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Chapel Hill Grad
23 December 2024
UNC Chapel Hill grads toss their caps in the Dean Smith Center,
15 December 2024 (photo by Jon Gardiner, ’98)A week ago Sunday was a good day, a full moon and the graduation of our other granddaughter, Isabel, from UNC Chapel Hill. Like her sister Olivia part of the Covid Class of ’24, Isabel had weathered a pandemic AND calculus to earn her B.S. in Environmental Science, and Lord knows we need her smarts in that contested arena. As for the arena where the ceremony took place, the Dean Smith Center on Chapel Hill’s campus, there was plenty of room for the more than 1800 new graduates and their proud friends and families. At 50 years past my own graduation from Furman in 1974, with vivid memories of both Isabel and Olivia from infancy on, I was primed to wax nostalgic, but less prepared for the dissonant notes of proceedings that began with a loud speaker announcement that any attempt to disrupt the program would be met with immediate expulsion: “You WILL be arrested.”
In my 43 years as an academic, I attended a lot of graduations, but that was a first—and ironic, especially for UNC Chapel Hill, as I was to learn later on. Just how much things have changed for universities over the decades was disconcertingly clear, beginning with my passing the time by counting the number of doctoral degrees to be awarded that day: 142, only 6 of which were in English and Comparative Literature, distinct fields back in my day when UNC Chapel Hill was considered one of the most prestigious English programs in the country. Of course, the humanities’ decline is widespread across the country: this November Boston University suspended admission to a dozen graduate programs in humanities (including English) and social sciences, and my own graduate alma mater, Tulane, gave up awarding Ph.D.s in English years ago.
Where’s Isabel? Dead center, looking down,
next to the Master’s candidate in blackSo, times change. But really, why did UNC Chapel Hill Chancellor Lee Roberts welcome the soon-to-be graduates by recounting his own tardy progress toward an undergraduate degree delayed by partying, and citing (as an excuse?) how much Winston Churchill drank? Having been given an art student’s beautiful rock supported by that young artist’s exquisitely crafted wooden pedestal, Roberts’s labored simile compared the graduating class to rocks that evolve over their time at university. Rocks evolve? Really? Back to class, Chancellor Roberts.
Okay. So not a gifted speaker. A gifted speaker did give the commencement address, cancer researcher Prof. Shelton Earp, but his sincere and poignant words—he conveyed not only his own well wishes, but those of his recently deceased wife, whom he clearly was mourning—could hardly be heard because he was too far from the mic, and no one made the necessary adjustment. The doctoral candidates (unlike the baccalaureates! A disappointment that) did get to march across the stage, but they were not hooded by their dissertation directors as I had been in 1984, the moment (my sister reported) that made my dear old dad weep.
Reader, we all celebrated nonetheless, with many photos and some tasty Asian takeout we happily consumed back at the spacious Air B&B proud parents Susan and Mark had rented for grandparents Ann, Jerry, and me to share with Isabel’s twin Olivia and some of Isabel’s closest friends, Sarah, Will, and Alice; we bonded over several jolly rounds of a Ransom Notes game.
Proud parents Susan and Mark with The Graduate 
Post-grad wave to sister Olivia 
These boots were made for graduating 
Mark and Susan unpacking graduation dinner from Eathawkers.com 
Isabel and Sarah partner for a game of Ransom Notes Being around all these clever, energetic youngsters was encouraging, and the good vibes lasted right though breakfast out at brunch place First Watch the next morning. That the young woman cashier there could not figure out how to change the $20 bill I gave her, even when I specified a ten, a five, and five ones, did, however, inspire some concern about educational slippage.
As the family dispersed, I headed for a walk ‘round the UNC campus I’d not seen before, relieved that I could figure out how to use the Park Mobile app and provided with a map by a gracious undergrad at the Visitor Center on East Frankin. The day was still overcast and chilly as I made my way across McCorkle Place, the weather likely contributing to my less than optimistic mood about the academy and Where We Are Headed. Korean artist Do-Ho Suh’s “Unsung Founders” memorial, a gift of the Class of ’02 installed in May 2005, acknowledges that the University’s first leaders were slave holders, and celebrates the servants and slaves who were crucial to its success: public art as salutary reminder of vexed history.
I couldn’t help but think of the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2023 ruling against UNC’s consideration of race in student admissions, finding that the University violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause. In January 2024, the University paid 4.8 million to the Students for Fair Admissions, and voted to bar the use of race, sex, color, or ethnicity in admissions and hiring decisions. In the fall of 2023, Blacks made up 10.5% of the first-year class. In the fall of 2024, they accounted for only 7.8%. I wonder what the Unsung Founders would think of that?
Continuing southeast on my ramble, I passed the Davie Poplar, named for William R. Davie (1756-1820), who helped charter the University and lay the foundation for the first building in 1793. Legend has it that Davie and a committee of trustees met under that tree and decided to build the University there. But, alas, I learned later that Davie was not on that committee: the legend is false. The Poplar itself surely has seen better days.
The Davie Poplar But there, at the edge of East Cameron Street was the Chapel Hill’s Old Well, first dug in 1795 as the University’s water source and in 1897 covered by the domed structure modeled on the Temple of Love at Versailles, now the University-licensed icon—and, since 1925, drinking fountain! I couldn’t help but think of the line from my own Furman’s alma mater: “And ‘neath her [Paris mountain’s] shade they [the students] rest secure / And drink from wisdom’s fountain pure.”
I next encountered Gerrard Hall, built in 1822 and named for Maj. Gen. Charles Garrard, a Revolutionary soldier and early benefactor, initially a chapel that took 15 years to construct, as the commemorative plaque records “due to the impoverished state of University finances.” Plus ça change, plus le même chose.
Camellias bloom in December in North Carolina On to the august neoclassical Wilson Library (1929) named for Louis Round Wilson, centenarian, University Librarian (1901-1932), “University Historian and Advisor to Presidents and Chancellors.” Methinks Wilson could have better advised Chancellor Roberts on rhetorical effectiveness. But his namesake building is a Beaux-Arts beauty.
The semester done, and no longer the University’s main library but rather a home to special collections, the Wilson was understandably deserted save for a solitary guard in the magnificent reading room, who told me most UNC graduates never set foot in the place. We shared a lament over that—and the omnipresence of food and drink in most university libraries today.
I headed back to my parking spot on Franklin street.
As it happened, I had unwittingly left my rental Nissan right by a monument resonant with topical meaning given the warning that began the previous day’s commencement. Here’s what it said:
The Speaker Ban
Along this wall in 1966 UNC students challenged a state law that regulated who could speak on UNC campuses. The students listed below invited banned speakers Herbert Aptheker, a radical historian, and Frank Wilkinson, a civil liberties activist. When students were prevented from holding these events on campus, they initiated a lawsuit that overturned the “Speaker Ban” law in 1968.
“I hope history will record that the student body did not shy away from this challenge, but firmly and responsibly met it head on.”
Paul Dickson III (Student Body President) February 1966
Still contemplating competing impressions of Isabel’s happy graduation juxtaposed with institutional history and the slippery slope of free speech eroded and the humanities abandoned, I took off for the Raleigh Durham Airport (RDU), making two failed attempts to stop at a Chick-fil-A and provision myself for the flight home. One was closed for construction and the other unfindable. The precarity of travel must have been something sculptor Gordon Huether had in mind when he offered RDU his “Highwire Travelers” piece.
But what made an even bigger impression on me as I made my way to the appropriate gate was the excising of human presence in favor of machines. A piano played Christmas carols without a piano player.
No waitress handed me a menu at the American Cafe restaurant; only a bar code greeted me when I sat down to get a bite. That impersonality drove me to the Flight Stop for a half-price sandwich (still $5.99 even at half price), which the automated checkout kiosk did not recognize as half price.
Oy! I was in the Research Triangle, but was only A.I. doing the research?
What saved the day and pulled me out of a dive to despair was, praise be, something no machine would have “thought” to do: the Southwest gate attendant, because she “loved Christmas,” appeared in costume, half Grinch, half Santa’s Helper, and managed to scan us on to the jetway while prompting a smile from all the weary road warriors boarding.
