A Tale of Two Galleries

Here on Plum Island, we look across the marsh to the mainland, a flat sea-level view of about two miles west as the crow flies or as a car drives along our single straight-line causeway.

No buildings interrupt that view except for those few along the road on the mainland side of the modest bridge: A semi-circle of about a dozen houses on a side-street called Plumbush Downs, a few more between there and Bob’s Lobster, a couple more set behind Bob’s, and a dilapidated boat house well past it, all of them along the outbound lane, a few of them set high upon stilts.

Along the inbound lane, a modest chip shot away from the road, is a single, two-story pink house. Turning 99 this year, it looks its age for having been abandoned about half that time. Thanks to its location, location, location and to its venerable visage, The Pink House has long been a mecca for painters and photographers, rivaling a fishing shack on a dock in nearby Rockport for the title of coastal New England’s “Motif #1.”

And now the National Fish and Wildlife Service, which has jurisdiction of the land where the Pink House sits, for some reason feels obliged to tear it down. Full disclosure here: Though not a full-blown member, I’m sympathetic to the group fighting to keep the house where it is. A “Save the Pink House” decal is on the back of my Nissan, and in 2017-18 when demolition was first broached, I wrote three Daily News columns questioning, attacking, and–okay I confess–ridiculing the plans.

A most imaginative reader, Andrew Griffith of a group called “Plum Island Outdoors,” turned one of those columns, “House of the Rising Sea,” into a song set to the tune of “House of the Rising Sun.” According to the chorus:

There is a house on Great Salt Marsh

They call the House of Pink

Alone along Plum Island’s road

Its legend is distinct
https://plumislandoutdoors.org/outdoor-history-plum-island/the-pink-house/ *

To cut to the chase: Though it may contain asbestos and be irreparable, and though it may never be of use, what harm does it do just sitting there for portraits, posing for pictures, and providing a chimney that is a favored resting place for owls, hawks, falcons, and occasional eagles?

Moreover, the Pink House is an attraction listed by the Essex National Heritage Coastal Scenic Byway, a 90-mile drive connecting communities from Lynn to Salisbury with “sights of interest, culture, heritage and value” according to the brochure which adds:

The Pink House has been on this list for years and only further cements it’s meaning as a notable landmark, deeply woven into the fabric of what makes New England special.

I’m heartened that there are so many local folks in the movement we call “Save the Pink House.” But, last I heard, we are running out of time. As I understand it, the need is to find someone who can exchange a piece of unused land the same size–not much more than the Pink House’s footprint–that abuts NFWS land anywhere in the United States.

Just this week, barely 30 miles west of us, the Mass Audubon Society purchased the legendary and revered Pawtucket Farm in Lowell to preserve it as a natural setting. That move had the added intent of preventing development.

Preserving the Pink House has no such intent. Nothing will be built there other than possible renovation or re-purposing that would barely extend the footprint. None of which would be funded by tax dollars. Nor is there anything near it that its existence might depreciate, no neighbors its peeling Pepto-Bismol paint might annoy.

And if NFWS claims that a natural setting will be regained, I can tell them that after forty years of looking out my window, I have never seen a lack of room for migrating geese and duck–and I’ve seen thousands at a time. Double or triple their numbers by factors of ten or twenty, and there will still be ample room on this, the second largest saltmarsh on America’s east coast.

NFWS has claimed that the house is expensive to maintain. But if it’s abandoned, what’s to maintain? Makes one wonder if there’s an ulterior motive. Do they not want painters and photographers along the causeway?

Do they not want art?

Covid put everything, including NFWS plans, on hold. While I was on hold, I started writing memoirs, including one called “Painted on Downtown Walls” about murals found in cities west of the Mississippi that…

… often included a scene of musicians jamming in a park, at a block party, or on an outdoor stage. What made me take note was the ethnic make-up: The guitarists and fiddlers might be anyone, but–apart from Native Americans in groups of their own–the drummers were always Black and Hispanic while the wind players were always Asian and White.

And so I described my own vagabond experience as a white flautist who often busked Larimer Square in Denver with an African-American drummer. For a blog, I went looking for a similar image and found this:

Mural: Lafayette Building: Flautist and Drummers--Detroit Mi

Hoping to credit it, I spent hours running into dead-ends on several websites. I found only that it was a mural, or part of a mural, on the side of the triangular Lafayette Building in downtown Detroit. Note the past tense. Although more than one writer described the Lafayette as “historic,” preservationists unsuccessfully tried to place the 1923 structure on the National Register of Historic Places. As is true–to date–of those of us trying to save Plum Island’s Pink House, they failed to find a purchaser.

When the wrecking ball hit in 2009, not only was that mural lost, so, too, were others. Or was it one large mural, mostly of musicians with a few Detroit Lions scenes back in the glory years of Barry Sanders, that filled a wall outside the first of the building’s 13 stories?

Never in my life have I been in Detroit, but three years ago when I learned of the lost murals–when, looking for but one, I found one after another that appealed to me–I went on a mission to find the name and whatever I could learn of the artist.

How many inquiring emails did I write? Well, I admit, just one, but with versions that went to the Detroit Public Library, the Detroit Historical Commission, the Detroit Free Press, a weekly newspaper, two radio stations, three colleges, and a Detroit writer named Alvin Hill who had just published Driving the Green Book, which begins in Detroit, and which I reviewed. I asked my son-in-law’s parents, both Detroiters, and a classmate of mine back at South Dakota State, a native of Flint with academic ties throughout Michigan.

What I got were mostly referrals to places I already tried, and just two emails telling me that they had nothing on hand but would keep looking. Nothing since.

Last week, I spotted a fellow wearing a Detroit Kronk jersey at the Moby-Dick Marathon Reading in New Bedford. He took genuine interest, but emailed me three days later that he came up empty. ”Kronk,” by the way, is the name of a legendary boxing gym that opened in 1921, proving that we Melvillians, like Ishmael himself, “try all things [and] achieve what [we] can.”

But I can take consolation that last week’s shot in the dark reawakened me. While I failed to find the artist’s name, I still have the pictures, the murals (or maybe The Mural), and can offer an anonymous gallery. Like images of the Pink House, we can still appreciate art occasioned by the Lafayette Building.

Difference is that the Pink House may yet occasion so much more.

-30-

Lafayette Building Gallery:

Mural: Harpist, Lafayette Building--Detroit MI

Metropolitan Building: Mural, Barry Sanders--Detroit MI — Detroit Lion running back from 1989 to 1998, Barry Sanders, #20

Mural: Lafayette Building, Man In Pink Jacket--Detroit MI

Mural: Violinist, Lafayette Building--Detroit MI

Mural: Lafayette Building, Two Musicians--Detroit MI

Metropolitan Building: Mural, Lions and Packers Game--Detroit MI — The artist was far more into music than football. The Lions in their blue jerseys appear to be playing against opponents in both red and white jerseys. Maybe this is a composite? Number 50 is most likely Paul Naumoff, a pro-bowl linebacker who played for the Lions, 1967-1978. No idea who 20 is or what team’s jersey that is.

Mural: A Band In The Park, Lafayette Building--Detroit MI

Metropolitan Building, Mural: Lions Sack Packers Quarterback--Detroit MI — Okay, so here’s Barry running the ball, but in front of him is a Green Bay Packer who also has a ball and appears to be about to throw a pass. That’s because Packer #15 is Hall of Fame quarterback Bart Starr who retired in 1971, twenty years before Sanders joined the NFL. So, definitely a composite. About to tackle Starr is linebacker (and placekicker) Wayne Walker, a six-time pro-bowler whose 11-year career was concurrent with Starr. So the artist did have have some sports-smarts. Who number 34 is or what team he plays for is anyone’s guess.

