Category Archives: New Bedford, Mass.

Organizing

Just got a call from the Religious Coalition for Freedom to Marry, to discuss the candlelight vigil that will happen out in front of First Unitarian on Tuesday (Sept. 13, 6-7 p.m.). Looks like Mark Montigny, the state senator for this area, will be speaking, but that’s not quite definite yet. It’ll be nice if he’s there, but it doesn’t matter as much as getting people to come down, light a candle, and stand in public witness for marriage equality.

And I’ve been spending so much time thinking about Hurricane Katrina that I’ve let other issues slip from my mind. I should be thinking about Hurricane Katrina — but can’t lose sight of the ongoing issues — marriage equality, peace abroad and in our streets, economic justice, everything we keep working for and hoping for.

And in amongst all the organizing, you have to reserve some time for personal renewal — which I’ve been neglecting recently — time to go for a nice, long walk.

Odds and ends

The first week or two of September has been the busiest time of year in all the Unitarian Universalist congregations I have served, as we rev up again after summer slow-down. This week at First Unitarian has been no exception. Church phone ringing, meetings, people stopping in to say hi, lay leaders trying to get thigns done — the usual. On top of that, Carol and I still don’t have DSL service at home, and there’s something wacky with the DSL service here at church. Net result — I haven’t posted anything to this blog since Saturday.

But here are some odds and ends from notes I’ve accumulated over the past few days….

Sunday evening: Candleworks restaurant, two blocks from our apartment, had an outdoors band which was, um, pretty mediocre (to be charitable) and all too audible from our windows. Rather than suffer, um, listen, we took a walk down by the waterfront. Talked with a crew member from the cruise ship docked at the end of state pier — fascinating guy, loves to travel, hiked most of the Appalachian trail a couple of years ago, has gone all over North America, has found perfect job working for a cruise ship. He’ll take a couple of weeks off in the fall to go deer hunting in Michigan, where he comes from. Also spent a couple of hours talking to J. S., director of the port facilities. He regaled us with tales of what it’s like to run a port as a local official having to intereact with state and federal agencies. He grew up on the water in Revere, and rowed all over Boston Harbor in his youth — salt water runs in his veins.

Monday: Carol and I drove to Horseneck Beach in Westport, the big state beach for the Southcoast region. All the lifeguard chairs had already been removed from the beach and stacked behind the showers building. I wandered over to the snack stand, which was still open. “Hi, any hot dogs left?” I asked. “Well if you want hot food, we have fries and clam cakes,” he said. The clam cakes looked soggy. I had fries. I could see the staff emptying out the shelves and scrubbing everything down. The end of summer.

Tuesday: The news from the Gulf Coast continues to be depressing. Might be some refugees coming to Otis Air Force Base near here, and one member of our congregation is working for a non-profit agency that will probably provide services to them. I am following the “blame game” that’s going on in the press — Bush is to blame, the Louisiana state governor is to blame, the Army Corps of Engineers is to blame, local governemtn is to blame. I’d love it if someone in authority just said, “Things aren’t going well, I’m sorry” — but we no longer say “I’m sorry” in our culture, do we? Bush is taking heat for his “weak leadership” — too early to second-guess anyone right now. As a minister what I’ve noticed is that Bush, an avowed Christian, has insulated himself from the poor and destitute. This, too, has become a national trait — those of us who are comfortable don’t want to get too close to the poor, the hungry, the destitute. It’s easy to write a check for disaster relief in a place a thousand miles away, but much harder to have to deal with hunger in someone standing next to us. Maybe that’s why some Americans are so angry at Bush for avoiding the poor and destitute — his actions are merely a reflection of our actions. No one likes to see an ugly reflection of themselves.

Wednesday: Had an appointment over at the Standard-Times, the daily newspaper here in New Bedford. Fun to walk through a real newsroom, although it looks nothing like the photos we have of the newsrooms my grandfather worked in. One picture shows him with the green eyeshade, sitting at a big wood desk covered with papers, sleeve garters, a couple of guys witting near him smoking cigars. The Standard-Times newsroom — big modern open space, fluorescent lights, windows looking out over the downtown, cubicles, computers on every desk. I was talking with Linda Rodrigues of the Standard-Times, and we discovered we are both interested in the new news media. Newspapers are moving more and more to Web sites, blogs, and so on. But I’ll bet the move away from newsprint will not change the basic newsroom — the computers are already there on everyone’s desk.

