Tag: Life

Let me repeat my fascination with subways

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I doubt that I’ll ever get back to New York City in my remaining years. Even Boston seems like a rarity, though far more likely. Yet let me repeat my fascinating with subway trains and their tunnels.

And Manhattan was, after all, the center of publishing, including best-selling novels.

Tackle that from the perspective of where I live now, where the year-round population would fit on a single subway train. Add the flush of summer people and vacationers or even the cruise ships that visit and it still wouldn’t add up much more. Some of the visiting cruise ships would be like three or four trains arriving and totally discharging for a stroll around the village. A hiccup, then, in comparison to a Manhattan underground station.

My playful novel Subway Visions, grew out of my encounters in the Big Apple way back when.

As I once noted, growing up in a Midwestern city that was too small for rail mass transit, or maybe it was from an intellectual awareness of underground as a conduit of counterculture and spiritual wisdom, subways came to define a Big City for me and to symbolize the range of possibilities present therein. A subway transit system separates cosmopolitan from lesser cities. The trains are filled with real people – a cross-section of the populace between many diverse origins and destinations. As an underground, subways also present counterculture and surrealistic currents many of the riders fail to consider. Here, then, were snapshots from that route.

Later, with my wife and kids, came our outings in Boston and its MBTA.

Or my favorite Dover lifeguard’s revulsion and disgust after relocating to Beantown for college and having a drunken passenger vomit on her sandals on a hot, crowded platform.

So much for my perception of a carnival air.

Still, I think of subways the way I think of rollercoasters, even with our small downtown of boutiques, less pressured than the subway station settings of much of Boston.

Just how do those cruise ship passengers view our village, anyway?

You can find Subway Visions 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.

Of ship captains and their families at sea

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The era of commercial wooden ships under sail is long gone, and Maine played a big role in its glory days. The town of Searsport, in fact, late in the 1880s claimed to be home to a tenth of the masters of American full-rigged ships, and thousands of ships were built along the state’s shores. Do note, though, steamships and steel hulls were rapidly changing the business.

As I learned in researching the history of our house, built by a shipmaster who raised four captains of his own, there seems to be nowhere they didn’t venture.

Unlike many, though, the Shackford wives seem to have stayed on land rather than venturing forth with their husbands and serving as the trusty navigator.

Here are some other families for perspective.

