Category Archives: New Bedford, Mass.

Autumn watch

In this part of the world, this is the best time of year for food.

At the downtown farmer’s market on Thursday, the produce was incredible, and cheap. From Mary, I bought the usual dozen eggs and two loaves of her oatmeal bread, a few pounds of her freshly dug red potatoes, some other vegetables — and she had the first Westport Macomber turnips of the year: huge white mild turnips, originally a cross between radishes and more traditional turnips, which you can eat raw or cooked, a local vegetable that you can’t find outside of southeastern Massachusetts. This turnip is one of the finest fall vegetables and its arrival should be heralded with a trumpet fanfare: a fanfare for the uncommon turnip. From the fruit grower, I got several pounds of Cortland apples; I used to be a big fan of Winesaps and Northern Spies, but his firm white-fleshed Cortlands have a superb texture and make just about the smoothest and best apple sauce: substantial, not at all watery, and nicely flavored. From the Mattapoisett farmers, I got carrots and cantaloupe (they’re still picking cataloupes) and cauliflower and, best of all, cranberries — real cranberries, with little bits of twigs and tiny leaves from the cranberry plant, in all shades of red from deepest crimson to pale green faintly tinged with red: just as small blueberries taste better than the huge agribusiness blueberries you find wrapped in plastic in the supermarket, so real cranberries are more flavorful, both more tart and sweeter at the same time. The next day, we drove out to Alderbrook Farm in Russell’s Mills and bought some local honey, and I made a huge pot of apple cranberry sauce, made from the Cortland apples and the Mattapoisett cranberries and the local honey — it turned a warm reddish-pink color — and I spread it on the oatmeal bread, and ate until I’d eaten too much.

On Friday, Carol called me on my cell phone and said, would I like to go to dinner at the farmer’s house? Carol worked for a couple of days pulling weeds at a nearby organic farm this week; she needed to get out of the house and away from the computer and the freelance writing, besides the fact that a little extra money is always welcome in our household. So we went for dinner at the farmer’s house, with another couple we know slightly. Before dinner, we walked around the farm; it is in its glory in this season. The summer squash spill out over the edges of the raised beds, covered with flowers and half-grown squash; the celery stands large and robust; the fall beets have grown tall leaves, rooted in deep red balls shouldering their way up out of the dirt; the salad greens show bright colors against the dark earth, light green and dark green and deep red. And the herbs were just as beautiful as the salad greens — curly parsley and Italian parsley, rosemary (Carol had weeded the rosemary bed that morning), different kinds of sage, chives, and other herbs I couldn’t recognize. After we met young Murphy, an Irish Jack Russell terrier who is being trained to catch the voles which plague the farm, and Murphy’s owner who was plowing up one bed of the farm with a tractor-mounted rototiller, we went in for dinner. Dinner included New Bedford scallops sauteed in fresh leeks and herbs, boiled potatoes newly dug, sweet and tender, and some kind of wild mushroom I had never eaten before.

So what if today is the autumnal equinox? So what if the nighttime will be longer than the daylight for the next six months? So what if winter is coming in? This is the best time of year for food, the best time of the year to be alive.

My stupid alter ego, Dan, is still away visiting his aunt and uncle. Another glorious day of ranting and raving on this otherwise tedious and uninteresting blog! And here’s what’s on the mind of Mr. Crankypants today….

What’s with all the overly loud music these days? You know what I mean. Like the New Bedford Whaling Musuem sponsoring monthly gatherings called After Hours, with the stated purpose “to socialize with old friends and meet new ones,” except the music is so loud you can’t socialize. Mr. Crankypants went to “After Hours” a few months ago, and tried to have a conversation with an old friend, but the music was so loud we gave up trying to yell at each other over it. Then an attractive young woman started eyeing Mr. Crankypants, and wandered over to say something, but alas whatever she had to say was completely unintelligible due to the loud music. Mr. Crankypants’s Significant Other said that the pretty young woman wasn’t eyeing anyone, she just had indigestion, and all she was saying was, “Got any antacid?” Which just proves the point — the music was so loud that Significant Other couldn’t hear anything at all.

It’s not just the Whaling Museum, of course. There’s the restaurant up the street that has live music on Mondays and Thursdays. It’s pretty good music, but there is no way you can carry on conversation over your dinner, unless you ask to be seated in the very back room, and even then you have to shout.

At least that restaurant has good music. Down the street from Mr. Crankypants’s apartment is another restaurant that has bad outdoor music on summer evenings. This particular restaurant aims at attracting the over-55 crowd, so the music is a banal mix of insipid 1950’s rock-n-roll and arthritic easy-listening hits (originated by dinosaurs like Frank Sinatra and Bob Dylan), sung by middle-aged crooners with potbellies accompanied by karaoke machines. They crank up the volume so loud that Mr. Crankypants can hear the middle-aged crooners two blocks away. When you go down to look at the restaurant, you see a few lost souls huddled at the tables farthest away from the speakers, their hair blowing back from the volume. There’s no way anyone could be carrying on a conversation over that music. Clearly, it’s the sort of restaurant you go to when you don’t want to talk with your date, or when you have to take your unpleasant relatives out to dinner — you surely don’t go there for the high quality of the music.

