A quick take on Nature’s people

Thanks to a couple of friends who I’ve talked to plenty of times about my Hog Island writing project and who still need to ask for basic details.  I’ll admit, I hate to make a pest of myself by dominating the conversation, but knowing the basic premise of this narrative might just go a ways toward promoting how interesting this darned story is. 

With that in mind, I present an abstract of my upcoming book, Nature’s people: The Hog Island story from Mabel Loomis Todd to Audubon. *

***

A quick take on Nature’s people

Mabel Loomis Todd entered into the Emily Dickinson legend through a friendship with her brother’s family.  As a new faculty wife, Mabel was welcomed into the Amherst community through soirees held at the home of the college treasurer and important-man-on-campus, William Austin Dickinson.  His wife Susan’s hospitality offered young Mrs. Todd a venue for companionship, engagement in the arts, and extended after dinner conversation.  Austin Dickinson’s participation in family activities was limited, but over time his friendship with Mabel grew.  

Mrs. Todd was quite taken, and taken in, by the Dickinsons.  But all was not right at the Evergreens, Austin & Susan’s home located just through the hedge from his parents’ homestead, then the residence of Emily and their sister Lavinia.  Story in town was that Susan’s friendships burned hot and bright for a time but then cooled.  The same could be said about her marriage with Austin, who subsequently spent many hours talking at his old home to sisters about life and his unhappiness.  

About a year after Mabel’s arrival in Amherst, her friendship with Austin had crossed what they lovingly referred to as their ‘Rubicon.’  Their affair, an open secret in town, would end only with Austin’s death thirteen years later.  David Todd, the new college astronomer and husband, tacitly approved of the pair’s intimacy because he was sincerely fond of them both and had a bit of a reputation himself.  Their only child, Millicent, grew up in that household.  Susan Dickinson was aware as well, and as story has it, did not make her husband’s time at home all that comfortable. 

Austin and Mabel celebrated their love as ‘of the ages.’  Surely sister Emily knew about them, though she never wrote about it, unless metaphorically in her poems and letters.  Emily’s own legend, in fact, has her in love with a married man herself, so perhaps she knew something about loving a man she could not have.  Mrs. Todd, by the way, did write about it.  A lot.  (See Polly Longsworth’s Austin and Mabel:  The Amherst Affair & Love Letters of Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd.) 

Following Emily Dickinson’s death and discovery of an unknown wealth of poetry, sister Lavinia ultimately turned to Mabel Todd to make sense out of the cache of paper scraps, written-on envelopes, and sewn-together, recopied poetry.  It was tedious work at a time of high family tension.  Within the next few years, Mabel Todd would publish three editions of Emily’s poetry and one volume of collected letters.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Besides their entanglements with the Dickinsons, Mabel and David Todd enjoyed full and engaging lives together.  Both were popular lecturers who often spoke of their travels on astronomical expeditions to far corners of an Earth linked, at the time, only by extended ocean voyages.  Besides Emily, Mrs. Todd spoke and wrote about mysterious destinations most of her audience could only dream about:  Japan, northern Africa, high in the Andes, Indonesia, Russia just as the World War broke out.  It should be noted too, that her voluminous personal written record of journals and diaries provides such in-depth personal insight into a woman of her era that it has been used in period case studies.  (See Peter Gay’s Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience Victoria to Freud.) 

By midlife Mabel Todd made a one more move that would broaden her personal legacy beyond the humanities.  Big into trees, she bought half of a mostly wilderness island in Maine.  She bought a second standing forest about that time, too, that one near Amherst, just to preserve the dignity of the stand.  Besides saving the trees on Hog Island, the Todds would make a summer camp there that the family enjoyed for over fifty years.  Upon the death of Mrs. Todd and the advent of Millicent Todd Bingham as island owner, Audubon entered the picture with a summer camp for adult leaders that has for decades impacted global environmental education while engaging the bodies, minds, and hearts of myriad Nature’s people.  

I am one.  

Tom Schaefer

Lake Cumberland 

23 February 2014

*No need to camp out at your local booksellers yet.  I figure if all goes well the earliest the book could see print is summer 2016.   Who knows?

Today’s elder idea:  Give me your answer, fill in a form / Mine for evermore. /  Will you still need me, will you still feed me / When I’m sixty-four? 

