Georgeann Murphy

Practical Humanism and the Will to Live

  • Southern Sojourn Day 19: 31 May 2022 Narberth PA > Madbury NH

    Narberth’s Thai Bistro across from the GET Café, awaiting setup

    My final travel day is a long one, though it begins well enough with coffee at the GET café in downtown Narberth, a short walk from Ann and Barry’s home.  The café is staffed by disabled workers who work carefully, deliberately, and cheerfully to get every order right, and after a couple of attempts, they do.  A fine, important opportunity for both staff and patrons to practice inclusiveness, this GET café.  We take our coffee and croissant, together with uplifted spirits, to a sidewalk table across from the Thai restaurant whose proprietor clearly has a green thumb.  Good for Narberth.

    Back home, Connor again assists with my suitcases, and I take off, at first alarmed by a persistent thumping that I fear means a flat tire.  After a few blocks, however, this abates, and I chalk the noise up to my GTI’s having been stationary, parked on the same hot pavement unmoved for two days.  I fire up (curiously antiquated metaphor for electronics!) the gps, and Google gal gets me through Philadelphia and into Princeton surprisingly quickly.  My intention is to retrace my original route south, and head north from Princeton to the Tappan Zee bridge, but somehow, I cannot find my way onto Route 206 north, and end up on the dreaded approach to the George Washington Bridge spanning the Hudson in a nightmarish tangle of traffic allowing for no exit.  Less than ideal, this.

    I cope by kicking my request for assistance up a notch from Google gal, asking right out loud for supernatural protection from David and all the ancestors gone before.  That (or something else) works, and I do make it all the way home with only gas prices ($5.849 per gallon at my last stop) to complain about. 

    Just outside Danbury, CT, 31 May 2022

    It’s a grueling 8-hour drive, the longest I’ve been behind the wheel on a single day this trip, having sworn off the 13-14-hour jaunts of my youth.  Google gal does help me avoid tailbacks on both I-495 and I-95, however, diverting me toward Manchester and Routes 101 and 127, the very familiar—and easy–way home from Manchester Airport.  I get back before sundown, fill the bird feeders, and with celebratory glass of wine in hand, survey the grass that needs cutting before dinner back at my grandparents’ dining table, feeling grateful.

    Home again. Back to all the comforts and responsibilities of that home, back to taking up once again the burden of organizing my solo life; it is the third anniversary of my husband’s death.   I will think about that, and lessons learned over the past 19 days, looking for correspondences and insights, for the next month and beyond.

  • Southern Sojourn Day 18: 30 May 2022 Narberth PA > Philadelphia PA and back

    Proud Firemen Parade, Narberth PA

    It is Memorial Day, and as we finish our breakfast on the porch (bagels, cream cheese, smoked salmon, and fruit), the wheeze of bagpipes wafts from downtown, so we hurry to catch the parade in progress. 

    Traditional bagpipes and drum . . .
    . . . and local Pride

    Enjoying that, and the hipster/Thornton Wilder-esque hybrid downtown, Ann proposes the next diversion, a trip to the Barnes Foundation in downtown Philadelphia.

    2000 Block Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia

    The Barnes houses one of the world’s greatest collections of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Modern Art, all displayed salon style, with Barnes’s curious accompanying collection of hardware, both paintings and fixtures arranged not chronologically but rather paired for the formal correspondences that Barnes believed could teach the uneducated viewer how to look at art. 

    Salon-Style display at the Barnes
    Paul Cézanne
    The Church of Saint-Aspais Seen from the Place de la Préfecture at Melun
    Grasshopper Gator?

    The Barnes was founded in 1922 by Albert Coombs Barnes (1872-1951), a chemist and business man who (like his counterpart gilded age pharmacist Edwin Wily Grove in Asheville) made his fortune by co-developing a tonic, Argyrol, an antiseptic silver compound that was used to combat gonorrhea and inflammations of the eye, ear, nose, and throat, and prevented blindness in babies born to syphilitic mothers.  He sold his business, the A.C. Barnes Company, just months before the stock market crash of 1929, and devoted himself to philanthropy.

    Barnes had begun collecting art as early as 1902, but became a serious collector in 1912, assisted by his Philadelphia Central High School classmate, artist William Glackens.  On an art buying trip to Paris, he visited the home of siblings Gertrude and Leo Stein, and purchased his first two paintings by Matisse.  Eventually, his collection grew so large that he was housing some of these priceless canvases in his employee’s homes.  In 1908, Barnes organized his company as a cooperative, devoting two hours of the work day to seminars for his employees, who read philosophers William James, Georges Santayana, and John Dewey, the latter of whom he had met in a seminar at Colombia University in 1917.  Dewey became a close friend and collaborator for more than three decades.  Barnes conceived of his Foundation as more school than museum, believing like Dewey (and like the undergraduate research program I used to coordinate) that learning should be experiential.   The Foundation classes included experiencing original art works, participating in class discussion, reading about philosophy and the traditions of art, as well as looking objectively at the artists’ use of light, line, color, and space. Barnes believed that students would not only learn about art from these experiences, but that they would also develop their own critical thinking skills, enabling them to become more productive members of a democratic society.  He had much in common with Centre College’s now-defunct Humanities Program, it seems.  Oh, Mr. Barnes!  How much we need your influence in these latter days!

    Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, architects, 2012

    I am made wistful thinking of how far from such democratically inspired philanthropy we have fallen in our era of Zuckerberg and Musk.  And as the young docent presents to us her gallery talk, I am reminded of the previous night’s conversation and Barry’s conviction that there is no will that can’t be broken.  I learn from Wikipedia that Barnes created detailed terms of operation in an indenture of trust to be honored in perpetuity after his death. These included limiting public admission to two days a week, so the school could use the art collection primarily for student study, and prohibiting the loan of works in the collection, colored reproductions of its works, touring the collection, and presenting touring exhibitions of other art.  Matisse is said to have hailed the school as the only sane place in America to view art.

    After Barnes’s death, however, decades of legal battles ensued, and (as Barry had said) Barnes’s bequest to Lincoln University, the nation’s first historically black college and university, was broken.  Despite legal challenges to moving the Barnes collection from its original home in Merion to Philadelphia, construction for the new building began in fall 2009, and the gorgeous new building opened in May 2012 with galleries designed to replicate the scale, proportion, and configuration of the original galleries in Merion.  Truly, I can see why the building won the 2013 AIA Institute Honor Award for Architecture, the 2013 Building Stone Institute Tucker Award, and the Barnes Foundation the 2012 Apollo Award for Museum Opening of the Year.

    Leaving the Barnes
    OLIN, landscape architect

    I am certain Barnes would have approved of the scan-and-click technology that dispenses with gallery labels and in their place presents the viewer equipped with a smart phone detailed information about every piece in the collection.  There’s so much to see and absorb–a head-exploding trove, in fact.  After a couple of hours, Ann and I share tea and a savory brioche in the café, and head for home via the Smith Memorial Arch, a Civil War monument in Fairmount Park with an acoustically remarkable “whispering bench,” conducting the quietest utterance from one end of its curving walls to the other without electronic intervention.  We also drive by the original Barnes Foundation in Merion.  Now leased along with its adjoining arboretum by Saint Joseph’s University for $100 a year, it retains its original educational purpose. 

    It’s been a full day.  We have another delicious dinner—shrimp and rice, salad, and more blonde brownies—on the porch, and Ann gives me three books to pack up and take home with me the next day, part of the ongoing informal book exchange that has become standard among all my academic friends with TOO MANY BOOKS! 

    I think Barnes would approve of that, too.

    , ,

  • Southern Sojourn Day 17: 29 May 2022 Williamsburg VA > Narberth PA

    At home in Narberth PA

    Driving from Sandy’s through heavy traffic ‘round the District I am more than ever grateful for Google assistance with navigation—certainly a godsend for a solo driver in a strange land.  In the late afternoon, I arrive in Narberth, a suburb of Philadelphia on the historic Pennsylvania Main Line with a population of 4,304, one of Philly’s most desirable neighborhoods, a cozy half square mile borough well known for a charming downtown, good schools, and low crime.  Niche, the website that rates schools, companies, and neighborhoods, gives Narberth an A+ rating.  And indeed, as I arrive on the Sunday before Memorial Day, the home I pull up to is a three-story Queen Anne in a neighborhood lifted straight out of Our Town. 

    View from the porch, my GTI and the house across the street in leafy Narberth

    Connor, Barry and Ann’s son, is the first to see me and after introducing himself offers to carry my bags up the rather daunting three flights of steps to my guest room at the top of the house—a service for which I am VERY grateful.  Barry and Ann have just returned from visiting relatives in Barry’s native Ireland, and Barry is on the phone with his brother there when Ann greets me.  She and Barry are part of my Tulane grad school gang, and though both also got PhDs in English there, Barry went on to the Tulane Law School, and remains a professor at Temple University’s Beasley School of Law.  Ann also teaches at Temple, writing, literature, and most recently business ethics, and both spent several enjoyable years working in Tokyo, where Barry was Director of the Law Program at Temple University Japan.  We three met up for the first time in years in New York City in early April, saw the new Letts play, and had a long, lovely dinner of reminiscing after.  Now I’m taking them up on their invitation to make a visit at the end of my southern sojourn on my way back to New Hampshire.

    The heat in Narberth is the reverse of what I’d expected:  it was actually cooler in usually steamy Greensboro, North Carolina than farther north, but I’m grateful for a reason to have the dinner Ann’s prepared out on the generous porch of an earlier era.

    Ever-elegant Ann of Ponchatoula LA on her PA front porch
    Barry and son Connor on a perfect spring evening

    Indeed, our situation reminds me of evenings on the porch of my grandparents’ Tudor revival home on Springbrook Boulevard in Dayton, Ohio, where after dinner in summer the neighborhood kids would eventually drift home from pickup games of Red Rover on the front yard and settle onto their respective porches as the fireflies came out and some of the adults told stories while others enjoyed their evening smoke. 

