Georgeann Murphy

Practical Humanism and the Will to Live

  • Southern Sojourn Day 4: 16 May 2022 Woodbridge VA > Charleston WV

    Packed the car and left Woodbridge, phone functioning (hallelujah), about 10.30 and drove west through the Shenandoah Valley under magnificent clouds and light rain, shafts of light breaking through the blue and grey, making the hills preternaturally green and lush, miles and miles of that fresh green breast of the new world.  I’m singing “Oh, Shenandoah,” though not so well as my sweet daddy did, until the gorgeous approach to West Virginia prompts several choruses of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” 

    Truly, the vistas do seem “almost heaven,” but the news of two racially motivated mass shootings, one in Buffalo, one in Irvine Ca, begs to differ.  At the welcome station, the flag flies at half-staff. 

    The juxtaposition of such spacious, fertile, seemingly endless natural beauty with the actions of “les mauvais singes,” always my late friend Ed Bastian’s sad dismissal of the evil men do, makes what we wicked monkeys get up to even more incomprehensible.

    When I arrive in the industrial outskirts of Charleston WV, the setting of my Comfort Inn on Maccorkle Avenue seems NOT so promising:  neither the huge parking lot nor the graceless façade on one of the Inn’s three buildings bodes well, and I spy an enormous truck stop and a McDonald’s next door. 

    The inside lobby and, finally, the room are, however, new and spotlessly clean, and clearly the Indian family managing the place knows what they are doing.  My second floor room overlooks the Kanawha River, conjuring visions of westward migration that I still recall from How the West Was Won, the 1962 epic—in Cinerama!  Jimmy Stewart piloting a flatboat ‘cross the wide Missouri!

    Kanawha River behind the Comfort Inn, Charleston WV

    With a little phone research I find a pleasant sidewalk restaurant, Pies & Pints, on Capitol Street where my attentive server Shalin serves me a small margherita pie and a glass of Malbec

    after which, fortified, I drive along the river to Cass Gilbert’s imposing 1832 Capitol building for a first look in the raking late afternoon sunlight. 

    Lincoln is very much in evidence here, but so is Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, and the pall of obstructionist Democrat Senator Joe Manchin rather blights what Gilbert called the “reasonable function” and “idealistic character” of a State Capitol, which should “constitute the best evidences of the character of material, success and solidity, culture and civilization of a state.”  O, that our politics and policies lived up to the grandeur of such architecture, or that our present cold civil war were done and the Union preserved.

  • Southern Sojourn Day 3: 15 May 2022 Arlington & Alexandria VA

    Sunday brunch at the Quarterdeck, Arlington VA, 15 May 2022

    Woke early in my Woodbridge guest quarters at 6.30, panicking, bowels loose at the thought of having no working cell phone for the entirely of my odyssey.  Somehow managed to talk myself down, and after a light breakfast followed by a few more futile attempts at fixing my Galaxy S10, I gave up, determined to enjoy the day, which was to begin properly at the Quarterdeck in Arlington, a crab place where Chris and I were to meet up with Chris’s daughter Charlotte for lunch.  We three arrived just as it opened, and headed for a paper-covered picnic table under a red awning laid with small wooden mallets and assorted condiments.  Once we ordered but before we were covered in shell bits dripping with Old Bay-flavored crab juice, Charlotte, both musician and coder, offered her assistance with my phone.  I gratefully accepted, and handed it over minus its pink cover.  In a matter of minutes, clever Charlotte had it sorted out—as the rest of the photos from this happy day can testify.

    Clever Charlotte with proud dad Chris

    O the bliss, Dear Reader, of disaster averted—and at the beginning of a gorgeous spring day in good company with a pile of delicious crabs to smash and eat.  Peripeteia divine!  I used the now restored functions of the phone to cancel the previously scheduled tech appointment at a Target miles away, and we made plans for a much pleasanter way to spend a Sunday afternoon, setting out to bring more crabs to another of Chris’s daughters, Marianne, and her family in Alexandria, husband George and young son Christopher.  Both hard-working attorneys, Marianne and George also had good tips for visitors, and after taking delivery of said crabs, they sent us off to explore Old Town Alexandria.

