Lullabies

Lullaby...and good night...
As some of you may know, Herb and I met at a professional conference many years ago. We were colleagues for many years, and later, friends. We supported each other through dark times, and laughed together. But most of that time, what we shared was our letters. We were on opposite coasts and enmeshed in work situations that were painful in different ways. In one workplace, when I had been treated poorly, Herb wrote me a letter that said, "people are advised not to burn bridges, but I am sending you a Zippo lighter." I reciprocated with the same words, many years later when he was also struggling at work.  When he was still smoking, though I wanted him to quit, Mom and I gave him my father's Zippo lighter because it was evocative of his own remembered past. 

A marriage seems to be made up of many of these things. He tells people of how we met. It is a story I like even if it is gilded a bit around the edges. He also counts things and estimates their cost as we drive along the road to work. It made me crazy for a while; now it makes me laugh. I have called these stories "lullabies" for their totemic quality and the way they are repeated again and again. As children, we ask our parents to sing the same song or repeat the same story they told us the night before, and the night before that, and the night before that; when we get older, we grimace at hearing the same hoary tales. Truth to tell, this is one of my lullabies that Herb has heard too many times for even the rain man to count.

But our friends Nelson and Betti were over the other day and asked whether we had gathered the words spoken at the wedding. We have not, though we should have. We have a video of Jonno singing, and Howard playing, and the words that Ursula and Linda spoke, but we are missing Susan's and Neoma's and Elie's and Deborah's and Grazyna and Howard's, though I doubt they were written down. But Nelson and Betti's words reminded me that Herb and I have not written each other letters in a long time, other than this blog. So I started thinking about the nature of the letter I want to write to him, now that we have been married for 90 some days.....

Dear H,
Once many years ago, I read of a conversation between a mother and her daughter. Fearing that she would develop dementia, because it was in her family history, the mother wrote to her daughter telling her about her rituals, the things that centered her, so if she could no longer ask, the daughter would know. So I have been thinking of what our rituals are, because this is what we know now that we didn't know before.

I would like a glass of water at the bedside at night, a sheet over my shoulders, and a blanket folded on my feet. I would like an open window without shades to watch the moon; you would like the shades drawn and the nightlight off.

You will want chocolate chips in a bowl beside your elbow in the morning. You drink water and cold strong-brewed tea with no cubes, and an IPA with your dinner meal. My morning coffee is light, with 2 sugars, and 3 cubes of ice. I like orange juice (extra pulpy) with seltzer in late afternoon, and in summer, some unsweetened cranberry juice mixed in.

You like darkness and close walls, and clarity of surfaces. You read one book at a time. Quickly. I like things that fit in the hand and things that are shiny or opaque, crafted or clear or colored, and things that make me laugh, and things that grow and flower, or once grew and flowered, or flew. I read a dozen books at a time, and many are never finished.

If you wash the dishes, I will put them away. You will make dinner when I return from travel  and that will make me smile; I will make dinner and salad and dessert and extra food for the freezer when we are due to go someplace else.

I will load the laundry and you can fold it. And when you are done, you will find me beside the light-most window or in the garden, with dirt under my nails.

You will want music; I will want silence (or sometimes, when I am writing, the sound of  native American pipes).

You will want speed: I will want slowness. You will walk quickly; I will be behind you examining a mushroom or a leaf or the texture of the gravel underfoot.

And at night, when we fall asleep, I will know the sound of your breathing, and you will know mine.
W.

Comcast, Round 2

I tried a week or so ago to start my cable and internet service, now that my landlord has moved out of the upstairs apartment and is going to close his account.  I go onto the Comcast website once again, into the New Customer area... fill in my contact info, DOB, and SSN (yes, it's at least nominally a secure site), choose the service package I want (which is on sale right now, yay!), and click on a button that says "Start Live Chat to Set and Confirm Installation Time."  Here's what it looks like, with some data redacted...

11:03 p.m.

user Herbert has entered room

HERBERT> Internet and basic cable installation, new service.

analyst Doris has entered room

Doris> Hello Herbert_, Thank you for contacting Comcast Live Chat Support. My name is Justine Doris. Please give me one moment to review your information.

Doris> While waiting, I would like to inform you that our goal is to provide you with a consistently superior customer experience – that’s our guarantee. Learn more about the Comcast Customer Guarantee at click here : http://www.comcast.com/corporate/Customers/CustomerGuarantee.html?fss=customer guarantee .

Doris> How are you today, Herbert?

Herbert_> Things are good.  I'm signing up for the basic cable/internet service, and need a modem as well.

Doris> Oh, so you don't have Comcast account yet, you are trying to set up one, correct?

Herbert_> Correct.

Doris> Thanks you for choosing Comcast as your Service provider.

Doris> Thank you for providing your information in the chat initiation form.  Would you please verify the information below is correct?
First name Herbert
Last name ________
Phone Number ______________
State MA
Street Address ____________
Zip Code __________

Herbert_> All correct.

Doris> Can you please provide me with the complete address, including the City and State?

Herbert_> Sure.  __________________________________.

Doris> Thanks.

Doris> Herbert' just to set proper expectations, we actually have Sales department who can further assist you with setting up new account.

Doris> I'll be providing the information that you gave me.

Doris> Our Sales department will provide you further details about the services available.

Doris> Do you have other concern before I'll transfer this chat?

Herbert_> Nope.  Thanks for your help.

Doris> You're welcome!

Doris> I would like to welcome you ahead for being part of Comcast Family.

Doris> Please stay connected to the chat for the next available representative. Thank you for choosing Comcast for your entertainment needs.

Doris> Let me connect you with our Sales team.  They have access to the most current promotional offers in your area and can assist you with getting the best option based on your needs.  Thank you for choosing Comcast as your entertainment provider.

Doris> Please wait, while the problem is escalated to another analyst

analyst Doris has left room

Bye, Doris.  Thanks for escalating me.

