Georgeann Murphy

Practical Humanism and the Will to Live

  • Why I like THE BEAR 31 August 2022

    Jeremy Allen White as Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto, Hair on Fire
    (photo from upi.com)

    Having now succumbed to temptation by streaming through all 8 episodes of The Bear for the second time in as many weeks, I’m doing a little self-audit to examine just why I love this series (which I’m happy to note will indeed have a second season).

    The first few reasons are quite personal.  My working at the New Orleans Hilton’s fine dining restaurant Winston’s in the early 80’s (as I struggled to write my dissertation until my wonderful dad gave me the money to quit waiting tables and just finish the g.d. thing) was a wonderful and complex experience.  Front of the house was all show biz, as we worked in “butler & maid” boy/girl teams, right up my alley as a drama and English major—and a professor in training, learning how to read a room, a table, and an individual’s responses and deliver what was wanted:  to be left alone (Dick Clark), to be secluded but fawned over (Billy Joel, using the separate wine room’s mirrored table for blow), chatted up, or merely taken good care of (the NOLA fire chief, who smoothly palmed me a C-note with his end-of-meal handshake).  The maître d’, a mad Frenchman named Claude de Leon, assigned me the VIP tables, and so ‘twas I who waited on Robert Lawrence Balzer, the first serious wine journalist in the U.S., when he came to dinner representing Travel/Holiday magazine.  Though “Bobby” Balzer found our chilled salad forks a “meaningless affectation,” I helped Winston’s earn the extra star we sought that night.

    Back of house, however, was the real education, and though I had worked before at a fine dining establishment in Greenville, South Carolina (with a wonderful chef named John L who looked after this neophyte with advice to “put on the chef” whatever went wrong with service, since I was the one working for tips), I’d never before served with an executive chef and CIA-trained (Culinary Art Institute of America) line cooks.  As I recall, there were three or four of these young men and a woman as pantry chef or garde manger, plus Big Al, the grill master.   I think Bart Shoemaker was sous chef, regretting his surname because the last thing a chef wants to be known as is a shoe maker.  The kitchen ran on adrenaline, drama, and sex; I had a brief, happy, and significant fling with one of the line cooks, a flirty Dutchman.

    Their work in that kitchen was HARD, hot, fast, demanding performance work—something The Bear’s creator, Christopher Storer clearly understands.  The show’s premise is that Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (the eponymous Bear, played by Jeremy Allen White), a young chef from the world of fine dining, has come home to Chicago to run his family’s Italian beef sandwich shop.  His beloved, difficult big brother Michael has taken his own life and left Carmen the restaurant, so in addition to the burden of re-inventing how the shop in shambles works, Carmen and other family members—including the close-knit kitchen crew—are coping with grief.  Carmen has one ally in a CIA grad who knows both Carmen’s superior reputation and the Escoffier kitchen brigade system, Sydney Adamu (played by the wonderful Ayo Edebiri).  Brilliant ensemble acting and frantic quick-flash editing together with a gang busters premise and narrative arc over 8 episodes really rock, alternately hilarious and deeply moving.

    Ayo Edebiri as Sydney Adamu on set with White as “Carmy”
    (photo from maxblizz.com)

    So, aside from the pleasure of re-living part of my young life, why do I love this show?  Let me count the ways:

    1. The “kitchen confidential” (pace Anthony Bourdain) exposé of what goes on back-of-house in a restaurant careening through service at full tilt boogie is thrilling.  Carmen’s explaining the man-hours dedicated to producing a single dish at The French Laundry alone is enthralling/appalling.
    2. Valorizing the sacrifice and commitment of people dedicating themselves to doing something very hard very well, over and over again, is something Americans need to see more of.  Hard work in the pursuit of excellence is the opposite of “quiet quitting,” deserving of respect and emulation—especially in a culture that has come to so readily disrespect expertise in any field.
    3. Respect is what the diverse characters of The Bear earn and practice—another template for our currently fractured and fractious era to consider.  This is what hard work for all the right reasons–and true familial devotion—look like.
    4. The show also does a good job of exposing the damage suicide wreaks on those left behind, another valuable lesson.
    5. Examining the relation of what one does to one’s identity may currently be unfashionable, on the assumption that the self exists independent of accomplishment. As Garrison Keillor used to point out, in Lake Wobegon “All the children are above average.” But that relationship is real and relevant, and attention must be paid.

    When I got my hair cut by my long-term most excellent stylist Terri last week, I asked if she’d seen this show I liked so much, The Bear.  She hadn’t, but one of her young associates had.  “That food show?” she asked.  “It’s great.”  I asked her why she liked it.  Her reply, “I’ve worked in restaurants.  It’s real and relatable.”

    She’s right.

    See you in September!

