Lawyas with attitude

   Walking through the mall on the way to the train I pass by a young woman who left our firm a few months ago. A large black woman with attitude.  She pretends not to see me and avoids making eye contact.  That works for me.  A middle-aged white man with attitudes of my own. 

 Seeing the young woman reminds me of a breakfast KC and I had years ago, before we had kids, at the Holiday Inn across the expressway from LaGuardia.  What took us to that place I can’t remember. 

The hotel was full of enormous black women, there for some kind of convention.  The older women cling to each other in the elevators, as if being transported to their third-floor rooms is an adventure, and one not without risk; as if the elevator doors might open onto the freeway, or the middle of the forest, instead of the third floor.  The younger women, the really big ones, ask me in loud voices if I know where the pool is.  When I admit that I don’t, they mutter something I don't quite catch.

Two of the older women sit at the table next to us at breakfast and spend a long time studying the menu.  I listen with one ear as they try to figure out how to eat for three dollars apiece.  They each settle on a side order of sausages, thinking toast must be included.  They sass the Japanese waitress when they learn they have to order the toast as an extra side.  When their food comes they spread grape jelly on the toast and roll the sausage links up inside and eat it with their hands.  They sass the waitress some more when they ask for more jelly.  And again when they ask for ice water.  As if the waitress has it in for them.

I can't help thinking that the slim Japanese waitress is disgusted by all of this.  I imagine she had a bowl of rice and a small piece of broiled fish and tea for her breakfast, and has never sassed anyone in her life.

I am embarrassed by all of this, including my own reactions to it.  We were a sad group there at the Holiday Inn.  And no better, twenty years later, walking through the Prudential Center Mall.

Waban Arches

   A cold still day at the end of December, heavy with clouds, but it's good to get out of the house anyway. Rachel and I pick the crosstown trail that meets and crosses the Waban Arches, the terrific nine-arch structure that carries the Sudbury Aqueduct over Waban Brook.  And that has become the favored spot of Wellesley's graffiterati.  

   I need to come back and make more of a study of this.   

Tuesday morning in Northfield

   The cook at Rooster's Bistro is an attractive young woman with what seems like a lot of makeup for a Tuesday morning in Northfield, Massachusetts.  With four customers at 8 in the morning, the Rooster would not seem to need a waitress as well, but here she is, an even younger woman with short, bleached blond hair, plenty of makeup of her own, and a small ring in her nose.  One of the customers turns out to be her boyfriend.  He drinks black coffee.   When the waitress comes over to visit with him, he makes a joke about how cold her hands were this morning.  

   A TV hangs over the back counter, playing The Today Show, "live from Rockefeller Plaza in New York City."  A celebrity chef shows us how to make a glaze for our New Year's ham.  A financial expert reminds us to max out our 401(k) contributions before year-end.  "If you're under 50, you can put aside up to $16,500, and your employer may match some of what you contribute!"  I wonder if the cook or the waitress even makes $16,500, much less has a 401(k).  

   They are, in any event, concerned with other things.  The cook has moved to an area near the back where she has pulled a curling iron from her bag and begun primping her hair in a mirror.  If someone else comes in, she will be able to see them from there.  It's a small place, and she can see the whole thing, absolutely all of it, from where she is standing right now.

Commonwealth Avenue Mall

   Turn your back on the financial district in Boston.  Turn your back and walk the other way, through the Common, past the Frog Pond and the ball fields, all the way to Charles Street.  While you wait for the light to change, buy a bag of roasted nuts from the vendor on the sidewalk and then munch them as you stroll your way through the Public Gardens and on to the Commonwealth Avenue Mall.  What a wonderfully rhythmic name, the Commonwealth Avenue Mall.  And a rhythmic walk it is as well, moving west a block at a time, past the statues and benches and the city folks with all their little dogs.    