Mural: Saxophonist, Lafayette Building--Detroit MI

* Pink House Gallery:

*For many more photos and more lyrics to what may be the only song ever adapted from a newspaper column, “House of the Rising Sea,” go to:

https://plumislandoutdoors.org/outdoor-history-plum-island/the-pink-house/

(Andy, if Adaptation of a Newspaper Column were a category, a Grammy would be yours.)

Fierce Urgency of Now

Ever notice that our most cherished documents begin with elements of time?

In the beginning …

When in the course of human events …

These are times that try men’s souls …

Fourscore and seven years ago …

One of literature’s two most quoted opening lines, “Call me Ishmael,” casts the narrator of Moby-Dick as an orphan out of Genesis musing over “a dark, drizzly November of my soul.”

The other unites even as it divides A Tale of Two Cities into “the best of times” and “the worst of times.”

Children’s stories begin with “Once upon a time,” prayers with “Now I lay me down … “

Every Saturday evening, “The News from Lake Wobegon,” that “little town that time forgot” on America’s prairie, always begins with “a quiet week.”

Time cannot forget Aug. 28, 1963, in America’s then-vibrant, now-static capital when — after citing “history” twice to thank those standing with him — Martin Luther King opened his “Dream Today” at the Lincoln Memorial with an echo, “Five score years ago.”

Earlier that year, James Baldwin invoked Noah’s Ark with a scorching look at race relations in America titled The Fire Next Time — a warning echoed with “fierce urgency” in King’s Dream.

Five years later King had seen the mountaintop, and Baldwin fled to Paris, leaving the Chambers Brothers to belt out “Time Has Come Today” with relentless tempo on, of all things, The Ed Sullivan Show.

In retrospect, the “British Invasion” was really the British Diversion: The Rolling Stones wavered between “Time is on my side” and “What a drag it is getting old,” and The Beatles’ “When I’m 64” was oblivious to The Who’s “Hope I die before I get old”–all while The Kinks grew “Tired of Waiting” for Jethro Tull’s “New Day Yesterday, Old Day Now.”

For American diversion, our parents turned their longing ears to Frank Sinatra for “A Very Good Year,” but Old Blue Eyes just up and flailed away: “Riding high in April, shot down in May.”

Trying to bridge a generation gap, the already-venerable and forever-young Pete Seeger sang from Ecclesiastes: “To everything, turn, turn, turn, there is a season … “

But the gap widened when the generation that marched to “The Times They Are A’Changin’” spawned one that partied to the tune of “Let’s Do the Time Warp Again.”

For a time warp yet again, recent tributes to King’s South African counterpart, Nelson Mandela, leave an impression that America was always united in the cause to end apartheid.

Much the way a January holiday has purged the national memory of when King was the most hated man in America — in Boston and Chicago as much as Birmingham and Selma.

History? Giving “free” enterprise priority over human rights, President Reagan vetoed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act in 1986 before the Senate overrode him 78-21.

In the House, young Wyoming Rep. Dick Cheney condemned the Mandela-led African National Congress as “terrorists.” For the sake of his vice presidential run 14 years later, Cheney could only rationalize: “The ANC was then viewed as a terrorist organization.”

Problem with the word “then” is that it betrays the word “now.”

Cheney’s neo-con Republicans won presidential elections in 2000 and 2004, and continue to obstruct popular mandates of 2008 and 2012.

Combined with Supreme Court decisions favoring corporate over civic interests, and, this summer, striking down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, the result is an American Apartheid based on wealth — to which race is no mere coincidence.

Takes me back 50 years to the day when this Little Leaguer wondered why a man who looked like Hank Aaron talking about a dream was such a big deal — and four years later when a man who looked like Willie Mays made it all too clear.

Usually we hold a book, but Baldwin’s fists rose from The Fire Next Time, grabbing my collars and shaking me to near whiplash:

“Wake up, white boy!”

In an America not yet reduced to 140 characters or less, King and Baldwin could wake up anyone willing to pay attention.

Attention is measured not in money, but in time — time to be paid in what King called “the fierce urgency of now.”

Only by default of time does our Stand Your Ground now betray our I Have a Dream then.

But as Pete still swears, “it’s not too late.”

-30-

Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. addresses the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., where he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech on Aug. 28, 1963, as part of the March on Washington. AFP via Getty Images

Don’t Pardon the Interruption

Many American sports fans will tell you that this weekend and next have been the best two on the calendar ever since the NFL initiated playoffs.

Before you object, what about the Superbowl? the World Series? March Madness? Olympics?, note that I have specified weekends. The Superbowl is a day. The World Series spread over a week or two. March Madness runs from Thursdays to Sundays. And the Olympics are but every four years.

Also, I define sports fans as those of us who enjoy a good match even when our home team is not involved. So it is for me when the New England Patriots do not play in any of the NFL’s six games with it’s best teams this weekend and four more next.

This year, however, the average fan–which is to say, the average television viewer–was excluded from the prime-time Saturday night game because it was streamed “exclusively” on Peacock. No matter that we already pay for access on cable, the NFL and NBC, the network that runs Peacock, pounced on an opportunity to milk yet more money out of us.

Must admit that there is no little comic relief in hearing many of the same people who condemn any regulation of private enterprise as “socialism,” gripe about the NFL/NBC scam. But no point in holding our breath waiting for them to support a motion that the House of Representatives intercede. Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY) is challenging the NFL’s controversial anti-trust exemption that “allows the league’s teams to sell their TV rights collectively, based on the decision to stream a playoff game.”*

Good luck to him, but there’s something here that deserves just as much attention: The hype they gave it. It began weeks before the game when they didn’t even know which teams would be in the game or that Taylor Swift would be shown with Tiffany Mahomes in a luxury box every time the latter’s husband threw a pass to the former’s boyfriend. Indeed, a week ago when the match-up was set, promos for the Peacock game included peaks at Swift between Kansas Chiefs’ touchdowns and Miami Dolphins’ interceptions against hapless teams during the season.

All of it with the booming encouragement of the network’s viewers to “make history!”

History? Yes. In an attempt to mask their own price-gouging, NBC pitched the Peacock game as an “historic event.” In a strict literal sense, they are right. As right as any of us would be if we stripped naked, painted ourselves blue, and went out on a public street on our hands and knees barking at telephone poles–and insisted when taken into custody that it was historic just because it never happened before.

To listen to the tough-guy voice over–the same as used for many sporting events and ads for pick-up trucks–you’d think NBC and the NFL deserve our gratitude for treating us like dairy cows. As ludicrous as it seems, many suckers ponied up the money. Whether they were gullible enough to believe that they were “part of history” may be doubtful, and only time will tell if the scam fooled enough “new subscribers” for them and for others to try it again.

Reminds me of Lyndon Johnson’s complaint while pushing for the Civil Rights Act of 1964:

If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket.

If the NFL/NBC scam is successful, that line will be updated:

If you can convince anyone that they are part of history, they won’t notice you’re picking everyone’s pocket.

In a phrase, “Make America Great Again.”

–30-

*https://www.nbcsports.com/nfl/profootballtalk/rumor-mill/news/nfl-wont-overdo-it-with-streaming-its-antitrust-exemption-relies-on-that?

https://www.the-sun.com/sport/10087982/peacock-streaming-issues-playoff-game-kansas-miami-chiefs-dolphins/

‘

View from a Natural Dam

PLUM ISLAND 12:30 pm: I’m near the gate to the Reserve, lived here since 1982. This is the highest tide I’ve ever seen out my window. According to my tidal chart, this is the peak. The water is now over the yellow lines on Sunset Blvd.