  • Thinking Ink: Tutored by Art

    Shiao-Ping Wang demonstrates the traditional art of Chinese ink painting

    “Tutored by my art” is how Friar Laurence, the herbalist in Romeo and Juliet who compounds a sleeping potion for Juliet, describes his pharmaceutical credentials.  In the past few days of editing my chapter on life lessons taught in that play, that phrase has leapt from the page to chime with other activities of the week.  I remember from my earlier life the phenomenon of being so immersed in rehearsing a play that no matter what else was going on, everything seemed a reference to, an aspect of the play I was preparing.  Of course, the richness of any Shakespearean text almost guarantees relatable correspondences of all sorts, and every fresh encounter with a play by Shakespeare, reading or seeing, reveals something new:  the play doesn’t change, but we do, so we recognize things in it we did not before.

    So, it’s not surprising that Friar Laurence’s phrase has me thinking about my mid-week experience in a five-hour Chinese ink painting workshop at the Barn Gallery in Ogunquit, Maine, the first time in decades I’ve had an artist’s brush in my hand, and the first time ever I’ve had the pleasure of being taught by my good friend, accomplished artist and educator Shiao-Ping Wang.  Earlier this year, I’d been mesmerized by her show at the Buoy Gallery in Kittery, Maine (see Jorge Arango’s illustrated review at https://www.pressherald.com/2022/01/02/art-review-abstract-art-allowed-shiao-ping-wang-to-break-free-from-confines-of-identity/ ), so when another dear friend, artist and former UNH colleague Carol Aronson Shore, invited me to go with her to Shiao-Ping’s workshop, I immediately agreed.

    Carol and Shiao-Ping grind ink at the Barn Gallery’s
    Chinese Ink Painting Workshop, 24 August 2022

    A perk of accompanying Carol was her sharing with me her impressive collection of brushes, inksticks, brush stand, and large, decoratively carved inkstone, the mortar for grinding and containing ink, all acquired during her visit to China years earlier, but never before this occasion put to use.  Shiao-Ping provided a variety of papers, each with its own qualities:  Maobian, the yellowish practice paper, smooth and semi-absorbent; Xuan, white and soft, showing subtle ink gradations; and Mulberry, less absorbent and good for layered and opaque technique.

    Brushes for ink painting compose a complete menagerie:  white, soft goat brushes; brown, firmer weasel brushes; mountain horse hair brushes mixed with badger, very rough in texture for irregular and expressive effects.  Apparently even the location of the hair on the donor animal is a factor:  Shiao-Ping alluded to one brush’s having “belly hair.” Such natural and transparent sourcing really appeals to me.

    Shiao-Ping inspects Carol’s collection of brushes
    SP’s hands, brush, and how to paint bamboo demo

    The materials of this art are themselves beautiful, and Shiao-Ping’s easy, self-effacing eloquence in describing not only techniques but the long tradition behind their evolution were as engaging as her demonstrations.  Her instruction, I gather, followed a pragmatic and traditional sequence:  first grinding the ink and then practicing initial strokes, leading to practicing making the Chinese character or logogram for “tree,” and then copying—or attempting to copy—renderings of first bamboo leaves, then bamboo culms and nodes, then rocks, then landscapes.

    Practice templates

    All of this was completely absorbing and, because absorbing, refreshing.  It’s rare that for so extended a period I’ve focused exclusively on completing a single, simple, repetitive task.  The few occasions where a stroke produced the desired effect seemed magical, as if the brush itself, not me guiding it, did the deed.  I recalled how when learning to ride, I often found that in the last few minutes of a lesson, by which time I had sweated through my habit, my near-exhaustion finally produced the relaxed command of my mount that allowed us to communicate effectively.  Less is more.

    Beginner’s attempts

    This day of discovering ink painting—tutored by art–was intriguing, reassuring, and restorative, a tonic vacation from the keyboard at which I now sit, typing away.  Such hands-on creativity I highly recommend to any novice with access to so gifted a teacher as Shiao-Ping Wang.

    Tradition venerated and preserved

    ,

  • Summer’s lease hath all too short a date

    Sunset at New Castle Common

    While the arrival of pumpkin spice on local menus precociously suggests summer’s end, the autumn equinox is still over a month away.  Still, the New Hampshire days grow appreciably shorter, the UNH outdoor pool sends warnings of early closure, and back-to-school anxieties bubble up in my dreams—even as my third fall of retirement signals that care’s end.  I reckon a lifetime of worrying about returning to school—kindergarten, six years of elementary, three of middle, three more of high school, four years of college, eight years of graduate school, and eleven years of tenure-track professing, followed by twenty-five more of just-barely-hanging-on adjunct teaching impose patterns two years of retirement cannot erase.  Two nights ago I was dreaming/worrying about being back in my lovely Centre College office, explaining to the husband who would be the reason I left that perfect-for-me job that I was concerned about copying my new semester’s syllabi (8-courses-per-year load back then), and woke at 3.40 am in an absolute panic about giving up the nearly impossible-to-get rare tenured associate professor of humanities position I left a quarter century ago.  It took quite while to re-situate myself in the present, despite all those troubled waters calmed long ago.

