Monthly Archives: June 2006

Rose City reading

My sister Jean just did a reading from her new book, Rose City: A Memoir of Work at First Unitarian in New Bedford. OK, I’m biassed because she’s my sister, but I really enjoyed hearing her read from her book.

Here’s what I said about her book when it came out:

“Just got your book…I like the way you write about work from the inside, not like John McPhee or Tracy Kidder who never really have to do the work they write about, much as I do appreciate their books. Your book is more like Mark Twain’s book, ‘Old Times on the Mississippi,’ about learning to be a river boat pilot; I think Twain gets it right in that book, about what it means to work. So do you. Now that I’m a minister, I’ve decided that work and working is one of the top three spiritual problems I see people facing: meaningless jobs, jobs that deny who you are as a person, not having a job. It’s good to read someone (you!) write about work as it really is.

“What really got to me in your book, I guess, was the bits on worker safety; because of my own memories of worker safety. I remember seeing a guy’s foot pulled off by a forklift. I remember seeing an old-time house painter, his hands all knarled from using lead paint. I remember standing in a 52′ trailer unloading insulation, lungs filled with itchy little fiberglas fibers that can cause silicosis. I remember choking on bronze fumes at the foundry. I remember always always always worrying about getting hurt when I was a carpenter, every single frickin day. On the funny side, I remember the carpenter I worked for climbing up into the cupola of the old Emerson School, in order to put up chicken wire to keep the pigeons out, but when he popped up the hatch all the pigeons flapped their wings covering his head in pigeonshit. In spite of all that I love to work, I have loved every job I ever had, at least at some level. You get at that in the book: the work can kill ya, but ya love it anyway.”

From the Los Angleles Times book reviews:

Rose City is a remarkable contribution to the literature of labor, a working woman’s portrait of an industry that has virtually disappeared from the United States…. Nowadays, should you want to bring your love a bouquet of red roses, be advised that such blooms have been coaxed by pesticides illegal in the United States, tended and picked by even lower-paid, less-protected laborers (most of them women)…. Perhaps a book about roses—grandifloras, hybrid teas with ‘the faintest of fragrances, like clean-washed hands,’ sweetheart Minuettes with vanilla petals ‘dipped in ruby sugar’ — a story of love made manifest in the work of roses, is a better gift.

A tale of the city, conclusion

First part of this series: link.

After the trial was over, I looked for news about the trial. (To my surprise, as I was researching this piece, I found a news story about the original murder online: link.) The trial of Lazell Cook didn’t make it into the Boston daily papers — it wasn’t important enough. On Thursday, March 12, 1992, the weekly Cambridge Chronicle reported:

A third man has been convicted of murdering two city men outside Newtowne Court in January 1990.

After three days of deliberation, a Middlesex Superior Court jury on March 6 found Lazell Cook, 21, of Brookline, guilty in the murder of Jesse McKie and Rigoberto Carrion. Cook was convicted of two counts of first degree murder and of one count of unarmed robbery….

In a separate trial, which ended Feb. 12, Ventry Gordon, 20, and Sean Lee, 20, both of Mattapan, were also convicted of first degree murder in the stabbing and beating deaths of McKie and Carrion. They were sentenced to consecutive life terms in prison — one for each murder.

Assistant District Attorney David Meier, who tried both cases, believes Judge Wendie Gershengorn, who heard the cases, will also sentence Cook to two consecutive life terms….

Another defendant, Ronald T. Settles, 28, of Mattapan, was found guilty of being an accessory after the fact in the earlier trial. He was sentenced to 6-1/2 to 7 years in prison. A fifth defendant, Ricardo Parks, 19, of Dorchester, was cleared of two murder charges and an armed robbery charge.

Nothing good came of these murders. As far as I know, Lazell Cook is still in prison. Jesse McKie and Rigoberto Carrion are still dead. I have never been able to explain the murders — these young men killed McKie so they could steal his coat; they killed Carrion because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. There is no sense in that. There is no satisfying ending to this tale of the city.

Nor can I make sense out of the recent murders in New Bedford. Those who are directly connected with those murders can tell the story of what happened, but I don’t see how they can make sense out of those stories. Those of us who are further away from the murders can listen to the stories, can look on in horror, but I’m not able to make sense of them. And I know there are all the stories that don’t get made public — the widespread domestic violence in America where people are beaten in the privacy of their own homes, other violence that isn’t reported.

As a minister, people expect me to make sense out of violence and violent acts. But if I’m honest with myself and with them, I am not able to make sense out violence. I have to look elsewhere for hope. Which, eventually, we will have to do here in New Bedford. We human beings do have that capacity: to not make sense out of something, and later to go on and lead hopeful lives. We just have to reach over and gently wipe the tears out of each other’s eyes, so that we can (sometimes) see hope again.

