Monthly Archives: August 2005

For last

Cambridge, Mass.

From Geneva, Illinois, to Richmond, Indiana; from there to Cambridge, Mass., and then to Concord, Mass.: orbiting around the “hub of the solar system.” Today was the day to fall down the gravity well, and into Boston, the Hub, itself.

Boston’s cultural institutions shaped me in ways I only dimly realize: Fenway Park, Symphony Hall, 25 Beacon Street; and perhaps more than anything else, the Boston Museum. So thence I road the Green Line trolley cars today.

Walking down Hollis Street towards the Davis Square subway station, along a narrow brick sidewalk where a tree has grown and uprooted bricks and spilled out over the granite curbstone and taken up more than half the sidewalk, so there’s just room for one person to pick their way between it and the white picket fence.

I got off the E-line trolley at Northeastern so I could walk the last few blocks to the Museum. First stop: the musical instruments collection. I thought every great museum had a musical instruments collection, and was shocked when I went to the Art Institute and found they did not. Another way Boston has shaped me: seeing musical instruments as art, not as beautiful objects for making music. I looked particularly at a mountain dulcimer made by James Edward Thomas, simple, elegant, painted black.

To the Asian art to look at Chinese hand scrolls. A scroll titled “Peach Blossom Spring,” by Qiu Yung of the Ming dynasty era, caught my attention. Excerpts from Tao Yuanming’s “Account of Peach Blossom Spring” accompanied the scroll:

During the Taiyuan reign of the Jin, there was a native of Wuling who made his living catching fish. Following a creek, he lost track of the distance he had travelled, when all of a sudden he came upon forests of blossoming peach trees on both shores. For several hundred paces, there were no other trees mixed in. The fragrant herbs were fresh and lovely, and the falling petals drifted eveywhere in profusion. The fisherman found this quite remarkable and proceeded on to find the end of the forest.

The forest ended at a spring and here the fisherman found a mountain. There was a small opening in the mountain and it vaguely seemed as if there were light in it. He left his boat and went in through the opening. At first it was very narrow, just wide enough for one person to get through. Going on a few dozen paces, it spread out into a clear space.

The land was broad and level, and there were cottages neatly arranged. There were good fields and lovely pools with mulberry, bamboo, and other such things. Field paths criss-crossed, and dogs and chickens could be heard. There, going back and forth to ther work planting, were men and women whose clothes were in every way just like those of people everywhere. Graybeards, and children with their hair hanging free, all looked contented and perfectly happy.

When the people saw the fisherman, they were shocked. They asked where he had come from and he answered all their questions. Then they invited him to their homes, where they served him and killed a chicken for a meal. When it was known in the village that such a person was there, everyone came to ask him questions.

The villagers said that their ancestors had fled the upheavals during the Qin dynasty and had come to this region bringing their wives, children, and fellow townsmen. They had never left it and thus had been cut off from people outside. When asked what age it was, they didn’t know even of the existence of the Han dynasty, much less the Wei or Jin.

In some ways, the story of Peach Blossom Spring reminds me of Boston.

The show of quilts from Gee’s Bend has at last reached the Boston Museum — it was at the Art Institute a while ago, before we started living outside Chicago. Polly Bennet, one of the quilters, said the following — one of the best statements for any artist, or craftsperson, or manufacturer:

Up until the start the quilting bee [a cooperative manufacturing effort in the community of Gee’s Bend], I just use old throw-away clothes [to make quilts]. I started buying material in ’66. I was one of them that built the quilting bee up. For that time I was making stuff that was being ordered. Star quilts, Trip around the World, –and a pattern they call Four Star. People would know my name and ask for a quilt I make. And I always make things just for my own pleasure, too. I like to try something I ain’t never made before. And I work on it until I get it straight. I want it fixed right because my quilts might go somewhere I ain’t never going to go, so they going to say, “This quilt made by Polly Bennet.” I got to put my best on it.

I particularly noticed this remark because during the trip out here, my sister Jean talk about what it is like getting her book published. Books and quilts go out, and people use them for what they will. Did Polly Bennet ever think the quilt she made in 1942, at the age of 40, this two-sided quilt in blocks, did she ever think it would wind up hanging in a museum rather than spread out over someone’s bed? Well, maybe she did –maybe she dreamed it just that way.