    As the summer season winds down, I’m alternately chastising myself for not getting more projects accomplished and making fitful progress on sorting-and-discarding (What to do with old VHS tapes??  How to manage the saudade—that perfect Portuguese word meaning profound longing for what can never be had again—conjured by handling my late husband’s “course packs,” those pre-internet packets of photocopied course materials, along with the handwritten notes and diagrams of flight patterns he made while studying for the instrument rating of which he was so proud.  Tucked into one of his pilot’s manuals I found a child’s primer, When I Grow Up, folded to “I want to be a PILOT when I grow up,” with the admonition that pilots need good teeth.  And the course pack for the 1982 Humanities 610 course, “New England Culture in Changing Times,” comprises material that would be far beyond most of the undergrads I last taught in 2020.  Ay, me.

    Artifact of another era
    Course pack cover: “The Concord School of Philosophy” with Profs. Watters, Andrew, Clark, and Students
    Want to be a pilot? BRUSH YOUR TEETH!

    Meanwhile, I hear the charger’s fan cooling the large lithium battery that will power my new electric lawn mower—once I overcome my fear of it blowing up and/or electrocuting me.  We do adapt to changing times, right?  Evolve or else.  At least I need no longer fret over congestion at the xerox machine as I queue to copy syllabi and silently rehearse my opening lectures.

    And it has been a fine summer of new and returning pleasures.  That swell and meaningful trip to visit family in Wisconsin.  Discovering the GBH studio in the Boston Public Library with its cool Newsfeed Café and intrepid Boston Public Radio hosts, Jim Braude and Margery Eagan broadcasting about our end times.

    The return of peach season at Union Lake Peach Orchard in Barrington.

    Union Lake Bounty

    Leisurely meals out with a friend along the Portsmouth waterfront, and an afternoon stroll through Prescott Park.

    Georgeann and Stephanie’s post-prandial stroll

    The Portsmouth waterfront and park in full bloom . . .

    Memorial Bridge, Portsmouth, and love locks
    Cleome blooming
    and Echinacea
    . . . and a Beatles tribute with the Navy Yard aglow across the Piscataqua River, Portsmouth

    Bringing a lawn chair to Sullivan Square, Berwick, and enjoying the rainstorm that cooled that very hot day, prelude to the performance of my talented aerialist neighbor Anne, in the excellent company of her mom Beth and son Leo.

    Anne strikes an attitude
    . . . and another, upside down on her trapeze
    Anne and mom Beth pre-show
    A slightly damp Leo enjoys lemonade via a peppermint stick
    . . . and transforms into a kitty-kat
    . . . then roars approval of his mom’s performance

    A first-time-ever swim in the bracingly cold and surprisingly rejuvenating waters of New Castle Common Cove with friend Jennifer, as the local volleyball teams gathered to play on the beach in their fluorescent shirts, composing a novel Bruegel scene.

    Enjoying sunset from my deck while anticipating the Southern Delta Aquariids meteor shower.

    Painterly sunset at Gnawwood

    More delights to come:  three dinner parties in four days—possible again since the worst of COVID seems past.  I’ll try my hand at Chinese ink painting next week, and enjoy the silent running of my new lawn mower:  with headlights!  For now, I’m groovin’ with comedian Tom Papa, whose book title exhorts:  You’re Doing Great! . . . and other reasons to stay alive.  The macrocosm’s a mess, political divide and social media run amuck.  Democracy threatened. Liz Cheney out of office for speaking truth. Human endeavor all vanity.

    Yet much of the time, it’s really pretty funny. Carpe diem.

  • Leaving Portage, Going Home

    25 July 2022

    Resident Sandhill Cranes on their way to breakfast in Saddle Ridge

    On Monday, my last morning in Portage, I for the first time spy the pair of Sandhill Cranes that visit the Andrew home most every morning to enjoy the dried corn left out for them.  Seeing them is a timely treat, and racing to the window in my underwear affords the chance to photograph them, if also a brief moment of embarrassment when I realize I am not alone in the room.    What follows my partially-clad photo shoot is a welcome breakfast of eggs, bacon, and Chad’s excellent blueberry pancakes, chased with a farewell cup of Pero.  I pack up my suitcase and join Rob to take a last walk around the Saddle Ridge neighborhood, golf course, and marina, and on the way catch up on more Andrew family back story. Meanwhile, Jan and Chad mow their lawn.

    Saddle Ridge marina populated with pontoon boats

    One last time we all gather at the dining table to sample and judge some of the root beers and sodas we brought back from the Museum of Root Beer the previous Saturday.  The winner:  not a root beer, but Caruso’s Dark Cream Italian Style Soda, deliciously rich with vanilla.  Leave it to the Italians.