So, hail to thee, Class of ’24! Congratulations and best of luck! And to borrow advice from Jon Batiste’s Late Show band: Stay Human.
The graduate and I (photo by Susan Andrew) -
Nutcracker Magic
7 December 2024
Backstage at Boston’s Citizens Opera House Last Saturday it was my great pleasure to accompany my wonderful neighbors Anne and Peter and their 6-year-old son Leo to Boston to see Leo’s first Nutcracker. Tchaikovsky’s confection has loomed large in my personal history, starting with my parents’ providing me a boxed set of 45’s to play on my little record player; I can still picture the pink pointe shoe on the cover. I loved that music, and was taking ballet at the time, so when my inspired first grade teacher Okla Hawkins decided to mount a production of The Nutcracker, I, completely unencumbered by stage fright and quite eager to display my “talent,” was a natural to be cast as the Sugar Plum Fairy. Perhaps architecture is destiny. That academic year, 1957-58, Pasadena Elementary School was without sufficient space for all those boomer babies, so Mrs. Hawkins’s class was held on the stage behind the heavy velvet curtains that separated our classroom from the cafeteria—where dining students were not allowed to speak lest they disturb us. I remember that space well, both as classroom and as performance venue. And I remember, too, that the tall, handsome lad Michael whom Mrs. Hawkins cast as the Nutcracker Prince was too petrified to perform, and was replaced by a shorter ginger-haired boy happy to show off—a great disappointment to me.
On Election Night this year, anxiety was running high when my neighbor Anne invited me to cross the woods that separate our homes to enjoy a beverage and some talk by the bonfire she built, her accustomed strategy for coping with fearful uncertainty. So we were there by the fire when young Leo emerged from the house with kazoo and tambourine, and proceeded to entertain us by kazooing selections from The Nutcracker Suite. Tonic hilarity ensued, and I was delighted not only by Leo’s performance by also by the recognition that here was another set of parents devoted to nourishing their child with music and performance, as mine had me. When Leo went back in, I asked Anne if Leo had seen the ballet, and when she replied no, but she thought it was time, our plan was hatched.
And so, we were off on our adventure on a cold but bright day in Boston. Our first stop was for lunch at an all-gluten-free bakery called Verveine on Mass Ave in Cambridge, the place packed with treats each more enticing than the next, as well as an overflowing supply of customers awaiting their orders and/or one of the few places to sit down at one of the communal tables. Staff and customers were all friendly and accommodating despite the crush and bustle, and my apple/cheese/arugula focaccia was delicious, inspiring an oft-repeated lament that our own nearby university town of Durham, NH had no bakeries, gluten-free or otherwise.
Oh, to order one of EVERYTHING! Then it was time to set out for the Opera House, and for me to relish NOT being the one driving for a change. I’d advised Anne to take advantage of Spot Hero, the parking app I’d discovered in the last year, a great stress-reliever in the quest to find parking in Boston, as one books it in advance. I’d also learned the hard way that one should not access said booked parking spot even one minute ahead of the agreed parking time or pay twice, so when we arrived at the garage 2 minutes early, I suggested Anne just “go round the block”—forgetting that blocks are a concept unknown in Boston. Next thing you now, we are headed south under Boston harbor on I-93, and what had seemed a perfectly timed, stress-free arrival now threatened a too-late entrance. But doughty Anne sallied on: working with three different cell phones, we navigated our way back to the Common and the corner of Essex and Washington, where Anne dropped off the three of us to make our way to the theatre in good time while she continued on to the parking garage.
The Citizens Opera House holds 2677 souls, and so there was another crush negotiating the metal detectors into the lobby. But Leo needed to make a stop at the box office. Knowing that we would be treated to a backstage tour after the show—my friend Elizabeth Olds is assistant to Boston Ballet’s artistic director, Mikko Nissinen—Leo had constructed a nutcracker out of a paper towel tube supplied with googly eyes and drawn-on peppermints alternating red and green for buttons. This he hoped to give to the REAL Nutcracker Prince after his performance. But one of the googly eyes had come off. So with help from box office staff and patient dad Peter, who showed his son how to make single-sided tape double-sided, Leo restored his paper nutcracker’s sight and we made our way up the several flights of stairs to left balcony B. Heroic Anne arrived from the parking garage just as the lights were dimming and the magic began, Leo clasping his nutcracker.
Peter, Leo with Nutcracker, and Anne And indeed, even at that distance from the stage, the music and dance were completely captivating. The sassy bear and mechanical-jointed doll inspired laughter, the battle of mice compelled. The snowflakes—balletic and fireproof paper alike—enchanted. Catching sight of a cloud descending from the flies to carry Clara and her prince away at the end of Act 1, Leo voiced an audible “Oh, my!” and warmed the hearts of every adult in the vicinity. Intermission offered a chance to get the wiggles out and to confer with Elizabeth, who surreptitiously passed along to Yue Shi, dancing the Nutcracker Prince at that matinee performance, that he had a fan in the balcony. And Act 2 delivered all the favorites: including the most sensuous Arabians I’ve seen, Mother Ginger, and the Grand Pas de Deux.
As the audience streamed for the exits, we descended to the bottom stage left exit from the balcony where Elizabeth, former principal dancer in the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and herself once a Sugar Plum Fairy, met us and showed us in sequence the Queen’s Box (terrible sightlines!), the snowflake remnants littering the wings (some of the little squares are mylar for sparkle), the prop table with Clara’s crown on its cushion. (How does it stay in place, both on the cushion and on Clara’s head? Magnets!). Chyrstyn Fentroy, soon to be that evening performance’s Sugar Plum Fairy, was warming up, and kindly stopped to inquire about the nutcracker Leo held. We posed on stage. The view from there is an epiphany.
Ms. Fentroy checks out Leo’s craftsmanship, with Elizabeth looking on 
Peter, Leo, Anne, and Georgeann–once again on stage 
The perilous path to the grid Stage right we saw the steps Mother Ginger has to climb to step into his stilts, directly below the rigging that lowers his 40-pound costume around him so all the Boston Ballet School students can hide beneath “her” skirts. Then to orchestra pit, where we got the conductor’s view of the house as well as the music and some instruments left behind till the next show, and learned the trick of the children’s chorus in the snow scene (the organ, not the kids!). The stage manager’s screen glowed, and Ms. Fentroy explained the purpose of the rosin she was applying to her pointe shoes (the better to avoid slipping) before rehearsing her upcoming pad de deux. I learned that the Opera House remains a “hemp house,” still using the centuries-old tradition of using ropes, pulleys, and counterweights to fly the scenery—by hand! And then, suddenly, there was the Nutcracker Prince, out of costume and appearing as himself, Yue Shi, graciously accepting Leo’s gift of the nutcracker and posing for a memento photo.
Leo as First Violin 
View from the pit Designed by architect Thomas White Lamb in 1928 as a movie palace, the Opera House was commissioned by Edward Albee Sr. as a tribute to his friend and business partner, Benjamin Franklin Keith.
The horns rest between performances 
Mission accomplished: the Nutcracker Prince receives Leo’s gift Elizabeth led us on through the costume shop: mice heads, soldier heads, and glittery tutus. Wardrobe manager Heather even retrieved the Mouse King Head for our appreciation (honestly, its realism could be the stuff of nightmares).
Heather displays the Mouse King’s head Finally, we said our thanks and goodbyes, and headed out of the theatre, shedding magic as we walked through the now-dark Boston streets searching out the pedestrian entrance to the parking garage.
Meanwhile, prep for the next performance begins As Anne pulled into my driveway, I was cataloging all of the day’s delights, including “sitting next to you, Leo.” There was a pause as Leo considered this. Then he said: “I didn’t even know who was sitting next to me. I couldn’t see anything but the dancers. I couldn’t look away from them!”
I later texted this review to my generous friend Elizabeth, who replied, “Oh, this makes my heart happy. Leo and his wonder is what it’s all about.”
