Tag: Life

Not to be confused, geographically speaking

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Living in Down East (aka Downeast) Maine is confusing enough, considering that it’s mostly north. How about some other place locations?

  1. Upper Cape versus Lower Cape Cod as well as the Inner Cape and Outer Cape, meaning Cape Cod, Massachusetts, not what you’d usually think
  2. Deer Isle (Penobscot Bay, Maine) versus Deer Island (Passamaquoddy Bay, New Brunswick)
  3. Swan’s Island, off the coast, versus Swan Island in the Kennebec River
  4. Saint John (New Brunswick) versus Saint Johns (Newfoundland)
  5. Round Pond versus Round Lake, both in Washington County, Maine
  6. Salem, New Hampshire, 28 miles from Salem, Massachusetts
  7. Portland (Maine) versus the newer one out west
  8. Washington, the state, versus the District of Columbia
  9. Columbia, as in the river, and Colombia, the nation
  10. Missouree, as it’s pronounced in Saint Louis, and Missourah, in the rest of the state

Woodville is its own contentious issue, at least in the renamed Baileyville in Washington County, south of the one in Aroostook. Blame the U.S. Postal Service for trying to end the confusion.

What do you know of the history of your home?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When our planned substantial renovations finally began last autumn, our contractor began uncovering particulars that indicated the house might be even older than we had reckoned.

It was enough to prompt me to follow up on friendly banter by more than one person who asked if I’d ever gone to the county courthouse to “run the deeds” back to the original owner.

Quite simply, no, not here or in the previous two homes I’d purchased and later sold as I moved on.

While I’ve done a great deal of genealogy, courthouse records were one line of research I’d never pursued. I had encountered other researchers who specialized in family properties and last wills and testaments, and I was grateful for what those legal documents added to the family picture.

Even so, do accept my disclaimer regarding some of the dates and locations that pop up as I applied that line of inquiry to our old residence. What I’ve gleaned and present here is in an attempt to get a big picture of the lives that have intertwined with the house we purchased and renovated. Some of the connections are admittedly soft and subject to further revision. I am surprised by how many gaps remain.

Keeping that in perspective, I did finally trot off to the Washington County courthouse in Machias, an hour away. Let me say that digitalizing the archived records has made this field much easier and more accessible, and the registrar of deeds and her staff proved to be very helpful and friendly.

The fateful day my curiosity about our house finally led me to the registrar of deeds in Machias came about while I needed something to round out the day while my computer was in the repair shop a mile or so away.

To get the bigger picture, I set forth with a sense of trepidation. Armed with little more than the plot number of our lot, I anticipated technical complications, a tangle of legalese requiring translation, and dark, dusty confines. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to find the room well lighted and organized the staff both friendly and helpful. Better yet, the transactions have been digitalized in an easily navigated system. The original records were also at hand, should I desire, and I wouldn’t have to interrupt anyone to help me follow these.

Each transaction included a reference to the book and page numbers of the previous purchase, which was all you needed to trace the line of owners.

If only it were that easy.

~*~

Running the deeds means starting with the most recent transaction and working down through time, document by document.

Despite its modest appearance, our house has an unexpected significance, as you will find.

There are good reasons I’m calling my findings a genealogy of an old house. We’re surprised by some of the characters who’ve lived here.

Taking the subway to now

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Damn Cassia! She even tore apart my first published novel, Subway Hitchhikers.

A lot had happened in the nearly three decades since the book was first published – and even more since it was first conceived in 1973. Gee, that’s more than a half a century.

As I came back to the story after the release of What’s Left, my first task was to bring the tale more in line with the rest of the series, starting with the name of the lead character. Kenzie was an advance over the hippie-era Duma Luma, which rather echoed Wavy Gravy of Woodstock renown. His earlier legacy of being a lama reincarnated in Iowa was also downplayed if not entirely erased. Besides, there had been reports of such things actually happening since my book was first published. I have no idea how they turned out, either.

Another big job involved changing the original structure of short present-tense chapters flashing against past-tense ones, like subway trains passing in opposite directions. It was a creative touch but quickly confused the reader. A more conventional chronological-order storyline took its place.

That was accompanied by a new plot based on Kenzie’s monthly trips down to Manhattan to study with his Tibetan Buddhist guru in a tenement on the Lower East Side. That development added a handful of other devotees to the characters and realigned any who had previously existed.

Some of the Tibetan details now reflected tales I had heard from a more recent friend who was studying to become a Buddhist nun. Never mind that her experiences came decades after his or that there might not have been a Rinpoche residing anywhere near the Big Apple. Rival yogis, however, were plentiful.

Tibetans by the early 21st century? Our favorite dining option in Manchester, New Hampshire, was a Nepali restaurant that featured momos, a steamed dumpling staple in Tibet, too. The owners and staff were quite honored when an authentic Buddhist Rinpoche dropped in and approved of their dishes.