    Generous flight of root beers and sodas from the Museum of Root Beer

    Rob and Pam once more undertake the long drive to return me to the Milwaukee airport, a ride that includes their farewell gift of Whooping Crane earrings, a thoughtful souvenir from the Crane Foundation.  My flight is a bit delayed, so I fortify myself for the journey ahead with a pesto chicken flatbread and an IPA for early dinner, and finish the book I’ve brought, Jenny Diski’s Skating to Antarctica, a memoir of travel and dysfunctional family romance.  I recognize the phenomenon of travel evoking memory as it did for Diski:  strange how new horizons often conjure the familiar, and prove foil to the past, the measure against which we understand the present.

    The flight home from Baltimore to Manchester is also delayed, and when I take my place at the Southwest stanchion, Boarding Group A, Position 27, the guy next to me complains he’s been traveling all day, missing connections because of ripple effect delays caused when Dallas Love Field Airport in Texas was locked down earlier that day:  a 37-year-old woman had fired several rounds in the ticket counter area before she herself was shot by a police officer “in the lower extremities,” and taken to hospital.  Again, an inexplicable shooting.  And so it goes.

    I finally get home about 2 am, shower, and head straight to my own bed.  Only the next morning do I see that my clivia plant, relative of my many amaryllis (all in the family!), has at long last begun to bloom in my absence.  That’s a welcome sight.  I am home again.

    Clivia in bloom at last

    Today at the Market Basket, the first chrysanthemums are on display.  It’s only early August. But fall is on the way. Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

  • Excursion from Portage WI, Day 2

    24 July 2022

    The Wisconsin River to the north meets the Mississippi in the foreground at Pikes Peak State Park near McGregor, Iowa

    A Sunday drive and cookout were a tradition in my family, with the usual destination a picnic table at Fort De Soto Park in Tierra Verde, Florida, just south of my hometown St. Petersburg, 1,136 acres on five interconnected keys on Tampa Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, home to mangroves, palm hammocks, live oaks, and LOTS of bird life—including seagulls capable of snatching a sandwich right out of my mother’s hand (“You dirty dog!” she exclaimed).  Typically we’d cook our Sunday breakfast on one of the stationary grills provided—scrambled eggs and bacon–supplemented by a treat picked up en route, usually from Mister Donut (the cherry cake donut was my favorite).

    All these years later, what my Wisconisn family had in store for me offered a very different landscape, but just as much fun (and egg salad on croissants standing in for scrambled eggs).  It’s a long schlep from Portage WI to Pikes Peak State Park, Iowa, but well worth the 119-mile drive.  The only Pikes Peak I knew of was in Colorado, but it turns out this Pikes Peak is named for the same Pike.  In 1805, then Army lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery Pike led two expeditions under the authority of President Thomas Jefferson through the Louisiana Purchase territory, first to reconnoiter the headwaters of the Mississippi River, and next to explore the southwest to the edge of the northern Spanish settlements of New Mexico and Texas.  It was on his expedition of 1806 that Pike sighted and tried with his men to climb his namesake peak in present-day Colorado before giving up the ascent in waist-deep snow.  Pike’s 1810 published account of his expeditions proved so popular it was translated into several languages for European distribution.  All that adventure and abundant new land!

    Pikes Peak State Park features a 500-foot bluff (elevation 1130 feet) overlooking the upper Mississippi at the confluence of the Wisconsin River, providing a magnificent view, as stunning today as it must have been to the first Europeans to encounter it in 1673, French explorers Father Jacques Marquette and mapmaker Louis Jolliet, who journeyed down the Wisconsin River in two bark canoes to meet the mighty Mississippi.  Once again, Nick Carraway’s musing at the end of The Great Gatsby comes to mind: they must have held their breath in the presence of this continent, “a fresh green breast of the new world.”

    Picnic party: Jan (in her adorable red dress) and Chad . . .
    . . . Rob and Pam
    . . . et moi

    The wonder of the place inspired us to take turns posing before this majestic backdrop, after which we enjoyed Jan’s excellent picnic lunch.

    Primo Picnic Spot

    I was happy to have Rob accompany me on a modest hike to see a modest waterfall, and all the world’s troubles seemed quite remote–

    Rob at modest waterfall

    –remote, that is, until we encountered a fellow hiker, who brought news from the previous Friday we had (happily) missed on our day of reunion and good times together:  the shockingly senseless, inexplicable early morning murder of three members of the Schmidt family, Tyler, his wife Sarah, and their 6-year-old daughter Lula, at another Iowa camp ground in the Maquoketa Caves State Park, the apparent murderer himself also dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.  Such horror in another Iowa State Park just 80 miles to the south, leaving a 9-year-old boy, Arlo Schmidt, the lone survivor, traumatized for life and all alone.