  1. Joanna Carter Colcord, daughter of Lincoln Alden Colcord, was born at sea in 1882 and is famed, among other things, for her collecting and musically notating maritime ballades and chanteys. She and her brother spent much of their childhood at sea, where they sent extensive letters to relatives in Maine. Later reminiscing how, after a break ashore where she could attend school, “when I was eight, I took my turn at seafaring, and Link got his introduction to the halls of learning. We put out from Portland lumber-laden into a full gale of wind, and I was sea-sick for the first (and last) time. On the fourth day out it faired away, and father took me, convalescent now, on deck and set me inside a life-ring that was lashed to the top of the after house. … I was not afraid; and I remember to this day the awe and enchantment of the scene. I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful, and I still think so. The little barkentine was running bravely, among the great seas which heaved up all around in sunlit walls of liquid sapphire. When she roe on one of the huge swells the seas stretched to a horizon of living blue, barred with mile-long white-capped combers. The sun warmed me, and its play on the snowy sails fascinated me.”
  2. Her brother Lincoln Ross Colcord, a year younger, was born at sea during a storm off Cape Horn. Recalling the life they shared growing up, he wrote: “I know no other home than a ship’s deck, except the distant home in Maine that we visited for a few weeks every year or two. My countryside was the ocean floor, where I could roam only with the spyglass; my skyline was the horizon, broken by the ghostly silhouettes of passing vessels, or at intervals by the coasts of many continents, as we sailed the world.”
  3. Also from Searsport was Georgia Maria Gilkey, who headed off to sea in 1906 as the bride of Phineas Banning Blanchard, of the same town. As she observed: “It seemed like old times being on board a vessel again. I spent most of my youth at sea with my parents, brothers, and sister. Banning grew up at sea, too, and he was a captain before he was twenty.”
  4. Not that the life was always so bucolic, as Captain John C. Blanchard noted in candid letters in 1844 to his wife Caroline in Searsport. “I am very anxious for to leave here for the mosquitoes,” in confessed in one, followed in another with “and the hot sun has made me look more like a native of Cuba than one from the North.  My health is tolerable good although I have no appetite to eat and the clothes that used to fit me now set like a ship on a handspike, as the saying is.” There was no respite in others, where “The mosquitoes would make you look more like a person with the smallpox than otherwise … The climate seems to me just as healthy in New York in heat of summer.” Also, “It seems as if the mosquitoes was determined on having the last drop of my blood. They were so plenty last night that we could but just breathe without swallowing them and as hungry as wolves. They make nothing of getting my blood right through my shirt and pants and now while I am writing they are doing their best.” Later, he noted having the American consul and two gentlemen from New York on board to dine as well as “a long string of Spanish ladies and gentlemen” who came calling. “I tell you what it is Dear C, you don’t know what a knack these Spanish ladies have of casting sheeps’ eyes but the gentlemen don’t like us Americans to even wink but dear Wife, all the Ladies in Cuba is no object to me.”
  5. Perhaps that provides one more reason for brides to join their sea captain husbands on his voyages. Nancy Sherman Mackintosh, for one, set forth with her new husband Alonzo Follansbee in 1837 and two months later admitted, “By this time I had learned all the nautical phrases, though I did not choose to use them, lest I get in the habit and use them on shore, which would be very mortifying for a captain’s wife.” Yes, salty language. At least she remained behind on shore in 1856, when her husband vanished at sea.
  6. Another bride, Fidelia Reed, in 1853 was so occupied with getting her quarters “systematized” for her honeymoon voyage from Boston that she barely noticed setting sail. Having “arranged all our books and movable articles so that they would not shake about by the motion of the ship,” she then saw “the steward fastened our trunks to the floor by nailing a bit of wood on each side of them to the floor, quite a new sort of arrangement to me.” As for her husband, John Jay Heard, “The Capt. says it seems quite as strange to him to have me on board, as it is to me to be here. He having always been alone, it looks rather queer to see ladies’ clothing hanging in the state room.” This, even though this was his second marriage. Novice Fidelia, by the way, did master the art of navigation.
  7. Manhattan native Cornelia “Connie” Marshall first set sail in 1855 as the bride of Captain Enoch Wood Peabody. Two days shy of Liverpool, their ship was overtaken by a tempest. As she wrote of that honeymoon cruise, “Weather continues very bad. Enoch is hard at work. Scarcely had a chance to speak to me during the entire day.” Conditions worsened, culminating in a cry in the night, “Breakers ahead! Hard down the helm!” as well as “That fearful sound, never shall I forget it, and amidst the noise I heard my poor husband’s voice in such tones as never before.” Amid the crisis, “He enters the cabin, how pale his cheek, my heart seems almost bursting. Oh, that he would but speak to me. His look is almost wild.” As for their life after that?
  8. Another Searsport-based wife, Maria Whall Waterhouse, took command of the S.F. Hersey in Melbourne, Australia, when her husband died, and according to legend faced down a mutiny with the aid of her late husband’s two pistols and the ship’s cook.
  9. Should you care to really dive into this topic, the academic article “Excitement and prey: Captains’ wives and the experience of marine animals on U.S. whaling ships in the 19th century” in the International Journal of Maritime History should be right up your alley, so to speak. Dealing with a more defined set of examples, author Emilia Svyalsami observed, “The ship’s society was hierarchical, and the captain had absolute power. A wife’s presence brought much needed comfort to captains, who often were lonely figures. They were even more so on the whaling ships, where the pressure of catching whales created tension and underlined the captain’s skills.” Many of the wives closely observed the natural world around them. Quoting shipmaster wife Mary Brewster, for instance, we have this about sunfish: “Had I never seen the fish perhaps it would have tasted better, but seeing it was sufficient to produce contrary feelings.” How droll. Add to that, from the following day, “Had porpoise for breakfast. The liver tastes very much like beefs’.”
  10. Missing from the records, though, are the observations of women like Sarah Bates, the wife of Captain Mariner S. Crosby, from the fatal last days before the ship went down. According to the memorial monument in Eastport’s Hillside Cemetery, the 33-year-old and her 44-year-old husband along with their four children, including an infant son, were “all lost at sea about Oct. 25, 1867, with the brig Sarah B. Crosby.” Similar markers, found across the region, have no bodies buried below.

