Auntie Allie’s Mann

Mann Orchard, Methuen, Mass.

Sitting at any of these tables while sipping morning coffee and planning the day’s itinerary on maps, I can see my mother moving among the rows of produce, the shelves of preserves and syrups, the tables of pies and pastry, the jugs of cider.

This is Methuen (muh-THEW-en), but if you go out the door, turn south, and walk maybe 15 minutes, you’ll be in my native Lawrence. With a few turns just over the town line, you’ll quickly find what I once called home. And if you did it over 25 years ago, my parents would still be there.

That’s how Mann Orchards became a favorite store for “Auntie Allie” as my many cousins called my mother, a name so musical I started using it myself. And that’s why I’ve enjoyed Mann’s apple and blueberry pies all my life. Yes, fruits and vegetables, too. Yawn…

Odd to think today that she and I were never here at the same time.

She passed away 22 years ago, and it was two years later that I joined the Marrakesh Express. Mann’s was already a regular customer, and I delivered here every Thursday for about twelve years in their former location about a Canadian football field away. While loading the van before my first stop here, the name on the manifest gave me a coincidental chuckle. And when I rolled in two stacks of boxes, I was all business until the invoice was signed. But then I looked up, I looked around, and time itself disappeared with the realization:

She didn’t come here just for groceries.

New England has dozens of these farmstands as large as modest supermarkets. What they all have in common is an authenticity that you feel as soon as you enter. They are as welcome a contrast to supermarkets as a country road to an interstate highway. Rather than enclosed in a series of aisles, you look over and across everything. In place of slick and smooth, you sense rustic and local; instead of fluorescent lights pressing down, sunlight pours through windows so that bulbs overhead go unnoticed. There’s nothing about these havens of nature that hurries you, and that suited Auntie Allie as much as it suits her son. I’ll bet she came here even when she didn’t need to. It would explain why there was never any lack of pies or cider on Buswell Street.

Too bad she didn’t live to see this new place with its very high roof propped up by posts and beams as inviting to the eye as the bins of apples below them.

Most farmstands include bakeries, many have butcheries, and a few, including Mann, sell beer and wine. Mann is among the largest, although it may not be half the size of Lyman deep in the heart of Connecticut which has an 18-hole golf course, a driving range, and a putting green across the road. (For my friends nearby, Mann is about the size of Cider Hill, two or three times the size of Tendercrop, though both of those, like Colby and Long Hill, are more densely packed.)

In this newer location, Mann joined the ranks of those with cafes, and for me became the first to double as a breakfast stop. The breakfast may be nothing more than an orange cappachino (or pistachio) muffin with coffee, but it’s as satisfying as mouth-watering, large enough to last through my connections of dots north into New Hampshire–as close as Buswell–or west to Massachusetts’ Pioneer Valley. (That’s the Connecticut River to readers outside New England.)

For me, the location could not be placed to more strategic advantage. Starting in Rowley, barely 20 miles away, I make Mann my first stop in either direction, north or west. Post-pandemic, I am no longer dispatched south, and here on the coast, there is no east. Well, yes, there’s Cape Ann, but we call that local, as most of the Winfreys live on it while, up here on Plum Island, I keep an eye on them.

So breakfast is easy, delicious, and inexpensive. On short days I might stop for lunch, and it’s a nice spot for a rendezvous with what few friends I still have in Lawrence and Methuen. I’ll recommend all Mann’s soups, but I always return to the chicken-cranberry-walnut salad. Filling, but that doesn’t stop Mann from adding a slice of pie–all at a price you’d call cheap in a restaurant.

Pre-pandemic, I was here so often that a young lass named Gina behind the counter would fill a bag and tell me to take it, a reward for keeping their shelves flush with fudge and chocolate. In the bag would be two orange cappachinos. Another woman there one day noticed me looking longingly at a display of take-home corned-beef dinners, a St. Patrick’s Day special. She reached in front of me, opened the door, took one out, handed it to me, and said, “Yours! Enjoy!”

All my thanks could have been as much for the memories as for the muffins and the meal.

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The interior. The cafe is at the back of this photo. The thin, brown boxes on the middle shelf on the left are Winfrey’s buttercrunch, one of many items I deliver.

Something tells me this photo was taken in the month of October very early before they opened. That parking lot is half full by the time I get there for breakfast.

Eleanor Butruccio Garvey (1925-2000), photo circa 1980.

With granddaughter and husband, circa 1980. Photo by an inept photographer, salvaged by Lenovo.

Still a Suspect I Suspect

When the Screening Room booked Ted K, I was tempted to tell the new owners to put my picture on the poster and bill it as my biography.

New to Newburyport, they’d have no way of knowing that, just 12 years ago, a few commenters on the Daily News website insisted that I was the Unabomber, so I spared Ben and Becca any cloud of suspicion concerning their one and only employee.

Frankly, I spared myself any attempt to explain how the question was raised 14 years after Ted Kaczynski was finally tracked down, arrested, convicted, and sent to Colorado’s “SuperMax” penitentiary for eight lifetime counts and no chance of parole. Maybe the anonymous trolls were seven years ahead of the pronouncement of “alternative facts.”

Anyway, I had already exhausted that joke during our run of the Norwegian film titled The Worst Person in the World, so once again I let a disgruntled Harvard grad and Berkeley math professor from Chicago take the blame for a series of pipe-bombs–most mailed, a few hand-delivered–that killed three people and injured another 23 over a 17-year span that eluded the FBI under four US presidents.

