MERRY CHRISTMAS, MY FRIENDS! KEEP THE SPIRIT ALIVE!
To all our friends out there in the blogosphere, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and ACLU-approved neutral non-sectarian season's greetings! (Of course, if it's so neutral and non-sectarian, one might be excused for wondering why we bother with the season or the greetings.) Anyway, the rough weather and the health challenges seem to have faded into the distance, for now.
The only sad thing was the untimely passing-away last week of our friend and talented poet (in both Spanish and English) Awilda Ivette Castro Suarez. She lived in a dark place and hid it so well behind a wide smile and a cheerful persona that it came as a rude shock to learn she would no longer be sharing her gifts with us.
We should treasure our loved ones, because we cannot know whether they will be with us tomorrow. None of us is getting out of this alive; we should live, laugh and love whenever we can -- while we can. So, blessings to all of you.
A week earlier, we had a freak Halloween snowstorm -- a heavy, wet one. Since most of the leaves were still on the trees, limbs came down by the score all over the area. One clipped my car to the tune of some $4,500 in body damage. Here was the scene the morning after...
Falling limbs took out power lines throughout the region; we were lucky to be in the cold and the dark for only four days. Others had no power for a week or more.
A couple of weeks before that was the pokhyelbka incident which I wrote about in the last posting.
Yes, it's been a rough autumn so far. But next week is Thanksgiving, so we'll count our blessings and be grateful for them. Best wishes for a peaceful holiday to all who visit this site.
And then -- Black Friday and all the attendant horrors of the weeks that follow. May we all keep the year-end holiday season in proper (and sane) perspective.
THE EARLIER sunsets are growing more noticeable every day. September is here. Tomorrow is Labor Day. The Autumnal Equinox is a little more than two weeks away. School has started; the Mile-Long School Bus rumbles around the sharp corner in front of our house like clockwork at 7:30 AM every school day, stirring us from sleep with the reminder of another day.
I love this season, when the sweltering blaze of summer becomes more muted and restful, and the crispness of October and the bright lights of the year-end holidays buffer the inevitability of winter. Perhaps I'll even get more writing done. I've just started an ambitious dramatization of a Russian submarine disaster in the Pacific Ocean in 1968. Hallelujah!
With granddaughter Betsy Paquette.
The whole crew (give or take a few).
NEXT FRIDAY, July 29th, my Aunt Janet Fuger, now of Rochester Hills, Michigan, will turn 100 years old. This is one extraordinary lady, who has outlived her three brothers (including my father), by keeping herself active, interested and physically fit. In the above ancient photo, she's Janet North Page, the happy-looking little dark-haired girl who at the time was probably three or four years old. The young man with her is her older brother Joe. Here are a couple more scenes from the same album...
These images were in a beat-up old family album that has spent most of its life stored away in musty attics and damp basements, and I find it amazing that the pictures survived as well as they have. I'm also very pleased that Aunt Janet's centenary celebration prompted me to resurrect these images and scan them for posterity.
Just for fun and comparison, here's how Aunt Janet looked (and behaved) in August 1982, during a family vacation/reunion in Pointe aux Barques, Huron County, Michigan...
It's been at least ten years since I last saw my Aunt. I'm grateful to my Michigan cousins, who are hosting an impromptu family reunion, to be capped off with an ice-cream social to be held next Saturday afternoon in Rochester Hills. And here's a toast to all families everywhere, and the bonds, however sporadic and tenuous, that bind them together!
One sunny afternoon recently, my old wanderlust came over me, and I found myself trespassing on Norfolk Southern railroad property in Reading, PA. This is the site of the old Outer Station of the Reading Railroad, now nothing more than a memory and a property you can acquire while playing Monopoly. The omega-shaped horseshoe (or lyre) expansion loops in a long-dormant overhead steam transmission caught my eye, and I made a few images...
I'm no steam engineer, but my understanding is that these graceful loops are installed at intervals on a steam transmission line, to allow for metal expansion when steam is passing through. They also make an appealing abstract image -- to me, at least.
The folks in charge take a pretty dim view of civilians prowling around this place, because there's still a lot of heavy rolling stock moving around. While I was there, a freight train was being made up, as you see on the left above. The sounds of rail cars being coupled and uncoupled is a pretty impressive staccato drumroll. It's comforting to see that there's still some railroad activity around here. Maybe not what it was in the 1880s, but I'm not either.
Here's a little tableau that presented itself to my wandering eyes last weekend in Jim Thorpe, PA. Kind of a Travelocity ad for rednecks, I suppose.
A little sliver of the City of Philadelphia extends along the east shore of the Schuylkill. It's the site of the earliest transportation canal started in the United States. The name of the place is "Manayunk," from an American Indian word meaning "place to drink." Nowadays the drinking isn't from the river, but you can get a variety of drinks and interesting food items from the establishments that line Main Street.