Sir Paul McCartney

image:  ‘Lobster House’ c. 1915:  From the Todd family archive photo collection at Yale University.  Used without permission here, but I’ll get all the paperwork straight before this one makes it into the book.

The Cumberland movements

Cross-posted from The Dressy Adventuress blog:  Just trying to let y'all know the book is moving along...

The other day as I was jotting down writing progress notes, I found myself using the expression movements for the essays that make up the preface and chapters of Nature’s people: The Hog Island story from Mabel Loomis Todd to Audubon.

I surely like the rhythm and musical action such an expression implies.  I don’t know that I can reach those melodic heights, but the flow-through of musical and project energy permeates my writing process.  

So thinking in those terms today, I can report that I have three movements in decent early draft shape with another about to begin.  

The preface has been written at least once before. This newest version came late in week one down here as a writing rant to just get me started.  I just rambled on for a few pages about my Hog Island story, and before too long I felt ready to jump to chapter 1.  So the preface is pretty rough, but before I head back to Dayton I’ll be refining it, maybe even combining some ideas from the first one.  

Chapter 1:   Introducing Mrs. Todd  

Early draft put to bed a couple weeks ago.  Again, maybe things to add, things to consider, things to talk about with mentors, maybe some things to delete and/or reassign, but overall, an early draft I can be proud of.  I was thinking of telling folks during talks I’ll make, if you don’t read any more of the book, read chapter 1.  Overall synopsis of the whole story. 

Chapter 2:  Transcendental activist

Rebuilt and augmented this week; D1 completed yesterday.  Phew.

Argument made that Mabel Loomis Todd’s legacy deserves to include her belief and action taken for the preservation and appreciation Nature as well as the energy spent in bringing Emily Dickinson’s writings forward.  

Thanks to Julie Dobrow from Tufts for both her essay ‘Saving the land’ and her tip on reserving Mrs. Todd’s journals and diaries on microfilm from Yale’s Sterling Library.  

Now it’s on the movement 4:  Of astronomy & Dickinsons

Major interest in Mabel Loomis Todd is due her impact on the Dickinson family.  This chapter endeavors to describe the major players and the Emily Dickinson narrative as objectively as possible.  Dickinson publication issues will be covered, through the trial, into the 30 year hiatus.

Subsections:  Mabel Loomis Todd early bio to 1881/Amherst; David Peck Todd early bio to 1881; Susan and William Austin Dickinson in earliest Todd Amherst years; Emily Dickinson, publication drama, affair, subsequent court, case and the Emily sequester years; Millicent Todd Bingham as family rear guard and Emily Dickinson contributor in her own right.

Movement 5 (this spring):  Vacationland

Discussion of Maine’s development into vacationland:  boarders, summer villagers, then cottage builders progression.  Focus on 1908:  what was America like when Mrs. Todd signed the papers in Wiscassett?  Retelling the story of Hog Is origins and summers at the Point Breeze.  This section will follow the Todds through summer 1913 when Mabel has a debilitating stroke as she prepares to travel to Maine.  

Movement 6 (summer 2014):  ‘God’s own heaven’

The story of summers at Camp Mavooshen beginning in 1915.  David soon leaves the summer picture when he is hospitalized for a progressing brain disease brought about by syphilis.  But summers go on.  Lots of stories from Mrs. Todd’s daily diaries and a half dozen or more essays from her unpublished Epic of Hog collection.  

The Plan calls for working on this movement on Hog Island this summer while I serve as writer-in-residence and actually live — I kid you not — in Mrs. Bingham’s former cottage that hasn’t been occupied for decades.  Goodness.   

Movement 7 (fall  2014):  Mavooshen’s men

At a time when women were beginning to feel their political and social clout, the guys deserve mention for services contributed to the camp’s successful operation.  To include:  

David Todd:  his father wrote books about efficient home building.  David was significant in construction of camp buildings and maintaining water transportation.  Further/final description of his profession accomplishments & his giving Mabel great topics to write and lecture about through family travel around the world.  

Frank Lailer:  the local retired smack captain who became the handyman who kept the camp running.  Ran Romany Girl in assistance to Todds in many ways.  Family came to dinner now and then.  Not much on Frank, but he was key.  

Howard Hilder:  The camp artist who both created a studio in a summer dwelling he build just down the shore from the family camp (known as the Osprey cabin) and also painted the osprey and great blue heron murals in Mavooshen’s ‘living room.’  Great family friend and help to Mrs. Todd at camp. 