    A pleasant riverside Sunday afternoon

    The vibe there beside the Potomac resembled a smaller, less touristed version of the Riverwalk area of New Orleans:  street musicians and magicians, sidewalk artists, green space, gelato shops, a paddle wheeler, restaurants, and a one-time torpedo factory reconstituted as both workshops and gallery space for artists.  Another version of swords into plowshares, this, artifacts of destruction replaced by creative art.

    We toured the extensive space, visiting glass artist Alison Sigethy and her dynamic, mesmerizing “sea cores,” and the drip art of Blu Murphy, among other delights.

    Back outside, the treats were audible and gustatory; fast-melting sorbet consumed to Dixieland tunes in the park with Chris, Marianne, George, and young Christopher George, who seemed as taken with the ambiance as I was.

    George and Christopher George
    Grandpa Chris, Christopher, and Marianne

    Another tip from Marianne sent us to Mo Mo’s for a takeaway dinner of extremely elegant and enviable sushi the likes of which are not to be found back in my NH home.

    All in all, ‘twas a glorious ides of May, a victory snatched from the jaws of defeat by three generations of a wonderful family.  After such a day, I was primed to take up my next adventure in good form, and slept soundly through the night.

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  • Southern Sojourn Day 2: 14 May 2022 Princeton NJ > Woodbridge VA

    Prince William Forest Park, Triangle VA, 14 May 2022

    The day began with coffee in lieu of the free breakfast Marriott did not provide once I negotiated a tricky left exit into the Delaware welcome station, “Home of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.”; left exits as political statement?  Surely not.  Traffic got heavier and faster, the traffic patterns more complex, the closer I got to the District, but I had my public radio pals (bless Rick Steves and Scott Simon) and the Google gal to calm and guide me—at least right up until the final turn onto my friend Chris’s street, when Google gal’s voice cut out.  Didn’t matter:  it was a safe arrival and a very warm welcome.  Chris proposed a walk in nearby Prince William Forest Park, 16,000 acres managed by the National Park Service in Triangle VA adjacent to Marine Corps Base Quantico, the largest protected natural area in the metropolitan District of Columbia region, and a “respite of quiet and calm” as advertised, especially welcome after a long, hairy drive.  Chris, retired UNH piano professor, had rehearsed (as performers do!) one of the many walks he has come to know since his move to Woodbridge, and indeed, it was restorative:  immersion in the humid, burgeoning spring green.  When we returned to his home from the park, Chris prepared a glorious antipasto platter for our dinner, and I made a call to Consumer Cellular, my carrier, about my phone’s voice dropping out; the Google assistant wasn’t talking to me when I asked her a question either, so it wasn’t just the gps function.  I’ve always had superior tech assistance from CC, expert, encouraging, and non-condescending to us seniors; the last time I’d called, the tech rep had congratulated me on correctly authenticating who I was by rattling off my identifying numbers:  “Flawless like a doll!” 

    This time, however, I had trouble making clear to the rep what my problem was.  After several attempts to explain, I seemed to have succeeded, and was executing the various steps she recommended until, I suddenly realized, she must have thought I needed the phone to speak to me because I was blind, and had had me initiate the phone’s accessibility function.  Now I was in tech hell:  the phone no longer responded to my swiping or tapping buttons, but instead issued vocal orders I could not understand– “quick tap twice long hold”–in a severe voice that lacked the amiable, mellifluous tones of the Google gal.  I couldn’t back out of this mode.  Neither could the tech rep help me.  I couldn’t even turn the damn thing off.  The best the rep could do was make a next-day (Sunday, of course) appointment for me at a Target store miles away.  The phone kept talking at me; reversing the flip command to “put a sock in it,” I put it in a sock and tried to stave off panic.  At the start of my 2700-mile road trip, I now had a dysfunctional phone:  no gps, no email, no texts, no calling. 