Ever play with a Proust questionnaire?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

For years, Vanity Fair closed each edition with its own Proust questionnaire of a celebrity, which I always read even when it was my introduction to the celebrity in question.

Turns out Proust merely prompted what became a popular party game and perhaps more.

Still, I’ve found that these can be a fine prompt for self-reflections, especially when I was drafting contributor’s notes to accompany my literary appearances in small-press periodicals.

Here goes.

What is your idea of perfect happiness? Being centered in the Holy Now within a circle of those I love and trust.

What is your greatest extravagance? Dining out. Or entry-level boutique wines.

What is your current state of mind? Littered across too many fields.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Actions rooted in a sense of duty or obligation, rather than passion or desire.

What do you consider the most overrated virtue? Patriotism.

What is your favorite occupation? Deep writing and revision when the act becomes a form of prayer.

What is your most marked characteristic? Serious, with a twist of lime.

What do you most value in your friends? Spiritual warmth.

What do you most dislike / deplore about your appearance? Aging, and all that comes with it.

Which living person do you most despise? Besides Trump and his toadies on the Supreme Court?

On what occasion do you lie? Not lies, exactly, but less than full disclosure under uncomfortable conditions.

Dreaming of literary success versus the reality

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Working in the thralls of daily newspaper journalism in the heartland was not my dream. Literary fame was. Of the critically acclaimed sort, as if bestseller status would follow.

Whoa, expressing that so boldly feels harsh, yet true. Even so, I did plod away on both fronts.

And now? I’m a survivor wondering what would have resulted if I had narrowed my focus.

I had no idea how crassly market-driven the shrinking book-publishing world was. So much for idealism.

~*~

Still, I pursued, working on my own into the wee hours.

These days, I have the luxury of revisiting my earlier work and wondering just who wrote it. The pages are so unlike what I’d venture today – wilder, for sure, and more profuse, often leading to an Oh-Wow! of admiration. The dross, fortunately, has been stripped away.

That’s been my reaction in presentations at our monthly open mic night here in town even when I’ve veered toward the edge of embarrassment yet still being warmly applauded.

Passages in both my prose and poetry make references I no longer understand but trust to leave untouched, perhaps for others to reconnect.

Writing? It’s like talking to yourself, ‘cept sometimes you have to get up to allow the rest of you to reply.

~*~

Another recent experience has come in assisting a friend to create a remarkable novel, one he finally presented to a literary agent whose thoughtful response seemed quaint, actually – the perspectives of three people in the agency, even though no. Somebody actually has time these days for such reflection?

It really did feel like an earlier era. I was rather envious.

~*~

I’m also recalling another experience after I had returned “back east” and was reading an essay about Snyder, Whalen, and Kerouac in the North Cascades, I felt sharp pain, knowing the lookout stations and High Cascades were so far behind me and the rest of my generation.

~*~

Add to that the fear of being discovered once your early book approaches publication. How strong are you in its potential storm?

Except, that you instead encounter indifference.

~*~

It can lead to bitterness, considering all the years and lost potential.

As for inscriptions at book signings?

Keep the faith!

Share your Light, too!

Applying the Tao of food

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The Chinese mystic Lao Tsu, the founder of Taoism, once said, or I think he did, that when it comes to food, we should eat what’s in season and from the region where we live.