Walter vanDyke Bingham:  Millicent’s psychologist husband who made medical history by helping write the first aptitude tests for the US Army c. World War I.  Famous on island for his humous essay Homo sapiens auduboniesis which seeks to describe the peculiar island visitor, the Audubon birder.  

Then on to movement 8 (fall 2014):  The advent of Audubon

Pretty much the story of Audubon’s presence on the island from 1936 to Project Puffin today.  More later.  

At this point on the calendar I have 2.5 weeks left at this amazing winter writing sabbatical.  It’s been a cloudy, grey Kentucky winter week prior to now.  The sun is out, the day is warming a bit, and the birds are working very hard at finishing the sunflower seeds left in the feeder, while I talk to you all before plotting out how this next movement comes together and what sources I need to tell the narrative True.  

It’s a good job if you can get it.  

Today’s elder idea:  Now what we have to do is cultivate the love of the beautiful. 

Mabel Loomis Todd

‘The Village Beautiful’

Explaining what it will take to get folks to want to save forests.  

image:  The author’s photograph of the camp ‘living room’ as it stood in 1981, having been unoccupied for about twenty years.  Recent restoration efforts have improved the structure.   

Writing process

Well, the book is coming along, but as I just posted on Facebook, even here in writing sequester at lovely, solitary Lake Cumberland, one can be distracted by squirrels in the sunflower feeder and bald eagles flying by the window.  Let alone sitting for some zen time contemplating the extensive rock face just across the water from my perch in the Kentucky hills.  

The first week here I couldn’t get the television to work like at all.  I listened to music instead, and had a little more quiet couch time, I think.  After Shannon came by and showed me the right buttons to push it’s been NASA TV at lunchtime and Rachel at 9 with the occasional search for something good to watch.  Last night I turned it off and went back to music.  

I was going to make this pretty quick today, but let me address the issue of writing a book as I know it.  I think about this stuff a lot, but don’t write about it much.  Bear with me.  

Writing a book is hard on many levels IMHO:  

1.  One must be sure to have enough of the right material to tell an historical ballad true.  My protagonist was a prolific writer, accomplished artist, and popular lecturer, besides having a very interesting love life.  First, it’s tough to get one’s head around the whole story all at once, and second, there’s so much stuff to read — most of it unpublished and archived in an ivy league university library far away — you hope you got all the good stuff.  One can have doubts about these things, but I think I’m okay.  Still lots to read, anyway you cut it.  

2.  Sitting for hours concentrating on plan/outline, specific subject matter, word choice & sentence construction, noting sources, revising as you go, and hoping like heck you haven’t left anything out takes a toll on one’s brain.  This, I think, is what most folks think about when they say writing is hard.  

3.  And then there’s the issue of life’s free-will choices.  I believe I could have done work other than teaching junior high and high school kids for thirty years and feel more beat up than I do.  Shoot, I got to teach thirty years and walk.  Thirty years.  Retired at 52.  When I have friends all around who say they’ll never be able to retire due to their job and personal savings limitations, it’s hard not to feel guilty.  Humbled, for sure.  

So I rather enjoy doing lots of stuff in my life.  I find cutting out most of the fun stuff to write a book that is really hard to do, presents a book production problem.  You might be able to guess such is the reason I’ve been at this project for over ten years.  

4.  Still, when I get going with the words on paper part of the writing process — aiming for 500 words/day minimum [per the advice of a wise university friend] — the ease of syntax feels pretty good.  I most often fear the muse will leave me at any time, though.  So a couple weeks ago when I got started late morning and didn’t quit until failing light after 5 for two days in a row, I felt a warm satisfaction.  

I now doubt what I wrote then is really so good.  Taking chapter two apart and rebuilding it is next on my docket and I’d rather not go there, for some reason.  It just feels like hard work.  I understand, indeed, the necessity of revising and editing.  See #6 below.  

5.  Work on The Dressy Adventuress project continues in one way or another, however.  Besides re-crafting the ‘Transcendental activist’ chapter, I have begun detailed planning for the next ‘movement’ which brings in the Emily Dickinson connection.  I am eager to get there, where I feel much love and energy.  I hope to be there by Monday, but don’t hold me to it.  I also have the need to cull out specific details of summer life on Hog Island from the already collected diaries of Mabel Loomis Todd.  This newer generation synopsis will be on my desk as I construct paragraphs.  And then there is the composite list of all of David Todd’s global solar expeditions.  I should have this stuff at my fingertips when I write content.  