    The Schmidt family, Tyler, Sarah, Arlo, and Lula

    On our lovely Sunday outing, I am too preoccupied by the warmth of the family around me to think much more about the family lost in yet another random shooting in America, land of the free, home of the brave—and the well-armed deranged.  But as I type this, I think of the Schmidts and wonder why.  Paul Simon sang it:             

    For we lived so well so long

    Still, when I think of the road we’re traveling on

    I wonder what’s gone wrong

    I can’t help it, I wonder what’s gone wrong

    (“American Tune,” 1975)

  • Excursions from Portage WI, Day 1

    23 July 2022

    Amish buggies outside the Pleasant View Bakery, Dalton WI

    The Andrew family had a full range of Wisconsin attractions planned for this Saturday, and after our cereal and Pero (a non-caffeinated coffee substitute), we set out through miles of really beautiful farm land to the Amish-run Mishler’s Country Store in Dalton WI, a treasure trove of bulk spices, old-fashioned candy, fancy soaps, and hard-to-find practical items for use in the kitchen, including a set of ergonomic measuring cups in a full range of sizes (like ¾ C).  The place was very busy, its parking lot serving on this morning as a registration site for some bicycling event.  No electricity (so no ac), no credit cards, just simplicity on offer, a place so out-of-this-metamodern world as to feel like a theme park.

    Sugar Fest at Mishler’s Country Store

    Once back in the car, we naturally all start talking about the 1985 Harrison Ford / Kelly McGillis film Witness, a favorite of my late husband’s and our friends in Munich, who found they could understand the Pennsylvania Dutch (or “Dietsch”) spoken in the film.  I’ve Mennonite inheritance on my mother’s (the Senseman) side, but no gift for languages other than English, so I, however, could not:  another degree of separation from the Amish and anyone not so typically monolingual as me and most Americans.  

    I found myself wondering about the way the Amish were in the world, traveling by horse-drawn carriages—and then thinking that the 1985 world of Witness now felt almost as foreign to me as the men in their broadfall trousers with suspenders and broad-brimmed straw hats and the women in their full-skirted dresses and aprons, prayer cap-covered buns at their napes, and bare feet—even when walking through the manure byproduct of their horses.  In 1985 there were no social media, gps navigators, smart phones, or e-tickets, and back then in the first spring of my assistant professorship at Centre College in Kentucky, I still wrote my lectures and papers on a typewriter, as I had my dissertation the year before.  Hard now to imagine all that away.  So how much harder to imagine life without electricity?  How do the Amish vote, I wonder—not just politically, but literally?  Can they vote electronically?  Maybe, as in my hometown of Madbury NH, pencils and paper and a wooden ballot box are still de rigueur.  And I’m pretty sure the Amish are better off not consuming 24/7 news on screens.

    Organic emissions outside Mishler’s

    From Mishler’s we drove to the nearby Amish Bakery on County Road H only to find it closed (due to health concerns, alas), but relied on our cell phones and Google maps to get us to another Amish bakery, Pleasant View, on Kiefer road, and discovered it, too, doing a bustling business.  The alluring aroma of fresh-baked goods in the lower level bakery below the homestead was hard to resist, even though lunch time approached, and lots of folks were taking advantage of the fine day to enjoy some donuts on the spot.  Attempting restraint, I bought a Czech peach kolache and some cashew brittle for later, and tried to distract myself with photography—and happily (thanks to my niece, who pointed out there was an Amish girl behind the bread rack I was focusing on) avoided shooting the young woman doing her best to stay out of the frame, shunning the graven images, individualism, and vanity of our selfie-obsessed era.  Good on the Amish.

    Pleasant View Bakery Bread
    Satisfied Pleasant View customers Pam and Rob . . .
    . . . and Chad and Jan

    Next stop, two firsts for me:  both the Museum of Root Beer and the Wisconsin Dells where it is located. The museum is the brainchild of my brother-in-law’s namesake son Reed, and features interactive and educational exhibits (like the loop of historical root beer commercials) and an amazing bottled root beer collection manifesting the astonishing variety of root beer production, from the sassafras root beverages made by American indigenous peoples before the arrival of Europeans in North America, through root beer’s first commercial marketing by pharmacist Charles Elmer Hires in 1875 and well beyond.  At Reed’s Museum one can taste-test a flight of root beers, enjoy “gourmet” root beer floats, and purchase an extensive selection of root beers, sodas, and related souvenirs.  My favorite:  one called “1919.”   But I limited my sampling because lunchtime was nigh.

