An Appetite for the Past

Today I took my appetite into the center of Derry, N.H., to a diner where I had one lunch five years ago and to which I hoped to return.

Then came the pandemic, followed by a rescheduling of my employer’s routes. I’m rarely sent into New Hampshire anymore, and even at that, Derry is far from a strategic location for breakfast or lunch, too late for one, too early for the other.

But today was a fluke, straight up US 3 and down I-93 all the way to Plymouth, a quaint, small college town best known as the place where one of America’s greatest novelists died while in the company of one of America’s worst presidents.

To be fair, Franklin Pierce was a college buddy of Massachusetts boy Nathaniel Hawthorne, long before one’s Scarlet Letter and the other’s White House, and Hawthorne, knowing his end was near, craved another look at the White Mountains where his old friend kept out of public view.

As for Pierce, his accommodation of the slavocracy was so appalling that he returned to New England only to be shunned wherever he went, including his buddy’s funeral. Sixty years later, Robert Frost, who lived most of his life on a farm just south of Derry, penned a fond, epic ode to the state called “New Hampshire” that summed up Pierce with this:

She had one President (pronounce him Purse,

And make the most of it for better or worse.

He’s your one chance to score against the state).

To and from Plymouth, some 70 miles north of the state border, I starved myself until I could feel it–and finally feed it–in Mary Ann’s Diner. Derry is about 20 miles north of Massachusetts–in fact, straight north of my native Lawrence–but I offset that with a delivery east of Concord to Chichester, a general store that would seem more at home with “Pierce for President” signs than with the ones I spotted in its neighborhood.

You find those general stores in the nooks and crannies of all New England states–just as you find diners decked out to immerse you in the 1950s mostly at interstate highway interchanges, but a few in town centers.

I had forgotten that Mary Ann’s was among them, recalling only the generous comfort dish and blue-plate price. Friends and family think I have an inexhaustible photographic memory, and I do recall odd and impossible things such as tricks made at 45s which we believed was Lawrence’s own card game, or so we thought* played under trees or on porches, who won, who lost, who looked on, the songs that played on our transistor radios while we dealt and bid and talked trash.

I can describe many of my Little League baseball games, not just my own hits and errors, and not just highlights, but who was in the stands, who was playing on the other team, the color of their uniforms, things said by the managers and umpires. But it’s a selective memory, so I may not know who won, if I played thirdbase or centerfield, the name of the other team, or if it was one of the games with a certain girl from my class leaning on the rail along Bodwell St. to laugh and wave at me–which I hope was her way of cheering for me.

As I often do, I looked at the specials board and, without looking at a menu, ordered: “Loaded Shepherd’s Pie.”

Let me correct that: I ordered before looking at the menu which proved entertaining enough to make me forget my hunger while awaiting the meal–especially to the tune of Chubby Checker’s “Let’s Twist Again” playing overhead. Quite a clever creation, but the author missed one trick: Derry is the hometown of Alan Shepard, the first American astronaut to fly in space. Shouldn’t they tweak the spelling to name their pie for him?

Still, the pie lived up to the word “loaded” which represented the menu quite well. Omelets included “Kitchen Sink” and “Philly Steak Bomblet,” while for lunch you can have “Billy’s Big Boy Sandwich” or “Dominic’s Monstah Montecarlo.”

But emphasis is on time more than size. “Fave” breakfasts include “The Elvis Presley,” “The Sinatra,” and “The 50s Special,” while the list of lunchtime sandwiches looks like one for an Autorama in the Eisenhower years: Thunderbird, Bel Air, Little Red Corvette, Pink Cadillac, Mustang, Barracuda, ’57 Chevy, Falcon, and–amazingly–Edsel.

Also offered was “Surf City,” which may or not have played on the speakers overhead while I wolfed down the pie. Seems that all I heard was pre-Beatles, popular when I was in elementary school, what we now call bubble-gum music. Beach Boys, Four Tops, Rickie Nelson, Leslie Gore, and all kinds of falsetto hallyballoo that today makes me wonder why our parents didn’t just shoot us rather than telling us how bad it was.