    Ann’s meal is delicious, crab cakes, rice, salad, and blonde brownies, and in the gloaming, in addition to grad school tales, Barry speaks of what the law can and can’t do (“There is no will that can’t be broken”) and how he makes good use of his legal and literary training, sometimes teaching poetry forensically, instructing students to look for evidence of what the poet was thinking.  I keep thinking of the old tv series Paper Chase, with patrician John Houseman as Professor Kingsfield intoning at each episode’s beginning:  “You teach yourselves the law, but I train your minds.  You come here with a skull full of MUSH, and—if you survive—you leave thinking like a lawyer.”  I doubt Barry intimidates the way Kingsfield did, but I’m sure his students DO learn to think better than they did before they took his class. 

    Both Barry and Ann were sorry to leave Japan, I’m interested to learn, and plan to return in the fall of 2023.  We speak of another tv show I’ve stumbled onto, Old Enough, a long-running reality show from Japan that follows very young children going on errands all by themselves for the very first time as a camera crew follows along:  stunningly daring parental behavior it seems to me, not only not a helicopter parent, but never a parent at all.  Ann tells of her more careful hybrid American/Japanese parenting, shadowing Connor in a metro car behind the one he was riding, just to be sure all was well.

    It is so good to re-connect with these admirable friends.  When they ask if my guest room is all right and I answer that it is not only fine, but strikes me as Parisian, the idea of comparing Narberth to Paris gets a big laugh. 

    Not Paris . . .

    Yet when I retire to it, the impression of my room persists, and I drift off in my garret with its charming roof-top views from an earlier time:  all turrets and leafy green tree tops.

    . . . but a garret with a view nonetheless

    The view

  • Southern Sojourn Day 16: 28 May 2022 Colonial Williamsburg > Jamestown

    Bridge across the swamp to the Jamestown Rediscovery archaeological dig

    After breakfast, Sandy drives me to Colonial Williamsburg—CW to the cognoscenti—where she is In Her Element, and gives me a private tour emphasizing two ongoing archaeological excavations. The first, “Custis Square,” is uncovering the physical evidence left behind by (1) John Custis IV, father-in-law to Martha Washington, whose first husband, Daniel Parke Custis, was John’s son; (2) his family; and (3) the enslaved people who lived on that land between 1714 and 1749.  Custis was (according to the explanatory sign) “a scientifically curious gardener who mixed local plants with English imports to create a formal garden described in 1734 as ‘[i]nferior to few if any in Vir[gini]a.’”  What today seems an open field was once gardens that featured shaped topiary, lead statuary, and gravel-lined walks tended and maintained by enslaved men and women; Custis owned more than 200 slaves, as well as several other Virginia plantations totaling thousands of acres.  Custis Square was his townhome.  Custis, it seems, was something of a difficult (Custis=cussed?) man, whose infamous arguments with his wife Frances Parke required intervention in the form of written “Articles of Agreement.”  He was slow to approve his son Daniel’s marriage to Martha (née Dandridge and later Washington’s wife), and is widely believed to have fathered by his enslaved woman, Alice, a son named Jack who was in Curtis’s will emancipated and promised a house and land–which he unfortunately did not live long enough to receive.

    Custis Square, Colonial Williamsburg

    The second excavation Sandy interprets for me is the site of the Historic First Baptist Church–Nassau Street, founded in secret and defiance of local law in 1776, by one of the nation’s oldest African-American congregations, and hidden under a parking lot for decades.  The Church’s “Freedom Bell,” cast in 1886 to mark the Williamsburg Church’s 100th anniversary, was refurbished to be rung at the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. on 24 September 2016, when 99-year-old Ruth Odom Bonner, daughter of Mississippi slave Elijah Odom, joined the Obamas onstage to ring that emblem of African-American resilience.

    Ruth Odom Bonner, her family, and the Obamas ring the Freedom Bell
    (photo by Leah L Jones for the NMAAHC)

    As Sandy explains what has gone on and what is yet to come at the excavation, a young man stops to listen, and when Sandy invites him to join us, introduces himself as Alex Daniels, a rising senior history major at William & Mary who has worked extensively in its archives and is writing his capstone thesis on the foundation of Colonial Williamsburg as the displacement of the at-the-time majority black community, dismissed by the CW founders as “undesirable elements” from which CW should be “liberated.”  The ironies of such language expressed in documents young Alex has found speak volumes, the gobsmacking collusion of both Rockefellers and William and Mary educators.

    Alex and Sandy at the Historic First Baptist Church site

    We go on to spend hours in the 1715 Bruton Parish Church cemetery, its monument to “Mammy Sarah” juxtaposed to the company of this bright, articulate young man eager to out past injustices. 

    With his arm in a cast from a skating accident, Alex is bursting to expound on his research—and, most flatteringly, to ask advice of us.  That advice:  his capstone beggars many dissertations, and should go straight to publication!  Alex’s bright academic future cheers both Sandy and me—me especially, now two years into retirement and away from the thrilling conversations I once had with UNH’s very best undergrads about their research in fields I often knew nothing of.  I miss those chats and those kids, and Alex, in many ways, immediately becomes a highlight of my road trip, a scintillating ray of youthful hope in our country’s dark days.

