago & northern Illinois) or the story doesn’t even run–as it did not in, say, Boston, Baltimore, Philly, etc. The husband is the hook. Hence, the headline.

I might have added that this is why right-wingers laugh at us. The meme is a triumph of political correctness over practicality and natural tendency. If this were a national publication, then, yes, the headline would be sexist and offensive–not to mention that it would get an F in any journalism class for naming “Bears” without “Chicago” in front of it. As is, the meme makes us (liberals) look petty and uninformed.

Done with the lesson in Journalism 101, I swilled down the Costa Rican, shut down the Lenovo, and returned to get my laundry. Before re-entering Village Washtub, I spotted the “Stop” shirt, stood still for a long sigh, looked at the sky, rolled my eyes, exhaled, and said under my breath, “No, don’t do it!”

Even at that, I didn’t know if I’d do it or not or even what it was I would or would not do. Nor will I ever find out. As I entered, the fellow walked toward the door, left to right until directly in front of me, but then turned the other way, giving me full view of his back. His shirt read: “Stop Making Sense.”

Well, how can I argue with a fellow fan of the Talking Heads? How can I object to the title of their legendary 1984 concert film re-released last year when I watched it every night I projected it? Like faulting a newspaper for making a local reference in a headline, it wouldn’t make sense.

Or is not making sense what I am now supposed to start?

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Corey Cogdell-Unrein and her medals for Trap Shooting. Photo courtesy of Athlon Outdoors. https://alaskasportshall.org/inductee/corey-cogdell/

Better Not to Dwell on It

You can’t take your eyes of Coup de Chance no matter how unsettling the story is, and like many Woody Allen films, it is that.

As one of my students said of American Beauty, a 1999 sensation, Coup is “a couple hours of watching people do things you wish they wouldn’t do.”

Actually, it’s just over an hour and a half. What may make it seem longer is that, before it ends, there are at least three moments when you think it will end.

What makes it seem shorter has to be the rapid pace of an energetic cast–not one of them known to American audiences–working with a crisp script, and a sizzling jazz soundtrack well established during opening credits. Many in Screening Room audiences sit through the end credits to hear it full tilt.

If that’s not enough, plot twists still surprise you no matter how much you expect them from Allen.

Yes, it is in French, and I have a theory that Allen wanted a film in subtitles for a very specific reason. Something in it I’ve never seen before, but I can’t say what or even where that is for fear of spoiling the effect.

Coup reminded me most of his 2005 film, Match Point, in part because both are about infidelity, but more because both films illustrate a frequently cited enigmatic quote from “The Mat-Maker” chapter in Moby-Dick:

Chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events.

As Allen himself told an interviewer: “You’re very dependent on chance and luck in life, more than you think.”

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Held over at the Screening Room: Thurs 5/23, 7:00 pm; Fri & Sat 24 & 25, 4:30 pm; and Wed & Thurs 29 & 30, 7:00 pm.

https://www.fred.fm/coup-de-chance-interview-with-director-woody-allen/
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15140278/

With No Effort Whatsoever

Glad to report that I’m finally back to the daily walk that proved so beneficial last fall during the annual athletic event diguised as a Renaissance faire.

Must admit, I have a ton–well, maybe up to 70 pounds, whatever I can get off–of catching up to do after months of, um, inattention, but I’m already packed to leave pretty soon for the gym.

Yes, today is in the 80s, too hot to endure the unshaded road into the Reserve. Another advantage is that those treadmills have dashboards with readings for calories, distance, time, and pace that seem to motivate me more than looking at the license plates of passing cars and adding up the numerals as if they were cribbage hands. There’s also those sidebars that reduce the weight on my otherwise hopelessly abused feet.

On Monday, it was overcast with a most comfortable breeze off the marsh, and so I took my water-bottle to that bench where I like to sit for as long as I walk either way. It’s a 2.25 mile roundtrip, the same as I’m now walking in the gym where it takes about 50 minutes–and where I work up much more of a sweat because I’m not sitting down for 45 minutes in the middle of it.