Motif Number 4 - The Bean

   Cloud Gate, a sculpture by Anish Kapoor, in Millennium Park in Chicago.  Everyone, with the possible exception of Kapoor, calls it The Bean.

   

Motif Number 3 - A particular obelisk

  

Motif Number 2 - Sea kayaks at Bearskin Neck

Motif Number 1

  

Postcards from Rockport

   

   Sitting on the T-wharf that juts out into scenic Rockport harbor, while Rachel and a friend meander on Bearskin Neck and KC naps on the bench beside me.  A warm, humid Labor Day weekend. 

   A cormorant dives and swirls among the baitfish just below the wharf.  I know what they do, but have never been able to stand above them and watch them swoop and turn under the water.  I try to snap some pictures, but they move so fast.  A man comes to watch and say, "Wow, look at that duck diving under the water after the fish!"  I generally don't correct strangers, and no doubt they often forbear correcting me, but this seems egregious.  "Actually, it's a cormorant," I say gently.  And he seems pleased to have learned something new.  "Cool.  A cormorant."

   About which I learn something new myself when I get home and look at the pictures on my laptop.  Cormorants, at least this type, have the most incredible blue eyes.  Cool, indeed.

   After the cormorant has his fill and moves off to bob out in the harbor, a boat comes in to off-load its catch.  A woman has gotten out of her car.  She comes over to see what's happening and calls back to her husband.  "Honey, they're bringing in the crabs." 

Postcards from P'town

      If you are vacationing on the outer Cape, which you should do, and you go to Provincetown to walkabout on a Friday evening, which you should do, and you walk up and down Commercial Street, which you could not help but do, you will see all the gay couples and singles and small traveling packs that you would expect, and then some.  And if you walk east from the docks and the main square and peer between the buildings on your left, and the sky is clear and the moon is full, you can cut behind the buildings and the parking lots to the beach where you can see the most beautiful evening scenes of the boats and the bay and the moonlight on the water.  We did that, and took some happy pictures there.  And then, when we had seen enough of the moonlight on the water, as if you can ever see enough, we walked back through the parking lot where a young man had run out the back door of one of the places to stand alone on the asphalt, his head bent forward, his fists pushed up tight into his eyes, crying as he stood there alone.  We sought only the carnival, but were reminded nonetheless.  Hearts are breaking, too, under every moon.

Kilroy was here, in Brandon

   On a Saturday night in July, after two days of fishing with my brothers, we attend the Brandon Town Players production of Kilroy Was Here, at the Brandon Town Hall in Vermont.  The program notes inform us that the Town Hall was built in 1861, in time to be the gathering place where Brandon -- a small farming village then and not much more than that now -- sent an astounding 116 of its men off to fight for the Union.  Vermont, I think, sent more men per capita to war than any other state, and has been doing so ever since.  Just before the show starts, one of the actresses asks all the present and former service men and women to stand and be recognized, and a notable percentage of the audience stands to accept our applause.  She then asks the we all consider donations to the Town Hall restoration fund, which is trying to raise $120,000 to update the bathrooms in the basement of the Hall, which she politely describes as "tired."

   The night is warm, the stage is small, the players are a mix of the very well cast (the slim, angular guy playing Kilroy looks just right in his khaki army clothes) and the we'll-make-do-as-best-we-can-with-those-we-have, including the 60-year old women playing the young USO hostesses and the similarly older men playing Kilroy's army buddies.  The singing is quite good and the staging makes the most of the small room in which to work.  The dialogue is slow.  But there are humorous moments and a good time is had by all, especially during the patriotic numbers.  When a giant American flag is unfurled at the end of the first act, and again at the end of the show, many in the crowd respond with a real excitement and passion, some even waiving tiny American flags they have brought with them.  People clap along enthusiastically with the marches.

   The show, like the great old building, like the entire evening, is corny, old-fashioned, and sincere.  Entirely free of sarcasm, irony, cynicism.  I was hot, and uncomfortable in my metal folding chair.  But I loved it.  And was happy to slip a few dollars in the barrel for the building fund before I left.

