Category Archives: Sense of place

Signs of wealth

Since I have to work on Sunday, my sister Abby said we should take my dad out for a Father’s Day dinner tonight. So I drove up to Concord to meet them for dinner. I wanted to go to the Barrow Bookstore, one of the best places to find used books on Transcendentalism, so I got to Concord before they closed, which left me with two hours to walk around the town. And, although I lived there up until five years ago, I was forcibly struck with how wealthy the town appeared. I know that the average family income is something like US$120,000. But, I asked myself, what were the visible signs of wealth in the town? I came up with five visible signs of wealth:

(1) No one I saw appeared to be particularly overweight or painfully thin. If you’re on food stamps, you buy cheap calories which tend to bulk you out; if you’re so poor you can’t even get food stamps you get very thin and wiry.

(2) I didn’t see anyone missing any teeth, no one at all. Everyone seemed to have access to excellent dental care.

(3) Nearly everyone, with only a few exceptions, looked trim and fit. People who do physical work get shaped by their work (e.g., when I worked for the carpenter, my right side was bigger than my left); or they may show the damaging effects of their work. But the people I saw in Concord looked evenly-shaped, very clean, with no obvious damage to their bodies; the trimness and fitness that comes through working out in a gym.

(4) The houses mostly looked to have been painted within the past five years, and very few houses had vinyl siding. Many of the houses were painted in more than two colors, e.g., one house with siding painted a dusty rose color, trim boards darker pink, window casings medium green, doors and windows dark green, porch railings off-white, black highlights here and there.

(5) The landscaping around most of the houses looked professionally done. Professional landscapers use bark mulch and mechanical edging tools freely, they don’t sharpen their lawn mower blades often enough, and there is a uniformity to everything they do.

As I walked around the town center, I passed one house that caught my eye because it did not look like the others. Instead of new, bright paint, it was clad with weathered cedar shingles and boards. Trees and shrubs and grapevines came together to make a shady inviting space, and the ground was covered with carefully laid pea stone. The house had unique and delightful details: a beautiful half-round window, probably handmade on site, each small pane reflecting light slightly differently; a delicate roof line on the sheltering eave over a door; a simple but inviting railing on a porch.

“She can’t still be alive,” I muttered to myself. Twenty-five years ago, I knew the carpenter who did all her work for her. He was a real craftsman, one of the few in town, and he told us about her. Madame would ask him to do something, then when he was done come back and say, in her French accent, “Oh, no no no no no, Bill, no not like that,” and Bill would listen to what she wanted changed, and take the just-finished work out, and do it again until it was perfect. He said he never minded because Madame was polite about it, she paid him by the hour not by the job, and besides it sounded as if they liked each other. He swore she was the richest person in Concord, by far — she was one of the Rothschilds, although she had a different last name — and she only spent a couple of months a year in the town, living in her many other houses around the world the rest of the year. She must have been so much wealthier than anyone else in Concord that by her standards they must have seemed no better than the working poor.

She must have been over seventy then; she couldn’t still be alive now. I should add that Bill died on Independence Day two or three years ago.

Sitting on the bridge at night

Coming home late at night from the supermarket, I saw the sign lit up to say “Bridge Closed.” I drove across Pope’s Island and pulled in behind a pickup truck stopped at the bridge, and turned off my engine. Damp cool air came up off the harbor. The driver of the truck in front of me turned off his or her engine. A few cars pulled in behind me.

To my right, I could hear the faint sound of a radio being played in one of the cars in the right-hand lane. To my left, I could hear two crickets chirping somewhere in Captain Leroy’s Marina. I don’t think I have ever heard crickets on Pope’s Island before. Usually, the sounds of traffic on the four lanes of U.S. Route 6 drown out most other sounds.

The bridge began to swing back. We all waited. I could hear two young women chatting and laughing in a car behind mine. A faint cool breeze blew in the window of the car. The crickets suddenly began chirping a little faster.

At last the gates blocking the bridge went up, we all started up our engines, the light turned green, we surged forward and were gone.

Anecdotes and one-liners

The Coalition Against Poverty and the Coalition for Social Justice held their annual awards dinner tonight. I was asked to do the invocation, and I stayed to see the awards, and to hear the keynote speaker, Rep. Barney Frank.

