Putting the ‘Dead’ in ‘Deadline’

Imagine yourself a resident at 105 State Street on Jan. 31. That’s when you and the other tenants of the 14-unit brick Federalist building wake up to find a notice from your landlord:

The building in which you live… is going to be closed and the expected closing date is April 1, 2025. The entire building will be shut down and reconfigured by a developer. All tenancy-at-will agreements will end on 3/31/25.

Scrambling for new digs, you are too distracted to look into legalities, but a neighbor questions Director of Planning and Development Andy Port via email on Feb. 9.

At issue: Article Eight, Sec. 5-253 of the City Charter covering condominium conversions and calling for a notice “of not less than two years” for tenants. Advantage Property Management (APM) gave you just two months.

Next day, Port responds. He has put the question to both the mayor and City Solicitor Karis North. But not until Feb. 21 does he add that the matter is being considered.

Your eviction is so sudden and your time to move so stunted, that the handling—or, rather, the non-handling—of this in City Hall would have either demoralized or infuriated you.

Mayor Sean Reardon and North both know of the eviction no later than Feb. 10. Despite a calendar clicking quickly toward an April Fool’s deadline, not until Feb. 21 does Port send this:

I have done what I can to this point by sharing relevant/helpful info with the Mayor/Administration and the City’s legal counsel…

The email is timestamped 11:19 am. At 12:02 pm, responding to a request for clarification, Port adds:

I was not suggesting that the Mayor or other officials can/would choose not to enforce a City Ordinance…

Despite that, three full weeks of the two months have passed, and still no effort on your behalf from City Hall to look into an apparent violation of the City Charter.

You note the contradiction: The city’s long quest for affordable housing has been prominent in the news, especially reports of City Hall promoting the possibility of 30 new such units at the Brown School. All while letting yours and 13 others slip away in a relative instant.

Not until March 5—more than halfway into your ordeal—does the mayor send an email to Port, to the neighbor, and to Madeline Nash, co-chair of Newburyport’s Affordable Housing Trust:

Thanks for sending this along. We sent a letter to the owner this week requesting more information regarding the sale and also referencing the ordinance.

Reardon is thanking Port for sending information that Port, according to his own email, had sent 23 days earlier. Moreover, on just that week of March 5, City Hall “sent a letter to the owner” with no more than 26 days remaining until your deadline to find a new home.

Considering the ordinance’s cut and dry stipulation of two years, just what “legal counsel” or “more information” is needed?

Answer: None.

It was all pretext for delay. By mid-March, you and the others have made other arrangements, sacrificial goats to Reardon’s apparent desire to avoid conflict with one of the city’s more prominent property owners—which, by definition, is a moneyed interest in city politics.

On March 11, you are either embittered or bemused by a story with a banner headline on the Daily News’ front page:

City solicitor reappointed by Reardon

You might start wondering why the paper never reported the inattention to your deadline called for by the City Charter when you learn how Reardon pounced on another deadline established by the same charter. Just minutes after the City Council voted 6-3 against retaining North as City Solicitor, Reardon said not so fast.

Perhaps the mayor should have said “not so slow.” He submitted his bid for North’s reappointment on Jan.13. That opened a 45-day window for the council to act, with Feb. 27 as their deadline. Inexplicably, Council President Ed Cameron, Reardon’s staunch ally and one of the three North supporters, waited until March 10 to hold the vote.

While wide awake to consequences of missing your own deadline at 105 State, you shake your head at the luck of Rip Van Cameron: Failure to do his job put him on the winning side of a vote he lost.

If you’ve been following the controversy just a few doors down across the street at the public library, the echoes of Rip Van’s glacially-paced handling of an investigation called for by a council vote back in July must be deafening.

And if you were able to kick back and relax in your recliner rather than frantically preparing to move, you might wax whimsical over the contradictions of headlines, deadlines, and riddles. You might even think that if Reardon, Cameron, and North ever join forces to form their own law firm, their slogan will have to be:

We put the Dead in Deadline!

For Reardon, time might as well be just another city ordinance: There when convenient, non-existent when not.

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Just a block up the street from the Screening Room and downtown Newburyport. Photo by Billy Wilson.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/billy_wilson/52546577412

Delight at the End of the Trouble

Ever since 1499 when I joined King Richard’s Faire as a strolling minstrel, our 10-month off-seasons have been as quiet as Lake Wobegon, although I suppose the “little town that time forgot” might seem modern compared to a Renaissance festival.

Not this year. Just halfway into our lull we learn that Carvershire, our beloved, shaded glen has been claimed for some other use, and we are moving a mile or so down Route 58 to a new location.

You can read the details in various news sources, or see and hear them on at least one Boston TV station, offered by any search engine. For those who do not already know what the new location has been since time-out-of-mind, the word “engine” is a clue–and no longer will we rennies laugh at the sound of a distant choo-choo.

From theme-park to theme-park we go, turning it into our own. At the front gate in the morning, I’d often greet groups of people approaching from the parking lot: “Welcome to the Edaville Railro– Oh, wait! That’s those other guys!” Best laugh line I had except for one in the same spot, facing the other way as they left the faire: “Thank you for spending you mon– Oh, no! No! I mean day! Your day! Thank you for spending your day, your day with us!”

