A couple of nights ago, we went over to Freestone’s at six. The bar was pretty full, and a courteous older man moved over so we could sit in two contiguous seats. I ordered scallops, and Carol drank orange juice and tonic water (she had eaten earlier, so she stole from my plate instead of ordering). We chatted about this and that, the bar emptied out, and eventually we wound up chatting with the courteous man who had moved over for us. He was from Boston, “an old Boston Brahmin family,” he said. We agreed that the world view of Bostonians ends at the Connecticut River. He told us that when he had gone to UCLA to do doctoral work, an elderly relative of his had exclaimed: Poor boy, you’ll be so far from the ocean out there. “She didn’t realize that there’s another whole ocean out there! It’s even bigger than the ocean here!” he said. Now I have heard this exact same anecdote told any number of times, but never with the level of detail he brought to it: he gave the name of the person who had said it and when she had said it, and he claimed to be a direct witness because she had said it to him. Perhaps he had worked this old anecdote into his own memories of leaving New England; perhaps the incident as he told it was actually the original of that now-widespread anecdote; perhaps his elderly relative had heard the anecdote and used it knowingly, with that extremely dry humor of some elder New Englanders which young people take too literally. So I just had to tell him the anecdote about Mrs. Cabot of Boston, who had to entertain Mrs. Smith of Ohio while Mr. Cabot did business with Mr. Smith; Mrs. Cabot said, “And where did you say you come from, Mrs. Smith?”; “Ohio,” said Mrs. Smith; whereupon Mrs. Cabot said, “Mrs. Smith, here in Boston we pronounce it ‘Iowa’.” He did not particularly care for my anecdote, perhaps because it was all too evidently made up.
Category Archives: Sense of place
Molluscs and clean water
Long walk today up to Riverside Cemetery in Fairhaven; from there, I walked out on the point for views of the upper New Bedford harbor. Found some of the older gravestones in the cemetery, dating from the late 18th C.
On the walk back, I went down one of the side streets that terminates at the edge of the water. The tide was low, and I was able to walk out onto the shore, mostly sand but with an admixture of mud. A greater diversity of seashells than I had expected: people say that New Bedford harbor is essentially dead, that only killifish and quahogs live in its waters, but that was certainly not true this far up into the harbor. I first noticed some long meandering tracks through the sand of some small gastropod, which proved to be Common European Periwinkles (Littorina littorea). I picked one up by its shell: the mollusc clenched its body into the shell, but after I held it still for fifteen seconds, it relaxed, letting its foot come out, and then its two delicate black tentacles, which it wriggled gently; if the tentacles are where its chemoreceptor cells are located, and if its eyes are at the base of its tentacles, perhaps it was exhibiting a kind of molluskan curiosity. I placed it back on the sand, and it resumed its course down towards the verge of the water.
There was a small patch of salt marsh hay growing from the muck, which, when I got close to it, proved to support a large number of Atlantic Ribbed Mussels (Geukensia demissa), packed in so tightly that their shells touched and it was only in the interstices between the shells that the salt marsh hay could grow. All these living mussels pointed upwards; with the tide so low, they were all closed tightly. In addition to these living molluscs, I saw quite a few shells and shell fragments, of course including Northern Quahog (Mercenaria mercenaria) which is well-known to grow in the most polluted waters of the harbor, but also Atlantic Jackknife Clam (Ensis directus) which we always called “razor clams” when we were children, and Eastern Oyster (Crassostrea virginica).
It was getting late when I stopped at this little beach, and I suspect if I had had more time I could have found a few more species. Given this diversity of species, it may be that the water quality towards the upper end of the harbor (that is, nearer to the Interstate 195 bridge) may be fairly good; and this is the only place in the harbor thus far where I have seen living molluscs.
(Reference: Seashells of North America: A guide to field identification, R. Tucker Abbot (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1968, 1986, 1996); in the “Golden Field Guide Series”.)
Another “Why I’m a UU”
Kok Heong McNaughton writes about why she’s a Unitarian Universalist, from her point of view as an Asian immigrant: link. Fascinating, well-written, concise.