    By the time we part with Alex at the Church, I’m hungry, so we share a sandwich at the CW Cheese Shop before driving on the Colonial Parkway to the Jamestown Rediscovery archaeological dig, baking in the bright sun next to the James River.  Once arrived, you approach by foot on a bridge crossing a swamp best viewed from above, the first evocation of the terrible trials that befell those Virginia Company settlers who landed on Jamestown Island in May 1607 to establish the first North American English colony 60 miles from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.  First, the malaria-infested swamp water laced with arsenic (!), then the starving time, cannibalism, and sporadic attacks from the native Powhatan tribe.  We walk past the Ambler Mansion (c. 1750) ruins, thrice burned, first in the Revolutionary War, again in the Civil War, and finally abandoned after a third fire in 1895, further testament to hard times and a veneer of civilization as thin as the remaining stone facing on the brick foundation. 

    We watch a handsome Native American with a gift for presentation explain the construction of buckskin apparel—and the necessity of cooperation and codes of behavior strictly enforced within a tribe, as banishment from one’s people in so harsh an environment meant certain death.  A lesson for our Balkanized nation? 

    A lesson in buckskin couture
    Captain John Smith addresses the James River, in front of the 1608 church where Pocahontas married John Rolfe on 5 April 1614

    We make a quick tour of the archaeological museum just before closing time, and head back to “civilization” for a wonderful feast at Greek restaurant Keφi, a cold pikilia platter with taramasalata, melitzanosalata, and tzatziki on a bed of arugula with kalamata olives, dolmades, and grilled pita, keftedes and kalamari with skordalia accompanied by a delicious Honey Golden Ale, and finally a slice of delicious orange semolina cake, portokalopita, for dessert.

    Greek feast at Keφi after historic Jamestown: back to the classics

    Back home we speak of missing our late, loving husbands, Alan and David, and the company of men in general, and confess how long it took each of us to appreciate the autoeroticism of fancy underwear.  Sandy, despite her seemingly unassailable good health and youthful looks, is, like Cameron, considering a move from her lovely home with its many steps.  Ever reasonable, she’s concluded if you want to age in place, you will be stuck at home if you can’t negotiate steps.  In an unrelated act of generosity, she makes a gift to me:  a set of “yoga toes,” the better to straighten and stretch our bunions. 

    And so, to bed.

    ,

  • Southern Sojourn Day 15: 27 May 2022 Greensboro NC > Williamsburg VA

    Colonial Williamsburg VA

    I’ve visited my friend Sandy in Williamsburg before, but previously approached from the north.  This time, my path is from the south, much more rural, and at one point driving the increasingly flat and fertile terrain I get stuck at a railroad crossing as a long freight train proceeds slowly, almost to its caboose, and then backs up for another disappointing five minutes before rolling out of the way.  Fine by me:  it gives me a chance to text Sandy of a slightly delayed arrival.  Once across the tracks, I drive along Route 5 in Charles City County, taking me past five of the James River plantations:  Sherwood Forest, Westover, Shirley, Evelynton, and Berkeley.  I stop at none; I had visited Westover before with David, my architectural historian husband, decades before, and I’m eager to reach Sandy.  But the very word “plantation” conjures my memory of how much I have in the past enjoyed touring such sites along the Mississippi—once with my dear daddy.  I had packed an elegant picnic lunch, complete with wine and some very fancy pastries from a fine New Orleans patisserie, La Bonbonniere, where German master baker Hans Fink once told me how much more sugar he had to add to his recipes to appease American tastes.  Well, my dad and I enjoyed those too-sweet-for-Euro palates treats under a venerable live oak outside Houmas House in Darrow, Louisiana.  For years after, I carried a voucher for a future discount at Houmas House in my wallet, a memento of that day and the tantalizing promise of a future visit.  I DID go back once again with David, the other prince in my life, this time focused on the symbolism of all the Greek revival mansions along the Mississippi, temple houses that effectively made gods of their owners.  That time, too, I recall with pleasure; a photo David took of me standing in Oak Alley was a favorite he kept in his UNH office.

    A younger me at Oak Alley, Vacherie LA, March 1994

    When we returned to Oak Alley many years later, things were quite different.  David had changed, prey to the debilitating anxiety that beset him at the end of 2007.  But more significantly for the Big Picture, slave quarters had become part of Oak Alley’s permanent exhibit.  I quote from the website:

    Located on the historic grounds, almost exactly where the original [enslaved] community stood, 6 reconstructed cabins give insight into their lives and habits. 4 of the Cabins depict a type of dwelling–a field slave’s quarters, a house slave’s quarters, a sick house and a post-emancipation residence. 2 have been converted to exhibit spaces, inviting visitors to understand slave life on a more personal level. Displays here focus on religion, punishment, how slaves at Oak Alley were clothed, and the work that consumed their daily lives.

    What does it mean “to understand slave life on a more personal level”?  This “correction” to a tourist attraction is part of a very belated racial reckoning I’m thinking of as I drive past the long lanes leading to the James River plantations, considering how the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and subsequent battles over school curricula, with their ignorant pushback about Critical Race Theory and systemic racism, find our country so far from the promise I naively, briefly believed we had come close to fulfilling by electing Barack Obama:  redressing America’s original sin of slavery.