One Edaville track curved around the backside of Carvershire before turning away and back through a cranberry bog to whence it came. We couldn’t see it, but the sound was unmistakable. “A baby dragon in the woods,” I’d tell patrons who did not attempt, as did I, to keep a straight face. As for the small aircraft sometimes heard over head: “Behold! Another flying machine from the great DaVinci!” It’s fairly–and certainly fairely–easy to turn laughter into cheers.

So the faire will open in 1525 from Labor Day weekend through what you folk of the future call October 19th. Since King Richard’s Faire is still on the Julian calendar, and since the Julian calendar went out of print over four centuries ago, we are never sure of the dates, only that we show up on the weekends.

Yes, we have performed and played and juggled in the glade every year save one since 1482 when Columbus was still slicing bologna in his brother Bartholomew’s delicatessen–in Lisbon, not in Venice, truth be told. Exception was 1520 when we were shuttered due to the Bubonic Plague, after which time we still have a cart with physicians wearing those alarming crow’s beaks that makes the rounds picking up a cadaver or two here and there.

Some say that the new locale features paved walkways. If so, that’s welcome news to those who occasionally tripped over Carvershire’s rugged terrain. Yes, there’s more authenticity in the bare ground, but I sure as hell will not miss the tree roots.

Then again, I will surely pine for the canopy of branches overhead unless the grounds crew can work some magic to shade the new site. Wouldn’t put it past them. Since I’ve been piping for King Richard’s realm, the most wondrous feats of all have been the days we have been able to perform that have followed days of deluge. Add those days together, days when opening just should not have been possible, and our grounds crew has saved at least two full seasons of that faire.

Many of the faire’s merchants worked a comparable miracle this past week, managing to move their shops and stands and signs out of Carvershire on but days notice. Many other faire friends were there to assist, bringing trucks and tools, all to allow all of us some degree of familiarity for seasons to come.

Speaking of seasons, yes, I’ll back for at least one more. Never before have I made a public announcement like this, but the off-season was already murmuring with change of personnel before we were hit with a short-notice eviction. And Yours Unruly was loud with complaint until cooler heads prevailed upon me to play in King Richard’s realm–wherever it may be and in whatever appearance–into the future with all of Edaville’s amenities.

No longer can I cling to 1499, the last year of the 15th Century.

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Movin’ On.” Photo by Paul Shaughnessy, 1508.

Ear Candy for All Ages

If we look at the bright side of life here in Soviet America, we might find encouragement in the resurgence of literary parables and satires of authoritarian rule.

Launched like a rocket in 2017 when Mar-an-Ego’s first spokesliar, Jelly-Ban Wrongway, called Ego’s version of inaugural events “alternative facts” despite all photographic evidence to the contrary.

Days later there were reports from coast to coast of George Orwell’s 1984 flying off bookstore shelves. Within a week, a new edition of the 72-year-old novel was printed.

Soon after, Republicans ramped up their attack on Roe v. Wade in anticipation of an Ego appointment to the Supreme Court. Feminists responded by drawing comparisons to The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s 1958 dystopian novel, igniting another stampede into America’s bookstores.

From the beginning, Ego drew many comparisons to Captain Ahab who sank his ship in pursuit of the whale that tore off his leg, all for the sake of revenge. And that was four years before Ego coined the name “Revenge Tour” for his campaign.

Eventually, classic titles gaining re-circulation in conversation, in the news, in classrooms and libraries were enough to fill the syllabus of a graduate seminar: Brave New World, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, The Road, The Hunger Games, stories from Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House, and more.

Another that I surely would have promoted is James Thurber’s The Wonderful O (1957) which might qualify as a cross between Orwell and J.R.R. Tolkien, though the closest comparisons may be The Emperor’s New Clothes and The Wizard of Oz.

A children’s story with no end of loopy language and word play, Wonderful O bites with political satire sure to amuse any parent or grandparent reading aloud. Never heard of it until I unwrapped a birthday gift two weeks ago.

While the premise is simple, the result is as textured and colorful as a Disney animation. And the pace of the narrative gives it a magical ride. As a likely nod to 1984, Thurber begins the tale with a familiar, yet often ominous sound:

Somewhere a ponderous tower clock slowly dropped a dozen strokes into the gloom. Storm clouds rode low along the horizon, and no moon showed.

The rhythmic and rhyming O sounds hint at the book’s premise: An attempt by power hungry leaders to stunt thought and dialogue among the people by debasing language. In 1984, this was called “Newspeak,” achieved by dumbing down vocabulary. Thurber takes the next step with characters, Littlejack and Black, who attempt to ban one letter from all speech and writing:

And so, language and the spoken word diminished as people were forced to speak without the use of O in any word. No longer could the people say Heigh-Ho, Yoohoo, Yo-ho-ho, or even plain Hello…

“We can’t tell shot from shoot, or hot from hoot,” the blacksmith said, in secret meeting with his fellows.

“We can’t tell rot from root, or owed from wed,” the banker said.

