Lost and found

Found:  one lost mojo.

Journaling on

   The big red book of Cheever’s collected short stories is iconic, and rightly so, but no better for my money than the white volume next to them on my bookshelf – the selected excerpts from his journals.  There is an honest, easy poetry about them, especially when confesses – again and again – his many lusts:  for fame, gin, release from gin, men, release from guilt about men, swimming outdoors, vigorous exercise generally and, above all, his wife. 

   I thumb from time to time, warily, through my own brand of recollection.

   I used to wonder if television, video games, and the rest of busy, modern living would hunt the journal, like the personal letter, to extinction. 

   I ventured my opinion, which was no – not as long as we need a place to say, “This is what happened to me.  This is what matters.  This is what I would say to you, if only I could.” 

   That was before the Internet, which proved me right.  People just don’t call it a journal anymore, but a blog or a post or a tweet.  The instruments change, but the song – the infinite song of being and meaning – remains the same.

Fluorescence

   Some people are like old fluorescent lights.  You don’t notice the humming, and that the humming bothers you, until you turn them off.

Not food blogging in Century City

   

   So, let us not become a silly food blogger.  As if 

there were any other kind.  Condemning this, ejaculating about that.  

   But there is a difference between all that pretention and simple retention -- making a little note for no other reason than to help you remember where you've been and might want to return.

   Like BJ's Brewhouse at the back side of the Westfield mall in Century City.  Excellent beer. Flatbread pizza with roasted veggies and goat cheese and fresh basil.  A pleasingly charred bison burger with barbecue sauce, roasted peppers and slaw.  A seat outside in some spectacular Southern California weather.  And a terrific soundtrack.  What's not to like?

   

Miss Bellows Falls

    The American diner is much in style these days. The great ones are celebrated in magazines and newspapers with regularity. New restaurants emerge that try to capture the diner’s spirit and appeal, but with more seats and higher prices.

     And so it was, bathed in all of this diner romance, that I steered my family to the Miss Bellows Falls for a meal on our way back from Vermont. It is old and very small. And that is the best that can be said of it. 

     The air inside is a greasy haze. Our poor waitress misses most of her teeth.

     As we wolf down our food, as quickly as we can, in walk Keith and Carl Amidon – the twins who led my elementary school basketball team to undefeated glory, but who, by high school, had faded away from sports or anything else that seemed to matter.  

     We didn’t acknowledge each other. I don’t know if they recognized me. 

     I wished at the time, and still do, I could think of the right thing to say.

Motif Number 6 - Rockingham Meeting House

     The Rockingham Meeting House sits on a hill above Route 103 between Chester and Bellows Falls.  I must have driven by it hundreds of times, thinking I should take the quick detour up Meeting House Road and have a look around.  Never did.  Always on the way to something else.

   But I stopped this weekend on the way back from fishing in Vermont.  A lone car was parked in the shade of a tree out front.  A side door was open.  A caretaker sat in a chair just in side the door, squeezing every word out of the thin local papers.  

   You can wander about as you will.  No velvet ropes here to keep you out of the pulpit or the balcony.

   It is spectacular. 

   The National Historic Landmark plaque out front describes it as a "rare 18th century New England Meetinghouse of the 'Second Period,' styled in the Georgian manner and unmatched among surviving New England meetinghouses. ... This is the most intact 18th century public building remaining in Vermont."The brochure tells us that the meetinghouse was built in the village that was the first focus of settlement in the town of Rockingham.  The town expected to expand rapidly and built a large meetinghouse to meet its needs, but as time went on settlement in the town shifted to Bellows Falls and Saxtons River.  A Congregational Church used the meetinghouse for services until 1839.  Annual town meetings were held here until 1869.

Much of what you can see today is original to the 18th century, including many glass panes in the twenty-over-twenty windows, interior plaster work, and most of the material in the box pews.  The pulpit was reconstructed in 1906, but the sounding board above it is original. The surrounding burial ground contains over one thousand graves, the oldest dating from around 1776, many with fine gravestone art.  Along the picket fence are a series of stone hitching posts.  A hearse shed and burial vault are also on the grounds.  I snap my photos.  Happy with some of them.  I need to come back, though, and get some other ones.  Different seasons and light.  More details -- door handles, cornices,  and such -- as Megan were do if she were behind the camera.  She has the eye for detail  while I'm always taking simple step-back photos, just trying to keep cars out of the frame.  So I'll be back.  The odds seem good that the meetinghouse will be here for a while.