I’m no speedster in the gym, clocking averages between 2.3 and 2.6, but I’m at my slowest on the road. So slow, that an elderly couple across the road went past me about a Canadian football field (with both its 30-yard endzones) away from the bench ahead of us and scored a touchdown before I reached mid-field–or the 55 yard line as our northern neighbors call it.

Though my fingers were crossed that they’d pass the bench, I watched them cross over and take seats when I was still more than a Canadian endzone away. Oh, how I missed a treadmill’s sidebars!

But I arrived and saw that they were at one end, something that I always do so that other strollers or bicyclists will feel welcome to sit down without asking. Of course, I did ask, as all who have ever joined me on that bench have always done.

In their greetings, I thought I detected a German accent. “Guten tag!” I hailed, and then to their invitation to the bench: “Danke schoene!”

For a moment they gave me blank looks until the woman responded, “That’s German. We’re from Sweden.”

“Oh, sorry,” I said, “Welcome to America!” But then I did it again, adding, “Willkommen!”

Two more blank looks, but they were grinning as he said, “That’s still German.”

We had a nice chat about the similarities of climate, which led me to believe they must be from the south of the Scandanavian Peninsula, and of climate change–a reminder that while languages may not cross borders with much ease, weather patterns cross them with no effort whatsoever.

After they continued their walk, I recalled my two-weeks in Hamburg, Germany, 45 years ago when I learned that everyone in Western Europe is at least bi-lingual, often tri-lingual, and that English is almost always the second language. In Hamburg, I met teenagers who spoke English with far more of a vocabulary than many teenagers back here. With that in mind, I laughed out loud at my absurd and all-too-American idea that anything I thought close would do.

The couple didn’t go much further before turning around. As they approached, I was determined to offer a farewell in unmistakable English. “Enjoy your vacation” came to mind, immediately followed by remembering that Europeans don’t use the word vacation. They call it holiday.

Well, now, which is it that my new friends would prefer to hear from their would-be Yankee host?

“Enjoy the rest of your stay here in America,” I called out.

They smiled and sounded quite pleased. “Enjoy your charming island,” she said to his nodding agreement.

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Swedish, German, American, or anything else, this is your view from the bench on an overcast day.
Photo by Christopher Hartin: https://www.flickr.com/photos/hartin/with/530158221/

Tiptoe through the Tombstones

Put on my “Newburyport Stands with Ukraine” T before going to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription.

Behind the counter a young woman I’d never before seen talked into a phone, looked at me, and put up an index finger as if to say one moment.

Seconds later she put the phone down and, before saying Hello or asking Can I help you? sang quite cheerily, “I like your shirt!”

Not sure if I was more charmed by the idea of someone so young taking an interest in Ukraine or triggered by an opportunity to spread the word.

Another possibility: With blonde hair, a very light complexion, and wide features, she may well have been surprised and pleased to see someone wearing the name of her ancestral home.

I had fished it out of a closet where it was buried under my ever-increasing number of Herman Melville shirts–Call me Ishmael, I Would Prefer Not To, New Bedford Whaling Museum–and shirts for about every brewpub within a 25-mile radius.

I knew that, later on, I would be at an outdoor gathering of a hundred or so Newburyporters for a ceremony on the side of a cemetery near downtown.

Honored were African-Americans enslaved before the practice was abolished in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1783. Once freed, according to archival records, they lived full, productive lives here–only to be buried in unmarked graves.

Newburyport historian Ghlee Woodworth was able to to determine the general location, a slope of the Old Hill Burial Ground facing west, but not specific sites.

Not until she heard of a new laser technology. With it, she and fellow local historian, Geordie Vining, located 18, all of which graves are now marked with headstones saying simply, “Once Known,” with a historical plaque at the top of the slope to explain them.

My shirt may seem disconnected from the event, but the previous night I heard the report that the seven-month delay of US aid to Ukraine caused by House Republicans has caused severe setbacks and the loss of territory to the Russians.

Last fall, Ukraine’s forces were pushing the Russians back to the borders they had crossed. Since then, the fronts have been incoming.