12:45: The water has crossed the road, the yellow lines are still visible under what looks like two inches. Every winter and spring there are tides that combine with a downpour of rain and the melted snow carried by the Merrimack from New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Add to that the lunar cycle–in this case, a New Moon–and I could be living aside a road along Lake Erie.

1:20: Though the tide is going out, what returns from the maniland is blocked by this glorified sandbar. Hence, though the chart says it’s receding, the view out my window is of a rising level behind what is, in effect, a dam. The water now completely covers the road, the yellow stripes barely visible under about half a foot of rippling water now halfway up the fire hydrant. I am no longer aside Lake Erie. I am on it.

1:30: Automated phone call from Town of Newbury tells me that the Causeway, the lone road that links us to the mainland, is closed. I laugh. They must have been forced to close it two hours earlier.

2:15: Neighbors start sending me pics and videos. House next door is a couple feet higher than my Shoebox, and has a second floor with a deck from which was snapped:

2:15 (Continued): This faces northwest toward Newburyport while, as you see, my front windows look southwest, and judging by the surging water over the road, I’d say it was taken right at the peak. Also at peak, a video taken at the island’s center where the causeway reaches us. It begins facing the ocean and ends facing the causeway and marsh:

3:30: A friend sends a recording of a track of a song recorded 50 years ago that sounds oddly folkish:

4:00: Storm ends, and the sun shines brightly, as if someone up there is having a good laugh. Well, so am I, though it’s rather tiring after all these years to have to keep reminding family and friends that I live atop a hill, that it would take a tsunami to nail my Shoebox, that the Beatles once wrote a song about me.

4:15: One protests, “You’re no fool!”

4:20: Time to lighten (if not light) up, I respond: But what if “fool” is a verb?

-30-

Jackson Way from the end of my driveway facing the ocean.

Facing southwest: Where Jackson Way meets Sunset Boulevard, viewed from the front of my and the photgrapher’s homes.
Both photos by Angela Anderson.

Truth Ahead of Time

First weekend after New Year’s is as close as I come to a religious observance these past five years, which makes Recuperation Monday most unusual.

For starters, I finished breakfast and began writing about it at 3:00 in the afternoon.

This year, because the day after the Moby-Dick Marathon Reading fell on the 8th, I was acutely aware of Cousin John who passed away just four weeks short of what would have been his 73rd birthday. Also my mother’s 99th, the combination of which made for memorable family gatherings years ago.

My mother might have stayed up for the livestream of my reading at 1:30 am Sunday, despite tuning in early for my scheduled time at 1:00. My cousin would have laughed at the thought; in fact, in 2020 and each year since, he did exactly that. But he would once again press me to answer a question he found irresistable when I told him of it.

John had quite a taste for the unusual, the eccentric, the bold. Pretty sure his favorite song was Warren Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns, and Money,” which tells us something. When I told him that Ishmael fits the decription of Zevon’s “Excitable Boy,” he demanded details. So when I returned from a pilgrimage to Herman Melville’s grave in the Bronx a few years ago, I was eager to tell him of the blank scroll on the tombstone. He immediately asked why?

“It’s a debate that has never been resolved.”

“Debate?”

“Some think it was Melville throwing up a white flag to a hard, cruel world. Others think it was his middle finger.”

Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, NYC. Photo by Michael Boer.

His reaction left no question as to which side he preferred.

Yes, I made it back from the New Bedford Whaling Museum, 100 miles away, before what little daylight we had gave way to night. The bulk of the storm stayed west of Boston’s Beltway well away from the coast, so I was able to navigate my compact Pequod north through Boston at a steady 35-40 MPH on well-plowed and sanded roads.

Bigger challenge was that I had gone 28 hours without sleep before leaving New Bedford relying on the rush of conversations about Melville, the sound of Moby-Dick as interpreted by all kinds of readers, and a full tank of caffeine.

New Bedford was hit only with rain, and so I drove 15 miles north before reaching the storm, and pulled into a highway plaza. Forecast was that it would clear by late afternoon, and so the longer I took, the better off I’d be.

Wanting nothing up north to concern me while in my church, so to speak, I stayed incommunicado while in NB, and so set up in the plaza with yet more coffee and my laptop to see what awaited me. Not much, but quite reassuring: A Plum Island friend posted photos of her street labeled, “Where’s the snow?” My landord assured me the driveway–a rather steep, if short, uphill–would be salted, and if I hadn’t “stocked up” on food, knock on their door.

Outside the plaza, the snow appeared to be tapering off, so I was back on 24 in less than half an hour. If I started feeling groggy, I knew that right on my path was caffeine in Braintree and Saugus, pit stops on my previous returns. Since both are Starbuck’s, I consider them part of my religious observance. Benediction on my way off Herman Melville’s dock.

Feeling fine, I passed Braintree and went smoothly through Boston and maybe another 15 miles up US 1. Never saw so few cars on that stretch. But I was I getting groggy, and in Saugus I was running into an actual storm. Bad luck, but nice timing. I holed up with coffee figuring I had about four hours to arrive home before dark.

My friend on Plum Island had made another post, likely about when I left the plaza. Photos were quite different, accompanied by her admission: ”I spoke too soon.” I sat by a window where, before long, I was watching a full-blown, howling blizzard that quickly covered my Pequod’s windshield and hood.

To take my mind off the storm, I returned to New Bedford by writing a few random prayers.

First was of gratitude for the Portuguese “Mini-Marathon.” Popped in thinking I’d just absorb the sound for a couple minutes. Half an hour later, I was still mesmerized, amazed to find that it sounds more like Polish & Russian than Spanish & Italian. A lot of CH and K sounds and deep, prolonged U‘s and O‘s. Didn’t understand a word, but figured out that baleia branca is “white whale.”

Left only because my stomach was screaming for something. One block away I sat down at Freestone’s where the clam chowder was memorable last year. Easily fell into conversation with Dick-Heads from Concord, trading reasons why Melville has proved so prophetic of America today.

Another prayer for the foremost draw of this event. No matter who they are or where from, conversation with anyone is already started. No one minds if you overhear a conversation and call in a comment from a distance, or if you join them. Quite unlike the tendency of the “real world,” as you may call it by contrast, those of us who congregate every January in the year 1851 are not content being told what we already think, and hearing from those we already know. Call us all Ishmael who will “try all things [and] achieve what [we] can.”

Like water running downhill, conversations veer into various paths, and another prayer of gratitude goes to the fellow with the Detroit t-shirt who took my card, thinking he could find what I needed: The name of an artist whose colorful murals of street-musicians were lost in the rubble of a building’s demolition in 2007.

There’s a lesson in that. I myself was wearing a hat that says “Newburyport Melville Society” when a couple stopped me for advice. They have reason to believe they own Melville’s bed–his deathbed–from NYC where he lived his last two decades and asked how they might track that down. Hoping that their bed lives up to their expectations better than I, I suggested the Berkshire Historical Society in Western Mass as their best bet to learn what became of his furniture. When I mentioned that his farm, Arrowhead, is nearby, they liked the idea of a weekend trip, and thanked me for it.

Another couple asked what connection Melville had to Newburyport. ”None that I know of. But he was on a lecture circuit, and I know he spoke in Lawrence.” They lit up. Unaware that Melville toured, they told me they’d look into the possibility in Springfield and nearby.

One fellow didn’t need my hat to recognize me. He subscribes to the Newburyport Daily News which runs a thumbnail photo with my column, one of which, he said, “inspired” him to join the reading. (“A toast for all holidays,” Dec. 14, 2022.)* Made it a point to be in the audience when his turn came, and I could tell he was a Melville fan long before that column. Like most of the 230 or so readers, he brought the text to life. No matter that he read the categorization of whales, his voice caught the smart-assed mix of whimsy and reverence, humor and indignation we call Ishmael.