The Baby Boomers started this trend of overly loud music. They ruined their ears when they were young by listening to too much loud music. Now that they’ve gone deaf, they keep turning up the volume. Which will make everyone in the succeeding generations deaf. It’s probably a good time to invest in companies that make amplifiers and speakers, for theirs is going to be a growth industry.

Summer is here

No doubt about it, summer is here.

We drove down from Cambridge to New Bedford today during peak rush hour, and traffic on the highway was so light (comparatively speaking) that we made the trip in an hour and a quarter. In fall, winter, or spring, that same rush hour trip would take between and hour and a half and two and a half hours.

Then at 7:30 this evening, we went to Margaret’s restaurant in Fairhaven for dinner. They said the wait would be “at least an hour.” Clearly, the summer people are back.

On the Fairhaven side of the hurricane barrier, what looked like three generations of one family stood along the edge of the water: three girls ranging from a preadolescent to a teenager, a middle-aged man and woman, and an older woman with gray hair and a big sun hat.

As I walked by, a small little drama unfolded. The tip of the oldest girl’s fishing rod started to bend down. She looked at is as if not quite sure what to do. Then it bent down even more.

“Dad!” she said. “Dad! I’ve got a fish!”

Dad, an energetic, friendly-looking man, bounded over the rocks towards her, calling out advice: “Now don’t drag it over the rocks, you’ll cut the line. Come down closer to the water. That’s it, now bend the tip of your rod down….”

By the time Dad had gotten to her, she had pulled the little silver fish up out of the water. “I got it!” she said triumphantly. While all this was going on, the older woman with the gray hair calmly pulled a slightly larger fish out of the water — but since the younger girls and the man were all watching the oldest girl, I think the only ones who noticed the older woman’s catch were the woman and me.

Dad helped the oldest girl unhook the little fish and throw it back, saying, “Now it’s my turn. It’s my turn to catch something.”

The littlest girl chanted in a singsong voice, “Daddy hasn’t caught anything, Daddy hasn’t caught a fish.”

Fifty years ago, I probably would have been thrown off by the fact that the family members had all different shades of skin from chocolate brown to palest white. Perhaps we have made some progress in this world, because I didn’t even notice that until after the oldest girl landed her fish. What I really noticed was that I just can’t get used to watching people fish in the ocean.

Saltwater fishing confuses me because I learned how to fish on rievers, lakes, and ponds. Saltwater fishing obeys the daily rhythms of the tides, whereas freshwater fishing obeys the daily rhythms of the sun. The seasons of saltwater fishing have to take into account the migrations of fish populations through the ocean, whereas the seasons of freshwater fishing (in this climate, anyway) depend on ice, water levels, and things like temperature inversions.

I suppose the father of that little family, who seemed to be the self-proclaimed expert on fishing, was teaching his children things like how to be aware of the tides. When we were kids, my father always took us fishing on freshwater. I have no awareness of tides. I’m acutely aware of the hour before sunset when the calm surface of a pond will be dimpled with hatching insects which will attract hungry trout; and some mornings I still awaken an hour before sunrise, ready to go down to the river and cast a lure into the lilypads trying to attract the hungry bass and the voracious northern pike.

Sometimes it seems that our adult attitudes are fixed by certain childhood experiences. I can’t get excited by the tides, but the evening and morning hours give me a thrill. And it never seems right to go fishing in the middle of the day, when any self-respecting trout will be sleeping on the bottom of the stream. And if I don’t even notice a mixed race family at first, maybe there’s real hope for the next generation.

Spring watch

Carol and I walked out to the end of State Pier in New Bedford Harbor yesterday, and stood there watching some fishing boats leaving port. We were chatting about something when we were surprised by a splash in the water behind us.

“What was that?”

A hundred feet out in the harbor, we could see ripples and small splashes, and then something big rolled up out of the water and splashed.

“Looks like some big predator fish chasing a school of small bait fish,” I said. I thought maybe they were bluefish, but I’m not a saltwater angler, so I wouldn’t know for sure. Bluefish (Pomatomus saltatrix) winter in Florida, migrate north, and hit the Massachusetts coast sometime in June, but I think of them as arriving later than June 8.

Today when I went out for a walk, I ran into Michael, the librarian at the Whaling Museum Research Library. He was headed across the bridge to Fairhaven, as I was, so we walked along together. On the bridge between Pope’s Island and Fish Island, he stopped and pointed out at the harbor at some ripples and small splashes, and every once in a while something big rolling up out of the water.

“Bluefish,” he said. “They’re up in the harbor already.”

