Category Archives: Sense of place

Dream birds

Just before I awakened this morning, I had a particularly vivid dream. We were going somewhere in a car — my dad, my sisters, my aunt Martha and Uncle Bob. We went through a small New England seaside town; it was no more than a crossroads, really; then turned off the main road, and down a badly maintained road through abandoned farmland:– a stone wall on one side, rank field grass just starting to turn green again after winter. It was a gray April day, windy but warm enough that we only needed light jackets. We found ourselves on a flat promontory, long grass with puddles here and there, and at the edge dark granite bluffs dropped down into the heaving waves of the gray Atlantic.

There were quite a few other people around, and a few other cars. Dad and my sisters and aunt Martha went off somewhere in the car (to find a picnic site?). Uncle Bob and I walked around the field, picking our way through puddles, talking about something or other. We passed by some bushes, and there on the other side of the bushes was a little hollow, and half a dozen striking birds that I had never seen before except in field guides: gray birds waddling hurriedly away from us, with black heads and crests, and black mantle, the scapulars an iridescent green bordered top and bottom with black. Uncle Bob would keep talking, until I managed to draw his attention to the birds, and of course he knew exactly what they were. Off in the undergrowth I saw another bird I didn’t know, chicken-like, bold black and white pattern with some rusty touches on wings and head; but Uncle Bob didn’t see them, and I didn’t get a good look at them. The gray birds, though — I knew I could remember them well enough to identify them once I got my hands on a field guide, and I knew they would be a new bird for my life list.

Then I woke up.

Carol was talking on the phone somewhere. I went to the bathroom. The dream just wouldn’t go away. It was so convincing, so vivid, that I thought I must have seen those birds in a field guide somewhere, and managed to insert them into a dream. I went out into our sunny living room to get a couple of field guides — Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds and the National Geographic Field Guide to North American Birds — and I leafed through them. The birds in my dream weren’t in either field guide. I thought, perhaps it was a Eurasian bird, one that I had seen in some European field guide. Slowly I realized that I was not going to find that bird in any field guide; except maybe in a field guide in my dreams, some other night when I am asleep.

I was vividly certain of the existence of these birds when I awoke. These birds do not exist in the world described by ornithology. In some sense, these two statements are equally “true” — in the sense that even though the birds weren’t real, they were an object of my consciousness:

For if we vary our factual world in free fantasy, carrying it over into random conceivable worlds, we are implicitly varying ourselves whose environment the world is: we each change ourselves into a possible subjectivity, whose environment would always have to be the world that was thought of, as a world of its [the subjectivity’s] possible experiences, possible theoretical evidences, possible practical life. [p. 28 of “Phenomenology” by Edmund Husserl, 1927]

As soon as I fully awakened, I gave up trying to find the dream birds in the waking-world field guides. But when I fall asleep tonight, my dreaming self won’t be surprised to find myself back on that rocky promontory next to the Atlantic Ocean, dream binoculars around my neck, dream-world field guides in hand, beating the bushes to find those gray and black dream birds with the iridescent green stripe running down their sides. And this time I will positively identify them.

Swing span bridge

A short video (3:54) of the swing span bridge along U.S. 6 in New Bedford in action. You’ll see boats, trucks, a moving bridge, everything a five year old could want. Woo hoo!

A couple of earlier posts about the bridge: here and here).

Quicktime video — Click link, and where it says “Select a format” choose “Source — Quicktime”. Wait until the file downloads to your computer, and then click play. This should work for dial-up connections, and offers higher-resolution for all connections.

Note: video host blip.tv is defunct, so this video no longer exists.

Happy Patriot’s Day

When you grow up in Concord, Massachusetts, you know that Patriot’s Day is the best holiday of the year. On April 19, 1775, the minutemen and colonial militia offered the first successful armed resistance to His Majesty’s Regular Troops at the North Bridge in Concord. So began the War for American Independence.

Sadly, Concord’s Patriot’s Day parade now takes place on the nearest Monday; and this year even the parade was cancelled due to the freak nor’easter that roared through Monday morning. But it’s still a day to commemorate. Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose grandfather watched the battle from the old manse a dozen rods away from the bridge, commemorated this day with one of his most-quoted poems:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled;
Here once the embattled farmers stood;
And fired the shot heard ’round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps,
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream that seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We place with joy a votive stone,
That memory may their deeds redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

O Thou who made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free, —
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raised to them and Thee.