Now it’s 11:28.  And I got to Doris from the new-customer-offers page, so how I was linked to a technical troubleshooter instead of an installation scheduler, I have no idea.

at 11:34, analyst Ronald arrives.

analyst Ronald has entered room

Ronald> Welcome to Comcast Chat Sales. It's my pleasure to process your order and answer any questions you may have throughout our conversation. Thank you.

Ronald> Hi there, Herbert.

Ronald> Sorry to keep you waiting.

Herbert_> Nice to meet you.

Ronald> I understand that you are interested in our Basic cable and internet. Is this correct?

Herbert_> Correct.  However, I doubt I'll be at this address for a full year, so I'd be interested in a plan that doesn't require a 12-month contract.

And now I’ve stumped him.  We’re immobile for five minutes.  Then at 11:38,

Ronald> Are we still connected?

Herbert_> Yes indeed

Ronald> Okay then.

Ronald> I can check on that for you.

Ronald> Is _________________________ your complete address?

Herbert_> Yes it is.

Ronald> Thank you.

Ronald> Please give me a moment to pull up your address here in our system. Thank you.

A couple of minutes go by.

Ronald> Herbert, may I ask for the exact apartment number?

Herbert_> This is a two family house.  My apartment on the first floor has the address XX ____________.  The upstairs apartment is XX-A ____________.  That's all the unit designations there are.

Ronald> Oh, okay.

Ronald> I can see here active Comcast customers in the two service address, Herbert.

Herbert_> The landlord, who lived upstairs, has just moved out, but has left his service active in that apartment.  There should be no active account for mine.

Herbert_> Could be that he had a different account for each.  His last name is ____________.

Ronald> Okay, thank you for the information.

Ronald> Let me double check.

Ronald> Yes, I can see here still active Comcast customer under that name, Herbert.

Ronald> No worries though, we can still install Comcast services in your address. However, the process for that is different.

Of course it is...  Now it’s 11:48 p.m.  I get up and pour myself a cup of tea.  It seems that Ronald is probably doing the same.  At 11:51:

Ronald> The step would be to verify that you have already taken over the address and also to update your address in the system of our local office.

Ronald> This would be a very important step. This is also for you not to be billed of the amount for which you do not owe. All you need to bring is a Valid ID and a Lease or any proof of residency.

Herbert_> Okay.  And where is this office?

Ronald> Sure, I will pull up our Service Center address and number for your references so you can make a call now or anytime at your convenience.

Ronald trudges off to the dusty archives to retrieve the 1994 phone book that has the Comcast street addresses in them. And can I really call NOW, at midnight EDT?  (The answer, we shall soon see, is "of COURSE not!")

Ronald> Comcast Service Centers in your area:

Ronald> 1. Somerville.  Hours: Monday-Friday: 9:00am-5:00pm (opens at 11:00am on 3rd Tuesday of each month). Saturday: 9:00am-2:00pm. 57 Holland St Somerville, MA 02144. 800-266-2278

Ronald> 2. Malden.  Hours: Monday-Friday: 8:30am-6:00pm (opens at 11:00am on 3rd Thursday of each month). Saturday: 9:00am-2:00pm.  300 Commercial St Suite 12 Malden, MA 02148. 800-266-2278 

Interesting that they both have the same 800 number.  If I were to call it, I'm sure I'd be speaking with someone in Tacoma.

Herbert_> Good.  Looks like I’ll be in Somerville tomorrow afternoon.

Ronald> Alright then.

Ronald> I hope you will consider this issue resolved in my end by giving you the steps on how to have Comcast services.

Ronald> Would there be anything else that I can be of assistance?

Herbert_> Nope, I'm all set.  Thanks for your help.

Ronald> You are welcome.

Ronald> Thank you for contacting Comcast! We appreciate your business and value you as a customer. Just to let you know, at the end of this chat there will be a short survey.  I would appreciate it if you would take a moment to complete it so we can continue to improve the service we provide to you. Please click on the End Session Button or Exit Chat Button to take the survey now.

Ronald> Goodbye and take care!

Goodnight, Ronald.  Sweet dreams.

So at 11:58, an hour after I started, I now go back to square one with a trip to Somerville tomorrow afternoon, lease in hand.  Back in the old days, I would have gone to their office in the first place.  Nowadays, I have to sit in a chatroom for an hour first before I then get to go to the office.  Progress!

Magic mushrooms

A short post today...For the second time in as many weeks, I was puttering around the house in my sweats - the equivalent of my jammies, not prepared for company, when there was a call at the door. (Herb wants to know why I want to live off the beaten path and this is part of it.) I didn't have time to run upstairs and put on real clothes, and because I was feeling poorly the night before, and slept in, I must have looked a sight!  Anyway, it was my friend David, with someone whose name I had heard before, from the town of 500 people a bit east of here. He had a grocery bag (or is it a sack?) full of purplish mushrooms, picked up the hill behind the barn. Edible. Cool. We talked mushrooms for about a half hour. Walked over to the compost pile. Nothing there. But we walked up to where he had picked these babies for dinner, and found another type he couldn't identify and chose not to try to eat. He exhorted me to read and test and educate myself, but I am reluctant to be my own guinea pig. Still I will be making spore prints with these two types later today.

I am struck once again, at the way "learning" comes in the door here, or appears along the side of the road.  The Harvard educator John Stilgo has written "Outside Lies Magic" and he exhorts his students to walk and look, and see and listen. He asks them to examine manhole covers and the way the grass is patterned after a mowing, and the color of smoke from a chimney against clouds or blue sky--clues to what is being burned for heat.  Too often I spend entire days in my desk chair and the only learning I do is on a single screen.

I am thinking I need to get dressed earlier in the day, and walk, or put on a pot of tea for visitors. If you are in the neighborhood, please stop in.

A time to plant, a time to reap.

