A Day in Manayunk

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.

Scotland the Brave!

Over the years, one of our family's favorite outings has been the Colonial Highland Gathering, held every year in mid-May at the Fair Hill Horse Show grounds in Fair Hill, Maryland, just over the Mason-Dixon Line from Oxford, Pennsylvania. My daughter Lindsay was a competing Highland dancer, and I competed occasionally in the amateur solo piping events and participated in the pipe band competitions. If you're ever looking for a colorful and unusual way to spend a lovely outdoor Saturday afternoon in May, I commend this event to you. These folks have been putting on this show for over 50 years, and they have the details worked out to near-perfection.

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.

A Happy Occasion

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.

A Week in the Tropics

EVEN THOUGH my triumphal re-entry into Philadelphia late last Saturday was aboard a wheelchair rather than a quadriga (chariot with four horses to you non-Latinists), Eve and I had a wonderful week in St. Maarten/St. Martin, Dutch/French Antilles. We'd flown out the week before during a temporary lull in the barrage of snowstorms plaguing this area, and spent the next seven days under clear skies reveling in 80-degree temperatures.

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.

A Sunset Journey into History

Eve and I celebrated our seventeenth wedding anniversary on October 9, 2010 with a sundown wine-and-cheese trip aboard the parlor car "Marian" on the Strasburg Rail Road, through some lovely, pastoral Lancaster County, Pennsylvania countryside. Having spent the first years of my boyhood in the age of steam locomotives and elegant passenger trains, this was more of a sentimental journey than I'd expected. I can still remember living close to both the Pennsylvania and Reading railroad lines in the Schuylkill Valley across the river from Conshohocken and falling asleep to the sounds of trains passing in the night -- the chuffing of the engines and the haunting wail of steam whistles. The air horns on today's Diesel locomotives don't even come close to that melancholy quality. The Strasburg Rail Road is a wonderful window into a day we'll never see again in this country, except where historically-minded folks take the time and effort to preserve and re-create these extraordinary pieces of machinery...

The Iron HorseAnd the Sinews of the Iron Horse.

We came to this adventure expecting a good time, and we certainly got what we bargained for. However, we didn't expect to be riding in such distinguished company... Someone told President Roosevelt he had a lot of nerve to be traveling in luxury with a woman not his wife. Ah, well. Luxury it was, and a fitting capstone to seventeen years of wedded bliss -- ours, that is; not necessarily Teddy's...

At the Foot of Broad Street

IT'S PROBABLY NOT generally known, but at the foot of Broad Street in Philadelphia, at the U.S. Naval Base, is what's left of the Henry C. Mustin Naval Air Facility -- a military airfield now abandoned and slowly being reclaimed by Mother Nature. Grass and even small trees sprout between cracks in the concrete of what once were runways where vintage warplanes took off and landed in the 1930s through the 1940s and perhaps even into the '50s. My little springtime wandering brought me to this place, which I'd last seen in 1976 when I was stationed at the Navy yard as a liaison officer to visiting ships during the Bicentennial celebration. Here's a big hangar which now serves as a commissary for Navy Yard personnel, of whom there are fewer and fewer with every passing year (note the jetliner making its approach to Philadelphia International Airport several miles to the north of Mustin Field)... I wasn't sure whether I was venturing into forbidden territory as I drove north along the Delaware into the semi-wilderness of the old airfield. I didn't see any "Trespassers Will Be Shot" signs, but I remember the Navy Yard being a seriously security-conscious place back in my Cub Scout field-trip days, when they didn't even allow cameras to be brought through the gate.

Adjoining the airfield complex were a goodly number of abandoned row homes, which undoubtedly housed base families back when Mustin Field was a going concern. It was an eerie feeling to be wandering in the midst of a ghost town within the geographic limits of one of the nation's largest cities. It occurred to me that, homelessness being the urban problem it is, these structures might have been fixed up and put to good use in some fashion...