    The web site promoting the James River Plantations I pass is also trying to address history that was either previously ignored or completely re-written, its promotion including a dash of black history:

    Charles City has been home to Indians and early settlers, planters, signers of the Declaration of Independence, Presidents, slaves, emancipators and free blacks, educators and agriculturalists. Descendants of these significant figures in American history still live in the county today.

    Benjamin Harrison, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and Presidents William Henry Harrison and John Tyler were born and lived here. General Robert E. Lee spent much of his childhood here. Agriculturist Edmund Ruffin, who fired the first shot of the Civil War, practiced his innovative techniques on Charles City soil. Lott Cary, the first black American missionary to Africa and founding father of Liberia, was born here. One of the first free black communities in America was located in Charles City, as well as the third oldest organized free black church.

    I’m thinking, too, of the powerful, even shocking Tracy Letts play I saw in April in New York, The Minutes, about the atavistic tribalism that underlies how we tell, revise, and even celebrate a bloody history.

    (Note the American eagle mask on a carrion-consuming crow)

    So, once again, on Route 5, I am driving through personal and national history, headed for Williamsburg, looking for America, and eager to see my friend Sandy, a specialist in eighteenth-century literature and a tour guide in Historic Williamsburg. She will not only connect me to the turbulent times we shared as graduate students, but conduct me to places I first knew as a child introduced to all the charm of Colonial Williamsburg before “colonial” had taken on its current pejorative odor.  Indeed, my parents tried their best to recreate colonial style by painting their cement block Florida ranch house in official Williamsburg paint colors.  For me, then, Williamsburg was all about molasses cookies, the pervasive scent of boxwood (I thought that the smell of old brick houses), a child’s tricorn hat, and a souvenir horseshoe with my name banged into it by an employee reenacting a smithy’s life.  I am about to see things through different eyes.

    But first, I arrive to Sandy’s gracious welcome, her lovely condo, and a visit/generous pour of wine with a couple of neighbors. One, Martha, is a fellow retired academic who is surprised to hear that Sandy’s and my little support group of Women Against Dissertation (WAD) had united to brave the many difficulties manufactured by Tulane’s graduate faculty—with, I proudly note, uniform success: all WADees earned our PhDs and tenure. Martha apparently had an easier time of negotiating the perils of grad school, though perhaps that left her with  fewer interesting war stories:  trials recollected in tranquility = comedy.  Sandy makes us a fine boiled dinner of shrimp, sausage, potatoes, and fresh corn, we reminisce, and I retire to her lovely guest suite.

    ,

  • Southern Sojourn Day 14: 26 May 2022 Greensboro NC

    “Greene is as dangerous as Washington; I never feel secure when encamped in his neighborhood.” –Lord Cornwallis

    My final day in Greensboro began again with yoga, followed by a drive around three different senior living facilities, all of them massive.  Provisions for aging boomers abound, it seems, particularly in the South; retirement communities are legion.  Cameron is considering another move to a place that would best accommodate and provide for the final stages of life, something everyone of a certain age is either considering or in denial about.  My plan, inasmuch as it IS a plan, is my determination to stay in our Madbury home, Gnawwood, which so delights and consoles me with its architectural choices all so carefully considered and rendered, the natural beauty of its setting, its store of memories, and all the visits from local critters:  the deer who grace the lawn and despoil the vegetation, the snapping turtle who lays her eggs here each June, the hummingbirds who entertain with their complex social interactions just outside my kitchen window, and the more rare surprise visits—a porcupine who so tentatively approached the dining room window last evening, or the first flash of a Baltimore Oriole’s bright orange plumage at the feeder.  Living at home, exclusively on the ground floor, would be possible with some rearranging of furniture, though we did design our three stories to accommodate a residential elevator. But I think my dad’s prognostication about that accurate:  such a disruptive installation is something we’d never do.  Of course, maintaining the house and grounds requires a good deal of time, money, and energy, and that’s just maintaining the residence;  what services, what care will the body electric need?  Difficult to consider.  Will it be easier for those of us, like me and like Cameron, without children?  Or harder?  Easier, I think.

    But it’s even easier not to think about what’s to come and just tick off errands on today’s to do list.  We go to Lowe’s and do a drive-by selection of a nice flowering plant for Cameron’s little patio—another mandevilla, as it happens, which I’m happy to make a gift.  Then to the grocery, Harris Teeter, for a bottle to carry to my next host.

    When we realize how close we are to the Guildford Courthouse Military Park, Cameron gives me an extended driving tour and a bit of history.  The Park’s 250-acre landscape encompasses the core of the battlefield where the armies of General Charles, Earl Cornwallis and General Nathanael Greene met on 15 March 1781 in one of the major Southern Campaign battles of the Revolutionary War.  Greensboro is uncommonly, lushly green and fecund this spring, but the town is named not for its verdant display, but for the general under whose command the ferocious Americans achieved a victory within a defeat.  The Battle of Guildford Court House raged for two and a half hours before Greene ordered his troops to retreat, giving the British a tactical success, but enabling Greene’s army to remain mostly intact.  Cornwallis’s victory, he knew, was pyrrhic, more than a quarter of his men killed, wounded, or captured;  “I never saw such fighting since God made me. The Americans fought like demons” he wrote.  Greene’s strategy changed the course of the Southern Campaign, and made possible the Americans’ shocking victory over the British and the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown on 19 October 1781, the last major land battle of the War. 