The newspaper of record

   On June 29, 2011, The New York Times posts this correction on its web-site:  

   An earlier version of this article contained a dateline that incorrectly referred to "Nantucket, R.I."  Nantucket is in Massachusetts.

   On June 30, 2011, I see this article online and consider a new blog label:  “Are you fucking kidding me?”

An unfinished basement

   The house I grew up in was built in the 1860s or thereabouts.  So my parents told us, and so we were happy to believe.  It meant we could say our house was built during the Civil War.  It made it seem historic, and not just old.  

   But old it was, as we were reminded by door frames that weren't close to being square to the ceiling.  Or anytime we went down into the cellar, with its packed dirt floor and stone foundation walls.  The foundation must have been dug by hand, something I never thought about in the fifteen years that I lived there, or the couple of summers I came back before I didn't.  Like a lot of things, it just didn't occur to me at the time.

   The cellar smelled faintly of earth and stones, because that's what it was made of.  And, because of my father, it smelled like metal and paint and chemicals for cleaning paint and the electric motor of the grinding wheel on the work bench and the cold sparks that flew from it when my father was sharpening the blade of the lawn mower or some tool that would just work a lot better if you took a few minutes out to sharpen it.  

   The dirt floor had a think covering of gravel that my father put down, a bucket at a time.  It made a crunching, scuffling sound as you walked around, your head stooped a bit from the low ceiling, to fetch something you had been sent for or to hold something down that needed to be steadied while it was cut or drilled or nailed or screwed or glued.

   In the back, behind the rows of shelves that held all the paints and stains, was a potato crib, made of boards and old shutters, that my father made to hold the potatoes that he grew in the big garden at the bottom of the back yard.  And behind that was the bulkhead with its short set of wooden stairs that led up to the same back yard.

   This was the bulkhead that the skunk walked up.  The skunk that fell into the cellar after he knocked in one of the little windows along the top of the foundation.  The skunk my father found in the basement when he went down one evening to do something or other, before beating a hasty retreat.  This was a problem.  He thought about various ways to catch the skunk and get it out of the basement.  But all manners of catching skunks involve the obvious risk of getting sprayed.

   And then I offered up the notion that if we just opened the bulkhead and waited for a while, the skunk might be able to walk up the stairs and just take himself out.  I think my father was the one who quickly yanked the bulkhead door open from the outside, before we all peered out the window, straining through the gloom, to see if the skunk walked out.  Which soon enough it did.  A big one, too.

   I remember this not so much because of the skunk, but because it was the first time I ever figured out something my dad didn't.  I didn't care for it then.  Nor now.  

Herd mentality

In a store window at the mall there is a herd of running elephants.  They are each about the size of a hand.  They are chrome or maybe silver-plated, with brass tusks.  They are identical in form, but vary a little in size.  Individually, it is not an elephant figure that I like at all.  But the whole of them, as a running herd, is captivating.  Like the herd of giraffes in the next window over. 

And so it is with any animals, as I think of it.  The single wildebeest on a television nature show is what?  So much ugly food for the wily crocodile hidden in the mud.  But a herd of them moving across the plain – that is a sight to behold.  So, too, a hillside of buffalo.  A school of any fish.  A flock of geese.   

The many moving as one.  Is it some hunter’s instinct in us that is attracted to this? 

The boy from Barton Road

Megan’s high school graduation was a couple of weeks ago.  So she is in that short little part of life where one is neither in high school nor in college.  That ends soon.

Only now, these weeks after the ceremony, does it occur to me if the boy from Barton Road was there.  Barton Road is home to the housing projects of Wellesley.  The kids there go to Schofield Elementary, as our girls did.

