July 28, 2007
A year ago I was approached by a man in his late 80's about ghostwriting his autobiography. He had lived a rich and varied life and loved to tell stories of his accomplishments and crises. He had coped with great success and tragedy, and about all he had not done was chronicle the events.
He had known lots of interesting people and been in very high places in his day; he sent me a packet of snapshots and newspaper articles about his life. Pictures revealed that he was a good-looking man, movie star good-looking in his youth, and the articles told of the fortune he had made in dealing with big corporations, selling the rights to his inventions and occasionally suing for large sums when his invention ideas were stolen. I was interested in his story, and felt that I would be good as a ghostwriter. I was up for the job. I encouraged him, admonishing only that he would have to be very open with me about some of the life situations in the newspaper items, situations that still might cause him some pain.
He would have had to relocate to be interviewed, or pay for my expenses if I had to travel. He would have to be candid. I would agree to work for him at a fixed rate for about six months, including writing time, and then submit what I had written for his approval. I would not be the salesman for the work, but I felt certain that with his lively personality and his truly unusual life story we could come up with a book that would sell.
I laid out the proposal and waited. Time passed, and he passed off my radar screen, by not acting. He probably thought better of the project and did not want to be under this kind of stress at this point in his life, no matter how strong his urge to be immortalized in print. I never received a refusal, but I had lobbed the ball to his court and it had not been returned.
I didn't blame him. For years he had probably regaled friends and acquaintances with tales of his childhood inventions, his successes and near-successes, and the odd and unexpected turns his life had taken. He was probably told by many an acquaintance, "You really should write a book about all this," but the reality of such a venture was not one he could handle.
An urge to write hits us as we grow closer to what we perceive as the end of life. There is a need to get it down in black and white, this little life, before it's gone. I can understand this myself, hacking away at a daily blog and thinking of books I must get done. My mother, always an admirer of writers (and married to a first-rate one), spent years researching a family history that including anecdotal tales going all the way back to family members who gave Robert the Bruce of Scotland a ride across the river in the middle of a war -- being awarded in later years with a coat of arms that read "I Saved the King." She completed her family history in the and self-published it in 1994 after almost 20 years of exhaustive research, and the result is a book that reflects all the charm of its writer and is constantly used as research by her three grown children. She printed copies for all living members of the family and distributed this work to as many of them as she knew.
Her little book is a treasure trove of information about our ancestors. It was a project that consumed her as she edged into old age, and a copy of it is in her bureau at the nursing home. She sometimes mentions it ("the book I wrote") and we sometimes pick it up to confirm a birth date or year, or cause of death, or any little piece of family information we could get nowhere else.
It is good that much of mankind is equipped with this autobiographical urge. Blogs are a great tool for this very thing. As to those who are not compelled to write, of course they create and contribute in many ways. But the actual stories, even with a very personal slant, are the stuff of life and the best we can do toward carving a place in the mythology of generations to come.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Friday, July 27, 2007
Real Woman, Fair Hope
July 27
I think it’s time for a real woman to be President of the United States. I say this somewhat defensively because it is assumed that since I cannot support Hillary Clinton, I am one of the ones who is somehow just not ready.
I have a certain amount of respect for Senator Clinton. I don’t deny that she has great intelligence and drive. I like to see the pictures of her laughing, and I don’t doubt that she enjoys a good joke every once in a while. She has presence and self-confidence. She is tough. But try as I might, I cannot find one thing authentic about her.
She speaks in platitudes (or, as they say, soundbites). This means she seems to be talking but nothing definitive is said or clarified. It’s designed to be clipped out and run on the evening news.
She never makes it clear where she stands on issues – any issues. She’s just being a politician, her supporters say. The Right paints her as a flaming Liberal, the Left as a middle-of-the-roader; in reality she will say whatever it takes to seem reasonable. But she doesn’t convince me. I can’t say I know anything about where she stands on matters vital to the leadership of this troubled land.
Take the war. She voted for it because she was lied to, as all of us were. Why is it so hard to say that vote was a mistake? Is she afraid to be called a flip-flopper? What kind of nonsense is that? “Flip-flopper” is a Madison Avenue term that means no more than a person who has changed his or her mind. It’s no disgrace to change one’s mind; in fact, that is an admirable trait as long as it doesn’t get out of hand. In my lifetime I have seen the birth of a new phenomenon – politicians being led around by the nose by their ad agencies. It is these ad agencies who created the phenomenon of focus groups to take the temperature of the public on every product in the marketplace, including, God help us, people who happen to be running for office.
I have been ready for a woman President long before most people can remember. For years there have been a few strong women pretty highly placed in political office. One even ran for President.
I’d have supported Shirley Chisholm if had lived long enough to run today even though she wrote, when she ran for the office in 1972: "I am a candidate for the Presidency of the United States. I make that statement proudly, in the full knowledge that, as a black person and as a female person, I do not have a chance of actually gaining that office in this election year. I make that statement seriously, knowing that my candidacy itself can change the face and future of American politics — that it will be important to the needs and hopes of every one of you — even though, in the conventional sense, I will not win."
Ms. Chisholm was wise, charismatic, brilliant and brave. She did not evade when asked where she stood on the issues. She was the right person, but at the wrong place in the wrong time. She was unique and the country was not ready for her. I’m sorry to say that, since I had voted for Dick Gregory in the 1968 election and was persuaded by my colleagues that my vote had put Richard Nixon in the White House, I chose McGovern over Chisholm in order to get Nixon out. Seeing how successful that kind of thinking was, I have voted my conscience ever since, almost never going for a candidate from either major party.
I’d love to see someone like Bella Abzug back in politics.
The country’s first Jewish Congresswoman, she didn’t worry about how she looked or what group might be offended if she opened her mouth. She was a true Feminist who didn’t worry about appearing feminine. She shot from the hip, and got more flack about her hats than about her policies. She once said, “The inside operation of Congress -- the deals, the compromises, the selling out, the co-opting, the unprincipled manipulating, the self-serving career-building -- is a story of such monumental decadence that I believe if people find out about it they will demand an end to it.” If she had had focus groups her candidacy for anything would have been dead on arrival – or she might not even have arrived.
A few years later I supported Arizona State Member of the U.S. House of Representatives Pat Schroeder in her short-lived bid for the Democratic nomination for President. Schroeder couldn’t raise sufficient funds, and apparently didn’t have the fire in the belly necessary to stick it out. She was bright, inspiring, and witty, coining the phrase “The Teflon President” about Ronald Reagan. She also said, “America is man enough to elect a woman President.”
I agree with that. But let’s wait until a real woman runs.
I think it’s time for a real woman to be President of the United States. I say this somewhat defensively because it is assumed that since I cannot support Hillary Clinton, I am one of the ones who is somehow just not ready.
I have a certain amount of respect for Senator Clinton. I don’t deny that she has great intelligence and drive. I like to see the pictures of her laughing, and I don’t doubt that she enjoys a good joke every once in a while. She has presence and self-confidence. She is tough. But try as I might, I cannot find one thing authentic about her.
She speaks in platitudes (or, as they say, soundbites). This means she seems to be talking but nothing definitive is said or clarified. It’s designed to be clipped out and run on the evening news.
She never makes it clear where she stands on issues – any issues. She’s just being a politician, her supporters say. The Right paints her as a flaming Liberal, the Left as a middle-of-the-roader; in reality she will say whatever it takes to seem reasonable. But she doesn’t convince me. I can’t say I know anything about where she stands on matters vital to the leadership of this troubled land.
Take the war. She voted for it because she was lied to, as all of us were. Why is it so hard to say that vote was a mistake? Is she afraid to be called a flip-flopper? What kind of nonsense is that? “Flip-flopper” is a Madison Avenue term that means no more than a person who has changed his or her mind. It’s no disgrace to change one’s mind; in fact, that is an admirable trait as long as it doesn’t get out of hand. In my lifetime I have seen the birth of a new phenomenon – politicians being led around by the nose by their ad agencies. It is these ad agencies who created the phenomenon of focus groups to take the temperature of the public on every product in the marketplace, including, God help us, people who happen to be running for office.
I have been ready for a woman President long before most people can remember. For years there have been a few strong women pretty highly placed in political office. One even ran for President.
I’d have supported Shirley Chisholm if had lived long enough to run today even though she wrote, when she ran for the office in 1972: "I am a candidate for the Presidency of the United States. I make that statement proudly, in the full knowledge that, as a black person and as a female person, I do not have a chance of actually gaining that office in this election year. I make that statement seriously, knowing that my candidacy itself can change the face and future of American politics — that it will be important to the needs and hopes of every one of you — even though, in the conventional sense, I will not win."
Ms. Chisholm was wise, charismatic, brilliant and brave. She did not evade when asked where she stood on the issues. She was the right person, but at the wrong place in the wrong time. She was unique and the country was not ready for her. I’m sorry to say that, since I had voted for Dick Gregory in the 1968 election and was persuaded by my colleagues that my vote had put Richard Nixon in the White House, I chose McGovern over Chisholm in order to get Nixon out. Seeing how successful that kind of thinking was, I have voted my conscience ever since, almost never going for a candidate from either major party.
I’d love to see someone like Bella Abzug back in politics.
The country’s first Jewish Congresswoman, she didn’t worry about how she looked or what group might be offended if she opened her mouth. She was a true Feminist who didn’t worry about appearing feminine. She shot from the hip, and got more flack about her hats than about her policies. She once said, “The inside operation of Congress -- the deals, the compromises, the selling out, the co-opting, the unprincipled manipulating, the self-serving career-building -- is a story of such monumental decadence that I believe if people find out about it they will demand an end to it.” If she had had focus groups her candidacy for anything would have been dead on arrival – or she might not even have arrived.A few years later I supported Arizona State Member of the U.S. House of Representatives Pat Schroeder in her short-lived bid for the Democratic nomination for President. Schroeder couldn’t raise sufficient funds, and apparently didn’t have the fire in the belly necessary to stick it out. She was bright, inspiring, and witty, coining the phrase “The Teflon President” about Ronald Reagan. She also said, “America is man enough to elect a woman President.”