Frank was introduced by a singer-sognwriter named Bill Harley, who committed the usual sin of playing and singing way too loudly, but who did the unusual and (mercifully) only played three songs. In introducing Frank, Harley told a story about going to perform somewhere in Alabama. There he wound up talking to someone who, upon learning Harley was from Massachusetts, started berating him for being from the state that elected Ted Kennedy as senator. “Stop it,” said Harley, “Ted Kennedy is the only senator who stands up for the poor.” Great anecdote — not sure what it had to do with Barney Frank.

Barney Frank went on to give an extemporaneous talk, marked by his trademark wit and intelligence. Unfortunately, his talk didn’t really hold together, but he got off some good anecdotes and one-liners, of which I noted down three:

Frank, who is gay, mentioned that he has been accused by right wingers of pushing a “radical homosexual agenda.” But, he said, his main gay rights issues are to allow GLBTQ people to “join the military, get married, and hold down a job.” That’s not a radical agenda, he said, “that’s about as bourgeois as it gets.”

While saying he supported capitalism, he said that he supported capitalism with significant government regulation. He noted that poverty has increased during the Bush administration. Frank reminded us that the Republicans claimed that a “rising tide floats all boats,” i.e., that any improvement in the economy will help all persons. In reply to this he said, “Yes, a rising tide floats all boats, but some poor people don’t have boats, and they’re standing on tiptoes now, and the tide’s going to go over their heads.”

In a long meandering digression, he talked about the importance of community colleges and state universities, because these institutions give wide access to higher education. This led to a comment about nursing programs in Massachusetts state colleges — although there’s a desparate need for nurses, and although there are plenty of young people who want to become nurses, there aren’t enough slots in nursing programs to meet either demand. One local nursing college, according to Frank, has only 42 slots for nursing students, but demand is three times that. If we’d fund community colleges better, said Frank, we’d have more nurses, all of whom could easily find jobs. “These are good jobs,” said Frank. “They’re not going anywhere. You can’t outsource them because somebody can’t stick a needle in your ass from Mumbai.”

Not one of Franks’ better talks overall, but the witty bits were delightfully caustic.

More of Frank’s wit in this New York Slime profile.

Analysis

A couple of blocks up the hill from us, in the little park known as Wing’s Court, some people decided to have a Garden Night. The organizers included quite a few people from the Sustainable Southcoast group that’s been meeting, and so of course my partner Carol was involved.

The organizers got donations of five cubic yards of compost, some hay, and vegetable seedlings. They coordinated with the city, and got permission to replant a garden that had gotten overgrown with weeds and bushes. A couple of local builders assembled frames out of 1×6 rough boards for creating raised bed gardens, and anyone who showed up was invited to take home a raised-bed-frame, some compost to put in it, and some seedlings. There was way too much compost, so Mark (one of the organizers) got a bunch of us organized to spread it in a grassy area to fill in holes and hollows. Different people played different kinds of music, from singer-songwriters, to a bunch of us who led some participatory singing, to a couple of kids who sang a few songs they knew.

The event started at 5:00, and went until after dark. Maybe fifty or sixty people came and went in the course of the evening. It was a very mixed crowd — people of all ages from kids to 20-somethings to middle-aged folks to elders — there were whites and black and Cape Verdeans, Anglophones and Lusophones — a few upper class people and middle class people and working class people — a good mix of men and women. The diversity is partly a function of being in the city, where there is naturally more diversity.

Everyone had a blast.

So why was this event so successful? I stood around after dark talking with a few of the organizers about what made it successful, offering my ideas of what led to success. First of all, it was a participatory event, and you could choose how much you wanted to participate: you could just watch, you could hang out and talk with friends, you could take home a seedling or two, you could sweaty by helping shovel dirt around, you could toast marshmallows over a charcoal grill, you could sing, you could help create a community garden — and so parents could bring their kids and the kids wouldn’t be bored, us men (who are socially conditioned to prefer working and activity to relationship) had something to do, and no one was sitting passively waiting for something to happen (or waiting to get bored so they had an excuse to leave). Second, the organizers were of different races and ages, and they plugged into their networks and got their friends to come; in addition to which, the activities were not particularly racially delimited activities. Third, the people who live or work in the neighborhood knew that their work was going to improve a park that we all use regularly, we knew we were doing something that would have a real impact on our daily lives. Fourth, it was noisy and smelly (the hay smelled particularly good) so people walking by the park knew something interesting was going on.