6.  The sage university professor told me, too, to expect ten rewrites of my book.  I don’t doubt that’s true, and that feels okay.  But rewrites can only follow ‘writes’ — or drafts.  

Having lots of time all by myself to find a way into that writing is a real blessing that I thought might help production.  It is working, but at a weathervane pace that points and takes me to places I don’t always know are connected.  

Have I ever told you how lousy my self discipline is?  I’ll save you the details…  

Today’s elder idea:  

for Bruce 

Yesterday on the phone

when you told the story of helping 

your unknowing mother 

relearn how to wipe herself

the feeling in my heart was warmth

for you and her sharing such a personal 

moment that breeched the parent / 

child continuum.  You came of age. 

In the coming to that place you 

did not welcome — where stature and 

family position reversed from caregiver 

to tended — I felt for you

a welcoming hand into the realm of the elder

where I, too, see a diminished mother

fighting tooth and nail the coming darkness —

one who will not go gently into that good night.  

I watch her struggle.  You watched your mother do the same.

Neither woman selected this path. 

Both would rather be baking on a hot summer day or

sorting laundry, wondering how one family could create so many dirty clothes. 

Maybe they might even rather re-experience 

the discomfort of the eighth and ninth months

of carrying us, struggling with weight gain 

and wanting, then, the ordeal to be over. 

Maybe not so much now.  

Both Nancy and Gertrude have become passengers swept

onto a nonreturnable journey that has served them well —

that has gifted them with time on this Earth 

in the presence of parents and friends and family

and the kids, like you and me, who now live into

our years as elders, singing & telling stories of what 

they taught us and what we now know as true.  

Tom Schaefer

Lake Cumberland 

4 February 2014

image:  In Mrs. Todd’s front yard on Hog Island.  (summer 2013)

Note:  This entry was also posted @ 'The Dressy Adventuress' blog / http://thedressyadventuress.blogspot.com

Considerate @ 64

I’ve been aware for the last couple of decades — since the advent of those ‘middle age’ years — that there’s a good chance I’ve lived over half my life.  

I know that some folks worry about such things more than others, and that hitting the big ‘4-oh’ or ‘5-oh’ can be a reality check that rocks them to their very core.  

I don’t know that I felt that way too much.  At least not consciously.  But within a couple months the Beatles song, ‘When I’m Sixty-four’ becomes a reality for me.  And now, it would seem, I am having a bit of an aging anxiety issue.  

Part of what gets me is my attempts to be a good guy during my life.  I was in one fight in my days, and that was back when I was a real kid.  Had to have been younger than ten.   

Always treated my girlfriends with respect, too.  And, I suspect, that is gnawing at the root of my mid-60s sensibility.  As a respectable church-going male, I don’t admit to enjoying erotica to many.  But I do.  I have one heck of photo library, I don’t mind telling you, and a small collection of paperbacks.  Always thought reading those pulp novels made me a bad boy.  It was a part of that ‘dark side’ good guys can’t let friends and family see.  

But now, with the coming of the E. L. James’s Fifty Shades collection of erotic fiction coming to the silver screen — and with the coming of my being 64 — I am looking at that issue a little differently.  

I have no doubt some of the scenarios in my old BeeLine collection are more graphic than the antics of Christian Gray and Anastasia Steele.  But still, here’s a guy with some personality issues that encourages him to ‘get off’ by having women sign agreements that he can dominate them sexually and they, in turn, will be submissive to his desires.  And the girls will like it, by the way.  Ana struggles with agreement issues, but she (as far as I am in the first book) is willing to take it in order to have Christian.  (Such an interesting name for dom, INMO.)

That does feel exciting to me on some level.  Sexual play can be fun, though I have to admit, I haven’t had the courage to engage in much in my mature life.  Even amid the digital collections of couples I have purchased, the ones that get my heart pumping most are the ones where a beautiful pair of folks are having graphic consensual action that both seem very much to be enjoying.  

And then — to completely change the subject — I stepped out on the deck of this amazing place I’m lucky enough to have for a writing retreat the other day to take a picture of a lovely pink/purple sunset in the clouds reflected on the water.  As I stood in the fading light, steadying the camera on a deck post, a wren popped out of the little birdhouse on said post, popped me on my hat, then fluttered down to the deck floor, turned around and looked at me.  I had seen the little person working the birdhouse over the last week, trying to figure if this place would be best to raise a brood come warmer weather.  I apologized verbally to the little guy (or girl) and got the heck out of the way.  