Button-pressing, envelope-pushing, cage-rattling, drum-beating, boat-rocking, wave-making, assumption-challenging, conventional-wisdom-questioning, anything-to-wake-anyone-up Ishmael, as I like to say. Each year I pick a time so late because I try to get “The Dart,” a chapter written as an op-ed column decades before the term was coined. Got it last year, but too late–in the other sense of the word–this year. Still, here’s another prayer of thanks for “The Whale as a Dish” and “The Shark Massacre,” the first of which, like others I heard, I now hear as op-ed.

Yet, another prayer of thanks for having arrived at the Whaling Museum just as people were crossing the street and filling the Bethel Church, the historic setting of a few of the book’s early chapters–the only ones delivered by two readers, one as narrator Ishmael, the other as Father Mapple who climbs into a bow of a ship facing the pews. In the book he climbs a rope ladder that he pulls up behind him to be secure in “his own Little Quebec,” but the modern, perhaps more insurance-friendly props fill the bill.

Fr. Mapple’s sermon, as you might guess, is based on the story of Noah, fraught with God’s admonitions to the fugitive whale-rider:

Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor!

The main news that I did not want from up north was about the column I just filed before leaving with the Newburyport Daily News, a grenade at City Hall. Would the editor balk at something so explosive? Even I felt uneasy hitting “send.” But there’s Mapple, there’s Melville, there’s God thundering from the way-up pulpit: Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal!

Never have I been so reassured.**

What makes the Marathon compelling for Melvillians, no matter how many times we have read the book, are the variety of interpretations gained by hearing the text in different voices. Like seeing your favorite natural scene, on the plains or on the coast, a mountain or a river, at different times of day or in different seasons. No matter how many times you visit, you keep seeing new things.

And you are struck by a fresh view of the present, no matter that Ishmael’s lens is 173 years in the past. Those of us who heard “The Quadrant” at 10:30 am were blessed to have a young fellow who channelled a raging Ahab to a degree that might have dropped the chiseled jaw of Gregory Peck.

Just two hours remained of the 25, but that show-stopper seemed the right time for breakfast across the street at Tia Maria’s. A couple who flew in from Santa Barbara apparently thought the same, and before our Portuguese omelets arrived, our conversation morphed from praise for the entertainment to alarm at the inescapable parallels to today.

Many chapters throughout the book, most notably “The Quadrant” and “The Dubloon” near the end, paint a picture of Ahab hauntingly close to Trump; of Fedallah and his phantom cadre to the MAGA Republicans; and of a gullible and sheepish crew to the US public–no matter how outwardly tough either think themselves.

In an election year when one party appears ready to nominate a man whose candidacy can be summed up in his own single word, retribution, and who himself called his campaign last year a “Revenge Tour,” how can we dismiss a book that, more than anything else, warns against vengeance?

Sorry to land this part of the account in the political mire of 2024, but this is Moby-Dick‘s claim to its place in American history and consciousness: Relevance so incisive you could call it truth ahead of time. For me to omit it from this report would be akin to a southern governor censoring Black History from school curricula. Or to a newspaper editor looking to comfort the already comfortable by ignoring the afflicted.

Doubt that? Then answer this: What would a Bible be if Satan were removed to spare you, or your children, any discomfort?

When I was in grad school, I wrote a paper on a bold premise: If the Bible is, as we often hear, “God talking to man,” Moby-Dick is man’s response.

A few English profs at South Dakota State were fascinated, at least when I laid it out over a table and a few pitchers of Grain Belt at Jim’s Tap in downtown Brookings. But my paper was pure academic speculation with a few quotes leaning my way. Any great work of art will be open to several interpretations, some inevitably contradictory. Moby-Dick has also been interpreted as an atheistic, even nihilistic treatise–a far crow’s nest cry from the accepted categorization of adventure story mixed with an industrial manual.

In Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby-Dick (2019), Richard J. King finds the book to be “proto-Darwinian,” a forerunner of Origin of the Species, published in 1859. He connects it to Rachel Carson’s 1962 classic, Silent Spring in a final chapter titled, “Ishmael: Blue Environmentalist and Climate Refugee.”

Most relevant today is C.L.R. James’ Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1952). James, a Trinidadian immigrant who wrote it while detained for six months on Ellis Island, makes a compelling case that Melville was the first critic of global capitalism, and that Moby-Dick is a forerunner of the totalitarianism genre that appeared nearly a century later with the publication of Brave New World and 1984.

Whether he was responding to God or not hardly matters. As Melville’s friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne worried, “He could neither believe nor be comfortable in his disbelief.” What does matter is that he was and still is speaking to US. America didn’t listen then, and ten years later sank into Civil War. Except for a few hundred Dick Heads who think that New Bedford, Mass. is a great place for a weekend getaway in January, nearly half of America is just as deaf now–while many more are paying no attention.

That would be more than enough cause for a white flag on a tombstone, but I rather favor my cousin’s verdict set to the chorus of “Lawyers, Guns, and Money.” May sound too aggressive for a church, but that’s why this excitable boy is a congregant. And why I call it prayer.

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* The enhanced blog version of the Daily News column:

A Thanksgiving Toast

** The editor pointed out an oversight on my part, for which I am most grateful, and the column appears in print today. Another blog version:

Where No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

The Great White Head of Hair, screenshot by Patricia Peknik, Co-Founder, Newburyport Melville Society.

Where No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Welcome to a city so accommodating that a woman once became mayor simply by telling us that she “listens.”

She wasn’t in office long before taking a position on then-Sen. John Kerry’s staff, and she was dealt a nice hand, especially the seaport’s parks, vistas, recreational and historic sites.

Subsequent mayors moved to enhance the parks, most notably naming Lisë Reid as a coordinator of contracts in 2006—followed by the creation of a Parks Department headed by Reid in 2014.

In 16 years, a small volunteer operation became a major parks system “envied by towns and visitors near and far,” according to her father, Robert Keller who added, “thousands of likes, follows and five-star reviews attest to the amazing work she has done.”

Keller’s letter to the Daily News protested Mayor Sean Reardon’s “re-organizational” move to combine Parks with Public Services, eliminating Reid’s position.

Then-Councillor Bruce Vogel also protested, noting that a public employee cannot be dismissed on the grounds of reorganization without approval by the City Council. He asked:

“Is it efficient to abruptly disassemble a department that was essentially built from scratch by Reid, who… has accumulated a wealth of knowledge and has well-established relationships?”

Keller noted “tens of thousands of dollars each year from the Parks Conservancy that Reid coordinated… [and] grant funding in addition to the almost $11 million she acquired over her tenure.”

A paternal relationship might evoke skepticism, but those numbers don’t lie.

If you followed 2023’s bizarre mini-series, “Librarians Gone Wild,” it’s easy to confuse accounts of Reid with those of the head of the Archival Center.

Flip the names, and Vogel’s mention of “accumulated… wealth of knowledge and… well-established relationships” easily refers to Newburyport historians and those who track down old records, deeds, and contracts.

To avoid the taboo on dismissal due to reorganization, NPL’s latest ham-fisted finesse is called “re-assignment.” All while unsubstantiated charges against eight volunteers, all retirees active in civic life, yet hang in Newburyport’s air.

If ethics were laws, NPL would be wrapped in yellow tape.

Or should I say City Hall? Another victim of Mayor Reardon’s “New for the Sake of New” charade is Joe Morgan, architect and devoted member of the Newburyport Historical Commission.

The timing of Reardon’s decision not to renew an annual appointment suggests an ulterior motive:

After months researching Frog Pond’s history and reviewing the mayor’s plans for it, Morgan honestly and fairly dissected City Hall’s proposed taxpayer-funded project.