From scene to scene, we see and hear the result of this purge applied to various endeavors: gardening, music, farming, science, games, law, and more. Thurber sustains the rhyme and rhythm with a mesmerizing pace right to the end, as when Andreus and Andrea (the good guys) thwart Littlejack and Black by invoking heroes and heroines of legend and lore who begin…

… streaming out of song and story, each phantom flaunting like a flag his own special glory: Lancelot and Ivanhoe, Athos, Porthos, Cyrano, Roland, Rob Roy, Romeo; Donalbane of Burnham Wood, Robinson Crusoe and Robin Hood; the moody Doones of ‘Lorna Doone,’ Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone; out of near and ancient tomes, Banquo’s ghost and Sherlock Holmes; Lochinvar, Lothario, Horatius, and Horatio; and there were other figures too, darker, coming from the blue, Shakespeare’s Shylock, Billy Bones, Quasimodo, Conrad’s Jones, Ichabod and Captain Hook–names enough to fill a book.

Add an ending as all-to-real as surprising, and it’s as easy to see as to hear why Harper’s called it the “loveliest and liveliest of parables.” As Ransom Riggs, author of the endearing Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, offers in her introduction to a 2017 re-issue, it’s…

… a commentary on world affairs a half century ago, but which feels absolutely (and sadly) relevant today. While balancing all that… it accomplishes feat after feat of linguistic acrobatics–not quite poetry, not quite prose, O is ear candy.

Yes, re-issued in 2017, same year that 1984 was the “Newspeak” of the nation. And given me the very week that Mar-an-Ego’s Littlejacks and Blacks banned 294 words from federal government websites.

Life in Soviet America is so full of coincidence!

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Make America Sick Again

Ever wonder why you never hear about Vitamin A?

With the first letter of the alphabet, it is conspicuous in its absence. The rest–B, C, D, & E–are all sold and bought and taken without limit. Especially C, a glass of which goes bottoms up with every breakfast I wolf down.

Whether you ever purchase those small containers of vitamins and other supplements in the supermarket or drugstore, or you have the discipline to eat right and can take your intake for granted, chances are that you’ve never seen V-A on a shelf or heard it recommended.

That’s because it isn’t on the shelf and is rarely recommended. I’m no doctor, but from what I gather, most of us gain all the V-A we need with a normal diet. Since it stays in the body, only those suffering from serious illnesses and from malnutrition have it prescribed. Otherwise, it can be harmful.

Being no doctor, unfortunately, did not stop RFK Jr. from worming his way to become secretary of the federal Dept. of Health & Human Services (HHS). Kennedy was one of the more prominent barkers of the anti-vaxx movement that no doubt increased America’s death toll during the Covid pandemic. Like the other crackpots, he condemned all vaccines, including those for measles and polio. No matter that vaccines in the 1950s put a virtual end to both.

Must say “virtual” here because such things never go away. The reason we kept taking vaccines through the Sixties and Seventies and to this day is to keep ourselves free of them.

Enter the anti-vaxxers. For over a month, we’ve heard of a measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico. Americans not yet deaf to reason also heard that the new HHS secretary was urging children to take V-A.

Vaccines? If you want, I suppose, but the Trump Administration discourages them while pushing Vitamin A.

Result was as quick as it was alarming: A measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico now has kids arriving at hospitals with liver damage due to doses of Vitamin A.

Well, the MAGA crowd has been loud and clear about wanting a return to the America that they fully enjoyed before the advent of Civil Rights. How can they object to a return to polio and measles if both ran rampant in the time of segregation they crave?

This is what happens when you see only size and ignore detail. I asked a friend now retired after a long career as a medical researcher at a west coast university what he thought of the return of measles:

RFK Jr today laments that HHS has 9 different Human Resource departments! As if that is a sure sign of inefficiency. Suppose he succeeds in reducing HHS staff from 80,000 to 60,000, while eliminating eight of those departments. Disaster.

Just one example of how “they” fail to see whole landscapes by browsing through an atlas looking for ways to save big bucks.

Eliminate all those blue highways! We don’t need them! We have the freeways!

Nice analogy! But it would be more accurate had he said “interstates” instead of “freeways,” as interstates weren’t built until Eisenhower called for them in the years after vaccines put an end (or so we thought) to polio and measles.

But that’s a moot point considering that, under MAGA rule, America is on a dead end.

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https://www.irishstar.com/news/us-news/rfk-jrs-measles-treatment-leaves-34952161

A City of Laws a la Mode

All my life I thought a deadline was when you had to have something finished.

Projects for school and work all have deadlines. Students missing them tend to fail and drop-out. Employees unable to meet them are either let-go or kept in low level positions.

Before March 12, I’d have added that public officials who fail to meet deadlines are often forced to resign—either by a governing body or due to their own sense of honor.

That was the day when Newburyport’s Daily News treated us to the banner, front-page headline, “City solicitor reappointed by Reardon.”

Ordinarily, this is not front-page news, but Newburyport City Hall is no ordinary news-maker. In the story we learn that the city council had voted 6-3 against retaining the law-firm of Murphy, Hesse, Toomey, and Lehane for another year.