Tonight the air temperature will be in the mid-30's. That seems sudden. And cold. But in  places like this, it has other ramifications, and ironically they help with the emotional transition to Fall.

The garden needs to be put to bed. [Click for the link!]

Truth to tell, I am both relieved and reluctant.  I have not had enough time to dig in the dirt, to satisfy me. With all that has been going on in both our lives, I have been on the road more than I would like and I have had to leave the garden to fend for itself, which it did well enough.  I wasn't planning to do any garden at all, but the idea that there would be a wedding here and that I would have no flowers to show off, just wasn't possible. Thanks to my friends, I had more blooms than ever. There was  more diversity than I am accustomed to, and the place looked great though admittedly it took longer than I might have liked to get it there. The sun gold tomato vines were sturdy enough to knock down the cages and far outgrew them. They were probably 7 feet tall if I stretched them out. The squash that I bought at the last minute (yellow summer squash and Kuri winter squash) produced prodigious vines that stretched far into the raspberries and corn and mint. They produced fruit modestly, but that I got anything at all with the early squash beetle infestation is amazing and there are 6 orange red globes resting in the upstairs study where they will be warm until their rinds harden. I harvested about 4 dozen potatoes  (also put in late) and Herb shucked 50 corn ears into a pot and I peeled kernels into snack size bags for freezing. I estimate that we got about one per ear. And the basil plants that we uprooted, washed and turned into pesto, produced roughly 50 snack bags - but I won't tell you the cost of the pine nuts and parmesan we added.  Suffice it to say that rain man has been doing the calculation of what we would have to charge if we started the pesto ranch.

For the past three nights, we have covered the green tomatoes and the dahlias, the impatiens and hostas, the petunias and nasturtiums with garden fabric and plastic and old woven plastic seed bags. Glen sucked one of the bags into his mower and in typical rural fashion dug under the behemoth to drag out the sheet of plastic while the engine ran.  I was sure we'd be retrieving pieces of his fingers from there as well.

I should cover some of the decorative plants tonight but I am reluctant to leave the relatively warmer living room to start the process all over again, and there is part of me that is ready to bid the dirt goodbye and let it rest. I still have squash to cook and freeze, and applesauce to make from the yellow apples that are better after the frost. And there are brussels sprouts still to harvest, so there remains work to be done even if I let some of the plants go to the frost. Still, my teachers were good ones, and I have Zara's words ringing in my ears: "they depend on you, and only you can do what is needed."  So tomorrow, it will be warmer and I won't need to cover the tomatoes and other plants. I will start harvesting apples and I will check the supply of canning jars for green tomato chutney. I will locate the apple peeler and the clamp to hold it to the table. And I will start clearing the garage so that Ed can bring us two more loads of wood to join the ones that are stacked against the north wall.  Instead of tracking grass and dirt into the house on my bare toes, I will be dodging bits of wood and twisting newspaper into knots for the wood stove. For the moment though, there are pink, red and purple dahlias, yellow rudbeckia in two sizes and some dead sunflowers that are oddly beautiful in their demise. They are in vases that we were given for our marriage, and they are reminders of the seasons that will come to pass.

"To everything - turn, turn, turn
There is a season - turn, turn, turn
And a time for every purpose under heaven

A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep

To everything - turn, turn, turn
There is a season - turn, turn, turn
And a time for every purpose under heaven

A time to build up, a time to break down
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A time to cast away stones
A time to gather stones together

To everything - turn, turn, turn
There is a season - turn, turn, turn
And a time for every purpose under heaven"

Serendipity

Nora’s in the kitchen making pesto from yesterday’s pre-frost harvest, and I’m reading 93 student papers from Wednesday’s class, listening to Pandora internet radio in the background.  The assignment was actually about listening to music as well, so the overall mood is pretty pleasant rather than the grind it might otherwise be.

For those of you who haven’t discovered Pandora, it’s a pretty ingenious internet service that allows individuals to start “radio stations” by naming songs or artists that they like, and then the software goes through the hundreds of thousands of other songs they have and finds things that match your favorites across several hundred criteria.  So every station periodically plays a song you’d never heard, but which you like right away because it’s musically related to your own preferences.

So I was listening to one of my stations (you can have as many as a hundred) and the song Sonho Dourado by Daniel Lanois came on.  I have another CD by Lanois, who’s brilliant, but I’d never heard this particular song until my station started playing it once in a while about two weeks ago.  It’s on the soundtrack of the movie “Friday Night Lights.”  Sonho Dourado is a haunting folk ballad played quietly with deeply distorted guitars; it stops me cold every time I hear it

I could go buy this on iTunes, and have that one song in less than a minute for $1.29.  Seems like a good deal.  But really, what I want to do is to go listen to the whole soundtrack.  If there’s one song this good on it, there might be others.  Or to find out if there’s another version of it on one of Lanois’ own albums.

It seems that iTunes is a particularly modern phenomenon, not in its technological savvy (which is amazing), but in its inexorable urging toward an immediate-gratification consumer environment, as opposed to browsing and finding new things. 

I want exactly this thing.  I want it now.  And then I want to be done.

We do that increasingly with libraries as well, in which the aisles and shelves are replaced in intensity by databases and quick look-ups.  We know exactly the article we want, we know how to download it from JSTOR, and we’re finished.  But I remember when I was in grad school (and even before that when I was a grade-schooler at the Hackley Public Library), how much I learned from just browsing the shelves and seeing what was nearby to the book that I thought I wanted.  I would be looking for something on rural sociology in the Golda Mier Library, and all of a sudden I’m discovering Walter Goldschmidt and immersed in a moral argument on corporate farming that actually has empirical data to support it.

Of course, I had time to do that.  That was my job then, to be curious, to poke around restlessly and satisfy my huge curiosity.  Nobody gives themselves time for that any more.  We’re too busy to learn new things; we can only learn more about the things we already know.

