Tag: Change

What is ‘home’?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The definition, like that of “family,” can be complex and elusive.

I’m looking at home as someplace much more than where I sleep at night or eat the majority of my meals. It’s more than a house or an apartment or even a tent, for that matter, even though for much of my life, my address has felt more like an encampment before I arrive, well, at what’s truly home.

The Biblical sense of sojourning matches much of what I’ve experienced, pro and con.

Think of a sense of comfort, for one thing, and belonging, for another. Not everyplace I’ve dwelled has measured up there. Rental units have always had limitations on how much you can personalize the space, even to the exclusions on painting the walls. And who knows what happens when the rents or lease go up.

As much as my native geography and its character are imprinted on my soul, the house I grew up in isn’t. How curious. As for family? I’ve now spent the majority of my life on the Eastern Seaboard, mostly New England. Four years in the Pacific Northwest were especially transformative. Yet deep down, I’m still a Midwesterner, though one now amazed almost daily by the movements of an ocean close at hand.

The place I’ve lived longest is Dover, New Hampshire, in an 1890s’ house that’s appeared often in this blog. As “home,” it had shortcomings, but it was where I built my own family, did some very serious writing and revising, ate marvelous food we had raised in our garden, delighted in some extraordinary neighbors (especially Tim and Maggie), delighted in the parties and guests we hosted, and thought I would spend my final moments within. Well, I almost did – but that’s another post or two. As I told the kids when we moved in, I would be in a pine box when I left.

Not that my plotline wound up following that course. It might have, actually, if my elder beloved daughter-slash-stepdaughter hadn’t whisked me off to the emergency room in time for a cardio-stent.

Back to the bigger story. As I retired from the office, it became clear we needed to downsize. I won’t go into details, but my elder daughter/stepdaughter (those distinctions blend for me but not everyone – room for many future blog posts) fell in love with a remote fishing village at the other end of Maine. And then, so did her mother. My introductions to the place were positive, but even though I had begun some intense decollecting and downsizing, and was well ahead of the others on that front, there was still a long way to go. Besides, I was in the midst of a major writing project and knew how long it would take to get back in gear if I packed up in the midst.

Even so, after a few furtive efforts, we bid on a property that had been for sale forever and were accepted. I was promptly dispatched to keep an eye on the place – essentially, as a writer’s retreat.

It needed, to put things succinctly, tons of work. But somehow, it’s felt more like home than anyplace else I’ve dwelled. As you’ll see.

The collapse of NBC

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I don’t mean the cracker company, either, the one known as Nabisco, for National Biscuit Company. Or was that Baking?

No, I’m thinking of what was once the broadcasting monolith, first in radio and then in television, the one that projected a peacock logo at the onset of color programming.

The financial struggles for traditional mass media in the digital age are well-known, but broadcasting has been hit perhaps even more drastically than newspapers.

As a child of the ‘50s and ‘60s, I’m still shocked at the disappearance of AM radio, especially its powerhouse clear-channel signals. My daughters, savvy as they are in tech matters, don’t even know what AM is. These were coveted media, and getting a license for even a daytime frequency in a metropolitan market could be a coup. Think of WKRP in Cincinnati for the insider view. Instead, though, owners have allowed many of these to go silent. As for FM? The real competition is from streaming and satellite.

We gave up our TV years ago after realizing that whatever we wanted to watch was available online. Still, I was stunned the other day to discover that NBC no longer has an on-the-air outlet in Boston. That was unthinkable. Nobody would give up a network affiliation and go independent. Yet, as I learned, it isn’t anymore.

The trigger came the other morning when I was gazing at my Yahoo news feed and clicked on the latest Patriots football gossip from NBC Sports Boston, one of the primary regional sources. Wait, I thought. Why isn’t this identifying a station? Or at least a channel?

And that’s when I went down the proverbial online rabbit hole and found out that the once mighty network exists solely on cable in the nation’s tenth largest media market. Even the Tonight Show.

As for its entertainment lineup?

There are good reasons we’re turning to the new seasons at Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, etc. Besides, we can watch those shows at our convenience, not the network’s.

I must admit finding it hard to keep up with all of these changes. How about you?

The demise of AM radio

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

In all of today’s media upheaval, many younger users are puzzled by the term AM radio, while automakers are even considering eliminating the bandwidth from new vehicles altogether.

When I was a teen, this would have been entirely inconceivable. AM was king, period.

Dominated by clear-channel 50,000-watt stations that covered half of the country at night – and many having staffs of several hundred – they ranged down to much smaller voices that aired only during daytime hours, and even those frequencies were highly coveted by investors or niche nerds.

In contrast, FM was more limited in range and quite fringe. Many of the stations simulcast the AM sister’s programming. Others specialized in classical or jazz or “elevator music” for medical offices and retail store backgrounds.

Flash forward to today, when FM is where the audiences are. Not just for music, either, though much of the classic rock was crafted around the sound of AM top-40 formats. The shift of talk radio to FM sealed the deal.

I’m still surprised when traveling to find how little is available on AM, at least in English. More surprised, actually, to hear of station licenses being laid down and going idle, even in rural areas like the one where I’m living.

Gee, we might even begin wondering about the era of radio drama and comedy. Those really were something.

What are you listening to today?

 

The joy of paying bills online

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Longtime readers of the Red Barn know my identity as a neo-Luddite, someone who resists many technological advances for ethical reasons. You know, let’s keep people employed.

But after some of you encouraged me to move ahead on the banking front, and heeding your advice, I’ve made the leap. And now I’m asking, “When is the last time I wrote a check?”