My, I have lived in a changing world. When’s the last time you even saw a subway token, by the way?

The freewheeling hippie-era fantasies of my book were soon followed by some creepy downsides. Hitchhiking out on the open road had turned sinister. Subway surfers, seeking the thrill of riding atop the cars in the tunnels and on the elevated lines above the street, were being decapitated and worse or worse by immovable objects in their trajectory. And the onset of homelessness during the Reagan years created whole villages surviving underground, as Jennifer Toth reported in her book The Mole People: Life in the tunnels under New York City, which was published just four years after my novel.

In addition, Long Island Newsday had assigned a columnist, Jim Dwyer, to its new subways beat, leading to a nonfiction book, Subway Lives: 24 Hours in the Life of the New York Subways, which came out only a year after mine. Now that’s some tough competition. No wonder I didn’t hear from him after sending him a comp copy for review when my book came off the press.

By that time, though, I was living an hour-plus north of Boston and entering a time of my life when I’d be riding its MBTA trains about once a week – perhaps a thousand fares one way and back with girlfriends and later family on my visits. Familiarity with underground mass transit hasn’t lessened my fascination.

Still, since Subway Hitchhikers had been about hippies, I had to admit they had largely fallen into disrepute or self-denial. But that’s not how the book stands now, something that’s reflected in its current title, Subway Visions; Along the tubes to nirvana.

As for today? Here I was, with my fascination with subway systems, asking my favorite lifeguard about her experiences in Boston during her freshman year of college. She must have been taking the cute little cars of the Green Line, right?

Instead, she emphatically told me how disgusting they are, miserable on hot days and packed at peak hours – and, especially, the fellow passenger, an utter stranger, who puked on her feet in sandals.

I didn’t dare show her my book after that.

Ten big prize winners I’ve known or at least met

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments
  1. Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Prize, economics
  2. Clarence Page, Pulitzer Prize, commentary
  3. Dick Locher, Pulitzer Prize, editorial cartoonist
  4. Gary Snyder, Pulitzer Prize, poetry
  5. Jeff MacNally, Pulitzer Prize, editorial cartoonist
  6. Jesse Haines, Baseball Hall of Fame, pitcher
  7. Jesse Owens, Olympic gold medalist, runner
  8. Marcy Nighswander, Pulitzer Prize, photography
  9. Ritter Collett, Baseball Hall of Fame, sportswriter
  10. Steve Curwood, Pulitzer Prize, investigative reporting

Now, for some background

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

While we wait for the continuing renovations to catch up with these weekly reports, let’s change the focus to the history of this old house itself. Give us a better idea of what we’re working with, too.

When we bought our full Cape at the end of 2020, the real estate listing dated its origin in the 1860s. As we became familiar with the home’s bones, we saw details suggesting construction as early as the 1830s. While the pedigrees of a few neighboring houses have been catalogued by local historians, ours was not one of them. The dwelling did appear more modest in comparison.

We did have to wonder if the dwelling had been rebuilt after one of the catastrophic fires swept the downtown and its fringes in 1886, 1864, and 1839. Some of our stone foundation is 18 or more inches thick.

The house did appear on a widely reproduced 1879 map of Eastport, one that gave a birds-eye view of the city. The two dormers may have come later – it’s hard to tell from the map.

An earlier historic map of 1855 not only had a house fitting the footprint of ours on the lot, but with two wings, accompanied by an identifying script “Shackford Est.” The difficulty came in trying to figure out which Shackford that would have been — the family was prominent and prolific.

An earlier Plan of the Village of Eastport, 1835, by William Anson presented rough designations of the structures in town, including a house where ours is and only a few others in the blocks around.

Thus, we do know the house was here before 1886, as the charred rafters affirm, reflecting the great fire that destroyed the downtown. Local history dean Ruth “Ruthy” McInnis, owner of the Todd House bed and breakfast, had primed us to look for that detail when we were considering whether to bid on the place. Other dwellings, as we’re learning, share similar damage.

What I’ve uncovered is that this house is even older than we suspected, and more historic. In many ways, it tells the story of the town, too.

Ahoy, mates! It’s a small world, indeed

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been caught off-guard several times while wearing my gray Louis R. French historic schooner hoodie around Eastport. (Well, one of them. I now have three, but that’s another story.)

The first encounter was at the county courthouse in Machias while researching the deeds to our home. A registrar asked what I knew about the boat and I started replying with the history. She smiled and said, “My dad worked aboard it,” back when it was a sardine carrier based in Lubec, the town just south of Eastport. During that stretch, the masts were removed and the vessel was powered by an inboard motor.

