Adventures in rentals

I’m glad to say that in the end we wound up having to choose between two great apartments — both brand-new, both with nice landlords who care about their properties, both within walking distance of all the major cultural attractions of New Bedford — but getting to that point led us in some interesting directions.

Like the landlord who didn’t show up to open up the apartment, even though I talked to him just ten minutes before. It was OK, though — after seeing the condition of the outside of the building (towering weeds, loose trash in the driveway, peeling paint), I wasn’t exactly eager to see the inside.

Like the apartment with spacious rooms beautifully redone, a gorgeous new kitchen — and puddles on the new kitchen appliances from the leaking roof. Given the smell of mold, that leak in the roof wasn’t exactly new, either.

Like the apartment with the kitchen in the middle of the dining room. I mean right in the middle. You know what a thrust stage is? Well, this was a thrust kitchen.

Like the many people who didn’t answer our phone calls, even though they had an ad in the paper, or a sign in the window saying “For Rent.” (Funny thing, too — many of those ads are still running, and many of those signs are still in the windows.)

It still wasn’t nearly as bad as searching for an apartment in the greater Boston area, or the Bay area. And it wasn’t nearly as easy as finding an apartment in Geneva, Illinois, last year. It’s just a part of the distinctive flavor of this place, from the old buildings that have been reconfigured with greater or lesser sensitivity, to the general wariness of New Englanders when it comes to returning phone calls from people they don’t know.

It’s a fascinating place. Frustrating at times, but fascinating.

Dream big, bloggers

A couple of days ago, I was idly browsing the Web, looking at different blogs. Generally speaking, people have a very limited conception of what might go on a blog. Personal confession and strident political commentary seem to be the dominant content in blogs, with a very few people experimenting with other genres of writing. I’m especially interested in “place blogs,” where the author of the blog gives you little portraits of where he or she lives. I like writer’s blogs, too, especially where the writer posts work in progress.

But imagine if Charles Dickens were alive today. I think a blog would be a great format for some of his novels, which after all were serialized when they first appeared. Which got me to thinking about blogs I’d like to see….

  • A blog written by a fictional character about his/her fictional life.
  • A blog by a real person about his/her travels in a fictional place.
  • A blog of literary or arts reviews (by multiple authors).
  • A “historical blog,” written from the point of view of a historical figure as if s/he were blogging in her/his own era, a sort of blog re-enactment; e.g., a Plimoth Plantation blog, a Civil War soldier’s blog, etc.
  • A blogicization of Dante’s Inferno, or Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year, etc.
  • Or best of all, something that’s just plain new and different.

Strident commentary and personal soul-baring have barely begun to tap the potential of blogs. Dream big, bloggers.

Farmers market

Downtown New Bedford has a farmer’s market on Wing Court off Union Street (down from Pleasant), Thursdays starting at 2:30 p.m. I decided to go check it out today.

Now I have a theory that you can tell something about a community by its farmer’s market. The Berkeley (California) farmer’s market is huge, with musicians, bakers, and lots and lots of organic farmers represented. You see people of every shade of skin color, dressed in everything from tie-dye to button-down shirts. The farmer’s market in Geneva, Illinois, had three farmers, two bakers, and a few craftspeople. Everyone is lily white except the one Hispanic farmer, there are no organic growers, and everyone is extremely nice. The farmer’s market in Davis Square, Somerville, was smaller than the Berkeley market, but otherwise looked pretty much the same — another bit of evidence that Berkeley has a direct connection via a space/time warp to Cambridge and environs. The New Bedford farmer’s market is small, but it manages to offer a good cross-section of Massachusetts farms.

At the far end of Wing’s Court was the lone organic grower, a woman with curly gray hair, skin burnt brown from the sun, and ice-blue eyes. She was straight-forward and no-nonsense, but also pleasant and polite. Her organic blueberries looked extraordinary, so I bought a quart. She also had jam and jelly, labeled “Tripp Farm, Horseneck Road, Westport.” The ingredients in the rhubarb jelly: rhubarb and sugar. Nothing else. For the wild grape jam: wild grapes and sugar. No weird sweeteners or additives, just fruit and sugar. And when I picked up the jars, the jelly inside slid around a little bit but not too much — just the right texture.

She watched me peer at all the labels. “What are you looking for?” she said. “Is there some kind of jelly you especially like?”

“I’m just looking to see what you have,” I said. Rhubarb sounded interesting, but I really don’t eat jelly any more. I was mostly curious.