I agree with that. But let’s wait until a real woman runs.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
The Heat of Summer
July 26, 2007
If you once lived in Fairhope and have relocated to somewhere else -- anywhere else -- you wonder how anyone ever tolerated the hot summers we have here. I remember talking to an old friend in the mountains of Switzerland. He then lived in Rhode Island.
I said, "It was so humid there! I don't think I was ever completely dry until I was 30 years old."
He said, "I remember one night in particular."
"Oh, yes!" said I. "It was even hot at night! People don't believe me when I tell them how hot it was at night."
"One night I couldn't sleep. We had fans, we had ice water, wet towels, showers, everything we could think of. But this night I woke up so hot nothing worked. I went out in the yard, looking for a breeze."
"I did that too! I remember doing that one night!"
To put a pinpoint on it, this night was probably in August of the year 1951. Maybe 1952. The weather service would have records. I've had the above discussion with a number of friends, all roughly of my vintage, and we all describe one sweltering night long after our families were asleep and we were suffering from the unbearable heat. We walked out into our yards, wailed at the moon, or prayed to God for relief, fell into the hammocks or the lawn furniture, yearning for a spot somewhere that was not so still and hot. All the county, to hear us describe it, must have been swarming with lawns full of little kids falling into hammocks or leaning on the tire swings and moaning.
It is now the middle of July. We can expect that kind of weather for weeks to come. It's just that when it gets here, it stays. There is no "cool snap." Summer has come like a warm damp blanket and you are trapped.
At least today nobody suffers. There is air conditioning. Nobody would dream of going outside looking for a gust of breeze, not even an ignorant little kid. We don't go into the natural air except for emergencies when we have to brave those few moments between the air conditioning of the house and the air conditioning of the car. Outdoor living, pictured so elegantly in the catalogues for outdoor furniture and television shows which feature recipes to be cooked on the grill, is not even attempted in the buggy, muggy Deep South. Our porches tend to be glassed in.
The weather forecast suggests lows in the 70's at night. We will probably keep that air conditioner going at night. Because with the humidity, if you don't want to end up out on the lawn in sight of a lot of little phantom moaning little kids, you're going to need conditioned air all the time if you want to sleep.
It's summer in the deep South.
If you once lived in Fairhope and have relocated to somewhere else -- anywhere else -- you wonder how anyone ever tolerated the hot summers we have here. I remember talking to an old friend in the mountains of Switzerland. He then lived in Rhode Island.
I said, "It was so humid there! I don't think I was ever completely dry until I was 30 years old."
He said, "I remember one night in particular."
"Oh, yes!" said I. "It was even hot at night! People don't believe me when I tell them how hot it was at night."
"One night I couldn't sleep. We had fans, we had ice water, wet towels, showers, everything we could think of. But this night I woke up so hot nothing worked. I went out in the yard, looking for a breeze."
"I did that too! I remember doing that one night!"
To put a pinpoint on it, this night was probably in August of the year 1951. Maybe 1952. The weather service would have records. I've had the above discussion with a number of friends, all roughly of my vintage, and we all describe one sweltering night long after our families were asleep and we were suffering from the unbearable heat. We walked out into our yards, wailed at the moon, or prayed to God for relief, fell into the hammocks or the lawn furniture, yearning for a spot somewhere that was not so still and hot. All the county, to hear us describe it, must have been swarming with lawns full of little kids falling into hammocks or leaning on the tire swings and moaning.
It is now the middle of July. We can expect that kind of weather for weeks to come. It's just that when it gets here, it stays. There is no "cool snap." Summer has come like a warm damp blanket and you are trapped.
At least today nobody suffers. There is air conditioning. Nobody would dream of going outside looking for a gust of breeze, not even an ignorant little kid. We don't go into the natural air except for emergencies when we have to brave those few moments between the air conditioning of the house and the air conditioning of the car. Outdoor living, pictured so elegantly in the catalogues for outdoor furniture and television shows which feature recipes to be cooked on the grill, is not even attempted in the buggy, muggy Deep South. Our porches tend to be glassed in.
The weather forecast suggests lows in the 70's at night. We will probably keep that air conditioner going at night. Because with the humidity, if you don't want to end up out on the lawn in sight of a lot of little phantom moaning little kids, you're going to need conditioned air all the time if you want to sleep.
It's summer in the deep South.
Friday, July 20, 2007
Manhattan 2 Hoboken, Commute Delayed
July 20, 2007
I wonder sometimes what the difference is between living in Fairhope and living in Hoboken -- besides the obvious one of looking across the river at the Empire State Building and looking across the bay and barely being able to discern anything like a skyline.
This reminds me of the time I showed Martin Platt, then Director of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, around Fairhope. His first reaction -- and this was in 1990 -- "This town has a case of the cutes," but he later said Fairhope would be livable "If only that were Toronto on the other side of that bay."
But I digress. In Hoboken, it's better than having Toronto across the nearby water. You have the city that never sleeps, the home of heart of the arts and commerce of America, the crown jewel of our country. (Okay, there are some drawbacks to NYC; there are problems. But give me a little leeway here. It's more interesting than Mobile.)
I am boning up on Hoboken. I'm checking out its history on the web. I'm reading the Hoboken blogs. Yesterday I found a very interesting post on a solid blog called Philly2Hoboken that described the ordeal of living through the steam pipe break and trying to get home to Hoboken. It brought it back to me what living in the city is like -- the uncertainty, the uneasiness in crisis, and the general atmosphere when you and your neighbors are drawn together in a way that nobody likes. I lived in New York in the 1960's and 70's and the worst situation we had to deal with was a blackout or two. Who knows what will be next, or how bad it will be?
The writer of Philly2Hoboken wove his way by cab to the ferry, trying to get over the river in the most expedient way possible. His commute is usually little more than ten minutes; on this day it was over two hours. But after enduring the inefficiency of waiting in long lines, looking for a ticket machine that didn't exist, he enjoyed the cool breezes on the ferry, and, although it docked at a place a long way from where he lived, he was able to get a bus to his home with no trouble.
A bus to his home! We don't have things like that in Fairhope or even Mobile. I can shed my car before I leave. I can get a train into and out of the city most days (and have the ferry option in certain emergencies or just when I feel like it).
Reading his blogpost, I could feel his relief at getting home to Hoboken. I can almost feel how I'm going to feel in the same situation.
I wonder sometimes what the difference is between living in Fairhope and living in Hoboken -- besides the obvious one of looking across the river at the Empire State Building and looking across the bay and barely being able to discern anything like a skyline.
This reminds me of the time I showed Martin Platt, then Director of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, around Fairhope. His first reaction -- and this was in 1990 -- "This town has a case of the cutes," but he later said Fairhope would be livable "If only that were Toronto on the other side of that bay."
But I digress. In Hoboken, it's better than having Toronto across the nearby water. You have the city that never sleeps, the home of heart of the arts and commerce of America, the crown jewel of our country. (Okay, there are some drawbacks to NYC; there are problems. But give me a little leeway here. It's more interesting than Mobile.)
I am boning up on Hoboken. I'm checking out its history on the web. I'm reading the Hoboken blogs. Yesterday I found a very interesting post on a solid blog called Philly2Hoboken that described the ordeal of living through the steam pipe break and trying to get home to Hoboken. It brought it back to me what living in the city is like -- the uncertainty, the uneasiness in crisis, and the general atmosphere when you and your neighbors are drawn together in a way that nobody likes. I lived in New York in the 1960's and 70's and the worst situation we had to deal with was a blackout or two. Who knows what will be next, or how bad it will be?
The writer of Philly2Hoboken wove his way by cab to the ferry, trying to get over the river in the most expedient way possible. His commute is usually little more than ten minutes; on this day it was over two hours. But after enduring the inefficiency of waiting in long lines, looking for a ticket machine that didn't exist, he enjoyed the cool breezes on the ferry, and, although it docked at a place a long way from where he lived, he was able to get a bus to his home with no trouble.
A bus to his home! We don't have things like that in Fairhope or even Mobile. I can shed my car before I leave. I can get a train into and out of the city most days (and have the ferry option in certain emergencies or just when I feel like it).
Reading his blogpost, I could feel his relief at getting home to Hoboken. I can almost feel how I'm going to feel in the same situation.
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Progress
July 15, 2007
When does the Fairhope Walmart open? Ah, that is the question.
About ten years ago I was on the Fairhope Historic Preservation Committee. I've mentioned this before on the blog.
Our purpose in those days was to celebrate the history of Fairhope and preserve its look of early 20th Century America. We created a tour of homes, showcasing the cottages that once exemplified Fairhope's early days. We saw change coming, but all the new people professed to love the little bungalows and the charm of the patchwork nature of the streetscapes. Some of us remembered the days when all the streets were not paved and children played in the gulleys in their many spare hours.
We found the preservation of the houses and old buildings themselves a hard sell with the business community of Fairhope, so we vowed to elect a mayor who was sensitive to Fairhope's past and try to get a few of our own members on the city council.
This did come to pass in the mid 1990's. A long-term Comprehensive City Plan was devised with the help of consultants, and a historic preservation ordinance was presented to the mayor who promised to help us get it passed. It was in the Comprehensive Plan that the city would be zoned to encourage neighborhood stores and no "big-box" stores would be built within the city limits. All this was considered a coup for our side, creating a small town of walkers, getting exercise in the fresh air and not impinged upon by the dreaded Wal-Marts and other chains. Ultimately all these good intentions came to naught.
The Historic Preservation Ordinance was cast into the wastebin as soon as the mayor heard a few objections. Cottages were demolished and replaced by very large, very expensive homes, almost all designed by the same local architectural firm, and all looking very much alike -- way too big for the lots on which they sat, very imposing and designed (totally unlike the Fairhope equalizing philosophy) to impress the neighbors and the world at large.
By the time the new Walmart was announced, just outside the city limits, a few people, maybe as many as a hundred, picketed with homemade signs announcing "No Walmart in Fairhope" and a great deal of media coverage accompanied them. Technically they didn't have a leg to stand on since the Walmart was not actually "in" Fairhope. A Sam's Club was on the way up in nearby Loxley, and another Walmart is slated to be built in Robertsdale, which will certainly meet with a warmer reception than the one here.
