Sippican Cottage Recommends:

Hi everyone. We offer stories about life in Southeastern Massachusetts at our sister site: SippicanCottage.blogspot.com Monday through Friday, generally. Visit us there, too, after you've maxed out your credit card buying our Sippican Cottage Furniture.

April 20th, 2010-

Our friends at Wrentham Antique Marketplace are selling our new Groaning Board dining tables like the hotcakes you can place on them every morning. Here's a seven footer you can steal for just $1500.00. Drop by their store on Rt 1A in Wrentham, Massachusetts and order one today! Tell Chuck and Cathy that Sippican sent you.

March 23rd-

We're having a big spring special on our Miles' Admiring Shelves. Order one by June 22nd and get a $30 discount, and free shipping to boot! A tremendous value. Customize yours from our list of available colors and finishes. Order one or a dozen today!

February 27th- Don't miss our St. Padraig's Day special. Order our fabulous Tiger Oak Shamrock Table by March 17th and shipping is free! That's a $30.00 savings you can put towards construction paper and glue sticks for your shamrock decorating.

January 11th-

Our new best friends at NECN are nothing if not professional. They've already got a video dub of my appearance on New England Dream House on their website. Here you go:

Is it tall, dark and handsome in here, or is it just me?

January 10th- It's 2009 already? Does the calendar have a snooze button? Yikes.

If you live in New England, and have electricity and cable TV this week, you can see Sippican Cottage Furniture featured on NECN's New England Dream House at 10:00 AM on Sunday, January 11th. 

They show it again at 7:00 PM  in the evening, so if you can't believe just how handsome I Iook on television, you can tune in again and check. Set your DVRs now!

December 8th-

Our handsome Mount Lebanon Table got a nice mention in the Denver Post last week. "Affordable Antique Looks."

Denver is a wonderful city (since the Broncos stopped beating the Patriots every year in the playoffs). Sippican Cottage Furniture has lots of customers out west, including the states of Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado.  Now if someone in New Mexico will buy something, we can have customers in contiguous states from Maine to Washington. (We could cheat and use the Four Corners to connect the states, but that wouldn't be sporting) Thanks, Denver Post; we're pleased to be included on a page with The Unsinkable Molly Brown. Not Debbie Reynolds; the real one.

November 4th- We've got another new item for you: The Mennonite Work Table. the Mennonites came to America and Canada and brought forth the bounty of the land with good, honest work. Our Mennonite Table allows you to carry on the tradition of good, honest work with our reproduction of their farmhouse favorite. Makes a great desk. Based on a real antique. Sure to be a favorite in your family until the sun winks out. See it here.

September 30th- Don't miss our new item: The "Super" Ten Finger Stepper. Same great utility as our regular Ten Finger Stepper, but with a solid Tiger Maple top step and whimsical fingerholes. Customize yours from a wide array of choices. Order one by Hallowe'en and get Free Shipping! It's scary how good a deal it is.

March 31st- Ah, Spring is but a hide and seek proposition. I don't care what the calendar says, it's still too cold to be Spring. But think ahead a little. The flowers will soon bloom, and you'll need a stylish bench to sit on to take off your Wellies after tilling your garden. Order a Harry Longbaugh's Bench by Memorial Day, and take advantage of our Free Shipping special. Save $30, and do it sitting down.

February 7th- Late winter greetings all! Lots of action at the Sippican Cottage these days. How about a new item for the catalog? Check out our Mount Lebanon End Table. All solid maple construction with a solid tiger maple tabletop. Nicely tapered legs make it look like it's going to get up and dance. You'll dance around your living room when you buy one, just to see the tiger maple grain shimmer as you shimmy by. Buy two and we'll like you twice as much as we do already. Just $325.00 plus shipping is a tremendous bargain. Order yours today before we come to our senses and raise the price.

January 28th- Brrr. Put another log on the fire and think of Beltaine. You can enjoy St. Patrick's Day in style with our late winter special. Buy a Shamrock Table by March 17th and get free shipping anywhere in the lower forty-eight states. That's a $25 value! You'll be in the clover early.

September 11th- Hi everyone. Don't miss our Autumn Special. Purchase a Harry Longbaugh's Bench and get free shipping anywhere in the continental United States. That's a $20 savings. Harry Longbaugh's Bench is the most useful thing we sell. It must be, as it is the most useful thing anybody sells, and we're anybody too.