Happy Patriot’s Day.

Bad dessert

Waiter Rant had a great post on bad restaurant desserts. And I posted a comment there that I can’t resist reposting here, because those of you who live in New Bedford may well know the restaurant I’m talking about in the second paragraph….

Ah, the joys of restaurant desserts…. Once when my partner and I were driving across country, I tried apple pie at every restaurant we ate at. The diners with their allegedly “home-made pie” were the absolute worst:– crappy pie without much in the way of apples, soggy crust, badly microwaved, tasting worse than a McD’s apple-pie-in-a-box. So much for the much-ballyhooed diner food. The absolute best apple pie I ate on that trip was at a Bob Evans — probably my least favorite chain, but they probably turn over so much food that at least the pie was relatively fresh.

On the other hand, bad desserts can be really good under the right circumstances. Here at home, the fancy restaurant in the next block over from our apartment serves really bad apple crisp. I mean really really bad. They buy it from someone who uses those canned spiced apple slices covered with sweetened goo that isn’t even crispy, and then at the restaurant they barely heat it with a microwave so that some bits are cold and some bits are hot. We love it anyway — we order it at the bar because (sick but true) it tastes really good with a martini. Yeah, OK, you have to drink half a martini before it tastes good, but whatever.

I was over at the fancy restaurant down the street earlier this week, and I think they now have cut down on the microwave time for the apple crisp (maybe they’re trying to save power?), and this time only the corners were vaguely warm. I ate it anyway. Yum.

So what I really want to know is this — have you ever gotten good apple pie at a restaurant? In fact, have you ever had a good dessert at a restaurant?

“Seek peace, and pursue it.”

Every Saturday at noon for the past four years, a small group of Quakers and other peaceniks have gathered on the lawn in front of the Capitol building in Washington D.C. to witness for peace. A couple of people have always brought a banner that reads: “Seek peace, and pursue it. Ps. 34:14.” The format is similar to silent meeting for worship in the manner of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers): everyone stands in silence together; but the only spoken ministry for these public gatherings is when a passer-by happens to ask someone why they’re standing there, in which case a quiet explanation is given.

Elizabeth and I were greeted by a man who shook hands with each of us and said, “Welcome, friend”; though he could have meant meant “Friend,” which is another name for a Quaker. We stood in silence, and I centered down and meditated on the words on the banner. Near the end of the hour, a man standing next to Elizabeth started crying; she comforted him and another man brought him tissues. When the hour was over, we all shook hands with the people on either side of us, saying, “Peace,” or “Peace be with you.”

Then everyone started chatting. Elizabeth talked to the people she knew from Friends Meeting of Washington. I saw a man who was wearing a “Christian Peace Witness for Iraq” button, and we talked about the peace witness in front of the White House yesterday. The older Quakers greeted a group of students from Sidwell Friends School: “Welcome, young Friends!” The students had a group picture taken with the Capitol building as a back drop. Then we all went home to get warm.

It was a good way to observe the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. (If you’re curious, you might look up the reference to Psalm 34:14 in the King James Version of the Bible, and read the whole verse.)

My impressions of the Christian Peace Witness on Friday: Link.

Happy 200th, Henry

I managed to miss the two hundredth birthday of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (27 February 1807 – 24 March 1882). A poet who is perhaps best known for his poem “Paul Revere’s Ride,” it also happens that Longfellow was a Unitarian. If you go up to visit First Parish in Portland, Maine, they will show you the pew which he and his family rented.

Longfellow’s reputation has fallen on hard times. Today, the critics dismiss his poetry as too sentimental. And the historians rightly point out the gross inaccuracies in his poems;– when I was a licensed tourist guide in Concord, Massachusetts, I had to constantly explain to people that despite what Longfellow wrote in “Paul Rever’s Ride,” Revere never made it to Concord because His Majesty’s Regulars captured him in the town of Lincoln.

Nevertheless, Longfellow’s straightforward language and imagery helped create the political mythos of the United States. I still get chills as I read the last lines of “Paul Revere’s Ride”:

In the books you have read
How the British Regulars fired and fled,–
How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
From behind each fence and farmyard wall,
Chasing the redcoats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load.
So through the night rode Paul Revere;–
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,–
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo for evermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

…although, in the context of the current political and military adventures of the United States, it is worth noting that Longfellow was a pacifist.