Changing names

So it was bound to happen sooner or later. I am going to have to take my husband's name. Silly me to think that I could live with the same name I have had for lo! these many years....

I went to a meeting of the caucus of the Vermont Democratic Party last night and was volunteered for duty as secretary. (I know, I know... it's an oxymoron being volunteered for something, but it happened before I knew it and it's really ok after all!) There were 8 of us there - all women of a certain age.  (Where ARE the young ones these days?) And all women I particularly like. One is the doyenne of the town, its heart and the go-to person for far more things than she should be; two are writers of Western history; one is a book store owner in the next town over; one is the ur-grandmother to all the town's children and she has run the day care for decades out of her house; one is a talented stone wall builder (think Andy Goldsworthy), and one is a newcomer to town and Professor of theater at a top notch college.  We didn't spend much time electing officers as I have said, though we exhorted the newcomer to run for office at town meeting next March-- new blood in a small town gets introduced quickly to the tasks at hand. 

We were about to go our separate ways when someone mentioned a friend in town. We'll call her Sally Smith. She's roughly 60 and has just retired after many years of working for a local non-profit. Her husband is a talented builder and they are linchpins of one of the local churches. They have raised two girls who are working hard to build lives living off the land, and one was hard hit by the Hurricane a few weeks ago. Her farm was cut off from any way to get her produce to market, and I can't imagine what happened to her animals or the veegetables she was about to harvest - but that's another story.

Back to the gathered women about to conclude the meeting. In a small town, there are always stories to tell about the neighbors. In this town, they are mostly informational and almost never mean-spirited. The stories remind people about someone who is ill or whose truck went off the road --a caution to others passing on the same stretch. They are about daughters or sons who have succeeded,  or opportunities to share garden bounty. 

"She's not Sally Smith anymore," we were told. Our mouths dropped open.

"The pastor of the church has told them that women must be subservient to their husbands, and this having a separate name... She's changing her name."

We were speechless, but not for long. One member of the group was about to stomp out in fury, when I stopped her to recount my dream of the previous night.

I was throwing a birthday party for H in the center of town. There was a stage in the middle of a space that looked as though it was set for the re-enactors at a Renaissance Fair. I had invited the town's children... odd in itself since neither of us have, or are particularly interested in, children. One child in a red and white dress was in tears thinking she hadn't been invited and I told her to tell her mom that she was of course included... I'll spare you the rest of the details. Suddenly I realized that the Pastor of the church was about to launch into a sermon. I furiously marched up on the stage to remind him that as a newcomer, he was welcome, but no sermons were appropriate at this birthday Easter party... That wasn't our way at parties. Satisfied I marched back down and went about my business, only to realize that he was back on stage about to deliver fire and brimstone while dressed in a long purple and black split tailed frock coat as ... SATAN!!!

Now, some of you may remember that Herb asked for some dream analysis before.... I am just concerned about these premonitions I seem to be having....

Anyway, as I said in the beginning, I am going to be changing my name too. Herb suggested that I take his name:  Nora Allen Rubinstein. And he will be taking mine:  Herb Jane Childress.

Wuh...wuh...wuh...waiting.

It's 12:22 and I am waiting for the bus. Well, not literally, but I am trying to work from Mom's apartment while waiting til 2:30 so I can get to the Bolt Bus stop at 3:00 for a 3:30 bus to Boston. I will get in at 7:45 and Herb will pick me up so that we can drive to Medford and we'll get there at about 8:15. 
 
I was going to leave for Boston yesterday, but I got hung up waiting for the FIT tech who was going to install software for the FIT office printer on my laptop. At about 2 p.m., he said he would be back in 20 minutes. When I left at 4:45 and saw him in the hall, it turned out he had forgotten. Maybe next time I am in NYC for the class, in 2 weeks.  It took me one and a half hours to get back to the apartment from the school which is about one and a half miles away. There were no buses, and I waited at three different stops before I finally walked most of the way -- with the computer on my back. I DID find a Whole Foods on the way, so dinner took about 10 minutes to empty from plastic containers onto plates on the table. It took us about 10 minutes to eat what probably took two hours of someone's time to prepare, not counting the time it took to grow the rice and the corn and the mushrooms.

On Monday morning, I also spent about an hour  waiting for another FIT tech to install some other software that would allow me to receive email on my laptop while at the school.  The tech stared at the installation window for 10 minutes while it did nothing. He didn't multi-task with the papers on his desk. He didn't try any workaround. He stared at the unmoving screen. And he did that about a half dozen times. Finally he asked a colleague whether they could install the software with my virus program (TrendMicro). They decided that they couldn't. Just as they made that decision, it began to work.  Back at the apartment, I had to call my cousin for help with the settings for the internet connection. Now the laptop works but the ipad won't send any email even though the settings are identical as far as I can tell.

I was supposed to teach my first class at FIT on the night after Hurricane Irene. I had taken the bus to NYC (see above) on the Sunday before that Monday class. The class was canceled and the following Monday was a scheduled holiday. So I hadn't met with my students til this past Monday night. I met a good and active group, but when I got to the classroom, it took about 7 minutes to load the first page of the document I wanted to work with, on the computer / projection system. It took another 5 minutes or so to be able to scroll down into the section of that document that wasn't visible - 12 minutes (roughly) to see a single page of text. Assuming the system didn't "time out" and go to a blank screen. I was never able to get it to turn off at the end of the evening. The ghost image of that projection is probably still up.

Makes gardening seem like it happens at lightning speed. Tomatoes are available if you want to while away some time at the kitchen table. No waiting.

I Got Nothin'

One of the general tricks to get traffic to your blog (aside from writing well, and putting your blog URL in the signature of your e-mails, and making a jillion comments to other people's websites with a link to your own) is to have a posting schedule and to stick to it.  You want to post often, to post regularly, and to build a readership who looks forward to your daily or every-other-day news.