That was my analysis of why this was such a successful event. The next question is, how do we make this happen again?…

Spring watch

The weather was perfect for a long walk — cool, a stiff breeze blowing fog up off the harbor. I decided to walk to Fairhaven via Coggeshall St., returning via our usual walk along U.S. 6. When you walk in the city, you usually see lots of people, but not today.

I walked north, roughly following the old railroad siding at first. On the other side of the railroad yard I could see that the parking lot for the Martha’s Vineyard Ferry had lots of cars. It felt empty on my side of the railroad yard. There were a few trucks parked outside the Wharf Tavern, but all the other parking lots were mostly empty. One man rode his bicycle past on the other side of the road; he looked like he might have been one of the Mayans who work in the fish processing plants.

Off one corner of the old mill building at the corner of N. Front St. and Kilburn St., someone has fenced in a small yard; you can barely see a couple of picnic tables through the stockade fencing, and some green weeds growing around the bottom of the fence. As I walked by (at about five o’clock on a Saturday), I heard what sounded like twenty or so women talking in that little yard, and I could smell the cigarette smoke.

I walked under Interstate 195, and turned right onto Coggeshall St. A man walked towards me, swinging his arms across his body as he walked. He looked down as he passed me. I dodged my way across the entrance ramps from Coggeshall to the interstate, and then over the bridge across the Acushnet River (that far up, you can’t really call it New Bedford Harbor). A dozen boys on bikes, all about ten years old, rode up the sidewalk and the side of the road on the the other side of the bridge. They stopped to look down in the choppy waters of the river.

Once in Fairhaven, I cut down Beach St., and under the interstate via River St. Down one street, I saw a boy riding around in circles on his bike, but aside from that I saw no one. I climbed over the stone wall around Riverside Cemetery. Through the trees I saw a man walking his dog; and a couple of people tending a grave, the hatchback of their car open as they took something out.

From Riverside Cemetery, I walked down Main St. The only person I saw was a man standing on his front porch with a power blower, blowing dust into the bushes. Cars whizzed by on the road, but I had the sidewalk to myself.

The swing span bridge on U.S. 6 started swinging open to allow a deep-sea clam boat to enter the inner harbor. There were two young men waiting on the other side of the opening, and on the north side of U.S. 6 from me. As the bridge swung counterclockwise back into position, the two young men jumped onto the bridge’s south sidewalk as it swung past them, walked briskly across, and jumped off where I was standing as the bridge eased back into position. They were obviously proud of their daring, and talked boisterously, and drew deeply on their cigarettes.

Four or five people were fishing on the wharf on the New Bedford side, next to the ice company, wearing warm jackets against the stiff breeze. One young woman sat in the car and talked to the young men, maybe in Spanish or Kriolu.

They were the last people I saw until I got home. Not many people think cool, windy, foggy weather is perfect weather to be outdoors in.

City singers

Readers of this blog may know Charles Hartshorne as that process theologian who wrote books such as Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (1984), and used terms like “panentheism” (I first heard about him as one of the editors of the complete works of Charles Saunders Peirce, but then I was a philosophy major). But Hartshorne also was a serious amateur ornithologist who published a number of papers in the field, and wrote Born To Sing: An Interpretation and Survey of World Bird Song (1973).

In Born To Sing, Hartshorne begins by dismissing strict behaviorism as “inadequate, at least in the study of human beings; moreover, in view of the evolutionary continuity of life, and the ideal of a unitary explanation of nature as a whole, it seem unsatisfactory dualism to make man [sic] a mere exception.” Hartshorne does not believe that we can attribute human motives to non-human animals, but he does feel that animals can find aesthetic enjoyment in their own ways. This leads him to a serious consideration of the aesthetic elements of bird songs.

As part of his argument, he establishes criteria for determining highly developed or “superior” bird song, and based on these criteria he develops a list of 194 species of superior songsters. Less than twenty of these species are indigenous to North America, and only eight of those species breed in our immediate area.

On a walk today, from urban New Bedford over to densely suburban Fairhaven, we heard three of these eight species: Northern Mockingbird, Northern Cardinal, and Song Sparrow (links go to USGS site with recordings of their songs). And I heard at least one other of these species, the Carolina Wren, near our apartment earlier this spring. Suburbanites dismiss cities as bleak, forbidding places, but if you’re willing to look, it’s possible to find incredible natural beauty.