P.S.: Latest news this morning is that no one will be relocated to Otis Air Force Base.

Update — September 10, 2005: Evacuees have been relocated to Otis.

Downtown summer evening

As I walk across the street towards the art museum, three people, two men and a woman, walk across the street in the opposite direction. I can’t quite make out what they are saying, but their voices have slurred rhythm of people who are finishing up a day of drinking.

There’s a cicada singing loudly somewhere near the old Standard Times building.

A woman inside Cafe Arpeggio walks from behind the counter carrying a bucket and a rag. There is no one else inside.

Outside “Solstice Skateboards” on William Street, four people stand around a Piaggio motor scooter. They all look to be in their early twenties. One man and one woman stand smoking and watching the other two, who are bent over the scooter pumping at the kick starter.
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“It should be starting by now,” says the one pumping at the kick starter.
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As I walk past, I smell gas, and I bet to myself the engine’s flooded. All the way down William Street, I never hear the scooter’s engine actually start.

Three teenagers stand by the fountain behind the Customs House, doing nothing. Talking. They look at me furtively, and lower their voices a little.

Three people stand outside the back door to Dunkin Donuts. “Look, I can’t talk right now,” says one woman. “I’m at work, so call me back, OK?” I think I see a mop in a mop bucket inside the door, and I guess they’re getting ready to clean up. One of them, a man, is sitting on the step, smoking, relaxed.

As I walk back towards the church, across Union Street outside The Main Event there’s a man sitting on some steps. He’s talking loudly, but he’s the only one there. It’s dark, so I can’t tell if he’s talking into a cell phone, or if he’s just crazy.

Up on Maple Street, a woman walks her dog, a sedate-looking Golden Retriever. I hear crickets.

Robert Pirsig says, “The Buddha resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha — which is to demean oneself.” That’s a little too pat, and it makes me want to respond, “Yeah, but if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” Don’t waste time on either explanation. Take a walk downtown on a weeknight at ten p.m.

Permit

Our belongings arrive in New Bedford on Sunday in a “PODS” moving container. On Wednesday, I checked to make sure everything was set up so the container could be dropped off. Everything most definitely was not set.

We don’t have a driveway at our new place, so the container will have to be placed on the street. The PODS company had said there were no restrictions on placing the container in New Bedford. As it turns out, the city of New Bedford requires a “Permit for Street Obstruction” to legally place the container on the street. The City Council office told me that I need to have the PODS company fax a letter to City Hall saying I was authorized to sign such a permit. Well, it took the PODS people three days to do that, but finally they faxed that letter over just before noon today. And forgot to tell me they had done so. The local PODS franchise is not what you’d call organized.

So I walked over to City Hall to get the permit. City Hall is a big brick building with Corinthian columns right in the downtown historic district. I walked in and tried to figure out where the City Council office was.

“Can I help you?” said the woman in a blue uniform standing in the elevator. I told her I was looking for the City Council office. “Get in, and I’ll give you a ride up.”

I got into the elevator. It was a big elevator, a half circle with a radius of a good eight feet, with open iron grates for walls and an upholstered bench along the circular wall — a grand elevator from a different era. The woman pulled the door shut, and took me up one floor saying, “They’re in room 215, to the left and over there –” pointing in the correct direction. She sounded efficient, pleasant, and helpful all at the same time.

Marble floors and oak doors, all very business-like but grand. The building belied its age only by the lack of air conditioning in the hallways, though gentle breezes blew through keeping it cool. I turned the ornate dull brass handle on the door of room 215, and stepped into a fairly ordinary air-conditioned office.

A pleasant and efficient woman took down the information, collected the fee of thirty dollars, and filled out the form. I could have been back in the Town Hall of Concord, Massachusetts, where I grew up. But as soon as I left their office (to head up to get signatures from Engineering and Building), I was back in those broad, grand, business-like hallways, built no doubt during the hey-day of the textilemills, whem money was still pouring into the city, and when no doubt City Hall was dominated by the Yankee elite who were, I’m sure, grand and very business-like.