Kaczynski would say “take the credit,” and according to the early reviews, that’s foremost in Ted K’s portrayal of him. And it is a feature, not a documentary. To the filmmakers’ credit, the film, while based on the life and writings of Theodore Kaczynski, is as much about how he became part of American culture. As one reviewer put it:

From magazine covers and news programs, everyone knew the police-artist sketch of a figure in sunglasses and a hoodie. For a delirious moment, the “Unabomber” was as large in the national imagination as O.J. Simpson being chased in his Ford Bronco. With a dark intensity and an unnerving intimacy, actor Sharlto Copley partners with director Tony Stone to bring this figure to life in a way that is at once transgressive and thought-provoking.

There is a mistake in that. While it was delirious whenever a package exploded in the offices of airline executives or lobbyists for lumber companies, the Unabomber was in the national consciousness for way more than a moment–or for the months that the OJ Simpson case was litigated. Better comparison would be to DB Cooper who hijacked a commercial Boeing 727, put on a parachute, and jumped out with a couple bags of stolen cash somewhere over an Oregon forest never to be seen again.

Even that doesn’t do as comparison since Cooper was never heard from again. Kaczynski kept striking, and he wasn’t just heard from, he was read.

After his last strike, he made it known that he would stop sending or planting bombs in return for the publication of what he titled “Industrial Society and Its Future” which would become known as “The Unabomber Manifesto.” The New York Times and Washington Post both ran it, all 35,000 words of it.

To call it anti-technology would be like calling cancer an inconvenience. And to compare it to cancer may be an understatement. To compare it to inconvenience would be ironic. He fully believed that all modern conveniences made people weak, not just physically but mentally, and in no way fit for anything called self-governance. Best summary for it would be the titles of the two books that he has written and published while in prison: Technological Slavery and Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How.

That, plus the sheer length of it led my critics to make the comparison to me. No matter that the manifesto was the combined length of any 50 opinion page columns I’ve ever written, anything beyond 50 words is beyond their attention spans.

The manifesto led to Kaczynski’s arrest after it rang bells for his brother David who wasted no time dropping a dime. The FBI handed letters supplied by David to an expert in language analysis at Vassar College early in 1996. The answer was yes, and in April the FBI raided Ted Kaczynski’s secluded cabin in the mountains of Montana.

Five months later, my daughter entered Vassar and heard the buzz. Not sure how much interest she took at first, but before long, much of what she heard about Kaczynski’s manifesto rang a few bells for her.

The Unabomber banged away for hours on an old Olympia much like the one that she’d hear through the walls while in her room. Technology? One of the items banged out on that typewriter was a call to ban the automatic transmission. Others were anti-television, anti-toilets-that-flush-themselves, and anti-many things that prepared me for my all-out war on cellphones in years to come.

No, she never accused me of serial bombings that began about the time she was born. But she wasn’t entirely joking when she said, “You do fit the profile.” Maybe she just couldn’t resist.

This Saturday night I’ll be able to see for myself when Ted K plays the Screening Room. As a bonus, I’ll be watching Ben–one of the Screening Room’s new owners–on the screen in the role of a computer store salesman. I just hope he keeps in mind that I am not the guy who killed him.

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https://www.newburyportmovies.com/ted-k

https://www.history.com/topics/crime/unabomber-ted-kaczynski

To Do What Must Be Done

Sisu is what they call it in Finland.

While it has always reminded me of the Jewish word, mensch, “a person of integrity and honor,” I now learn that Finns consider it not a noun but a verb denoting:

… the immense power of life within you and nations that won’t let life perish, the fire in the belly that transmutes fear into faith in the face of adversity, and… the courage to take action against impossible odds.*

As you can imagine, the word sisu has been echoing throughout Finland since the start of the invasion. In a country that also shares a border with Russia–and has already been threatened by Putin–they can easily relate. Whether the rest of the world knows the Finnish word or not, most all of us agree–with awe and admiration–that the Ukrainian people are sisu.

And that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a mensch who personifies sisu.

Praised heaped on Ukraine’s president–from the entire world with the exceptions of Russian oligarchs, Belarus officials, America’s Republican Party, and Fox Noise–is well-deserved. In fact, it is understated by those who have forgotten what he did less than three years ago.

While there’s no comparison between a phone call and a military invasion, keep in mind that the implication–or the veiled threat–of the phone call was to leave a nation vulnerable to military invasion from a hostile neighbor already armed at its border.

Keep in mind, too, that the phone call came from the then-president of the United States who repeatedly allied himself with the Russian dictator.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has now stood up to both of the world’s foremost proponents of fascism.

He’s more than a noun. He’s a verb. Sisu!

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https://ghanafiles.com/ukraines-president-volodymyr-zelenskyy-biography-real-age-facts-wife-children-houses-cars-net-worth/

The quote is from a Finnish page on social media which comes to me second-hand. The emphasis on four words is in the quote.

Terms of Beguilement

Though all attention is on Russia and Ukraine, there’s an unmistakable American echo in this invasion. Not rolling in on tanks or flying over in planes, but finessed with language.

When Donald Trump seconded Vladimir Putin’s description of his invading forces as “peacekeepers,” he was echoing the “alternative facts” offered by his faithful advisor, Kellyanne Conway, in the days following his inauguration.

Within days of Conway’s oxymoronic claim, bookstores sold out of 1984, George Orwell’s 73-year-old classic dystopian novel, and the publisher ran another edition. The rush had not so much to do with surveillance and a police state, or with conformity and loyalty oaths, as it had to do with Orwell’s theory of the distortion of words and revisionist history to achieve all of the above.