    Greensboro resident Judge David Schenck had a strong desire “to redeem the battlefield from oblivion,” his words from a December 1886 diary entry.  By that time, the area was an unindustrialized rural landscape.  The location of the battlefield, about an hour’s ride from the small town of Greensboro, was largely forgotten to area residents.  After purchasing part of the battlefield, Schenck convinced local businessmen to join his cause and established the Guilford Battleground Company (GBC). The GBC prioritized the beautification and ornamentation of the battlefield.  In 1917, stewardship of the battlefield passed to the War Department, and in 1933, under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, transferred to the National Park Service who maintain it now. 

    Greene Monument, Guilford Courthouse Military Park, Greensboro

    Battlefields are complex terrain, and this one, clearly favored by walkers, joggers, and bikers, is no exception.  My dad, the Civil War buff, made Gettysburg and the story of Pickett’s Charge and the Angle Copse a vivid memory from my childhood:  seeing the long grass of that blood-fed field ripple and part with the evening breeze as the sun sank over Cemetery Ridge conjured ghosts of soldiers marching through it to their destiny.  Stopping now to read inscriptions on monuments to Greene–and to Schenck and other earnest nineteenth-century citizens dedicated to preserving glorious history—I return again to despondent thoughts of my country’s currently degraded condition.  Would citizen soldiers today “fight like demons” to protect their homeland—as Ukrainians continue to do even as I type this, as American patriots once did?  Does anyone even know our history?  My colleague Lisa reported an undergraduate asking her whether in World War II we were allies with the French or the Germans.  And so many Americans still under the spell of the grifter former president Trump believe the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen, remaining wedded to a delusion that no amount of carefully documented evidence to the contrary can dispel.  Where are we headed, this Memorial Day weekend of 2022?  What, indeed, are we remembering? The Guilford Courthouse Park leaves me pessimistically pensive.

    But lunch at home beckons.  I pack up the GTI for tomorrow’s drive into Virginia and take a walk while Cameron practices her violin, and then enjoy being treated to dinner out at Lucky 32 Southern Kitchen:  “earnest food and hospitality in an upscale joint.”  My “earnest food” is fried catfish and greens, served by an earnestly eager young waiter.  Dessert is chocolate chip cookies taken at home while watching a tv show about the National Spelling Bee.  And so, to bed.

  • Southern Sojourn Day 13: 25 May 2022 Greensboro NC

    Temptation on display at the Delicious Bakery in Greensboro NC

    For the first time since leaving home, I take time to do my accustomed morning yoga routine on the soft living room carpet while Cameron practices her violin behind me.  This feels very good, both the stretching and the company. 

    Cameron practicing

    Then Cameron drives us to the huge YMCA downtown, where after filling out a rather extensive visitor information sheet, I am admitted as a guest to swim in the lap pool while Cameron “hangs” in an adjacent pool and chats with her trainer, Julie, for an hour, which grants her considerable if temporary relief from pain, I think by decreasing gravity’s compression of her spinal column.  I have a lap lane all to myself, and it is the first time in a very long while since I’ve been in an Olympic-sized pool.  I wonder if I am up to swimming 50-metre lengths back and forth for an hour, but manage it pretty handily (with a VERY slow breast stroke) for 45 minutes before joining Cameron in the therapy pool.  Neither pool is crowded, and I wonder what the average age of the few swimmers would be; except for the young life guards, the only people there are either elderly (like me, or apparently older) or kids first learning to swim.  Mitigated gravity is a great thing, and I recall how the boring repetitiveness of swimming laps in the Tulane pool after spending a day cramming for my doctoral oral exam was a much-needed de-stressor, allowing time for all I’d been studying to settle into my brain while simultaneously stretching out posture cramped by being hunched for hours over a carrel desk.  I enjoy watching two little boys at their instructor’s urging braving jumping into the deep end for the first time, and recall the St. Pete country club, Holiday Park, my parents joined to ensure that both their Floridian daughters would know how to swim.  Swimming turned out to be a graduation requirement at Furman University years later.  So glad I was given that head start.

    From the pool and my first experience of a machine that extracted water from wet suits (great idea!), we stopped at a drugstore so I could replace the shampoo containers I had inadvertently left behind in the Asheville Best Western Glo, after which we got slices of cake at a bakery named Delicious (another great idea:  a place that sells slices of gorgeous layer cakes), picked up another dinner from Reto’s catering:  tomato chicken and broccoli, with my slice of choice, salted caramel (another first!) for dessert.  We talk, Cameron and I, of ultimate things for a while after dinner—serious conversation comes so easily with this good friend.