I skipped the elevator on the way out of the building. I need the exercise of climbing the stairs. And it would be too easy to be seduced by that big old elevator. Once out of the building, I crossed the street past the huge SUV parked in the Mayor’s special parking place with “City of New Bedford” painted on the doors.

It’s going to be a little busy the next four or five days as we move into our apartment, during which this blog may not see many (or any) entries. Back soon, though!

Sales call

The heat and humidity broke on Monday, finally. On Tuesday we opened the windows to the office to let in a little dry air. Our congregation’s office is in the basement, and it gets pretty damp, so the dry air felt good. It felt so good that Claudette, the administrator, opened the door, too.

We were sitting in the office working at computers, fielding phone calls, I was muttering to myself as I tried to make sense out of some files left by the interim minister. OUt of the corner of my eye, I saw two people walk into our office. I don’t yet know everyone in the congregation, but I was pretty sure these two people weren’t members of the congregation. They looked like salespeople to me. They smiled too readily for real New Englanders. He was dressed in a dark blue three piece suit with a faint pin stripe. Not even the lawyers who go in and out of the court house wear a three piece suit in the summer. And they don’t show off their suits as this fellow did; for lawyers it’s just a uniform. As for the woman, she wore business-like black slacks, but her top was cut just a little too low for an ordinary person.

They both made far too much eye contact. Yup, salespeople. I said hello.

“How are you? said the woman brightly.

“Very very busy,” I said, hoping she would get the hint. I smiled (I’m very good at forcing smiles since I used to be a salesman myself), and deliberately turned back to my work. I hoped Claudette could extract us from this.

“Hello,” said Claudette. Claudette managed to stay polite, but she injected a huge dose of scepticism in that one word.

“Hi, we’re from Quill Office Products,” began the woman. She did not have a New Bedford accent.

“You were just over here,” said Claudette. “Not you, but someone from your office.”

“Yes, well, we sent…” began the woman. Her smile did not falter one iota when Claudette interrupted her again.

“I’ll tell you what I told her,” said Claudette. “We’re very small, and we don’t order much at any one time. We don’t use more than a few reams of paper a month. It’s a small office, and we just don’t order much.” She paused to take a breath.

“That’s OK, we…” the woman tried to interject, but Claudette kept right on.

“And we get everything from Staples, right across the river,” said Claudette. “We like to buy from a place that’s local. Not that Staples is exactly local, they’re owned by a big conglomerate, but they employ local people, and they bring jobs into the city.”

As Claudette stopped to take a breath, the woman tried to start in again, but Claudette just talked right over her. This went on for two or three minutes. Caludette is very very good, but I could see that Claudette was not wearing them down. The woman’s smile was still just as bright as when she came in. The man stood absolutely silent and stock still, and I guessed that his role was to take over should the woman ever falter. It seemed unlikely that she would ever falter.

So I butted in. “I’m Claudette’s boss,” I said. “We’re not going to buy anything. We really don’t have time to talk right now. We’re very busy.” I smiled again, very politely, but I bared my teeth.

Unbelievably, they left. I think they were already intimidated by Claudette, and quailed at the thought of having to take on some strange man with a pony tail whose role wasn’t very clear except that he was Claudette’s boss. Or was he?

We agreed that they would be back next month. A few minutes later, Claudette said, “I think I’m going to close the door now. There are too many flies coming in.” Big black lazy flies buzzing around and around driving us crazy.

Adventures in rentals

I’m glad to say that in the end we wound up having to choose between two great apartments — both brand-new, both with nice landlords who care about their properties, both within walking distance of all the major cultural attractions of New Bedford — but getting to that point led us in some interesting directions.

Like the landlord who didn’t show up to open up the apartment, even though I talked to him just ten minutes before. It was OK, though — after seeing the condition of the outside of the building (towering weeds, loose trash in the driveway, peeling paint), I wasn’t exactly eager to see the inside.

Like the apartment with spacious rooms beautifully redone, a gorgeous new kitchen — and puddles on the new kitchen appliances from the leaking roof. Given the smell of mold, that leak in the roof wasn’t exactly new, either.