    Museum of Root Beer, Wisconsin Dells

    We arrived at a Culver’s restaurant after driving the gauntlet of the Dells’ commercial drag, a stupefying several miles of tourist attractions—water parks, roller coasters, and other “family friendly” amusements built around–and completely obscuring–the natural beauty of the Wisconsin River’s glacier-carved sandstone formations.  I’m reminded of similarly beautiful natural wonders blighted by crappy capitalism:  Niagara Falls, for example.  Culver’s is a welcome respite, a very successful burger chain rooted in Wisconsin featuring ButterBurgers, Frozen Custard, Wisconsin Cheese Curds, and Pretzel Bites in addition to less locally celebrated fare.  I indulged in a mushroom-and-swiss ButterBurger and my semi-annual shake.  The posted menu invited patrons to inquire about flavors other than those listed, and I asked about the possibility of getting my favorite:  coffee.  Brian, the boy behind the counter, sadly informed me they had no coffee shakes—only “expresso [sic].”  I told him that would be fine, and indeed it was.

    Chad keeps current over a reuben at Culver’s while Jan attends to Rob

    By then in our day of Wisconsin-themed adventures it was well past 3 pm, and we still had the International Crane Foundation to visit—and darkening clouds on the horizon.  The cloud cover turned out to be a blessing on this very hot day, however, and we made a quick tour of the living exhibitions before the docents had to hurry us out a bit in advance of the 5 pm closing time to keep us safe from approaching lightning strikes.  The Crane Foundation works worldwide to conserve cranes and the ecosystems, watersheds, and flyways on which they depend, and the Center in Baraboo WI features all 15 species of cranes, nature trails, guided tours, and a gift shop.  The thunderstorm’s approach abbreviated our visit, but after a day filled with so many new sights for this novice WI visitor to see, heading home to enjoy Jan’s pasta salad dinner and the sound of the rain hitting a thirsty landscape felt quite a good idea.

    Sculpted cranes take flight at the entrance to the International Crane Foundation in Baraboo WI
    Wattled Crane
    Black Crowned Crane
    Conserving energy, grasses, and wildflowers at the Crane Foundation

    Back in Saddle Ridge, I played the one piece I’ve learned after taking up the piano again for the first time since sophomore year in high school, the initial piece in Schumann’s Kinderszenen, a sunny if ever-so-slightly wistful Von fremden Ländern und Menschen.  My brother-in-law’s Steinway B’s action and tone are very different from my husband’s—familiar, yet surprisingly disparate, rather like the midwestern “foreign lands and people” I’ve spent the day with. 

    After dinner, we survey storm damage:  the wind—perhaps a microburst—has taken down a massive limb from a nearby pine, temporarily blocking the road.  The branches of the family tree, however, feel more strongly attached than ever.

    Storm Casualty at Saddle Ridge
    A perfect day ends with a walk to the Saddle Ridge marina

    , , ,

  • On [to] Wisconsin 21-22 July 2022

    Pajama club at BWI, as two eager passengers await their late-night flight to MKE

    Made it to Milwaukee Thursday night, 21 July, on a late flight from Manchester via Baltimore/Washington with only two slight catches.  One:  the parking lot in Manchester has converted to a system that does not issue tickets encoded with your entry time, but instead somehow records that info on the credit card you use to enter the structure.  Not knowing that, and fearing I would be charged the max sans ticket, I had to haul my bag down to the parking office before checking in at the Southwest counter, only to find out I actually wasn’t in trouble.  Two:  the hotel shuttle for the Sheraton at the Milwaukee airport (which is, in fact, run by Marriott), is marked neither “Sheraton” nor “Marriott,” but “Best Western.”  Happily, the woman driving it figured out I was looking for her, and picked me up anyway.

    So, I made it to a comfortable hotel room, where the televised commercials were the only other things disconcerting.  I don’t know whether broadcast tv (which I no longer get) or Wisconsin (as opposed to the East Coast) is to blame, but seeing ads for Trump’s so-called “Freedom Tour” (aka “Freedom from Truth” or “Disinformation Tour”) was distressing—especially as the only other ads were political spots promoting candidates whose only mentioned qualification was endorsement by Trump, that Lying Monster of Narcissism, Defiler of the West Wing, Election Denying, Constitution Threatening, Sexual Predator.  Yikes.

    But the timely arrival of my family the next morning cleansed that very bad taste in my mouth, and we enjoyed very much both service (thanks, Katie!) and cuisine at Milwaukee’s excellent brunch place, Blue’s Egg.

    Rooted Veggie Hash at Blue’s Egg, Milwaukee, with fresh spinach, poached eggs, avocado, chili hollandaise, and challah toast

    On the drive west to Portage, we stopped to have a fine visit in Madison with Emy, a sister-in-law I’d not seen since my brother-in-law Neil’s memorial celebration in Chico, CA in 2019, and were treated not only to a tour of Emy’s lovely home and her refreshing mint iced tea, but a chance to catch up with her daughter, Becky, and Becky’s granddaughter, Amory, who performed a dance of her own invention to “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s cinematic score to Disney’s Encanto.  LOTS of energy packed into that little lassie!