Living in a so-called temperate climate, as I have, makes the adage difficult to maintain day to day through a full year, but as a guideline, I’ve appreciated its merits. Besides, it’s not a bad concept to keep in mind when sitting down to ponder seed catalogs and ordering, and then getting the mailings and planting the seeds under grow lights, as many folks do at this time of the year.

Here are some foods as I see them applying. Many but not all are items foodies pay dearly to obtain. Others are the basic reason for gardening – or is the practice itself the reason and any harvest arrives as one more blessing?

  1. Asparagus: I came to love this herald of spring when I was living in an apple orchard. The sprouts grew wild, free for the taking, and glutting out for the month they sprang forth was a delightful challenge. I repeated the celebration with a bed or two in Dover, and do miss those.
  2. Fiddleheads: These ferns are another herald of spring and well worth the expense. We’re hoping to raise our own, as well as asparagus, as we get better settled in here.
  3. Strawberries: Just in time for a few birthdays in June …  
  4. Crabmeat: It’s available if you know where to look, but Betty’s (the best) is available only from late spring to early autumn. Fresh is definitely the tastiest.
  5. Lobsters: Again, year-‘round, but the price does drop as the waters warm. Not that they’re ever cheap.
  6. Blueberries, raspberries, currants, and cranberries: Our county leads the nation in the harvest of wild, low-bush blueberries. Cranberries are a more recent addition at a few farms. Raspberries and currants are whatever we can keep from the deer.
  7. Summer garden abundance: lettuce, sugar snap peas, parsley, basil, cucumbers, tomatoes.
  8. Potatoes: The skins are so tender when fresh, and the insides haven’t yet turned starchy. My, they are sweet and creamy, definitely worth the excuse to head up to Aroostook County, where culls can be a bargain.
  9. Garlic and leeks: We do store these, so the “in season” doesn’t always apply. But they do brighten up what we’re eating through the winter months.
  10. Scallops: Speaking of winter, getting these straight from the fishing boats is heavenly. Those you buy at the market or in a restaurant aren’t quite the same.

Fresh cider and pick-your-own apples, peaches, and pears were things we enjoyed in Dover but haven’t yet located here in Way Downeast Maine. We’re lookin’, though.

Like a boat, a book is launched

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

That image seems especially appropriate as we celebrate the appearance today of my newest collection of poems, Ocean Motion, now available in the ebook platform of your choice. Yes, let’s envision a book floating on the water like a boat.

For much of the first half of my life, the concept of an ocean was incomprehensible, even more so than mountains.

As I’ve noted earlier, I grew up far from the seashore or even craggy ranges like the Rockies or Alps. The Great Smokey and other Southern Appalachian glories were a bit closer. I didn’t encounter the ocean until I’d reached adolescence and we visited Florida on a camping trip with some of Dad’s old Army Air Force buddies. I next saw surf my senior year of college, with my then-girlfriend and her parents. From there, my encounters went to a few times on the Staten Island ferry or other points in New York City or Long Island, and then the ferry rides in Washington state, a few days camping along the Pacific (recorded in my American Olympus book), a jaunt along the Oregon coast, and then Maryland, New Jersey, and ultimately New England, plus a few returns to the Gulf Coast of Florida.

In all of those, I faced an enigma, a recognition that I didn’t quite grasp its appeal. Something was missing. It was like a gray Lake Erie looming with whitecaps I had seen around age seven, except that there was something else called tides. It was water with nothing else but sky on the horizon.

The pace of my encounters picked up, especially once I moved to New England, nearly half of my life ago now. Having a boss who owned a 32-foot sailboat fostered some of that, especially when we ventured forth once or twice each summer from Newburyport, Massachusetts, or once from Portsmouth, New Hampshire – both notoriously treacherous harbors.

As I describe in one poem, my first time of being in a sailboat was also my first time out on the Atlantic and my first time of seeing whales (including a minke that surfaced only feet away from me) and my first time of setting foot on an island, one that was now a Unitarian and Congregationalist churches summer retreat.

Those experiences all infuse these poems.