Actually, it was for cash, only because I’m still resisting the ATM option. I do like face-to-face, especially in a small town, OK? And I believe an awareness of personal spending is important.

That said, among the unanticipated consequences of the shift is the fact I no longer need to keep a separate ledger, except for the checks I actually write, and my wife has instant access to those numbers, too, for our shared expenses covered there. (I won’t get into the details of our domestic bill-paying, but it’s worked for us.)

It’s also led to my using my credit card in many small-transactions instances, much like my younger daughter,  rather than cash. As she does for a cup of coffee.

But now there are new questions, like what am I going to do with all of these commemorative postage stamps I ordered as a bargain online? In response to Donald Trump’s destruction of the U.S. Postal Service?

As for Underground Railroad connections?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

While Quakers were active in the Underground Railroad for fugitive slaves, the practice wasn’t universally embraced within the Society of Friends. In fact, much of the illegal action across the North was undertaken by evangelical Protestants who even created the altar call at revivals to enlist fellow workers.

Yes, it’s one more story in the American experience that needs to be better known, in all of its gritty reality.

As I describe in Quaking Dover, the Cartland family farm in Lee is believed to have been a stop on one of those lines to freedom. While documentation of such participation is rare, escaped slaved turned abolitionist Frederick Douglass was a frequent visitor to the farm, and like also its small Quaker meetinghouse and school.

The bigger question would be how did the fugitives get that far and where did the route head from there? Not everyone along the way was sympathetic, after all. Newburyport, Massachusetts, for one, was downright hostile and thus an unlikely place to jump ship. As for Portsmouth or Dover?

Establishing reliable yet invisible connections every ten or 20 miles would have been quite an accomplishment. What prompted households to risk everything to the moral cause? They were, after all, a threat to a vast economic system and its wealth.

It’s one more another interesting twist to develop in future research through New Hampshire.

The passing of my last aunt marks a generational change

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

News of the death of my dad’s youngest sister was not unexpected but a jolt all the same.

For years, she had been something of a cypher in my awareness, originally when she came home from college or later in her visits from California, far from our Ohio.

Mom’s family, apart from her stepmother, was largely non-existent, except for a few encounters in Indianapolis, central Illinois, and Missouri. And she had her differences when it came to Dad’s clan, which did filter my perceptions.

I really didn’t understand the array of uncles, aunts, and cousins until I got heavily into genealogy. Before that, I was rather amazed at (and baffled by) the connectedness of one girlfriend’s Jewish family, which seemed to have cousins everywhere. Just what was a second cousin, anyway, much less removed a degree or two?

When Dad died, though, after a decline to Alzheimer’s, his last remaining sister insisted on flying out to the funeral, along with her husband.

And that’s when I finally got to know them – personally rather than abstractly. Thankfully.

The revelation began when she and her spouse, my Uncle John, came down the gateway at the airport and he swept our youngest up in a big bear hug while proclaiming, “It’s so good to have another Democrat in the family!”

The kid had no time to be appalled. He was instantly high on her list of rare approvals.

It was an effusive side of him I’d never seen. He was, after all, a retired University of Southern California dean and an ordained Presbyterian minister. And he was a warm, fun-loving guy. Who’d a thought?

It was the beginning of many other revelations over the next several days.

Slowly, I realized that his wife, that baby sister my dad called T.J. rather than Thelma, stood halfway in age between my dad and me – much more in my direction, that is, than I had thought. And it also dawned on me that she was the last person who might be able to answer many of the questions I had accumulated regarding my grandparents. Except, that is, she was equally in the dark on many of the answers.

In the months after the funeral, that questioning led to a fascinating round of correspondence between her and me and, at her insistence, our cousin Wilma, six months Dad’s junior.

It was an extraordinary research project, actually, one you can read as the Dayton’s Leading Republican Plumber sequence on my Orphan George blog.

At last, I came to know my grandparents for who they were rather than what they were supposed to be or weren’t. But I also came to know and appreciate T.J. and John and Wilma, too, and so much of what I had been missing.

As I learned, only Dad called his sister T.J., so I felt a responsibility for keeping the moniker alive, especially for some of the reasons she expressed.

~*~

Leap ahead, then, to a letter I had from her a few months ago relating that Uncle John had died of cancer – and that she, too, now faced a terminal prognosis. She agreed to chemo only to buy time, as she said.

That led to a long, difficult letter from my end and then, to my surprise, two phone calls – we had never talked on the phone, for whatever reasons. These two, of course, were strong exceptions.

On the second call, I shared the news that Wilma had passed over after Christmas, having reached the 100-year-old milestone. T.J. was glad I had included her.

And then, a few weeks later, a first cousin reached me by email using an address he was uncertain still worked – I’m not sure we had ever communicated that way. Usually, it was the annual Christmas card and letter exchange.

He had the sad news, as he said, that T.J. had died after a week in hospice, her body weakened but her mind still alert.

~*~

Thus, within a few months, the last three of the generation before me in our family have died, and that places me next to the top in the senior generation that emerges. Or the oldest male, if that matters. Not that I’ve heard from most of the others in years.

What strikes me, though, is a sense of exposure or vulnerability, like having a roof or an umbrella blown away overhead. Like it or not, I’ve moved into that elders edge that they filled. No longer do I have those more experienced to turn to, and I’ve been feeling how inadequate I am in comparison to the best of them.

Not just in the family, either, but within my religious circles, too. I’m now the oldest surviving former clerk of Dover Meeting, for instance, with all of the institutional memory that’s supposed to embody, even as I now reside 300 miles away.

What I have to also observe, with gratitude, is that through them, I’ve also known blessings and perhaps even wisdom. May I pass those along, too.