The last thing that's been up here is four days old now, a rant about Comcast customer service.  Four days... that's like a century in Internet years.  That was so long ago, people still knew who Rebecca Black was.

I'd love to be witty and productive, but there are some days when I just got nothin'.  I spent all day today in front of a database and a spreadsheet, pulling out the grades for every single course at our school for Fall 2010 and Spring 2011 so that we can look for patterns of success and difficulty.  I've gotten to be really good at extracting data from our student-record system, checking it for duplicate records, and then doing rapid data crunching to build comparison tables.  I know about 15% of what Excel can do, which means I know more about Excel than anybody else in the building.

And I was working my way down the list of courses, examining the average grade and number of fails for each course.  It's pretty manual work, since there are a different number of students for each course, and most of the courses are three credits but some of them are 1.5 which means you have to divide by the appropriate number of credits.  And I'm powering through this, getting my results and putting them into the Word document I'll use for reporting.  I'm feeling good about my capabilities.  And I suddenly had a feeling of my friend Pete looking over my shoulder...

Some of you know Pete.  I wrote a book about him, about the ways in which he was incapable of imagining an adult life for himself.  A lot of the book was his own commentary on the perceived futility of adulthood, and on the decidedly mixed pleasures of being 22.  And I felt Pete watching me pull grade data together, and I could hear him saying something like, "That sucks.  I'd rather deliver pizzas.  Why would anybody want to be good at that?"

Why indeed. 

I'm supposed to teach tomorrow night, a lecture on the nature of cities and the ways in which we can understand Boston as a series of independent problems or as a completely interwoven system in which every solution to one problem causes dozens of others.  And I got nothin' there either.  I know more about Boston and about urbanism and about systems thinking than a room full of 19-year-olds... but that and four dollars would get me into line at Starbucks.

I was reading one of the local papers a couple of days ago, with a lifelong Bostonian comparing Boston to Disneyland.  He ended with a parody of Disney's old tag line, declaring Boston "The Surliest Place on Earth."  And as a Southie native, he was proud of that.

He's right, of course.  Boston is a city of naked power.  That power gets exercised through finance or through "knowing somebody" or with a couple of feet of pipe.   The Bulger brothers exercised it in related ways, one becoming a gang leader accused of 19 murders and the other becoming the President of the Massachusetts Senate and then President of the University of Massachusetts.  Ray Flynn was mayor of Boston for ten years until 1993 when he was made Ambassador to the Vatican, and there's the nature of Boston in one sentence.

The Burrage House, a remarkable mansion a block from our school, was built in 1899 on the backs of the immigrant miners of upper Michigan copper. Albert Burrage was the owner of Amalgamated Copper, and on the board of Standard Oil, and in a move 120 years before its time, worked endlessly to prevent public-service employees from being members of political organizations (Boston's Burrage Ordinance of 1892).

I just don't like Boston.  Why should I teach it?  Maybe I should teach all that other stuff tomorrow night.  I can just play a Ben Affleck movie.  "I need your help.  I can't tell you what it is, you can never ask me about it later.  And we're gonna hurt some people."  "Whose car we gonna take?"

And before class tomorrow, more data.  More grades of Spring 2011 courses, downloaded and compiled with remarkable speed and accuracy.  ("Why would anybody want to be good at that?") 

Today was a day of trying to look forward into the fog, and seeing nothing take shape.  And tonight isn't much better.  But at least there's a blog post out of it...

Them Damn Bureaucrats

One of the common tropes of contemporary life is the inability of "the government" to do anything without submitting you to acres of red tape.  Well, friends, let me tell you that it ain't about the government.  It's about size and impersonality.

I've just spent 90 minutes online in two different chat sessions with Comcast, trying to start cable and internet service.  My landlord, who had been living upstairs and who is the current subscriber, has just bought a single-family house in nearby Arlington, and he'll be closing his service once I start mine.  Except... well, therein lies the story of my two different "live chat" sessions, with Jessica and with Gian Carlo.

Used to be that "live chat" sessions were for conversations with people named Crystall and Brandie.

Jessica (if that's her real name) was very friendly, with lots of canned answers.  I thought for quite a while that she was an automated respondent, equivalent to those voice-activated systems, but she started to reply to somewhat more difficult questions with real answers, so I think she's actually human.  I told her I didn't want to sign up for something with a two-year service agreement, because I probably would only be here for a few more months, so she got me a price on the same TV/internet plan without an agreement (only $5 a month more expensive, so that's fine).  Meanwhile, two or three minutes at a time are going by between responses because she's simultaneously handling probably a dozen or so chats with different customers.

If I'm lucky, they were all Comcast customers.  She might also be handling pizza orders and emergency calls, for all I know.

So after an hour or so, she'd walked me through several options, and then I started on the online registration.  Step 4 of the online form said I had to choose a 2-year service agreement in order to go to Step 5.  But Jessica, bless her heart, said that I'd just have to click on "I agree" and then start a second chat with the Service Origination Specialist and then tell him I wanted the package without the agreement.

So I've entered my information, chosen my plan, and agreed to the service term that I didn't really agree to.  (Remember when ATMs were a new idea?  The banks sold it on the basis of convenience, which it is, but what it also is is a way for the customer to do her or his own data entry, thus relieving the bank of having to hire tellers.  Internet registration sites are the same thing.)  I bid a fond farewell to Jessica, and began my new chat with Gian Carlo.

But we had to cover some of the same ground, because Jessica and Gian Carlo weren't on speaking terms.  He didn't know that I hadn't just moved in, or that I needed a modem.  And he certainly didn't know that I needed a plan without a minimum service term.   (Jessica and Gian Carlo sound like a couple who should be in love by the end of the movie, but one of them was probably in Terra Haute and the other in Galveston...)  It was only a few more minutes until he discovered that this address already had active service, which of course I had written in a prior chat sentence, but that information wasn't on the script for that particular moment in the scene, so he hadn't caught it.  Once he discovered that service was on, he informed me that I couldn't order a service origination until there was a service cancellation already scheduled.