All those years we thought 1984 a warning against oppression, it never occurred to us that it might serve as a blueprint for oppression.

We like to think that we control language, but as Orwell reasoned, “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” Indeed, in 2017, many Americans began believing in “alternative facts.” In 2020, it turned into alternative science, and by 2021, who knows how many of COVID’s victims died of it?

We can thank those who parse Putin’s “bizarre” tirade at the start of the invasion for its distortions of history and language, but we need to start parsing equally bizarre language that is taken for granted–sometimes written as law–right here in the USA.

This weekend marked the tenth anniversary of the murder of Treyvon Martin in Florida.

We all know the story and still feel the racial fallout. Rather than rehash, let’s strip it of race and all other detail, and consider only its language:

One person, A, walks past another, B. With a gun, B follows A. A keeps moving away from B. B pursues A. B catches A, an altercation starts, the gun fires, A is dead. B does not deny shooting A. In court, B is acquitted when his lawyer invokes something called “Stand Your Ground.”

In a nutshell, B, who pursued A, is judged to have stood. Unless B left his home and went after A on a conveyor belt (which he himself would have to have owned since the defense was “standing his ground”), this is transparent bullshit.

In any other English-speaking country in the world and at any other time in history, this would be unthinkable. Here in 21st Century America, “Stand Your Ground” is law in many states.

Before long, as most observers tell us, the Supreme Court will hear a case that could determine the fate of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that gave women full reproductive rights.

Anti-Choice activists–to use a far more accurate name for a movement that ignores the necessities of life after birth–have been waiting all these years for a shift in the Supreme Court. When Amy Coney Handmaid Tale Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg, they had it.

Whether we call them Anti-Choice or Pro-Life, and whether we prefer to avoid the word “abortion” (as I just did) with other terms such as “reproductive rights,” they have made a 49-year habit of using the phrase “abortion on demand.”

Again, strip this of the issue and all details:

A woman seeks medical treatment. Does she demand it? Is any clinic ever obligated to give it? If the clinic says no, is there a consequence? If the clinic says yes, does the woman have to pay? What kind of demand is it if there’s agreed-upon payment? Is the payment on demand?

Let’s apply Anti-Choice “logic” to other services whether we pay out of pocket or are covered by insurance: Do we have hernia repairs on demand? Cavities filled on demand? Oil changes on demand? Our driveways shoveled by the neighbor’s kid on demand?

The only other common use of those two words is a commercial pitch from a company that streams movies into your home. They want you to demand what they have.

Again, you smell the bullshit as soon as you open your nose.

In a courtroom, you’d think that “abortion on demand” would be ruled out of order as prejudicial language, but after 49 years of repetition, judges may no longer notice it.

Just as few notice the gratuitous prejudice in phrases frequently in the news, from “hardline feminists” and “environmental extremists” since the 1970s to “radical left” in recent years. Sometimes it’s done with a change of one word, as when the estate tax is called “death tax.” Or an obscure phrase with a menacing sound used repetitiously to make anything the speaker doesn’t like sound evil, such as “critical race theory.”

Those who do this do not want you to be aware of ills they’d rather live with, that may be to their benefit. But they can’t condemn something as undeniably positive as awareness, so they abbreviate the word into one menacing syllable. Hence, states such as Florida are now passing “anti-woke” legislation.

In the parlance of today, prejudicial language such as on demand has become “normalized.”

As has “stand your ground.” And “peacekeeper,” not in the short time since Putin and Trump used it, but since 1986 when the US developed “peacekeeper” missiles to counter an arms buildup by the USSR. Or since 1943 when the US Navy launched a patrol frigate named “Corpus Christie.”

That last was five years before Orwell wrote 1984. Maybe he took it as a blueprint for his warnings of debased language that flew off the shelves of bookstore weeks after Trump’s inauguration.

Given what has been said since, it’s too bad he’s not around to write a sequel.

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https://www.activistpost.com/2016/06/5-ways-orwell-1984-has-come-true.html

A Time of War, a Time of Peace

Nice to see George McGovern making the rounds on social media. He who proclaimed:

I’m fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in!

I add an exclamation point to the line as quoted in the meme which, given the timing, appears to be a call for America to stay out of war no matter what borders Putin chooses to cross. Exclamation? Well, he said it during an interview in Gonzo, the 2008 documentary film about journalist Hunter Thompson. A genial, soft-spoken man with a perpetual smile, McGovern was comparing American military involvement in the Middle East at the time to Southeast Asia in the Sixties when he suddenly interrupted himself, raised his voice, and threw up his hands.

Each night, the Screening Room audience cheered the moment, and I never heard what he said in the next few seconds as he calmly resumed his answer to a question.

To a New England audience, it may have seemed like a show of momentary frustration despite the gravity of the words. Yes, I’m a native Massachusetts boy, but I did live seven years in the Dakotas. What my friends here likely don’t know is that, for a South Dakotan, a raised voice and two hands flying upward constitute a full-blown temper tantrum.

McGovern was, of course, the antiwar presidential candidate in 1972. A Democrat who was Robert Kennedy’s closest friend in the Senate and could claim his mantle, McGovern was also a decorated veteran would not allow his staff to publicize his wartime heroism.

He piloted a B-24 Liberator for 35 combat missions in Italy during World War II and received numerous combat awards. Apparently he thought that America would rather vote for a president based on an ability to govern rather than a knack for flying planes or hitting targets.