    Words and images worth remembering on the fridge

    And then I retire to my comfy guest bed to watch a couple episodes of the streaming series that’s recently captured my interest, Bosch.  Viewing screens late into the evening is not good sleep hygiene, I know, but the plot twists and moral ambiguities that the appealing title character, a preternaturally gifted and empathetic detective, negotiates are too compelling to log out of early.  I am able to read myself to sleep soon after—all that swimming helps.  It’s been another low-key, restful day, a boon at the end of two weeks on the road, and I am grateful.

  • Southern Sojourn Day 12: 24 May 2022 Asheville > Greensboro NC

    Sullivan’s Lake Townhome Community, Greensboro NC

    The morning is clear, and as I pack up to leave, the sun shining through the Best Western window catches an accidental prism somewhere that refracts the light into its constituent wavelengths, filling my open suitcase with Roy G. Biv’s rainbow—the mnemonic I learned from David:  red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.  I think of the 1960 Disney film Polyanna, with Hayley Mills in the eponymous title role, getting the acidic recluse Mr. Pendergast (or is it the hypochondriac Mrs. Snow?) to string the decorative crystal drops on a lamp across a window to fill his room with rainbows.  Hayley Mills and that film made a big impression on me:  in the fourth grade, I got a haircut identical to Hayley Mills’s in The Parent Trap, and had a locket like the one she wore as Polyanna, when she converts the pessimism of the town’s fire-and-brimstone Rev. Ford (played by Karl Malden) by showing him her locket’s inscription:  “If you look for the bad in mankind expecting to find it, you surely will.  A. Lincoln.”  Mr. Lincoln was my father George’s hero, and that quotation stuck with me.  Now, this morning, my dad, Abraham Lincoln, Hayley Mills, and my sweet David all seem to suggest it will be a fine day.  Signs and wonders.

    The drive through the mountains to the Piedmont is lovely, and I stop for breakfast at a McDonald’s, the “big breakfast” of scrambled eggs, sausage patty, potato cake, and biscuit:  way too many calories, but delicious, a treat I used to award myself on the occasional Sunday in graduate school days.  I don’t think I’ve had it since, but it tastes VERY good.  And a fellow customer, a man, holds the door open for me in a most courtly manner when I leave.  Another southernism?

    As I approach Greensboro—it is so much bigger than I recalled from an earlier visit, population over 300,000, with multiple highways to match—news breaks of the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas:  19 children and 2 teachers dead.  This is the second mass shooting since I left home on the 13th:  the supermarket shooting in Buffalo happened on 14 May.  I’ve not heard much news since I’ve been on the road, but this penetrates.  What is WRONG with us?

    When I pull into my friend Cameron’s development, she comes out to greet me as I pull into the parking spot that her directions have made crystal clear is for me.  She’s using her Rollator walker, but that doesn’t impede her warm welcome—characteristic of this dear friend.  Cameron and I are both widows, once married to good friends, my David and her Russell, who met when they were both studying music at the University of Michigan.  David’s path branched toward art history, but Russell’s continued on to a successful career as a composer, whose works were frequently programed by the summer New Hampshire Music Festival conducted by Paul Polivnick, a great admirer of Russell’s music.  Cameron and I hit it off from the moment David introduced us, and we four spent several jolly summer weekends together in New Hampshire’s lake district, close to one of the several satellite UNH campuses hosting the Festival.  We’d spend hours floating in the lake chatting, then dress for dinner and the concert, after which David and I would spend the night as guests in one of the lakeside cabins Russell and Cameron rented—including one terrifying night when a ferocious lightning and thunder storm rolled through, convincing us all that if a bolt hit one of the adjacent towering firs, we’d all be goners. We survived.

    Cameron is the kindest, most level-headed, and bravest person I know.  Losing Russell was a cruel blow, but neither her first nor the last.  A professional French horn player, she had to give that up when she lost her embouchure, and throughout her life has been afflicted by a multitude of impairments, illnesses, and chronic pain.  Yet she perseveres, calmly, uncomplainingly, logically pursuing solutions to whatever problems arise, and now continues her life in music by learning to play the violin.  In October 2019 she flew from Greensboro to help me manage David’s memorial event in our Madbury home, and we have a standing weekly phone call that has been a source of comfort and joy ever since.

    I am so glad to see her in her comfortable, beautifully situated condo.

    I take a little walk around the place to stretch my legs, we have a fine dinner from Reto’s Kitchen, a catering service she patronizes, and together watch the finale of a network tv show I do not know, This Is Us.  I like it—but am surprised by the number of commercials, having now gotten used to the streaming services I’ve discovered ever since COVID shut us all down in 2020.  Cameron’s taken great care outfitting her guest room with bedding for every guest’s comfort, layers of lovely sheets and blankets of variable thickness that can be heaped or discarded to accommodate the sleeper’s preferred temperature, and her guest bathroom is stocked with every conceivable toiletry a guest might have left behind.  I feel very much at home.