I can’t imagine a better Christmas gift.
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St. Augustine Respite
18-21 November 2024
Castillo San Marcos, oldest masonry fort in the continental U.S.,
constructed 1672-1695 (National Park Service photo)Seeking an escape from the woes of this soon-to-pass year (my sister’s death, Hurricanes Helene and Milton, and the return of felonious Trump), I had a pre-Thanksgiving reunion with my brother-in-law Richard and nephew Daniel in our nation’s oldest city, St. Augustine, founded in 1565 (Shakespeare was then one year old) by Spanish conquistador Don Pedro Menendez de Aviles. Both Richard and Daniel are history buffs, and my earlier October 2021 visit with my Women Against Dissertation (aka WAD) pals from Tulane days was sufficiently fresh in my mind to suggest the city’s charms as a respite from care.
The city delivered, first with an excellent dinner al fresco at Cortesse’s Bistro and Flamingo Room Piano bar on San Marco Avenue not far from our Doubletree. The Mediterranean food was excellent, reasonably priced, and served by the charming Alejandra, a Mexican beauty. Such a treat for me, just arrived from chilly NH, dining on flounder piccata and enjoying the lovely patio. Next time, I’d return for the piano bar and laissez les bon temps rouler.
Daniel and Richard happy to be at Cortesse’s Bistro 
Appreciating tropical weather in November as I never did while growing up in St. Petersburg, the next morning I enjoyed a brief swim in the Doubletree’s unnecessarily heated pool.
I note here that when I returned my rental car at the Orlando airport three days later, the temperature was 62o and the Dollar rental attendants were all wearing puffy jackets and wool caps. Perception of cold is certainly relative, especially if you’ve recently taken a plunge in New Hampshire’s Lamprey River.
Our first morning we had breakfast at a nearby Denny’s: not recommended, but the Doubletree offered only an extravagantly priced breakfast—$15 for a mere continental, PLUS a $24-per-night parking fee. Caveat emptor: the hotel’s location on San Marco is good, but those warm chocolate chip cookies on arrival don’t make up for breakfasts not included. We then walked a short way north on San Marco to the Old Jail to get tickets for a single day hop-on-hop-off Old Town Trolley tour. Unlike the Doubletree, this was a bargain at the senior ticket price of $38.47.
We got off just past the city gates and made our way to Castillo de San Marcos—along with LOTS of youngsters in school groups. This was Richard’s and my maiden voyage with our lifetime senior passes to the National Parks and federal recreational lands, and it turns out each of us could have brought an additional three adult guests. Another good deal!
I can’t really explain my fascination with forts; I seem able to compartmentalize and stow away the brutality and pure cussedness of humanity they represent. I’ve certainly come to understand Mark Twain’s paraphrased inability to understand prejudice: white men, red men, black men, yellow men—they’re all human beings, and there’s nothing worse than that. The geometry of the Castillo certainly appeals, and the ranger who spoke to us (the son of two teachers, and it showed) made clear the strategic advantages of its star shape, waterless moat (for keeping cattle safe), and the extraordinary cannon-ball-eating coquina limestone of which the fort’s walls, between 12-19 feet thick, are made.
Detail of a coquina block from the “King’s Quarry” on Anastasia Island in what is now Anastasia State Park How extraordinary that those little shells, the small pink, lavender, yellow, and white “butterflies” I collected in my youth could over time form stone that defeated iron by simply absorbing its impact. The watchtowers of this fort look very like those of the earlier El Morro, the castillo guarding the port of Havana built between 1589-1640. So, as with most experience these days, each new adventure carries for me an analogous memory: David’s and my 2015 trip to Cuba as well as my mother allowing her little Georgy to bring live coquinas, packed in a sand-and-salt water-filled Tupperware, on their flight back to Ohio . Reader, don’t try this, even if TSA allowed. Which they wouldn’t.
The watchtower at bastion San Pedro, built by Native Americans from nearby missions along with skilled workers brought in from Havana After a thorough inspection of the Castillo, we hopped back on the trolley to reach our next stop, the Cathedral Basilica of St. Augustine on the northern edge of the Plaza de la Constituciόn, the oldest Catholic church in the city and the oldest parish in the country.
Cathedral Basilica of St. Augustine, three walls of which are original coquina, built in 1797 and two feet thick 
I lit a candle for my sister—like me, baptized Catholic, but unlike me married Catholic—and for all those gone before, while nonetheless discomfited by all I know of Catholicism’s institutional brutality and iniquitous abuses. Family history: to marry my Catholic father in 1947, my fiercely Protestant mother had had to promise to baptize their children Catholic, though in later life my dad just as fiercely lapsed. In the meantime, my mother, once I reached what she judged the age of discretion, took me to visit every different house of worship, including the local temple, in St. Pete so I could “make up my own mind.” And at the end, my dad, who never went to mass once he moved to Florida, told me in no uncertain terms to keep the priest then making rounds at the hospital away from him.
It’s complicated, such reconsiderations of what has gone before. But it was early afternoon, and Richard had spotted what I initially thought was an unlikely lunch venue for a sunny, very warm day: a black-walled grilled cheese joint. I nevertheless allowed myself to be persuaded, with happy results: the Grilled Cheese Gallery lived up to its promise of magic with my “Night in Amsterdam” (gouda, gruyere, swiss, and cheddar on artisan white) and raspberry hibiscus iced tea. The disco lighting and soundscape (the pounding beat and Donna Summer, shades of the late ’70’s French Quarter in NOLA) nearly had my tired tourist self dancing. Presentation, as my artist friend Carol said, is everything.
All hail the Grilled Cheese Gallery at 16 Cathedral Place 
Well fed and refreshed, we walked over to Flagler College, built in 1888 as the first in a series of luxury resorts on Florida’s east coast, the Hotel Ponce de Leόn, by Guilded Age industrialist and railroad magnet Henry Morrison Flagler who had partnered with John D. Rockefeller to found the Standard Oil Company. The grand hotel launched the careers of young architects John Carrére and Thomas Hastings, at the time young men just out of college now best noted for designing the New York Public Library and the House and Senate Office Buildings adjacent to the Capitol in Washington, D.C. Louis Comfort Tiffany designed the interiors, replete with stained glass and mosaics. The Edison Electric Company powered the building with steam heat and 4000 electric lights, making it one of the first electrified buildings in the country. Our Old Town Trolley guide told us that because light switches were so novel as to be alarming to hotel guests, the Ponce hired staff whose only job was to turn them off and on.
Flagler College, formerly known as “The Ponce” 
Flagler’s astonishing foyer In 1968 the former hotel became Flagler College, with an annual tuition of $42K, our guide reported, which seemed to astonish our fellow trolley-ites; me, not so much, since out-of-state tuition at the public University of New Hampshire is well over $37K, and the most expensive schools in the U.S. are now billing at $70-$80K. In 2021, my visit to Flagler College was in the company of my fellow WAD friend Sandy, who had with her husband Alan stayed at the Ponce then still in its glory days, another layer of sedimentary history to add to my current experience, along with the knowledge that my great uncle Vercil Senseman once lived between the winter homes of Edison and the Ford on the Caloosahatchee River in Ft. Myers. Uncle Verce, initially trained as a fine-finishing carpenter before becoming a real estate success, used to make furniture from felled exotic trees given him by his neighbor, Edison. And the woman on my recent Madbury hike was a Flagler descendent who attended my rival high school in St. Pete. Is aging all about diminishing degrees of separation?
The remainder of our trolley tour took us past places worth exploring on another visit: the Lincolnville historic district, a community established by freedmen after the Civil War in 1866 which became in 1964 a base for civil rights activists like the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who marched on the street now named for him. Our late grilled cheese repast kept us too full for dinner at one of two intriguing restaurants, both on Riberia Street, the St. Augustine Fish Camp and the Ice Plant, places to try next time. We had just enough time post trolley tour to drive to and finally locate the St. Augustine Lighthouse on Anastasia Island in the failing light. Deciding to come back the next day, we opted for a humble pizza joint dinner at Borrillo’s on San Marco and called it a night.