Be that miscalculation as it may, McGovern knew the difference between a war of choice and a war of necessity, between initiating war and having to stop those who do initiate it. As the son of a Methodist minister and himself a Sunday school teacher, he was as well-versed as Pete Seeger in the Book of Ecclesiastes: “a time of war, and a time of peace.”

Although the Nixon campaign painted him as an extremist, McGovern frequently co-authored legislation with his close friend and fellow WWII veteran, Republican Bob Dole of Kansas, one of the Senate’s leading hawks. In 2007, he delivered one of the five eulogies at a memorial for yet another WWII vet, Kurt Vonnegut, whose novel, Slaughterhouse Five, was a touchstone of the antiwar movement back in the day.

Anyone who voted for him–as I did in ’72 and again in ’80 for re-election to the US Senate in South Dakota–appreciated that inclusiveness and was willing to make those distinctions.

Unfortunately, he, or more precisely his quote, is being floated today by people who make no distinctions. And they are both left and right. Some on the left preach peace, which is admirable, but at all costs, which is not. Do we let Putin take Ukraine? Do we overlook that he has already threatened Finland and Sweden? What if the year was 1939? Do we stand with Churchill or do we cheer for Chamberlain?

On the right it’s complicated. Half the Republicans are condemning Putin, and condemning Biden for not stopping him. The other half is siding with Putin and insisting that Biden stay out of any European involvement. That first half will join the second in a heartbeat if American troops defending the borders of NATO nations are engaged.

Contradiction? Fox News was pro-Putin up to Friday the 25th, slamming Biden for drumming support for Ukraine. As of Saturday the 26th, head cheerleader Tucker Carlson and the rest are now condemning the invasion, ridiculing Biden for not doing enough for Ukraine. At a conservative convention this weekend, Trump and others criticize Putin but save their condemnation for Biden. Some seem to think that Biden has already sent American troops into combat. This is among several glaring falsehoods spelled out in social media chatter prompted by the McGovern quote. Typical claims sound like these:

Biden has caused this war to deflect attention from the stolen election.
It would not be happening if Trump was still in the White House.

No mention of Trump’s praise of Putin’s invasion–and no memory that it was the Ukrainian president that Trump tried to shake down for his own political gain. As for Trump’s parroting of Putin’s claim of “peacekeeping,” they may well believe it. Could be the reason that the conservative conference crowd in Orlando broke into an approving chant: Putin, Putin, Putin…

Fox and the Republicans can afford such contradiction and confusion because both play to an audience that has no memory, no attention span, and no ability to make distinctions between things such as a war of necessity and a war of choice, between the war that McGovern fought and the wars he later opposed.

So, while it’s heartening to see his picture and name making appearances on my screen, it’s depressing, though not at all surprising, to see that the American public still has nothing more than a superficial idea of who George McGovern was and all he stood for.

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Here he is circa 2004 with my good friends, Dan and Karen Anderson, and their daughter Sarah at an art fair in Rapid City, So. Dakota, where McGovern was helping out the Pennington County Democrats at their tent. Photo taken by an aide.
In October, 2012, George Stanley McGovern passed away in Sioux Falls, So. Dakota. He was 90.

A Paler Shade of White

Any window with a long view over a flat horizon might hint at it.

Truth is that this small room has glass wrapped around three sides, and I wonder if anyone else can imagine, while sitting comfortably, sipping coffee, the effect of seeing a full-blown, hard-blown blizzard raging on all around you after it has already covered everything in sight.

In white.

If there were trees in view, we’d call it a “winter wonderland,” an expression used so often that it takes an effort not to yawn on the third syllable.

Football fans might be inclined to call the marsh as it appears right now a “frozen tundra” no matter how many times others have told them that “tundra” all by itself means “frozen land,” and so the term is… Oh, forget it!

At times I can discern the gray vertical lines that represent two telephone poles nearest me, and several thinner, horizontal lines connecting them that wave themselves into my attention, but for the most part I’m looking at a solid wall of white that dissolves into nothing but more white between here and the low hills some four miles directly east to the mainland and about eight miles to the north and south of this glorified sandbar called an island.

Yes, we hear descriptions of “White-Outs” every winter. We all recall breathless stories of “blinding storms” from motorists who have been caught in them, meteorologists who tried to warn those motorists of them, and reporters who’ve been sent out into them to tell us of the motorists who ignored the meteorologists’ warnings. Can any Bay Stater my age ever forget Shelby Scott holding a microphone before her with one hand while clinging to a flagpole with the other, seeming at times to fly horizontally while telling us how bad it is in Southie?

And we read them in our literature. From Jack London’s Alaska gold rush to Willa Cather’s Great Plains Trilogy, we hear winter at its whitest described. With all due respect to Dr. Zhivago, the most gripping descriptions of winter storms may be found in Giants in the Earth–one of America’s finest novels, but it goes unrecognized because it was written by a Norwegian immigrant in his native tongue.

Apparently, even white people can be whited-out.

Still, all those examples, from Shelby Scott to Ole Edvart Rølvaag, are from people in the storm. Here I am in the comfort and warmth of my home, and yet I’m surrounded by storm. And not any manifestation of it on land or trees or cars or on anything. Just the color white. As if there isn’t anything on which or anywhere for it to land.

Closest description I can think of has not to do with a storm, but a whale. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael describes “the whiteness of the whale” in a chapter so named. As with me in my modest room, he on the expansive Pacific is both appalled and calmed by the enveloping lack of color. Oddly, it’s in another of Melville’s stories where views from windows are walled off by buildings next door. Like a pun that wrote itself, it’s set on Wall Street, and the character who tries to look out those windows is famous for repeating a single line: “I would prefer not to.”