This upset Kim Turner, the mayor’s project manager, who wrote Morgan insisting that he take another look. Morgan’s response, CCed to the City Council, methodically critiqued City Hall’s undue rush to create recreational boating on the Frog Pond.

What? Is the river to be paved?

Since all tragedies need comic relief, Turner claims the public craves boating there. A nice photo-op for her boss? Well, he is known downtown as “Mayor Photo-Op.”

Concurring with Morgan, retired Northeastern Professor and Newburyporter, Vladimir Novotny, a specialist in water quality management, abatement, and restoration, wrote to the City Council warning there was no survey “by environmental biologists to determine the impact on aquatic wildlife.”

Morgan concluded there would be no report “on damage that might be inflicted on amphibian populations… Why was such a survey not conducted prior to project design?”

Poor Kermit! Will it be renamed “Dead Frog Pond”? Will Mayor Photo-Op pose with bloated blue toads?

In a yet another act of contempt for public servants in the Port, 2023, Mayor Present played no part, but The Ghost of Mayor Past sure did.

A lawsuit slapped the Zoning Board of Appeals. Filed in Boston. No matter that civic boards of independent resident volunteers exist to save taxpayers the expense of litigation and ensure that all decisions are made locally.

Hell with that! Twomey Funeral Home, represented by a former mayor, went to Massachusetts Land Court. No, nothing illegal in that.

Still, this is a former “public servant” suing volunteers from among the public she once served. In a metamorphosis that might rival the imagination of Franz Kafka, “Lisa Listens” is now “Lisa Litigates.”

And the city now accommodates Sean Smiles. All while public servants—and before long, frogs—are laid to waste.

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Superior Courthouse and Frog Pond on the Bartlet Mall (pronounced “mal” locally), Newburyport, Mass. Photo by Alison Tames, found on Pinterest.

Ringing a Southern Belle

While many express amazement that a presidential candidate could or would not answer the most basic question about the Civil War, I’m more surprised by them than by her.

Apparently, they missed it when Nikki Haley wanted to prove how guilty Joe Biden was of the inevitable inflation following the Covid shutdown. In her haste to paint Biden as The Grinch Who Stole the 4th, and no doubt inspired by lists turned into social media memes, Haley compiled one halfway into his second year as president.

At first I refused to believe it. Another troll’s trap, like so many that have poisoned American politics since the Russians launched troll factories in 2016. But those with more hi-tech savvy than I noted that it was Haley’s account, and they proved it with a screenshot.

Good thing they acted quickly. She took it down within ten minutes of posting, no doubt tipped off by someone close, likely one of her two twenty-something kids. And her staff dutifully took all blame for it, giving the impression without lying outright that Haley had nothing to do with it.

Her introductory declaration, if you can’t decipher it against the black background in the screenshot:

Remember last summer when Biden bragged about a $0.16 savings on your July 4th cookout? Well, this is what you’re spending on this 4th of July.

Putting aside the impossibility of anyone “bragging” about saving 16 cents, or the probability that Haley confused a $ for a %, there’s a saying that lotteries are for people who are very bad at math. But those who play ignore percentages. What do we say of someone who adds them?

If her brains were gunpowder, they wouldn’t blow her head off.

So answers one hard-right website (link below). But that was six years ago in reference to her statements regarding gas attacks in Syria when she was Trump’s Ambassador to the UN. They said as much of all her predecessors as far back as Madeline Albright, including Republican Colin Powell.

When she was South Carolina’s governor, Haley received a $575 pistol as a Christmas gift from her husband. Apparently, nothing combines “I love you” and Christmas like a Beretta PX4 Storm. She also woowed the NRA by posing all smiles with automatic weapons while calling any and all attempts to regulate guns a “lazy approach” when we should be focussing instead on mental health as a way to stop the nation’s epidemic of mass shootings.

Poor Nikki! Her photo-op with one automatic rifle drew a hail of attacks and ridicule from gun owners who value gun etiquette and rules of safety. A tweet from Marine Veteran and U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-New Mexico)–now running to unseat Sen. Kyrsten “Look-at-me!” Sinema (I-Corporado)–was relatively mild:

Poser alert: Why is your finger on the trigger ! 1. Bolt is clear back and there is no Magazine. 2. The linked ammo on the stand you are “shooting” from doesn’t feed into the magazine fed weapon you have. 3. Your stockwell is gonna hurt you when that weapon kickback.

Many asked Gallego’s opening question. Which brings us back to Haley’s failure this week to answer a simple question–or, more to the point, her awkward attempt to dodge it:

She was triggered.

On the video, we can see her pause and turn her back on the audience before turning back around to answer–rather, to dodge. We can see the panic on her face as soon as the question ends, and her confusion is palpable. No, the trap is not the question, but the answer–something that Republican primary voters never want to hear. We see a woman in the trap of knowing the truth but unable to say it. Still, she must say something.

Why is anyone surprised?

She’s a Republican. Regarding racism in American history, the entire party has been steeped in denial since Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi–not far from the site where three civil rights workers were murdered by the KKK–with a States’ Rights speech.

Ever since, Republican denials have been endless, but one is most illustrative: Newt Gingrich, Republican Speaker of the House during the Clinton administration, taught an American History class at a junior college in Georgia. The Christian Science Monitor dispatched a reporter to audit the class who found that, despite hours of lecture about the “War of Northern Agression,” slavery was never mentioned.

What Haley eventually stuttered, Gingrich was able to preach in smooth, confident tones: It was all about states’ rights and federal overreach. In 2012, Gingrich and former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Penn.) ran in presidential primaries with promises to turn back the clock to before 1965. Both deliberately stated the year without mentioning the reference: The Civil Rights Act which they wanted to undo. Four years later, a huckster skilled in media manipulation would turn it into the more innocent sounding “Make America Great Again.”

In an unforgettable response to one of my columns years ago, one angry Newburyport Daily News reader declared, “Lincoln was a traitor. The KKK was the good guys.” I soon learned that both statements appear on numerous right-wing sites, along with many more in the same vein. As a deceptively more user-friendly and forward-looking version, MAGA is often expressed by people who revere Lincoln and abhor the KKK, including African-American Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina who insists that race has nothing to do with life in the USA today.

Republican Creed holds that America is defined by “rugged individualism.” This covers much more than racial issues, and it explains how people such as Haley, Scott, Clarence Thomas, Ben Carson, even Herschel Walker can be right-wing heroes. A gun is loaded, aimed, and fired by an individual; gun regulation is an agreement by a state or city or county population. Private enterprise is based on individual ownership, though a few can team up; public organizations are all-inclusive. And who has yet to hear a Republican call for the end of public libraries on the grounds that bookstores serve the purpose? Nor do they vouch for public education.

Did I say inclusive? Republican Creed does not tolerate the word, or any word that moves us from individual to community. Again, there are examples by the day that go unnoticed, but one nearly ruined Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination in 2010. When Barrack Obama praised her as empathetic, Republican senators howled that she would be soft in decisions regarding where federal funds might go. They demonized the word, and Kagan spent a week explaining to them that the quality had nothing to do with judicial decisions.

Six years later, Republicans would figure out a better way to deny a Supreme Court nominee who might make decisions in the public interest rather than catering to all that is private. Better, because it is based on an objective number (time) rather than on a subjective word.

As soon as anyone says the word “race,” we move away from the individual toward a group, a community. That’s why Republican voters do not want it taught in schools. As a talking point, they’ve demonized an obscure legal term and made it as frightful as “card carrying Communist” was to their parents and grandparents: Critical Race Theory. Haley’s choice that night was not so much if she would answer the question, but if she would commit political suicide.