The second time was when a friend, a legendary ship pilot, smiled and said he rode many times aboard it as a kid. Bob did correct me, saying the French wasn’t a sardine carrier but a freighter carrying cat food to Canada. (“Cat food to Canada?” Sounds like a title to me.) His family did own canneries in Lubec, Eastport, Portland, and a few other places. That’s yet another history to consider.

The next incident came while leaving my dentist’s office and his wife ( a.k.a. center of operations) Mary, blurted out, “Lewis R. French? That was my family’s boat.” For 50-some years, in fact, or the time it was based on our waters, when her Burpee and Vose families possessed the vessel. From her I learned that during the Prohibition, the French was an active rum-runner. Sardine carrier? Huh? The missions do get more interesting, no?

She also said something about ghosts. Well, if they could talk.

She does have the book published later, but I do suspect some of those details are missing.

The most recent account came while watching a big cruise ship come into Eastport. A woman standing nearby saw my hoodie and then told me she used to work in the office when the French belonged to Seaport Navigation. (She confirmed that my dentist’s wife’s families were among the owners). The headquarters was on the second floor of a waterfront building that she pointed to, one where friends of ours have their gallery and apartment, and said she never got tired of the view. She remembered typing up many documents regarding  deliveries of canned sardines to the railroad line in St. Andrews, New Brunswick. Shipping them from there rather than by truck from Maine was much cheaper. By this point, the French was Seaport’s backup ship.

So sardines were still part of the story.

This may seem petty but …

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Do we really have to wait another year for the new Interstate 395 leg from Maine Route 9 to I-95 itself to open?

It’s only a few miles and minutes but eliminates a lot of aggravation in getting from here at the eastern edge of the country to most of the rest of the USA. That half-hour of narrow roadway competing with Canadian tractor-trailers on icy pavement plus small-town radar speed traps is an aggravating bottleneck, believe me, even before you factor in all of the Acadia National Park seasonal crush. The new route will ultimately get us around Bangor/Brewer more swiftly and maybe save us ten minutes or so at most, but on a five-hour drive that can be huge.

As it is falls back into a Trump-era vision of what’s supposed to be good at least as the fireworks and firearms retailers along the way declare.

 What’s the biggest traffic hang-up you hate?

When an interlude becomes pivotal

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Rather than being a retreat to the hills, as I initially saw the period between her future father’s leaving Daffodil after college and his return a few years later, I now see him undergoing a major slow-motion transformation amid frenetic surroundings.

For him and for me, this was a personal High Hippie time, pro and con, no longer a mere interlude to a landing somewhere in the future but a rich mix of its own.

And now, thanks to the daughter, Cassia, I had a better sense of where the larger story was headed.

Before writing and publishing my novel What’s Left, I had depicted his situation in two parallel volumes – Hippie Drum and Hippie Love – one full of near misses when it came to new love, while the other (R-rated) more often connected.

As I returned the drawing board with Cassia standing beside me, I had to admit the dual presentation was a luxury that did nothing to advance the overarching story. The two conflicting books, while beginning and ending at the same points, ultimately confused the reader. Still, it was a valuable experiment for me to file away. Thanks, Cassia.

Reuniting them into one book was a bigger challenge than you’d think. Finding the right tone, verb tense, and balance were only a start. More clearly profiling Kenzie’s country and in-town circles plus his workplace required another big effort.

If I ever do another novel, I don’t want more than four or five characters, if that. (Fat chance.)

~*~

Helpfully, What’s Left now gave me a clearer sense of Cassia’s aunt Nita as a central figure. Only a year older than Cassia’s future father, she now expanded from being his guardian angel, as she was in Daffodil Uprising, into something more of a magnet and Wise Woman who came and went as needed as he underwent crucial encounters, many of them emotionally painful.

~*~

In my revisions to what now stands as Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, I also wanted a better integration into the urban parallel to Kenzie’s life at the time, the subway novel, which would undergo its own thorough reconstruction.

My own job hours at the time would have been too constrained to allow the escapes to the Big Apple that I compress into Kenzie’s timeline. I didn’t even have a two-day weekend – only Sunday off after a late Saturday night, and then Wednesday; four of my days I had to be at the office by 5 or 6:30 in the morning, and it was brutal. In one of my later career positions, however, I did have a floating three-day weekend, which I adapted to Kenzie’s situation. Once every month he could head off somewhere, which soon became jaunts to New York City.

Another thread that I strengthened was his introduction to Tibetan Buddhism and subsequent growth in its practice, giving him a good reason to be heading off to the big city as often as possible.

~*~

In the years after moving from Binghamton, the scene of the action, and off to the ashram and beyond, I lost touch with all but one person from that period. Well, make that two, but he was an older sports editor who had nothing to do with the hippie scene. The other was a former girlfriend where the parting had been mutual.