So I logged off from that chat after having assured him that he'd done well ("It was a pleasure to work with a customer as pleasant and kind as you, sir," he replied, which might have been Gian Carlo and might have been keystroke set Alt-Shift-F9.)  But before the chat window closed, I was shunted to a four-question survey about my satisfaction with the service I'd received.  I did my best to indicate that my questions had not been resolved while at the same time not casting blame or accusations on my friends Jessica and Gian Carlo, who had done their utmost.   They need their $11 an hour jobs, and it's not their fault that Comcast (whose CEO, Brian Roberts, made $31.1 million in 2010) was unable to provide a more fluid and individualized set of options.

So any time I hear some wingnut complain about the DMV or the Postal Service or government-service unions, I'm just going to reply:

• Comcast
• Blue Cross Blue Shield
• Dell
• Wells Fargo

Those systems make the DMV feel like Jack the corner grocer.  And there is no CEO in any government agency who makes $31.1 million a year.

Message in a Bottle

Although I haven't lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for nearly a decade, the San Francisco Chronicle is still my daily paper.  It's smart and literary and cares equally about the news and about contemporary culture.  They've spawned several generations of daily columnists, most prominent among them Herb Caen, Art Hoppe, Leah Garchick and Jon Carroll.  Carroll is one of my favorite writers, and I turn to his work every morning.  He's closing in on his 30th anniversary with the paper (he started in 1983), which means that excluding vacations and sick days and so on, he's written something like six thousand essays.

In an interview once, he said something that I've found enormously valuable for my own life as a writer.  "By definition, one of my columns is going to be the worst column of the week."  That's pretty liberating, being freed from believing that every single thing you write has to be better than anything that's come before.


His most common structure is to write about something he saw or attended or read or noticed, and then to shift to a larger lesson that the specific illustrates.  Which is what he did yesterday.  He began by ostensibly writing about OnStar, the GM-based roadside assistance program that allows you to push a button on the rear-view window and be connected to a call center that can bring you a tow truck or an ambulance.  But it soon became evident that the real topic for the day was loneliness, and the reassurance that comes from being able to talk with someone, even a stranger, when you have no one else to talk with.

I read the essay to Nora, and we both just sat for a minute when we finished.  "That's why we check our e-mail ten times a day," she said.  "It's not just because some news or some work stuff might have come in.  It's really about 'Maybe somebody wrote me a letter...'"

This blog is a form of OnStar.  We write a little story, and we push the little button that sends it out into the world like a message in a bottle.  We trust that it's seen; in fact, we have empirical evidence that it's been seen about six thousand times, by people around the world.  And we hear back on a regular basis from about five or six people, people who let us know  that the messages are received.  You're our OnStar call center. 

Too many people are alone, with no one to reach out to.  Even people who ostensibly are surrounded by co-workers and friends, but who don't have someone to whom they can tell their secrets, with whom they can be silly, or afraid, or joyful.  Or just read a newspaper to.  That's the great joy of being with Nora; she knows me in all of my manifestations.  While planning the wedding, we often remarked that one of our strengths was that at least one of us at a time was sane.  Never the same one of us from one day to the next... but when one of us struggled, the other reassured.  That's continued since the wedding as well.  We talk ourselves into strength.

Just a castaway
An island lost at sea
Another lonely day
With no one here but me
More loneliness
Than any man could bear
Rescue me before I fall into despair

I'll send an SOS to the world
I'll send an SOS to the world
I hope that someone gets my
Message in a bottle

A year has passed since I wrote my note
But I should have known this right from the start
Only hope can keep me together
Love can mend your life
But love can break your heart

I'll send an SOS to the world
I'll send an SOS to the world
I hope that someone gets my
Message in a bottle

Walked out this morning
Don't believe what I saw
A hundred billion bottles
Washed up on the shore
Seems I'm not alone at being alone
A hundred billion castaways
Looking for a home

I'll send an SOS to the world
I'll send an SOS to the world
I hope that someone gets my
Message in a bottle

Sending out an SOS 

The Police, Message in a Bottle, 1979

Notes from a day's ramblings....

Item 1: H and I cleaned out the old cardboard boxes in the garage yesterday. We had a LOT between my many moves and his, and the fact that if we buy anything that comes in a box, I save it, in case we need it for that oft-fantasized day when we will move to a home of our own. In 8o-plus degree heat, I cut boxes into flats, folded wine inserts and climbed over the old wood stove that I bought because it was pretty and the dog kennel (long unused) to get to the appliance boxes that were stowed behind filing cabinets that hold papers I haven't looked at in years, and a bookcase of Ball jars and squeak ease and car gunk cleaner . H stood in the attic of the garage where it was well over 90 degrees and folded and stacked and organized boxes and stray book shelves and placed everything in size order. We have a substantial car load or two to take to the dump on Monday including the speakers from my college stereo and an old pet carrier and the carrier for the top of my beloved Jeep. Oh yes, and we also picked the last of the early apples. Eventually I expect to make sauce.

Item 2: Our friend Susan sent an article from the NY Times on the farms that have been devastated by the hurricane that will be unable to send produce to the Greenmarkets. One goat cheese maker says that her goats were traumatized and she will not have milk for their fresh goat cheese. Some of that milk comes from the farm that I used to live on. The woman that bought it has about 70 goats and an assortment of chickens and ducks and a horse and a mule and two pairs of mini donkeys. She says her parents wouldn't let her have pets when she was a kid, so she is over-compensating now. She and her husband both have Ph.D.'s  but couldn't find teaching jobs, so she started the farm after having done a wide range of small part-time jobs as a vet tech, book seller, feed store salesman  etc. He went to Pharmacy school and is now working at one of the local pharmacies. They sell goat's milk cheese on the weekends at the Farmer's market in town. In any case, their goats are fine. She has a new baby and as an older parent, she is trying to figure out how to play with her infant. I suggested one of those cat toys with a rod and a string attached to a feather. Maybe one of those catnip pillows.