There was a morning in October, when Megan was in the second grade, when a boy who lived in Barton Road came to school in his bare feet.  The mother left the house early every morning to get to her job.  The boy’s uncle was supposed to come over and get the boy off to school.  But that day he never showed up and the boy somehow ended up locked outside his house, without his shoes.  He walked to school, about a mile away, in his bare feet.              

This was in October, when there can be some pretty decent days in Massachusetts.  But then there are some other days. 

I forget his name, if I ever knew it.  It seems, like a lot of folks, I wasn’t paying as much attention as perhaps I could have.  But hey, we’re all busy.  Right?

I’ll have to ask Megan if he made it to graduation.  And if he did, if he had some family there.

For those of you sitting on the other side of the plane

Much is written these days about the information that corporations are collecting about all of us every time we use our credit cards, our phones.  Perhaps every time we log on to what my brother calls the inter-web.  They track what we buy, where we go, how we get there, how we pay for it, and so on, all of which in the end paints some kind of pixel picture of us.  The major air carriers have collected some information about me that for some reason has caused them to program my seat assignments such that, no matter what airline I travel, no matter in which direction, I am always seated on the opposite side of the plane from which, the captain tells us, the passengers seated on that side will shortly be having an excellent view of the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, or whatever it is that is worth coming on the radio to mention.  What I have done to deserve this I know not.

Postcards from San Francisco

   On the way to San Francisco for a conference, I suffer all the little common worries of the modern traveler.  Will there be room in the overhead for my suitcase?  If I have to give it up here at the gate, will it really make it into the belly of the plane?  Will the person sitting next to me be obese?  Will they give us the whole damned water bottle this time, or just a stupid plastic cup of it?  And so on.  It’s ridiculous, of course.  Especially once you’re up in the air and soaring west and further west, across the vast plains, the mountains, the deserts.  

   Five hours in and one to go.  You’ve done your work for the day, read the interesting bits of the Sunday Times (of which there were too few), and your back is sore.  But still, you are making good time, incredible time, flying in this rocket ship.  Below, the occasional highway looks like a dusty trail.  Your sore back and cramped legs are nothing compared to those of the pioneers who set out, not so long ago, to cross these lands in hard wagons, or walking alongside them, trying to stay in the wagon’s shade.

   Somewhere over Utah (I think), I hunt through the journals on my laptop for the notes I wrote of my last visit to San Francisco, which turns out to have been eleven years ago.  I don’t date what I write (I should), but there is this reference to Miss Megan being six: 

   We are at war in Iraq, and with Al Qaeda.  The news contains rumors of terrorists in the U.S., or perhaps elsewhere, armed with surface-to-air missiles and the intention to take down commercial airliners.  I am about to fly to San Francisco for a conference on asbestos litigation.  A colleague at work asks if I am nervous about flying.  I respond as Churchill did to his aides who urged him to take cover during the Blitz.  “I am protected by the impenetrable shield of probability.”  At home in the evening, talking to my 6-year-old who does not want me to go away, it is harder to feel sure.

   Megan, of course, is long over any separation anxiety around my business trips.  Sadly, incredibly, we remain at war in Iraq and with Al Qaeda.

   I did a good job last time getting out of the conference hotel and exploring the city, and ate well, too.  Strolling The Embarcadero, checking out the sea lions at Pier 39 and gazing out at Alcatraz (La Isla de los Alcatraces, The Island of the Pelicans); Fisherman’s Wharf, looking for actual fisherman and fresh fish, not just chowder in bread bowls; and Ghiardelli Square.  Riding the cable cars.  The park at Fort Mason.  The marine museum at Aquatic Park.  The buttery swordfish atop a spicy, colorful curry with lemon, mango, red jalapeno peppers and coconut at Ponzu; a salad with Dungeness crab and bay shrimp at one of the places along The Embarcadero; and the whole roasted fish and two fine glasses of wine at The Slanted Door, at the corner of The Embarcadero and Brannan Street. 