I posted this event on Facebook.  Maybe you read it.  In any case, one of my friends commented, ‘You have always been a considerate man, Tom. I am sure the wren appreciated it. :-)’

Which brings me to the topic for this post:  Yes, I would agree that I have tried to live a life considerate of other life forms on the planet.  I did, after all, just hang sunflower seeds out on the deck yesterday afternoon.  I hope it helps somebody make it through this very cold week.  

But then the nagging idea hits me that my life of consideration has kept me from having some pretty decent ‘sinful’ fun.  

Sin, of course, can be interpreted as many things.  Stuff we were taught as kids was designed to keep us out of trouble.  Then when we got older, we realized some limits set were more a product of making society more comfortable, and not so much tangible issues of right and wrong.  

So here I sit nearing my 64th birthday and I wonder what I’ve missed.  Fact is, I’m no kid anymore.  I am now of the older and wiser generation.   

Still, doesn’t change the fact that I wonder what kind of fun I’ve missed out on. 

*** 

I expected this blog entry to be a bit shorter, hoping to direct you, gentle reader, to my other blog, The Dressy Adventuress.  With the focus this winter on my book, I encourage you to share this important time of production with me.  Shoot, when I get it done, I just know you are going to want me to sign your copy.  And you can say you knew me when!  ;-) 

Do take a look when you have time:   The Dressy Adventuress

Today’s elder idea:  There is something deliciously satisfying about actually owning land which is truly one’s own.

Mabel Loomis Todd

20 July 1908 diary entry

image:  Sunset over Lake Cumberland (20 January 2014)

earthspeaks @ the New Year

The other day as New Year’s Eve ground on to the inevitable television watching of the ball drop at Times Square and a champagne toast at midnight, I gave a bit of thought to a new year for the planet.  More specifically, I gave some consideration to the ‘state of my life’ as it approached taking on yet another year.  

It is hard to fathom that I have been retired from working secondary school for over ten years.  I can remember when I approached that last year teaching history at Wayne High School, I wondered if the year would ever pass.  I mean, one and done was something to look forward to at that stage in a career.  And as much as I enjoyed teaching, I was ready to ponder what would keep me entertained for the second half of my life. 

It was on a winter Sunday afternoon in 2001 when I sat at my computer contemplating my joining the internet world with the purchase of a domain name all my own.  On that afternoon, a couple thoughts were stirring through my ‘mellowed’ brain (if you know what I mean), when the concept of earthspeaks popped through the options.  

I’m sure like many of you, my home office space is the gathering place for all kinds of valuable stuff.  My father’s collection of Tarzan books resides there, as does my modest collection of gifted Nancy Drew titles that have come with me since I was in the sixth grade.  I still have some college texts stacked in one bookcase, with an extensive collection of poetry in another.  Behind me is the prose collection of spiritual stuff, more contemporary history pieces, and Nature/environmental essays, all filed in alphabetical order by author.  

So on that Sunday when I was searching for a catchy expression that I could morph into a domain name, my eyes fell upon a favorite collection of thoughts by Steve Van Matre and Bill Weiler titled The Earth Speaks: An Acclimatization Journal.  Perhaps I was introduced to that book first on Hog Island, when just before dinner a short reading from it was shared with campers.  What wasn’t to like, with thoughts by Henry David Thoreau, Joseph Wood Krutch, Wallace Stegner, and Rachel Carson, among so many others, punctuating the end of a day of boat trips and/or a workshop on mushrooms?   

In any case, when my Sunday thoughts pondered the idea of the Earth speaking, I thought earthspeaks would be a fine domain name for a soon-to-be-retired educator who walked with high school kids into the Grand Canyon and sponsored Saturday hikes for junior high school kids.  earthspeaks, it would be.  

Problem was, earthspeaks.com and earthspeaks.net were not available for purchase then.  (The .com site sold women’s linen clothing, if memory serves, while the .net site was the internet home of someone who made multi-media Nature shows.  Both are currently out of business, it would appear.)  All that was left was earthspeaks.org.  I wasn’t sure if I qualified as an organization just yet, but I went ahead, bit the bullet, and bought the domain name.  Besides, one friend observed, the .org sounded organic, and wasn’t that the point anyway? 