The most hits I get on this blog these days come from the search words "When does Fairhope Walmart open?" I can report that I don't know exactly when it will open. It hasn't been in the newspapers (or on television) yet. But I've been out to the site to snap the photo above, which shows the building completed and a lot of activity therein.
I am not against this development any more than I am "for" it. I don't much like Walmart, and don't frequent the one in nearby Daphne, but I have no doubt this one will have a lot of traffic and that most locals will be pleased to have it so convenient. It's not one of my causes, as historic preservation was. It's just a fact of life. And it will be a fact of Fairhope life any day now.
Monday, July 09, 2007
The Little Theater of Geneva
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| Reg Bird, Mary Lois Adshead in Forty Carats |
They're all in boxes now, photos of the many plays I worked on in Geneva back in the 1980s. It started as a lark, a Monday evening activity at the American Women's Club, sitting around a table reading plays. After a few months of this, one of our regulars suggested, "It's time to mount a production."
If memory serves me it was Bob Hinely, a personnel guy at the Du Pont company and longtime amateur actor, who made that suggestion. He said, "Reading plays is fun, but if this is going anywhere, we've got to get a stage and put on a show."
He was right. I had been an actress in New York, studied with Peggy Feury and her mentor Lee Strasberg, and had been in plays since I was a teenager in Fairhope. I had worked backstage a little, but what I really wanted to do was direct -- so all the pieces fell in place to get something started. I had been on the board of Geneva's English Drama Society (GEDS), but when I didn't get re-elected to that I decided to produce American plays with the American Women's Club.
We started with an evening of one-acts, which went off pretty well. Then we held auditions and began planning a full-scale production. The play I chose was the old chestnut The Man Who Came To Dinner.
It had a cast of 28 people! This was a way to get ourselves known in the American community of Geneva -- I cast the minister at the American Church as a delivery man, and the Vice President of the American Women's Club as a television newscaster. I updated the script ("Hamilton Fish" became "Prince Andrew," "Gertrude Stein" became "Frank Sinatra," that sort of thing). What I didn't know when doing that was that every single celebrity name dropped in the play became a laugh line in the show -- and there were lots of them. Here we see Dorothy Watkins as the actress charming Keith Kentopp as Whiteside. |
| Jim Buckner, Dorothy Watkins in The Little Foxes |
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| Reg Bird, Julian Finn In Tribute |
Ronnie later directed a first-rate production of Deathtrap in Geneva. We all had great fun.
The Little Theatre changed lives. Reg moved back to Michigan where he and his family produce summer theatre on Torch Lake. Ronnie has written plays and movie scripts. More than that, we offered something unique in Switzerland, and we had as almost many Swiss in the audience as we had Americans. There is nothing quite like the theatre of a country and how it represents everything about that country. We were an outpost of American culture as well as the best of the American attitude that if-you-want-to-do-it, you-can! We made friends and we made memories.
I hope someone looking up Little Theatre of Geneva finds this blog post and adds a comment. Wherever you are, you remember all that we did. It's one project that will live in my memory, and that I'll always be proud of.
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Friends in New Places
July 5, 2007
I've still got one foot in Fairhope, but I've got the big toe of the other in Hoboken. I check Craigslist every day to see what's for rent there -- even though it will be months before I'll have any need to follow up; we all have our little compulsions -- and I go to the official Hoboken website and many of the blogs serving the area to get a feel for the place.
I get the distinct sense that there's a lot of testosterone in Hoboken. There is an air of conflict and aggression about the place, an atmosphere not prevalent in small cities in the South. I've visited a couple of Hoboken blogs and made comments there. I've gotten responses. One of them even posted about my plans to move and that elicited a few advice comments.
The writer of that blog, Jeff Fario, wondered if my attraction to Hoboken was a mistaken association with New Orleans. Hadn't thought of that at all -- it seemed sort of European to me, with that wide main street, and all the shops and neighborhood bakeries (and Catholic churches), which New Orleans does, but more distinctly Italian-American. It had more diversity than Fairhope, and more youth. It had a lot more bars, but my days of hanging out in bars for any period of time are pretty much behind me. (Thank God and AA I survived!)
The shop above, with Xmas tree lights and hanging pots, plus its very American sign above the door, spoke to me of Hoboken. You wouldn't see that around here in Lower Alabama. It had a blatant tackiness that was charming without trying. It didn't look like somebody's idea of Art, but it got my attention. There are lots more picturesque views of Hoboken, more elegant ones and more upscale ones. But here and there are touches of a simple bygone day, like the sign in shape of a hand pointing to "The Clam Broth House," which is no longer there. I hope they leave the sign up forever. (If I were running an Italian restaurant, what would make me think to celebrate clam broth anyway? What's so great about clam broth, in the galaxy of tasty Italian food? Maybe somebody in Hoboken will be able to tell me.)
There's a chance I won't meet any of the guys who write Hoboken blogs. Or that if we do we won't particularly hit it off. I just like knowing they're there, and I like their feisty, macho Hoboken take on things.
And the fact that they're in cyberspace lets me visit my own virtual reality of Hoboken while still living amid the spectacular sunsets and painted pelicans.
I've still got one foot in Fairhope, but I've got the big toe of the other in Hoboken. I check Craigslist every day to see what's for rent there -- even though it will be months before I'll have any need to follow up; we all have our little compulsions -- and I go to the official Hoboken website and many of the blogs serving the area to get a feel for the place.
I get the distinct sense that there's a lot of testosterone in Hoboken. There is an air of conflict and aggression about the place, an atmosphere not prevalent in small cities in the South. I've visited a couple of Hoboken blogs and made comments there. I've gotten responses. One of them even posted about my plans to move and that elicited a few advice comments.
The writer of that blog, Jeff Fario, wondered if my attraction to Hoboken was a mistaken association with New Orleans. Hadn't thought of that at all -- it seemed sort of European to me, with that wide main street, and all the shops and neighborhood bakeries (and Catholic churches), which New Orleans does, but more distinctly Italian-American. It had more diversity than Fairhope, and more youth. It had a lot more bars, but my days of hanging out in bars for any period of time are pretty much behind me. (Thank God and AA I survived!)
The shop above, with Xmas tree lights and hanging pots, plus its very American sign above the door, spoke to me of Hoboken. You wouldn't see that around here in Lower Alabama. It had a blatant tackiness that was charming without trying. It didn't look like somebody's idea of Art, but it got my attention. There are lots more picturesque views of Hoboken, more elegant ones and more upscale ones. But here and there are touches of a simple bygone day, like the sign in shape of a hand pointing to "The Clam Broth House," which is no longer there. I hope they leave the sign up forever. (If I were running an Italian restaurant, what would make me think to celebrate clam broth anyway? What's so great about clam broth, in the galaxy of tasty Italian food? Maybe somebody in Hoboken will be able to tell me.)
There's a chance I won't meet any of the guys who write Hoboken blogs. Or that if we do we won't particularly hit it off. I just like knowing they're there, and I like their feisty, macho Hoboken take on things.
And the fact that they're in cyberspace lets me visit my own virtual reality of Hoboken while still living amid the spectacular sunsets and painted pelicans.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Cottage For Sale
June 30, 2007
As of next week, it will be official. The Captain's House will have a For Sale sign in front, be listed on the local MLS, and the traffic of looky-loo's will begin in earnest.
The 1,900-square-foot cottage is a genuine Fairhope treasure, not that that means much these days. Built in 1916 by Ed Roberts, one of the bay boat pilots, it was solidly constructed and has an ambiance of bygone days that suggests the comfort of a warm hug. I've lived in it for four years and put more money into shoring it up and bringing it up to date than I like to think about. The house has meant a lot to me, and I thought it was likely to be where I ended my days -- until I woke up one day and my life had changed so I decided to put it on the market.
I'm not being realistic about the price, because I hope someone will really appreciate the house and its location. Like everyone in Fairhope, I don't believe in the principle of Single Tax any more, particularly when it comes to selling my own house. Part of this is because I know if I don't ask top dollar, a buyer seeking to flip the property will end up buying low, tearing the house down and selling high, and I will be the loser. Fairhope itself has been the loser in this game for many years now. If it doesn't look as if I can sell the house for my price, down will come the house and the beautiful two lots will be sold separately for a pretty penny. It might as well be me who gets the penny.
I don't feel one way or the other about this. Ever since I moved in I've sought to make an example of the captain's house: This is what old Fairhope looks like. You can do it too. Buy an old house and bring it gently up to date. I've been happy in hog heaven -- making a statement by the way I lived and hoping that statement would set an example in the town I grew up in and once loved. Seeing the fallacy of that has been frustrating almost to the point of heartbreak. Of course Fairhope is not what it used to be, but it is what it is. It is in a transition, becoming something else entirely. I just don't choose to stay around and be a part of it.
You'll read more about this here in days to come. In a way I wish things were different. But for me anyway, they will be. I'm moving to Hoboken.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
The Pelican Legend
June 28, 2007
Fairhope is known as an artists' colony. It never was one, but it once had a few real artists. Now it has an Art Association, mainly made up of hobby artists and offering classes in painting, sculpture and pottery to the general public. This club is very successful, and has spawned a few artists, to be sure. It's just that their idea of art does not quite coincide with mine.
An offshoot of the Art Association is a committee called the Committee for Public Art. This came into being after the Marietta Johnson Museum raised funds for a statue of Marietta Johnson, a very simple, tasteful piece with three figures, slightly larger than life, one being Mrs. Johnson herself and the other two being children who are learning from her. After the erection of this statue the Committee for Public Art went into action and raised money for a statue of "The Spirit of Fairhope." This work, an abstract, three-pronged piece in blue, stands at the entrance to the town, just across the street from the Art Association building. The committee has sponsored a number of projects, including sculpture of a couple of dolphins, a sea horse, and I don't know what else. Until the pelicans.