Item 3: H and I went to Manchester to have breakfast in a place called Up for Breakfast, above a consignment store and nearly next door to the craft gallery we like: Epoch. They had a waiting list and we were sixth, having gotten in before some of the larger parties because there were only two of us. Up for Breakfast  has about 15 tables and probably serves about 200 people a day. They use about 350 pounds of potatoes a week which are cut into home fries by hand - daily- and they have soy milk and vegetarian sausage on the menu as well as Andouille and Elk suasage and vegetarian and regular bacon. The raspberry jam, made by Bonnie, the owner, is outstanding. As usual, I asked too many questions...

Item 4:  We looked at a house we had seen on the MLS. We both thought it a possibility from the drive-by we did, though it isn't in our beloved Middletown. It's in a development of sorts but has a small piece of land and is wooded and is on a flat road that would make plowing easy. On the listing sheet, it looks as though it has a lot of light through multiple French windows, but it isn't my dream of an old house and old barn on old Vermont land. Still...

Item 5: I have been avoiding email today. I checked it in passing as I went on the internet to check to see if the breakfast place was open. An old work friend who has been a good "contact" if not a personal friend, and whose work I respect, and who is someone I would like to know better, sent out a gang email. The Art Hop next weekend is dedicated to someone with the same last name. It turns out to be his 12 year old son who died suddenly "while exploring potholes."

Yesterday Herb wrote of my dreams. I dreamed last night that I was watching a video and a young child (maybe 3) was exploring with a pail or a shovel in his hand. In the last scene of the video he was on a mountain ridge with ocean behind him, and that was followed by a white screen with black type. I don't remember his dream name. Let's call him Sam Smith. "Sam Smith died on July 12, MMXI.

Just another day in the neighborhood.

Dear Dr. Freud...

It's a good thing I had vacation time around the wedding, because since I went back to work in July, Nora and I have spent more nights apart than together.  And that's likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

But last night was the first night we were together in two weeks.  And we both slept the sleep of the dead.  No middle-of-the-night wakefulness, no churning.  It was terrific.

We did, however, both dream.  Nora and I both have very entangled dreams, and often wake up remembering them in some detail.

My dream segment:  I was coming into a very tough, shabby business street of some town, foggy and lit like a film noir.  I parked the car at the curb—I remember that I was parked on the right side of the street—and hadn't yet gotten out when I realized that I was being approached from both sides by toughs.  Not just random street thugs, but people who wanted to bring harm to me specifically.  I decided that the best course of action was to not represent a threat, so I put my head back on the headrest and pretended to be asleep.  I could hear the head guy tapping with his fingernails on the passenger-side window.  I did everything I could not to move my head toward the sound, but I knew that my eyes were moving that way every time I was surprised, and I hoped they couldn't see the eye motion below my eyelids.  The tapping got faster, like typewriter keys as my nemesis clattered his fingernails against the window.

I awoke, to hear Nora snoring.  Snhk-nhk-nhk-nhk-nhk-nhk.  And thus the mystery of the clattering fingernails was solved.  I returned to peaceful sleep almost immediately.

Nora's dream segment:  We were in Boston, and I was at the BAC.  Nora called me, on her way in to work, and said, "I hope you're not going to be mad at me."

"Why?"  Apparently, I was already prepared to be mad at her.

"I went to Bloomingdales, and I bought two Tibetan Mastiffs," Nora said.  "They're short-haired and grey."

I guess I wasn't too mad.  "You could go to that store called The Pattern and get collars and leashes.  And we could name them No and Can't."

Nora was struck by the fact that the two dogs slept spooned together, when they weren't racing around the apartment at a substantial rate.

This is NOT what a Tibetan Mastiff looks like, but it's the dog in Nora's dream...

Any dream interpreters out there?  Let us know what we're really thinking about.

And can someone help coach Nora out of her monster-dog fixation?  We both want a dog, as soon as we're living together in one spot, but all of the dog breeds that Nora wants seem to have been featured on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom.  HUGE dogs, dogs who need to have a sunroof in the car so they can sit up straight.  Mastiffs and Danes and Wolfhounds and Great Pyrenees and Kuvasz.

The Kuvasz can cost up to ten thousand dollars a day to feed.  When YOU have unexpected expenses, turn to Mutual of Omaha.

The "better half" weighs in...
No!!!! Can't!!!
Not a Kuvasz!
Actually the dreamer was confused...it was a Neapolitan Mastiff I was thinking of but it looked like the Dane above.)
Newfoundland or Landseer - Good dog!!
Leonberger - Very good dog!!!
Coonhound - Yes! Yes!

Maremmas - Yes! Along with our sheep and goats and Alpacas and Llamas...
St Bernard - oh be still my heart!
Therapy needed?

Women's Wisdom

I drove up to Middletown Springs today.  It took not much more than the usual four hours, but I could definitely see the impacts of the flooding as I drove across VT103 from Chester to Wallingford.  There were significant (and often unmarked) washouts along the shoulders, sometimes biting into the traffic lanes as well.  There were trees down within the floodplain, piles of river rocks in unlikely locations.  I saw a utility trailer in the river at one point, and a muddy car in someone's yard tilted up onto an equally mud-coated power generator.

But I arrived at about 3:30, and it took me a couple of hours to relax, leaving the memories of driving and work and vomiting cats to fade behind me.  While I was doing a little emergency work via e-mail from the deck, Nora got a call from our friend Jeannette.  She was checking in to see how Mom was doing; as they chatted, Nora mentioned that I'd arrived.  "Well, I'd better let you go, then.  You need to start dinner for your hubby."