Coda, with link to another blog’s account of the same murders

A tale of the city, part four

First part of this series: link.

As it happened, Jesse McKie’s grandfather went to the same church I did, the Unitarian Universalist church in Concord, Massachusetts. He came up to me once during social hour one Sunday, and said, “Are you on a jury in Middlesex County Superior Court in Cambridge?”

“Yes,” I said, surprised.

“I’m Jesse McKie’s grandfather,” he said.

I told him since the trial was still going on, we could not talk about the trial, or anything to do with it. So he showed me sketches he had made while he was sitting watching the trial. I remember one quite good drawing of the judge — I no longer remember her name. After the trial was over, we really didn’t talk about it. We would smile at each other and say hello, and that was about it. He died a couple of years later. What could we have said.

I still remember the expressions of the faces of the defendant’s mother and stepfather when we returned the verdict of “Guilty”: expressions that you might have when the nightmare that has you moaning in your sleep suddenly gets much, much worse.

Conclusion of the story…

Children’s books

I like to follow the field of children’s literature, to see what kids read besides Harry Potter. Two blogs on children’s books, both established in the past year:

“Read Roger,” by Roger Sutton, the editor of Horn Book magazine. Horm Book is the pre-eminent review of children’s literature in the United States. By turns delightfully snarky and wonderfully incisive, “Read Roger” offers news about the children’s book world, and well-written, wide-ranging commentary about children’s books, literature, and culture.

“Children and Books,” by Abby Kingsbury, the children’s librarian for the Town of Harvard, Massachusetts, public library. This is a brand-new blog, and so far what she writes about is the intersection of children’s books and real life. In the June 6th entry, Abby visits a public school class and reads the book Beatrice’s Goat aloud, and then gets the kids excited about Heifer Project. Even if Abby didn’t happen to be my sister, I’d still follow this well-written blog.

A tale of the city, part three

First part of this series: link.

I did not make another entry in that journal until three days later….

7 March 1992

The trial is over; the deliberations are over. We the jury returned a verdict of guilty of armed robbery, guilty of two counts of first degree murder (felony).

We went out afterwards, 9 of us out of the 16, for pizza and beer. Afterwards, on the train ride home, I was overcome by lassitude; sinking into a state of —- letting inertia keep me from moving on. One has to be completely dedicated, utterly disciplined, in order to accomplish anything. That of course is not possible. And one would like to let go of ambition and drive, and let go and relax and sit and watch while letting go of action. But to do that is to allow death to overcome. Strife is the constant.

The man being tried was twenty or so, a slight black youth. The crime was what the legal profession calls a “joint venture,” that is, a gang or group of people together, armed with two knives between the four of them (although we were only allowed to know of one knife), roughed up one young man named Jessie McKie, held him while punching and kicking him and while one of them cut his face twice with a knife then stabbed him three times in the chest, two of the stabs almost simultaneous, a double thrust to the heart that severed a rib on the way in. They took his jacket and left him on a snowbank. They turned to someone who had been walking with McKie, one Rigoberto Carrion, and stabbed him, punched and kicked him, pushing him against a chain-link fence so hard that they rubbed skin off his buttocks through his jeans, and left him staggering down the street leaving behind him drops of blood. He died a week later in the hospital: brain-dead, so the doctor turned off the respirator. Jessie McKie died in the snow, they were unable to revive him in the hospital.

The photographs of the bodies in situ were horrific. As were the photographs taken during the autopsies. Senseless. No perceptible motive for the crimes. Enough said for now.

I wrote nothing further about the trial in that journal; indeed, I stopped writing in that journal soon afterwards, and there are still thirty-nine blank pages left.

Part four of the story…

A tale of the city, part two

First part of this series: link.

The details of the murders came out over the course of the trial. My most vivid memory, I think, was the testimony of the blood spatter analysis expert. As she was qualified as an expert witness, it became obvious that she was an extremely bright young woman: degree from one of the Seven Sisters colleges, a long line of qualifications for someone so young (she must have been in her early twenties), articulate. She was attractive in a geeky sort of way; at least she seemed attractive until she was asked when she first decided to become a blood spatter analysis expert: “When I was 13,” she said, turning to face the jury (she always turned to look at us when she testified), “after I read a true crime book where the crime was solved due to blood spatter analysis.” That was just a little too creepy; to know at thirteen that you wanted to become an expert in such an arcane, and, let’s be honest, such a gruesome job.