It also brings back fond memories of Unitarian Universalism along the Pacific Rim — which has a distinctly different flavor from New England Unitarian Universalism. Here in New England, we look towards the east, across the Atlantic, and it feels like we’re fairly aware of European, and to a lesser extent African, cultures. But the Pacific Rim in North America looks west, across the Pacific. It’s a very different orientation.
April is gray
April is gray this year, the way it should be. I was worried after such a sunny March. Years ago when I worked in a lumberyard there was an April when the sun did not shine once; at least not that I can remember; and it rained and rained until the river backed up into the millbrook which backed up into the lumberyard, forcing the foreman to move piles of vulnerable plywood and drywall. By the end of the month, we all became irritable from lack of sun. April can be that way: gray, now cold and now warm, showers, drizzle, rain, too much wind, the time of sunset too rapidly changing; a month that tries patience and fortitude. Because of the grayness I often find myself staying inside, even though it’s pleasant outside; or when I go outside I keep my head down, and only with difficulty do I look up to see masses of white blossoms covering a tree; only with difficulty do I hear and listen to a House Finch singing its amazingly liquid song. I notice the dandelions’ first yellow blooms only to think, Now that they’ve bloomed they’ll be too bitter to eat. On Sunday, I saw a two-year-old in his mother’s arms, clutching a dandelion bloom and grinning, but he was also clutching a piece of crumpled paper and a piece of candy in the same hand and I couldn’t say which he grinned at. I suppose if I lifted my head more, or paid more attention to what I hear, April would feel less gray; but I happen to like gray, and for that reason I like April.
Meriam’s Corner
Yesterday, my sister Abby and I went to Concord (Massachusetts) for the annual Meriam’s Corner exercises. If you didn’t grow up in Concord as we did, you probably don’t know that Meriam’s Corner was where the colonial militia and minutemen engaged with the Redcoats on the afternoon of April 19, 1775, as His Majesty’s troops started on their way back to Boston. Every year there’s a ceremony commemorating the engagement the week before its anniversary.
We thought we were on time, but the fifes and drums were already playing when we pulled up. A park ranger showed us where to park on the grass, and we hurried over.
Abby’s husband, Jim, is a direct descendant of the Meriams who owned Meriam’s Corner. Jim was at work, but Abby tried to see if any of his family were with the Meriam contingent who were participating in the ceremony. She couldn’t see anyone.
Just in front of us, a man was trying to control a little boy and a big dog. The man had to keep shushing the dog, even holding her muzzle shut so she wouldn’t bark. The dog started barking when the little boy toddled past the rope that kept people out of the area where the Concord Minutemen were going to fire their muskets. The man turned to shush the dog, but then he saw why the dog was barking and grabbed the boy. The boy’s older sister was obviously a veteran of this event: she covered up her ears just before the Minutemen started to load their muskets. The dog saw the girl cover her ears, started to bark, the man grabbed the dog’s muzzle, she twisted away, was about to bark when —
Bang!!
— the muskets went off. Astonished at the noise, the dog didn’t bark thereafter.
Bang!!
It takes forever to reload an 18th C. musket.
Bang!!
Only a three-gun salute. Some dignitaries put a wreath at the commemorative plaque. Things were pretty much over. Abby and I walked over to get a closer look at the Meriam contingent, but there wasn’t anyone she knew. We waited until the Middlesex County Volunteers started off; their music is exceptionally good, and they always put on a good show to boot. By then it was time to head off to the Paul Revere capture site, to see the ceremony there — but that would be another story.
Parking
A friend came in to downtown New Bedford to meet us for dinner at Freestone’s restaurant, just up the street from our apartment. She said:
“I drove up and saw all these empty parking places. I kept looking for signs that said ‘No Parking.’ There was parking right in front of the restaurant, but I wound up driving down a block because I just couldn’t believe there would be all this parking in downtown New Bedford. Finally, I rolled down my window and asked this man about all the empty spaces. He looked at me and said, ‘Lady, this isn’t Paris, France.'”