Moving to Dover, as I remarried, picked up the pace. The tides reached downtown, after all, and Great Bay along one side. Plus, with the kids, we got to visit Maine beaches and Cape Cod at their grandfather’s. And later, picking up one after her work at a coastal motel, I had repeated exposures to the ocean at midnight, another world altogether. I wouldn’t say it was romantic, even with a full moon.

The resulting poems eventually appeared in small-press literary venues around the globe as well as a series of PDF chapbooks at Thistle Finch editions.

As these poems demonstrate, the more I’ve gotten to know ocean as the North Atlantic along New England, the more in awe I am. Other writers can express the ocean from their own locale and nuances.

Still, I have come to love lighthouses and do treasure opportunities to climb up within them to savor the view from the top. But don’t get too romantic, it was a harsh, often dangerous, life for the keeper and his family. I hope these poems reflect that reality and more.

Do note that New England thrived on seafaring, designing and building distinguished vessels along its forested shores and sailing them around the globe to Asia and elsewhere and then back or out to hunt whales. The memories are imprinted in the muscle and soul of its people.

Remember, tides rise and fall dramatically in New England. You learn to be alert, even wary. And, do note, I’ve learned so much more since I first expressed that.

One of the ocean chapbooks included in the final collection was titled “Land Overlaps Sea,” an outlook that still impresses me, considering that it’s actually the other way around. The poems in the collection reflect places close to where I lived at the time and ways they interact with the Atlantic. It has been quite instructive over the years, even for an old landlubber like me.

Meanwhile, bits of sea shanties – the chanted or sung work ditties of sailors over the years – muffled and muted by the wind, flit through background, even if you don’t quite catch their words.

While the poems reflect a period of my life before moving to a remote fishing village at the far end of Maine, what I’ve encountered since confirms my impressions.

Maritime historian and sea chanter Stephen Sanfilippo and his wife, Susan, have definitely added much to my comprehension, as have my new friend, Captain Robert J. Peacock, and my times out on the waters, especially week-long cruises aboard the historic schooner Lewis R. French, as you’ve been seeing here.

~*~

So here we are, with my thought that each new volume is akin to the space within a vessel:

a book launch
rather than release

BOOK
BOAT

the connection floats for me
my experience on the water flows everywhere

For my poems of the sea, check out Ocean Motion at Smashwords.com. You can find also find it at the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. Or ask your public library to obtain it.

Before you start your car, thank this auto pioneer 

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When we think of many of the technological advances that impact our daily lives, we usually don’t know the names of their inventors, even when we know the businessmen who got wealthy as a result. Elon Musk did not invent the Tesla, for instance, nor did Bill Gates invent the internet or Henry Ford, the auto. The list is actually a long one.

Consider John William Lambert, mentioned in a previous Tendrils.

I remember visiting an early coworker and, upon seeing an old car with an impressive Lambert name in brass across the radiator sitting at an open garage door, I asked, “Ann? Is that car any relation to you?” She replied that her grandfather used to make them but otherwise conveyed no knowledge that he had been so prominent a figure.

Here are ten facts from his life.

This was the breakthrough vehicle.
  1. He invented the first practical American internal combustion gasoline automobile in 1890 in Ohio City in Van Wert County, Ohio, where he tested it on the village streets early the next year. It was the Buckeye gasoline buggy, a surrey-topped three-wheel runabout with one seat. It had a three-cylinder, four-stroke engine.
  2. In 1891, that horseless carriage became the first automobile offered for sale in the United States. Priced at $550, it attracted no buyers.
  3. Undaunted by the buggy’s reception, he turned his attention in 1892 to making stationary gasoline engines for farm and industrial factory use.
  4. Lambert’s base of operations was the Buckeye Manufacturing Company, which he had founded in 1884 as a farm implement manufacturer and moved in 1892 to Anderson, Indiana.
  5. His experiments with drive-train technology led to the Lambert friction gearing disk drive transmission. The gradual, or gearless, transmission became a signature feature on all of his future cars.
  6. His next attempt at an auto line came in 1895 with a model called the Buckeye. It was a four-wheel modification of the buggy but failed to find buyers.
  7. His first marketing success was the Union, released in 1902. About 300 of the tiller-steered cars were sold.
  8. In 1906 he introduced his first Lambert, establishing himself as one of the more successful automakers of the time. Production peaked from 1907 to 1910 with 2,000 cars a year.
  9. Buckeye Manufacturing, which built the cars, had moved by 1905 to Anderson, Indiana. The Lambert Automobile Company was one of its subsidiaries. Touting its Lambert Friction-Drive Automobiles and Trucks, the Buckeye factory mass-produced Lambert’s cars, gasoline engines, and auto components as well as fire engines, railroad inspection vehicles, and steel-hoof tractors before closing in 1917. At its height, the company had more than a thousand employees.
  10. Lambert held more than 600 patents and died in 1952, age 92, in Anderson.
At its prime, the Lambert came with 15 layers of hand-painted color.