Maybe because I’m a film projectionist, I would prefer to see things end by turning black. Whether it’s a sudden turn-out-the-lights or a “fade to black,” it seems the natural order of things. We talk of death as darkness, but how would we know? A person dies, we may or may not read the obituary; a film ends, we read or skip the credits.

Lately I’m haunted by the memory of one exception, a film that ended with a fade to white. As stark a finish as I’ve ever seen, though that may be due to surprise, the exact opposite of expectation. Released in 1999, it was one of those films that frustrates viewers because it leaves them wondering how things turn out. Many of them then accost the projectionist on the way out, demanding answers. Do they think that we see a different film? That we cut the final scenes to keep the outcome to ourselves?

A full white screen seemed just right for an ending with no certain outcome, lighting up dozens of perplexed people wondering if the man (played by Kris Kristofferson) flying the rescue plane wanted to save or kill the main characters. It was certainly perfect for a film titled Limbo–“a condition of unknowable outcome” according to its tagline.

What I find so appalling and appealing about the whiteness of raging winter storms may be the same thing I find compelling and urgent about writing these slice-of-life vignettes and stab-with-purpose commentaries. Though I know the storms will end but never know how far my next rant-and-rave will go, both are snow-jobs.

And you could say both are done in blindness.

Just as I close, as white darkens into gray while an unseen sun reaches an obscured horizon, a northern cardinal alights on my neighbor’s bird feeder, a streak of red before my eyes.

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From the Shoe Box facing southwest. This pic and the one below taken by next door neighbor, Kim O’Rourke, after a storm ten or twelve years ago.

Facing northwest, toward Newburyport. On a clear day you can see the wind-turbine lined up right behind the water tower in the industrial park. Looks like a giant egg with a propeller. You can also see Seabrook Station. Photo taken by a non-photographer from inside the Shoebox, not following any snowstorm but during the combination of full moon and high tide following snow melt in the spring. What I call “the Lake Erie Effect.”

Photo by Kim O’Rourke during the Snowpocalypse of 2015.

Before I thought to put a hook-and-eye lock on the door, the snow just came in. The presence of a bicycle tells me that this photo was taken in the early-90s. View out this window is to the northeast.

This blog is for Gary Brooker, vocalist, keyboardist, frontman for Procol Harum, who passed away early this week–and who wrote “A Whiter Shade of Pale” among other memorable songs. There he is, just a few years ago, in the center of a great band that was still touring. Rest in Rhythm, Conquistador!

And That’s the Way It Was

Most often they do it with a photo of Walter Cronkite. Whether with photo or just by invoking his name, they’ll pose the question as a rhetorical lament:

Remember when reporters just read the news without telling us what to think?

One friend assessed the problem in more detail:

With the news being so sensationalized, I acknowledge the history and then turn it off and don’t actively follow it— I’ll pick up news throughout the day without searching for it: radio, friends, online etc…. I try not to delve down the news hole [because] nowadays nothing is news, it’s all biased commentary[.]

Please know that this is a conscientious, intelligent fellow, a music instructor who has given this semi-literate hack a few tips regarding sharps and flats, and who years ago effortlessly helped me craft my only musical composition, “Walking under the Influence.”

I’ll guess that when he says “acknowledge the history,” he means that he keeps himself aware of national and global events, which to me is the most important step. After all, if you don’t turn the ignition, Ford or Ferrari don’t matter, it ain’t going anywhere.

After that, we part company. Ample news is reported in print and on radio and television. Reported as news. Many people share my friend’s impression because they make no distinction between news reports and programs that did not exist in Cronkite’s day: Analysis that delves into history, traces cause/effect, suggests motivations, predicts things to come. Much of that is then subject to opinion which at times is nothing better than biased commentary.

NBC is news; MSNBC is analysis; PBS & CNN are both. I’ll leave the rest for others to “decide.” Newspapers label their editorial pages and their features, much like they do sports and arts sections, while reports fill other pages, starting with the front.*

Today’s confusion may be due to social media which mixes it all as one.

I’ve been practicing some degree of journalism for over 50 years, and what I’ve seen is a gradual tendency of the public to overlook the distinctions between news and editorial. Many consider it all editorial. Overlooking the distinctions between analysis and advocacy, they consider all of it biased.

This is why so many people today think that a comparison is an equation, and that an explanation is an excuse–both of which tendencies have prevented many of us from realizing just how fascistic the rise of the MAGA crowd has been.

The problem is both right and left. Just this week in the Newburyport Daily News, a reader implied that the editors endorsed a letter from a Trumper just by printing it. She went on to insist that letters be labelled as not representing the views of the editors. Maybe it’s my age, but I find it staggering that anyone could graduate from an American high school and not know the primary function of a newspaper’s letter-to-the-editor section.

For all of the misconceptions and all of the rhetorical laments that they raise, there is one common denominator. Call it lowest or highest or anywhere in between, I’d rather compare it–and may as well equate it–to all faulty ignitions, Ford or Ferrari. Two words:

Informed citizenry.

Jefferson used the term more than once: It was “at the heart of a dynamic democracy” as well as “the best defense against tyranny.” Madison cited it when he wrote “freedom of press” into our First Amendment. Ever since, with a few obvious, low-point exceptions, most presidents have respected and encouraged a free press.

When Lyndon Johnson told his aides after watching a live report from Vietnam, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America,” he wasn’t castigating the press, he was recognizing the role of the press in the design of self-government.

That’s the way was, and that’s the way it still is. No way around it: Not to pay attention, not to be informed, is to forfeit democracy.