July 20th- Hi. The sun is hiding her face again today. Hot and muggy. It's more Mobile, Alabama than Massachusetts outside. We drink our lemonade and are fine with it. What's summer by the shore without a little bead of water at the end of your nose from time to time?

Let's have more pictures of items we shipped recently. These went to longtime customers the Connollys in New Jersey. Nice people. Nice tables.

Oh, I've let a couple cats out of the bag early there. That's a new table design, and a new tabletop color, too. Don't tell anybody until I get the new webpage coded, OK?

July 19th- Hello Everybody. The sun is shining here today after days of rain. Lovely. We're very busy making furniture, and are too thrifty with new photos for you, our beloved visitors. So let's see some picture of items we've shipped recently. They've gone all over the country. First, to Pennsylvania. Here's two Ancient Mariner Bedside Tables, in Clapboard White, with Lovely Tiger Maple tops, lightly distressed. Spiffy. Click on the picture to enlarge.

May 24th- We have a Summer Special for all you nice people that like a little organization with your madness. Buy one of our Treasure Island Shelves by September 3rd, and receive free shipping on your order. That's a $30 value! Don't trip over tank engines all season. Put those treasures away.

Jamuary 29th- Hi everybody. We've updated our Kipling Table page with many more new pictures, and lots of new color combinations too. Click here to see it.

January 25th- Hello again everybody. Busy, busy, busy. Lots of orders from all over the country. We'll have lots more pictures soon, including many new items.

You've asked for it -- here it is: A Color Selection Page. We'll add more pictures to it as we get them, but it's bound to help right away. Enjoy!

January 9th, 2007- Hi everybody! Thanks to everyone for all the orders in 2006. We had lovely people From Washington State to Maine, Minnesota to Texas, and most places in between on the customer list. This year, we want more states to enjoy the value and beauty of our Instant Antique Furniture. And we need someone -- anyone-- from North Dakota to sign up for our catalog mailing list. We have folks from all the states but one! Come on North Dakota! Everybody can sign up here.

Don't miss out on our Saint Patrick's Day special. Order one of our lovely, solid "Tiger Oak" Shamrock Tables by March 17th, 2007, and get Free Shipping. That's a twenty five dollar savings. Visit our Shamrock Table page here.

October 10th- Goodness, we're busy here at the Sippican Cottage. We're filling orders right now from coast to coast in this great land of ours. And we get print catalog requests every day.

We're offering an Autumn Special with all the catalogs we send out. What's that? You want a print catalog too? Sign up here. Amaze your friends. Sow envy among your enemies.

But you can get that same Autumn Special right here on the internet:

Buy a Harry Longbaugh's Bench, get free shipping.

Don't wait. The offer only last until December 25th. Hmm. That date rings a bell. Can't quite place it.

Oh well; it will come to me.

May 31st- I trust you had a pleasant Memorial Day holiday.  Our older son marched in the parade and played the trombone. Fabulous.

We've got a new picture of a Sippican Cottage Console table on the site. The old picture, and the one we used in the print catalog, really didn't do it justice. This one's much better, don't you think?

We delivered one to Wrentham Antiques Marketplace, another sold before it was done, and we have two more about  for immediate delivery. This batch is a rich, smoky cinnamon color, with magnificent prominent tiger striped grain. You really should order one today, as your life has been devoid of meaning and beauty lately, and only tiger maple can cure that. Everybody knows this. Get one here.

May2nd-

We delivered furniture to our friends at Wrentham Antiques Marketplace in Wrentham, Massachusetts today, and last Thursday too. Lots of wonderful things there before, now it's way past wonderful. We're partial to our Extra Longbaugh Benches. Here's a picture of one in clapboard white:

 Jayne at Wrentham gave us the idea for the longer length, and at exactly 5 feet, they make a terrific seating bench for our Grandma Barker's Kitchen Table. Use one in your foyer to sit and take off your boots when you come in --it's mud season in New England. That's the season just before bug season. Go to Wrentham and get one or two for only $349.00 each.  That's so cheap for such a versatile and handsome item, it's like stealing. We won't report you though, we'll just make more. Go to Wrentham and see all sorts of wonderful Sippican Cottage items now, with more coming every week. Go!