Perhaps people are surprised because Haley seems the most humane and reasonable of the Republican candidates–and the one with the best chance of taking the nomination away from Donald “Merry-rot-in-Hell-Christmas” Trump. For that reason, their surprise surprises me. By this time, I’d have thought that everyone was onto the Republican Creed.

Maybe adding percentages was just a momentary misstep for Haley. If she learns the lesson, she’ll stick to what has made her Dodger Extrodinaire: Subtracting clarity.

Problem for us is that she’s also the Republican’s best hope to reclaim the White House. Her ads bluntly tell us that Biden is “too old,” a well-documented concern for younger voters. Moreover, if Democrats make the repeal of Roe v. Wade a top issue, Haley has ample experience dodging that one. Just try figuring out her position on reproductive rights based on what she has said since declaring her candidacy.

What makes anyone think she is anything better than anyone else preaching the Republican Creed? The youthful looks? The moderate tone? The voice that reminds us of Dolly Parton? The idea of a first woman president?

Each attraction has its percentages, and together they might just add up.

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https://www.newsncr.com/world/democratic-lawmaker-and-ex-marine-lists-three-mistakes-nikki-haley-is-making-in-her-mandatory-gun-photo/

Nikki Haley: Warmonger Extraordinaire!

My Cousin German

We say that our cousins are our first friends, something that might be more the result of geography than of blood lines.

For my cousin John and I, the close relationship of two sisters–our mothers, daughters of Italian immigrants in Haverhill, Massachusetts–put us together for hours at a time before either of us could remember. Likely began a day or two after I was born when he was just ten weeks old. All I recall from the toddler years is a few whacks followed by the admonitions of our two moms: ”No hitting!” And, “Play nice!”

Didn’t matter that we lived about a dozen miles apart in the Merrimack Valley: me in Lawrence, a densely populated, industrial city in decline; he in Groveland, Haverhill’s idyllic suburb spread out along the river’s east bank. Women had won the right to drive cars, or so it seemed, and the invention of the automatic transmission made it possible for anyone to get behind the wheel just in time for Ellie and Kitty to visit each other. I had no siblings, but John had Johanna, a sister eight years our senior. Not only was a cousin my first friend, but another cousin was my first baby-sitter. And so it was that less and less of our time together was in Lawrence, more and more in Groveland.

In time we grew into sports, playing them outside, and making them up inside: Basketball with a rolled up pair of socks we shot at the tops of door frames; baseball on the floor with Lincoln Logs as bats whacking marbles off the new, glossy, installment-each-week encyclopedia set up as an erratic Fenway outfield wall with an empty cigarette carton for bullpens; and most elaborate of all, Tire Football.

At the top of a steep ramp on one end of a long corridor, we released rubber tires of model cars into an obstacle course of plastic car parts to the other. A running back and three blockers had four downs to knock down the defense and get the runner to the endzone. Or, we might elect to kick a field goal after three. This was done with parts of an erector set as the goal post and a book of matches as the ball. John kicked with his index finger, while I preferred the middle (joke unintended, though extended), something we actually argued over.

We named teams for the newly formed American Football League. We had standings and kept stats. While we rooted for the Boston Patriots–yes, Boston!–we played no favorites in the corridor and did nothing to prevent the Buffalo Bills from winning the championship and Cookie Gilchrist from scoring the most touchdowns. As consolation, Gino Cappelletti kicked the most field goals, likely because he used an index finger.

John’s parents were quite relieved by this game because it replaced the previous use of the ramp and corridor to race those model cars. Paint marks from the cars–red, black, blue, but never green which is bad luck on a race track–were all along the bottom of both walls. That, however, was a minor annoyance compared to our penchant for going to the kitchen stove for repairs. The ramp was steep enough for speeds capable of creating serious cracks in the axles. John figured out early on that, if you softened plastic in a flame, it’ll stick to any plastic you want, and it works especially well if you soften both sides. Of course we did this when we were home alone, but it left a smell, and the thought of two pre-teen boys hovering over a gas burner, perhaps not too careful with the dials, must have been unnerving.

But our moms had bingo to play, our dads had beers to drink, Johanna had friends to entertain, and grandpa had his Polish newspapers to read. Could say we grew up as something between cousins and brothers. Brothins? Cousers? Neither rolls off the tongue too well, and I’ve been spitting them out ever since I thought of them. But I am intrigued by a term commonly used in the 19th Century: cousin german.

The g is lower case because this has nothing to with the European nation, and all to do with the English word, germane, from a Latin root meaning “closely attached.” Likely, it was the formation of Germany as a unified nation in 1848 that caused the English-speaking world to drop the term in favor of “first-cousin.” Cousins at any other distance were called just that, “cousins,” and so the added degrees (2nd, 3rd, etc.) fell into place just in time for FDR to safely marry sixth-cousin Eleanor.

The Eleanor I knew, my mom, had two sisters and five brothers, so John and I had many first-cousins, none of whom we spent a fraction of the time with as with each other. Not with all of them combined. If he could be Polish-Italian and I could be Irish-Italian, then cousin german sounds about right.

Six of our first-cousins were German-Italian with the third sister as their mom living in Ohio. My parents and I were visiting them one summer when a letter from Kitty arrived to let Allie and Babe know that John was recovering quite well and not to worry. Worry about what? All of us were puzzled until my dad guessed that this was a second message that beat the first message to its destination due to the unpredictability of postal service in the Eisenhower years. Zip codes came later. Best we could do, in this case for example, was: Akron 10, Ohio. Why not telephone? Believe me, the cost of long-distance calls was something to avoid back then, even if a member of the family was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance after being struck by a car.

My dad was right. Kitty’s first message arrived the next day and would have scared us back to New England had it arrived on time. Instead, we returned when planned, and when I saw John, say, two weeks later, he showed no sign of any accident. His bicycle, however, looked like a fifth grade science project gone very, very bad.

During these early years, something went very bad with one of his legs. A rare childhood bone disease called Perthie’s. Can’t recall which leg, or exactly when, or for how long he had to wear this god-awful brace that slowed him down no matter how hard he kept running. I’ll guess that it was two years, but even then as a child, he knew to disdain complaint and respond with determination, a quality that made him as competitive as anyone on the court or field.

After the brace came off, it was never mentioned. In Pentucket Regional High School’s Class of 1968, he was the starting point-guard on the Sachems basketball team. He also played third-base and pitched for Groveland’s Babe Ruth team, hurling a no-hitter in Rowley, followed by a two-hitter in Salisbury. And he made a Haverhill all-star team that faced the legendary pitcher, Eddie Feigner. He struck out, but just to have been on the field with Feigner was a matter of pride for him–and envy for me.

He also worked on his brother-in-law’s pit-crew at the Pines Speedway and had a life-long love of auto racing and antique cars. For years, he had a 1947 Chevy Fleetmaster that he drove from the island into the Port on sunny weekends. By the late-70s he moved to Plum Island where he resided most of his adult life. When he heard that his cousin german was giving up his Prodigal Son years in the Dakotas, he rolled out the fatted calf and found me a nearby place to grill it. It appealed to him to have a beat up, old Ford Falcon with a North Dakota plate parked outside his window.

He had a keen taste for the eccentric. That Falcon had its gears stripped in the time it took me to learn a standard. A Dakota friend disconnected the column shift and cut a hole in the floor to replace it with a three-speed stick. One rod wouldn’t fit, so he changed the pattern, transposing 2nd and 3rd. Result was a one-of-a-kind pattern, sopmething of a W instead of the expected H. John occasionally asked to drive it when we went to the mainland, laughing everytime he put the clutch in. One evening this came up in conversation with other friends as we watched a Celtics game, an event for which John often hosted small gatherings. One of his friends asked why I didn’t fix the transmission. Before I could answer, John turned into Mount St. Helens: ”Because it works!!!!”