So happy 200th, Henry. Sorry I missed the actual date. But according to the Web site of the Longfellow Bicentennial, I’ll have plenty of other opportunities to celebrate — including an “evening conversation” at 6:30 tonight, at the Longfellow National Historic Site in Cambridge.

Sunday school teachers can find activity kits here: Link (scroll down and follow the link labeled “Activity Kits,” which brings up a pop-up window).

Works by Longfellow at Project Gutenberg: Link.

Free wifi in North Cambridge

We’re cat-sitting again in north Cambridge, but the cat’s house only has dial-up access to the Internet. Being a cheapskate, I refuse to pay for wifi. Fortunately Carol found a great place with free wifi — Grand Prix Cafe at 2257 Mass. Ave. Good panini, huge slices of apple pie, decent coffee, and they don’t try to chase you out after an hour.

Spring watch

The incredibly warm weather this week still hasn’t melted all the ice in Cambridge — we still have to walk over a thick slab of ice when we go out the back door of the house where we’re cat-sitting. But most of the ice is gone, and I saw big fuzzy catkins on a pussywillow tree over by Alewife Brook this afternoon.

A conversation you might have in Cambridge

There was only one chair open on the third floor of the Harvard Coop. I took it, sat down to read through Clear blogging: How people blogging are changing the world and how you can join them. Since I was in Cambridge, I politely ignored the man sitting in the chair on the other side of the small table from me.

A third man, a tall well-spoken man, walked up, and spoke to the other man. “Hey, how you doing? Mind if I join you?”

The well-spoken man pulled up a chair and they began talking in low voices. I was deep into the blogging book, but even so couldn’t help noticing when the well-spoken man pulled a tabloid newspaper out of his day pack and showed it to his friend. I became aware of the conversation.

“I asked him if he wasn’t fearful, saying this kind of thing,” said the well-spoken man.

“What do you mean?” said his friend, who had a West Indian accent.

“Well,” said the well-spoken man, shaking the tabloid newspaper, “what this says about the history of racism in the United States, and international African revolution…”

“But wasn’t he a white man?” said his friend.

“Yes he was a white man, but he should still be worried,” said the well-spoken man. “I talked for a while to his friend, who was also white, and he admitted that he felt some fear talking like that on the street.”

I saw that the tabloid was Burning Spear, the “Voice of the International African Revolution,” offering “real political analysis of the crisis of parasitic capitalism.” I wasn’t going to break in, but after all they were waving around a revolutionary newspaper and having this conversation in a public place within four feet of me. “He probably should be worried,” I said.

“Yes,” said the well-spoken man, encouragingly. From his vocabulary and manner of speaking, I had thought him to be a graduate student, but from his face I decided he was middle-aged.

Continuing with what they had just been saying, I said, “In today’s political climate, it’s not necessarily wise to assert that the slave economy in the U.S. allowed American businesses to develop the capital that led to our current economy we now have.” I smiled. “That’s the kind of thing that can win you an FBI file.”

The well-spoken man grinned back. But the man with the West Indian accent remained skeptical. “But you’re talking openly about this.”

“It’s Cambridge,” I said, shrugging. “And we’re sitting in the Harvard Coop. In some other place like, oh, Indiana I might feel differently.”

The well-spoken man said, “I’m glad those two white men were willing to talk openly about this. But what gets me is when black people deny what’s going on.”

That led to a discussion of which American intellectuals are willing to talk openly about race and racism. I said I admired Cornel West for taking a public stance in Race Matters and Democracy Matters. The well-spoken man was dismissive of West, and instead championed a professor of sociology currently at Harvard (who of course was African American), who apparently is more radical than West.

We talked a little about the current political climate in the United States, they asked where I had come from, and the man with the West Indian accent said, “New Bedford is a pretty rough place, isn’t it?” I told him that the murder rate in Boston was higher than in New Bedford. Before I went back to my book on blogging, it came out that the well-spoken man was not a graduate student, and was actually unemployed and living in a homeless shelter.

Then I said I shouldn’t interrupt their conversation any more, and I went back to the book on blogging, which at last I decided to buy. When I got up to leave, they were deep in a conversation about the nature of human intelligence, and whether intelligence could be accurately tested and quantified.