March 20th-

Hello again everyone. We're making furniture like gangbusters this week. We're filling orders for our existing line, of course, but we have some new things in the works, too. As usual, the best ideas for things to make come from the customers; if all businesses would pound that into their collective heads like a railroad spike, life would be much more pleasant, wouldn't it.

A lovely correspondent from the midwest couldn't fit our Longbaugh Bench where she needed it to go. She asked for a smaller one. It' s almost ready to ship, and it's cute as a button. Perhaps we'll offer it as well as the usual size. We'll post a picture of it here when the paint's dry.

Just to confuse matters, we're making a Longbaugh Bench that's five feet long, too, to serve as the seating for our Grandma Barker's Kitchen Table, which is also five feet long. A customer wandered into Wrentham Antiques Marketplace on Rt. 1A in Wrentham, Mass, and wondered if she could have one that big, and wandered off without ever knowing what a good idea it was. My boys refuse to sit on anything else now, and the prototype will never make it out of our house, I fear. Don't worry, we'll make more, and post pictures of them here too. Thanks go out to our mysterious stranger. She'll be back I bet, as Wrentham Antiques Marketplace is so darn pleasant, and she'll probably see the bench, forget her earlier desire for just that item, and say to herself: "What a great idea! I wish I thought of that!"

February 27th, 2006-

Hello everybody. What's new? Lots and everything, of course.

We got another article written about us In Furniture Today Magazine. It's always nice to see your name in print, and spelled correctly for good measure. Furniture Today's E-Business Editor, Brian Carroll is a very pleasant person to talk to, and is very accomplished at writing informational articles in a manner that avoids dryness. No mean trick, that.

The latest article is written about our approach to marketing on the internet. It goes into detail about what we're doing, and why, and since the Internet is still the Wild West in many ways, the approaches to selling on the internet vary wildly.

I've been contacted by a few other retailers, and found out that some people have been told to copy my technique to the letter. I'm going to advise you here to avoid that. Instead, copy my approach. Here it is, and it's a lot older than the internet:

I'm trying to make the best possible things I can, in the most efficient way I can devise, and sell it as inexpensively as is possible, while continuing to feed all our families down here at Sippican. I assume my competitors are on the same page here. If, not, look in the mirror, friend, not on the internet. That being said, how do you market on the internet? How do you market anywhere?

The purpose of marketing is to make people who would be interested in your product aware that it exists. Really, that's about it. I'd like to stake out on a sand dune the marketers that are in the business of fooling potential customers into thinking they want what the guy's got to sell, no matter what it is. "There's a sucker born every minute" is no way to go through life. And in the long run, it never works out for anybody.

Now, I assume that the whole world doesn't want what I've got. That's fine. But the internet allows me to find -- check that; allows people to find me -- that are interested in what I've got. And so I'm just a small fish in an enormous pond, but I'm in the correct pond, and all the anglers are looking for my kind of fish, as it were.

That's the key to the internet marketing thing. Don't try to sell cotton candy at Funeral Homes. You're wasting your time. Why mindlessly try to attract people to your website if you don't sell what they want? You're wasting everybody's time, including your own. I don't try to get people looking for chrome and glass dinette sets to get hijacked to my page, hoping they'll buy something I do have when they get here.

People are paying for play in the search engines, and I'm always deeply suspicious of them. If you have what I want, why do you have to pay to force your way to the front of the line?

I put all this stuff on the internet because I want the customer to understand what they're getting, and who they're getting it from.

I used to live in a town, hours from the ocean, that featured a sailboat on the official town sweatshirt because they didn't know what to put on there that encapsulated the town. Kinda sad, really. I moved from there to a town on the ocean, because I wanted the reality, the substance, not an illusion.

Tell your customers who you are, and what you've got, and maybe they'll buy it from you. Try to spell all the words correctly. Be pleasant. Don't try to appear to be something that you're not.

Did I mention the spelling?

January 24th 2006-

Greetings. As promised, here's a picture of the jelly cupboard we fashioned to complete the assortment of items for the " All Sippican Cottage Kitchen."

It's a bad picture, but it's a fine cabinet. It's based on our "Treasure Island Shelf," with doors and a Solid Pine top added.

 I'm thinking of adding it to our line. Anybody else want one? Besides Mrs. Sippican, I mean. She's demanding one since she saw this one.

January 23nd 2006-

Good day everyone. Snow today. Bundle up!