   Brannan Street, I later learned, is named for Samuel Brannan, who on May 12, 1848, rode through the streets of San Francisco waving a bottle of gold and shouting, “Gold!  Gold!  Gold from the American River!”  So began the great Gold Rush.  One wonders what else might be named for Brannan, besides this one street, if only he had kept his mouth shut for a little while.

   Strolling through Chinatown, with its grocery stores and meat shops and fish shops.  Fish lie gasping, flopping, bleeding in tanks and tubs that range out onto the sidewalk.  Large eels rope around on top of the ice.  Enormous, phallic clams hang out of their shells.  Striped bass are plentiful, the schoolies laid out whole, the large ones hacked into big chunks, some proudly displayed with a good portion of entrails attached.  Heads for sale.  Tails for sale.  Heads and tales and who knows what, all tied up in a plastic bag for sale.  A buck fifty.

    And when I have seen it all, I haven’t.  There in the back, on the floor, were two boxes with dark, green turtles in them.  Live, low-to-the-ground turtles.  One of them out of the box, heading slowly, steadily, knowingly it seemed, toward the front door.  I looked away, so as not to tip anyone off.

   The notes I wrote last time seem pretty poor now.  Not much more than "I did this, and then I did that.  And then I ate this and that."  Except maybe the bit about the turtle, which I still like.  And maybe this, about my stroll one night after dinner.

   The walk back to my hotel takes me past the Greyhound bus terminal.  A big, desolate place, with the long, high-backed benches that you see in all the old bus terminals and train stations.  It looks like the loneliest place in the city, right now.

   A sad sigh wells up as I remember the nights my dad took me down to the train station in Bellows Falls to catch the Montrealer down to Philadelphia.  What did my dad think while we made small talk and waited for the train?  Did he try to imagine what college life was like, not having gone?  Did he look at me the way I now marvel at my girls?  Did he wonder if I’d be hungry on the train?  Or was he lost in thoughts about the work ahead of him the next day, and the extra cup of coffee after lunch that this late-night excursion would require?

   The sadness is immense at times.  That I can’t talk to him about any of this.  I miss him.

One for dinner

   Ah, the glamour of business travel, manifest this time in the dinner I have scarfed at the Chinese restaurant at the Marriott Residence Inn in White Plains.  I have complied with the good traveler's rule never to eat at the hotel unless absolutely necessary only because of the absolutely necessary part, as I need to take only a quick break for fuel before getting back to my room and my work.  The food is decent -- a little plate of pickled cabbage, a small bowl of hot-and-sour soup, a plate of stir-fried shrimp and vegetables -- although I  could have done without the adjoining table of mom, dad, three very small loud and whining children, and mom's parents.   Grandad:  "Jimmy went pee-pee today for me, and showed me his big boy underpants!  High five!"  Grandmom:  "I think my lower lip went numb."  And so on.

   On the way out, I see a woman about my age sitting at a table just behind the hostess stand, across from the obligatory fish tanks.  By herself.  Another road warrior.  It should be rude of our innkeepers not to at least have suggested we sit together rather than dine alone.  It should be rude of me not to at least stop and say hello and make some small talk, rather than just leave her sitting there by herself, looking adrift and uncomfortable.  But instead, in this so-called modern world, the opposite of these things is true.  

Speaking of Charleston

      

Standing around the fire pit outside my brother’s house, drinking beer and doing the casual grilling that is left to men, while the major cooking and talking goes in inside.  One way or another the conversation comes around to my family’s April vacation trip to Charleston, which gets me saying to my brother the things I now say to everyone about Charleston. 

I talk about the horse carriage ride we took around the old part of the city (actually just part of the old part of the city) the afternoon we arrived.  How the old city is terrifically beautiful and historic, huge chunks of it saved, ironically, by its own post-bellum poverty.  For decades no one in Charleston could afford to tear down the old crumbing homes and put up something better, so the old homes and streets remained in place until the money finally came, by which time the urban planners and regular folks generally had come around to the obvious – that it was better to preserve and restore the historic than to knock it down in the name of progress.  And so the streets of colonial Charleston go on for blocks and blocks, on a scale that seems far greater than anything that remains of the other great colonial cities of Boston or Philadelphia or New York.   