Carol joined me at the museum after work, and we saw an Italian film there, “After Midnight” (Dopo Mezzanote), part of the museum’s excellent film series. While waiting for the film to start, C. came up to say hello, someone I had known when I worked at the Watertown, Mass., church. The narrator of the film said:

Tales, where do they come from?… Tales are like dust in the wind…. Perhaps places are the best way to tell stories.

And then, describing the heroine, Amanda, the narrator says:

Amanda wishes she had a better life, but mostly she settles for dreaming about it — which is a common attitude.

We caught the trolley, and transferred to the Red line, and came back out here to Cambridge. So I finally made it in to the Hub. Maybe it would have been better to go to Fenway Park, but the results would have been the same.

Tomorrow — on to New Bedford, and the end of the trip.

Concord

Cambridge, Mass.

A sort of pilgrimage to Concord, Massachusetts, today. I met my dad (who still lives in Concord) in the late morning to take a walk. It was hot, so we decided to go to Sleepy Hollow, the cemetery where a number of famous Transcendentalists are buried. We just wanted a cool place to walk on a hot day, but I did make a point of visiting Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s grave. She was a contemporary of Emerson’s, a Transcendentalist who ran the West Street bookstore where she sold Transcendentalist books, published “The Dial” for a few issues, and hosted some of Margaret Fuller’s “conversations” for women (sort of early consciousness-raising sessions). Elizabeth Peabody never married, always claimed she was too busy, and had an incredible career as a teacher, reformer, and intellectual. She is perhaps best known today for introducing kindergarten to the United States — in her conception, a way to give children of all scoi-economic groups a head start before they started school. An amazing woman, and my favorite of all the Transcendentalists.

Her grave stone is down the hill from “Author’s Ridge,” where Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Lousia May Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne (her brother-in-law) are buried. She’s buried in a beautiful little hollow dappled with sun and shade. And her legacy lives on in some interesting ways. Late in her career, Elizabeth Peabody mentored a young educator named Lucy Wheelock, who later went on to found Wheelock College, where my mother got her bachelor’s degree. Lucy Wheelock was still a presence when my mother was studying there, and my mother went on to teach for a dozen years. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if my mother chose to pursue her career and not get married as Lucy Wheelock and Elizabeth Peabody did. Mom was an excellent teacher, and who knows where her career would have gone? We’ll never know, but it’s fun to speculate.

After I had lunch with dad and my two sisters, I went for another long walk on the Battle Road Trail in Minuteman National Historical Park in Concord. It’s blackberry season, and I ate some really good blackberries. It must be a good year for blackberries, because they were large and plump and tasty, and worth every scratch I got picking them.

Here

Cambridge, Mass.

Here at last — well, in Massachusetts at last. We got here sooner than I had expected, but that was partly because we decided not to stop anywhere along the way except to sleep. We’ve done a lot of driving over the past two days.

It was good to see Carol again. She’s been here in Massachusetts for six or seven weeks, working at a new job, while I closed up the apartment in Geneva. Carol is cat-sitting in Cambridge, which is why we met her here. She, Jean, and I went out for dinner last night at about 8 p.m. You can read my sister’s blog to read about our dining saga. But I want to go back to Monday evening….

Monday evening, Jean and I were in Batavia, New York, home of Batavia Downs. After an 18 month hiatus, the track is going to open again today. It sure seemed like there were lots of people trying to find a motel room in Batavia on Monday evening, maybe in anticipation of the opening. We finally wound up at a Days Inn, taking a room that had “weak A/C.” They said that was all they had left, and no one else had rooms so we took it. We dumped our luggage, and went to find dinner.

We followed the signs to Alex’s Place, right across the street from Batavia Downs. You can see the long narrow horse barns from the front door of Alex’s. Alex’s was packed. Lots of people who seemed to know each other, felt like a real locals’ hangout.

Our table was positioned so we could watch the bar. Right at the corner, my sister noticed an attractive young woman was flirting with a very thin young man. How did Jean know she’s flirting? “See the way she’s flipping her pony tail?” said Jean. The young man was clearly fascinated. He turned so I could see his face, and I saw he had a moustache that did not quite match his face, as if he hadn’t had it for long and hadn’t quite figured out how to trim it so it looked its best.