    Attempting to convince myself I could still certainly manage travel—as I had many times before—sans cell phone (I had maps!  Land lines still existed—in some places), I focused on enjoying the antipasto,

    and, after dinner, Chris’s playing. Via You Tube, he introduced me to a gorgeous operatic soprano, Rosa Feola, performing at Wigmore Hall, and I even attempted to play the first of the Schumann Kinderszenen for him.  His piano has an action very different from David’s, impressing me with yet another issue professional touring pianists have to put up with.  I had only phone panic to contend with; sleep, Dear Reader, after the long day came easily.

  • Southern Sojourn Day 1: Madbury NH > Princeton NJ

    Twilight on the Princeton campus, 13 May 2022

    Google maps are great, but how do you contradict the GPS assistant who wants you to take the shortest route when you want to take the longer, less trafficked, and MUCH greener route through the Hudson River valley and across the Tappan Zee (“Tappan” after the Native American sub-tribe of the Delaware/ Lenape people, and “Zee,” Dutch for sea) Bridge?  I fight the objecting Google bongo drums directing me south when I want to go west, and lunch at a rest stop near Washington’s headquarters outside Fishkill NY, contemplating the temporal distance between General Washington and me, texting photos of my roadside still life back to photographer friend Julie in NH.

    Crossing the Hudson reminds me of flying with David in the Warrior 500 feet above the river, self-announcing our way first down the starboard side and then up the port, well below the top of the World Trade Center en route to a friend’s first gallery show in the City:  one of several incentives that prompted David to earn his wings.  Revolutionary and personal history fade in and out, like radio waves of Boston Public Radio’s Jim Braude and Margery Egan giving way to Christian Rock, then Afro-Cuban, then Fauré before I exit to NJ 252 and take a one-way bridge and a long ride along the Delaware & Raritan Canal to reach Princeton, my first night destination.  One small, panic-inducing hiccup:  the first gas station I stopped at declined my VISA card, but accepted another.  Later, in the hotel, both a text and an email from Chase explained why:  Chase didn’t know it was me.  I allayed Chase’s misgivings, paired my cell phone with the Marriott tv (!!!), and searched out a very nice Italian place, Mezzaluna, for a fine dinner in town.

    A stroll through the Princeton campus afterward first invited admiration of the vernacular campus gothic, a glow that gave way to dispiriting thoughts of how this new world version of Oxford and Cambridge was ersatz, something of a theme park:  America has no medieval universities.  Scholarship and learning were held in such high esteem when first universities were founded, borrowing administrative structure and elitism from the Church—the reason Princeton’s library looks like a cathedral.  And yet, UCLA and other colleges now expect adjunct professors to work for free:  doctorate, five years of teaching experience, and letters of recommendation all for a salary of $0.  As a colleague recently observed:  being a professor used to be a good job.  Not to mention student debt, curricular slippage, and 43% of Americans getting their news—their “truth”—from Fox.  Contempt for expertise, facts, data, scientific method has blighted the ivy on those lovely pseudo-gothic walls, and our democracy is imperiled.  What would the Princeton founders have made of digital capitalism?  Whither the Princeton graduates of 2022?  Beautiful campus.  Confounding times.

  • Home again

    Outside Danbury, Connecticut, last fill-up, 31 May 2022

    Leaving Philadelphia at 9 am on 31 May as the temperature climbed to 96o, I arrived back home in Madbury NH to 55o temperatures at 5 pm, three years to the day since the final hours spent with my darling husband David.  I awoke alone this morning to the silence of a house with only one resident sleeper, a change from nearly three past weeks of travel and visits, reminded of that 1 June 2019 with David so recently gone, his absence so raw and still present.  We moved into this house over Memorial Day weekend in 2001; he left it exactly 18 years later.  I am looking for patterns.