In the days when Fairhope didn't think of itself as an artists' colony, but rather a Single Tax Colony, we had an artist-craftsman in residence named Craig Sheldon who made his living in the construction trade. Craig was a wood-carver who occasionally got commissions to create sculpture. He created whimsical animals and occasional political whimsies out of wood, and built his own house in the form of a tiny castle, out of local tile, stone, and found objects. He raised three children and lived a rather astonishing life in his little corner of Fairhope.
At the end of his life -- I believe he was in his 80's and suffering from Altzheimer's -- he was commissioned to create a sculpture to go in the new fountain at the community college. The result is the statue of pelicans you see above. It was not Craig's best work, but it had a sense of wonder about it -- those soaring birds with their command of the sky -- as did everything he created.
He's been dead some ten years now. The Committee for Public Art had an idea to use molds of his pelicans and give them to some of their members to decorate artistically and put up all over town. Here's just a small sample of what they came up with.
The effect is a Disneyfication of town, punctuating the corners of the toney, flower-bedecked village with little exclamation points of painted pelicans, looking for all the world as if they wished someone would wash them of their overwrought designs and set them free as they once were. Word has it that one of the painted pelicans has been stolen from its perch. Someone says this is worse than stealing a Stop sign. Someone else says whoever said that is insane.
Whether they are art or not they are all over town, these profaned pelicans, these tarted-up waterfowl that once made a simple statement by a complex man in the place he wanted them. I knew Craig Sheldon, and I think I know what he'd say about the painted ladies. A temperamental man with the soul of a poet and the tongue of a sailor, I don't think he's resting in peace these days.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Okay, Hoboken: Freeze!
June 17, 2007
Freeze, Hoboken! Don’t let the developers in to tear down your glorious old buildings on Washington Street and put up something cheaper and tackier. Stay as sweetly raffish and wise as you are today, with Italian restaurants, bakeries, and row houses all over. The casual observer sees Catholic churches everywhere, and a beautiful Tudor style Episcopal church (with an announcement on its board outside of a celebration of the history of Gay Pride Week) as the main street becomes residential and trees crop up.
The Hoboken "attitude" is well-known. The surprise after actually visiting is how small-town nice the place is. One short shot on the train and you're in the West Village, in New York itself, but ignoring that, the small city of Hoboken (pop. 38,000, one mile square and so tightly bound by Newark on one side and Jersey City on the other, unable to grow) has a personality all its own.
Hoboken abounds with websites and blogs. Just Google it. There is an annual Italian Festival, a reknowned Music Festival, and Saints' Festivals galore. There are three theatre companies, one producing Shakespeare (de Vere) in the park. The Hoboken Library is said to have a special section of CD's of its favorite son, Frank Sinatra.
The view of Manhattan from Sinatra Park is spectacular. Sidewalk cafés flank the fancy apartment buildings that face the river and the park. Beautiful people sip pretty drinks and see the mommies with with strollers across the way.
Stay this way, Hoboken. I can't stand to see one more important little American town lose its heart and soul.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Oz
June 13, 2007
I’ve had quite a trip, navigating the subways and looking for a neighborhood that hit me between the eyes. In the process I’ve discovered that I still love New York, and the city itself has been reborn into a safer, cleaner place than the one I lived in from 1964-1988. Even the transportation system has changed, been updated, expanded, and made more convenient. Living in New York used to be an endurance contest with a lot of perks. Now it’s even more perks -- and less endurance is required.
Overall, it has a lot more to offer – but the price is way higher than it used to be, which is to be expected. Well, New York, you’ve changed. I’ve changed too. (That’s a line from a 1970’s ad for a now-defunct bank.)
I’ve been to neighborhoods I never heard of in the old days: Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Long Island City. I’ve been to places that have been washed down, cleaned up and scaled up. I’m staying in a neighborhood that was once full of dirt, homeless men, and prostitutes – and is now one of the prime residential areas of the city, with elegant brownstones sporting roses in front and power-washed facades.
But nothing struck me like the neighborhood I found yesterday. I had heard about it but nobody I asked was clear how to get there. Everybody had heard of it, heard good things about it, but seemed to think it was remote or difficult to find. I was determined. With a moniker like “Dumbo,” how obscure could it be. There’s TriBeCa, SoHo, NoHo, and Dumbo, which stands for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. There is some question if there even is a Manhattan Bridge overpass, but everybody has heard of Dumbo.
I made my way via the subway to Brooklyn, went a stop too far, but I hadn’t wanted to get sidetracked into Brooklyn Heights, a beautiful neighborhood I already know pretty well. I asked a cop where the bridge was and was pointed in the right direction with the instruction, “It’s a good little walk.”
As I approached my destination, I took this picture. The sight of that activity in view of the bridge literally took my breath away. This is it, folks, Oz. The section of Brooklyn, overlooking the city with converted warehouses, great restaurants, parks, and apartments that recently were deserted offices and storage buildings. I had found Dumbo, and I loved it at first sight.
Monday, June 11, 2007
An Evening with Piaf
June 11, 2007
How could a bioflick about the tragic French singer Edith Piaf be anything but depressing? I said something similar to my nephew Will yesterday at brunch, while we listened to the lovely singer Pamela Luss at the Mannahatta lounge/restaurant in SoHo. We were talking about the new movie La Vie en Rose and discussing whether or not either of us would go.
But then I had an evening with nothing to do, and knowing it would be unlikely the film would ever make the screens at cineplexes in Lower Alabama, I opted to catch it at a screen a few blocks away, on West 23rd Street.
I knew what I was in for – a grueling retelling of a life as full of heartbreak and trauma as the voice of Piaf herself, the trembling “little sparrow,” who could fill a stage with the strength of her pain and the glare of her sheer human endurance. French actors have a gift for capturing the ordinary and making it as compelling as it is beautiful. You can see all the way through the eyes of these performers to their hearts, souls, and the national character of La France itself. Marion Cotillard, a beauty I had not seen before, transforms herself to the singer from the streets of Paris who came to be an icon for a generation of French.
The film plays tricks with time and surprises us with bits of plot information too late, but the overall effect of seeing it is that of travel to the Paris from the early through the mid years of the 20th Century. Here we meet a sickly girl, raised in a brothel and nurtured by whores, pushed by her street-circus-acrobat father to sing to hold the crowds. The first time out, she essays Le Marsellaise and does herself proud. This being her song, we see that she herself is a metaphor for France’s indomitable, tortured soul, and we see why the French responded to her with adoration to the point of idolatry. Never mind that the real Piaf was 4’8” and wraithlike, that her voice was a piercing, trembling, emotionally wrenching shriek from a heart begging to be broken once more. Never mind that the real Piaf had a life of success, adulation, and was mentor and lover to Yves Montand (among others), and died not of overwork or neglect as the film suggests, but of cancer, at the time married to a 26-year-old man who adored her. This movie dwells on her tragedy, and bathes us in it.
Having said that, I know it’s weird to admit I liked it. Americans will be reminded a bit of Judy Garland, and rightly so, but Piaf was herself, and she was Paris. The movie is beautiful, Cotillard is breathtaking, and you leave the theatre being thankful to be ordinary.
How could a bioflick about the tragic French singer Edith Piaf be anything but depressing? I said something similar to my nephew Will yesterday at brunch, while we listened to the lovely singer Pamela Luss at the Mannahatta lounge/restaurant in SoHo. We were talking about the new movie La Vie en Rose and discussing whether or not either of us would go.
But then I had an evening with nothing to do, and knowing it would be unlikely the film would ever make the screens at cineplexes in Lower Alabama, I opted to catch it at a screen a few blocks away, on West 23rd Street.
I knew what I was in for – a grueling retelling of a life as full of heartbreak and trauma as the voice of Piaf herself, the trembling “little sparrow,” who could fill a stage with the strength of her pain and the glare of her sheer human endurance. French actors have a gift for capturing the ordinary and making it as compelling as it is beautiful. You can see all the way through the eyes of these performers to their hearts, souls, and the national character of La France itself. Marion Cotillard, a beauty I had not seen before, transforms herself to the singer from the streets of Paris who came to be an icon for a generation of French.
The film plays tricks with time and surprises us with bits of plot information too late, but the overall effect of seeing it is that of travel to the Paris from the early through the mid years of the 20th Century. Here we meet a sickly girl, raised in a brothel and nurtured by whores, pushed by her street-circus-acrobat father to sing to hold the crowds. The first time out, she essays Le Marsellaise and does herself proud. This being her song, we see that she herself is a metaphor for France’s indomitable, tortured soul, and we see why the French responded to her with adoration to the point of idolatry. Never mind that the real Piaf was 4’8” and wraithlike, that her voice was a piercing, trembling, emotionally wrenching shriek from a heart begging to be broken once more. Never mind that the real Piaf had a life of success, adulation, and was mentor and lover to Yves Montand (among others), and died not of overwork or neglect as the film suggests, but of cancer, at the time married to a 26-year-old man who adored her. This movie dwells on her tragedy, and bathes us in it.
Having said that, I know it’s weird to admit I liked it. Americans will be reminded a bit of Judy Garland, and rightly so, but Piaf was herself, and she was Paris. The movie is beautiful, Cotillard is breathtaking, and you leave the theatre being thankful to be ordinary.
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Hiatusville
June 6, 2007
Tomorrow I leave for a vacation in New York. I'll take my laptop, but my dance card is pretty full and I don't expect to be posting on the blog.
It may be hard to understand that writing for a blog is (for me anyway) as much an addiction as reading blogs probably is for you. It's a public journal, an archive of life. As you get older you need to leave some traces of your work in a public spot -- whether it be graffiti scrawled on a wall, a poem in a scrapbook, a file folder of letters or essays, or even a baseless lawsuit that somewhere in your heart you consider your ticket to immortality.
Am I a writer? I started the blog because I had published a book, and I thought anyone reading the blog would be intrigued enough to buy a copy. The book did little to sell books, but it made me a host of new friends who drop by occasionally and sometimes even make themselves known. I see that I have visitors from the UK, drawn to posts about "Andy Worehole," which was the name one of my commenters used on one of the many posts about Andy Warhol. It's a phonetic spelling that the English might naturally use on Google, and I'll bet this is the only blog that particular entry takes them to. Others come from nearby Huntsville or Covington, for what motives I can't imagine, but I have regular readers from Jacksonville and the guy with bananas for a name lives out in California somewhere. At one time my regulars were from Madison, Virginia (benedict s.) and Sweden, and there were some heated and exciting mental battles between them. I still get frequent hits from a favorite oaf in San Jose, Costa Rica.