“I have some other jelly, I just haven’t put it out yet,” she said. “I’ve got beach plum…”

“Beach plum!” I said. The last time I had had beach plum jelly was probably twenty years ago when my mother got us some from down on the Cape or islands. “I haven’t had that in maybe fifteen, twenty years.” Or maybe more like thirty years — I remembered a wild, spicy taste, not as tart as currant jelly….

She got some out, and I said I’d take it. “I have to put a label on it first,” she said. “We don’t putthe labels on until we have to, because if it gets foggy the ink on the labels runs. It’s five dollars, it’s more than the others.” Of course it is — picking wild beach plums is hard work.

The next stop was two pick-up trucks, back-to-back, with a gray-haired man at each one, one leg up on the truck bed, arms folded over the knee. They both wore neat and trim shirts and work pants. Their vegetables were unbelievably inexpensive — I bought a lot, but only spnet a dollar ninety.

I went to the one who was selling the vegetables (since I already had blueberries). He had nice tender young yellow summer squash, and curly head lettuce — how he grows lettuce in this heat is beyond me.

The last truck stood right by the Union Street sidewalk — there were only the four trucks, it’s a small farmer’s market — and it was run by a brisk, friendly woman a little younger than I. She had by far the widest selection of vegetables, along with fresh eggs, peaches, plums, and a few New Jersey apples she had gotten somewhere. She was both a farmer and a saleswoman, pleasant and efficient, the kind of person for whom the chickens probably lay bigger eggs. I bought wax beans, a dozen eggs, and a gorgeous sunflower from her. She must have known that no one can resist a small, perfect sunflower.

As I said, it’s Massachusetts farming in miniature, lacking only two kinds of farmers: the Southeast Asian farmer, often Hmong, with incredible vegetables, and the dreadlocked hippy farmer whose organic bok choy has holes in its leaves from cabbage moths. I thought about this as I walked home, and as soon as I got in the kitchen I tried the beach plum jam. The texture was absolutely perfect, and it tasted just as good as I remembered. The problem is, I no longer care for sweets. Carol will probably wind up finishing it off, and next time I’ll get curious and try the rhubarb jam.

Hot

Hot and sticky today. Not as hot as the midwest, nor as hot as it gets around here a few miles inland. At a meeting this afternoon, we all talked about the heat. Strategies varied, from cranking up a big old air conditioner, to getting cranky. I don’t like air conditioning, and prefer to get all mean and cranky. But today was mostly cloudy, the lack of sun made it bearable — for me, anyway. And I’m reading Wilfred Thesiger’s book Arabian Sands. He is travelling with five Bedu tribesmen through the Empty Quarter of Saudia Arabia, by camel and on foot. They have no more than a pint of liquid, camel’s milk mixed with brackish water, a day. The landscape: sand dunes, hundreds of feet high, almost no vegetation. Thesiger writes: There would be no food till sunset, but bin Kabina heated what was left of the coffeee…. I lay on the sand and watched an eagle circling overhead. It was hot…. Already the sun had warmed the sand so that it burnt the soft skin round the sides of my feet. No shade. Uncertain supplies of water. Whereas in New England, summer is a chance for us to bake our bones in comfort before winter sets in again.

Turtle

This evening, I went down to Allen’s Pond Audubon sanctuary in Dartmouth. At dusk, I was walking back along the beach when I heard someone shouting something over the sounds of the ocean. It was a fisherman I had seen fishing earlier.

“What?” I said, cupping my ear.

All I could hear in response was something-something-turtle.

I looked all around, but didn’t see anything. “Where?” I said.

He beckoned me over towards him, and when I got close enough he pointed to the ground in front of him. “It’s a leatherback,” he said.

A dead leatherback turtle lay at the edge of the water, mostly out of it. I would have said head first, but most of the head had been eaten away by something, leaving only the skull. If you weren’t looking, it could have been just another dark rock with seaweed hanging on it.

“I almost didn’t see it, but then I kicked this,” pointing at a piece of the flipper. “A boat or something must have hit him in the water,” he continued. “He must have come up here to die. Then probably one of the coyotes ate his head.” He paused, and we looked at the turtle for a bit. “I didn’t think they came this close in.”

“He hasn’t been here long,” I said. “He doesn’t stink yet.”