    When I got home last evening, I first filled the bird feeder with seed, the suet basket with a fresh cake, and the hummingbird font with sugar water, unpacked the car, poured a glass of wine, and surveyed changes in the yard and garden since I’d left on Friday, 13 May.  The grass needs mowing and the last of the daffodils are long gone.  I’ve missed the lilacs entirely.  The rhododendrons are blooming, at least where the deer haven’t cropped them; there, bright new green foliage has sprouted.  Ditto the azaleas, most of their blossoms similarly ravaged.  The Solomon’s Seals dispatched by deer have allowed the hostas they previously shaded to emerge—including one that most certainly I never planted, now growing across a path, uphill from its fellows, under a pine.  How did it get there?

    My return home unscathed after so many miles, so much traffic, and the koyaanisquatsi of I-95 (How is it we continue to survive the George Washington bridge approach?) seems no less than miraculous, the revelations of travel and reunions with close friends now distant in time and space rendered rich and strange.  I propose, Dear Reader, to consider it all here, in posts of peripatetic epiphanies.  Looking for patterns, and now more than halfway through my 69th year, taking stock seems not only a good idea, but a necessity.

    My Southern Sojourn:

    19 days

    2728 miles

    13 states + D.C.

    21 friends

    3 family

    2 mass shootings (rising to national—however brief—attention)

  • May the 4th be with you . . . .

    Mark Hamill, George Lucas, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford

    Those, Dear Reader, were the days. See “Empire Laid Bare: Making the Original Star Wars Trilogy–in Pictures” in THE GUARDIAN, 3 December 2018.

  • If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.

    3 May 2022
    Demonstrators at the Supreme Court react to news that the Court is poised to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that the U.S. Constitution protects a pregnant woman’s liberty to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction.
    (photo by Francis Chung / E & E News / POLITICO)

    Though often attributed to either Florynce Kennedy or Gloria Steinem, Steinem herself elaborated the provenance of this quotation in a 2006 Boston Globe interview:

    “You know who said that? Years ago [1971], I was in a taxi in Boston or Cambridge. There was an old Irish woman taxi driver. Flo Kennedy, the civil rights activist, was my speaking partner at the time. We were sitting in the back talking about abortion and the taxi driver turned around and she said, ‘Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.’ And I’ve always been so sorry that I didn’t get her name.”

    That taxi driver was spot on.

    (Thanks to the good work of the Quote Investigator)

  • The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.

    Gen. John Sullivan House, Durham, NH, c. 1740

    In “Harry Truman’s History Lessons,” published in Prologue (Spring 2009, Vol.9, No. 1), a magazine featuring articles based on the U.S. National Archives, Samuel W. Rushay, Jr., archivist for the Truman Presidential Museum and Library, asserts what history meant to Harry S. Truman:  both ethical and moral guidance and, most notably as President of the United States during his two terms in office (1945-1953), a tool he used to make decisions.  Plutarch’s Lives (c. 120 CE), Rushay writes, gave Truman the insight that “It was the same with those old birds in Greece and Rome as it is now . . . .  The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.”

    Today, 28 April 2022, is Yom ha-Sho’ah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the 1945 U.S. liberation of the Dachau concentration camp and commemorating the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust.  Falling on the 27th day of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar, Holocaust Remembrance Day also honors the Jewish insurgents inside the Warsaw Ghetto who in 1943 resisted SS and police efforts to deport them in the first significant urban revolt against German occupation in Europe.

    But how much is remembered, or even known?

    On 19 September 2020, The Guardian, like many other news sources, published survey findings of a “shocking” lack of Holocaust knowledge among Millennials and Gen Z:

    “Almost two-thirds of young American adults do not know that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and more than one in 10 believe Jews caused the Holocaust, a new survey has found, revealing shocking levels of ignorance about the greatest crime of the 20th century.

    According to the study of millennial and Gen Z adults aged between 18 and 39, almost half (48%) could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto established during the second world war.

    Almost a quarter of respondents (23%) said they believed the Holocaust was a myth, or had been exaggerated, or they weren’t sure. One in eight (12%) said they had definitely not heard, or didn’t think they had heard, about the Holocaust.”

    More anecdotally, my colleague teaching American students in London recently reported that one of them did not know we were allies with the French, not the Germans, in both WWI and WWII. 

