END OF THE LINE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Maybe the last of the high-visibility newspaper chiefs was Dave Burgin, an abrasive, volatile, but brilliant editor who began his legendary career at the New York Herald Tribune in 1963 and then went on to head a dozen-and-a-half major metropolitan daily newspapers, most of them already in their death throes, ranging from the Washington Star to the Orlando Sentinel (his one big success story) to the Dallas Times Herald to the San Francisco Examiner (where he was fired – twice) to the Oakland Tribune. Of course, it’s hard to leave a lasting impact if you don’t stay long in any community.

Still, one boss I had always returned in amazement after a visit with Burgin. Said he was the only person in the entire business with a real vision for a future or the changing needs of younger readers, along with the reasons they were avoiding newspapers en masse. He, too, saw the value of the weird comic strip “Zippy” for his Bay Area readership and was willing to run it page-wide on Page A2. Not that it would fly quite the same in Dallas.

One of his lasting bits of wisdom was the question, “What do I have in the paper today that will bring a reader back tomorrow?” I’ve looked at a lot of newspaper copy with that question over the years and felt we were missing the answer.

Actually, it’s a good question for a lot of businesses. I think it’s even a matter of getting down to the basics.

FREE OF THE ENTOURAGE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Most newspaper writing and editing is done is large, open newsrooms rather than small, private offices. It’s amazing to think anyone can actually concentrate and work amid the surrounding mayhem, especially when the scanner is blaring police and fire dispatches and the television’s on overhead. (Well, I took to streaming opera and music by living composers to blot out that hysteria.)

Still, a few management-level editors had offices, and we’d get visitors who’d head there or to the conference room for private meetings. Usually, the men would be in navy blue suits, along with a woman or two in high heels. That is, they’d arrive and depart as a team. Since New England Cable News also had a presence in our newsroom, I’d sometimes get a phone call from my younger daughter, the political activist. “Do you know who’s standing behind you?” No, I hadn’t looked. I was too busy working. And she’d call out the candidate’s name.

Not that they were all politicians. Sometimes they were business executives or lobbyists of one stripe or another. Even the writers and artists seemed to travel in packs. And often a face would look familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. Let me add that many of them look quite different in person than they do on video.

Late one afternoon, though, I looked up from my terminal and noticed a dignified solitary personage striding into the room. He was taller than I’d suspected but the face was one I soon identified. David Broder, a Washington Post columnist my college professor had called the best political reporter in the country decades earlier, an evaluation that remained dead right.

I didn’t interrupt with a greeting as he walked past. Respected his space and thinking. But I was far more impressed than I’d been by any of the celebrities who had posed behind me.

RAT-TAT OSCAR

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The title of a chapter in Bill Adler Jr.’s Outwitting Squirrels says everything: “Know the Enemy.” (My copy was a Christmas present, one of many squirrel-related items the family wraps and presents me, in their own vein of humor.) While Adler’s focus is on the difficulties squirrels cause bird feeders, including me, the bush-tailed mammals can be a homeowner’ nemesis – “tree-climbing rats,” as one friend insists – causing a number of fires as they gnaw through wiring and insulation. Ditto for the electrical utility.

In combat, however, one side can begin to resemble the other: their actions and thoughts parallel and overlap. A canny devil may even earn respect.

Many of the poems in a series I call Rat-Tat Oscar poems originate in my encounters with squirrels as part of my second marriage – evicting them from the walls of the house, from their raids on the bird feeders and garden, and eventually from the haunts in the barn – and are spurred by my wife’s quip, watching me transport them away in a Have-a-Heart trap, that I was operating a squirrel taxi. They can drive a man to madness or violence.

The poems also draw on annual Christmas letters to friends and family over two-and-a-half decades, turning the encounters to a would-be squirrel’s perspective. Of course, my wife and children will also insist I’m often more than a tad squirrelly.

Surprisingly, there’s not a lot about squirrels in mythology. Maybe the most prominent one is the Norse Ratatoskr, along with a handful of Native American stories. Maybe they had as much trouble making sense of squirrels in the universe as I do.

THAT FRESH PERSPECTIVE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

When it comes to food, this time of summer is always a revelation, at least here in northern New England. The sheer abundance and variety of fresh produce is such a contrast to the rest of the year. One bite from any of the kinds of tomatoes we harvest is enough to make you ask just what those imitations in the grocery really are. You can go down the list.

Yes, this has been building up, beginning with the asparagus and lettuce in the spring and continuing through the strawberries and blueberries and a number of other crops along the way. Should we even mention peaches and apples, now coming on strong?

Let me argue that there’s nothing more marvelous than a sandwich loaded with real mayonnaise and sliced fresh tomato and nothing else. Forget the bacon. Lettuce is nice, if it hasn’t all bolted. Or a sprig of fresh basil. But that’s it. Pure and simple.