When the two victims were stabbed, the blood went everywhere. It was on the clothing of the defendant: little spatters of blood on his boots, on his pants, everywhere. We learned about the different types of blood spatter, and how a blood spatter analysis could tell how far away someone was standing when the blood was spattered. The defendant was standing very close indeed.

A week ago, I happened to stumble across a journal that I had kept in the summer of 1983; and tucked in the back, I just happened to find five entries from March, 1992. I don’t remember writing them. Two of those entries concerned the murder trial….

4 March 1992

We continued deliberations today; all twelve of us shut into the jury room, with the symbolic mace leaning across the closed door, from one jamb to the other. Because of Ash Wednesday, the judge allowed us to start an hour late, and our foreman came in with his forehead smudged. Ash Wednesday I know is the first day of Lent but aside [break in the original]

Carol just came in and wanted to talk….[long digression about our trivial conversation]

I had meant to write about the jury, our deliberations, the gory incidents brought out at the trial. At least I have gained a few minutes when I have not thought about the trial and our deliberations. Tomorrow, I am cooped up again in a small room with eleven others, becoming rubbed raw, each of us, against the others and the moral horror of events.

Part three of the story…

A tale of the city, part one

Before a church meeting today, J— asked me why I hadn’t yet written about the recent gang violence in New Bedford [Link]. I said because if I wrote right now, it would be too negative. But her question got me to thinking about violence in cities, and that got me to thinking about something that happened a couple of weeks ago. And if you bear with me, I’ll eventually get back to what’s going on in New Bedford right now.

Back on May 20, Carol and I were staying up in Cambrindge, and we walked from Porter Square to Inman Square, and then kept walking down Cambridge Street. All of a sudden, I felt funny, and I turned to Carol and said, “This neighborhood isn’t safe.” She didn’t understand why I said that, or why I felt that way — it was a beautiful sunny day, no one looked threatening, the neighborhood hadn’t really changed. And then I realized what was going on.

Back in February, 1992, I got called for jury duty, and I was empanelled on a jury that was going to deliberate in a murder trial. It was actually a relief to hear the trial would probably take three weeks:– I was working for a carpenter, he had no work to speak of, I was already down to three days a week; and if I served on a jury, the state would pay me fifty bucks a day for the duration of the trial.

On the first or second day of the trial, they took us all on a bus to go out and see where the murders had taken place. One of the two people murdered was Rigoberto Carrion. He was stabbed while walking through a housing project off Cambridge Street late at night, and managed to stagger out onto Cambridge St., and collapsed in the middle of the street at a set of traffic lights.

I saw those traffic lights, and that’s when I started to feel funny, and that’s when I said to Carol that the neighborhood we were walking through wasn’t safe. I had seen those traffic lights for all of five minutes through a bus window at the beginning of that trial in 1992. But the memory was still clear enough fourteen years later to set my nerves on edge when I walked by….

Part two of the story…

This could be us…

This blog entry by iMomus comes via BoingBoing:

I’m about to write my next Wired column. I’ve decided it’s going to be about the effect of information addiction on the life of couples. And I’d like your help, because I don’t want it just to be me going on about me. But naturally it starts with me, what I’ve observed in my own life. Here’s a photo of me and my then-girlfriend (she’s now happily married to someone else) Shizu, back in 2002…. [Link]

The photo could be one of Carol and me: sitting at the kitchen table, both with open laptops, eating a meal together. The dozens of comments to the post reveal interesting variations on the theme.

Interesting to know that this little bit of the way we live is worth a Wired column.

Good news, bad news

Bad news

The rain let up at about 5:30, so we walked out to the end of the State Pier. We were chatting away, looking out at the harbor, when Carol gasped and said, “Look!” The old New Bedford lightship, a kind of symbol of the harbor, has been listing to port for some time, but this afternoon it was over on its side….

The cherry red hull of the Lightship New Bedford shone like a beacon on the waterfront yesterday after the 133-foot vessel flipped on its side because of a leak.

Full story and picture.

Good news

The Green Bean, home of the best coffee in the downtown neighborhood, has settled in to their new digs on the corner of Purchase and Union streets. Carol and I went up at 4:30 this afternoon, as we both took a break from our writing projects. We got our coffee from one of the friendly owners, and sat down to drink it. It’s a great place to sit and watch the people and the cars pass by on a drizzly Friday afternoon — much nicer than their old location.

M-F 6:30 am – 5 pm, Sat. 8 am – 2 pm

More good news

Tomorrow, Saturday, June 3, at 7:00 p.m., there will be a reading of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl,” in honor of the poem’s 50th anniversary. A number of New Bedford noteables, including former poet laureate of the city Everett Hoagland, will be reading.

See ya there — Gallery X, 169 William St. (the old Universalist church).