Well, we've got a picture of the all Sippican Cottage kitchen from one of our favorite customers. We've made  a custom design china cabinet based on an antique from Johnston's Antiques in Franklin, Mass; to the right we have a variation on our Ma Barker's Kitchen Table; and a supersize version of our Mile's Admiring Shelf hanging over it:

Fabulous, n'est pas?

But wait, there's more; tomorrow we'll show a picture of the jelly cabinet that goes along with it. There's a Ten Finger Stepper in the kitchen too. Thanks Janice, the room looks fantastic!

January 2nd 2006-

Happy New Year to ye, one and all.

"A place for everything, and everything in its place."

What a magnificent sentence. Like most trite things, it's true, and expressed in a lapidary fashion. Hell, the sentence is practically a palindrome, but it doesn't suffer from its simplicity. There's an ethos there that far exceeds: "Put your clothes in the hamper or no cookies." Why is it "zen" if it's foreign but just pedantic nagging if it's domestic?

Let's see what we can glean about it:

The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition.  2002.

Things should be kept in order.

Wow. Thanks for that, really. Who wrote that, Cotton Mather? Himmler? For gosh sakes, there's more there than that, isn't there? Or is it just me? I've devoted great chunks of my life to domiciles and the things that go into them, and seen exactly what the truism means, played out on innumerable domestic stages. In my experience, it's the first half of that old saw that's always lacking, and causes 99% of the problems you find with the second half. People --I include myself here; I'm people too -- are always struggling to fashion proper homes for their belongings, and until they do, those belongings, cast adrift in their homes, circulate like bedouins from one horizontal surface to the next, and annoy their owners to distraction. It's not just effort or fortitude that makes life orderly; it's just not possible to have one half of the equation missing and get the end result.

Let's try somewhere else:

Selected Writings on Proverbs by Archer Taylor

Let us now turn to the proverb with which we are concerned: "A place for everything and everything in its place." Marshall McLuhan has recently explained it as an allusion to printing and the necessity of returning type to its box, when it has been used; see his Understanding Media (1964).

No, no, no. Marshall McLuhan is a one note piano. I'm an ignoramus, and even I know this expression is older than Gutenberg. What a maroon. For the life of me, I can't understand how people like Mr. McLuhan leverage a few (in his case, one) sound bite about one thing into a career. "The medium is the message," he said, (wrongly) and everyone falls all over him in perpetuity for his opinion. He's like a workman with one tool in his toolbox -- a hammer -- so the whole world looks like a nail to him.

Bless Mr. Taylor, he didn't give up there, but kept on sledding and found:

Well, now, since Augustine was born in Tagaste which is now in Algeria, in 354, methinks Mr. McLuhan should go back to talking ragtime about television, where he can be innaccurate and puerile about the correct millenia.

Notice the relationship, baldly stated. It needs to have a proper place to have a proper use. A coffee table is a useful thing. If you crack your shin on it four days a week because your house is cluttered, its usefulness is diminished. And we've all pitched perfectly good things in a dumpster because we couldn't make them fit in our humble homes, or our lifestyles. A shame, really.

But we're not done yet. Let's keep looking.

 "Omnia tempus habent, et suis spatiis transeunt universa sub caelo"

(To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.--Ecclesiastes 3:1).

"A place for everything, and everything in its place." indeed.

So buy an Admiring Shelf, or a Treasure Island Shelf, or something with a drawer to put your things in, and make them fit in your life properly, at hand but not cluttered.

If anyone asks why, tell them Omnia tempus habent...

December 14th-

Greetings to all, and Happy Holidays.

I've been involved in the construction of many different things in my life. I've built a birdhouse, (by myself) and a football stadium, (I had help) and most everything in between. I've frozen and sweated, and strained to lift a heavy load as well as frustrating myself over the most delicate filigree. I've been in thousands of homes from modest to palatial. The ones I haven't been in, I've read about. But last week, the most extraordinary thing happened to me. A real first.

I still make custom furniture. I hate to admit it, really, because when people find out you can and will make things, they haunt you day and night in the most pleasant way. Sippican Cottage is an idea, really, and the idea is to serve the largest possible number of nice people by selling standard items. And no matter how much I love making something original and unique for nice people, it limits the range of people you can serve. And so what is surely a blessing, loyal and faithful customers that want just that special something, can also be a distraction, like a scenic overlook on a highway-- you just can't help yourself -- you've got to stop and enjoy it, though the highway beckons.