However, the council vote meant nothing. Why?

As the report tells us, when Mayor Sean Reardon submitted his bid for re-appointment on Jan. 13, the city council had, as required by the City Charter, a 45-day limit to deny it.

Feb. 27 was their deadline; March 10 was their vote. Reardon could have made the announcement on Feb. 28 but may have waited in hopes of avoiding embarrassment of his staunch ally, Council President Ed Cameron, who was responsible for meeting—and then missing—the deadline.

Had the vote been in favor of renewal, all of this would have gone unnoticed.

Making matters worse, Cameron was one of the three votes to keep the firm. Hence, failure to do his job put him on the winning side of a vote he lost.

There’s a reason why all codes of ethics include a warning that goes something like, “avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest.”

To say that Cameron’s gaffe was due to incompetence or mere carelessness would be generous.

The report offers no specific monetary reasons why Attorney Karis North of the law-firm was so objectionable to at least two of the councilors.

At-Large Councilor Connie Preston called herself “100% not OK with our lawyer needing to ask the mayor if it is OK to let us know when she erroneously opined to give our powers over staff to the mayor.”

Ward 5 Councilor Jim McCauley told the Daily News that the law-firm had “lost all credibility,” citing “some decisions here that have cost [the city] money.”

But North tells the mayor what he wants to hear, and so he pounced on Rip Van Cameron’s lapse to keep her no matter how much she has cost Newburyport.

Two weeks later, yet another front-page, banner headline tells us that “Mayor’s memo has councilor asking questions.”

According to the Daily News, Reardon sent a memo around City Hall “reminding employees not to talk to council members about day-to-day issues.”

Here’s what Sec. 2-7 of the City Charter has to say about that:

The city council may require any city officer, member of a city agency or city employee to appear before it to give any information that the city council may require in relation to the municipal services, functions, powers, or duties which are within the scope of responsibility of that person and within the jurisdiction of the city council.

The councilor questioning Reardon’s “reminder,” McCauley, reminds us that city councilors represent city residents.

But that was lost on Cameron who has forgotten that a democracy depends on an informed citizenry.

As always, Cameron’s position supports the mayor’s: As the Daily News worded it, “councilors should not get involved in personnel matters.”

Oblivious to contradiction, Reardon declares, “That’s not me trying to control anything, that’s me trying to hopefully keep city councilors in their lane.”

When it comes to information, the idea of public representatives “staying in their lane” is profoundly anti-democratic. Moreover, the memo, no matter how mildly worded or how wide the smile of delivery, serves as a gag order.

Regarding city ordinances, Reardon is selective: Pounce on one to override a council vote; ignore another to limit what the public knows.

Deadlines? Only when he can exploit them.

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Portrait of Newburyport City Hall by George Darcy of the Newburyport Art Association, 65 Water Street. Judging from the rainbow crosswalk, I’ll estimate that this was drawn in 2022, give or take one year.
https://newburyportart.org/naa-events/2023-spot-peggy-poppe-george-darcy

My Moveable Feast

Four musical friends, all guitarists, and I meet for coffee at Chococoa downtown every Tuesday morning. I always arrive five or ten minutes late, figuring that, at this age, it’s better late than right away.

They talk for up to two hours about chords, progressions, this diminished, that suspended, amplifiers, microphones, makes and brand-names while I munch on a lemon-ginger scope, sip black dark-roast, and pretend I know WTF they’re talking about.

At least one of them knew what this past Tuesday was, and so when I appeared, they all went to the counter as I was seated and walked back like the offensive line from a football huddle with the desired scone on a plate and a solo burning candle sticking up from it. One brought his guitar and strummed to the tune they all sang.

Despite the resulting noise, about a dozen seated patrons and a few baristas all applauded and cheered, perhaps as relieved as I that the annoyance was over. So began my 75th trip around the sun.

The afternoon was not another ambush. Rather, it was planned and I agreed to it a week ago. Again downtown, four friends who wouldn’t let me pay for the pan-seared salmon or its maple glaze, nor the side of crisp Brussels sprouts in a sweet chili glaze with blue cheese dressing, nor the crab cakes in a roasted corn salsa. Not even the IPAs to help it all go down. Gifts included a Jabberwocky certificate for books to buy, and two books with blank pages in which to lie.

Lie on the beach, that is, which I do more and more of every summer. One other gift, a volume of James Thurber for comic inspiration, will fill that bill nicely. It took me over 70 years, but I finally realize that “happy” is synonymous with “relaxed.”

Walt, who arranged this literary anti-weight-loss program, hinted at having the staff serenade me, but once was enough for this year–and for the rest of them no matter how many–and I consider it a birthday wish granted that I wasn’t so embarrassed as I had been just eight hours earlier.

As our party neared its end, three gray-haired women took the table next to us. Before long, a line of Loretta’s staff was lined up behind me striking up the tune. I turned to tell them to go away, but they were all addressing one of the gray-hairs who was beaming with delight.

When the staff finished the song and the hub-bub subsided, I called over: “This is my birthday, too!”

“Really!”

“Yes,” and then feeling a need to prove it, “We share this day with Grover Cleveland, Wilson Pickett, John Updike–“

“Queen Latifah!”

