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.

     

Who needs orchids anyway?

    

… Or roses, for that matter.  Beautiful, yes.  But as for the thing itself, only bad things can happen.  

   Give me the violet that appears out of nowhere in the middle of the back yard.  An unexpected gift.  

   Or the blossoms on the cherry tomato plant in the little herb garden behind the house, which will transform completely.  You wait for the first one of the season, which will be so good you eat it with your eyes closed. 

At Reading Terminal Market

     In a quiet corner of the Reading Terminal Market, away from the crowded main corridors, an Amish girl takes her lunch break from selling pies and jams.  A small sandwich is on the table in front of her.  Her head is bowed, her hands in her lap.  I wonder - briefly, stupidly - how it is that this Amish girl could be texting on a smartphone.  Then I realize she is saying a brief prayer before she takes her meal.  I take my coffee - just milk, no sugar, no grace - and move along.

Grist Mill

    On a weekend trip to Rutland to watch E run the Crowley, I stop to fish in Chester on the way both up and down.  Up, I've just got time enough to try the upper Williams River around the Grist Mill, where Route 103 bears left into the Stone Village.  In other words, a few hundred yards from the house where I grew up.  Back in the day, before flooding knocked it out, a sizable dam was here, and you could reliably catch nice trout in the deep pools just below.  Above the dam were bullheads and suckers that you could always see looking down from the bridge.  

     The mill itself, a big red building with an old water wheel still attached, has been there a long time.  It's where Clarence Adams's long string of burglaries finally came to an end.  He was, by all appearances, a leading citizen:  state representative, town selectman, church deacon, incorporator of the Chester Savings Bank.  But for nearly 16 years he burglarizing numerous homes and every store on Main Street at least once, some as many as six times.  He sympathized with the victims for their losses; suggested plans to capture the thief; and  offered money for a reward for the thief's capture.  He finally was caught in 1902 when Charles Waterman, who owned the mill, rigged a window with a shotgun that would blast anyone trying to break in.  Adams was wounded, caught, convicted, and sentenced to ten years in prison, although he escaped and fled to Canada.  Far and away the biggest drama that Chester has seen.

   There was an art gallery in the mill when I lived in town.    My mother sent me there for art lessons one summer when I was very young.  She believed, as mothers will do, that her children all had some artistic talent that only needed to be found and released.  Speaking for myself, this was not true, like a lot of things about me that turned out to be untrue.  

   There was, in any event, no particular drama at the grist mill on this fine summer afternoon.  Nor any trout that would rise to my flies.