    And then there’s denial that goes beyond either ignorance or amnesia.  As the House committee continues investigating the deadly 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol, an Axios-Momentive poll from January 2022 revealed that more than 40% in the U.S. do not believe President Biden legitimately won the 2020 election.

    Yesterday I strolled along the Oyster River on a glorious spring day, gazing at the lovely home of General John Sullivan, who left the Continental Congress to serve under Washington from Cambridge to Valley Forge, and later served three terms as Governor of New Hampshire, leading the fight for ratification of the U. S. Constitution.  The General Sullivan house is Durham, New Hampshire’s only National Historic Landmark:  history made visible.

    Today, Dear Reader, I wonder what use our fragile democracy makes of history as yet another despot, like so many before, pursues crimes against humanity in Ukraine.

  • GEM Centennial Day

    George Edward Murphy, DDS

     22 April 1922-25 April 2002

    Best of dads, dentists, friends, sons, husbands, grandfathers, U.S. Army veterans,

    Beloved by all lucky enough to know you.

    Rest in peace on this your centennial birthday.

  • The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too.

    How do you, Dear Reader, respond to the seashore?  Matthew Arnold heard there “the eternal note of sadness”—like my mother and paternal grandfather as I recall.  For Arnold, “the turbid ebb and flow / Of human misery” evoked a thought all too resonant for our present time:

                   . . . we are here as on a darkling plain,

                   Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

                   Where ignorant armies clash by night.

    But for me, the seaside has long been a comfort, the paradox of those recurrent waves, eternally the same and yet with each breaking swell unique, linking past to present, not sounding sadness, but rather establishing one’s place in time and space.  Today’s post title is Mary Tyrone’s line from Long Day’s Journey Into Night, O’Neill’s great play pulled from the lives of his own tormented family, and a role I acted (at age 21, how absurd!) as an undergraduate senior.  I had seen Laurence Olivier play James Tyrone to Constance Cummings’s Mary in London’s National Theatre production during the fall of 1972—three times, in fact, so taken was I with the play and those performances.   After the third time, I felt compelled to wait at the stage door—as no one else did—to tell the cast that production had, I believed, changed my life.

    At first a backstage manager thought I just wanted an autograph, collected my program, and brought it back signed, expecting me to leave then.  But I felt compelled to thank the cast and lingered.  I suspect this fellow must have alerted the actors that some star-struck American might ambush them as they left the theatre, as I don’t recall seeing them depart through that door.  But then, a long black limousine drew up to the curb, and I knew this must be for Lord Olivier.  It was now or never.  So, when he appeared, I rushed up to him to blather my thanks for the autograph and his performance, which I had returned and returned to see again and again.

    In response, Lord Olivier took my right hand in his, and patting it with his other hand, thanked me for waiting so long in the cold to tell him that, asked what brought me to London, was I studying the theatre, and hoped I was enjoying London.  After what felt like five minutes, he apologized that he really must go, thanked me again, let go my hand, and disappeared into the back of the limo.  I, gobsmacked, regarded my right hand with awe, and hyperventilated my way back across Waterloo bridge to share my story with my roommates in our Bloomsbury student quarters. 

    Returning to campus in the new semester, I for the first time added theatre classes to my English major, was cast in LDJ, and many years later earned my doctorate by specializing in Renaissance literature, Shakespeare, and drama as a genre.  That landed me a tenure-track position split between the English and drama programs at Centre College of Kentucky, tenure, and a year’s appointment as director of Centre’s new London program.  Back to London, where my life had first diverged from what I thought it would be, back to London, where I met my future husband, another professor, and again took the road less traveled by.  And that has made all the difference.

    This morning in a just-before-waking dream of an extended conversation with a very sympathetic Lord Olivier, we sat side by side on a couch.  When I rose for a moment to study something across the room and left my purse behind, he gallantly tucked it behind a cushion so no one would snatch it.  My first thought on being fully awake:  “The past is the present.  It’s the future, too.”

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