“Yes, she was next on my list.” In truth, I was just about to name Rimsky-Korsakov, but we’ve all had enough Russian interference in our golden years.

Asking if they had ever been to a Renaissance faire, I told them that we rennies have our own birthday serenade: “May I sing it for you?” No one ever says no to this. The woman was aglow. A few of the staff returned to hear it, and I projected enough to be heard all the way to the walls:

This is your birthday song

It isn’t very long–

And then instantly turned back to my four friends, “Okay, enough of that. You were saying?”

Always gets a healthy laugh at an open air festival, but it has some added reverb to it in a restaurant. Don’t really know for certain. I’ll ask my guitarist friends this coming Tuesday. I’m sure they know what “reverb” means.

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Turning 74 in a sweater my mother gave me well before I turned 50 and likely ten years before that. Photo by Walt Thompson who, judging from staff in the background arms akimbo, must have taken it while I faced and serenaded the woman sitting just ten feet away.

Pink House Fate as Symptom

Out my window, looking northwest toward the center of Newburyport, I once could see one of New England’s most frequently photographed, sketched, and artistically rendered buildings. Canvas devoted to it over the years would cover it many times.

Aside our one and only road to the mainland and all by itself on the flat marsh, the Pink House was built in 1925 under circumstances debated to this day. Some call it an example of “spite architecture.” When a judge ruled in a divorce case, the story goes, he ordered that the husband provide the wife with a home. Spitefully, as the story also goes, he put it near nothing and no one, fully exposed to coastal elements including high tides that would sometimes surround it, and out of reach of the electric grid and running (fresh) water at the time.

True or not, as Rochelle Joseph of Support the Pink House, Inc., claimed while recording a farewell tribute video during a farewell vigil the night before what we expected to be the final day, the story attracted international attention. Other tributes told of the resulting increased tourism. Various local groups have long included photos of the Pink House in their brochures.*

Joseph also asked anyone listening to look across the marsh aside the house. This is a technique well-known to visual artists that the rest of us never notice: The very singularity of a house on that spot enhances the natural setting surrounding it, much like a barn or tractor to one side of a photo will help accentuate rows of crops that fill it.**

Yes, a farewell to the “Pink Lady” as it is also called. The place has been abandoned since at least 2005, and as I recall, it wasn’t until 2010 or so that we started hearing of the National Fish & Wildlife Service’s desire to demolish it. Somehow, it is on NFWS land–even though it’s a few acres by itself, set over a mile apart from the Plum Island Reserve, which is what NFWS is here to manage.

Several initial attempts to demolish it were rebuffed by tireless efforts of Support the Pink House, delaying it for several years before running out of options. Demolition began and was completed two days after the vigil.

The distance from my window to the house is slightly over a mile as the Canada geese fly, so I was unable to see the gathering or their cars–unless you count the flashing blue lights of a police cruiser assigned to slow approaching vehicles for the sake of the gathering and to make sure that the two-lane road was not bottle-necked.

I hoped to attend, but an about-to-turn-74-year-old body has veto power over any desire of heart or purpose of mind. And so I watched Joseph’s video in real time, along with the responses expressing regret that came from as far as Ireland, and from people who summer here–from Maine, New York, Ohio, Virginia, Florida, Mississippi, Nevada, enough of them to fill every US house and senate seat if they were so spread out.

Must admit that I have not been anywhere near the vanguard of Support the Pink House. Ten, twelve years ago I had a few satirical columns in the Daily News aimed at those wanting to take it down, which I hope were helpful to the cause. In recent years, I attended a few meetings and signed a few petitions. All of it a far cry from my involvement with the Newburyport Public Library’s dismantling of its own, world-acclaimed Archival Center.

No doubt for that reason, one comment on Joseph’s video piqued my interest:

What is happening to the Pink House is symptomatic of what is happening to our country.

From the censorship inflicted in recent years on schools in southern states to the planned termination of the US Dept. of Education, and from the library on the mainland to a landmark on the marsh, it is the erasure of history, of memory. But why?

For an answer, NFWS offers a plan for a parking area with an observation tower. Sounds so much more functional than an abandoned house, right? Now consider that NFWS already has seven parking areas and two observation towers in the Reserve. Isn’t that a reason to keep the one and only artistic treasure and unique tourist attract right where it is? No? How about if we consider that NFWS has a six-mile stretch of road on Plum Island where it can add things without displacing–or destroying–anything else?

If that’s not enough to keep the Pink House where it is, then yes, the unstated, unacknowledged reason is to erase the past. And the resistance to it, as happened to those who advocated keeping NPL’s Archival Center in tact, turned the powers-that-be against those who resisted.

Consider this exchange in the comments to Joseph’s video:

It feels like they are demolishing it due to a grudge they have against people who love this… Because their reasoning doesn’t make sense.

I’ve felt that way since the start- I feel like it’s not about the house for them, it’s all about the power. Just awful.

I do have a few dozen friends who can tell you that this describes NPL’s Archival Center, but I doubt you need anyone to tell you those two lines can be easily applied to any discussion of Project 2025‘s plans to slash funds and personnel for public services.