Just weeks after the initial invasion, pro-Ukraine shirts were sold as fund-raisers. As opinionated as I’ve always been, I have avoided shirts or hats as well as bumper-stickers with political messages, but the entirely unprovoked invasion of Ukraine broke all rules.

As one elderly friend puts it, I was overcome by “that 1939 feeling.”

To me, a shirt–or hat, jacket, etc.–with a message is an invitation to conversation or, more often, a nod of the head or a knowing smile. Messages you don’t like or which are of no interest, you can ignore. No imposition, no foul language. Or you can question, and anyone wearing one should be prepared for debate.

After last night’s report, I wanted that shirt to serve at least as a reminder. And, as grave leads onto grave, it seemed right for yesterday’s local commemoration.

Pretty safe bet that most everyone there sides with Ukraine over Russia, that none of them ever fell for the social media fraud fueled and fanned by Fox Numbs that Zelenskyy bought himself two luxury yachts with American money–a claim repeated as fact by Republicans on the floors of both House and Senate. Or that any of them would want any US alliance with Putin as most congressional Republicans, their presidential candidate, and Fox openly crave.

As must all be true of the young woman who expressed approval while dispensing my Terazosin. I responded with a reflexive “Thank you.” After the transaction was complete, I added:

“And so, come the first week of November, you know what we need to do…” I tailed off.

Her face turned into a question mark. Well, a few minutes had elapsed while she located the bag and then while I answered the annoying questions on the technology-for-technology’s sake screen. I grabbed the middle of my shirt and gave a tug. “And tell your friends!” I added.

Question mark turned exclamation point: “Oh, yes!”

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Photo courtesy of Newburyport Preservation Trust via Facebook.

Older I to My Younger Me

There’s a picture I like to send friends whenever our talk veers into the nostalgic fantasy of “What advice would you give your younger self?”

Before the photo, however, two pieces of advice are immediate:

As soon as you hear the word “hurry,” the answer is no.

Putting the second piece aside, the real question here is unavoidable: “What if you had it all to do over again?” Whether “it” refers to a time of life, a day, a decade, or the whole post-puberty show, we’ve all wondered what we might do with the ultimate mulligan, take-back, or do-over.

We’ve all speculated on what-ifs, maybes, and might-have-beens.

While the specifics are all personal, we share the overall themes. What if I took that job, did not quit that other job, attended that school, moved instead of staying put, remained in a distant place rather than returning home?

You’ll no doubt notice that I’ve left out marriage, as well as the dreaded R-word. Problem is which one? If I scrolled through all the close calls, I’d have no time to consider the remote possibilities.

At times it was the remote possibilities that steered me away from the close calls. More often it was my addiction to specualtions of past and future, all while trying to make sense of the present. Often I seem distant even to myself. Writing is a solo performance.

Which may be the point of the question that we ask ourselves and with which we tease each other. Shakespeare, a master of revisionist history (just ask the Ricardians), might call it what stuff as parlor games are made of, while Vonnegut, a frequent pilgrim to both past and future (his 1997 novel is titled Timequake), might recognize it as strange travel plans for a trip already taken.

Sometime between those two, Dickens may have had this in mind when he subjected Scrooge to the three ghosts. Nothing the old man could do about the past, but by showing him the future, the third ghost made the present seem a past in which Scrooge was present, and the old tightwad took the hint. More to our present point, however, when confronted with Fezziwig’s party in his distant past, what does the old Scrooge do but attempt to advise his younger self?

The time-warping game (or trip) is most entertaining when expressed as advice: What would you, you old goat, you geezer, you burned-out Boomer, what would you say to your own bumbling, bonehead teenage self?

This is why I have that picture. Taken when I was between eight and ten nearly two thousand miles south of anywhere I had ever been, it shows an old and wizened Ernest Hemingway chatting up into the inches-away ear of a young, jet-black haired Fidel Castro.

No, I’d never be mistaken for Hemingway now or Castro then, but at a glance, close enough. More than the resemblance are the expressions: Hemingway intense, Castro with a slight smile.