I don't know if I'll continue the blog when I return. I say I don't know because I don't. I tried to kick the habit before Christmas of last year, but I kept my hand in. Up until that time I was posting every day, sometimes quite well if I do say so myself. I suggest you browse past posts if you're interested. You'll find posts on specific movies and on the meaning of movies themselves, as well as the meaning of God, the meaning of life, and the philosophy of Marietta Johnson. Seek and you'll find. Use the little search tool at the top of the blog, in the left hand corner, or scan the months linked on the side. The blog was begun in March of 2006, but the first few months were deleted through an error of the blog administrator -- me.
I only know this. I'll keep writing, and I have a lot of writing to do when I get back on June 18. The blog may be one thing too many in the future.
Then again, it may not. It doesn't do any harm, does it?
Tomorrow I leave for a vacation in New York. I'll take my laptop, but my dance card is pretty full and I don't expect to be posting on the blog.
It may be hard to understand that writing for a blog is (for me anyway) as much an addiction as reading blogs probably is for you. It's a public journal, an archive of life. As you get older you need to leave some traces of your work in a public spot -- whether it be graffiti scrawled on a wall, a poem in a scrapbook, a file folder of letters or essays, or even a baseless lawsuit that somewhere in your heart you consider your ticket to immortality.
Am I a writer? I started the blog because I had published a book, and I thought anyone reading the blog would be intrigued enough to buy a copy. The book did little to sell books, but it made me a host of new friends who drop by occasionally and sometimes even make themselves known. I see that I have visitors from the UK, drawn to posts about "Andy Worehole," which was the name one of my commenters used on one of the many posts about Andy Warhol. It's a phonetic spelling that the English might naturally use on Google, and I'll bet this is the only blog that particular entry takes them to. Others come from nearby Huntsville or Covington, for what motives I can't imagine, but I have regular readers from Jacksonville and the guy with bananas for a name lives out in California somewhere. At one time my regulars were from Madison, Virginia (benedict s.) and Sweden, and there were some heated and exciting mental battles between them. I still get frequent hits from a favorite oaf in San Jose, Costa Rica.
I don't know if I'll continue the blog when I return. I say I don't know because I don't. I tried to kick the habit before Christmas of last year, but I kept my hand in. Up until that time I was posting every day, sometimes quite well if I do say so myself. I suggest you browse past posts if you're interested. You'll find posts on specific movies and on the meaning of movies themselves, as well as the meaning of God, the meaning of life, and the philosophy of Marietta Johnson. Seek and you'll find. Use the little search tool at the top of the blog, in the left hand corner, or scan the months linked on the side. The blog was begun in March of 2006, but the first few months were deleted through an error of the blog administrator -- me.
I only know this. I'll keep writing, and I have a lot of writing to do when I get back on June 18. The blog may be one thing too many in the future.
Then again, it may not. It doesn't do any harm, does it?
Sunday, June 03, 2007
My One and Only Love
June 3, 2007
I thought that title would get your attention. Actually, the subject of the blog is the popular song by that name, one that had eluded my attention until it was recorded on Rod Stewart's "American Songbook IV" CD. Even then, I didn't think much of it.
Rod Stewart? Moi?
I admit I hadn't discovered the aging rocker until he began recording corny old songs and singing them on tv with an unabashedly straightforward style. I bought the CD for tunes like "My Funny Valentine,""I Wish You Love" and "Thanks for the Memory" -- the latter of which Stewart rescues from its permanent association with Bob Hope, who introduced it in his first movie, The Big Broadcast. Even typing the movie's title, The Big Broadcast, makes me feel like an old windbag. But while I'm at it, I recommend that you see the movie, or at least Hope's duet of the original "Thanks for the Memory," which he sings with great charm.
I'm still in the process of transferring my vinyl to my laptop, whence it will go to an MP 3 or an iPhone or something really sharp and impressive up-to-date. However, the music that's being transferred has a certain nostalgic tinge -- records I've had since I was a teenager, which was many years ago. I have some of my father's old jazz albums, a smattering of Rosemary Clooney and Tony Bennett, a ton of Frank Sinatra, my late husband's Count Basie, my old Kris Kristofferson, Tom Paxton and Joni Mitchell.
I even have a gang of Christmas music albums, including one I bought in Switzerland that has many of the old French carols we sang when I was a child at the Marietta Johnson School (I am bored stiff by secular Xmas music). I have transferred a few favorites from original-cast Broadway show albums: Have you ever heard Ray Middleton since "My Defenses Are Down" from Annie Get Your Gun?
It's an emotionally draining trip, re-recording all this stuff, because you have to listen and make powerful decisions to discard huge and emotional parts of your life. I've described it here before. I still love the music, but I don't need all this vinyl; I need less stuff. I'm more than halfway through, but I had to stop because it was too painful. Now I've started up again so that I can finish the job.
I picked up one of Jim Adshead's albums, "George Shearing: Blue Chiffon." I had saved "Velvet Carpet" since the mid-1950's, with its sweeping, swooping string-background to Shearing's inventive jazz noodling (Who can recover from "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" superimposed on top of "Dancing on the Ceiling"? I ask you!), but hadn't liked the "Blue Chiffon" as well, so I didn't familiarize myself with it all that much. I decided to listen to a side and see what I thought of it. The next decision was, can I live without this particular rendition of this particular tune? Okay, I like the tune "I'm Old Fashioned," and don't have it in my collection, and Shearing's version is very nice. Then I came upon "My One and Only Love," a song I knew only from Rod Stewart's CD and didn't much care for, with its contrived rhymes and banal sentiment. But Shearing's version was gorgeous. Not too lush, not too fiddly, but a beautiful melody elegantly jazzed up. I had to have it.
My nephew Will Friedwald is a jazz historian, and the author of a book called Stardust Melodies which gives the "biographies" of a dozen popular songs. He'd probably know the story of the birth of "My One and Only Love," plus the background of its writers and all the people who ever recorded it. I contend that nobody did it better, and that it comes off as well by Shearing as it ever did by anybody. I'm glad to have it.
As to my own one and only love, that'll have to come in another post.
I thought that title would get your attention. Actually, the subject of the blog is the popular song by that name, one that had eluded my attention until it was recorded on Rod Stewart's "American Songbook IV" CD. Even then, I didn't think much of it.
Rod Stewart? Moi?
I admit I hadn't discovered the aging rocker until he began recording corny old songs and singing them on tv with an unabashedly straightforward style. I bought the CD for tunes like "My Funny Valentine,""I Wish You Love" and "Thanks for the Memory" -- the latter of which Stewart rescues from its permanent association with Bob Hope, who introduced it in his first movie, The Big Broadcast. Even typing the movie's title, The Big Broadcast, makes me feel like an old windbag. But while I'm at it, I recommend that you see the movie, or at least Hope's duet of the original "Thanks for the Memory," which he sings with great charm.
I'm still in the process of transferring my vinyl to my laptop, whence it will go to an MP 3 or an iPhone or something really sharp and impressive up-to-date. However, the music that's being transferred has a certain nostalgic tinge -- records I've had since I was a teenager, which was many years ago. I have some of my father's old jazz albums, a smattering of Rosemary Clooney and Tony Bennett, a ton of Frank Sinatra, my late husband's Count Basie, my old Kris Kristofferson, Tom Paxton and Joni Mitchell.
I even have a gang of Christmas music albums, including one I bought in Switzerland that has many of the old French carols we sang when I was a child at the Marietta Johnson School (I am bored stiff by secular Xmas music). I have transferred a few favorites from original-cast Broadway show albums: Have you ever heard Ray Middleton since "My Defenses Are Down" from Annie Get Your Gun?
It's an emotionally draining trip, re-recording all this stuff, because you have to listen and make powerful decisions to discard huge and emotional parts of your life. I've described it here before. I still love the music, but I don't need all this vinyl; I need less stuff. I'm more than halfway through, but I had to stop because it was too painful. Now I've started up again so that I can finish the job.
I picked up one of Jim Adshead's albums, "George Shearing: Blue Chiffon." I had saved "Velvet Carpet" since the mid-1950's, with its sweeping, swooping string-background to Shearing's inventive jazz noodling (Who can recover from "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" superimposed on top of "Dancing on the Ceiling"? I ask you!), but hadn't liked the "Blue Chiffon" as well, so I didn't familiarize myself with it all that much. I decided to listen to a side and see what I thought of it. The next decision was, can I live without this particular rendition of this particular tune? Okay, I like the tune "I'm Old Fashioned," and don't have it in my collection, and Shearing's version is very nice. Then I came upon "My One and Only Love," a song I knew only from Rod Stewart's CD and didn't much care for, with its contrived rhymes and banal sentiment. But Shearing's version was gorgeous. Not too lush, not too fiddly, but a beautiful melody elegantly jazzed up. I had to have it.
My nephew Will Friedwald is a jazz historian, and the author of a book called Stardust Melodies which gives the "biographies" of a dozen popular songs. He'd probably know the story of the birth of "My One and Only Love," plus the background of its writers and all the people who ever recorded it. I contend that nobody did it better, and that it comes off as well by Shearing as it ever did by anybody. I'm glad to have it.
As to my own one and only love, that'll have to come in another post.
Saturday, June 02, 2007
Good for a Laugh
June 2, 2007
Say what you will about the National Spelling Bee. Movies have been made that touch people's hearts; movies about little kids learning the joy of achievement, about adults learning from children; movies about the pressure, tension, and the miracle of a child being held to some arbitrary standard and transcending the challenge. Broadway plays that win Tony Awards have been produced about spelling bees. I've said a lot about the spelling event over the years. I once wrote an angry letter to the editor of the local paper about it. As a matter of fact, I'm ag'in the whole thing.