I tell my story about our tour guide, a cheerful, roundish fellow with a melodious voice and an easy calm delivery.  He knows his stuff and his genuine love for Charleston shines like a gloss on every sentence.  He is, on the whole, terrific.  Except when he tells us that all the history books get it wrong when they say the first shots of the Civil War were fired from Fort Sumter, which was manned by federal forces, when in fact they were fired at Fort Sumter, by cadets from The Citadel who – my words now, not his – could not wait any longer to begin the violence that inevitably came with secession. 

The history books that I have read, not surprisingly, get exactly right this business of who first shot at whom, but that’s not my issue with our guide.  Rather, it’s the bitterness he reveals a few minutes later when he criticizes the Union forces that came back to Charleston later in the war and laid siege to the city for over 500 days, blowing cannonballs through the streets of “the most beautiful city in the South” until it much of it lay in ruins.  To which there are a couple of rejoinders that I decide not to make out loud.  The first being that the siege would not have gone on for 500 days if the good folks of Charleston had the common sense to put up the white flag a bit earlier.  The second being, what the hell did Charleston think was going to happen when they so proudly shot up Fort Sumter and drove the tiny federal garrison away?  Can it be that they thought then – and still think now – that think having started the greatest conflagration this continent has known, there should not have been any shooting back? 

If you’re going to start a fight, you better be prepared to win it or quit it fast or get your ass whipped. 

I talk about the rest of our week.  How we take a guided kayak tour through the salt marsh and ride horses through the low country woods.  How we see dolphins from the kayaks and the beach, and alligators in the ponds and even a big one in the surf.  Lone blue herons and white egrets.  Squadrons of brown pelicans.  The blessing of the shrimp fleet.  Eating shrimp and grits and gumbo and fried tomatoes, fried pickles, fries hush puppies, fried chicken.  Washing it all down with lemonade and the ubiquitous sweet tea. 

Our last day we go out to tour Drayton Hall, a great square brick mansion, sitting in the middle of a vast lawn on the bank of the Ashley River, miles upstream from Charleston. It has, against all odds, survived largely in the same shape that it was built in 1738. 

Like Charleston itself, it is beautiful but bittersweet – built with the riches of “Carolina gold” rice.  Every grain of it planted and tended and reaped and processed and loaded and shipped by slaves, working under the hot sun and the whip.  The sun is the same one we stroll under as we cross the grounds to tour the grand old house. 

The whip they don’t show here anymore. 

So this is what I talk about when I talk about Charleston, a place I would soon return to and explore a great deal As it turns out, even as I was telling my Charleston stories by the fire pit at my brother’s house on a Sunday evening, talking about the remnants of the old rice plantations and all that was built from them, The Sunday New York Times Book Review that was sitting on his kitchen table (which we hadn’t yet looked at that day) had a good review of a new book, Saving Savannah, about the Savannah region during and after the Civil War.  Savannah, another place still to visit.  Not far from Charleston, at least these days.  Part of the tidewater region where, as the reviewer put it simply and starkly enough, "small armies of slaves spent their days knee-deep in the stagnant water of the paddies, churning out the profits that made their masters spectacularly wealthy."  More notable than the review itself was this accompanying picture of slaves plowing a rice field near Savannah, circa 1855.   

We know the history of man, and so we are used to the awful notion of slavery.  But it is another thing to see it in actual pictures, to think that slavery has existed into an age modern enough for photography.  And to walk into the remnants of a rice field slaves carved with tools like this into the swampy pine forests of Carolina and Georgia.  And to walk the floorboards and stairs and porches of one of the grand homes that was built from such as this.
Truly, we have no idea.  But the remnants, in so many ways, remain.