Yes, it is “what is happening to our country,” and so from my window right here on Plum Island, I stared into a fog bank in which yet another piece of the USA was put asunder. It was as if Mother Nature herself felt a need to hide the act.

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*It’s reputation is enough to draw Boston media to the farewell. Here’s what appeared in the nightly news:

https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/supporters-rally-in-support-of-plum-islands-pink-house-ahead-of-demolition/3652489/

**In 1956, Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean starred in a film titled Giant set on the Texas plains. There are numerous scenes with the mansion in the distance, the only thing standing on the table-top land. The director and cinematographer employed the technique Joseph describes. About five years ago, Honda filmed a commercial along that road that may well have been inspired by scenes in that film, with the car in the foreground cruising down the road left to right while the Pink House moves front right to left in the background.

A Mayor for One Old Newbury

Yes, I’m running for mayor of Newburyport—and then some.

Last year, that was a joke intended for April Fools Day. For some reason it ran two weeks early on the Ides of March.

Of all days! I guess using the word “incompetent” five times in a single sentence to describe a sitting mayor does have a stabbing effect.

Some readers wrote asking if I had lawn signs. Well, no, but can I interest you in one of my books? My memoir about life as a street-musician perhaps?

The premature annunciation raised a second problem: I live on the Newbury side of Plum Island.

Problem? My friend Rand McNally called it a reason to run as a re-unification candidate:

“Look at the Massachusetts map,” enthused the renowned cartographer, “you can balance ‘Great Barrington’ in the southeast corner with ‘Great Newbury’ in the northeast.”

Carto-poetry! Sure beats crypto-currency, but what would it take to become a selectman in a town that could then annex a city that divorced it 261 years ago?

While exposing the still-raw memory of our more recent loss of West Newbury, just 205 years ago? Boo-hoo!

The joke soon ran its course from Turkey Hill to Frog Pond to Hellcat Swamp, and I’m now identified as “a resident of Newbury” rather than of Plum Island. No more preferred proper nouns for me.

All because some readers thought I was looking for votes instead of laughs. Did they miss the casual mention of my parole officer as my chief advisor?

Then came the call to reclaim the Panama Canal. Got me to thinking: Re-unification may well be my ticket into City Hall.

Any honest description of Newburyport City Hall these past three-plus years will bear uncanny similarity to the job description of a model.

Not a role-model to emulate, much less rely on, but a fashion model obsessed with looking good, always posing, flashing smiles, and assuming agreement that all the shiny merchandise they hawk is the best.

It’s an occupation that, by definition, favors youth and disdains age.

If you wonder where Elon Musk gained the idea to turn the US Treasury over to a team of underaged techies, you need not look far.

Newburyport CH has ridded the city of highly competent and experienced public servants in favor of young people right out of college, pliable to the will of those not much older.

That includes a mayor whose theme song could well be “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” and his hand-picked bobble-head directors now on civic boards. All while the city council president mumbles the lyrics to “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

That’s not a “City Hall.” That’s a “Photo Hive.”

Free of any campaign, I kept pushing for the former volunteers who served for years in the public library’s Archival Center only to be smeared and slandered by a cabal that never produced a hint of proof.

By now, the investigation may be over. But there’s an item too new to be in it that is telling:

NPL is now closed on the Saturdays of holiday weekends.

When asked about it by a patron, Head Librarian Kevin Bourque told her it was so staffers could enjoy a long weekend with their families.

Can you imagine a nurse or a cop being told that?

Put aside that no other library does this, that weekends are the only times many folks have free, and that a library is a public service that should logically be available on Saturdays.

Consider only that these are the same staffers who ran the volunteers out of the Archival Center because, they claimed, those vols were doing work that the staff considered their own.

Turns out that those jealous of work don’t want to do it.

Such is the union contract recently negotiated by the current mayor and his team in Photo Hive.

Seriously, if no one is on this year’s ballot to oppose Mayor Reardon, write me in. My first move will be to negotiate the re-unification of Newburyport, West Newbury, and Newbury.

My second move will be to identify myself as a resident of “Great Newbury.”

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At Loretta, downtown in The Port, turning 74, March 18, 2025. Photo by Walt Thompson.

Emboldened by Color

If you had asked me before today to name the most calm, dignified community in these parts, I would have answered Byfield.

The one village that remained loyal to Newbury after the Port and West Newbury bolted, Byfield is the southernmost reach of our sprawling town, which makes one wonder why our public library and the post office are located there.

Be that as it may, across the street from one of those buildings is the Byfield Community Arts Center, an elegant, if modest, 19th century structure that hosts a wide-range of events for people of all ages and practitioners of all artistic circles and stripes.

To help make the place appear a bit more inviting, the good folks there put up rainbow streamers in the two brackets over each top corner of the front door. Nice touch having one on each side for an enveloping symmetry. And art, as they say, is all about color.

Don’t know how long the streamers were up or just when the wind twisted them in such a way that they could be mistaken for flags. I did drive by to see that they were the six colors of the rainbow, and not the newer version known as the “Pride Flag” with the triangle of five colors superimposed on the original six.