As for the rest? I wondered where they all went, though I’ve even forgotten most of their real names. Why couldn’t I have been more snide, like calling a character “fat, stinky Frank” or “gaunt Ellen”? Nicknames were only a move in that direction.

As I revised, though, I now had the Internet at my fingertips.

Satellite maps allowed me to see that two – and maybe all three – of my housing sites there had been demolished. (I’m wondering whether I even tried driving past them in my calls on the newspaper editor when I was with the features syndicate. I don’t recall.)

And then a few ghosts from my past reconnected, first from the ashram years – I hadn’t been ostracized after all – and then my former housemate in upstate New York, the one who forms the basis for Drummer in the story.

He event came up with his wife for a visit in Dover. It was about time I met her. She was a much better fit for him that the Latina who commanded his devotion in the book. (I couldn’t invent a character like her out of thin air, by the way. She really was a center of attention in any room we shared.)

Back in the day, he had gloried in a full naturally blonde Afro back in the day, only now it was shaved bald. His smile and intensely blue Nordic eyes were the same, along with his eternally goofy outlook on life, but that chrome dome was disconcerting.

It was time to catch up.

“Did Jnana really have long hair?” my elder stepdaughter asked.

“Oh yes,” came the reply.

Somehow that was enough to get one of my younger generation to relent from their vow to kill me if mine grew out again.

“If you’re writing hippie novels, you might as well look the part,” she conceded. So I got their permission to grow a ponytail. Maybe she was just tired of what was called a combover for the balding.

He also filled me in on some of mutual friends. One was an OB-GYN in inner-city Philadelphia. Another, a federal attorney in upstate New York. Yet another was a functionary for the United Nations. And the biggest lover of the lot had settled down to raise a large family while working as a social services executive. So much for one of my hippie circles.

I even found a girlfriend, via a Chicago Tribune photo and story, who remembered very little of the time and only vaguely pictured me. She had been much more of a presence in my life, even at our distance, than I was in hers, it turned out. I had even hoped she’d be The One.

In fleshing out the characters in my pages, I now had a second Summer of Love to draw on as well as related experiences. I could ask people about their own hippie identities, and many of the thoughts filled earlier posts here at the Red Barn.

While connecting the dots for one figure whose account to me had never neatly added up, I broke out weeping. Signs of adolescent abuse were abundant. I suspect one of her teachers as a villain, but have no proof, of course. Is he even still alive?

As for the others?

Let’s be honest. We freaks weren’t as close as we’d like to think. I hate to consider that the despised fraternity brothers of college may have had the more solid connection.

So what did happen to those who shared the farmhouse? And most of the lovers?

Not that I’m thinking they’d make another novel. Not unless a unique structure surfaced, say something like postcards.

Is this how A.I. is supposed to improve our lives?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know about you, but I’m finding myself spooked when another social media platform suggests I “friend” someone I know has deceased. It’s not just a one person, either.

It’s even scarier when the next suggestion in their line is a former lover who scooted off from our engagement.

Even if there are some things I’d like to clear up with them, I must admit it’s too late for this round of mortal life. In one case, I was set for reconnecting only to hear she was in the final stages of Hospice care.

Another disturbing reaction to these pitches is the seeing how hard it is to remove an outdated site by anyone other than the account holder. Yes, as I was saying about deceased. Perhaps you’ve been a member of a group that’s run into a similar problem, where someone set up the site and then moved on without leaving the administrative details. Beyond that I’m seeing instances involving people who live alone, or did, and receive no obituary. That’s where I find this can get creepy.

As I said, how about you?

Can we really communicate with the dead?

Shelter-in-place boredom? You kidding?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

This post was supposed to appear four years ago but somehow it fell through the cracks. With a few tweaks, it retains relevance, IMHO.

Here goes, from back in Dover, New Hampshire:

~*~

Catching up with my dentist, now that his office is open again, we noted our astonishment that so many adults were complaining of being bored during the official shutdown of most businesses, schools, churches, and public services.

Bored? I repeated my adage that boredom is a luxury of the teenage years – most adults I’ve known simply don’t have time for it. Alas, it must say something about the people I associate with. (Well, frankly I find most TV to be boring, but others might say the same thing of the operas I’ve been streaming every night. ‘Nuff said there.)

My dental doc, meanwhile, expressed his gratitude for the time off as “paternity leave” he suddenly had to devote to his two- to four-month-old daughter, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, as well as time to catch up on a pile of desired novels. Not a bad combination.

We also touched on studies of the eye damage being done to children under age two by their extensive use of digital screens. Well, and their need for boredom to allow essential self-exploration, discovery, and growth, too.

On my end, I have to acknowledge how little cash I’ve used since March 11, the last time I went to the bank. Mostly, it’s been plastic, which fortunately hasn’t spiraled out of control.

What did you discover in this period of changed focus?