A lovely woman and her husband commissioned me to make them a china cabinet, based on a very old and interesting example at Johnston's Antiques in Franklin, who we've mentioned here before. The original is of an age and provenance such that it becomes important, not just interesting. Few of us can afford important furniture, and even if Bill Gates adopts us all, there isn't enough important stuff to buy anyway. It is, by definition, rare.

And so, we copy. And like the very best customers, they ask me to improve upon the original, to make it more useful, and perhaps, more comely, instead of a slavish copy. That's always a tall order, to improve on something that's good already, and you deliver the item with the feeling one has when performing in front of an audience for the first time. Practicing the violin in the garage helps, but it's not the same as Carnegie Hall, after all. So you stand there, and hold your breath, and they say they adore it, and for a moment you know what the diva holding the roses at the end of the opera feels like.

That feels good, believe me, but that feeling is not new to me, thank goodness. I've lived long enough for the curtain calls to start to outnumber the throwing of rotten tomatoes, as it were.

What was truly extraordinary, was that the customer wished to commission additional items, and began to search for something to show me to get an idea of what she wanted.

Now, I've been shown scraps of wallpaper, and chips of paint, and pages torn out of magazines from Popular Mechanics to Art Digest. I've been shown cocktail napkins, and plans stolen from architect's offices, and out of print books with the text in Greek. I've been handed the catalogs of my competitors, my colleagues, and the mighty retailers from Ralph Lauren to Home Depot. But for the first time, someone handed me a Sippican Cottage Furniture catalog, and pointed to an item in it, and used it to describe the general outlines of the thing she wanted.

I can't die happy yet, though, until someone tries to sell me one of my own items in an antique store.

Get your free catalog here.

November 1st-

Hi everyone. We've got lots new here at Sippican:

For starters, we have a new look on our home page, with better graphics and so forth. Hope you like it. We had a crack team of subliminal message experts working on the masthead for forty days and forty nights, and all they came up with is that when you roll over the picture, it looks different. Oh well, it's nifty, at any rate.

We've got a new print catalog coming out soon. Now you can get genuine Sippican ink on your fingers. Sign up for the free catalog, (and e-mail notification of new items and specials too, if you like,) right here:  Yes, I want a fabulous print catalog sent to my house, and soon.

I've got yelled at a lot because my picture wasn't on the website. Why you'd want to see the owner of Sippican Cottage Furniture is beyond me, but you can see it on our new, improved, About Us Page. If  I'd known I'd live this long, I would have taken better care of myself. At any rate, the furniture's nice.

You can find a limited supply of our furniture at: Cameron House Interiors and Gifts, 4817 West Park Boulevard, Plano, Texas. 75093  Drop by and tell Christine we sent you. We're excited to be in the Lone Star State!

We've got lots of new items we're adding to the catalog. Check back often.

Don't forget, you can see, touch, and buy our furniture at:

 Wrentham Antiques Marketplace

Rt 1A

 in Wrentham Massachusetts,

and at:

 The Old Company Store

5 Elm Street

In Wareham, Massachusetts.

More locations coming soon.

And you can now read our commentary page at :

http://sippicancottage.blogspot.com

August 1st-

What's up?

In an obvious attempt to lose half my readership, I write today about cats.

It doesn't matter what I write. If I write that I like them, the dog people ... (crickets)

See, they're gone already, they didn't even stick around to see if I was going to link to the haha funny home video of the cat grabbing at a string on a ceiling fan and going helicoptering around for a spell before being hurled into the sliding glass door. But they've all already seen it ten times, and e-mailed it to their friends, they know if you're not in on it already, you're not in on it at all. You are an apostate. You like those cats.

Yes, yes I do. When I was growing up, I wanted a dog. My dear mother was petrified of animals, and disliked untidiness, so no go. And your parents know you better than you know yourself, after all, and knew I couldn't care for such a beast. Not for more than a week. Now, the information available about dogs is very sketchy, too patchy for me to make a valid assessment really, but I gather the creatures live longer than a week. No dog for you.

No cats either, a creature that  gave poor mom the willies more than a dog, even. At least a dog, well, how do I put this? The dog goes outside. Any Venusian who visited our planet would know who's in charge around here immediately, by observing which one craps in a box, and which  one empties it.