Like the apartment with the kitchen in the middle of the dining room. I mean right in the middle. You know what a thrust stage is? Well, this was a thrust kitchen.

Like the many people who didn’t answer our phone calls, even though they had an ad in the paper, or a sign in the window saying “For Rent.” (Funny thing, too — many of those ads are still running, and many of those signs are still in the windows.)

It still wasn’t nearly as bad as searching for an apartment in the greater Boston area, or the Bay area. And it wasn’t nearly as easy as finding an apartment in Geneva, Illinois, last year. It’s just a part of the distinctive flavor of this place, from the old buildings that have been reconfigured with greater or lesser sensitivity, to the general wariness of New Englanders when it comes to returning phone calls from people they don’t know.

It’s a fascinating place. Frustrating at times, but fascinating.

Farmers market

Downtown New Bedford has a farmer’s market on Wing Court off Union Street (down from Pleasant), Thursdays starting at 2:30 p.m. I decided to go check it out today.

Now I have a theory that you can tell something about a community by its farmer’s market. The Berkeley (California) farmer’s market is huge, with musicians, bakers, and lots and lots of organic farmers represented. You see people of every shade of skin color, dressed in everything from tie-dye to button-down shirts. The farmer’s market in Geneva, Illinois, had three farmers, two bakers, and a few craftspeople. Everyone is lily white except the one Hispanic farmer, there are no organic growers, and everyone is extremely nice. The farmer’s market in Davis Square, Somerville, was smaller than the Berkeley market, but otherwise looked pretty much the same — another bit of evidence that Berkeley has a direct connection via a space/time warp to Cambridge and environs. The New Bedford farmer’s market is small, but it manages to offer a good cross-section of Massachusetts farms.

At the far end of Wing’s Court was the lone organic grower, a woman with curly gray hair, skin burnt brown from the sun, and ice-blue eyes. She was straight-forward and no-nonsense, but also pleasant and polite. Her organic blueberries looked extraordinary, so I bought a quart. She also had jam and jelly, labeled “Tripp Farm, Horseneck Road, Westport.” The ingredients in the rhubarb jelly: rhubarb and sugar. Nothing else. For the wild grape jam: wild grapes and sugar. No weird sweeteners or additives, just fruit and sugar. And when I picked up the jars, the jelly inside slid around a little bit but not too much — just the right texture.

She watched me peer at all the labels. “What are you looking for?” she said. “Is there some kind of jelly you especially like?”

“I’m just looking to see what you have,” I said. Rhubarb sounded interesting, but I really don’t eat jelly any more. I was mostly curious.

“I have some other jelly, I just haven’t put it out yet,” she said. “I’ve got beach plum…”

“Beach plum!” I said. The last time I had had beach plum jelly was probably twenty years ago when my mother got us some from down on the Cape or islands. “I haven’t had that in maybe fifteen, twenty years.” Or maybe more like thirty years — I remembered a wild, spicy taste, not as tart as currant jelly….

She got some out, and I said I’d take it. “I have to put a label on it first,” she said. “We don’t putthe labels on until we have to, because if it gets foggy the ink on the labels runs. It’s five dollars, it’s more than the others.” Of course it is — picking wild beach plums is hard work.

The next stop was two pick-up trucks, back-to-back, with a gray-haired man at each one, one leg up on the truck bed, arms folded over the knee. They both wore neat and trim shirts and work pants. Their vegetables were unbelievably inexpensive — I bought a lot, but only spnet a dollar ninety.

I went to the one who was selling the vegetables (since I already had blueberries). He had nice tender young yellow summer squash, and curly head lettuce — how he grows lettuce in this heat is beyond me.

The last truck stood right by the Union Street sidewalk — there were only the four trucks, it’s a small farmer’s market — and it was run by a brisk, friendly woman a little younger than I. She had by far the widest selection of vegetables, along with fresh eggs, peaches, plums, and a few New Jersey apples she had gotten somewhere. She was both a farmer and a saleswoman, pleasant and efficient, the kind of person for whom the chickens probably lay bigger eggs. I bought wax beans, a dozen eggs, and a gorgeous sunflower from her. She must have known that no one can resist a small, perfect sunflower.