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The moment that Walter Cronkite removed his glasses following his announcement of the death of John Kennedy is often cited as his only show of emotion during a newscast. A few years later, his reporting from Vietnam was among the reasons that Lyndon Johnson did not run for re-election in 1968.

*About front pages: If there was ever a journalistic equivalent of “sacred space,” it was the front page. Advertisements were a cardinal sin, and editorials appeared there only on very special occasions. Only exception I know of to the latter rule was the Manchester (NH) Union Leader, which daily ran hard-right editorials on its cover as early as Kennedy vs. Nixon if not before. For it, the paper had a national reputation as either “cranky and belligerent” or “eccentric and arch-conservative” depending on whom you were talking to. Gradually, ads began to appear around the edges of front pages, and now they are commonplace.

I Laugh, Therefore I Think

“Welcome to World War Three!”

Chaz always has a wisecrack greeting when we get together or when he calls. When some earth-shattering event takes place, I don’t need caller ID when my phone rings.

Some will complain that joking about a military invasion takes humor too far. Apparently they know nothing of the role that Charlie Chaplin played in turning American public opinion against Hitler. As Salman Rushdie would put it 50 years later, “laughter is thought.”

This is why Slaughterhouse Five and Catch-22 are always on lists of banned books. The military-industrial complex and the politicians it owns do not want us questioning warfare. They want us supporting, if not signing up for it. If they were honest, the slogan would be, “Support our contracts,” but that’s not very inspiring now, is it? “Support our troops!” has so much more appeal.

And then there’s those who will object to calling warfare between two bordering countries a “World War.” Ah, yes, the “Nothing-can-be-compared-to-the-Nazis” crowd! Even liberals fail to notice that recent laws in Texas and Florida–and pending in other states–offering bounties to anyone who “reports” a woman ending a pregnancy or a teacher assigning To Kill a Mockingbird are right out of 1930s Germany.

If you know any unemployed former KGB or Stasi agents back in the old Eastern Bloc, tell them they have ample job opportunities with career growth deep in the heart of Dixie.

As it’s being reported, yes, all of the shooting and bombing and bleeding and dying is contained within the borders of one nation, Ukraine. However, Putin claims that it never was a nation but historically was and should again be part of Russia–something he could as easily say about Alaska.

By this logic, Mexico could conduct a “special military operation” in Texas, which might not be a bad idea.

To this end, Russia declared two sections of Ukraine to be independent “people’s republics,” the exact tactic and term used by he-to-whom-no-one-can-ever-be-compared in 1939 before rolling into Poland and Czechoslovakia.

We like to forget–or not know to begin with–that Hitler had his supporters in America. Many of them. With swastikas draped from its balconies, Madison Square Garden hosted a “Pro-America Rally” supporting the Nazis on February 20, 1939, and white-supremacists appeared to have a chance to defeat FDR in 1936. That, too, is repeating itself in the form of a former president now cheering Putin on, calling his pretext of “peacekeeping” to protect the newly “independent” territories a stroke of “genius.”

Reports accurately describe the invasion now underway. It is all within the borders of one or three countries depending on whom you chose to believe–the press and officials of democratic governments on one hand; or authoritarian rulers, their state run media, and their cheerleaders such as Trump and Fox News here in the free world.

What the reports miss is that the primary target of Putin’s Ukraine gambit is on the other side of the world. Knowing that American is deeply divided between the reality of our own diversity and the MAGA impulse to fend for yourself and let the world be damned, Putin does not need to win a war. He just needs to create a mess. No matter what Biden does or how well he does it, Trump’s Republican Party will harp on the very existence of Putin’s mess as if Biden created it and sustains it.

Even as Trump continues to cheer Putin on, openly envying his dictatorial “savvy,” Republicans will tell us that all would be peaceful if they were in charge. And there very well could be enough voters who fall for this in their carefully gerrymandered states to put them in charge.

While Chaz may be joking with his cheery “Welcome,” calling what began this week a “World War” is no exaggeration.

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A Russian newscaster can hardly believe it. https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1026592348048957441

As Driveway Leads on to Parkway

When I reach the bench overlooking the marsh a little over a mile from home, I make it a point to sit on one end.

The idea is that anyone else out for a walk or bike ride can feel free to sit down without having to ask.

Of course they always do. Or did. While this worked well before Covid, it has been a moot point these last two years. Share a bench with a stranger? We are now crossing the road to avoid walking near each other while passing in opposite directions.

On a warm February day following so many cold ones, I’m eager to resume my suspended routine, if just for the day. Before I reach the gate to the Reserve, less than a football field away, aching muscles and general soreness from the waist down tell me to turn around, try again tomorrow.

But I learned long ago that it wears off, not entirely but enough to reach my reward, the bench–and, if lucky, a random conversation.

Bad news. Two people on the bench. Yes, this is a national holiday, and I’m not surprised. Moreover, there’s a second bench another tenth of a mile down the road. Let me compensate for some of my idle time.

Before I get there, a car pulls over, people get out, the bench is claimed. Shouldn’t there be a rule against people in cars using the benches? I turn back, hoping that the first bench might be vacated by the time I return. I try not to hold it against them that they have been there so long, having spotted them when I rounded a bend at least a tenth of a mile before I passed the first time. True, I sit there for far longer times, but I leave room.

They stay put, so I take a seat on a grassy knoll across the road, perhaps 100 feet before I’m across from them. They see me. Good.

One calls out: “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” I call back. Now offer me a seat, I think to myself.

“Do you have water?”