And so as a child, we had a succession of wildlife that taught you nothing about the wild, or about loyalty, or about ferocity, or greed or want, or anything else. Goldfish, gerbils, that sort of thing. For a while, we had little turtles in a dish. You can tell you're through with them when they turn white, by the way.

And so my mother was right of course. I've killed more fauna than a hunter gatherer tribe. But the desire is not a slave to the intellect. I needed another mammal around the house, one that wouldn't do anything I'd tell it to, and the best I could hope for is predicting its behavior a little. No I'm not referring to my wife, although the description is an apt one. Cats.

Cats are the pet for you, if you must have a pet, but don't deserve one. They are what all housepets are, animated furniture. They become part of the fabric of your lives, no question, and fray all the fabric in your life, it's true, but they're in the background, and don't bother. Feed them in a desultory fashion, and every twenty five days or so, they'll deign to sit in your lap and go prrrrrrrrrr. I'm up for that.

My friends have dogs. They never go anywhere, or do anything, without first thinking of how this will affect their creature. They're better people than us, it takes so much tenacity of will to sign up for that kind of responsibility, to be trusted so supremely with the wellbeing and care of another being. One that will never grow up and mow the lawn for  you, I mean.

Get up one half hour late one morning, and go to the door to let the cat in, and he'll be gnawing the head off a rodent outside the door, and look up at you and you'll know what he's thinking: "I had to do this myself, you big stiff; and I'm going to throw up parts of this on your couch later, that'll learn you to sleep in."

And so I like the solitary nature of the cat, and its mystery, and the fact that the minute he goes outside, he reverts to his feral self, and the only difference between the little beast and a tiger is its size, and the pink collar he's wearing. He'll shred my wife's clothes for saddling him with that, I bet. Ruins his feral vibe with the woodland creatures.

Two cat is best, three cats is madness, four or more and you're a newspaper article. We got two black cats at the animal rescue place, to replace the two beloved animals we buried in our yard after living at our new house for a short while.

Of course they were dead before we buried them, what are you, dog people? Anyway, they had lived a long and happy life, and dreamed every night by the fire of mice with lead shoes, and passed away old.

The Big One was just a little lad then, and we asked him to name the new ones. Moonshine and Sunshine he said. I laid some groundwork for editing by pointing out that they were both identically black, and neither was likely to answer to "Sunshine." He liked "Lady Godiva," for the chocolate color, not the streaking incident, and so it was Moonshine and Lady Go.

Two black cats. Bad luck perhaps. Moonshine was headstrong and roamed far afield, and I found her after a short spell by the road, where curiosity... well, you get the picture, and I buried her in the woods next to the others. Tears were shed. Lady Go was sad, if cats can be sad.

My wife loved that animal. She is kind to all things great and small, and raises we three male beasts in addition to the cat. Pets are tests of your kindness and reliability, and Moonshine tested our hearts.

He appeared out of the woods that surround our house not long after, skinny, sickly, disheveled, wild. White with gray and black, mottled. He'd pace around the perimeter of the lawn like a panther, lean, hungry, feral. My wife considered it a sign, so soon after Moonshine's demise, and she fed that beast. She'd put out food at night, though I told her it was crazy;  raccoons and possums and foxes and god knows what else would show up each night looking  for the buffet. No matter, HE might get some of it, and that was enough for her. Occasionally we'd see him, closer now, but you couldn't approach him or he'd disappear for days.

My boy remarked the patch of grey atop his head made him look like he had a page boy haircut, although he didn't know to call it that, he just said: He looks like Moe!

So Momo it was.

My wife is kind, and animals know "kind" when they see it. But a cat is cautious, oh yes. After nine month of patience and caution, he allowed her to touch him once, while he ate greedily from the bowl, still nowhere near the house. Just like me, he was finished.

Soon he was eating on the back step, and sleeping on a pile of straw left over from a Hallowe'en display, at the corner of the house. And then one day, when a year had passed, she put the food in the back hallway, and left the door open.. He came in over a period of ten minutes, still terrified, but curious. She closed the door behind him. And he went CRAZY.

He made that traverse of 38 feet from end to end of the house over and over, launching himself at the windows in the doors, crashing to the floor, and racing to the opposite end for another leap and collision. My wife and little boy scurried around shrieking and trying to reach the doors to open them before he got there, but he was everywhere, and frantic, and they were trapped in the house with a wild beast. They finally got one open, and he was gone.