Well, if that isn’t my life in something worth a thousand words. It’s likely that an advisor as serious as I can be now would be laughed at by me then. But I’d rather think Hemingway is cracking a joke, as I always prefer now, and that Castro is simply doing his best to keep a straight face–just as I often did then.

Lately, there’s a commercial for an investment company in which old people sing to their younger selves, “Don’t let your older you hate you!” The youngers cringe as if begging for impossible forgiveness while the olders resume their forced labor to supplement inadequate pensions.

Forty years ago, the late Massachusetts senator and presidential candidate, Paul Tsongas, while battling cancer, insisted on this: “No one ever died saying they wished they spent more time at the office.” Don’t know if such records are kept, but that may have been the most quoted line in 1997. That’s when he died and his 1984 book, Heading Home, was re-issued following his long bout with the disease.

So which is it? Work all you can while you can and turn your sunset years into uninterrupted vacation? Or party all you can when you can and keep working till you drop?

Put me in the latter category. My twenties (the 70s) were years of frequent moves, under-the-table jobs, changing jobs, aborted college degree programs, resumed degree programs, eventual completion of two of them, a stint with VISTA, various fruit harvests, jam sessions, busking, and what I called “improvisational travel.”

Put another way, I may have put more hitchhiking miles on my thumb than I put dollars into Social Security.

Since then, however, I managed enough so that, now, in my seventies (these 20s), my expenses are covered. A day a week projecting films, and another day driving a delivery van are all I need to break even. Both roles suit me: Driving long distance lets you think long thoughts; throwing a few switches before and after a two-hour film is just right for writing those thoughts down.

At the risk of sounding–and being–hopelessly naive, I believe I can live like this well into my eighties (the 30s). Far from hating the younger me, Older I is grateful that Younger I didn’t just spend so little time at the office but avoided offices entirely since my thirties (the 80s).

Admittedly, I still wonder what life would have been like in Salem, Oregon, or Hamburg, Germany. Or on either end of US 1, Fort Kent or Key West. Or grad school in El Paso or Flagstaff or Cairo, Illinois. Or college in Denver or Pittsburgh. But I’m ever-thankful for the choices made, including all the years at Salem State and in both Dakotas.

And I’m thankful for what I dodged, especially a public relations post for Polaroid along the most miserable commute on Boston’s beltway. That one involved upsetting a friend who set it up and his wife, my cousin, who hasn’t spoken to me since. Which brings me to the second piece of advice I’d give my younger self, the one my daughter, upon graduating from Vassar, called the best advice she ever received:

You have to be willing to piss people off.

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Ernest Hemingway and Fidel Castro in Cuba in 1960. Photo taken by Roberto Salas. (Via NBC News.)

A Cloudy Clarification

A local tale for fans of George Orwell, George Carlin, and others anywhere who skewer what might today be called “alternative language”:

When the president of the Newburyport City Council said that investigate is “too strong a word” and offered “look into” as a more accurate term for what one of its committees was newly assigned, Daily News readers started clicking into on-line dictionaries.

As just about everyone I ran into that week asked, “Doesn’t ‘investigate’ mean ‘look into’?”

Dictionaries tell us it means to look into closely, carefully, methodically, thoroughly. Surely, Councillor Ed Cameron did not intend to swear off care and thoroughness, so what was the method to his cloudy clarification?

Perhaps, he took the lead of Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway who coined “alternative facts” and is introducing us to alternative language. Call him Kelly-Ed Cameron.

In the interest of full disclosure, I hasten to tell you that I was among the signatories of the petition requesting said investigation of City Hall’s Human Resources Dept.

Yes, I signed and I continue to write about NPL because, although what happened cannot be undone, the city can retract never-specified charges made against the volunteers.

More importantly, the public should know what happened, who suffered from it, and who is trying to hide or dismiss it.

Many wrongful acts—ranging all the way from domestic to international—can never be undone, but that cannot be a reason to stop investigation of them.