But no matter. This week BCAC was told their pair of rainbows violated Newbury’s flag bylaw. According to its social media post:

The use of the “rainbow” and the colors within are not directed towards any political movement, or any movement for that matter. It is simply an Arts Center using colors to express art, which is created with colors.

This standard would have ruled out the Pride Flag. Honestly, had I seen that eleven-colored, incoherent eyesore, I’d be more dubious of BCAC’s use of the word “art” in its name than its choice of decoration. Furthermore, rainbows, because they represent a full color spectrum, have been a symbol of the arts for time out of mind, long before their adoption by any minority group.

Says Jack Rybicki, founder of Newbury Chatter, a social media page that closely follows all of the doings of Newbury Town Hall:

The flag concern is not a Bylaw, it’s a recently passed ‘Policy’ forwarded by Select Board Member Bill ‘Collector’ DiMaio who has venomously targeted the BCAC and is behind pushing TA Blais’ call to Dave Hill, president of the non-profit… It’s overreach and overstep by a Bully Select Board vice chair who should vacate the leadership position.

Tracy Blais is the town administrator who sent the notice to BCAC. Her edress is on BCAC’s social media post in hopes that supporters will let her know where they stand. As one of those supporters commented on the post:

It seems to me that this either was mandated by the new federal Administration or someone in town was emboldened by that Administration to complain.

“Emboldened by” is a alarming phrase. There have been many reports from all over the country of emboldened individuals and groups since the USA turned into a reality TV show in 2015. What is happening regarding flags in Byfield is relatively negligible, verging on laughable. Elsewhere? Just this week, residents of a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Cincinnati announced that they are arming and organizing themselves in response to a rally held nearby by neo-Nazis who waved swastikas and shouted racial slurs at them.

Whether or not Newbury town officials have been “emboldened” by America’s descent into fascism, the BCAC’s next door neighbor sure acts like it. On the chain-link fence that separates the two is a sign facing BCAC which shows two cartoonish characters fighting each other. For their faces are the images of a laughing Kamala Harris and a smiling Tim Walz. The caption in thick red letters across the top: “Dumb and Dumber.”

One commenter notes that the sign shows Walz grabbing Harris’ breast, but the bodies are hand-drawn and it’s hard to tell just what’s what below the enlarged heads atop two bodies that both appear to be male. Either way, it’s quite a look for the Newbury town officials: The symbol used to welcome people is unwelcome; the sign posted to ridicule people is as welcome as a playful joke.

And a joke it is. As are all signs that reveal nothing of the subjects drawn on them, but reveal and spotlight all we need to know of the people who make and display them.

For all of that, it’s hard to imagine that Newbury officials will insist on the removal of rainbow streamers in the sleepy village of Byfield. Unfortunately, the ridiculous sign next door risks turning the formerly calm and dignified center of the village into a setting for an episode of Beavis and Butt-Head.

Still, that’s well down the harmless end of the spectrum of acts “emboldened by” anything now sweeping the Unraveled States of America. Safe to say, Cincinnati can’t happen here.

Unless, of course, the feeble-minded sign is just the start of something.

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Byfield Community Arts Center. Photo by Carolyn Thomson Casey courtesy of Newbury Chatter, Jack Rybicki, moderator.

A Coastal Home Companion

Well, it’s been a noisy week in Great Newbury, my newly reconstituted hometown.

Over in the Port on Saturday, the Invisible Patriots, thanks to the instant magic of social media, put over 300 very visible protesters on High Street to voice and display signs of displeasure with the new federal government’s betrayal of democracy, humanity, the water we drink, the air we breathe, the children we raise, the veterans and the elderly that America once held dear.

The approving horns of passing cars were almost non-stop for the two hours they endured rather fierce windchills. Mittens over his ears, Wally no sooner moaned that he should have brought a bottle of Excedrin III, than Nell snapped, “You haven’t heard anything I’ve said in 45 years!”

Wally, in character, appeared not to hear his wife of 55 years, but when she looked down the row to shout hello to Meredith, he took me aside: “That’s when she kept saying how handsome Reagan was every time she saw his dopey grin on TV.” He stepped away and started waving at passing cars. Nell, smiling, grabbed and held his free hand, doing the same.

On Sunday, the Pink House Neighbors gathered for a vigil to pay tribute to a century-old house built on the marsh about halfway between Plum Island and Rolfes Lane, which is about where Newburyport declared independence from Newbury proper in 1764. Again, a lot of honking, and I was hoping Wally would show up with his Excedrin. No luck for me.

And no luck for the Neighbors, as the demolition crew arrived in a fog bank Tuesday morning to do the dirty deed. Many of the Neighbors showed up again to see it smashed, broken, and loaded into trucks. All I can tell you is that it was still standing when I drove off the island at 9:45, although all the necessary vehicles, including police, were already there. When I returned at 12:30, only the foundation remained. Even the Neighbors had gone.

And so had the fog. So strange to recall that, while the island itself was sunny and clear, the marsh was covered. You might have thought a cloud had landed on it. Most fog banks cover the island as much or more than the marsh. Nor was there any fog on the mainland. It was as if nature itself felt obliged to hide the act, a repeal of a friendly amendment to its varied beauty by our stunted need for conformity.