We looked over the body: almost black, sleek and streamlined, phenomenally beautiful even lacking the head. We thunked the shell. It was resilient, and sounded and felt much like a ripe watermelon when we tapped it with our knuckles. Ridges ran the length of the shell. The flippers were tapered and graceful. The whole body was big, a good five or six feet long, probably weighing a few hundred pounds. Even the blue-green curl of intestine spilling out from between the shells was beautiful. A senseless death.

“Well, now we can say we saw one,” said the fisherman, “even if it was dead.”

We started walking back to the road, and I asked him if the blues were running. He said they had been, but they had been feeding voraciously on some smaller fish and weren’t interested in what he threw at them. It was getting dark enough that the colors were fading, and as I got in the car I heard a few last terns screeching as they dove for prey into the ocean.

Past Lughnasa

I happened to pick up Henry Thoreau’s journal from 1854, and read this passage from August 7, 1854:

Do you not feel the fruit of your spring and summer beginning to ripen, to harden its seed within you– Do not your thoughts begin to acquire consistency as well as flavor and ripeness– How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had a seed time of character?

Something to consider for this week just past Lughnasa, when we are poised in expectation, the first fruits of the harvest beginning to pour in, but we don’t yet know how bountiful the harvest will be.

New Bedford

New Bedford, Mass.

Carol and I left Cambridge at about 10:30 this morning. We had to take separate cars since Carol will return to Cambridge on Sunday. She has to commute to Watertown, which could be a two-hour drive from here at rush hour, and she’s still trying to work on her next book while working full time.

I arrived here in New Bedford at about twenty past noon, twenty minutes late to pick up the key from Nancy C., who has kindly loaned us her house in downtown New Bedford until we can find our own apartment. The drive down here was bad. I had a hair-raising ride through Somerville and the Central Artery, and I learned that the driving directions you get on the Internet are pretty useless in the Boston area — in greater Boston, you don’t just need to know when to take a right and when to take a left, you need to know which lane to get into well before you have to make the turn, and you have to know that to stay on Somerville Ave. you have to take what looks like a sharp left. Of course being Boston, the drivers are insane, the roads are still a mess with the Big Dig construction, and Interstate 93 was all backed up south of the city. I sat in traffic for twenty minutes on I-93, and saw two accidents, and three cars pulled over by the State Police. It was just a nasty drive from Cambridge until traffic eased out close to New Bedford.

But at last we made it to New Bedford.

And at about one o’clock, my two sisters, Abby and Jean, my father, and Jim, Abby’s husband, arrived to spend the afternoon in New Bedford. We had lunch and walked over to the National Park visitors’ center. They wanted to see the waterfront, so we crossed the pedestrian footbridge over Route 18. Dad and my sister Jean had to stop every hundred feet to take photographs. Jean took 64 photographs yesterday. I don’t know how many Dad took. Downtown New Bedford is photogenic, with most of the houses and commercial buildings from the 19th C., and a few from the late 18th C.

“Seagulls,” said Jean, as several circled and cried overhead. “I could work in a town that has seagulls.”

We walked over to the waterfront, looking at the fishing boats tied up there, going into the Wharfinger’s Office which now houses exhibits for the National Park, and wandered over to look at the Ernestina, a wood-hulled schooner built in 1894, and originally christened the Effie M. Morrissey. She was a fishing schooner on the Grand Banks, sailed to the Arctic as an exploratory vessel, and is now a national landmark, currently being restored. As we were looking her over (as Dad and Jean were taking lots of photographs), a three-masted vessel, a barkentine, came into port and tied up just down the wharf from Ernestina. Carol being who she is, she immediately struck up a conversation with the crew, and learned they sailed from Philadelphia headed for Booth Bay Harbor, to go into drydock there. “If we stayed another half hour,” said Carol, “I would have gotten us an invitation to go on board.” She would have, too, but we had to head back to the cars, so Dad and my sisters and Jim could get back to Concord.

After we ate dinner, Carol and I went to Baker Books in Dartmouth, the town just west of New Bedford. Going to a bookstore is our usual weekend date. That we went on our usual weekend date says more than anything that we are here, we are settling in.

I’ve arrived now. The journey from Illinois is over.

Travel

I am reading a translation of travel writing and other prose by Basho, 17th C. Japanese writer. He writes:

Now, for those who set their heart on the spiritual arts and follow the four seasons, writing is as inexhaustible as the sands on the beach.

He wrote this in a haibun about a painting, and he decides that the writers of his day do not measure up to the master poets of the past:

The joy of continuing their truth is difficult for those today.

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.