My guess is that Cameron thought only that “investigate” implies the very existence of guilt and hoped to reinforce the committee’s claim to neutrality. Unfortunately for him, “look into” implies an easy going, kid-glove approach to accusations as serious as those of bullying and verbal abuse that were publically broadcast without ever a hint of proof.

Not only that, but his minced words fit a pattern that has been present from the very beginning when Mayor Sean Reardon claimed he was “suspending” the volunteer program.

No. After eleven months and counting, “suspension” is nothing other than a euphemism for “erasing” the volunteers. Even if a new volunteer program begins, the former vols will not be welcome back—certainly not if the defamation of their character remains unproved and left to stand.

The purpose of euphemism, as always, is to cover up or excuse. In Newburyport City Hall, it also serves a more specific role: To minimize.

When speaking of the Archival Center, Reardon and his chief of staff, Andrew Levine, always acknowledge its importance and the need to preserve it. But they always add mention of the “small percentage” of the public who use it–by which they mean, set foot in it.

No mention of neighbors who benefit from one resident digging out a deed or a document showing property lines. No mention of those who attend public presentations of historians who frequent the center, or who read the books and essays written by them. No mention of researchers who call or email the center and had information sent to them.

Certainly no mention of at least 30 books in which the center and archivist Sharon Spieldenner are credited in the acknowledgements.

A talent for minimizing may well be why newly appointed NPL director, Kevin Bourque was chosen for the job. His summary of a recent library survey reported just 37 comments regarding the Archival Center.

By ignoring no less that 57 other comments supporting the volunteers, all while mouthing the “importance” of the archival center, Bourque may well have out-Reardoned Reardon.

Recognize all this for the lip service that it is, and Cameron’s “look into” can be called eye service.

Other linguistic stunts go unnoticed by anyone unable to pay full attention. For instance, City Hall keeps saying that the former archivist was “approved for administrative leave,” implying she was the cause of controversy. Specifically, it was Family Medical Leave.

They say she “retired,” implying that it was her decision and she, age 60, felt it was time. No, it was forced resignation, as any honest person who has paid any attention will tell you.

At every step, in every sentence, with every casual glance, the intent is to minimize and eventually dismiss. Whether he thought of it or not, this is the context for Kelly-Ed Cameron’s replacement of “investigate” with “look into.”

Question remains: Will Cameron and the City Council keep following Reardon’s deceptive script.

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Note: This is a slightly longer version of a column that ran in the Newburyport Daily News on May 15 under the headline, “Paying eye service.”

https://www.juvecreative.com/success-stories/the-art-detective/

Hoping to Drop and Hop

When I attended a meeting of Newbury Democrats for the first time in my 41 years as a resident of the town, I thought of it as a minor item to check off my bucket list.

All these years I have endorsed Democratic candidates, especially progressives over moderates in primaries, always from the arm chair or beach chair from where I write, never in the nuts and bolts of canvassing, knocking on doors, or even licking envelopes.

Hey, writing takes time, and even that has to be carved out of the time it takes to make a living. And I can claim to pay some dues by writing for a paper that, though it may be published in foregone-conclusion Massachusetts, circulates in the fairly well-populated southeast corner of up-for-grabs New Hampshire.

But I’m slowing down as I age, and so much free time has me looking for less-physical things to do. Must admit that when I saw that the Newbury Dems were looking for delegates to a convention, I thought the reference was to the national event in Chicago. For me, that would spell major bucket list.

Took me no more than a minute in that first meeting to realize that they needed bodies they could send to the state convention, June 1, in Worcester, about 80 miles away. For much of the meeting, we listened to speeches from those who were vying for selection to represent us in Chicago. All were people who had paid real Democratic Party dues, even the 17-year-old senior from Ipswich High who emphasized that he would give Biden and Harris “a message from youth.”

Then came our own selection for Worcester. I was content to let the party veterans have every slot, but there weren’t enough volunteers. Volunteer? Before I knew it, I was voluntold, and how could I say no?