Never one for politics, he was alternately amused and annoyed by my penchant for it, although he gladly bailed me out of a Boston jail after one of my arrests at an anti-war demonstration. Rather than city streets and public rallies, he spent as much time as he could in White Mountain campgrounds or on Plum Island Beach.

On Plum Island he was known as a skilled and reliable plumber who always showed when needed and never left a job unfinished. Many customers regarded him as a friend, with a few he played golf, and many more islanders enjoyed his generous wit, wry smile, quick laugh, and engaging conversations he often kept going by asking what if…

In recent years, time was always a blur to us as we reminisced of football in our grandmother’s harvested garden in Haverhill or hitting fly balls to each other in the oversized schoolyard across the street from 414 Main. Our assessments of our younger aunts and their friends doing the limbo, a dance-craze of the early Sixties, had to do with their age and our coming of age.

I’ll guess that he and his companion, Lisa, had been together a dozen years before moving off the island into Newburyport. When she passed away some five years later, John landed in Salisbury. Almost next door to a liquor store, no designated driver required.

Despite health issues, he kept working for a few select clients, but otherwise contented himself home alone watching sports and anything to satisfy a nostalgia for the Fifties, including Three Stooges movies, a favorite of both of us back in the day when our re-enactments drew more calls from the next room: No hitting! Play nice! Must admit that John’s final years might echo one of the zaniest sketches: Calling Dr. Beam, Dr. Daniels, Dr. Beam…

Could be wrong, but I figured I was the last person he kept in contact. Couldn’t get him to the Winners Circle or any other pub, no matter how much I bragged of that weekend’s tips at the renfaire to cover the bill. When I told him that, through the magic of social media, I was in touch with his high school friends he hadn’t seen in 40 years, he took interest and relayed his greetings, but declined any reunion. Closest he came was to instruct me: “Ask Bill if he remembers the skating rink play.”

He would come over every few months, outside of winter, to join me on my deck for burgers and Pabst Blue Ribbons. Red Sox opening day was an annual tradition–until this year. Up on this hill overlooking the marsh, he’d remind me of the what-ifs he kept asking long ago. Many about family:

What if our grandparents didn’t board the boat in Naples? What if John (an Ohio cousin four years our senior) made the Baltimore Orioles? What if we took Uncle Mussy and Aunt Ginny up on their invitation to stay in Fort Lauderdale? Were their daughters adopted?

Many more about sports: What if Ted Williams played in Detroit with that porch hanging over right-field? What if Tony C. didn’t get hit by that fastball? What if Ernie Davis had lived?

Some with a taste for science-fiction that are now science-fact: What if cars could drive themselves? What if telephones didn’t need wires?

He glowed when I let him know that one of his barbs back in the Eighties when millionaires started buying all they could of Plum Island was, in fact, the premise of a national movement a century earlier: What if you had to live on property in order to own it?

He made us laugh, but he also made us think.

Early this year he stopped answering his phone, wired or not. After wondering if I had become too much of a nag about reunions here or pizza there, I now wonder if I wasn’t persistent enough. Or, was I just offering a low-dose version of contentment: Calling Dr. Pabst, Dr. Gansett, Dr. Pabst?

Born January 8, 1951, the son of Bennie Hyzuk and Katherine (Butruccio) Hyzuk, John is survived by his sister, Johanna Hyzuk-Deveau of Haverhill, by a niece and two nephews, and by numerous first-cousins. He left no last wishes, but considering that he was an ardent Boston Celtic fan for most of seven decades, a contribution to a charity sponsored by the Celtics would be a safe bet to honor the memory of John Peter Hyzuk.

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Growing Old in the DSA!

One of the great ironies of American life is the frequent use of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” as a jingoistic, my-country-right-or-wrong, love-it-or-leave-it anthem by the MAGA crowd and other right-wing cranks and bigots.

The lyrics? Hush, don’t let on! Let them revel in volume and beat. Perhaps that’s all America is these days.

Consider what happened with Roe v. Wade. Before it was overturned, Republicans everywhere argued that it was a matter of states rights, consistent with their stated principle for a limited federal government. The Supreme Court ruling itself stated as much. Overturning Roe, they claimed, was not any kind of stand against women’s rights, but purely a Constitutional adherence to states’ rights.

That, as we ironically like to note, was then. As soon as the ruling came down, Republican officials everywhere began calling for a federal ban.

If their about-face appeared effortless, it’s because they’ve been doing it since 2010 when they all voted against Obamacare and then, after it passed, went back to their districts to take credit for the benefits that were immediately apparent. They did it again with the infrastructure projects made possible with Biden’s Build Back Better initiative. Why let truth get in the way of a good photo-op?

But that’s just politics, you say? Fine, let’s turn to sports:

While so many of us are in a swoon over a $700 million contract for ten years signed by a baseball player, few of us notice the football player who, for the sake of a contract, has done something equally–perhaps more–revealing of American values today.

Caleb Williams, quarterback for the University of Southern California, has announced that he will not play in his team’s upcoming bowl game. Williams has become one of the top prospects for the National Football League, figuring to be one of the top three picks in the NFL’s draft this coming spring. An injury could lessen his value.

Maybe I’m too old to understand the ways of the modern world, but aren’t American youth still hearing teachers and coaches and clergy and employers and military personnel and all kinds of role models, including parents, preach the gospel of teamwork?

I would have added sports commentators on TV and radio to that list, but their reaction is more ironic than William’s unwitting twist that makes a truthful lie of the adage, “there’s no ‘I’ in team.” They agree with him, praise his good sense, and insist that he’s the best bet for a high picking team in need of a QB. (Hello New England Patriots!) And pay no attention to the irony of a team drafting a player who just ditched his team.

Well, sports is a business, you might say. Okay, let’s turn to the basic values that we all learn as Americans from the earliest age. I’ll bet that you can do this with any common, relevant American expression, but for here and now, let’s try E pluribus unum.

Need I even make a case that nearly half of the present pluribus wants nothing to do with much of the remaining pluribus, and there ain’t no unum about it? Did not one of Trump’s aides propose a rewrite of the words on the base of the Statue of Liberty? All the years we prided ourselves as a nation of immigrants, and now we call them “aliens.” All the documents dating back to colonial times calling us “a city on a hill,” and now we crave to be a garrison behind a wall.

All in the season when so many of us set up Nativity scenes. Migrants fleeing persecution. Put a star over them, send them gifts, sing them songs: Deck the halls with boughs of irony…

A friend now calls us the “Disintegrating States of America,” a name that made me realize that the word “democracy” is lately being dismissed by the right in favor of “constitutional republic.” A coded endorsement of minority rule, including the Electoral College.

A minority on the rampage against minorities. All their blather about not letting New York and California “dictate” to the rest of the country, while perfectly willing to have Pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin do exactly that. All their alarm over “mob rule” (code for urban populations) while rationalizing what we all saw on January 6, 2021 (very fine people).

And the biggest doozies of them all: We are a nation of laws, and No one is above the law.

They might as well be lyrics in Springsteen’s song. Like This is the greatest country on earth, the claim is all that matters. Any substance is ironic at best.

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If the numbers were this high nine years ago, imagine what they are now.

A Crack in Time

Maybe I got the time or date wrong. More likely, I deliberately went unannounced without checking what my friend said two weeks ago as an excuse to do something else if he didn’t show.

There were no games of any note on the screens of the Claddaugh Pub in the heart of downtown that early on a Saturday afternoon, and he was not one of the eight or so men in the cavernous, sports-crazed, Celtic place. And so back in the car and up the hill I went.