 

A few things I’ve celebrated over the years

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

(Prompted by artist Jane Kaufmann.)

  • Acceptances for publication large and mostly small.
  • When newcomers return to Quaker meeting.
  • When meeting for worship settles into warm silence.
  • Fires in wood-burning stoves.
  • Truly fine pizzas.
  • Wines and cheeses.
  • Appearances by bald eagles and osprey, some of them over my yard.
  • My wife’s Christmas traditions – especially the observation of Advent and the 12 days after.
  • Retirement and the opportunities it’s opened.
  • Viewing whales from shore here.
  • Whale watch cruises, no matter what we wind up observing.
  • A week’s windjammer cruise. Twice now.
  • Great classical music performances, including opera.
  • Part-singing in choirs, chamber choirs, and Mennonite circles.
  • The renovation of our 1787 homestead.
  • Small-town life in Eastport and Dover.
  • Sunrises and sunsets.
  • Riding big-city subways.
  • Full solar eclipses and Northern Lights.
  • The Greek Orthodox festival and community.
  • Mount Rainier.
  • The election of Barack Obama.

So why did I write poetry?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

A poetry editor a decade or two ago asked why I write poems, and in response I came up with this:

I’ve been writing poetry and fiction for so long the questions of “how” and even “when” and “where” arise long before any consideration of “why.” That is, the practice quickly turns directly to “just sit down, start keyboarding, and see where it goes.” Even so, my “why” quickly turns to a succession of motivations within an evolving exploration that continued to present itself as poetry. So here are some of my primary Whys along the way:

  • Because it sustains expansive dimensions of language and thinking that have been precluded from my employment as a newspaper (and, briefly, social sciences) editor, where expression is intended to convey a single layer of factual presentation.
  • Because it allows me to pursue wordplay, surrealism, ambiguity, innuendo, absurdities, but especially my own emotions and experiences that are forbidden in objective third-person writing. (Intentionally or otherwise, my literary endeavors have worked as a reaction against and counterweight to the strictures of professional journalism, the way a pianist might balance classical and jazz or country-western performance.)
  • Because it has kept my skills as a headline writer sharp and pliant.
  • Because it collects and distills the seemingly random wanderings of my Aquarian mind and my often-obscured impressions and feelings.
  • Because it reflects the intuition and clarity that arise in my practice of meditation.
  • Because revision, a crucial element of writing poetry, pushes me beyond linear narrative to a more mysterious matrix as I looking between the cracks and broken syntax to admit other voices to appear.
  • Because it allows me mythologies for exploring and celebrating places I’ve lived and people I’ve known along the way. (If I’d taken more photos during all those years, would the drive have been lessened?)
  • Because it immerses me in a long stream of poets, troubadours, singers, storytellers, mystics, prophets, and shamans before me.
  • Because it’s a kind of prayer.
  • Because it keeps me looking at the world around me with an awareness of gratitude and wonder.

Well, that’s what I wrote at the time, and the editor fired back with a round of questions I didn’t have time to answer. Way back then. I have no idea how I would answer now. I do hope it would be less ethereal.