He doesn’t know who’s the true boss. That would be the Chicken Farmer in our family, and, yes, I still love her. She really does tend to some gorgeous chickens and their colorful eggs.
Author: Jnana Hodson
In downsizing to a remote fishing village in Downeast Maine, this eclectic writer feels everything's coming together.
Ten fears in an approaching hurricane
Even this far north, we’ve had our moments. Among the things to consider:
- That it’s going it hit full force, or even with winds in excess of 70 mph and five or more inches of rain.
- Roof shingles blown away and/or leaking.
- Falling trees and branches.
- Flying objects. Things nobody thought to tie down, especially.
- Broken windows.
- Long power outages leading to loss of frozen and refrigerated food – meat, scallops, blueberries, homegrown chard, especially. Worse yet, the microwave won’t work.
- Basement flooding when the sump pump loses power. As for the furnace?
- Wet mattresses and books if the ceiling starts to “rain.”
- Isolation when the causeway floods.
- Just where we’re staying if ordered to evacuate.
Are they really vain expenditures?
Upon graduation from college, in my social-activist period, I wondered how American society could possibly afford High Art while so many went hungry and homeless – domestically as well as internationally. Then I began to see everywhere a desire for expressiveness – in every ghetto, the ghetto-blasters and Playboy, spreads, graffiti and blues bands. To say nothing of the influence of professional sport, to which nearly every ghetto youth seems to aspire. (And more than a few others.)
So opera and museums and other “Establishment” operations came to lose their exclusivity in my vision. Extravagant expenditures in those realms are overshadowed by big-league athletics sports for similar reasons and then by military budgets across much of the globe.
See how much each person needs to reach into the realms of thought and imagination – the spirit; anything less reduces our existence to nothing more than economics, impoverishing everyone in the society.
So I noted.
By the way, Versailles still offends me.
Kinisi 276
You hate to lose.
Even diet.
Makes you see paying your bills
as a pain.
At home by the water
Not everybody on North Haven island has a basement, as we saw on a jaunt ashore. Think of it as local color, as seen from a cruise aboard the historic schooner Louis R. French last summer.
For more schooner sailing experiences, take a look at my Under Sail photo album at Thistle Finch editions.
As for the clothes washer and dryer
In the original layouts for the upstairs, I thought a laundry room was pushing our limits. On the other hand, I didn’t want a washer and dryer in the bathroom, either. That just would have looked, well, utilitarian. Besides, keeping them separate would avert crowding when competing uses erupted.
So what would be wrong with keeping them downstairs?
That’s when the fact that we would have to carry our laundry up and down stairs was pointed out to me. They’re the bulk of our wash load.
OK, I relented and was willing to go see where the new plan would lead.
I had to admit that no longer having it in my bedroom and studio was going to come as a relief.
~*~
What I’m seeing now is how much this “luxury” really enhances our daily living, starting with the sheets and blankets storage.
I’ve long been a fan of having elbow space as part of my work area. For perspective, I recommend Richard Swenen’s 1992 bestseller, Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives.
The laundry room – and the slightly wider than normal hallway between it and the stairwell – reflect that thinking.
The laundry tub also fits into that idea of margin, with its deep bowl facilitating household and painting projects cleanup more easily than a bathtub does.
Add to that the ease of ironing.
There’s even thought of running a clothesline out from the window.
Frankly, I’m not so sure about that, though I’m willing to be convinced otherwise.
Where are they now?
In the hippie circles where I lived immediately after graduating from college, I remember visiting one couple’s apartment on the second floor of a former Victorian carriage house, not that it was in any way chic. They had one room that had benches or modest pews around the four walls, something I now see as resembling a Quaker meetinghouse interior.
Their reason was the small group they welcomed to study the works of Armenian mystic George Gurdjeff (c 1867-1949). He’s best known for his book, Meetings with Remarkable Men, published in 1963, describing his visits in remote mountains and deserts mostly, places he paid homage to eccentric and often aged holy men of varied stipes.
Looking back at my own life and people I’ve met, though, I’m not sure his were any more exceptional than many I’ve known. Maybe they were just a bit more eccentric.
It’s a thread running through most of my work, actually.
In my relocations around the country, I’ve lost touch with 99 percent of them, but do wonder how the rest of their lives unfolded.
Here’s a sampling.
- High school classmates and other youths from our church.
- Fellow commuters and faculty from the new Wright State University.
- The other residents in my two dorms in Indiana, especially the ones who show up in Daffodil Uprising.
- The other residents of the hippie farm in New York’s Southern Tier or my Hawley Street digs in town. See Pit-a-Pat High Jinks.
