Mottled pink and gilt-edged clouds
new moon
Author: Jnana Hodson
In downsizing to a remote fishing village in Downeast Maine, this eclectic writer feels everything's coming together.
A travel perspective
Suppose I lost everything I had packed in a car fire.
My meds and dental retainer likely the biggest loss.
Didn’t bring my laptop, and my cell phone’s in my messenger bag.
Everything else could be readily replaced.
Well, including those. Even the phone numbers I had stored there.
Looking for God in the details
The architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is often credited as the origin of the quip, “God is in the details,” but the phrase actually goes back much earlier.
Still, however tedious but essential, details do extend to the minutia of building and sustaining a marriage, a family, and a wider community. You can also apply it to any number of other things, including business, sports, the fine arts, politics.
In researching Quaking Dover, I am left with many gaps in the records of Friends’ godly endeavors. When, for example, did Dover Friends cease to run their own schools?
In addition, in writing a history, the details can drive one mad.
May I suggest the devil’s at work there, too?
Heads up!
Oh, my, so much has happened since the Common Ground Fair at the autumn equinox.
The week that followed, when I was out in the schooner, introduced so much, and two days after I returned, the big renovation project on our house finally began.
Many of those developments will be presented in weekly posts after the New Year. I do need time to digest the implications. Remember, I spent too much of my professional life as a journalist in the immediacy of daily chaos. I do value a longer view.
For now, there are other bits to catch up on as well.
Life is feeling very rich, indeed, if I don’t let it become overwhelming.
Stunning bridge over the Narrows
At the top of Penobscot Bay, this is the principal welcome to Downeast and Acadia. Or for those of us going the other direction, to the rest of America.
You can even go to the top, the equivalent of 40 floors, for a spectacular panorama.
Election reflections
These shoulder elections, where nobody’s running for national office, are still important.
In small places like Eastport, getting someone to run even unopposed for local office can be a challenge. We had all the bases covered, although the surprise was when a write-in candidate won one of the two city council seats.
I can’t imagine that happening in a bigger setting, but who knows. A write-in for president? My!
Statewide, a radical proposal to take over the two widely hated electrical utilities failed. Big money is hard to comprehend, even if we’ll be paying it one way or the other. The frequent storm outages won’t be going away, nor will the continuing higher-than-national bills customers here receive. Somehow, I don’t think the issue will be going away, despite the lopsided tallies.
Just how much do those emergency home generators cost altogether, anyway, as insurance against the current setup? It’s not that many households before we’re talking billions.
Otherwise, the initiatives moved in a progressive direction, including the right-to-repair measure.
I am relieve to see opportunities for right and left to come together at a local level, however gingerly.
Still facing those relentless deadlines
It’s been more than I decade since I retired from the newsroom and its relentless deadlines, but those still haunt my sleep. Typically, I’m called back again in an emergency. In reality, that would violate my pension.
A SATURDAY NIGHT SHIFT. I’m doing something like makeup except that they drop additional tasks on me. I’m supposed to do three letters-to-the-ed pages but can’t do it. Am no longer trained for the new procedures, tech changes, passwords, etc.
In one, I run into out-and-out sabotage.
In another, I’m in charge but the deadlines have really moved up. Of course, I’m having trouble getting set up and in gear, can’t find stuff, and run behind. About 10 a.m. the rest of the staff starts showing up, wanting to know what to do. I’m trying to get one editor going on the Back Page but I can’t find a sheet of paper of any kind in the entire newsroom to show her the quick-and-easy way to get it done.
No paper at the newspaper? I awaken rattled, more than once.
USUALLY, I’M TRYING TO PAGINATE but don’t know the new computer system at all or don’t have the right passwords or other access. Maybe there aren’t even enough computer terminals or chairs. Sometimes that even takes me back to the yellow carbon-paper layout pages we used long ago. Still, the approaching deadline leads to panic and my feeling obsolete and incompetent.
OR I’M FILLING IN ON OBITS. (I want to write that as “orbits.”) But the office is different and it’s a new computer system, so I’m putting all the obituaries on one computer file to cut and paste in later, which is where the trouble kicks in around deadline. Nothing’s working right. (As a category, this is also akin to the old trying to make a flight or trip or finals test.)
On top of everything, the time card issue comes up (paper cards, not the computerized one … which would have been another nightmare) and I realize I can’t accept pay for this shift because of my pension clause. I’ve resolved to compromise and have the pay sent to charity, this case the Santa Fund.
IN OTHER VERSIONS, I haven’t been filling out timecards and thus haven’t been getting paid … since it’s direct deposit rather than a check, there’s a delay in my discovery.
That leads to frantically trying to find timecards and wondering how I’ll ever tell the company much less tell my wife and face her wrath.
In reality, my last stretch there we’d gone to electronic timecards. Now those could be a real-life nightmare!
Superb sea chantey singer
As you can see, Stephen Sanfilippo is more than a maritime historian. He can sing his research findings. Small concerts like this one upstairs at the Pembroke public library are one of the delights of living Way Downeast.
The Metropolitan Opera broadcasts take on a new tone
One of the benefits of donating even a modest amount to the Metropolitan Opera’s broadcast fund is that you receive an annual schedule booklet, 36 colorful, glossy pages with the casts, broadcast times and estimated lengths, and summaries of the plots. The booklet arrives a month or two before the next season begins, and I keep mine as wonderful future references.
The upcoming Saturday matinee broadcasts, which start airing on Dec. 9, have already been controversial, due to the company’s shifting focus toward increased contemporary and sometimes realistically gritty works. The first presentation of the season, in fact, is Florencia en el Amazonas, inspired by the writings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and only the third Spanish-language opera to be performed at the Met. (Carmen, after all, is in French and will be heard on Jan. 27.) Other works from our own era are Dead Man Walking (Jan. 20), X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X (Feb. 3), Fire Shut Up in My Bones (April 27), John Adams’ opera-oratorio El Nino (May 4), and The Hours (May 18).
That unprecedented string of operas by living composers doesn’t mean the usual masters aren’t on the menu. Mozart (3), Wagner, Verdi (4), Puccini (3), Bizet, Gounod, Donizetti, Johann Strauss Jr., and Gluck are all in the lineup, with two of the dates yet to be announced. Conspicuously absent is Richard Strauss.
Two of the archived presentations feature my favorite-ever conductor, Max Rudolf: Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro on Dec. 30, with Victoria de los Angeles and Cesare Siepi, and Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore on April 6, with Luciano Pavarotti, Judith Blegen, and Ezio Flagello. As one conductor once told me, Rudolf could have been famous, if he had wanted that. At the Met, he worked largely behind the scenes as Rudolf Bing’s artistic administrator before going to Cincinnati and rebuilding that city’s great orchestra.
Also of note is that the long-running broadcast series has a new sponsor, the Robert K. Johnson Foundation, only the third in its history. The series was underwritten by Texaco from 1940 to 2003, followed by Toll Brothers luxury homebuilders (2005 to 2023).
Gee, have Texaco’s red-star gas stations been gone from the landscape 20 years already?
Even tradition changes.
Passing neighbors
Now that they’re walking a dog
they don’t have time
to stop and talk anymore.
Now that she’s dead
the outdoor light is
turned off every night.
Jnana's Red Barn 