Must admit that, as I left, the tune overhead made my knees wobble. Nostalgia never hit so hard as I froze before opening the door and racing in the rain toward the van across the street. “Easier Said Than Done,” like Alan Shepard’s trek beyond the atmosphere, was more likely in the Kennedy years, but it was still the same vibe we danced to at parties in each other’s homes.

One party was held at St. Augustine’s Elementary School–which went to 8th grade–by the nuns who perhaps wanted to see what we were up to. What they saw were all the boys standing and sitting on one side while all the girls kept to the other. Sister Bernadette, a young woman as I recall, though the habit makes it difficult to figure, listened to four or five songs before she had had enough. She charged in our direction and grabbed one of her favorites by the arm:

“Go over there and ask someone to dance!” she demanded.

“Ye-ye-ye-ye-yes!”

Not too many years ago, at a 50th class reunion, the girl-now-woman reminded me of that dance. The years have been quite good to her, and the joy on her face and in her voice was that of a school girl as she raised her hand: “And you picked me!”

Even then, I guess, I had an ear out for irony. Despite my stutter, we danced to “Easier Said Than Done.”

Don’t know how long it will be before I return, but I do not doubt, as the local bard put it, “that I should ever come back.” That “Big Bopper Burger” sounds pretty good.

-628-

Turns out 45s came from Ireland with our grand- and great-grandparents. For those of you in other parts of the USA, it could be a variation on Euchre.

“Easier Said Than Done”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT3ivugR2eY&t=1s

Turns out that, while Derry is where Mary Ann’s first opened in 1989, three others have opened in the nearby NH towns of Salem, Amherst, and Windham:
https://www.maryannsdiner.com/

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/559642691193698753/

By a Marsh on a Rainy Day

On the year’s shortest day, Robert Frost famously watches a villager’s woods fill up with snow. On the second, I hear a menacing forecast. On the third, I awake to see a saltmarsh fill up with water.

Frost’s horse thinks it queer to stop without a farmhouse near, but I’m still at home upon a hill in bed before a window watching grasses disappear.

My windows rattle in gusts of storm, odd echoes of harness bells that shake the old man back awake. But this old man watches, making no mistake, pausing nothing but breakfast.

Nor is there a house in sight from my island to the mainland where Frost’s woods stretch toward a frozen lake. My marsh, now lake, keeps moving north, whitecapped in surging tide.

Frost’s darkest evening becomes my gray day, all grasses now submerged in a shade matching sky, as well as the two-lane road, leaving but a utility pole and the top half of a fire hydrant as reminders of just where I am.

No, that’s not at all Frost, but for the old man who stopped on Plum Island four decades ago, it’s a first.

Frost’s downy flake is my driving rain; his easy wind my gas heat, an easy, welcome warmth up from my floor.

Mouth of a river? Atlantic salt marsh? Arrival of winter? Sea-level rise? Encroaching climate change? A cacophony, perhaps a symphony of ocean, moon, storm, and melting glaciers?

My estuary may be lovely, but it is neither dark nor deep. To tell of its contrary charms, I’ll leave for another day, for there’s an omelet I must eat.

Does way ever lead onto way? All I know is that the tide will turn and the grasses reappear on these darkest days of every year. And I will sip coffee.

And that makes all the difference.

All the difference is what that makes.

-30-

Blessed Are the Jokers

What do the Republican Party and the Bible have in common?

All our lives we hear that any talk of politics and religion should be avoided, which may well be why our politics is a mess and many of our churches struggle to remain relevant. By not talking about it, we are not thinking about it. We reach adulthood not knowing how politics work, and so by middle-age we dismiss the whole show as bad. Faith in God becomes a buffer against the outside world rather than a way to participate in it.

There are churches that actually call themselves “Faith Alone,” and everyone has seen the “John 3:16” signs. Strikes me as a convenient dodge of the call for good works, no matter that it immediately follows in John 3:17, something that anyone who has ever actually read the Bible knows.

It also runs counter to the idea of participatory democracy. When Roger Williams warned that “when you mix religion and politics, you get politics,” he was calling for a wall to separate church from state. He was not telling us to stay on one side and ignore the other, but insisting that we know the difference.

With the pending ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Republican Party will complete its transformation into a church, with a Golden Calf as their God, and their state-imposed religion will be our politics. What do today’s Republicans have in common with the Bible?