We used to have spelling bees in school as a way to drill correct spelling into us. As such, they were harmless, and did get us to focus on a list of words and rules that would help us in a world before the Spellcheck feature on computers did it all for us. But the "national spelling bee" concept erased any real learning value in spelling bees and made it a showcase for children, a new arena in which parents could micro-manage their children's lives and the media could make a hero of a child, after months of memorization, repetition and focus on a single activity would happen to be dealt a list of obscure words that he had worked on learning to spell and not crack under the pressure by actually spelling the last one right.
It's no coincidence that most winners (including this year's) are home-schooled, where they are given full-time to focus on the one important thing in life: learning how to spell the words they might be given in the bee.
Usually the winning word is one that adults don't know the meaning of, and the child will likely never have the need to use. This year is no exception there, although the word itself does not seem to be a very difficult one. As in most tests, winning the spelling bee has more to do with guessing right than anything else.
But this year there was a treat in the contest.
It seems that most of the serious young spellers are normal, well-balanced kids after all, as exemplified by the adorable moment replayed most often on the tv news after the event. An 11-year-old from Terre Haute named Kennyi Aouad was given the word "sardoodledom" as his spelling word. Don't tell me he's not a good speller; he's had to go through life spelling both Kennyi Aouad and Terre Haute. Well, the word sardoodledom was one he'd never come across before -- except maybe on his spelling list -- and hearing it pronounced cracked him up. He knew how to spell it, but just saying he did struck him as funny. He would lose it every time he had to pronounce it. If you didn't see the footage of his spelling the word, look for it on YouTube; it's surely there, and it will give you a laugh today and a smile forever.
Can't help but love this kid! Can't help but hope that he knows how much joy he gave us jaded curmudgeons who hate the National Spelling Bee but love the spellers.
Say what you will about the National Spelling Bee. Movies have been made that touch people's hearts; movies about little kids learning the joy of achievement, about adults learning from children; movies about the pressure, tension, and the miracle of a child being held to some arbitrary standard and transcending the challenge. Broadway plays that win Tony Awards have been produced about spelling bees. I've said a lot about the spelling event over the years. I once wrote an angry letter to the editor of the local paper about it. As a matter of fact, I'm ag'in the whole thing.
We used to have spelling bees in school as a way to drill correct spelling into us. As such, they were harmless, and did get us to focus on a list of words and rules that would help us in a world before the Spellcheck feature on computers did it all for us. But the "national spelling bee" concept erased any real learning value in spelling bees and made it a showcase for children, a new arena in which parents could micro-manage their children's lives and the media could make a hero of a child, after months of memorization, repetition and focus on a single activity would happen to be dealt a list of obscure words that he had worked on learning to spell and not crack under the pressure by actually spelling the last one right.
It's no coincidence that most winners (including this year's) are home-schooled, where they are given full-time to focus on the one important thing in life: learning how to spell the words they might be given in the bee.
Usually the winning word is one that adults don't know the meaning of, and the child will likely never have the need to use. This year is no exception there, although the word itself does not seem to be a very difficult one. As in most tests, winning the spelling bee has more to do with guessing right than anything else.
But this year there was a treat in the contest.
It seems that most of the serious young spellers are normal, well-balanced kids after all, as exemplified by the adorable moment replayed most often on the tv news after the event. An 11-year-old from Terre Haute named Kennyi Aouad was given the word "sardoodledom" as his spelling word. Don't tell me he's not a good speller; he's had to go through life spelling both Kennyi Aouad and Terre Haute. Well, the word sardoodledom was one he'd never come across before -- except maybe on his spelling list -- and hearing it pronounced cracked him up. He knew how to spell it, but just saying he did struck him as funny. He would lose it every time he had to pronounce it. If you didn't see the footage of his spelling the word, look for it on YouTube; it's surely there, and it will give you a laugh today and a smile forever.
Can't help but love this kid! Can't help but hope that he knows how much joy he gave us jaded curmudgeons who hate the National Spelling Bee but love the spellers.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Whizzing Chunks of Time
May 29, 2007
Okay, so I had a birthday. If you are a regular occupant of the Internet, which I assume you are or you wouldn’t be reading this, you’d realize I’m getting pretty old. Not yet 70, but pushing it pretty hard.
I can tell you that at this point life is experienced as whizzing chunks of time – a projected future that keeps coming at you and then disappearing. You spend a lot of time dwelling in places and time zones in which you used to be. The past, I mean. Other voices, other rooms, another place and time. And sometimes it's instructive.
Then again, you anticipate what's coming next. I decided to give myself a party on the weekend before the birthday. This would make it not quite a birthday party, and the less said about age the better. This would give me something to do for a rather manic two weeks as I got ready, including cooking, straightening up, getting the right dishes and glassware out, selecting appropriate attire, etc. Now that's over. The guests have come and gone, the food has been consumed, and the dishes washed and put away. It was an excellent party, actually, with little mini-events and minor scenes, a lot of laughs, and the chance to see beloved friends all in the same place. I drank champagne, but with the adrenaline level I never felt it. I have to keep reminding myself why I bother with champagne at all.
Now comes the next chunk of time: planning a vacation in New York beginning a week from Thursday. All of us in the know are aware it's not really a vacation, but a business trip in which I'll explore the underpinnings for my next life-phase, yet it will be a vacation as well. I need to know my way around the residential areas surrounding the city so as to help with my big decision. I need to eliminate certain neighborhoods and concentrate on those that hold the most appeal for me.
You'll hear more about this whizzing chunk as the time draws closer. I will not make any firm decision until after the big Marietta Johnson School Reunion in early October. Planning and preparing for that big party will occupy most of the next timechunk.
Any birthday makes me aware of all those things that have changed within -- and without -- myself. A look in the mirror almost always causes a pang of regret and grief for a loss of something I didn't even know I had. But I also know that, as the chunks of time whiz by with greater alacrity, almost all the old feelings are still under the surface, that inner child and former nymphet are ready to appear in the older, wiser and flabbier person's body.
Sometimes I forget what's in the mirror and react as the adolescent. In spite of the wisdom of the years, I drop everything I've learned and succumb to the call of my former, reckless and carefree self. I make a decision to change my whole life once again.
When you get to be my age, if you're lucky, you may learn a lesson that transcends the reflection from the mirror and the preoccupation with things you cannot change.
Okay, so I had a birthday. If you are a regular occupant of the Internet, which I assume you are or you wouldn’t be reading this, you’d realize I’m getting pretty old. Not yet 70, but pushing it pretty hard.
I can tell you that at this point life is experienced as whizzing chunks of time – a projected future that keeps coming at you and then disappearing. You spend a lot of time dwelling in places and time zones in which you used to be. The past, I mean. Other voices, other rooms, another place and time. And sometimes it's instructive.
Then again, you anticipate what's coming next. I decided to give myself a party on the weekend before the birthday. This would make it not quite a birthday party, and the less said about age the better. This would give me something to do for a rather manic two weeks as I got ready, including cooking, straightening up, getting the right dishes and glassware out, selecting appropriate attire, etc. Now that's over. The guests have come and gone, the food has been consumed, and the dishes washed and put away. It was an excellent party, actually, with little mini-events and minor scenes, a lot of laughs, and the chance to see beloved friends all in the same place. I drank champagne, but with the adrenaline level I never felt it. I have to keep reminding myself why I bother with champagne at all.
Now comes the next chunk of time: planning a vacation in New York beginning a week from Thursday. All of us in the know are aware it's not really a vacation, but a business trip in which I'll explore the underpinnings for my next life-phase, yet it will be a vacation as well. I need to know my way around the residential areas surrounding the city so as to help with my big decision. I need to eliminate certain neighborhoods and concentrate on those that hold the most appeal for me.
You'll hear more about this whizzing chunk as the time draws closer. I will not make any firm decision until after the big Marietta Johnson School Reunion in early October. Planning and preparing for that big party will occupy most of the next timechunk.
Any birthday makes me aware of all those things that have changed within -- and without -- myself. A look in the mirror almost always causes a pang of regret and grief for a loss of something I didn't even know I had. But I also know that, as the chunks of time whiz by with greater alacrity, almost all the old feelings are still under the surface, that inner child and former nymphet are ready to appear in the older, wiser and flabbier person's body.
Sometimes I forget what's in the mirror and react as the adolescent. In spite of the wisdom of the years, I drop everything I've learned and succumb to the call of my former, reckless and carefree self. I make a decision to change my whole life once again.
When you get to be my age, if you're lucky, you may learn a lesson that transcends the reflection from the mirror and the preoccupation with things you cannot change.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Another Look at Memorial Day
May 28, 2007
Memorial Day, I was taught, was started in the South after the Civil War. Widows, mothers, and others who loved men who had lost their lives in the defense of the South in that tragic war went to cemeteries often and put flowers on the graves of their beloved men. It became institutionalized as Confederate Memorial Day, in a few years co-opted by the bereaved on both sides. At first the women of the North had their day for decorating graves, and they called it Decoration Day; but over time the two sides came together to honor all who died in the Civil War under the appellation of Memorial Day, and one day was set aside.
In the South, where many diehards still reside, there are pockets where Confederate Memorial Day is observed on various days in the year, but let us face it, there have been many more men lost in many other wars, and the memories of the Southern cause have been blurred by so many re-inventions that there is absolutely no point in defending anything about that particular war.
Imagine my surprise in reading this in an article by Adam Cohen in today's New York Times:
Memorial Day got its start after the Civil War, when freed slaves and abolitionists gathered in Charleston, S.C., to honor Union soldiers who gave their lives to battle slavery. The holiday was so closely associated with the Union side, and with the fight for emancipation, that Southern states quickly established their own rival Confederate Memorial Day.
He gets his information from an impeccable source, Dr. David Blight of Yale University, who has written several award-winning histories espousing this theory. In fact, Dr. Blight's take on that particular war has helped shape our perceptions of our wars, our history, and our racism.
Well and good, and I hope I'm not considered a racist (but I feel certain I would be by Dr. Blight) because of what Memorial Day means to me. I don't love the holiday (except that it usually falls, as it does this year, on my birthday), and I certainly don't love the Civil War or the Southern cause. I Googled Memorial Day and found many an entry, not all of which support the idea that the day itself has helped the country to proceed with ignoring civil rights. This one I found quite fair and balanced, partly because it re-tells the old old story I grew up with, true or false. Don't miss the page on Mrs. Logan.