He’s a saltwater fisherman, so I’ll take his word that these were blues. Their arrival means that springtime is almost over.

Race? Ethnicity? (Cape what?)

Back in 1981, a group of New Bedford residents got together and created a book called Spinner. Inspired by the “Foxfire” books from Georgia, the staff of Spinner collected lore, legends, and oral histories from older residents of the city. Five volumes eventually got published, the latest in 1995.

I came across the first volume of Spinner at Upstair Used Books, on Pleasant Street in downtown New Bedford. I went in and asked Ira, who owns Upstair Used Books, if he had any books on local history. “Oh sure,” he said, “I’ve got a couple of copies of the first volume of Spinner.”

The essay that really caught my attention was an interview with Lucy Ramos titled “Black, White, or Poruguese?: A Cape Verdean Dilemma.” Here are some excerpts from this interview:

Being a Cape Verdean is special to me and to my children even more so — because we’re a potpourri really, we’re a mixture of people. We have both European and African influence. When I was younger our country was still ruled by the Portuguese government, so we’ve gone through some changes, you know. When we were young we were Portuguese because that was our mother country, and the we went through the Black part of our lives in the sixties. And now I think we finally know who and what we are, which is Cape Verdean, and it is something special. And we are different, we’re different from the American Blacks and we’re different from the Whites. We’ve taken from both cultures and that makes us unique….

Here in New Bedford, you know, we just kind of accepted the fact that we were Cape Verdean and that everybody knew what that meant. But when Cape Verdeans began to go away from the community, they began to have problems.

For instance, one of my sons was in the ROTC and they travel a lot. Everywhere he went he would say, “My name is Ramos,” and everybody thought he was Spanish. And he would say, “No, I’m Cape Verdean.” “What’s a Cape Verdean?” they would all ask, so it became a thing to be able to tell them where the islands were, that we had our own language and dialect, had our own foods, music, and culture.

The older people may still say “We’re Portuguese”; that is how they were raised. But I think the New Bedford Portuguese always objected to us saying we were Portuguese, because they felt we really weren’t. And so we always had this little slight conflict. Now I think we have our own identity and we’re not Portuguese and we know it. But I think it was important in particular for our children to know this. Especially after the Black Crisis we went through. I think our children needed to know that they have their own culture and their own heritage. They don’t have to borrow from the Portuguese or anyone else….

In the sixties we had lots of problems here locally with the labels “Black” and “White.” You see, up till then the kids identified themselves as Cape Verdean. But at that point they had to take a stand, especially in high school. You were either Black or you were White, there was no in-between. So you had to decide then, “Am I a Black or am I a White?” and nobody wanted to hear whether you were Cape Verdean or not. The kids had a difficult time then because they had to make that decision.

People may not understand this, but it was very difficult because Cape Verdeans come in shades from pure white to ebony black. For instance when my kids were going to the Greene School, the teacher would identify the child’s race by looking at him. I had three sons all in the school at the same time. I was a carpet joke because I have three sons three shades; and one teacher identified one boy as Black, one teacher identified one as White, and one was identified as Mulatto. So I have three children identified as three different races….

I think the majority of kids now are coming around to saying they are Cape Verdean. But if it is a choice of identifying White of Black, I think they would choose Black. I think it was more difficult for the older ones, the parents and the grandparents, to accept that their children identified as Black. Some of the kids were even dropping the Cape Verdean altogether and it was just Black. There was lots of peer pressure, and they felt you couldn’t be in-between, you had to be one or the other, and if the color of your skin wasn’t pure white, that didn’t give you much choice to begin with anyway.

This essay caught my attention not only because it tells about a moment in time when racial categories shifted and forced some people to have to claim a new racial identity.

As a result of reading this one short interview, I’ve added another long book to my summer reading list: Between Race and Ethnicity: Cape Verdean American Immigrants, 1860-1965 by Marilyn Halter (University of Illinois, 1993) — when I finish reading it, I’ll post a summary of this book here. I think there are some fascinating implications for the ways we perceive and construct racial identities here in the United States.

Parade

Around noontime, Carol went up to watch the Memorial Day parade here in New Bedford.

“How was it?” I asked when she got back.

“It was fine,” she said. “Some people walked down all the way from Buttonwood Park alongside the parade. You should have gone.”

“I suppose I should have,” I said.

She started eating watermelon. “I figured that as long as some kid from New Bedford died in Iraq, I should at least go to the Memorial Day parade,” she added. “Actually, I didn’t realize it, but four kids from New Bedford have died in the war.”

I felt a little guilty that I hadn’t gone. “Four from New Bedford?” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “One of their fathers was there. He stood up next to the mayor. He didn’t speak, but it looked like he was maybe crying a little.”

I guess I really should have gone to the Memorial Day parade. Sadly, because this war shows no signs of ending, when I do go to the parade next year there will probably be some more New Bedford kids who have died in Iraq.