On a recent Saturday, we visited the annual Manayunk Arts Festival, which for a weekend crams the community with visitors who, after they miraculously find a place to park, jam the main thoroughfare to see the work of hundreds of artists, artisans, craftspersons and other interesting characters displaying their work.
Among the more unexpected examples of craftsmanship were what some Chabaa Thai Restaurant chefs with surgical skills and time on their hands were doing with some...
... watermelons.
I'm sure Manayunk has reverted to its usual identity as a sleepy little riverside neighborhood, dozing away in the sunshine and the rain, dreaming of its past days as a center of transportation (canal and railroad) and industry. It's easy to miss as you drive along the Schuylkill Expressway just across the river.
After Lindsay grew up and moved away, and after I drifted away from the piping scene (more's the pity), I missed the Colonial Gathering for more years than I can remember. So, it was with a poignant sense of nostalgia that Eve and I headed down the road to Fair Hill for this year's Gathering. Of course, there was the spectacle of the massed pipe bands at the formal opening of the Games...
And you could watch the mysterious process of tuning a pipe band for competition: Half an hour's fiddling with reeds and drones and chanters, for maybe seven minutes of time performing under the critical scrutiny of a panel of judges (who would probably write on the score sheets that the tuning should have been better)...
There were many tempting (mostly greasy) Scottish food items for sale...
...but you had to be prepared to wait ... and wait ... and wait...
(Don't see too many skinny folks here. Do you?)
And whether all that waiting was worth it is a question on which I take a more jaundiced view nowadays than I did in my earlier years when I was blessed -- or cursed -- with an industrial-strength gastrointestinal system.
As the soon-to-be summer sun began to sink in the perfect sky overhead, we headed for home, burping happily with the taste of Forfar bridies and beer. The Fair Hill Games had been one of our family's favorite gigs back in younger times, but this year I found I had experienced at first hand the truth of Thomas Wolfe's observation that you can't go home again. It was fun, but it didn't have quite the electric thrill it has had for me in the past. Ah, so, sic transit gloria mundi.
And, I hasten to add, if you haven't experienced a Scottish festival like this one -- especially if you have children -- you owe it to yourself to check it out. Who knows? The bug might bite you the way it bit me and my family many years ago. It's a great way to experience something you don't see every day if you're not in Scotland or Canada!
In the final analysis -- even if you can't go home again in the strictest sense -- it's satisfying to revisit places you've been happy in the past.
It was a couple of lovely May days on the campus of Harvard University, witnessing and participating in Lindsay's doctoral commencement from the Graduate School of Education! Pretty doggone inspirational, it was. Here's what she looked like after the robing ceremony on Wednesday the 25th:
And here's a shot of her with Brad and his family:
The ceremony took place in the Tercentenary Theater in Harvard Yard, between Widener Library and the University chapel:
And here's what all the fuss was about:
It was a wonderful occasion, but it seemed to fly by, and a wistful sense of anticlimax hovered in the background after it was all over. Unlike the typical graduation, however, there was no packing up, loading of the car, tearful farewells and signing of yearbooks. Lindsay will be working at the Center for Education Policy Research in Cambridge, teaching statistics at Harvard, continuing to live on campus as a freshman proctor, and raising daughter Nora. Brad will be pursuing neurology research at Mass General and Harvard. I fear we have a couple of career academics in the family.
Yes, it was with a touch of mellow "the-party's-over" feeling that we boarded the subway for South Station and the Greenbush commuter rail line bound for Cohasset and a visit with our dear friends John and Pokey Kornet. That feeling passed as we spent a delightful evening discussing everything from mosquito netting in Thailand to global financial planning, which reinforced my belief that good friends can converse on just about any subject.
Just around the corner from our Dutch-side villa was Cupecoy Beach, one of the island's famous clothing-optional bathing venues. When I noticed that I was the only male on the beach wearing swim trunks, I thought, "What the hell, when in Rome..." and took 'em off. Never thought I'd do that. Such is the magic of SXM. It's interesting how the standard-issue human body, after a certain age, is not really all that erotically stimulating. I was reminded of a herd of elephant seals on a rocky beach in sub-antarctic South Georgia.
The rest of the time, we toured the island over its narrow, traffic-choked roads, enjoyed a couple of truly outstanding meals at Le Bistro Nu in Marigot and the Calmos Cafe in Grand Case,
explored the ruins of Fort Louis in Marigot,
and lounged around the pool at our Ocean Club villa.
Of course, I was not going to be allowed to get away with so much enjoyment scot-free. On the Friday before we left, all the rich food and drink started to blossom into an excruciating flare-up of gout in my left foot, and by the time our plane landed in Philly, I could hardly walk and every step felt as if it was through broken glass. Hence the wheelchair.
Would I do it again? You betcha! Wheelchair and all.