Let us observe the day with not receiving mail, finding the bank closed, thinking of the real meaning of each and every war, and also not forgetting that it's my birthday.
Memorial Day, I was taught, was started in the South after the Civil War. Widows, mothers, and others who loved men who had lost their lives in the defense of the South in that tragic war went to cemeteries often and put flowers on the graves of their beloved men. It became institutionalized as Confederate Memorial Day, in a few years co-opted by the bereaved on both sides. At first the women of the North had their day for decorating graves, and they called it Decoration Day; but over time the two sides came together to honor all who died in the Civil War under the appellation of Memorial Day, and one day was set aside.
In the South, where many diehards still reside, there are pockets where Confederate Memorial Day is observed on various days in the year, but let us face it, there have been many more men lost in many other wars, and the memories of the Southern cause have been blurred by so many re-inventions that there is absolutely no point in defending anything about that particular war.
Imagine my surprise in reading this in an article by Adam Cohen in today's New York Times:
Memorial Day got its start after the Civil War, when freed slaves and abolitionists gathered in Charleston, S.C., to honor Union soldiers who gave their lives to battle slavery. The holiday was so closely associated with the Union side, and with the fight for emancipation, that Southern states quickly established their own rival Confederate Memorial Day.
He gets his information from an impeccable source, Dr. David Blight of Yale University, who has written several award-winning histories espousing this theory. In fact, Dr. Blight's take on that particular war has helped shape our perceptions of our wars, our history, and our racism.
Well and good, and I hope I'm not considered a racist (but I feel certain I would be by Dr. Blight) because of what Memorial Day means to me. I don't love the holiday (except that it usually falls, as it does this year, on my birthday), and I certainly don't love the Civil War or the Southern cause. I Googled Memorial Day and found many an entry, not all of which support the idea that the day itself has helped the country to proceed with ignoring civil rights. This one I found quite fair and balanced, partly because it re-tells the old old story I grew up with, true or false. Don't miss the page on Mrs. Logan.
Let us observe the day with not receiving mail, finding the bank closed, thinking of the real meaning of each and every war, and also not forgetting that it's my birthday.
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Graduates Aplenty
May 26, 2007
This time of year we all seem to be thinking of graduation...getting dressed for somebody's and/or remembering our own. At the Organic School (aka Marietta Johnson School), we've been honoring special people who graduated in past years since January. We send a picture to the paper and a few paragraphs about the honoree. And then they don't run them. Never mind, these are people dear to our hearts and important to the life of the school.
Above we have the very colorful Mordecai Arnold, USMC Ret., retired educator, and leader of many cake walks; looking at the award given to Helen Porter Dyson, Class of 1926,and his former kindergarten teacher. He himself will be Graduate of the Month of June.
The next picture shows State Representative T.Joe Faust, class of 1959, receiving his award as Graduate of the Month of May from yours truly, President of the Board of Managers, and not incidentally Class of 1958.For more information about the previous Graduates of the Month, just click on this. This site gives info on each of the graduates of the month, and lots more. You'll love it.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
A Time To Love
May 23, 2007
A few months ago, maybe as much as a year, there was a lot of activity on this blog concerning questions of love and what it is. There still appears to be interest in the topic.
At that point we had a regular reader (“benedict s.”) who was always suggesting that we all read Spinoza, because he believed the philosopher had as many answers as we had questions. I believe he’s not blogging himself any more – and he seldom visits here, because, he tells me, he’s completing his book on Spinoza.
While I attempted to define love, or at least to confine it, isolate it and break it down, he gave us Spinoza’s simple and felicitous definition “Love is joy attached to an object.”
Being sometimes a contrarian, I thought I could do better. It never seemed to me that joy was synonomous with love, although joy could at times be a component of the complex emotion.
I reminded him of something I’d written several years before:
Love is a word that has baffled those of us whose mother tongue is English ever since there was such a language. For one word to encompass all the meanings of love is probably as limiting to the emotion itself as it is to the attempt to define it. This impoverished vocabulary may actually have contributed to the emotional restraint of the English. Mother love, romantic love, love from a grandchild, love of life, love of God – are these things the same?
Love is not necessarily an emotion. It is more likely the substance of the heart, the source, the sustenance of the spirit, the food behind all that is positive in human existence. It is unquestioning sacrifice, unrequited mercy, unsolicited grace.
In later discussions, the reader calling himself “Officious Oaf” asked what homosexuality was all about, and did it fall in the realm of the “normal” or was it an illness, aberration, or what.
I responded that to my way of thinking it was all about love.
Love itself is hardly usual, but it is normal. Normal madness, perhaps, that eventually evolves into comfort, support and well-being in the presence of a particular other person. I wouldn’t agree with Spinoza here, that it could be defined as “joy attached to an object,” since there is so much conflict within love that “joy” is only one facet of it. How about “madness attached to an object”? Clever, but hardly sufficient. Such a definition would have to incorporate the reality that, with time, the madness of true love abates to a dull roar and then spirals into acceptance.
The Spinoza disciple wrote this comment:
On a less serious note, what's this business with love being madness? I've heard poets say that, but just put it down to license. Love always seemed a joy to me. Still does. But there are sometimes confusions that attach themselves to particular loves.
I know a guy who has had three wives -- not at the same time -- and still loves them all. Same guy has had several other loves that he still loves. And I can tell you for a fact, all his loves still give him joy. Madness? Maybe. But in his private madhouse, they feed well.
To which I wrote this comment:
Love is passion, conflict, chaos, pathos, cosmos, peace, hope, sanity, madness, sorrow, and joy too. It engages and confronts every emotion possible, including desperation and pain. Not all love, of course, is any one of these things, and seldom is it all -- and probably never all at the same time unless it is really madness. Shall we say it is a complex emotion and leave it at that?
I have one more tangent to go onto here before I leave love behind this time, however – the concept of obsession. A sometime addict of the Dr. Phil show, I was intrigued at the mentally unbalanced man stalking his own wife as shown on the program over the past few weeks. His possessiveness and paranoia had driven her away from him, and yet he persisted in deception of himself and everybody surrounding him, in and outside the rehab facility Dr. Phil sent him to, all the while calling it “love.” I am reminded how often real madness is attributed to love, and how seldom, in our rush to allow everybody one love for his or her own life, we have screened the use of the very word love. There are those of us who are tied to people for a lifetime through obligation, dependency, or need – at times theirs rather than our own. Sometimes when we say “I love you,” we actually mean something else entirely, but we are more comfortable normalizing ourselves with the one emotion everybody is expected to understand.
Few of us really do understand it. I had an emotional crisis myself about 15 years ago. I had been “in love” many times in my life but had never quite gotten my mind around what was happening in my heart. I was attracted to people who had no love to give, yet I assumed what I was getting was enough. Worse, I assumed it was the best I could have. In my therapy and support groups, I tried to understand and recapture the feeling of love, to identify it. My heart’s search kept taking me back to the same time, place and people – my grandpa and my auntee (great aunt), and myself the toddler on their knee. Then I thought of my own daughter. I knew the closest I had ever had to love came from these sources and I cherished that reality. That would always be love for me.
Now I have two grandsons, and when I think of them I am overwhelmed with how much love there is in the world. They show me love with every movement, and I love the opportunity of loving them. The love that goes back and forth between us has a great deal of joy in it, but it is enriched by concern, tenderness, and commitment.
As a single person, I admit there is always the possibility of romantic love around some corner -- the hope of ending my days with the love of my life. Ah, come on, I say to myself. The days you have left are few and the possibility of a certain relationship – a one and only – ever coming on the horizon lessens with every passing year. And what on earth would you want that for now? All the questions keep coming back.
In all the previous discussions, I seem in all too big a hurry to drop the subject. If someone cares to elucidate the topic for the rest of us, I’ll keep it afloat as best I can.
A few months ago, maybe as much as a year, there was a lot of activity on this blog concerning questions of love and what it is. There still appears to be interest in the topic.
At that point we had a regular reader (“benedict s.”) who was always suggesting that we all read Spinoza, because he believed the philosopher had as many answers as we had questions. I believe he’s not blogging himself any more – and he seldom visits here, because, he tells me, he’s completing his book on Spinoza.
While I attempted to define love, or at least to confine it, isolate it and break it down, he gave us Spinoza’s simple and felicitous definition “Love is joy attached to an object.”
Being sometimes a contrarian, I thought I could do better. It never seemed to me that joy was synonomous with love, although joy could at times be a component of the complex emotion.
I reminded him of something I’d written several years before:
Love is a word that has baffled those of us whose mother tongue is English ever since there was such a language. For one word to encompass all the meanings of love is probably as limiting to the emotion itself as it is to the attempt to define it. This impoverished vocabulary may actually have contributed to the emotional restraint of the English. Mother love, romantic love, love from a grandchild, love of life, love of God – are these things the same?
Love is not necessarily an emotion. It is more likely the substance of the heart, the source, the sustenance of the spirit, the food behind all that is positive in human existence. It is unquestioning sacrifice, unrequited mercy, unsolicited grace.
In later discussions, the reader calling himself “Officious Oaf” asked what homosexuality was all about, and did it fall in the realm of the “normal” or was it an illness, aberration, or what.
I responded that to my way of thinking it was all about love.
Love itself is hardly usual, but it is normal. Normal madness, perhaps, that eventually evolves into comfort, support and well-being in the presence of a particular other person. I wouldn’t agree with Spinoza here, that it could be defined as “joy attached to an object,” since there is so much conflict within love that “joy” is only one facet of it. How about “madness attached to an object”? Clever, but hardly sufficient. Such a definition would have to incorporate the reality that, with time, the madness of true love abates to a dull roar and then spirals into acceptance.
The Spinoza disciple wrote this comment:
On a less serious note, what's this business with love being madness? I've heard poets say that, but just put it down to license. Love always seemed a joy to me. Still does. But there are sometimes confusions that attach themselves to particular loves.