Since that time I’ve taught a couple classes at Aullwood Audubon Center & Farm here in Dayton and a couple others at the Hog Island Audubon Camp in Maine, all under the banner of earthspeaks.  I tried to build a website, hoping it would house an e-magazine, but it never really worked.  You could go find earthspeaks.org now, if motivated.  All you’d find is the last update made in 2009 which includes a lovely picture of our front yard dogwood tree in its full May glory, a pic of yours truly, and links to this blog and another connecting the reader to an essay of mine on one of my favorite places on the planet, Crestone, Colorado.  

Still, tom@earthspeaks.org provides my primary email address, and that is really enough.  In a real way, if the gentle reader wanted to know what the proprietor of earthspeaks.org was thinking, all she/he would have to do is surf over here to The Back Porch for content.  So in that regard, the website still does its job, though I always dream of updating it with photo slideshow links, more Nature poetry and essays, and room for reader comment.  I’ve had a sign posted on my office closet door for years that reads:  earthspeaks.org: A humanities-based web community.  Didn’t happen, though it was a great idea. 

So here I am at the beginning of 2014 writing my 188th blog entry, born of the concept of earthspeaks.  And, I must say, I am pleased overall with how things have worked out.  I still work at poetry writing when the muse permits, and I still very much enjoy taking walks in the woods watching birds.  I still teach a bit of history (and poetry) at Hog Island, and am about to set off on a January/February sabbatical to make progress on my book about Mabel Loomis Todd there, The Dressy Adventuress.  In August this year I’ll be writer-in-residence on Hog Island, to boot, doing my best to get Mrs. Todd’s story as a woman of Nature in print.  

The book, of course, will require another website, too.  I have purchased the rights to thedressyadventuress.com.  Nothing there yet, but if 2014 works out like I hope it does, that site should help folks learn about my book and, perhaps, help me sell a few more copies.  

So as 2014 opens, I am pleased to reflect that I am still wedded to the concepts behind the origins of earthspeaks.  I love the sea, I love the mountains, I love the desert — all places where Nature’s people make their work of living on a planet circulating in a spiral arm of the Milky Way.  It is my fervent hope this year that I can do justice to living mindfully and do what I can to be one with All that call this planet home.

***

As mentioned, tomorrow I head off to seclusion to work on my book.  I’ve learned that if a body wants a different result, one has to try something new.  I’m trying something new.  Wish me well.  

Do stop by here to see how things are going.  I’ll be blogging as The Dressy Adventuress takes shape.

Today’s elder idea:   One final paragraph of advice: Do not burn yourself out.  Be as I am: a reluctant enthusiast, a part-time crusader.  Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure.  It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it.  While you can.  While it’s still here.

Edward Abbey

except from The Earth Speaks: An Acclimatization Journal

image: Front-yard goldenrod at Mrs. Todd’s Camp Mavooshen.  (Hog Island, summer 2013)

Winter

If the truth be told, I’m itching for a good snowfall.  

Pause.

My most recent thought is that the above line should really be the content of a Facebook comment, not the major plot line of a blog entry.  I mean, what can a writer say about a snowfall?   ;-)

Thinking about snow positively seems against the Midwesterner’s way of thinking.  Snow = wet, slick road = slow traffic at the least, major damage to your vehicle and possible loss of life at its worst.  True. 

So drive slowly.  Or don’t drive at all.  

For me, such is part of the true joy of big Ohio winter weather events:  Everybody slows down.  Have to.  Wouldn’t be prudent to drive out in 6 inches on the ground and snow still coming.  Toss another log on the fire. 

As much as I loved teaching, I was always excited for a snow day.  Like few other professions, I got a day off when it was deemed too chancy to send out a fleet of school buses to transport children for miles for a day of education.  

Other kinds of education would be on tap for a snow day, whether going out playing in the snow with my girls or giving them a day to read, watch Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street, or work on crafts.  We sat by a fire in the fireplace with mugs of hot chocolate most snow day mornings, too.  At least I think we did.  Sure is a rich memory.  Sometimes I wonder what is true memory and what has been enhanced by dreams.  

Winter snow days have that kind of power of me, I’m afraid.  I have a handful of great weather memories connected to snowfall.  One of my favorites is the first night I walked out into a heavy snowfall — and heard nothing.  I mean nothing.  Dead silence.  Maybe a hint of a car moving across the intersection beyond, but so muffled.  So quiet.  The snow sucked up every sound wave as it moved in, covering the neighborhood.  Magical, indeed. 