Should clarify for those unfamiliar with Great Newbury: The Pink House had no neighbors in the real physical sense. Indeed, it’s solitary stance in a flat marsh, set far enough back from the road to give it a mystique, is what made it such a cherished subject for painters, photographers, poets, and song-writers, including the legendary local duet, Garmon & Griffunkle, who wrote “House of the Rising Sea” which begins:

There is a house on Great Salt Marsh

They call the House of Pink

Alone along Plum Island’s road

Its legend is distinct

And on in that vein for another nine stanzas. Everyone’s favorite lines, judging from the emphasis put on them when sung at local hoots and clambakes, comes near the end following a call to turn the house into an environmental educational center:

And to show the truth of climate change

We’ll re-name the House of Pink

We’ll call it House of the Rising Sea

Awash in low-tide stink*

Yes, I skipped the pivotal event that happened Monday which proved to be the last gull feather to force the Great Newbury Merger on Wednesday. Folks downtown in the Port may have thought it was the two people screaming “propaganda” and “lies” outside the small cinema to protest the showing of the Palestinian film, No Other Land, which just won the Oscar for Best Documentary of 2024. Happened on my day off, but I had been answering attacks on the cinema’s social media page which made me wonder how many films I’ve shown there since I joined in 1998. About 1,200 I’d say. How many with Jewish themes, characters, and settings? Dozens. How many Palestinian? Five at most.

Old Eddie happened to be plodding by with his cane and thought the two were selling some new fast food with “paprika and fries.” His Eastern European taste buds went off like the lights on a pinball machine, but he was disappointed when they stormed away. Not to worry, he and his Balkan buds were content to settle for a bag of popcorn.

But that was all noise signifying nothing compared to what happened in City Hall–or should I say the former City Hall–Monday night. The City Council fired the city attorney but a 6-3 vote. After nearly two years of non-stop evidence before their eyes and ears that the woman was serving the mayor’s interest regardless of what the ward and at-large representatives had to say, they finally hit delete.

Nell and Meredith were at the meeting a year ago when she advised that the results of an investigation could not be made public. More than one incredulous councilor reminded her that defamation of character was the subject of said investigation, which is by definition public. They may as well have been talking to a door knob. Nell and Meredith wondered why the lawyer wasn’t fired on the spot. Of course, they’re old enough to remember a time when she would have.

Saw them both with husbands Wally and Wilbur in Taffy’s having breakfast this morning. Didn’t have the heart to tell them that the lawyer has been re-instated because the City Council president, Rip Van Comatose, missed a deadline for notification. The mayor immediately took time out of his busy schedule of photo-ops to pounce on the technicality and re-hired her. By law, the lawyer who says that truth cannot be made public will remain the Port’s lawyer for another 12 months.

And so it was on Wednesday that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts finally intervened. Month’s ago, a group of us here in what is now the burough of Plum Island met with similar groups in West Newbury, Byfield, and Newbury proper, all alarmed by the growing menace of the Port to its neighbors. We hatched a plan to reunite as a single municipality which Newbury was in colonial times before the Port and West Newbury went their own way and Plum Island was divvied up like Franklin’s snake. Only Byfield loyally remained, but it is now equal to the others as one of Great Newbury’s five buroughs. Such was the plan we sent to Boston.

To our great and delighted surprise, our petition several months ago was soon joined by Rand McNally. The world-renowned cartographer, who used to summer here on Plum Island, pointed out that, with Great Barrington in its southwest corner, the map of Massachusetts would be pleasingly, artistically balanced by having Great Newbury in its northeast corner. Indeed, his slogan no doubt carried the day with legislators in Boston:

Carto-Poetry – It beats Crypto-Currency!

And that’s the news from Great Newbury where the river is strong, the tides are long, and the land, every acre of it, is cause for a song.

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*The complete lyrics to “House of the Rising Sea” with black dots I can’t figure out how to delete but which I hope you can ignore:

There is a house on Great Salt Marsh
They call the House of Pink
Alone along Plum Island’s road
Its legend is distinct
A writer for the New York Times
She wanted to move in
But when she learned why it was built
She found a tale of sin
A marriage lay in ruins
A divorce that was a fright
The wife, she won a brand new home
But hubby built in spite
Oh, that was many years ago
Before the wires and pipes
And so it began attracting
Cameras and artist types
But no one lives there anymore
And with threat of Rising Sea
The Pink House now is targeted
For demolition soon to be
But then there is Plum Island
So rich in history
Why not let the Pink House tell it,
As the House of the Rising Sea?
Oh, Newbury, tell your people,
Not to let the house be done,
And avoid the sin and misery
That would curse us, every one
Instead, let’s add a platform
To observe the wildlife all
With plaques and charts to tell those tales
And not hear the wrecking ball
And to show the truth of climate change
We’ll re-name the House of Pink
We’ll call it House of the Rising Sea
Awash in low-tide stink
There is a house on Great Salt Marsh
They call the House of Pink
Alone along Plum Island’s road
Its legend is distinct