I know a guy who has had three wives -- not at the same time -- and still loves them all. Same guy has had several other loves that he still loves. And I can tell you for a fact, all his loves still give him joy. Madness? Maybe. But in his private madhouse, they feed well.
To which I wrote this comment:
Love is passion, conflict, chaos, pathos, cosmos, peace, hope, sanity, madness, sorrow, and joy too. It engages and confronts every emotion possible, including desperation and pain. Not all love, of course, is any one of these things, and seldom is it all -- and probably never all at the same time unless it is really madness. Shall we say it is a complex emotion and leave it at that?
I have one more tangent to go onto here before I leave love behind this time, however – the concept of obsession. A sometime addict of the Dr. Phil show, I was intrigued at the mentally unbalanced man stalking his own wife as shown on the program over the past few weeks. His possessiveness and paranoia had driven her away from him, and yet he persisted in deception of himself and everybody surrounding him, in and outside the rehab facility Dr. Phil sent him to, all the while calling it “love.” I am reminded how often real madness is attributed to love, and how seldom, in our rush to allow everybody one love for his or her own life, we have screened the use of the very word love. There are those of us who are tied to people for a lifetime through obligation, dependency, or need – at times theirs rather than our own. Sometimes when we say “I love you,” we actually mean something else entirely, but we are more comfortable normalizing ourselves with the one emotion everybody is expected to understand.
Few of us really do understand it. I had an emotional crisis myself about 15 years ago. I had been “in love” many times in my life but had never quite gotten my mind around what was happening in my heart. I was attracted to people who had no love to give, yet I assumed what I was getting was enough. Worse, I assumed it was the best I could have. In my therapy and support groups, I tried to understand and recapture the feeling of love, to identify it. My heart’s search kept taking me back to the same time, place and people – my grandpa and my auntee (great aunt), and myself the toddler on their knee. Then I thought of my own daughter. I knew the closest I had ever had to love came from these sources and I cherished that reality. That would always be love for me.
Now I have two grandsons, and when I think of them I am overwhelmed with how much love there is in the world. They show me love with every movement, and I love the opportunity of loving them. The love that goes back and forth between us has a great deal of joy in it, but it is enriched by concern, tenderness, and commitment.
As a single person, I admit there is always the possibility of romantic love around some corner -- the hope of ending my days with the love of my life. Ah, come on, I say to myself. The days you have left are few and the possibility of a certain relationship – a one and only – ever coming on the horizon lessens with every passing year. And what on earth would you want that for now? All the questions keep coming back.
In all the previous discussions, I seem in all too big a hurry to drop the subject. If someone cares to elucidate the topic for the rest of us, I’ll keep it afloat as best I can.
Monday, May 21, 2007
The Story That Fairhope Isn't
May 21, 2007
Browsing on my blog I find the following post which bears repeating:
It has come to my attention that Fairhope is billed in the promotional literature as a “Storybook Town.” It has also been called such things as a “little Norman Rockwell town,” and a “Disneyland town.”
Aargh. I am doing what I can, by harping on the subject of Fairhope history on this blog, to keep it from becoming any of those things.
When I first moved back in 1988, there actually were some remnants of Norman Rockwell cottages, little houses that had been built between the two World Wars -- modest houses that looked as if nice families lived there. Fairhope had an undiscovered quality that I would hardly have called “storybook” in the sense of the charming little Tudor homes of California or the New England farm houses, or the Midwestern carpenter gothics of the 1800’s. It was almost unreal in its quietness. The last of the fabled hotels of the town, The Colonial Inn, stood decrepit in its prime spot overlooking the bay, all but abandoned, awaiting the wrecker's ball.
There was very little to do on a Saturday night. There were a few eateries, but only one really nice one, a remodeled old farmhouse out behind the new shopping center, known as Dusty's. It was owned by a local character who had had a career as a cocktail pianist and had a young, creative wife who put the restaurant on the map, thereby giving parched little Fairhope a first-class place to take visitors or a special date.
A novel had been published in 1959, written by a young man named Robert E. Bell, who had been so entranced by what he called the magic of Fairhope, that he set his story in a fictionized version of the town, renaming it Moss Bayou, and smothering the setting with such phrases as "Somewhere after a turn down the street, he saw a glimmer of water, gold-flaked through the trees; the frond-dragging palms bent with the curve of the road which heat-danced ahead of him, charging the sky with its electrical glare." The title of the book was The Butterfly Tree, and it was not the last book to drench Fairhope in the mysteries of the imagination of an outsider.
An insider, I worked with Bob many years later on a book that I hoped would present a more realistic picture of the Fairhope I knew, incorporating his lyrical prose describing a town projected from his memories with my own workaday knowledge of what it was like to grow up in the little enclave that I found neither magical nor romantic.
The book we collaborated on reflected two sensibilities and embraced Fairhope from two sides. Its title was Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree, and if you've read much of this blog or if you click on the link, you'll know almost all there is to know about it short of actually reading it.
Both those books may have contributed to the myth that Fairhope was some kind of ethereal, enchanted locale, a Brigadoon that only appeared in the line of vision of the fortunate few. Charming as that image might be, it simply isn't true.
Fairhope was a very real town, founded on the principle of providing economic parity, especially in housing. Land was available on a 99-year lease basis, with a low “rent” or tax, to be paid to the Colony yearly, to be determined by what would be considered fair market value. Each family could build what it could afford on the land leased from the Colony. Little houses were built by the impecunious couples who wanted to participate in the Utopian experiment known as the Single Tax Colony, and these houses were expanded room by room as the families grew. That is why so many of the early cottages had small rooms and lots of them. Those little affordable abodes grew with the families that inhabited them.
The Single Tax experiment could hardly be called a rousing success, especially after the Federal Government established an income tax on all citizens in 1913. It was a sound principle that eventually was proved wildly impractical, perhaps especially in Fairhope, the town that was created in order to prove the opposite. Apparently greed is human nature, and the selflessness required to ensure collective individualism -- the term used by E.B. Gaston, Fairhope's founder to describe his ideal economy -- was soon overshadowed by the wave of opportunists who learned how to exploit the very land he fought to preserve.
If Fairhope is a storybook town, the story has been rewritten too many times to be of much consequence. Even the historical cottages, for the most part, have been demolished and replaced by monuments to the prosperity of their owners -- huge, ostentatious houses that compete with each other for attention and blur the landscape that was once authentic, meaningful and charming in spite of itself. That it is still a storybook town is the greatest fiction of all.
Browsing on my blog I find the following post which bears repeating:
It has come to my attention that Fairhope is billed in the promotional literature as a “Storybook Town.” It has also been called such things as a “little Norman Rockwell town,” and a “Disneyland town.”
Aargh. I am doing what I can, by harping on the subject of Fairhope history on this blog, to keep it from becoming any of those things.
When I first moved back in 1988, there actually were some remnants of Norman Rockwell cottages, little houses that had been built between the two World Wars -- modest houses that looked as if nice families lived there. Fairhope had an undiscovered quality that I would hardly have called “storybook” in the sense of the charming little Tudor homes of California or the New England farm houses, or the Midwestern carpenter gothics of the 1800’s. It was almost unreal in its quietness. The last of the fabled hotels of the town, The Colonial Inn, stood decrepit in its prime spot overlooking the bay, all but abandoned, awaiting the wrecker's ball.
There was very little to do on a Saturday night. There were a few eateries, but only one really nice one, a remodeled old farmhouse out behind the new shopping center, known as Dusty's. It was owned by a local character who had had a career as a cocktail pianist and had a young, creative wife who put the restaurant on the map, thereby giving parched little Fairhope a first-class place to take visitors or a special date.
A novel had been published in 1959, written by a young man named Robert E. Bell, who had been so entranced by what he called the magic of Fairhope, that he set his story in a fictionized version of the town, renaming it Moss Bayou, and smothering the setting with such phrases as "Somewhere after a turn down the street, he saw a glimmer of water, gold-flaked through the trees; the frond-dragging palms bent with the curve of the road which heat-danced ahead of him, charging the sky with its electrical glare." The title of the book was The Butterfly Tree, and it was not the last book to drench Fairhope in the mysteries of the imagination of an outsider.
An insider, I worked with Bob many years later on a book that I hoped would present a more realistic picture of the Fairhope I knew, incorporating his lyrical prose describing a town projected from his memories with my own workaday knowledge of what it was like to grow up in the little enclave that I found neither magical nor romantic.
The book we collaborated on reflected two sensibilities and embraced Fairhope from two sides. Its title was Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree, and if you've read much of this blog or if you click on the link, you'll know almost all there is to know about it short of actually reading it.Both those books may have contributed to the myth that Fairhope was some kind of ethereal, enchanted locale, a Brigadoon that only appeared in the line of vision of the fortunate few. Charming as that image might be, it simply isn't true.
Fairhope was a very real town, founded on the principle of providing economic parity, especially in housing. Land was available on a 99-year lease basis, with a low “rent” or tax, to be paid to the Colony yearly, to be determined by what would be considered fair market value. Each family could build what it could afford on the land leased from the Colony. Little houses were built by the impecunious couples who wanted to participate in the Utopian experiment known as the Single Tax Colony, and these houses were expanded room by room as the families grew. That is why so many of the early cottages had small rooms and lots of them. Those little affordable abodes grew with the families that inhabited them.
The Single Tax experiment could hardly be called a rousing success, especially after the Federal Government established an income tax on all citizens in 1913. It was a sound principle that eventually was proved wildly impractical, perhaps especially in Fairhope, the town that was created in order to prove the opposite. Apparently greed is human nature, and the selflessness required to ensure collective individualism -- the term used by E.B. Gaston, Fairhope's founder to describe his ideal economy -- was soon overshadowed by the wave of opportunists who learned how to exploit the very land he fought to preserve.
If Fairhope is a storybook town, the story has been rewritten too many times to be of much consequence. Even the historical cottages, for the most part, have been demolished and replaced by monuments to the prosperity of their owners -- huge, ostentatious houses that compete with each other for attention and blur the landscape that was once authentic, meaningful and charming in spite of itself. That it is still a storybook town is the greatest fiction of all.
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