I want to revisit that wonderland whenever I can.  It’s not a province you can visit.  It’s not something you can even come to expect.  Maybe this winter will be mild and every day just brown grass, bare trees, and grey skies as far as the eye can see.

But then there might be a weather advisory a couple days prior.  Yes, conditions look promising for a heavy snowfall if this front moves this far by then.  But maybe not.  So the snow-expectant have learned to make snide comments about weather men and women who ‘always get it wrong’ and go about their regular business, but watching more carefully for weather updates.  Hope winters eternal. 

And then, sometimes, there is a blessed event.  A beautiful snowfall that starts just about dawn and continues throughout the day.  You tune in to the Weather Channel to confirm what you see out your window.  Yup.  Lookin’ good.  Still snowing strong out past Indianapolis.  And the world changes. 

The bottom crawl line on the television teems with schools, churches, and some companies who have reconsidered the wisdom of having colleagues come out in weather to gather for whatever purpose.

Instead, the family unit is united in a special event that all will participate in; that all can see.  If all goes well, this could me a memory of a lifetime.  Maybe it will be the foot of snow predicted.  Maybe the trees will glimmer with ice before some fall from the freight.  In any case, it will be special. 

So, yes, I’m ready for a Calgary Clipper or a Nor’wester or whatever named storm blows up somewhere headed for the Miami Valley bringing a winter smorgasbord of precipitation.  I wish everybody the best.  I want everybody to have a warm place to stay, like me.  I hope everybody is safe on the roads.  I hope everybody has wood and a wood-burning fireplace.  

I hope everybody has a chance to get out into a good winter snowfall and feel one of the Earth’s softest and most beautiful events.  And then just stand there in a zen-moment, sensing snow accumulating on you, too.  On your nose.  On your glasses.  You stick out your tongue and wait for a few flakes to find you, melting coldly, immediately returning sky-born moisture to your being. 

Pretty damn cool, if you ask me.  

Today’s elder idea:  The snow doesn’t give a soft white damn whom it touches. 

e. e. cummings

image:  Noah doing his snow removal piece at Grandma & Grandpa’s.   (December 2004)

Late November

When the time for blogging comes around, I begin to feel topics in my gut.  I start weighing what topic is working on me and then I try to figure what a reader might get into.  At this juncture on this cycle, it would seem, the gentle reader gets a potpourri of grandpa thought.

***  

When the most recent internal alarm clock for this blog entry tripped a couple weeks ago, it was at least a week before the 22nd.  I decided then I had to write about the JFK assassination. 

I asked an old friend who was a classmate of mine on that Friday afternoon fifty years ago — us in the 8th grade  — what she remembered.  It was nice to have the accuracy of my memory confirmed.  

It was around 2:00 EST, after lunch for our classroom at Immaculate Conception School.  The academic week was pretty much over.  We were finishing up business by having a classroom civics club meeting with yours truly facilitating. 

I must have chaired a number of civics club meetings that year.  Can’t remember anything about any of ‘em — except for November 22.  Singed into memory: 

I was sitting up behind the teacher’s desk running the meeting.  Mike Yosik had the floor and was talking about the benefits of our installing an aquarium in the classroom.  I can still just about make out his complete face in my memory, though I can’t recall if was sitting or standing.   

In the middle of what Mike was saying, the principal, Sr. St. Augustine, clicked on the PA in the office, an audible click we students had learned meant stop talking and listen to the announcement.  Her voice was a bit subdued, unlike the raucous football punter we all knew and loved on the afternoon playground.

I don’t recall Sister’s exact words, but the phrase ‘the President has been shot’ seared like a hot iron making a memory indelible.  I was stunned.  I distinctly remember thinking that he can’t die.  He couldn't die.  He meant too much to the world.  He was an exciting family guy, just about my dad’s age, who from my point of view was succeeding in making the world a better place.  Besides, he was the first Roman Catholic President this country had ever elected.  He was one of us.  He couldn’t die.  

My friend remembers the meeting and the announcement, too, but she remembers a next thing that 1) she couldn’t believe, and 2) I don’t remember.  I suspect my head was still analyzing the odds of a ‘shot’ President surviving such a thing.  She remembers another of the guys in class picking up the aquarium discussion like nothing happened.   