    Brother-in-law Chad and sisters-in-law Jan and Emy catch up
    Nephew Rob and Chad inspect Emy’s well-groomed perennial border
    Amory’s dance to Lin-Manuel’s song

    From Madison, Rob drove us back to Chad and Jan’s development, Saddle Ridge, in Portage, and another lovely home—not only to them, but to a pair of sandhill cranes (+ one more hanger-on).  Deceptively small-seeming from the garage entrance, this home (like my own) rides a hill, so that the downstairs gives way to very generously proportioned guest quarters and bath as well as additional living space, and two “offices,” my retired ophthalmologist brother-in-law’s and his talented seamstress wife’s spacious sewing room, outside of which the sandhill cranes gather for the corn provided them each day, sounding uncannily like the velociraptors of Jurassic Park.

    Velociraptors Sandhill Cranes

    After settling in, we head to the Saddle Ridge clubhouse for a Friday night fish fry—and the unexpected heroics from my sister-in-law RN Jan, whose medical training, compassion, and grace under pressure became manifest when one of our fellow diners fainted and cracked her head on the hard floor.  Jan to the rescue; at last view of her accidental patient on the gurney being carted to the ambulance, all would soon be well.

    Back at home, the two birthday boys (one turned 88 the previous week, one turning 55 the following Monday) and their brides opened their presents, books for the boys and goat’s milk skin cream for the girls, after which we all headed gratefully to our beds.  A good day.

  • Recombobulation

    Sign just past the Milwaukee (MKE) airport TSA security screening area,
    25 July 2022

    Returning at 2 am early Tuesday morning, 26 July, from a long weekend with family in Wisconsin, I am too travel-weary to do much more than open windows—the house closed up over the very hot five days of my absence was 87o when I walked in.  I turn on the bedroom ac, shower, text of my safe arrival, and hit the hay.  Waking later, mid-morning, I go about repossessing the house, moving back outside plants brought in to prevent their cooking on the west-facing deck, restoring to their accustomed squirrel-proof Wild Birds system pole bird feeders brought inside as cautionary protection from the bear who brought them down two weeks ago.

    I settle in the cool downstairs apse, and have my usual summer breakfast of cereal with fruit and iced coffee.  I’m immediately rewarded by the arrival of a male rose-breasted grosbeak, his formal tuxedo seemingly stained by the bright red blood of a slit throat, though his vigor at attacking the hanging suet cake belies any such trauma; this red bib is just part of his very cool outfit.  I unpack, sorting the clean clothes from the soiled, noting what was never worn, and examine my souvenirs:  whooping crane earrings made from cereal boxes and purchased on the sly as a gift from my niece and nephew at the International Crane Foundation, and my pragmatic purchases from the Amish-run Mishler’s Country Store in Dalton WI:  one cake of Fels-Naptha laundry soap and two delightfully fragrant bars of Australian Wavertree and London Lemongrass & Lemon Myrtle soap, a small scoop for flour or sugar (made in China), and a set of measuring cups (also made in China) with ergonomic handles.

    Mishler’s Country Store, managed by the Amish community of Dalton WI

    It is good to be safely home, especially now the air is cooler, the weather more like the vaunted New England summer before global warming became so oppressively apparent.  I have missed some comforts of home:  morning coffee, omnipresent NPR, streaming The Old Man on Hulu, my bidet, and getting my sugar allowance in the form of cocktails, beer, or wine rather than the ice cream and sweets favored by my late husband’s family.

    Nonpareils and Sprinkles I did NOT buy at Mishler’s

    But I also feel the lack of what I found in Wisconsin:  the most comfortable bed ever, appointed with feather bed mattress topper and beautiful white trapunto spread and pillow covers; a spotless, beautifully furnished and efficient home layout; the company of a loving family (oh, to be in such good company now in my third year of solitary widowhood!); the generous, efficient, observant domesticity of two other women; the ongoing good-natured teasingly performative competition between two men of different generations; the relaxing pleasure of happily being not in charge, but instead following the lead of my hyper-capable and competent retired Army/Foreign Service nephew; the liberating hilarity of back-seat “chicas” struggling to buckle seat belts into receptacles exasperatingly located underneath the cheeks of the little woman in the middle; new, gently rolling landscapes of corn and crops of varying greens; new ways to be in the world; sandhill cranes; family stories:  histories filled in; tales of fences mended—and not; tales of what gets talked about–and what doesn’t.  Tolstoy got it wrong:  all happy families are not alike, nor is each unhappy family unhappy in its own way.  Somewhere in the spectrum from the Cleavers to the Simpsons, all families are unique.  I am lucky to be part of this one, and to have had the time we did together.

    My Andrew family, left to right: Pam, Rob, Chad, and Jan, 22 July 2022

    I am recombobulating and remembering all we did.  I will write it down to keep it.