They are null and void of humor.

Some will object to that claim, and they’ll have no trouble finding videos and audios of Republicans laughing and cracking up audiences in their campaign appearances. Since I watch a lot of news, I’ve seen and heard plenty myself.

None of it is humor. All of it is sarcasm and ridicule, derision and dismissal, insult and smear, often belittling others to create an illusion of superiority to share with those who are in on the so-called joke, such as when the Golden Calf God contorted its face and held up a limp hand in mockery of a reporter with a disability.

That’s not humor. That is hate.

Lack of humor is a frequent comment made about the world’s all-time best selling book, and it is remarkable that any piece of writing that long would not crack a single joke. But it does lend itself to no end of humor, a vein frequently mined on A Prairie Home Companion:

How do we know that Noah’s horse was named “Toothee”? (Pause) He keeps saying “Whoa to thee!”
Where is tennis played in the Bible? (Pause) When Joseph served in Pharaoh’s court.
What about baseball? (Pause) In the big inning…

There’s a risk in telling religious jokes, just as there is in telling political jokes in front of those who cling to strict ideologies. A few years ago I liked to tell people that when Bernie Sanders became president and made me his Secretary of Transportation, I’d make CODs illegal. These were people at stores where I made deliveries who knew I was speaking of “cash on delivery,” though I call it “chaos on driver.” I gave up after several interrupted me at the mere mention of Sanders’ name. What? You’re a socialist???

It’s not that they can’t take a joke. It’s that, regarding politics, there’s no such thing as a joke.

Back when I was teaching, midway into a semester, I’d burst into a class breathless, about a minute late:

You won’t believe what just came on the news!

Nothing silenced a class and grabbed attention so successfully as that ruse. I’d gasp for breath and let the silence hang a few seconds:

The University of Minnesota has banned the Bible from its library!

In my evening classes of adult students, I’d hear at least one grumble of “political correctness” among many gasps. After a pause, I’d start talking while walking back toward the open door I just entered:

The faculty agreed that the book is discriminatory. For all the attention and space it gives to St. Paul, it never mentions Minneapolis.

Stepping out of the room just as I finished, I would hear the groans and laughter–and an occasional curse–from the hall as I prepared to return to the room and lead a discussion on the hot topic of PC. In retrospect, I’m glad that I made a lot of them laugh and that I could demonstrate–both with the joke and with the discussion that followed–that, as Salman Rushdie best put it, “laughter is thought.”

On the other hand, some took the story as proof of PC’s hold on higher education even when they knew it was not true.

Back then, as late as 2002, I dismissed their insistence as a fluke. As New England joker Robert Frost wrote of apples that fall to the ground during harvest and are consigned to the cider press rather than polished for sale on shelves, I regarded their stands “as of no worth.”

Twenty years later, we are facing the consequence: Humorless Republicans in Congress such as Marjorie Taylor Greene with her Mazel-tough space lasers, Louie Gohmert with his suggestion that the National Park Service re-tilt the planet to offset climate change, Jody Hice with his rejection of DC statehood because the city has no car dealerships, and that’s just for starters.

No one believes any of that, not even those who say it, and especially not anyone who lives or works in Washington DC with its 36 car dealerships. But for those who conform to ideology, it is accepted as gospel even though they know its not true. Blind faith is what makes today’s Republicans more of a religion, or a cult, than a political party. What they say only has to justify what they believe. Truth has nothing to do with it. No thought required, and therefore no laughter welcome. Williams’ “Wall of Separation” is gone, and his prediction proves true.

Humor, by its nature, threatens ideology.

If you are free of political ideology and religious dogma, there’s no end of laughter at the Golden Calf God’s Colonial airports, Sharpie hurricanes, cancerous windmills, medicinal Clorox, Greenland Purchase, Andrew Jackson during the Civil War, Frederick Douglass at age 200, “oranges of the Mueller Report,” waterbombs over a burning Louvre…

If only the consequences were not so dire.

-30-

Here’s a good example of turning a single word into a joke–in this case, “intellectual.” Notice the brand name (he says as if it was possible not to notice it): https://www.etsy.com/listing/1011398496/america-needs-jesus-and-trump-flag-5×3

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.

-30-

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/