- The yogis of the ashram and those who came as guests. (Yoga Bootcamp.)
- Ex-lovers over the years. (Blue Rock, Braided Double-Cross, Long-Stem Roses in a Shattered Mirror.)
- Colleagues from the public policy research institute at Indiana University. One of the leaders did go on to win the Nobel Prize in economics. As for the others?
- Fellow poets and writers along my way.
- Fellow journalists and other newspaper workers. I’ve come across a few and read of others, but mostly they, too, have faded from sight. Eight papers in all. (Hometown News.)
- Quakers I’ve experienced in nine yearly meetings.
- The staff as the media syndicate where I worked, plus newspaper editors in 14 states, back when I lived in Baltimore.
- Mennonites and Brethren in Maryland.
- Neighbors around the Jacuzzi at Yuppieville on the Hill, Granite State.
- New England Contradancers in Greater Boston and across New Hampshire and southern Maine.
- Greek Orthodox in Dover. (What’s Left.)
- Voices in Revels Singers in Watertown outside Boston.
Trying to trace down even a few of them has been frustrating. Some have shown up in news reports that led me to them, fleetingly. Many of the women have taken their husband’s surname, which becomes a barrier. Facebook has led to some from my high school years, but beyond that I am surprised by the number of “friends” who are inactive at their profiles or other folks who have no online presence at all. And then there are ones I’ve come across at Find-a-Grave.
It’s been quite a cast in my zig-zag journey to here.
By and large, though, I’m seeing how short we’ve come in regard to the lofty goals we once professed. My heroes, especially.
~*~
That said, you can find the novels they inspired in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. They’re also available in paper and Kindle at Amazon, or you can ask your local library to obtain them.
Among the true-life insights found in literature
Henry Miller, quoting his grandfather (in fiction, Nexus, at least):
Why are the dead so stiff?
Because there’s no joy in them anymore.
(Do I file that under Jewish Humor?)
An air of a ghost town
Much of Way Downeast Maine stirs up echoes of the American Far West, at least in the eyes of some, and that includes impressions of ghost towns.
The downtown of Lubec has some prime examples, including this imposing waterfront emporium that was the headquarters for R.J. Peacock company’s wide-ranging sardine operations.
I think the structure has a slight resemblance to the long-gone steamship wharf that once welcomed passengers just below our house in Eastport. This one is still standing.
To explore related free photo albums, visit my Thistle Finch blog.
George Bernard Shaw wasn’t shy in sounding off on classical music
The famed English playwright was also an esteemed music critic, though he wrote under the pseudonym Corno di Bassetto, 1888 to 1889, before moving on to a more respectable newspaper for four years. There, he signed his reviews G.B.S.
For perspective, he was an ardent advocate of Richard Wagner, which put him in opposition to Johannes Brahms.
Here are some sharp notes.
- “Hell is full of musical amateurs.”
- “A man who can tolerate Bach and Scarlatti on a modern piano can tolerate anything.” (He was the first converts to the original instruments camp of early music.)
- “Nine times out of ten, when a prima donna thinks that I am being thrilled by her vibrant tones, I am simply wrestling with an impulse to spring on stage and say ‘My dear young lady, pray don’t. Your voice is not a nail, to be driven into my head.’”
- “There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem.”
- He did concede some points. “Mind, I do not deny that the Requiem is a solid piece of music manufacture. You feel at once that it could only have come from the establishment of a first-class undertaker.”
- He redefined the scope of the job, saying “I purposely vulgarized musical criticism, which was refined and academic to the point of being unreadable and often nonsensical,” or more to the point, “I believed that I could make musical criticism readable even by the deaf.” To wit:
- “Handel is not a mere composer in England: he is an institution. What is more, he is a sacred institution. … Every three years there is a Handel Festival, at which his oratorios are performed by four thousand executants, collected from all the choirs in England. The effect is horrible; and everyone declares it sublime. … If I were a member of the House of Commons, I would propose a law making it a capital offence to perform an oratorio by Handel with more than 80 performers in the chorus and orchestra, allowing 48 singers and 32 instrumentalists.” He was way ahead of his time on the size issue.
- Many of the musical affectations of the time drew his fire. Regarding one imposed on a Mozart aria, he commented, “The effect of this suburban grace can be realized by anyone who will take the trouble to whistle ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ with the last note displaced an octave.”
- To him, a “poor performance was a personal insult to be treated accordingly.”
- Still, stridently avoiding pale cliché, he did praise those who surpassed his standards. Describing one singer, he wrote, “I was consoled by a human caress after an angelic discourse.”
Jnana's Red Barn 