St. Augustine Lighthouse, built 1871 
The Keeper’s House, dressed for the holidays After breakfast at the FarmHand Kchn on Ponce de Leon—MUCH better than Denny’s across the street and purveyor of an excellent Cuban sandwich—we returned to the St. Augustine lighthouse, at 165 feet the second tallest in Florida and 27th highest in the country. Along with the Maritime Museum in the Keeper’s House, the lighthouse is now a Smithsonian affiliate, and deservedly so. The current exhibition on the east coast’s nascent shrimp industry was really interesting, but taking seriously the posted cautionary sign, I enjoyed sitting out the 219-step climb to the top of the lighthouse that Richard and Daniel gamely accomplished.
Keeper’s House and Maritime Museum From there we headed to Anastasia State Park also on the island Spanish engineer Arradondo named for the martyr in 1737. While the boys had lunch at the snack bar, I took in the vistas: dramatic skies, scrub, and waving sea oats much less plentiful than when my mother painted their cousins in St. Pete in the 60’s.
We followed up the beach with a visit to the newly opened Cookiebird ice cream bar back on San Marco and a stroll down St. George Street to window shop and visit the Saint Photios Greek Orthodox National Shrine, a memorial to the first Greek settlers arriving on the American continent in 1768.
St. Photios Shrine, completed 1979 
A sad reminder of recent history We finished our last day in town with dinner at the local Village Inn, a first for me (adequate liver and onions, excellent apple pie).
Early the next morning I negotiated the complicated way back to the dauntingly enormous Orlando airport, passing along the way the “World’s Longest Car Wash” and a man hosing down a 20-foot-tall rubber duck at a hot tub dealership (ah, Florida!), and began my journey back north, uneventful save for a near-miss collision in the rainy dark at the traffic circle only 10 minutes from my Madbury home. That left me shaken, and all the more grateful to be safely back from Florida. Home again.
Bird of Paradise blooming in November, Flagler College courtyard -
The Plunge
15 November 2024
The very chilly Lamprey River seen from the bluff above in Durham NH The leaves are down here in Madbury NH and we’ve had our first November night of temperatures consistently in the 20’s; though my snowplow guy Dave staked the driveway weeks ago, this is the first morning it seemed plausible I’d awaken to snow. We’re on the threshold—in so many ways.
Last Monday morning I passed my annual Medicare Wellness check at my primary care physician’s office (“Remember these words: banana, chair, sunrise. Draw numbers on the blank face of this clock and show me 11:10”), and then, minimally encouraged, I drove to the friend of a friend’s home on the Lamprey River for a cold plunge. I’d re-connected with my friend Lisa in Boston the previous Saturday at the SpeakEasy Stage’s production of Steven Drukman’s fine new play, Pru Payne, about a celebrated if acerbic critic finding cross-caste love in a memory care unit; again, note the relevance to my own possible trajectory. Lisa had invited me to join her doughty women’s group for a plunge, and having discovered the physical and mental revitalization of cold dipping in the Atlantic over the summer, I decided such a post-election shock to the system was just the thing.
And it was: stinging cold, and quasi-hilarious as the salty epithets of our august quintet of women echoed up the steep river bank for the next 5 minutes. But! Getting out of the river meant negotiating the sharp, leaf-and-muck-dense river’s edge, slipping backwards on the cold slime and initiating second thoughts about the wisdom of this exercise. My catalog of catastrophes, other senior gaffs, came to mind: leaving the handheld sprayer on after watering the dracaena behind the bathtub upstairs, resulting in a steady stream of water pouring from the downstairs ceiling fan onto the Steinway in the library below (9 August 2021); carrying the laundry basket down the stairs not holding on and missing a step, resulting in a broken right fibula (24 October 2022); believing my wallet stolen from my purse at a Bratton Room recital on the eve of my travel to Miami, only to find it on my return from Florida in the other purse I had already moved it to before the concert (26 February 2023). Was freezing in the Lamprey to be my self-initiated cockup for 2024?
No, as it happens. A hand from a friend and the will to avoid complete humiliation propelled me safely up the many leaf-covered steps sans railing. Despite joints chilled into near non-compliance, I managed to get myself up out of the Lamprey gorge and into our host’s hot tub. Sublime. Finally, dripping in my bathing suit with only a towel wrapped around my lower half, I made it to my car to take my leave, opened the trunk, pulled on a sweatshirt, flung my purse inside, and slammed the trunk closed, only then realizing that the purse—with my key and wallet with AAA card were inside the now-locked car. Humiliation complete. Wet, cold humiliation.
Fortunately, I was among capable, sympathetic women of comparable age who shared stories of their own mishaps and bid me forget about mine. Our host Debbie lent me her phone to call AAA, served me hot tea, and lent me some dry clothes. Bob from AAA arrived within 20 minutes, and, using a couple pieces of cardboard cut from a detergent box, wedged an inflatable bladder between the door and the rubber weather stripping, inserted and pumped up said bladder creating just enough space to insert a slim jim to hook the door handle, and popped that door open. On seeing the PhD after my name on the AAA card I was finally able to retrieve from inside and show him, Bob asked what I taught. When I told him mostly Shakespeare, he nodded knowingly, and as he headed back to his truck, turned to face me and said “Adieu, adieu, adieu! Remember me.”
So, a happy ending. And tidings of what came next, for that same afternoon, I got an email from the head of author acquisition at Barnes & Noble, offering to place copies of my Will to Live book in all 51 of the B&N stores nationwide. Apparently B&N scouts books published on several platforms, including Amazon/KDP, looking for what they think marketable. Having judged WTL a good prospect, they want to include it in their upcoming December – May promotional campaign.
WTL gets another chance Turns out, the at last corrected proof copy of WTL I had unexpectedly received the previous Wednesday was printed by B&N from the master file now in their possession. I am to pay for the printing, and they in turn print, distribute, and promote. I get the royalties. I spoke at length to the acquisition head on Tuesday, slept on it, and signed the contract on Wednesday. Another plunge. Slippery bank of muck? Or money in the bank? Time will tell.
Meanwhile, each day’s news is a nauseating told-you-so assault. At the end of Wednesday’s excellent and so necessary yoga class with Ruth, I asked the young mom beside me how the post-election event she attended the previous just-post-election Wednesday went. She told me that one man in that gathering, a Brit, said he had grown up in the UK never understanding how fascists could have taken control of Europe in the 1930’s. Lesson learned: “Now he knew.”
So, as Barnes & Noble prepares to launch my book, I’m trying to tend the garden I can. My dear friend Diane’s Aristophanes translations have just come out on Hackett, and it’s certainly time to produce Lysistrata, as UNH’s Theatre and Dance program will this spring, I hope using Diane’s theatrically savvy new translation.
Now available on Amazon! That South Korea’s 4B movement of the 2010’s (women say no, “bi” in Korean, to men: no dating, no marriage, no sex, no childbearing) can take hold here, I doubt: the manisphere seems to hold sway, at least for now, Trump winning the majority of women’s votes. Is’t possible? Apparently, yes.
So, on Thursday I returned to the excellent ministrations of masseuse Anne Marple, whose healing hands do consistently provide a respite, literally lowering my blood pressure by 20 points.
The Healing Hands of Anne Marple, Licensed Massage Therapist Anne’s lovely studio is in the lower Rollinsford Mill by the Salmon Falls River that separates New Hampshire from Maine, the other river of my week crowded with incident.
The Salmon Falls River in Rollinsford NH, 14 Nov 2024 But it’s those enormous mill buildings I keep thinking of, once thriving, often “dark and satanic,” finally abandoned as technology moved on, and then re-purposed as condos and studios: time and the river flow by those imposing structures, change the only constant.
Salmon Falls Mills 
Salmon Falls Mill corridor: sweatshop repurposed as studios So we beat on, boats against the river flowing. Our country has taken a very cold plunge into a future that does not bode well. Slippery, murky, mucky slope? Again, time will tell. We pull up our socks and hope that, in the concluding words of Drukman’s captivating character Pru Payne, what we do to carry on will be “good enough.”