As my wife recounted the tale to me when I arrived home from work, I had to stifle a smile. She thought she had blundered, and he was gone forever. She doesn't know men very well, I thought to myself. Though all she gets all day is we three men, men, men. She had become the sun around which that little creature orbited, as had we all, and sure enough the next day he was back.

And shortly thereafter, he was sleeping by the fire, and making that prrrrr noise, a little peeved about THAT UNFORTUNATE INCIDENT AT THE VETERINARIAN, but exhibiting to this day the only attitude that cat owners generally envy their dog friends. Gratitude.

July 29th-

Greetings.

I love this picture. I love the Spanky style clothes, and the leather shoes, and the hissing radiator, and the chipped basin, and man oh man, look at that cowlick. The poor little fellow isn't going to get anywhere with that, though he's giving it a go. Only momma's spit can paste down a cowlick, and this poor little fellow's mom had to go off to work, and leave him to wrestle his devil ears by himself. The year was 1943, and I imagine she's making something for the armed forces, and the little fellow's dad is too, or is in the armed forces.

And so he's left in the care of someone barely visible on the right, and among his peers. I like watching my own sons pal around with their friends, and try to watch the proceedings without participating as much as possible. Your very presence intrudes, and staying in the background allows them to sort things out as much as possible among themselves. And it's fun to watch them try to do things that you take for granted, but they're still learning. The effort of it, and the satisfaction after is amusing. When they're older, the mileposts of accomplishment get fewer and farther between, and instead of daily trophies, you get yearly diplomas.

Whoah, wait a minute. A daycare center for working mothers in 1943? That's unpossible. I thought all you Stepford Wives were freed from domestic bondage in 1968 or so, when your 1950s Ozzie and Harriet manacles were finally broken. But there are hundreds of pictures like this in the Library of Congress, from all over the country, and innumerable picture of Rosie the Riveter to go along with it. 'Splain it to me Lucy.

I'm going to make 100% of the audience angry now, which is hard to do. Usually, either 50.5% or 49.5% hate you for what you say. But I'm going for the whole enchilada today:

A. There was no evil man-plot to keep women out of the workplace before.

B. There was no evil government plot to destroy the family by ramming women into the workforce.

For all you folks that think we evil white men get together twice yearly and plan how we're gonna oppress everybody, you need to look at our closets. We can't dress ourselves without help, just like the little fellow pictured above. Secretly ruling the world is unlikely.

For all you folks that think it's all a government plot to bring socialism to middle america on black helicopters, you need to visit the Post Office. Look around. The government can't figure out what it's doing. If you can barely tell what you're trying to do, it's unlikely you're trying to wed it to an evil purpose.

It's all, as Homer Simpson says, "just a bunch of stuff that happened."

My wife stays home and cares for our children a little, and me a lot. Many people see that as example "A" above. Not so. It suits us both, and our children, and we can, so we do.

Earlier in our lives, our oldest was shuffled off to daycare so we could both work, and many people saw "B" above. Well, we needed money. Half of it did go to the government, after all. But he's pretty well adjusted. He doesn't recite "Let A Million Flowers Bloom" and scream 'Death to the Capitalists" because he swapped germs with a dozen of his peers when he was two. And his mother gives him a whiffle in the summer, so no cowlick. In short, we all survived.

Then what are we to make of it? It easy:

A. We're all rich

B. People are valuable.

Women work now because there's a shortage of people. Women worked in 1943 because there was a shortage of people, of the male, induction age type. And women, like men, can be lured away from the joys of the home if it pays good enough. And since as the years pass, and the amount of heavy lifting required continues to diminish, and the jobs get more sophisticated and lucrative, and human ingenuity and sophistication becomes more important, employers must do everything they can to lure people into the workforce. Like pay the world. And overlook the occasional childbirth interruption.

People blithely say the world is overrun with people. Okay, smart guy, try putting an ad in the paper looking for help. Let's say you're fussy. You don't want meth smoking child molesters or people that sleep at their desks. You're gonna have to offer a lot to get anyone, and if you're fool enough to exclude enormous swathes of the population because they're, well, girls, you're going to be sitting waiting for the phone to ring for a long time.

And we are all rich. Let's not be ingrates and complain about opportunity in America. We have problems, because human beings are imperfect. But the largest problem among poor people here is obesity. Tell someone in central Africa that any of us is not  rich, and they'll likely disagree. And ask you for a dollar to eat for a month. We're a rich enough nation to pay people to be poor, and get obese. That's rich.