The Naval Base is also the last stop before the razor-blade factory for a number of ships comprising the nation's mothball fleet. Back in the day, the carrier Enterprise and the battleship Iowa were moored there, along with a host of cruisers, destroyers and other ships of the line. On this particular day, however, I saw mostly retired amphibious vessels and minesweepers. Here's an image of a dock landing ship of the type that steamed with our squadron deployed in the Caribbean in 1968 and 1969... And the strange-looking ship you see in this image is a Newport class tank landing ship that wasn't even in commission back when I was an LST engineering officer in '69... Back in MY day, the stars of the LST fleet were the Suffolk County class -- bigger than but essentially no different from the ships that landed tanks and vehicles over the beach at Normandy in 1944... Although I can say with a straight face that I served in the country's naval forces in the Vietnam years, I got real lucky with respect to WHERE I served. If I had extended my service contract for an additional year, I was looking at shore duty with a beachmaster unit in the Mediterranean. But I'll never know what an adventure that might have been because I opted to return to civilian life at the first opportunity.

I guess we can drive ourselves nuts pondering what might have been.

It was a rather melancholy thing to see what's become of Philadelphia's Naval Base, but I was glad to have dropped in for a look-see. The next -- and last -- stop on my sentimental journey was 1714 Sylvan Lane, Gladwyne, PA, where my family lived from 1957 to 1997. There were a number of trees in the front yard which survived the grading and landscaping during construction, and it appeared one of them had finally given up the ghost. The new owners had done something I've never seen before, and I must say it's one of the most creative and imaginative uses of a dead tree I've ever seen... My Dad was a talented whittler. I think he would have approved this piece of work.

And so, surfeited with nostalgia, I charted a course for Reading (which is not an easy place to get to from Philadelphia when the traffic is heavy), and the next day I was back in harness, slogging away through the swampland known as The Practice of Law. If I keep practicing, and if I live long enough, I just may get it right.

Springtime in the City

One pretty day last April, I got my usual case of springtime wanderlust. Since nothing dramatic was going on at the office, I proudly and unabashedly decided to go off on a little frolic to my old home town, Philadelphia. Since I was in no particular hurry, I drove down Kelly Drive, along the east shore of the Schuylkill. In the East Falls section of the city, I visited Castle Ringstetten, the upriver clubhouse and social quarters of the Undine Barge Club, one of the venerable rowing clubs whose boats are housed along Boathouse Row several miles downriver....

Many years ago, I put in a lot of miles pulling an oar (or, in some cases, a pair of sculls) up and down the Schuylkill, wearing the colors either of the Undine Barge Club or The Haverford School. Won my share of medals and trophies and plaques and other hardware, which still collects dust around the house. Castle Ringstetten was locked up tight that day, but I remember what a wonderful museum of late nineteenth-century Philadelphiana the place contains. Back then (and still today, I'm sure), Undinians gathered there for several dinner meetings every year, each time beginning the meal with the traditional "Handle Oars!" (pick up silverware); "Toss!" (bang silverware on table); "Let Fall!" (drop silverware back on table, with as much noise as possible).

Well, I didn't get inside, but I wandered around back, where it appeared some horticulturally-inclined folks had been at work on an azalea garden... By this time, I was good and hungry, so I wandered down to Fourth and Bainbridge Streets for a visit to the Famous Fourth Street Deli...

The Famous, as it's known among those who love it, was a favorite haunt during my Naval Reserve days at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in the '70s and the '80s. The fella who ran the place in those days -- David something-or-other -- would spot a bunch of us in uniform coming through the door and holler to the waitress who usually served us, "Stand by, Maggie! The fleet's in!"

My salivary glands still experience a Pavlovian torrent at the memory of huge piles of warm beef brisket on an onion roll, with cole slaw and Russian dressing, and a great big Kosher dill pickle. So, I guess you know what I had for lunch that day. It took some determination to finish the thing, it was so big, but I certainly wasn't going to allow any of that to escape.

Burping happily, I toddled off to my next destination, which I'll tell you about next time.