Only one gull in nine pays attention at the Oyster River Landing, Durham NH -
Necessary Distractions, Before and After
8 November 2024
Pepperrell Cove, Kittery Point ME For several weeks leading up to Election Day, I was trying to find reasons to hope—or at least to calm the malaise made physically manifest in vague nausea, weakness, and occasional arrhythmia. I found many temporary reprieves, one in the accommodating generosity of the folks who tended to my lawnmower and others who served me a fine lunch in Pembroke NH, and more calm in the beautiful sea grasses fringing the boardwalk at the Great Bay Discovery Center, with the delightful company of young moms and their curious kids.
The fine folks at Mowers and Blowers in Pembroke NH sharpened my EGO lawnmower blade WHILE I WAITED to save me another hour’s drive back to pick it up again. Thanks to Penny for that kindness, and to Nick, who cleaned my machine and loaded it back into my GTI with ease. 
Mill town Pembroke NH on the Suncook River 
St. John the Baptist Catholic Church, Suncook NH 
Evidence of a once-prosperous Pembroke 
Excellent brunch well-served by Maria at Shirley’s: “The Southerner,” two eggs, cheddar, BBQ sauce, and braised pulled pork on perfectly toasted sourdough 
Great Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve and Discovery Center,
Greenland NH
A beautiful day on Great Bay with a view of sea grasses
once used as salt marsh hay
Discovery Center’s boardwalk through the marsh 
. . . and through the woods I also tried diverting myself from election angst by making up new dishes, and spent a full hour “decorticating” the cardamom seeds I had on hand, removing them from their fibrous pods to bake Kardemummabullar, Swedish cardamom buns.
Latest brunch inventions: “Egg Gnawwood,” poached egg topped with sharp cheddar and Everything But the Bagel seasoning from Trader Joe’s on creamed spinach and a wedge of coarse-ground cornmeal cornbread 
Spiced veg for dinner Election Day itself I filled quite deliberately, starting with a morning tai chi class, then helping with the Madbury Public Library’s book sale, and in the later afternoon, directing UNH students toward free rides to the polls, sweetening the call to vote with baked goods. On Election Night, I sat by my neighbor Anne’s fire bowl, watching the sparks ascend in the dark and voicing Big Thoughts as we were sporadically entertained by her son kazooing tunes from The Nutcracker Suite while accompanying himself with accordion and tambourine. Bliss. And hope for the future.
And when the next morning after a broken sleep I dared to turn on the radio and heard the phrase “President-Elect Trump,” the dread became despair acute enough to make me vomit. A brisk 3.5-mile walk through the Madbury woods along old stage roads and a Bellamy River diminished by low rainfall (global warming?) distracted me with both the good company of other seniors and the 80o heat, uncommon in early November New England (definitely global warming). Our hike leader Kathy had apparently made it clear no one was to speak of the Election, and that was a good thing.
Kathy, prudently sporting optic orange in hunting season, leads us on a Seacoast Village Project hike. Alice, on the right, attended my rival high school in St. Petersburg. What are the chances we’d meet up in Madbury NH? Sweat and exhaustion thus took the place of despair for a while on Wednesday, and the reassuring sympathy of my favorite radio hosts on Boston Public Radio helped, too. I started typing this while awaiting Vice President Harris’s concession speech, and cried at her strength and bravery as she consoled and encouraged her supporters like the compassionate leader she has been and would, alas, have continued to be.
Then I went off to my yoga class another much-needed distraction: salutary physicality and moving meditation.
Now what? There’s consolation from the late-night comedians: Desi Lydic, Seth Myers, Stephen Colbert, and especially Jimmy Kimmel, himself moved to tears as he spoke of what the country has lost.
What’s the strategy now? Harris says roll up our sleeves. Right. I’m starting to plan some publicity for my book, Will to Live, apparently now soon to be available with its initial formatting cockups corrected. And today brought a lovely lunch with good friend Stephanie in Pepperrell Cove ME.
Can a mocktail like this delicious Crew’s Cure assuage sorrow? Maybe not. But the ginger helped with post-election nausea. Kudos to the Ski Club. Tomorrow I go to see a new play in Boston, Pru Payne. And going forward there’s a reunion with my brother-in-law and nephew in St. Augustine, and, come December, the joy of taking my kazoo-playing young neighbor to his first Nutcracker, with a special tour of the backstage magic by my Boston Ballet friend and prima ballerina emerita Elizabeth Olds.
Ji Young Chae in Mikko Nissinen’s Boston Ballet Nutcracker So. Distractions a-plenty in my certainly privileged life. I’ll be spending a lot more time out on the deck , keeping an eye on the stars (yes, dear Kamala: they ARE brightest when it’s darkest). And, on the recommendation of Steven Hill, author and co-founder of FairVote, I’ll see what I can to do advance the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, designed to ensure that the candidate who receives the most popular votes nationwide is elected president (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact).
The work continues. We pull up our socks and carry on. OMG
Election Night Moon from the deck, before the Fall Boston Ballet, Boston Public Radio, election, Great Bay Discovery Center in Greenland NH, Kamala Harris, Mowers & Blowers of Pembroke NH, National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, Pembroke NH, Pepperrell Cove Ski Club, Seacoast Village Project, Shirley’s Kitchen, The Nutcracker, voting, WILL TO LIVE -
The smallest twine
28 October 2024
5.26 pm, 21 October 2024, Madbury reservoir As my birth month draws to an end, the line that comes to mind is Leonato’s from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. His daughter Hero’s chastity has just been falsely impugned, which makes her swoon. The attending Friar suggests Leonato let her accusers believe Hero dead so that they will come to prize her “lacked and lost.” Leonato replies: “Being that I flow in grief, / The smallest twine may lead me.”
This close to what all seem to agree is the most significant election of my lifetime, and on the heels of Trump’s fascist rally in Madison Square Garden, my attempts to navigate torrents of anxiety have me grabbing at any hopeful lifeline, however small. The twine I was reaching for Saturday night in Portsmouth at the Music Hall was Paula Poundstone’s comic relief.
Paula Poundstone (photo by Michael Schwartz, WireImage) The evening began well enough: I found ample parking (rare in Portsmouth) at a new, well-lighted and appointed parking garage on Foundry, and arrived at my excellent seat in the orchestra at the same time as a young couple who were, I learned, celebrating their tenth anniversary by returning to the site of their first date. Charming and romantic, I thought (if a bit poignant, my sitting there solo missing my David). Poundstone made her unassuming entrance, and pretty quickly her comedy, largely improvised by engaging her audience, turned to her expressing the anxiety I’m certain most of her audience shared: the proximate threat of a second Trump presidency. Baffled (like so many of us) by how ANYONE could be at this stage undecided about the election, Poundstone opined (in a rough paraphrase): He HID important secret documents in his BATHROOM, he tried to OVERTHROW our DEMOCRACY, his every-other sentence is a LIE, and people say “I don’t know enough about HER???!!!
From Poundstone’s entrance, the couple next to me had not laughed. And about ten minutes in, they started talking to each other so loudly that it obscured Poundstone’s miked routine. Twice I asked them to please hush, and finally, they simply got up and left. I can only assume they knew nothing of Poundstone’s NPR persona and were likely Trump supporters. Poundstone was actually wonderful—such a high-wire act, solo improvising for nearly two hours—but that couple’s response disturbs.
It’s been a lovely month, crowded with happy incidents and birthday remembrances from friends near and far, two very fine play performances, wonderful Manny Ax, several dinner parties attended and one given, some lovely autumn walks, yoga, tai chi, a good book club discussion of Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel, delightful weekly chats with my dear friend Cameron in Greensboro.