Upriver I had come. If you visualize the mouth of the Merrimack on a Massachusetts map as a human mouth seen from the side with the top of Plum Island as the lower lip, I live on the back of a bottom front tooth. That would put Lawrence, 25 miles due west, about where the tonsils are; Lowell being the back of throat where the analogy ends. While the human digestive system turns south from there, a trip up the Merrimack turns north. No way I will ever draw an analogy between the State of New Hampshire and any functioning brain.

First pilgrimage to Tower Hill in at least twenty years. Drove past all the spots, even the barbershop where I always got a crew-cut that was the look before the Beatles changed everything. It’s now some kind of second-hand store. The Gulf “filling station,” as my parents’ generation always called them, where my dad relied on “Goody” for all repairs, and where I first got gas of my own for 28 cents per gallon. The corner where I awaited bundles of the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune to deliver, including the ominous, gusting, overcast two-hour delay on Nov. 22, 1963.

Drove past the neighborhood fish and chips shop on Milton St. that made Friday the most cherished day of the week no matter what we had going on Saturday or Saturday night. Treadwell’s ice-cream place just down the hill. The Jewish Community Center where we played hoops. That’s right! While we Catholic kids were taught that we alone could go to heaven and everyone else was damned to eternal hell, the Jewish kids looked at us and asked, Hey, wanna play basketball?

Both of my homes on Byron Ave. and Royal St. and all along Ames St. where I marched in patrol to St. Augustine’s Elementary School. The school buildings and church and rectory are all still there, now some kind of “community center” across from that row of small businesses, none of them with the same name, though I suppose “Lawrence Mini-Mart” has a lot in common with Hall & Turton’s–minus the soda fountain, minus the out-of-town newspapers–Haverhill, Lowell, Manchester, three from Boston, two from New York, one in French.

Walked the full distance around The Reservoir where I played tennis, went sledding, played football, and played catch with my dad when I was six and seven and pretended I was Ted Williams (to his delight) or Mickey Mantle (to his dismay). Tennis courts were within sight of my grandmother’s house, but they are now a basketball and a volleyball court. Top of the Rez at the Tower is adjacent the cemetery, a short walk from the plot I would visit. The chainlink fences were new, at least to me. Around the Tower it’s ten-feet high with cameras on top. The lower one seperating the Rez from the cemetery meant I had to get back in the car and drive a half-mile around. Yes, there was an opening torn in it wide enough for me, but maybe the fence was another excuse–this time to shorten the walk and have the car with me.

Also striking were the large, elaborate, colorful Victorian and Georgian mansions built back in Lawrence’s heyday as the “Textile Capital of the World.” Somewhere around the turn of the previous century, Lawrence was the world’s most densely populated city, with immigrants from everywhere working impossible hours to make a handful of mill owners filthy rich. The strike in 1912 ranks among the five landmark actions of the American labor movement, giving birth to Bread and Roses. The workers won, but the owners ran the clock on concessions until the Bolshevik Revolution scared the wits out of fear itself. By 1920, save for token improvements, the status quo was back in place. The name of the city’s minor league baseball team said it all: The Lawrence Millionaires.*

You see it, too, in churches that are close to being cathedrals, and in public buildings such as City Hall, neighborhood fire houses, and the library:

One after another I whispered the names of friends and classmates as I rolled past their homes. If there was a single over-arching impression, it was how close all the two-tenement homes seemed to be. My memory leaves ample room for two cars parked side-by-side, as well as a twelve-year-old boy furiously throwing a rubber ball against the four or five cement steps up to the side doors near the rear of 14 Royal. How I loved the line drives when I hit the steps’ corners. Couldn’t run to save my life, but my reflexes were better than any back then. Now I wonder how I didn’t keep smashing my elbows on both sides.

The open lot next to Stacey’s, where we played baseball and football, and where I often kept an eye out for Cheryl who lived just down that street, now has two homes. Ditto the open lot at the end of Byron Ave. My inner Cat Stevens asked, “Where do the children play?” And that’s when I realized that, apart from the Rez where five small Spanish-speaking boys played soccer and barely a dozen adults were walking, I saw no one outside on this relatively mild Saturday afternoon.

And then I drove past a home on my paper route that triggered a memory repressed as soon as it happened.

Let’s call them the Nolans. Danny was my age, playing for an opposing Little League team, when we somehow became friends. His sister Sharon, just a year younger, may have greased that skid, although twelve-year-old boys in Lawrence in the early-60s still pretended that girls were of no interest. Sharon, an irresistible combination of good looks and mischief, was of such increasing interest to me that I paid attention to her especially when her brother would not. Then came the day when she bounced into the kitchen where we were sitting and asked if we wanted to see pictures. I said sure, and I think Danny stayed seated only to explain any family photos that might be incriminating.

“I just found this box in mom and dad’s closet,” she announced as if we were about to view a world premier. Her voice was musical, teasing. I didn’t care at all about the pictures, but would easily show interest with the delight in sitting next to her for as long as it took. A few dozen pics of day trips when they were younger, all in black-and-white, all reminded me of my own family day trips, many to the same places. Sharon and I were laughing so freely that Danny couldn’t resist and started adding his own commentary.

And then I saw something I never saw before. Not in a picture nor in the flesh. Female. Frontal. Nude. All laughter and chat ceased as we beheld Mrs. Nolan, lying on a bed, facing the camera with a smile as wide as her open thighs. Three pre-teens, two her own, remained frozen and silent for what seemed the length of a boring church sermon. Sharon then turned it over as if it was just another shot of Danny at Fenway Park. But the next pic was of Mr. Nolan approaching Mrs. Nolan on the bed. He was ready for what appeared to be about to happen. In retrospect, we may have been lucky that none of us knew enough to realize that this meant there was a third person in the room. Sharon tried again, like the driver of a car with failing brakes, only to reveal what indeed happened.

We saw maybe two more before Sharon grabbed all the pics, closed the box, and ran with it out of the room. Danny said what an adult would have said to me at that moment: “You better go.”

In the days and weeks that followed, Danny avoided me. That wasn’t hard to do since we did play on different teams, and he–and his sister–went to the public school. Plus, the incident happened on a late summer day, so the baseball season was ending and school about to begin. I had hoped to get back together, to at least let him know, that it didn’t mean anything. Of course, that’s easy for me to say. And I have honestly not thought of it for all of sixty years until this weekend.

As for Sharon, I was conflicted. May be that all I’d ever be to her was a reminder of her shame. Or did she know what was in the box, layered with day-trip photos to put me way off guard, hoping for some other kind of reaction? I always thought she looked just like her mother, but I doubt I ever said that to her. If I did, was the photo some kind of proxy? Here I am! Invitation? Would you like to see more? All that is doubtful, but either way, I never saw or heard of her after that. My days as a paperboy had ended; high school beckoned; and virginity, wanted or not, remained mine for another four years.

What a memory to have pound me after all these years on my way to my parents’ resting place. When I arrived I wondered if I should make an act of confession. Bless me, parents, for I did sin that day I was so quiet during supper. No matter that I was simply there, or that it was all sixty years ago. Several minutes passed before I realized I was hearing exactly that: I was simply there–the Nolans’, the cemetery, Byron, Royal, then, now–and wasn’t life good all those years ago?

When I started breathing easier, I realized I was starving. Thwaite’s Market which makes pork pies just like the ones I used to know in the same tins that I made them 55 years ago was a short drive away. As another friend said when I told her of my pilgrimage (but not of the Nolans), this is the right time of year for it.

My dashboard showed the time inching toward three, the time that the Army-Navy football game was set to begin, sure to be on the screens at Claddaugh, and likely what my friend (dating back to first grade in 1956) had in mind.

-30-

*https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/tag/lawrence-millionaires/