“Yes,” I hold up my bottle. When are you leaving? I refrain from asking.

“Would you like to sit down?”

“Yes, thank you!” Why am I such a jerk? I ask under my breath as I labor myself onto my feet.

Conversations in the Reserve always begin with birds, but this time I announce while still walking toward them that I’m fully vaxxed and boosted. They laugh, say the same, and ask if I want to see their cards. “Oh, I never bring a wallet in here. I want no reminders of anything in it.”

Then comes the question that has led every chance encounter here for months: “Have you seen any snowy owls?” Their car has New Hampshire plates, so, playing the role of host, I let them ask before giving them a rundown. Nothing today, I tell them, but snowy owls and an assortment of hawks–cooper’s, red-tailed, harrier, sharp-shinned–and bald eagles have made occasional appearances this winter.

“My friend took a photo here of a peregrin, a peregreen, a– How do you say it?”

“Peregrine falcon.”

“Yes.”

“I recall one here a few years ago, but not since. Also a king eider duck, right out there (pointing a short distance in front of us). They rarely come south of the Arctic Circle, I think because everyone laughs at them. They look like clowns! Too bad the swans aren’t here today. They often are. Right in front of us.”

“A lot of them by the bridge,” said the older one, about middle age.

“Those were geese!” said the younger women, maybe my daughter’s age.

“Canada geese. No lack of those noise-makers.”

The women laugh. One asks where I parked my car.

“In my driveway.”

“Ya, I thought you must live here.”

The younger one laughs, “Driveway! That reminds me.” She gives me a quizzical look: “Why do we park in a driveway and drive in a parkway?”

She’s surprised that I keep a straight face at the riddle. I relish her confusion before I reply, “There is an answer for that.”

“There is???”

“When cities first started designing their public parks, they included paths, called parkways, for the horse-drawn carts to drive through them. So there’s half the answer. I suppose that when cars came along, people didn’t want to park on roads overnight, so they had spaces next to their homes, called driveways, where you could drive off the road to park your car.”

Both women react as if they’ve found the Oracle of Delphi or maybe Paul’s Burning Bush, and we chat for a half hour about the view here and at other national parks, about greenhead flies, about the arch in St. Louis, about their governor (whom none of us like), about the Patriots’ Super Bowl appearances.

The younger woman is wearing one of the 56 SB hats that she has, one for each game, back to 1966. I tell them that I was 15 years old then. They are too polite to comment.

We talk mostly about places we’ve been, about families and where we grew up, but most memorable was their question about the plaque on the bench, a memorial dedication to one Lois Cooper:

“No, I did not know her,” I told them.

“We noticed the pussy willow slung on the side behind you.”

“Yes, something is often there. I sit on this bench so often that I suppose I should pay rent, so I wasn’t at all surprised to see that when you called me over. This bench was put here just about four years ago, and it was still new on a December day when I saw a bough of holly there. It was an overcast day but so unseasonably warm that I sat longer than I should have, and didn’t get up until feeling hints of rain.”

I pointed up the road: “I barely reached that tree when it started coming down, but within a minute, a small white car pulled alongside me, the window buzzed down, the driver leaned over and offered a ride.”

“Well,” said the older woman, “probably someone who saw you dozens of times.”

“Probably. After thanking him, I told him about the new bench, the plaque, and the holly, and how it all impressed me that someone would add the holly–” I started laughing.

“What’s funny about that?” the younger one.

“Oh, no, not that. Something just now hit me: Was I using that as an excuse for why I didn’t have sense enough to avoid the rain?”

“What did he say?” both of them.

“He had this glow on his face as he let me talk. After I stopped, he let a few swipes of the windshield wiper go by before telling me that he put the holly there, that he had the bench put there, that Lois Cooper was his wife.”

Whether I was their Oracle of Delphi or just some chatty old man who happened to be in the right place at the right time, the two women both took long looks at the bench, the plaque, the pussy willow, and seemed to regard all of it anew. When they got up to leave, it was with an air of reverence. I thanked them for their hospitality.

“Want a ride back?”

“Oh no, I need the exercise, and I’ve been lax too long.”

“Well, hope to see you again here sometime.”

“If it clouds up and starts raining before you’re off the island, you could turn around and come back for me.”

“Will do!” they laughed. What they don’t know is that, if rain did start falling, one of the first cars leaving would stop for me, and I’d be taken care of. That’s the way it is over here.

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Keep in mind that this map is set with north-to-south going left-to-right with east at the top in place of north as maps most always are. The benches I describe are at the Salt Pannes Wildlife Observation Area marked between (Parking Lots) 2 & 3. Go a little over a mile north, just out the gate, and you might find me at home as I am right now, just over the “ve” in Sunset Drive, where I also overlook the marsh. Pics of that and other shots of the island at:
https://thelittleblogofmagic.com/2020/11/23/chasing-the-sun-at-parker-river-national-wildlife-refuge-plum-island/

A click of the mouse to “The Little Blog of Magic” for this map. Click around on the site, starting with posts titled “Autumnal Transformations” and “Salt Seasons” for gorgeous photos of the marsh between Plum Island and Newbury/Rowley:

https://thelittleblogofmagic.com/

Barding Around

Last winter, a friend in Portland sent me an ad for something called the “Screw Shoe,” a bizarre piece of Yankee ingenuity which she figured would allow me to continue my much-needed daily exercise.

Helpfully, she added: “Made for running on ice but walking will suffice.”

I credited her for the clever reference to one of Robert Frost’s most enigmatic poems, but she was surprised by the “happy coincidence,” claiming that she takes “no credit for anything, only cash.”