Shiao-Ping and Brian sing “Happy Birthday to YOUUUUUU” I even scored a couple of triumphs over tech adversity: a challenged charge on my VISA card dropped, an appealed parking ticket forgiven, and successful use of a diabolical app-driven ParkMobile parking meter all sparked joy, however absurd the work-arounds necessary to live in our tech-centric time. Case in point: in order for me to open a new savings account, my helpful, newly promoted TD Bank clerk Gabby had to have her supervisor show her how to work around the barriers her not-yet-upgraded-to-reflect-her-new-status computer threw in her path, while I, standing at the counter opposite and less than two feet away from her had to initial a series of agreements and e-sign forms on my tiny cell phone screen. Even that did not quash my good mood; in fact, I felt triumphant.
Intrepid kayakers shoot the rocks off Ft. Foster ME as Jennifer and I walk the trail 
Wood Island Life Saving Station viewed from Ft. Foster ME Not that all personal annoyances are in abeyance, however. The struggle to get Amazon KDP to correct their many formatting mistakes has currently resulted in their “unpublishing” my book, calling with still-unfulfilled promises of perfection, and sending me the ugliest demo web site imaginable, featuring my name spelled wrong: “Georgean Murpy.” I fear a legal challenge lies ahead. And after many months of waiting for a quite uncomfortable EMG test to try to determine the source of my left leg’s weakness, the orthopedist who ordered the test only reported to me that he could make no sense of the neurologist’s conclusions, and advised that since the pain I had experienced had lessened, I should just “wait and see” if there would be more improvement.
On the other hand, my silver brocade bromeliad is blooming for the first time in five years, and I’ve managed to accomplish almost all the “winter’s coming” chores: houseplants safely back inside, hoses drained and stored, outdoor water supply cut off, deck railing freshly painted with penetrating oil. But I’ve not taken the canoe out since my last birthday, and the Madbury reservoir, for all its gorgeous autumn display, is so low that launching the canoe would mean some perilous wading through boot-sucking muck. The last time I tried that, I had to be pulled out by my larger, stronger friend Gregg.
And OMG. The election: Trick or Treat? November 5th will mean voting, helping with the Madbury Library’s book sale, tai chi, and . . . what fresh hell?
Portsmouth Market Basket parking lot, 24 October 2024, 1.29 pm I’ll try to take comfort in my resident barred owl’s hoots and occasional visits, the roving flock of wild turkeys, and the juvenile deer caught faux-boxing each other on the west lawn, an encouraging sight first thing in the morning.
George visits the feeder, 17 October 2024, 5.51 pm Still, another Shakespearean line comes to mind, this time from the Third Citizen in Richard III: “All may be well; but if God sort it so, / ‘Tis more than we deserve or I expect.”
Madbury reservoir, 21 October 2024, 5.39 pm, happily indifferent to the election -
Taking Stock
7 October 2024
Jennifer’s Cosmos in the afternoon light with Jane’s Frank Gehry tea set On this the last morning of my 71st year, I asked the phlebotomist drawing blood (completely sans pain; she was really good at her job) whether my 71-year-old blood today would be any better than my 72-year old blood tomorrow. She replied that the 72-year-old blood would be even better, and asked me if I had any birthday plans. My question had broken an awkward silence, and engaged her and the trainee in the room, both now smiling. So I answered that yes, I did: on Thursday I would go with good friends for dinner, followed by Emanuel Ax’s performance at the lovely Groton Hill Music Center, now a venue for Boston’s Celebrity Series, its warm wood interior like being inside a cello. I did not say that in 2002, “Manny” Ax had stayed at David’s and my home, and had asked if it would be okay if he practiced on David’s Steinway first thing in the morning. (I thought, “Let me see. How would it be to awake to the sound of Emanuel Ax playing downstairs?”). Of course we said yes.
Manny with the Allentown Symphony Orchestra, 27 Sept 2015 That’s one of the many indelibly wonderful memories my imminent birthday inspires. Earlier this week I emailed Mathilde Handelsman, who had so wonderfully played that same piano to entertain my guests here on my 70th birthday. Now she and her fellow musician husband Edward Cho are both happily employed at Wake Forest U, where they also fortunately dodged the worst of hurricane Helene. And last birthday I had our nephew and niece Rob and Pam Andrew visiting to help me celebrate, another happy time.
But this year, on the anniversary of the 7 October attack that ignited ongoing horrors in the Middle East, so poignantly falling between the high holy days, celebrating feels a much greater challenge. My stepdaughter and family in Asheville will be living with Helene’s damage and without running water for a long time, and my widower brother-in-law and nephew will leave their less storm-resistant Safety Harbor home on Tampa Bay tomorrow to shelter from Hurricane Milton’s approach with other family behind hurricane-proof windows. “Safety” Harbor indeed. The times and climate are out of joint.
And this will be my first birthday without my sister Jane’s good wishes and overly abundant gifts. I put out her cards from last year to remember her, but only exaggerated the void her February death has left.
Will to Live, out at last on Amazon And then there’s Will to Live, my book begun 25 years ago and finally published at the end of August, replete with formatting mistakes added by Amazon/KDP that have quashed all desire to celebrate that long-anticipated event. The fraught vicissitudes of my year-long relationship with self-publishing should be a cautionary tale to anyone considering working with KDP, and however worthy I still believe my book to be, I’m straddling the decision to keep fighting with KDP to correct their mistakes and fulfill our contract, perhaps with legal support, or to simply let it all go. Dear Readers, if you are interested and find some value in the book, please let me know.
Waiting for showtime at the A R T Yesterday I lamented KDP’s not supplying their promised fliers-with-QR code which I would have left there in Cambridge at the American Repertory Theatre’s closing performance of Romeo & Juliet. But today I find that regret mollified by gratitude for the privilege of once again experiencing the power of that script interpreted by capable artists and one truly gifted actor, Emilia Suárez, who so completely inhabited Juliet as to make all that role’s famous lines completely spontaneous and so exquisitely, painfully moving. Movement and choreography by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (the Capulet ball was gangbusters!) and fight consultant Thomas Schall’s brawls were all extraordinary. In fact, I found myself crying during the Mercutio/Tybalt/Romeo sequence: a first, that. And when Romeo’s intervention allowed Mercutio (another role extraordinarily realized by Clay Singer) to fall on Tybalt’s dagger, an audible gasp of horror escaped from the young woman sitting next to me. I didn’t agree with all director Diane Paulus’s choices: the death at Romeo’s hand of an incongruously fey, fruity Paris (Adi Dixit) was omitted, thus making nonsense of the Prince’s later lamenting his loss of “a brace of kinsmen.” But man, did Shakespeare’s Juliet ever live and shine through Ms. Suárez!
And so, my Libra-like balancing act kicks in with a little help from Will—a very long “life assist” in my case. Besides, bracketing my passage to and from the Loeb Theatre there in Cambridge was the Harvard Square 45th Annual Oktoberfest in full career on a sun-drenched early autumn afternoon. Hard to be a sourpuss while making one’s way past the lederhosen and dirndls.
So what if for the first time ever I’m seeing even the woolly bears turned prematurely white with worry?
Despite the anxieties that bracket every morning awakening (OMG, the election! My book! My aching, antique joints!) I can still take satisfaction in the modest success of the Strafford County Democratic Committee Picnic on 28 September; we took in $8K.
The Strafford County Democratic Candidates 
Patty and Cassandra Levesque prep for the “Taste Global / Vote Local” Picnic 
Banner at the American Legion Post 47 in Rollinsford NH And I still look to the heroic strength and devotion of President Jimmy Carter, 100 years and 1 week old as I turn a mere 72 tomorrow. In 1987 I was teaching at Centre College in Kentucky where President Carter was the commencement speaker. All faculty members got to shake his hand, and when my turn came, I was astounded to hear him greet me by name! Turns out someone had shown him a Centre annual with photos of all the faculty members, and with his eidetic memory, a great gift for a politician, he had learned all our names. Centre was indeed a small college with relatively few faculty members, but President Carter’s personable gesture then reflects the genuine, always interested kindness of the truly great man he remains. What a privilege to have shaken his hand.