A few weeks later, I arrived at Peabody High School where delegates from all the congressional district’s gathered to vote for six people–three male, three female per state party rule–to join the Massachusetts delegation in the Windy City come July. Just four men, including the Ipswich High senior, gave their five-minute pitch before a vote. Five women then did the same, and then two women for one alternate designation.

I found it honestly painful to leave any of them out, although I just as honestly wouldn’t mind a last-minute cancellation that would force one of them to find some retired geezer who could drop what little I have to drop and hop on a flight to O’Hare. Or would I jump in my Nissan and use the assignment as an excuse to drink beer and reminisce for a few days coming and going with my cousins in Akron?

But there was one woman, Diann Slavit, whom I wanted to send west more than any others. In her earlier emails and in her handout in Peabody, she didn’t simply mention, she emphasized immigration:

As a full-time immigration attorney, I work daily with immigrants from all over the world… I have seen the devastation in the immigration process that former President Trump left behind.

In Peabody, we heard her talk of guiding immigrants through the naturalization process, of working for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Act, better known as DACA, and of putting undocumented students on paths to citizenship.

When I arrived home, I wasted no time finding a link to my Daily News column written just before the 2022 mid-term elections. All Republican candidates were demonizing immigrants in the most contrived ways. Fox News (sic and sick) was running videos of chaos and mayhem–some of them from other countries–on loops, deliberately creating the impression that America was under constant attack the entire length of the Rio Grande. Words such as “invasion” and “crisis” and “caravan” implied that the effort was organized, and that American forces were engaged in armed combat–and were vastly outnumbered.

The fraud was so immersive that, over a year later, a Republican US Senator from Alabama could deliver a response to the State of the Union Address on a national telecast carried by all networks and several cable stations and blame Joe Biden for crimes committed in Mexico, 600 miles south of the border, when George W. Bush was president.

Back in November, 2022, I happened to be reading a book Herman Melville wrote in 1849, a few years before Moby-Dick. Rather than a whaling ship, Redburn is set on a merchant vessel which delivers cargo from New York to Liverpool. The return trip is a boatload of immigrants whom Melville treats at length in details so real and descriptions so humane that it would be ridiculed by the MAGA movement as “whining” and dismissed as “woke.” In the column, I quoted one lengthy passage that is as close as the English language has ever come to the Eight Beatitudes.

When I forwarded it to Slavit, I noted that, although there was no question whom the convention would nominate, there was a platform to be written, and that immigration should have a more prominent plank than other Democrats may favor–one that is pro-active like her own stand on the issue. Perhaps, I offered, Melville’s assessment might help in the formation, even in the wording.

Next day, my in-box offered this:

Thanks so much for your support! I take the plight of immigrants very seriously and have dedicated my life to it! Thank you for sending the piece you wrote. I will share it with the rest of the Massachusetts National Delegates! Diann

I may not be ticketed for Chicago this summer, but I’ll have my say. Something always at the top of all my lists.

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What Melville saw in Liverpool:

By James Frederick Smyth for the *Illustrated London News* in 1850, one year after the publication of Melville’s *Redburn.* Caption reads: “The Embarkation, Waterloo Docks, Liverpool.”

“Quarter Deck on an Immigrant Ship – The Roll Call.” Also by Smyth for the *Illustrated London News* (*ILN*), 1850, as are all of the sketches shown here. Worth noting that illustrations first appeared in periodicals in 1832. First published in 1842, the ILN was a huge, immediate success with wood-engraved drawings, a technique still considered new and experimental in 1850.

“Dancing Between Decks.” Melville’s *Redburn* includes an account of an Italian concertina player named Carlo among the mostly German immigrants who made their way to Liverpool. He sang laments and they shed tears for homelands and families they thought they’d ever again see. But he also played dance tunes, and they laughed and kept time.

“The Departure.” Melville’s estimate of 300 immigrants on *The Highlander*–modeled on a merchant ship named The St. Lawrence on which he sailed in 1839–seems quite plausible.

A slightly longer blog version of the Daily News column I sent Diann Slavit who forwarded it to the rest of the Massachusetts delegation to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago:

A Thanksgiving Toast