Where are they now?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

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.

An air of a ghost town

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

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

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

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.

  1. “Hell is full of musical amateurs.”
  2. “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.)
  3. “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.’”
  4. “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.”
  5. 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.”
  6. 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:
  7. “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.
  8. 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.”
  9. To him, a “poor performance was a personal insult to be treated accordingly.”
  10. 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.”

Fitting me like a glove

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I posted a year ago, this would be the first time I’ve had a tailor-made personal space. How heavenly! Look at those two windows higher up on the wall, allowing for shelving below and cross-circulation of air in the warmer months in addition to natural light.

Roughly 12-by-14 feet, including the closet and writing corner, much of it would be taken up with a very comfy double-sized bed, but the room was also intended to enclose my 200-plus journals, rows of LPs and CDs, a turntable and Bose stereo, hundreds of books, plus clothing, filing cabinets, and a writing corner. Hey, I’ve been downsizing.

The room is isolated, tucked away from everything, unlike the previous space where I could keep an eye on passers-by on the street and deliveries to the back door, the entry that got 98 percent of our use. I could even see the deer in our yard. The new room, in contrast, feels more like a treehouse, even with that double-sash window that displays a corner of the ocean and all of its changes.

~*~

My bedroom is the smallest of the four, but it fits me like the proverbial glove. If I sometimes think of it as being like a treehouse, that was something I never had as a kid, though I did climb often to the top of the elm in our back yard. I can nearly clamber to its tippy top in my sleep, almost 70 years later, hundreds of miles to the east.

In our renovations, the room is also envisioned as a place for my continuing downsizing, a consideration for my heirs who have no interest in my journals, manuscripts, recorded music, clothing, or ancestral snapshots and formal photographs. I don’t want to burden them with any of that. Still, despite my previous efforts, there’s so much I still need to sort through in my remaining time. Back to those journals, manuscripts, recordings, clothes, and photos. Some of that labor may even lead to future posts here.

Back when we moved into our Dover house, the one with the red barn in New Hampshire, I needed tons of space for my literary projects – everything was on paper. Not so now, especially after so much of that paper is now available to readers in digital publication.

What we did with the wall between mine and the front bedroom is especially delightful. Originally, the space was supposed to be divided between the two bedrooms, but then she who must be obeyed ceded it all to me, except for the space overhead. Her reason was that this was the wall where she decided her bed should go, and the bed would have obstructed the closet. OK, then.

Gee, I had been thinking about what might go up my side of the space. Instead, I have a bit of upper wall, which makes me wonder what might be displayed there instead. My Far West cow skull, perchance? Or a moose antler rack from around here?

My proudest part of my upstairs quarters is the writing center carved out of what would have been closet, up against an outside window. Here I can see a corner of the harbor and yet also have so much at hand overhead.

~*~

The back two bedrooms – mine and the one we’re designating as guest room – are largely square in their floorplan but were to have a signature charred beam running upward along the exterior wall, a reminder of the 1886 downtown fire that charred our rafters but didn’t get further than that. For us, these are also reminders of a chimney fire or two that the house also survived. For the most part, the rooms are mirror images of each other, except for differences in the wall that has the closets. More on that in a later post or two.

When it came time for the drywall to go up, we yielded on preserving that detail and instead went for an unbroken wall, mostly because of the expense of the labor needed to execute the details. Alas.

~*~

In the renovations, my room took priority because so much stuff from where we were dwelling downstairs had to move up to make room for ongoing work as it shifted to the first floor.

Besides, I was tiring of trying to sleep and write in the same chamber as the clothes washer and its noise. That future dining room was getting very crowded. We would need it as a staging area for the next stages of renovation.

I never realized how much I was surrounded by Greeks

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

For whatever impulsive reason, I ended my first published novel, Subway Hitchhikers (now revised into Subway Visions) in a Greek family’s restaurant in Indiana. In a town I I’ve dubbed Daffodil, which shows up in the title of the next book in the series., in fact

At the time, I saw it as emblematic of East Meets West, especially apt considering its Tibetan Buddhist twist.

Little did I know, once I picked up the trail again not quite two decades after that publication, of the ways Greek-Americans interacted with my life, even in the Midwest.

Consider these tidbits:

My best friend’s mother was delighted by her neighbor’s repeated explanation, “Athens! She is beautiful. The rest of the country?” A spitting sound I could never ever spell out was accompanied by the open palms of both hands coming down side by side from overhead.

His other best friend was Greek-American, someone of a philosophic outlook who wound up living in my circle in Upstate New York after getting out of the Army. Yeah, some hippies were veterans.

Later faint details of a landmark restaurant passing into a new generation much like the one in the novel, still in Daffodil.

In the Pacific Northwest, discovering souvlaki on our forays to the University District of Seattle.

Back in Northeast Ohio, the Greek bakery in a small storefront surrounded by houses on a quiet street six or seven blocks east of our home.

In Baltimore, “All the pizza’s made by Greeks,” which seemed wrong – where were the Italians? And, in my salesman role on the road, “All the diners are owned by Greeks.”

In New Hampshire, the Athens restaurant downtown – popular but, to my senses, bland and tired – in contrast to one of my favorite takeout places where we ordered for the office – the menu that introduced me to gyros.

Add to that the cathedral’s big Glendi, which sent food to the newsroom in gratitude for our coverage, or the little frame St. Nicholas church I’d pass on one route to and from the paper.

One of our older coworkers, a photo lab tech, was Greek – kind, smiling, though I got to know little else. Later, one of the men I worked more closely with in the composing room was half Greek. His name, Perry, was after his grandfather, Pericles.

All of this fleeting, fragmentary, but coming together in once I moved to Dover and its annual, free-admission Greek Festival. From there, I picked up Greek dancing and the liturgy of the Orthodox faith, not that I converted. It still enriched my Quaker Christian strand.

And then there was Davos, in Watertown Square, a block down the street from my weekly choir practice. The restaurant was expertly run by Hispanics after its founders moved on.

It’s an element I miss living on this end of Maine. The closest Greek restaurants are in Brewer and Waterville, both blissfully satisfying.

For more of what they present, look to the Cassia’s World category here at the Red Barn or to the novel, What’s Left, which is available 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. It’s also available in paper and Kindle at Amazon, or you can ask your local library to obtain it.

 

Where did all those classmates go?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

There are holes in the listings posted in the website. Individuals, perhaps, who want no contact, though their location is known. Perhaps others who have been ostracized, after prison or scandal. Others just fallen through the cracks.

I see, too, others have been added. Girls who left to have secret babies. Boys who maybe got their GEDs or returned to the fold through marriage. I’m glad to see them included.

In the meantime, I prepare a message. The one that says my location can be known, even if I’m not attending this year’s reunion. Even now, it’s a long road from here to there, and back again.

~*~

How curious, coming across that note a few decades after I wrote it.

I’ve reconnected with a few via social media.

But many holes still remain. Frankly, I don’t know what I’d say to them if they did show up. We have gone in quite different directions, after all.