President and Mrs. Carter, in Jakarta, Indonesia on 7 June 1999 to monitor elections, shake hands with children (well before MAGA delirium cast all in doubt back home). So. I’m turning my gaze forward and upward. On Thursday, before I’m off to hear Manny play once more, I’ll stream the launch of NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft currently scheduled for 12.31 pm; see https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/events/2024/10/10/watch-the-launch-of-nasas-europa-clipper-mission/ . My dad George, who once shook hands with Orville Wright, always rose early in our St. Petersburg home to try to see the launch of NASA spacecraft from Cape Canaveral across the Florida peninsula, and often he was able to. Rocket scientists hope the Europa Clipper will help determine if one of Jupiter’s icy moons could support life. Research suggests an ocean twice the volume of all of Earth’s oceans exists under Europa’s icy crust.
Technicians test a set of massive solar arrays measuring 46.5 feet long and 13.5 feet high for NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft inside the agency’s Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on
7 August 2024
Artist’s rendering of the Europa Clipper Well. We’ll see. In the memorable words of Monty Python’s “Galaxy Song,” Dear Readers:
Just remember when you’re feeling very small and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere out in space
Because there’s bugger all down here on Earth.
Time for another new year.
-
RIP Maggie Smith
28 December 1934 – 27 September 2024
Maggie Smith as a different Aunt Augusta with Alec McCowan in the 1972 film
Travels with my Aunt (Archive Photos/Getty Images)I saw Maggie Smith star with her then-husband Robert Stephens in Noel Coward’s Private Lives when I was a stage-struck student studying in London in 1972, and secured both their autographs after the performance. When in 1974 at Furman University I was cast as Lady Bracknell, Algernon’s Aunt Augusta in Oscar Wilde’s impeccably hilarious The Importance of Being Earnest, our director Pete Smith’s most frequent note for me was “more Maggie Smith!”
An actor of astounding range and unparalleled comic timing, Maggie Smith’s infinite variety captured in memory and on film remains a legacy of delight for all time.
Thank you, Dame Smith. Rest in peace.
Maggie Smith as Violet Crawley in Downton Abbey (Nick Briggs/PBS via AP) -
Summer’s End
21 September 2024
Film buffs assemble for the Telluride-by-the-Sea Festival at the
Portsmouth Music Hall, 13-15 September 2024Does the passage from one season to another account for my mercurial shifts of mood? I wonder. More tired than I’ve any right to be, I blame my fatigue on having been away from home three weekends in a row. As Earth was to Antaeus, Tara to Scarlett O’Hara, Gnawwood is to me. While time spent first on Star Island, then among friends back in Kentucky, and finally this past weekend in Portsmouth at the Telluride-by-the-Sea film festival was all most enjoyable, I find I wake every morning anxious about something. Maybe it’s the toxic infusion of the 24/7 news cycle. Or maybe it comes down to some underlying dread of whatever circumstance might force my move away from Gnawwood. “What comes next” is a frequent topic of conversation among us 70-somethings, and my 72nd birthday looms.
Joints, heart, and eyesight are not what they once were of course, though given my privileged access to healthcare, I really can’t complain (though I do when the cardiologist recommends against the taking of wine with dinner. Really??). It does seem queer that my outlook on life can be so suddenly, absurdly brightened by discovering that the Drano Max Gel I poured into my hair-clogged bathroom sink ultimately worked its magic after more than 24 hours so I didn’t have to call our wonderful plumber Ed back after he’d just been here attending to another issue. I can be blithe and bonny over something so trivial and then sigh over the discovery that if I ever want to buy again the now-discontinued little Clinique travel soaps I’ve been using since 1976, I will have to depend on consumercare-US@gcc.gbnf.estee.com, a resource for finding remaindered inventory.
Or it may be that I’m just anxious about the imminent arrival from Amazon of my book: customers who pay full price for it can have it within two days, but my author’s copy, ordered on 9 September, takes two weeks. As of today, I’ve sold all of 18 copies, but have not yet seen it myself. My friend Stephanie, who joined me for a lovely lunch at Wentworth-by-the-Sea’s Salt yesterday (we recommend the Basil Lime Rickey) tells me that first sight of one’s book may well be surprisingly unaffecting; one was, after all, done with that, creatively, quite a while ago. We’ll see. Soon. I expect the Amazon truck momentarily.
Stephanie and I catch up at Salt, the lovely dining room at
Wentworth-by-the-Sea, New Castle NHMeanwhile, the time speeds apace. The Telluride-by-the-Sea festival was both very enjoyable and instructive; I saw six of the seven films on offer and REALLY liked four of those.
I skipped the claymation Memoir of a Snail, and barely tolerated the assaultive cinematic indulgence of RaMell Ross’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel Nickel Boys. Promoted as a “visually adventurous coming-of-age story set in Jim Crow-era Florida,” it proved narratively impenetrable to me until glossed by our more informed seatmate Brian. But the star-studded Conclave lived up to its program blub, turning the cinematically gorgeous, mysterious protocols of a papal election into an “elegantly satisfying thriller, a thoughtful meditation on the mystery of faith, and a reminder: election season is not for the weak.”
Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal Lawrence in Conclave Two comedies, one a believably fictional recreation of the chaotic 90 minutes leading up to the first broadcast of Saturday Night Live in October 1975, and the other a documentary of Will Ferrell’s cross-country road trip with dear friend and comedy writer Harper Steele, who came out as a transwoman at age 61, both entertained and left a surprisingly long-lasting impression.
Gabriel Labelle as Lorne Michaels in Saturday Night Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night is often hilarious in its uncanny representation of then unknown but soon-to-be all-star comedians (Belushi, Ackroyd, Radnor, Chase, Curtain, et al), and even poignant in its evocation of a half-century past. And in Josh Greenbaum’s Will and Harper, two very funny people reveal with extraordinary candor both the depth of their abiding love and the range of our diverse country’s response to celebrity and to difference.
The eponymous Will [Farrell] & Harper [Steele] But the real gem of the festival was Iran’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, already a winner at Cannes. Even at 168 minutes, this oh-so-gradual revelation of how an unjust system perniciously abrades the ties that bind even a loving family never fails to compel attention as it builds to its remarkable conclusion—predicted in the title, but only at last apparent in the experience of a film that explicates the iniquity of a totalitarian regime, incorporating footage of real protests on the streets of Tehran with brilliantly acted fiction.
Soheila Golestani, Mahsa Rostami, and Setareh Maleki in
The Seed of the Sacred FigSeeing six films over one weekend at the Portsmouth Music Hall can be brutal on the backside, but by Sunday, my fellow film buff friend Carol and I had figured out how to provision ourselves and take advantage of Portsmouth’s nearby Hearth Market.
Carol at the pleasant piazza outside Portsmouth’s Hearth Market I’ve also recommended that the Music Hall provide interstitial Tai Chi in the pedestrian Chestnut Street space outside the theatre. Motion is the lotion.
Though I personally accomplished few of my household chores over the past weekend—even under pressure as the days grow appreciably shorter—I was lucky to have the expertise of Bosnian father/son team Emir and Ezmet restore Gnawwood’s stucco, and their boss Greg Thulander of Facades, Inc. not only re-caulk the joins between the portico’s stucco and its granite steps, but trim back the rhododendrons threatening to compromise the stucco on the east side of the house. I’m hoping that Greg, personable, skilled in his trade and a former historian/preservationist, will one day finish the book he told me he began years ago: I offered him my testament to retirement as a good time to revive a manuscript once abandoned.
Ezmet and Emir of Facades, Inc. restore Gnawwood’s stucco And then came one last summer’s evening picnic at the New Castle Common with friends Jennifer, Martha, and Phyllis and all the paparazzi assembled with tripods and telephoto lenses to photograph the rise of the Harvest Supermoon over the Wood Island Life Saving Station. The haze made the silent sails of two crafts crossing the moonglade all the more poetic.
Full Harvest Supermoon and spinnakers, New Castle, 17 September And so, on we go, sailing into autumn and all the anxieties of this unprecedented, terrifying election season.
Courage, Dear Readers! Namaste.