  • Getting rid of things

    Daylily (“Primal Scream”) circle of life, 9 June 2022

    F. Scott Fitzgerald, master of concluding cadences, finishes his short story “Three Hours Between Planes” (Esquire, July 1941) with this phrase embedded in his final sentence:  “the second half of life is a long process of getting rid of things.”

    Nearly paralyzed by the prospect of sorting through and discarding the accumulated stuff of two lifetimes, agonizing over what “sparks joy”—or might do so in the future (ah, Marie Kondo, there’s the rub!), I startled on hearing that line at the end of yesterday’s Selected Shorts broadcast.  But ever since attending WGBH’s “Community Conversation:  Roe Overturned” broadcast from the Boston Public Library studio on 30 June, I’ve been thinking about the remarkable haste with which the conservative super majority of the Supreme Court has gotten rid of things I believed essential to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness:  bodily autonomy, protection from gun violence, clean air, and the separation of church and state. 

    Paris Alston, Margery Eagan, and Callie Crossley after the “Roe Overturned” broadcast, 30 June 2022
    Jim Braude broadcasting on “Boston Public Radio,” 30 June 2022

    Clarence Thomas’s shopping list appalls, as does the eagerness of his wife to overturn a free and fair election.  The first caller into the 30 June broadcast, Daniel from Marlborough, was a veteran so horrified that rights guaranteed to half the population of his country would now be denied, rights he said he and his comrades had bled and died for, that for him, the Fourth of July was canceled.  He was burning his uniform, and he invited any women needing support or protection as they protested Roe overturned to call a veteran, who would stand and fight with them for women’s health protection rights.

    GBH Studio at the Boston Public Library

    I am certainly well into the second half of my life, Mr. Fitzgerald, but am loath to think my country is, too.

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  • The Fourth of July

    Milkweed at Wagon Hill Farm, Durham NH, 22 June 2022

    It is the Fourth of July, and I am having trouble concentrating.  My setup for a dinner party to begin at 6.30 is complete—beer and wine cooling, the New York Times’s Juneteenth peach-molasses chicken soon to be grilled, the salads made and strawberry-rhubarb cobbler baked.  I’ve prepped the staging area for fireworks later, and loaded the cd player with Americana—Danny Barker, Tennessee Ernie Ford singing the Songs of the North my daddy always sang along with, Samuel Barber’s heartbreaking setting of selections from James Agee’s prose poem Knoxville:  Summer of 1915.  That last is closest to my mood:  tearfully nostalgic, longing, somewhat lost in saudade, that profound melancholy yearning for what can never be again.  I look forward to celebrating the company soon to arrive, if not the State Of Things.

    Wagon Hill trail

    I’ve been back at home for four days and a month, and my travels through the south, confronting the past, both personal and national, are partly responsible for this current state of mind.  More forward, however, are the wrenching changes SCOTUS has imposed over the last week before the Court’s summer recess, a week historian Heather Cox Richardson notes in her 1 July posting of Letters from an American “will certainly show up in the history books.”  Maybe that’s why I’ve put Tennessee Ernie Ford’s Civil War songs on the playlist:  what’s been called the current cold civil war no longer seems cold or civil.  And just now there’s news of another mass shooting in Chicago. Happy Independence Day.

    From the Wagon Hill peninsula

    Things have changed so much in the past three years since my husband David’s death:  I long to hear his take on what the great American experiment has come to in this moment; I compose mental lists of these changes, from the macro to the micro:  the pandemic, the Biden presidency, the attack on the Capitol, the Supreme Court’s taking the nation back to the Articles of Confederation; my trip to India, my retirement, the water damage to our library ceiling, my new car.  I look for commonalities emerging from my most recent journey:  time spent with dear friends, some grieving spouses, some grieving lost children, all concerned by the state of academia, the country, their own families.  All the promise inspiring those civic-minded titans of the gilded age–Grove building the Arcade in Asheville, Schenck restoring the Guildford Courthouse Revolutionary battlefield in Greensboro, Barnes in a Philadelphia suburb devoting his wealth and energy to making art accessible, believing that an aid to democracy–feels impossibly naïve in light of the structural racism underlying the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg, qualifying our admiration for the “enlightened” Thomas Jefferson, and seemingly resulting in the resurgence of white supremacy movements like the Patriot Front who paraded through downtown Boston yesterday.

    Great Bay seen from the peninsula

    Our country’s natural beauty is astounding, its promise equally so.  My local surroundings are beautiful, as these photos from nearby Wagon Hill Farm illustrate.  Here in Madbury I have a resident turkey hen, who the other morning took care to teach her two chicks how to take a dirt bath in the corner of a mulched bed a snapping turtle had earlier scooped out for her eggs.

    On the Wagon Hill trail, late afternoon

    I’m looking for profundity in the mundane—and almost, almost finding it.

    Wagon Hill Farm Homestead, Durham NH

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