As I said in a recent letter to the editor …  

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

One of the more baffling things I’m finding in living here is the reluctance of folks in one town to participate in something in a neighboring town, as if they were worlds away.

It’s not just a matter of coming in to the Eastport Arts Center, either, or watching a movie in a little theater in Calais.

Pembroke’s renovated library has been hosting a series of free chantey sings by maritime historian Stephen Sanfilippo, and those would welcome (and do deserve) more participants. His well-researched programs usually include much than work songs, despite the title. A recent one that dug into clams and oysters would be a fine eye-opening example.

The most recent event included an illustrated talk by Susan Sanfilippo, drawing on the town’s historical society’s archives. She discussed ships built along the local tidal banks and then showed images of the resulting vessels as they sat in faraway places like Cuba, China, San Francisco, or Hawaii.

Stephen then used the varied destinations of the Pembroke ships as the basis for songs we all joined in singing later, often including nonsense verses while we looked at slides of the vessels. A calypso, anyone?

I should say it was all delightful and enlightening.

Besides, it was a sampling of what happened all along our Quoddy coast. I could image launchings from Shackford Cove in Eastport that then made similar extraordinary voyages.

Who says there’s nothing to do around here? Please look again and expand your horizon.

Of note across the street from Dover’s Quaker meetinghouse

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The home Isaac Wendell built by 1827 sits across Central Avenue from the Quaker meetinghouse.

I often parked next to it on the side street and admired the bird boxes and woodworking details on the ample barn and house additions.

He’s most noted as the cofounder with John Williams of the Dover Cotton Factory, the forerunner of the big mills downtown, but of interest to my story, he had married Anna Whittier, a close cousin of the celebrated poet John Greenleaf Whittier.

We can assume Greenleaf was a welcome guest there on his many visits to Dover.

Let me add, the relatively humane working conditions in the mills deteriorated drastically after Williams and Wendell lost control to new investors, leading to the first labor strike by women in America in 1828.

Wendell also shows up in the founding of the Sawyer Mills, which I discussed a week ago, as well as a foundry.

One of the many ways the dynamic of American society has changed in my own lifetime

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

As Dover First Parish pastor David Slater wrote in 1983: “Christianity is becoming more and more counter-cultural. In the 1950s public values were largely Christian values (even Protestant Christian values). Today we are more religiously pluralistic, but even more importantly, more secular. We can no longer assume that the values of the church will be shared by the larger society.”

How prophetic, considering where American society is today.

And how ironic, considering that his congregation embodied the common culture the Quakers in my book were countering.

Did I hit a moose way back when?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

It was dark and very cold that night, with snow piled high along the freeway.

Now that I’m getting familiar with deer, I realize that the critter I nicked with the right fender was much larger than any of the deer I see these days. They seem rather small, actually, apart from their appetites.

Still, that encounter could have been much worse. I have to consider myself quite lucky. A few feet one way or the other, the beast could have come crashing through my windshield.

Just one more fact of living where I do.

Way out of my hazy league

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

One sequence involves covering a political convention. Miami? Savannah? Charlotte?

THE FIRST PART takes place in a large room with gauzy tea-color curtains and a slight breeze, likely a hotel ballroom. I see a friend from my high school days across the room but she does not see me and moves from the scene before I can break off the conversation I’m in.

THE SECOND SCENE is in a makeshift newsroom, lots of lively activity – Hugh McDiarmid may be running the show. I meet a young brunette (short hair), and there’s her coy, smiling reaction.

THINGS HEAT UP, but now I’m watching a young male with her (that is, somehow I’ve distanced myself). She’s ready for something wild – perhaps in a room just off the newsroom – a storage room? But the male, realizing how little he knows her, discovers he doesn’t have a condom and a wild pursuit follows … asking his coworkers, Do you have a …

THERE’S AN INTERLUDE of being out, as a team, covering the story and then trying to phone the newsroom, which is working out of borrowed space in another newspaper. (Part of the chain? Professional courtesy?) The switchboard has no idea what we’re talking about … until someone says something about … ?

Singing together without masks at last

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

As we came together in a shared physical space after Covid, we continued to wear masks as a safeguard against resurgences of the virus. Choirs were, after all, a major source of contamination.

We even gave several concerts donned in special masks that gave us extra breathing room. But they did muffle our sound and diction while also fogging our glasses.

What a relief, then, when our director agreed about a month before our last set of concerts that we could go without the masks, if we individually desired.

What a difference it made! We were clearer in tone and lyrics, and our sound projected better. Our ability to hear each other also improved. It was like being unshackled.

It was like declaring the pandemic over, though we knew the virus was lingering.

What single move gave you that ah-hah! Breakthrough as we came out of the Covid onslaught?

As a reminder from the dominant side

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The ruling Puritans in New England had reasons for opposing the Quakers, something I need to remember in the midst of my Quaking Dover arguments, They don’t get much sympathy in their objections, at least from my audiences.

As Dover First Parish historian Donald R. Bryant put it, “The Quakers did not conform with the orderly practices of the Puritan churches. They would not join in fellowship, and met among themselves, propagating their own beliefs. Many of them did not do this quietly, but in a manner that was disturbing to regular church members. They were apt to interrupt a meeting or a preacher, or to even interfere with the proceedings of a court. They insulted church order and disturbed the peace. Their conduct was described as ‘indecent and provoking.’”

Some of these points still sting as I look at today’s political and social polarization.