Autumn arrives on Nute Road -
Leaving / Not Leaving
9 September 2024
Old Centre (1820) at Centre College, Danville KY, my old Kentucky home from 1984-1995 The sound that broke through my dream this morning seemed a cross between the coyotes’ eerie roll call I often hear at night and the honking of geese headed south. The dream—of a group effort to set up Christmas trees for an outside display; was one of us Alec Baldwin??—dissipated, slowly replaced by curiosity sufficient to rouse me from my happy slumber back in my own bed after two nights away in Kentucky. Geese passing in their V-formation, a wavering skein, could not have made a noise lasting that long, and I’ve never known the coyotes to howl in the morning light. Like Frankenstein’s monster, I hobbled unsteadily to draw the bedroom curtains, my arthritic joints further stiffened by the restrictions 737s impose on Southwest passengers. Mystery solved: a rafter of 14 turkeys roiling in a spiraling circle at the bottom of the hill below my bedroom window, not clucking, not gobbling, but, I learn via Google, calling their assembly yelp, a cluck/purr that adult hens use to gather poults that have wandered off: yuuup, yuuuuup, yuuuuuuup, yuuuuuuuup. Or was it their early morning tree yelp, simply the turkeys’ way of talking among themselves?
Whatever my ineptitude decoding turkey talk, the sound and then sight—like a witchy coven casting a corporate spell—was sufficient to dispel my habitual morning dread of all that needs doing that I don’t want to do, getting me out of bed and back into the world with some considered gratitude for my privileged circumstances and yet another safe return home, this time from Danville KY to Louisville to Orlando to Manchester to Madbury NH.
Barbara Hall, friend and former Centre colleague, generously provided transport, room, and board for my stay at Centre. I provided dinner at Le Relais, part of the FBO (Fixed Base Operation) at Bowman Field 
Bowman Field (1919), Kentucky’s first commercial airport and the oldest continuously operating airfield in North America 
Louisville International Airport (formerly Standiford Field, SDF) promotes its most famous product 
How absurd that to get back to Manchester from Louisville I had first to fly to Orlando, and after a three-plus-hour layover sit on the runway another 45 minutes delayed by a passing thunderstorm. One blessing: flight 2040 had 100 open seats. In typically wry Southwest fashion, the flight attendant announced that seeing any passengers sitting three abreast with so many open seats available, “we WILL make fun of you.”
A storm approaches Orlando International Airport (MCO, formerly
McCoy Air Force Base)
Palms once familiar to this native Cracker now seem exotic 
Airport Abstraction: MCO tram Time spent in the pleasant liminal space of the Orlando airport offered a pretty fair dinner of shrimp and grits at the Cask and Larder with a local draught IPA called Five Points described as composed of “centennial, columbus, mosaic, citra, simcoe, and warrior hops.” Is’t possible? Buoyed by the beer’s ABV of 7.2, I was inspired to roam the concourse, recording signs of its fantasy portal significance, even as a glimpse of Kamala Harris on a bar tv screen offered a remote reminder of high stakes reality, with THE debate just two days away.
The Cask and Larder at MCO 
Shrimp and Grits and Five Points IPA (ABV 7.2) 
MCO as Fantasy Portal 
Where Louisville touts bourbon, Orlando’s sugar takes another form. OMG And it was probably the IPA that prompted me to follow up a compliment from Centre College friend Bill about my just-published book by reading the sample chapters now available on Amazon.com on my phone. Riddled with anxiety about the reception of Will to Live: Learning from Shakespeare How to Be and NOT to Be, I consoled myself by thinking, once again, that the writing wasn’t half bad. Of course, maybe that was the IPA talking. Dear Future Readers out there: you will, I hope, decide.
On the flight from Louisville, I had been seated next to a couple flying to Orlando for a hardware convention. Politely leaving me to my New Yorker, they waiting till we landed to chat and reveal that while they were in town on business, they had a daughter who was currently working in Paris’s Disney World. Having announced at age 8 that she wanted to work for Disney, the daughter has done just that, climbing the corporate ladder from custodial assignments to overseeing ride safety. Her dad proudly proclaimed her salary more than what both her parents put together made; her mom as proudly declared her “married to the mouse.” And though she was currently in Paris, she’d nevertheless arranged VIP passes for her parents to all Disney offers in Orlando. Quite right, too.
The Mouse Of course, spending time in Orlando might also be some cosmic joke the universe—or my recently departed friend and mentor Roberta White—was playing on me. Afterall, Orlando as a character links my academic turf with Bobbie’s, mine Shakespeare and hers Virginia Woolf. The only reason I was in Orlando was Southwest’s quirky routing from Louisville to Manchester, and the only reason I was in Louisville was its proximity to Danville, Kentucky, where on Saturday Bobbie’s family, friends, and colleagues gathered in Old Carnegie on the Centre College campus to remember and celebrate our much loved Roberta White. All who offered formal remembrances were moving and eloquent—not surprising, given such native talent nurtured and enhanced over decades by Bobbie’s brilliant teaching, canny mentoring, clever collegiality, and loving friendship. I was most moved by Mark Lucas, once Bobbie’s student, then longtime colleague, and now the just-retired emeritus (forever young and handsome, the crush of generations!) Jobson Professor of English at Centre. Unable to find the reading glasses that he later discovered right in his breast pocket, he had to accept a pair offered, amusingly still on their tether, from an obliging audience member in order to read an account of his search for the treasure he found among Bruce and Bobbie’s extensive library: Bobbie’s annotated copy of Ulysses.
I’m so grateful that I had had an hour’s conversation with Bobbie in May, one we knew would be our last, yet one just as witty, informed, honest, and loving as all the many others we’ve had since I joined the Centre faculty in 1984. I of course was also mightily aware throughout the weekend of my own golden age past in the company of such warm and erudite colleagues, many still close friends even after the almost 30 years since I left cozy, nurturing Centre and my tenured position for the much thornier comparative anonymity of the always marginal tribe of adjuncts and affiliates at the smallish, grossly under-funded state university that is UNH. Much has changed in the macrocosm of academia, too, since I left Centre in 1995, and certainly the Centre I left is not the Centre it now is, with its then vaunted humanities program now discarded. But how gratifying to feel all those connections still vital—even ones I didn’t know existed.
The vernacular domestic architecture of West Broadway in Danville KY 
In the spring of 1984 following my job interview at Centre College, I spent part of the evening walking through this handsome neighborhood, wondering if I would some day spend the night there. 40 years later, I did. 
Oooops. My good fortune was to have two mentors at Centre, Bobbie White and Carol Bastian. One week from today it will be ten years since Carol died on 16 September 2014, and her three children, Julie, Tim, and Tony were there in Danville to remember Bobbie along with the rest of us. Julie was the only one I had met before, and though I kept thinking I should know her—she very much resembles her mom—I didn’t place her until she came to me. Julie introduced me to her brothers; I had, of course, heard many tales of all three young Bastians over my long friendship with Carol. What I hadn’t counted on, however, was that they would know much about me. On first meeting Tony, he said, “Oh! You’re the one who gave up her job for love!”
It’s true, I think, that we often underestimate how much others take in about us. There’s a Hidden Brain episode about this (“The Influence You Have: Why We Fail to See Our Power Over Others,” 24 February 2021). But the influence is there, however unacknowledged. And what a consolation for loss that it is! My mother Virginia used to say we never lose the ones we love so long as we remember them. How many gratefully remember the likes of Roberta White and Carol Bastian! My Shakespeare professor at Tulane, Ned Partridge (remarkably also former professor to his then student, Milton Reigelman, the professor who hired me at Centre), once said: the professor’s job is to make himself obsolete. I get what he meant, but presumptuous pronoun use aside, I don’t think that’s quite right. “Obsolete” implies discarding. And we don’t discard what shapes us: we incorporate what shapes us, in a literal sense, as a tree will sometimes envelop the supporting fence it grows beside. Our nurture becomes part of our nature.
So rest in peace, Roberta. Your work here is finished, but the work goes on thanks to you. Blessed be the tie that binds.
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Georgeann Murphy 