As I said, it’s Massachusetts farming in miniature, lacking only two kinds of farmers: the Southeast Asian farmer, often Hmong, with incredible vegetables, and the dreadlocked hippy farmer whose organic bok choy has holes in its leaves from cabbage moths. I thought about this as I walked home, and as soon as I got in the kitchen I tried the beach plum jam. The texture was absolutely perfect, and it tasted just as good as I remembered. The problem is, I no longer care for sweets. Carol will probably wind up finishing it off, and next time I’ll get curious and try the rhubarb jam.

Turtle

This evening, I went down to Allen’s Pond Audubon sanctuary in Dartmouth. At dusk, I was walking back along the beach when I heard someone shouting something over the sounds of the ocean. It was a fisherman I had seen fishing earlier.

“What?” I said, cupping my ear.

All I could hear in response was something-something-turtle.

I looked all around, but didn’t see anything. “Where?” I said.

He beckoned me over towards him, and when I got close enough he pointed to the ground in front of him. “It’s a leatherback,” he said.

A dead leatherback turtle lay at the edge of the water, mostly out of it. I would have said head first, but most of the head had been eaten away by something, leaving only the skull. If you weren’t looking, it could have been just another dark rock with seaweed hanging on it.

“I almost didn’t see it, but then I kicked this,” pointing at a piece of the flipper. “A boat or something must have hit him in the water,” he continued. “He must have come up here to die. Then probably one of the coyotes ate his head.” He paused, and we looked at the turtle for a bit. “I didn’t think they came this close in.”

“He hasn’t been here long,” I said. “He doesn’t stink yet.”

We looked over the body: almost black, sleek and streamlined, phenomenally beautiful even lacking the head. We thunked the shell. It was resilient, and sounded and felt much like a ripe watermelon when we tapped it with our knuckles. Ridges ran the length of the shell. The flippers were tapered and graceful. The whole body was big, a good five or six feet long, probably weighing a few hundred pounds. Even the blue-green curl of intestine spilling out from between the shells was beautiful. A senseless death.

“Well, now we can say we saw one,” said the fisherman, “even if it was dead.”

We started walking back to the road, and I asked him if the blues were running. He said they had been, but they had been feeding voraciously on some smaller fish and weren’t interested in what he threw at them. It was getting dark enough that the colors were fading, and as I got in the car I heard a few last terns screeching as they dove for prey into the ocean.

Finding wifi and other adventures

Dartmouth, Mass. Carol and I are in New Bedford, Massachusetts — I’m here for a “candidating week” at First Unitarian of New Bedford, and Carol has a job interview or two. Some notes on our adventures…

Very windy and blustery today. After I got back from church today, Carol and I went for a walk near the harbor in South Dartmouth. I am not the most observant person in the world even at the best of times (I have been known to walk right past people I know and love). And today was so blustery, chilly, and wet that I was even less observant than usual.

But even I couldn’t miss the Red-Throated Loon swimming along the causeway crossing the harbor. We got within fifty feet of it. It was windy enough that I couldn’t hold the binoculars steady, but even then that’s the closest, best look I’ve ever gotten of a loon. The checkerboard pattern on its back was clear as could be. Which is a good reason to take up a pastime like birdwatching — it gets you out of your head and into the real world.

Even though I spotted the loon, Carol had to point three times before I could see the little green crab among the stones at the east edge of the harbor.

Later the same day….

This evening, Carol and I headed out to find a wifi connection. We tried a cafe Carol knew about in Warren, Rhode Island. We couldn’t connect — other people in the cafe could, but our computers wouldn’t, for whatever reason.

In desperation, we drove around ((must have … Internet fix … must … have)), taking random exits off I-195, looking for a likely spot. We even parked outside a Comfort Inn that advertised free highspeed access, to see if we could pick up something. No dice.

At last, we hit the jackpot — off to the right, a Panera Bread place — they have wifi! (Needless to say, Carol was the one who spotted Panera…)

So here we sit, eating dinner, checking email, and updating blogs — for us, this is a hot date.