You can put all those cookbooks aside.

Another of those nothing-can-be-better experiences is one that sometimes follows a day at the beach. On my way home, I pull off the highway at a nondescript seafood wholesaler and boatyard where I purchase three one-pound soft-shell “chix” culls – the lobsters that may be missing a claw or simply not be visually perfect enough for the restaurant crowd. If it seems extravagant, I remind myself I’m saving 50 cents a pound, which makes each lobster cheaper than a McDonald’s fish sandwich this time of year, even before you get to New Hampshire’s added eight percent Meals and Rooms Tax aimed at tourists. And the lobsters are from local waters, rather than shipped in from Chile or wherever.

A bit up the road I stop at a farm market, if it’s not Wednesday, when I’d have already hit one of two farmers markets. This time, it’s fresh corn-on-the-cob – ears picked that morning.

As soon as I arrive home, I put a big pot on the stove, go outdoors and shuck the corn, which then goes into the pot once it reaches a full boil. Five minutes later, the corn comes out and the lobsters go in. The water’s already flavored.

Butter goes immediately on the corn, to melt thoroughly before I add fresh-ground pepper.

Ten minutes later, two of the lobsters join the corn on the plate – and that’s it, plus a squirt of lemon in the melted butter. Forget the little dish of butter you get in a restaurant; just use what’s come off the corn. Yummers, as we sometimes say.

So I retreat to the Smoking Garden, where making a mess is no problem, and delight in my classic twin lobster repast as the dialogue in my head asserts the king of France never ate better. Gold flatware and rare porcelain would add nothing to this meal. Julia Child, for all of her insistence on fine culinary technique, would have to admit that all of those skills existed only to try to emulate the wonder of this simple afternoon glory. Tamar Adler, with her advocacy of one-pot meals, would no doubt be on my side here.

The third lobster, you ask? It goes into the refrigerator for lunch or even breakfast the next day. I’ll add a dollop of mayo on the side, for dipping, and find myself re-creating lobster salad, minus the bread.

If we’re really being ambitious, we save all of the shells for chowder stock or lobster ravioli, the latter dish sometimes getting an extra lobster all its own for the meat. Either way, that step really lowers the per-serving cost.

This hardly makes me a foodie or even give me any creds in the kitchen. So? The fact is that we’ll never be able to subsist on the food we raise on our little city-garden. But it, and the local farmers and fishermen we visit, give us many reminders of the inescapable wonder of freshness on the plate. You can’t beat quality ingredients after all, and this is where it all starts.

As Julia would say, Bon Appetit! With or without the king of France in the background.

JOE-PYE WEED

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments
The spring after we moved into our house, we bought our Joe-Pye weed at the county Conservation District's annual plant sale, along with the pussy willows and a host of other plantings -- a bargain way to go, if you can. At the time, I thought this was the dumbest name imaginable, though. I mean, we were planting WEEDS? No, my wife said, it was just the name. As for Joe Pye, she said he was an Indian healer. Or maybe he was just somebody who used the plant for healing. Turns out it comes in all sizes, although ours are stunningly tall. When they bloom late in the summer, the wild birds are very happy. And while that makes me very happy, let me admit: after a few seasons, these plants began popping up everywhere, just like weeds.
The spring after we moved into our house, we bought our Joe-Pye weed at the county Conservation District’s annual plant sale, along with the pussy willows and a host of other plantings — a bargain way to go, if you can. At the time, I thought this was the dumbest name imaginable, though. I mean, we were planting WEEDS? No, my wife said, it was just the name. As for Joe Pye, she said he was an Indian healer. Or maybe he was just somebody who used the plant for healing. Turns out it comes in all sizes, although ours are stunningly tall. When they bloom late in the summer, the wild birds are very happy. And while that makes me very happy, let me admit: after a few seasons, these plants began popping up everywhere, just like weeds.

OPA!

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The Friday and Saturday of every Labor Day weekend here features Dover’s Greek Heritage Festival, which is much more than a fundraiser for the Assumption Orthodox church.

It’s more a community-wide FUN-raiser, with traditional food (the teenage workers in the kitchen, reflecting the instruction of patient grandmothers, is something I wish we had in our own congregation), conversation and mingling, cultural displays, crafts for sale, and best of all, live music and dancing.

But oh, my, am I really there dancing in that YouTube clip? All the dancers wearing white aprons, by the way, had dashed out from the kitchen, taking a break before returning to the cooking and cleaning. But, heavens, I still look like a New England contradancer. Lighten up! I really was having fun, but I’ll promise to stand straighter and smile more this time. OK?

STROKE OF GENIUS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

“Do we have any cream rinse?” I asked, heading for the shower.

“The WHAT?” replied the chorus.

“You know, the stuff you put in your hair after you’ve used the shampoo.”