Then another young woman, wearing fashionable glasses, joined the first young woman (we called her “Glasses Girl” to distinguish her from the first). The first young woman made the young man get off his bar stool so Glasses Girl could sit between her and the young man. We decided that the first young woman realized that the young man just wasn’t going to go away, but didn’t quite know how to get rid of him.

It was quite a little drama to watch. I decided that these people probably all knew one another, maybe even worked together. Jean wasn’t so sure. Then Jean said, “You know where we got this from?”

“What?” I said.

“Watching people and figuring out their motives,” Jean said. “Mom used to do this.”

“Oh yeah!” I said. Suddenly I remembered Mom doing just this kind of thing — watching people, and figuring out the story or little drama that was being enacted.

Then back to the hotel, where we grdually realized that we didn’t have “weak A/C,” we had no A/C. It was stifling. At 2:30 in the morning, I called the front desk, and they found us another room. We had air conditioing from 2:30 a.m. until 8 the next morning, and then another long hot drive with the windows rolled down. And here we are, in Massachusetts ahead of schedule. I still feel jangled from all that driving. Good thing Jean was willing to come along and share the driving with me. Thanks, Jean!

Hub

Cambridge, Mass.

You’ve probably heard the saying, Boston is the hub of the solar system. And you may well have thought, What East Coast snobbery, or What a dated sentiment from the early 19th C. when Boston was the literary center of the United States, or What a provincial thing to say, or maybe you didn’t think anything at all because you felt it was so patently untrue.

I have said all those things to myself, and have always used that saying with a sense of irony. “Hub of the solar system,” spoken as if it has quotation marks around it. But it’s also true for me, because I know I have been shaped by Boston-area literary heritage, by Boston-area instituions, by Boston area people. So here I am, in Cambridge, right at the edge of the hub of the solar system.

Not that I ever want to live in Boston, or even in Cambridge. I’d rather be outside the hub of the solar system. New Bedford will be close enough — or, I should say, far enough away.

And I do fit in, here in Cambridge. I ran into someone I went to middle school with, and an old friend saw me from the bus and sent me email saying hi. Walking over to the farmer’s market at Davis Square, I saw A. and T.’s house, and the house where R. and her sister M. used to live. Boston and Cambridge are smallish provincial places where you do know people.

So here I am, and while we’re here I’m enjoying being in Cambridge, next door to the Hub. Jean and I walked up Mass. Ave. towards Harvard Square to visit bookstores today. Jean stopped in at Robin Bledsoe, who sells art, architecture, and horse books (Jean was looking at the horse books). We went to Harvard Bookstore, where I found a translation of Japanese travel narratives, a book on the Cambridge (England) Platonists, and a Perry Mason novel.

Looking through the used nonfiction books, I wound up standing next to a tall thin young woman talking to a young man. I got the impression she had just graduated from college. She was telling him about a job interview that she had gotten with what purported to be an advertising agency. “So I got all dressed up, in like my best businessy clothes, and went in for the interview.” Then she told about her first interview, though I missed part of what she said, and she was called back the next day for a second interview. “So I walk into this room full of men in suits, and I’m wearing my business outfit, and they start talking to me, and they were saying I’d be good for the job.” I squatted down to look at a book, and missed a sentence or three. “It turns out I’d have to go door-to-door for like four hours a day, selling door-to-door. When I got back home, I was like, Nick, I got duped, I thought I had a real job, but it wasn’t at all, it was like going door-to-door.”

While we were at Harvard Bookstore, Jean saw that Michael Cunningham was going to be reading from his latest book tonight. So tonight we went to hear him read.

We got there 50 minutes early to be sure to get a seat. The reading was in the bookstore, and there wasn’t much room. Twenty minutes before he was to start, it was standing room only.

He came up to Cambridge from a stay down in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod (how very Boston). He was wearing a faded pink t-shirt, was very tan, with bleached-out hair, the picture of a Provincetown beach bum. He is a charismatic speaker, and he reads quite well. I have to admit I have not read any of his novels. I felt a little guilty that I was taking up one of the precious few seats. But then I realized that I belonged there, too. I’m a reader and a booklover, and unlike music lovers we don’t have concerts; unlike art lovers we don’t have gallery openings; our social events are author readings. It was good to be in a room full of book lovers, and it didn’t matter if we were in Cambridge, or Provincetown, or Geneva, Illinois — for readers, anywhere there’s a book and someone to read it, it’s the hub of the universe.