Prince Estabrook
After visiting my dentist up in Lexington today, I wound up with about an hour before my lunch appointment in Arlington. So I drove out to the Minuteman National Historic Park to take a quick walk. I wound up in the visitor center on the Lincoln/Lexington town line, and of course I had to stop in at their little bookstore. With some excitement, I realized they had a new book on the Battle of Concord and Lexington.
I grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, the town where colonial militiamen offered the first successful armed resistance against His Majesty’s troops at the Battle of the North Bridge. I love reading about that moment in history. So finding a new book about April 19, 1775, was an exciting moment.
Especially when it’s a book about Prince Estabrook, the African American who was one of the militiaman injured at the battle on Lexington Green, and later apparently won his freedom by serving in the Continental Army.
The book is called Prince Estabrook: Slave and Soldier, and it’s by Alice Hinkle. The book tracks down all the sparse information that remains about African American Revolutionary War soldier. Of equal interest, the book also offers a portrait of Charlie Price, an African American man who has played the part of Prince Estabrook each year for many years now, during the annual re-enactment of the battle on Lexington Green. I have seen Price in that re-enactment many times, and I always liked that the group of re-enactors had paid attention to the fact that it wasn’t just white guys out there shooting the muskets. (In the book, Hinkle lets Price tell how meaningful it is to uncover the contributions of this black patriot.)
So there I am, standing at the cash register in the visitor center buying the book, talking to one of the nice volunteers who work there. When he sees the book I’m buying, he says, “Hey, Charlie Price is standing right over there. Why don’t you get him to autograph the book?”
I turn around, and sure enough, there’s Charlie Price. I recognize him, not just because his picture is on the cover of the book, but because I have seen him during the re-enactments. Wow!
The nice volunteer goes over and says, “Charlie, here’s someone who wants your autograph,” and Mr. Price walks over. He’s tall, almost as tall as I am, and even though he’s wearing a National Park Service uniform, for just a moment I get him confused with the real Prince Estabrook. We talk for a minute about how we both were moved when we found Estabrook’s grave in the cemetery out behind the Unitarian Universalist church in Ashby, Massachusetts. Then he signs my book:
We kept our powder dry!
Prince Estabrook
Charlie Price
6 April 2006
How cool is that?
Spring watch
We’re staying in a Cambridge apartment today, and signs of spring are everywhere: purple and yellow croci blooming down the street, forsythia about to bloom, a sprig of pussy willow with big fat gray catkins that someone place in a vase in the entryway to this floor.
Astute reader Craig pointed out a recent article in the Kane County Chronicle: the owls are back nesting in a larch tree outside the old courthouse in Geneva, Illinois. [Link] Last year, I was living in Geneva and wrote about the owls as a sign of spring [Link]. Good to know that spring is indeed coming in Geneva as well as here in Massachusetts.
City critters
Went to park my car in the Elm St. garage at about ten last night, and wound up getting into a long conversation with the evening parking lot attendant about what mammals might live in the downtown neighborhood. He’s in the parking garage five evenings a week until eleven at night, and from his perch in the entrance booth he regularly sees skunks and possums. We have both seen gray squirrels, of course. And he said there’s a feral cat that lives nearby, appropriately named “Downtown” — a woman who lives nearby feeds “Downtown” every night just across Elm St. on North Second St.
We talked about whether coyotes have made it to the downtown neighborhood yet. He has talked to several people who claim to have seen coyotes in other parts of New Bedford. We agreed that one of the sure signs of a coyote living in the neighborhood is a distinct drop in the cat population. I argued that the presence of “Downtown” the cat indicated that there are no coyotes nearby, but he argued that “Downtown” is tough enough to lick most coyotes.
What other mammals in this center-city neighborhood? Well, I’ve seen harbor seals swim right up to the downtown waterfront. He saw a cottontail rabbit in the garage once. There are doubtless rats and mice. I’ve seen a big brown bat in the church. But shouldn’t there also be raccoons? — can we confirm the presence of coyotes downtown? — any other mammals? We decided this topic calls for more investigation. He’s going to talk to the people who come into the garage and pump them for information; I’m going to start watching for road kill along Route 18 to see what turns up.