  • Happy Birthday, Virginia

    Virginia (30) and Georgy (14 mon) prepare nuts for Xmas cookies on the front porch of 7101 Date Palm Ave, S, St. Petersburg, Florida, Dec 1953

    Happy Birthday # 99 to

    Virginia Ruth Senseman Murphy

    17 June 1923–2 January 2008

    Artist, Bookkeeper, Family Historian, Seamstress

    Devoted Homemaker

    Beloved Friend, Daughter, Sister, Wife

    Best of Mothers

  • Southern Sojourn Day 11: 23 May 2022 Asheville NC

    The Grove Arcade, 1929, Downtown Asheville, Charles N. Parker, architect

    The rain has continued into the morning, but Mark, Olivia, and I nevertheless head to downtown Asheville for breakfast at the Early Girl before I return Mark to the Beaucatcher Road bungalow where he is working on installing crown molding in the living room. 

    Mark at the Early Bird

    He and Susan are hoping to put their little cottage on the market soon, so Mark is working against the clock—and, to some extent—against “extreme nostalgia,” as so much of their family history, and all of the twins’ childhood, happened there. Mark is a talented craftsman; the house will be in its best-ever shape when they leave it for their new home.

    Mark’s handiwork: an elegant new entrance gate and deck

    Having visited periodically over the last two decades, I, too, can easily conjure up—perhaps more than those living there continuously—scenes from the past, as when the front door entrance once served as a diaper-changing venue and two adorable toddlers ruled the roost.

    Once I drop Mark off, I take Olivia back downtown to her job interview at Anthropologie, bemused by Olivia’s using gps—just like me—to find the place.  Ah, the younger generation and their device dependence!  The rain persists, but dropping Olivia off, I find a very convenient place to park nearby, and imagine Grandpa David may have cued the parking gods from the great beyond.  I fill Olivia’s interview time by walking (yes, using Google maps!) to the Grove Arcade, an historic architectural landmark conceived by pioneering Asheville developer Edwin Wily Grove in 1922, and completed in 1929, two years after his death.  An elegant structure, the Arcade claims the distinction of being America’s first indoor shopping mall, the dream of that Gilded Age self-made millionaire.  E. W. Grove (1850-1927) had grown up poor, running a modest little drug business in Paris, Tennessee, when in 1878 he realized that a fortune was the future for anyone who could produce a “tasteless chill tonic,” a suspension of bitter quinine in syrup that could ease, if not cure, the symptoms of malaria, a disease ravaging the South throughout the 19th century.  Grove had himself lost both his youngest daughter Irma and his wife Mary to malaria.  In 1889, Grove’s Chill Tonic was born, and by 1890 sold more bottles than Coca-Cola (see K. C. Cronin’s “Asheville History:  The Legendary E. W. Grove).

    Grove moved his business to St. Louis where he could more easily ship his product throughout the U.S., but the smog and smoke of the factory district there caused Grove chronic respiratory problems.  So with his doctors’ urging in 1897, Grove, his second wife Gertrude, and their two children began spending their summers in Asheville to take the clean mountain air.  In so doing, the Groves were following the lead of George Vanderbilt, who in 1888 had visited Asheville and was so charmed that he began buying up the 125,000 acres that would eventually become the self-sustaining estate, Biltmore, with a 250-room château designed by Richard Morris Hunt surrounded by formal gardens and pastoral landscaping laid out by Frederick Law Olmstead.  Since 1930, when the Vanderbilts first opened it to the public, Biltmore has remained a thriving tourist attraction. My own family visited it often in the late 70’s and 80’s, and once posed before its imposing facade for the Murphy Family Christmas card.

    Back to the enterprising Mr. Grove. By 1907, he had turned his attention from tonic to real estate, having himself acquired 1000 acres of land and created charming residential neighborhoods in North Asheville, now on the National Register of Historic Places.  In the early 20th century, sanitariums and natural beauty were both drawing people to Asheville, but with Grove’s construction of the Grove Park Inn, completed in 1913, tourism won out, inspiring Grove’s Arcade downtown, which after many varied iterations was revitalized and reopened in 2002.  On a rainy Monday, it is a good shelter.

    The Grove Arcade

    When I meet Olivia back at the lucky parking space, we return to the Best Western Glo and revive a tradition begun when she and her sister were wee ones, swimming in the motel pool, in this case a salt water pool that leaves our skin remarkably soft.  Then it’s back to Beaucatcher, where Olivia and I examine some of the family photographs I’ve also brought south to their appropriate home with Susan.  When she returns from her work at RiverLink, we all go out to dinner at the Copper Kettle, where again I am propelled back to the past, remembering an earlier dinner there after a flight down to Asheville disrupted by weather that delayed our arrival by a full day.  David bought me a flocked scarf from a local craftswoman showing her wares there. 

    Is it ever possible to experience the present uninflected by memory?  I think not.

    The rain has let up and in the midst of goodbyes, I leave my umbrella in the family car, but Susan has it waiting for me, hanging from the mailbox, when I swing by to pick it up on my way to Ingles for peanut butter and cash for the road ahead.  A stranger behind me in line volunteers his Ingles rewards number on hearing I am a visitor who doesn’t have one, and the very elderly but very kind cashier helps me get the cash back I need.  Again, the kindness of strangers.  I head back to the garish Glo, wondering what E. W. Grove would make of the Asheville he departed just five years shy of a century ago.  Would he be wrestling the past as much as I am?