Next thing I remember is Sr. Ann Mary climbing out of her seat at the back of the room, making her way up an aisle saying we would continue our discussion and meeting at a later time.  I returned to my seat.  

I don’t remember how long we waited until we were dismissed for the day.  I have a sense the classroom was pretty quiet.  We were standing in dismissal line when Sr. St. Augustine came back on the PA.  I imagine her voice cracked a bit.  The President is dead, she announced.  

I can remember my very place in line when I heard her unfathomable words.  Within as few minutes as possible I was running down Fauver Avenue eager to get in front of our old black and white television to watch the news.  I had sat for hours watching space shots over the last couple years and had really gotten a sense for history in the making.  I could not begin to imagine what the news looked like when a President of the United States was shot to death.  

Though I wanted to sit in front of the old Westinghouse all evening, I had work to do.  I was a morning newspaper carrier who had bought those papers from the Journal Herald and I had to collect from each and every customer so I could pay my weekly bill regardless of world history.  My guess is I set out sometime after 5 to collect my 45 cents from everybody who was home.

I think it was at Mrs. Sengle’s house where I stood in the living room for a few minutes watching with her as Jackie Kennedy disembarked Air Force One in her pink dress stained in her husband’s blood.  Only later did I hear she refused to change clothes when offered on the plane, saying she wanted the country to see what we had done to her husband.   

What else can I say about the brutal and bloody death of an eighth grader’s personal hero?  It wasn’t the day the music died, but something felt very different after Jack Kennedy passed.  Lyndon Johnson turned out to be okay in terms of Great Society legislation, but he was no charismatic Jack Kennedy.  It was a hard time.  

And in just a touch over four years from that November 1963 day, the deaths of both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy would make the omega bookend for us kids in the high school class of 1968.   

***

Well, that was longer than I thought it would be.  But here’s what else I wanted to mention today: 

Waffle Shop was amazing this year.  Thanks to all who made the effort to come down.  I like to tell people that if we get 1600 in the door in four days, we had a good Waffle Shop.  We had 1800 this year.  We set a modern record for lunches served.  All good news, indeed.  

Be advised that Outreach Grants applications are due either to me via email or in hard copy to the Christ Church office by 16 February 2014.  We’re very proud in our $89+k in Outreach Grants over the last 10 years.  If you’ve got a good idea, let me know. 

***

I have been moved of late by the concept of living a life with enhanced gratitude.  

I try in a zen kind of way to lead a life of gratefulness.  Every day I have on this marvelous planet is a gift unto itself.  

Living a life of gratitude seems very grounded to me.  

On my office door hangs, among other things, the saying ‘Practice gratitude.  Honor the ordinary,’ a line I picked up from James A. Autry, author of the book Choosing Gratitude and guest of Bill Moyers a couple months ago.  I was so taken by explanations that I ordered Autry’s book before the show was over.  

Then the other night I’m catching up on some TED podcasts and I come across one from Edinburgh this past winter by Br. David Steindl-Rast.  His topic?  Living a life of gratitude. 

Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine brother, cited studies showing the commonality that happy people are most often grateful people.  Sure, he says, one would think happy people would be grateful for their happiness.  He contends it really goes the other way:  Folks who lead a life of gratefulness are most often pretty happy with the the gifts life has given them. 

He says that even when one is dealt a hard blow, like loss of a job, or death of a parent or child, one can be grateful for the opportunity to rise to the occasion.  Those of us who have buried loved ones know something about that. 

The David Steindl-Rast TED link:

http://www.ted.com/talks/david_steindl_rast_want_to_be_happy_be_grateful.html

***

For those of you who are aware of my attempts to write a book on Hog Island, be advised that Shannon Wood, a long-time friend, has offered me use of her lake house at Lake Cumberland, Kentucky.  I’ll be on my own January and February next down there getting my focus tightened and making progress on chapters.  

It feels like the time is now to make good progress on The Dressy Adventuress.  I’ve tried different approaches to writing in the past with minimal success.  Getting away and getting lost in my work seems the best way to go.  Wish me luck. 

Today’s elder idea:  Say what you want to say and let the words fall out — honestly.  I want to see you be brave…

Sara Bareillis

‘Brave’

Very cool song…

images:  Top:  Early November at Wild Grace.  JFK:  borrowed off internet.  Bottom:  Thanks, indeed!  ;-)