Category Archives: New Bedford, Mass.

Morning

The gulls woke me up at the crack of dawn. Every morning they sit on the rooftops around our building screaming: Auw! Auw! Kee! Kee! Kee! Kee! Kyoh! Kyoh! Kyoh! Kyoh! With an effort of will I tuned them out and went back to sleep. I don’t know when Carol got up.

A cicada wakes me up much later. It must be sitting on the volunteer maple that sprouted up right next the the building behind us and which is now twelve feet tall. This cicada sounds just like the cicadas I listened to on hot summer afternoons when I was a kid. It almost lulls me back to sleep: zzzZZZZZ…. It seems to go on forever.

When it stops, I get up. I happen to glance in the mirror. If I’m not going to kid myself, my hair is more gray than blond now. It’s my day off and it’s still summer, so I forget to shave.

I stand in the kitchen. A cicada buzzes in the tree across the street. I hear a gull screaming in the distance. We bought a blueberry pie yesterday at the farmers market, and there is one small slice left this morning. I know I’m going to eat it for breakfast. There’s one slice of pie left, I say to Carol. It’s yours, she says, and looks back at her computer. I make a pot of tea, and slide the blueberry pie onto a dark green plate.

At its height

This week has been filled with those perfect days we sometimes get in late August, when it feels like autumn at night yet becomes pleasantly hot by mid-day; when we are drawn outdoors to let the mellow sun drive the last of the New England cold out of our bones.

Summer is at its height: the parking lot for the Martha’s Vineyard ferry is as almost as full as you’ll ever see it; and there are as many cars as you’ll ever see over on State Pier near where the Cuttyhunk ferry docks.

A few tourists are even wandering around New Bedford, far from their usual haunts. Usually, tourists in New Bedford walk one block from the National Park’s visitor center down to the Whaling Museum, and then get back in their cars and drive away. But today, Carol and I saw several tourists in other, less-touristy, areas. We saw a man pushing a stroller on Macarthur Drive near Fisherman’s Wharf, where he was accosted by one of the more insistent panhandlers (the fellow who once, when I told him I didn’t have any money for him, screamed at me: “Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!”). Only a perfect summer day could draw a tourist to walk along Macarthur Drive.

If I had any doubt that summer is at its height, at it sfull glory right now, that doubt would have been eradicated by the farmer’s market on Thursday. While I stood in line at each farmer’s table, waiting my turn, I looked over the biggest diversity of produce we’ll see all year: blueberries, plums, peaches, pears, summer apples, cataloupe; broccoli, tomatoes, zucchini, yellow straightneck squash, patty-pan squash, acorn squash, lettuce, kale, collards, pole beans, bush beans, garlic; gladiolas, sunflowers, and other cut flowers. There were so many things for sale I’ve forgotten them all.

Summer is at its height, yet the sun sets three minutes earlier every day; I keep getting surprised by how soon it grows dark. Summer is at its height, but yesterday I planted some more fall flowers, white and red chrysanthemums, and tied up the asters. And today I seeded our tiny little raised-bed garden with a fall planting of Swiss chard.

Classic car night

I’m sitting in the Green Bean coffee shop, looking out through the big plate glass windows at classic car night in downtown New Bedford. All kinds of classic cars, from souped-up 60s muscle cars to lovingly restored Model Ts to brightly-painted Volkswagen Bugs, are parked with hoods open or driving down Union Street.

There are also all kinds of people walking around:–

A much-pierced man with assymetrical facial hair and a black heavy metal t-shirt smiles and chats with two elderly ladies. A small boy wearing a button-down shirt and a clip-on tie is standing on the street corner, waiting in line to ride on the Zoo Choo Choo, a little electric-powered train. A big man wearing an orange, yellow, and black Hawai’ian shirt rolls down the street in a powered wheelchair. A black man and a white man walk down the street together looking at car engines and talking to each other out of the sides of their mouths. Two of the car owners pretend to get into a fist-fight — they part, laughing, and the gray-haired man goes to stand beside his big muscle car with a huge supercharger sticking out of the hood, while the young man stands beside a sedate 50s-era Volvo. A big burly man wearing a red-white-and-blue bandanna and a Harley muscle shirt bends over to peer in the window of the Volvo. Two women (who, as it happens, recently got married) take a picture of the teal-green Mustang with their cell phones.

It’s like a poster for diversity or something.

Summer

At noon, Carol went to the farmer’s market at Clasky’s Common. She got some beans, some peaches, and a perfect cantaloupe. She knows I love cantaloupe. She said: “The farmer told me he picked it at five this morning.” I cut it open almost as soon as she brought it in the door. It had one little bruise, but aside from that it was perfect, and perfectly ripe. I ate half of it right away. We did some housework, went shopping, went for a short walk. At four o’clock, I ate the other half. It was so good, I couldn’t resist. That was too much fruit to eat in less than four hours, and I’ll probably get the collywobbles alter on, but what good is summer if you can’t gorge yourself on melon?

Death on the rooftops

The Herring Gulls who nested on our rooftop this year hatched out two chicks, but the chicks didn’t survive for very long. There’s a skylight in our bedroom, which goes up through a part of the roof with a very shallow pitch. That’s the part of the roof where the chicks like to spend their time. We have discovered that they like to sneak in under the skylight and stand on the insect screen above our bedroom, to get out of the sun and the rain. We don’t like them to stand their, because we don’t want their droppings coming down through the screen into our bedroom, so while the chicks are running around on the rooftop we keep the skylight barely open.

But somehow they crept in anyway. Then it started raining. The skylight has a rain sensor that closes it automatically. The chicks got crushed to death. It gave Carol a nasty shock when she went in to go to bed, and there were two dead gull chicks trapped between the insect screen and the sash of the skylight.

I got the stepladder and pushed them out of the way. While I was cleaning up the gull droppings on the floor under the skylight, the two parents stood on the skylight and screamed and hollered. I’m not sure I would attribute grief to Herring Gulls — they are fairly non-social animals. Yet the disappearance of their chicks, and then the sudden appearance of the dead bodies, must have been disconcerting to them:– all their energy had been devoted to parenting, and then suddenly it became quite clear to them that they were no longer parents. They screamed and hollered for about twenty minutes, and then flew away.

Carol felt bad about the dead chicks, but I told her that the mortality rate for Herring Gulls in their first year is something like eighty percent. In the three breeding seasons that we have lived in our apartment, only one chick out of six has even survived long enough to fledge and fly away — three fell off the edge of the roof, two were crushed to death by the skylight. Even with such a high mortality rate, the population of Herring Gulls is rising in Massachusetts, so I am not tempted to feel sentimental about it.

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.