We did have dinner kind of early this evening... over at Sissy's Kitchen, using one of our wedding gifts.  I don't know if that counts as making dinner for one's hubby, but it was good.  When we returned home, Nora called Mom and checked in; our friends Susan and David were over visiting with her, and both of them talked to Nora as well.  Susan asked, "So what are the two of you going to be doing?  Will you be working, or getting re-acquainted?"  Nora suggested it might be some of both.  "Well, you could open a bottle of wine, and read poems to each other."

I like the way this is going.  Pretty soon, I'm going to be reclining on my Chesterfield while Nora brings me vodka limes, and Ed and Simon perform the greatest hits of Hall and Oates.

Ed's the one on the left...

Who knew that in 2011, women would be advising Nora to emulate June Cleaver?

I haven't gotten any advice from my guy friends on how to treat Nora...  "Mow the lawn, dude."

Markers...

Nelson married us on June 25. He and his wife Betti are painters, musicians, teachers, gardeners and good friends. They stopped by when they saw my laundry on the line. (That's one of the ways people know that you are at home in a small rural town...that, and spotting your car in the driveway, and footsteps in new snow.)

We chatted at the patio table. We reset the chairs that Emmett and Kerstin had stowed in the garage before the storm, with the plants and the garden chaise and an assortment of pots and garden tools. We reviewed what we knew of the water damage. The culvert in the Tinmouth Channel had held despite a churning that no one alive remembered having seen. "Worse than the floods in '27," some of the elders had said.

"Want to join us for the dinner club?" they asked. Wednesday nights at the Tinmouth Snack Bar. 5:30.

In a city, there would be hundreds of choices. And no one meets for dinner at 5:30.

In Tinmouth, as in Middletown, there is only one choice.

The Tinmouth Snack Bar is a simple place with  about ten tables. There is a long ramp to the front door, and everyone uses that one door unless you want ice cream from the long window on the front. Our friend Emmett has his Vermont photos hanging on the walls. The daughters of local families serve the meals. They are shy and friendly and a bit awkward, but there is the sense that this is a good job, and the money will help them defray the cost of college or a used car, or an apartment of their own. The menu is small town diner fare-- burgers and fried fish and turkey dinners, though Tina has two vegetarian options and a chef salad with garden lettuces and dried cranberries on her specials menu. We drank her  iced tea and lemonade combination and had ice cream from one of the great Vermont ice cream companies. Ruth had homemade zucchini bread and we talked about making sure that you don't leave your car unlocked lest there be an orphaned box of squash in the back seat when you return.

Nothing happens quickly here, so customers chat and laugh, and catch up on the local news.

The "dinner club" was sparse-- Nelson and Betti and their friend Ruth who works in the town office two days a week and is the librarian (yes, Tinmouth which has a population of 633 has its own library. And its own paper.). Ruth's husband Bob, braved the rerouting of roads to go to a birthday party for someone who has a business selling free range turkeys in a town about an hour north. No one knew where Betti's brother Grant and his wife, Jo were. They're regulars.

"Got through, ok?"

One couple lost more to the hail storm a week before the Hurricane. They lost 120 onions that were flattened and their apples were downed, and the siding needs to be replaced as it is dented from the hail. Tina lives three doors away and had no hail. Someone else photographed it --hands held apart about six inches to show the depth of the pile up against the house. "She knew no one would believe her, so she took a picture."

Everyone knew about the severing of roads. Everyone knew that Rt. 103 was back in order. We talked about how H could get here from Boston on the weekend. "Through Springfield probably. Is Chester still out?"

And then Kevin R. arrived. He's a local contractor. He's been working on the hole in Rt. 4 in Mendon. "We're picking up gravel in Florence. Dumping it at the top and working our way down. The hole's 30 feet deep. There were hundreds at the resort in Killington. Couldn't get out. They're escorting them down in the hole on a track no wider than a dump truck, and back up the other side. Every morning. They're looking for a skidder to take out the trees. Saying it's three weeks worth of trees. They'll have two dirt lanes going by the hole in a month. No paving. No asphalt."

We sat quietly, asking questions from time to time. He seemed to want to talk. Maybe the need to get it all out. Maybe part of living in Vermont. We like to talk when there's someone to listen.

"Sewer line's out. Emptying into the brook." Rutland had had excess capacity and so they extended the sewer line into Killington some years back. There would be some work to do fixing that. "Pipe's coming from Pennsylvania."

Betti and Nelson and I had been talking about the now defunct gourmet restaurant on Rt. 4 that had been up for sale for some months, maybe as much as a year. I had said they'd have a hard time finding a buyer now. "Hemingway's gone," Kevin said. "Just the top of the roof sticking up above a sink hole."

"Goodro Lumber's gone."

Tina started asking about whether her husband who works for the county water district could get up to Killington now. He had filled the water tower before the hurricane but it was probably about half empty now. And without power there wasn't much he could do to change that. And then somehow, as things will do, the conversation turned to the man who worked for the water district whose body had been found. He had gone up there with his son on Sunday. The son's body hasn't been found yet. Tina's husband Greg was always saying they needed to use safety equipment. She had dated the father in high school. They had broken up. There had been a marriage and a divorce, and then he had met his second wife. She was a friend of Tina's. Used to work together. She'd been married before. Split up. But when she met Mike..." Tina paused. "They were in love. Lost their other son about a year ago." He had been at a party and fell down the stairs. "Broke his neck."  He had been 25. The son who was still missing had been 29.

So once again, I search for a way to end this post... It's too easy to talk about the importance of understanding the real stories beneath the counts of deaths and businesses lost. It's too easy to write of the manner in which our lives turn on a dime.

Herb and I have been married 67 days. In that time, there has been a whole lot to absorb, figure out how to cope with, and as with the roads, we keep on, making detours at roads that are closed, finding a bridge across the mud and churning...