Keeping sockpuppets at bay

Linda, the secretary at the New Bedford church, read the recent article in the New Bedford Standard-Times that reported on how both the Fairhaven (Mass.) and New Bedford Unitarian Universalist churches recently each asked a certain Level 3 sex offender to not attend worship services at our churches. Linda has a child, so she is entirely sympathetic with churches who consider carefully before deciding whether a given sex offender should be part of their community.

We agreed that the article didn’t say much, but that it wasn’t terrible.

“But,” she said, “did you see what people are saying in the comments?” The Standard-Times allows anyone to comment on any article, with absolutely no moderation or editing in place, except that you can flag a comment if you feel it is “inappropriate.”

“Yeah, I did,” I said. “Do you know what sockpuppets are?” She did not, so I explained that unscrupulous Web surfers will create fake online identities for themselves, so-called sockpuppets, so they can promote a certain point of view without admitting their real identities. “Near as I can tell,” I went on, “most of those comments are made by sockpuppets of one or two people who just want to promote their point of view.”

Are they really sockpuppets? You can judge for yourself: here’s the article, and the comments.

The real point is that allowing unmoderated comments degrades a newspaper’s Web site. The Standard-Times would not allow unmoderated letters to appear on their editorial pages; it doesn’t make sense for them to allow unmoderated comments on their Web site. It looks to me as though the Standard-Times doesn’t understand the Web, and doesn’t really care about the quality of their Web site. They should try to remember that newspapers provide us with two things: decent writing, and good editing. When it comes to the Web, the editing should be most important, for while there is plenty of good writing out there on the Web, there isn’t much in the way of good editing.

Newspaper editors need to realize that their Web sites need to have the same careful editing they devote to their dead tree editions. They also have to realize that Web sites require different kinds of editing, such as comment moderation; and that comment moderators need to have a different skill set than traditional newspaper editors — comment moderators have to be able to promote online community, keep the conversation moving, not let people feed the trolls, identify and remove sockpuppets, etc. This is why I think most newspapers will fail to make the transition to the Web — they will not be willing or able to figure out how the Web works.

The local press

The local daily newspaper, the New Bedford Standard-Times, published an article today on convicted sex offenders wanting to attend churches. It’s always interesting to read an article in your local paper on a topic about which you happen to know quite a bit — it gives you a good sense of how good your local paper is. This happened to be a subject about which I know quite a bit — indeed, the reporter interviewed me, quotes me in the article, and went on to interview at least two other people I suggested she call.

Unfortunately, this story revealed to me that the Standard-Times is not a particularly good newspaper. The facts are mostly right, but the story doesn’t really go anywhere. It covers the obvious points:– convicted sex offenders can benefit from participating in a religious community; churches have to protect their children; the situation is difficult. But there’s very little in the way of a specific local story — it’s a collection of loosely-connected generic facts rather than a real story.

I wish I could provide a link to the story so you could read it yourself, but the Substandard-Times requires a paid subscription to view anything except the current news on their site. But the hell with it — you don’t want to bother reading their story anyway; it’s not worth your time. Instead, go and read this really top-notch story on the same topic from the New York Times.

Not that the New York Times is a very good newspaper any more — they’re not. The quality of their writing and editing, like that of most newspapers, has gone down year after year for the past decade or more. And that’s what’s happening at a big national newspaper; the local newspapers are even worse. The local newspapers claim that their readership is declining because everyone gets their news from the Web these days. But that’s not true — we still need local newspapers that report on local news; that’s something you can’t get from the Web. The real reason newspaper readership is dropping is because the quality of the writing and editing is going down.

It’s too bad that local newspapers are so bad, too, because there are plenty of real stories that need to be told. There certainly is plenty of corruption and political intrigue going on in this city that needs courageous reporting. But it has become clear we’re not going to get that kind of reporting from our local newspaper. Oh well. Maybe someone will start a well-written, hard-hitting political blog in this city….

Yup, another joke

Ken, who has one of the driest Yankee wits I know of, told me a joke today. (When you read it, you have to imagine it being told in a completely deadpan voice, with plenty of pauses.) Here’s the joke:

— How far is it to Westport as the crow flies?

— About four thousand flaps.

This joke will probably not seem funny to non-Yankees — I pity those people.