A day later, the title of that very poem appeared on my screen:

Coincidence? I took it as a command from above. Staged as dinner theater at the Clay Hill Farm just south of Ogunquit, Maine, it conveniently plays about halfway between here and the home of my Maniac friend, and so we converged to catch it.

For me, maybe it was a command from above. Every fall, Kirk Simpson plays the title role of the Renaissance Faire where I am a loyal subject. Before the performance of Fire and Ice, I made the mistake of introducing him as King Richard, a no-no when an actor is in another character, but Kirk’s admonition was mild. My friend was both stunned and amused by the act of shaking hands with royalty.

Next moment it was all Robert Frost who took the center of the dining room, and we were alternately moved and amused by what we learned of personal triumphs and tragedies that shaped Frost’s poems in ways we never knew.

Though a it’s a one-man show, Simpson establishes Frost’s wife, Elinor, as a palpable character offstage behind a closed door that she and her doctor prefer he not enter. She suffered depression and died of breast cancer and heart disease in 1938, 25 years before he passed at the age of 88. Throughout the play, Frost interrupts his reminiscences and poems to knock on the door and holler a few inquiries through it. As we learn more of family tragedies, we increasingly wonder if Elinor would not (rather than could not) respond to him.

Among the poems delivered in Fire and Ice is “The Lockless Door,” a poem rarely, if ever, included in school texts. As Frost’s commentary on the dueling nature of opportunity vs. fear, it takes on new meaning before the door to bed-ridden Elinor’s room:

It went many years,
But at last came a knock,
And I thought of the door
With no lock to lock.

I blew out the light,
I tip-toed the floor,
And raised both hands
In prayer to the door.

But the knock came again
My window was wide;
I climbed on the sill
And descended outside.

Back over the sill
I bade a “Come in”
To whoever the knock
At the door may have been.

So at a knock
I emptied my cage
To hide in the world
And alter with age.

Echoes of Edgar Allen Poe and a forecast of Maya Angelou aside, Frost had good reasons to “hide in the world” that were achingly recounted in the narrative we heard. In addition to Elinor’s were the deaths of four of their six children, one just days after birth, another at age eight, another at 29 from a “perpetual fever after childbirth,” and the fourth of suicide at 38.

Another lesser known Frost poem, “‘Out, Out–‘,” describes the death of a child so hauntingly yet so dispassionately–a difficult mix well made by Simpson–that you might wonder if the poetry was an expression of what Frost felt or a shield against it. Following the accidental cut of a chain-saw into a boy’s hand:

The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

In Clay Hill’s dining room, no fork or spoon stirred as Simpson served those lines, one of several passages where you would have heard a pin fall through the air before the drop. Poems so acquainted with the night are offset by the rhyme and whimsy for which Frost is best known, characteristics that lace author June August’s text, summed up by Frost’s description of public appearances and readings as “barding around.”

Frost’s triumphs such as “The Road Not Taken,” “Swinging on Birches,” and “Mending Wall” are nicely blended with hidden chestnuts the way rock-and-roll bands in concert mix their greatest hits with obscure, quirky cuts from their albums. The effect is rewarding whether you’re a devout fan or a casual listener.

Those in the latter category are surprised to learn that he didn’t gain recognition until he left America to live ten years in England. My friend noted that it happened “without any connections or friends or sponsors. Just on merit–which is something we Americans think we coined.”

Like me, she wondered about the effect of the regional accent, the difference that a soft rather than a hard R makes in lines such as “My little horse must think it queer/ To stop without a farmhouse near.” As a narrator, Frost debunks this issue, reminding us that he lived the first ten years of his life in San Francisco. But in his recitation of “Stopping by Woods,” the last words in both lines sounded musical with two syllables.

Another highlight was Simpson’s reenactment of Frost’s appearance at John Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961. Most descriptions tell us simply that he could not read the poem he wrote for the occasion due to the glare of the sun, that he put it aside and recited, instead, his 1941 classic, “The Gift Outright.” What we saw were the attempts to read the intended poem, and we heard the opening lines interspersed with wisecracks at his own inability to read them:

Summoning artists to participate
In the august occasions of the state
Seems something artists ought to celebrate.
Today is for my cause a day of days.

Frost was the first poet to read at an inauguration, news to my friend who was reminded of Amanda Gordon. That’s no mere coincidence. Soon into Gordon’s “The Hill We Climb” is a passage:

And yet the dawn is ours
before we knew it,
somehow we do it.
Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn’t broken
but simply unfinished.

What my friend heard was an echo of that as soon as Simpson began “The Gift Outright”: The land was ours before we were the land’s

But that’s as far as either of us wanted to go with making comparisons to today and politics. As she put it, “It was nice just to be immersed in something of another time, when the poetry, like the world, was a lot simpler.”

No doubt, that’s why Frost’s poetry endures. And we can thank the Yankee ingenuity produced at Clay Hill Farm for helping to keep it that way.

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Kirk Simpson as Robert Frost, or King Richard XI disguised as Robert Frost, looking right at us. Photo by Carla Valentine.
https://www.clayhillfarm.com/

An inability to read, met with wise cracks. Even a vice-president trying to be helpful can’t help but smirk. And, yes, that is Harry Truman grinning over LBJ’s shoulder.

My own “re-enactments” of Robert Frost range from a New Hampshire apple orchard to a South Dakota classroom as far back as the early-80s. Here’s what I had to say in September, 2015:

https://www.wickedlocal.com/story/record-citizen/2015/09/05/100-years-swinging-on-birches/33582443007/