“Oh! You mean the CONDITIONER! They haven’t called it cream rinse for decades.”

Yeah, that stuff. There I go again, showing my age. Only to be corrected by my wife and kids.

Actually, I have to admire someone’s marketing savvy, however far back. Cream rinse, introduced to me by my first lover, always sounded like an indulgence – a luxury, superfluous but comforting. (She did have silky hair.) But conditioner? Now that sounds like something you might need to counter the, uh, harshness of shampoo. Not a luxury, but a necessity, making it all the better for marketing and sales.

Just goes to show the power of one word, doesn’t it.

OCCASION OF CELEBRATION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

As I posted in a poem back in April, spotting a hummingbird is an occasion of celebration. They’re so tiny and so fast you’re likely to dismiss one as a dragonfly or as some other large, speedy insect if you’re not paying attention. Sometimes you notice more the irregular angles of their zig-zag flight, the motions no other flyer can manage, rather than the bird itself, and then you start observing closely. And sometimes you just happen to look out when one’s hovering nearby, say at the blooming azalea in front of the bay window.

I hadn’t seen any this year until a few weeks ago, when I glimpsed out from our kitchen and noticed one working its way through our stand of burgundy-color bee balm. I called for my wife to come look, but by the time she came over, it had vanished behind the asparagus, and that was it. You have to be quick. And now those blossoms are gone by.

I’d also remarked that we hadn’t seen all that many goldfinches this summer. Sometimes we seem to have thousands, but these things can go in cycles, so I just figured it was an off year.

And then, late yesterday afternoon, I sat down in the far corner of our yard simply to enjoy a cold beer and regard our garden and house from that perspective. Since this is also the glorious time of year I consider high summer, what I viewed was a culmination of so much that had been building up. Everything was quite green and lush, of course, and the garden was punctuated by the red of tomatoes, the yellows of squashes and peppers, and the incredible purples of eggplants, even before I got to the flowers. As I settled in, after admitting to myself the grass needs to be mowed again, I realized this was dinner rush hour for the birds. Who knows why, but they do seem to eat in spurts, at least when it comes to populating our feeders. And here they were, far more than I could count (after all, they’re constantly flitting from one place to another). Not only that, but many of them were goldfinches, perhaps attracted by our sunflowers that have finally started blooming. Mourning doves landed in the grapevine and wild-rose covered branches of the black walnut tree before looping down to the ground under the main feeder, littered with birdseed as it is. Along the tree I could see just the gray flickers of squirrel tails as they raided the ripe nuts from the branches. In short, it was lovely. And the grass seemed to be just the right depth for many of the smaller birds to go grubbing.

That’s when I caught the distinctive flight of the hummingbird, which then did something I’d never before seen: it actually landed on one of those branches, where it quickly became a camouflaged bump on the distant limb. Soon there were two, and I don’t ever remember seeing two at once. (Well, maybe once in Maine, at a friends’ feeder outside their kitchen slider door?) Still, a first, as far as our yard and garden go.

Minutes later, I spotted one working its way through the zinnias about a dozen feet from me. How meticulously it hovering above a single flower and vacuumed each petal. Next thing I knew, it was gone and then one followed by a second came shooting inches past my head, even as I ducked instinctively. Well, that was the second … and third … time in my life I’ve had to dodge that bullet! They certainly seemed to having fun, as birds and bees are said to do.

It’s been said that meditation may have originated in the art of hunting. That is, in learning to sit very still for extended periods of time and just let the wildlife come to you, if you’re worthy. So I sat very still, the way I would in Quaker meeting for worship or in a half-lotus position on my meditation cushion. Over time, I saw at least four hummingbirds working their way around the yard, swooping from the trees to the Joe Pye weeds, the sunflowers, the zinnias and cosmos, and somewhere behind me, before landing repeatedly in the trees.

All of what was happening could be considered as an epiphany, those special moments when the Holy One appears or becomes manifest in an individual’s life. No, I’m not suggesting that the hummingbirds are divine or even angelic, but this was clearly a reminder of the times and ways we are blessed. You can’t just go looking for it and expect it to happen. You can only be receptive and grateful when it does. You also have to know what you’re seeing and be able to name it, knowing how rare and wonderful it is. Along with the simple pleasures of having everything momentarily perfect. Isn’t that a definition of miracle?

Soon, of course, the hummingbird sightings became fewer and fewer. The ones in the yard were probably already migrating from further north and bulking up for their long flight in a few weeks across the Gulf of Mexico. Their season here is nearly over. The finches, meanwhile, will be around longer before donning their gray traveling cloaks, as one friend says, and then heading south.

On our part, all this was soon followed by our own time for dinner with its fresh sweetcorn, tomatoes, and basil eaten al fresco in the golden rays of the setting sun.

What was I saying about an occasion of celebration? Indeed.