And so, some of us work outside the home. Some of us work from the home. Some of us work in the home. Some of us place our children with other children when they're one or two. Some wait until they're five. Some of us wipe bottoms. Some of us pay to have those bottoms wiped. Some people don't work, because they have money, but ignore their children and leave it to nannies to take care of them. Some people work, and spend every waking hour left with their children.

It's just a bunch of stuff that happened.

July 28th-

Dudes.

I used to play darts. I know, "how exciting." Well, I needed to find an activity you could participate in with a Guinness in one hand, and softball requires a taste for warm light beer that I lack. So off to the Irish pub, and the boards.

Not any more. I'm a big old man, with children and a wife and bills and so forth, and the idea of hanging around in a bar seems strange now. But I was single once, and was a "Norm" at Liam's Irish Tavern, which isn't there any more. That's fine, as I'm not there any more either.

Anyway, I thought I was good. You had to win to keep playing, and the other Joes at the bar were pretty good, so I practiced toeing that stripe and mechanically pumping (both) elbows for a good long while until I was proficient enough to avoid sitting down. I was streaky, and enraged many a better player by stinking it up for most of a game, and then pulling it out late, and seeming like a sandbagger. It didn't hurt that I'm 6'-2" tall with long arms, and leaned over pretty good, and seemed to be inserting the darts, not throwing them.

At any rate, I started playing in leagues and so forth, which are the kind of thing the average person had no idea existed, until you happen upon them, and you realize there's entire worlds of people doing all kinds of things you never even heard of in a very serious way. The internet has become an engine for these peculiar worlds. Go to Google, and type in ANYTHING you can think of, and you'll get a ton of sites, and an education.

Anyway, I thought I was good, all those years ago. Then I got an education about perspective.

Our dart team traveled to a club in South Boston. It was a real club, too, not a restaurant or bar like usual, but an old fashioned members-only club, where you rang a doorbell while standing on an unlit threshold in a parking lot, and a disembodied voice says: who are you over an intercom. There was a problem. Women weren't allowed into this club, and we had brought one.

Now, this is twenty years ago, but it was just as jarring a bit of news then as it is now. We were struck by the unfairness of it, or whatever you'd call it: not letting a woman in. We protested that if she couldn't come in, our team wouldn't play. The voice said, if she's on the team, that's different. Inside, he explained that women were barred from the club because all the men would have fistfights over them in the club, and for the men's and women's own sakes, these knuckleheads had to be segregated. They weren't fit company for the women.

 I realized I was very far from home, though I had been born not ten miles away.

There were a great many illegal Irish immigrants in the place, and I began to see why brawls had to be avoided at all costs, as a visit from the police meant more than a trip to the pokey and a black eye to many of the devotees of the place; they'd be deported too. My own Irish relatives had drifted down from Antigonish, Nova Scotia to Boston a hundred years ago, after fleeing Ireland, and did all the work no one else would deign to do, just like these rough and tumble fellows, and I was sympathetic. 

And they played darts.

They mopped the floor with us , though they were blind drunk. They never even put down their drinks, they just walked to the line, and fffft fffft fffft, it was over.

And so you learned that being good means judging yourself in the context "compared to what?" And compared to them, well, let's just say that after the match blessedly ended, and our beating was over, I was chosen as our "champion" to play the king of the club, one match, for a little money. He hadn't even played up until then, and I couldn't imagine he'd be worse than the guys who had just annihilated us, but I wasn't ready for, well, the "compared to what" education I received.

I threw my three darts. My score was recorded in chalk. The Irish champion went to the line, and pulled out three nails. Three great big nasty twenty penny spikes. Bang, bang, bang into the board. He never missed anything he threw at. And he did it with nails, to show me I wasn't worthy of an even fight. It was over almost immediately, and I knew "compared to what" was now "compared to that," and where I stood in the Pantheon of Darts wasn't on any sort of pedestal, it was around back, near the men's room.

Every single one of those drunken roustabouts was unfailingly polite to us men, and exquisitely deferential to the only woman in the bar, the one we had brought uninvited. But we left immediately, to get back to a universe we understood.

Which brings me to the subject of our essay today, and a long and circuitous route we've taken. Take a look at this guy:

Blind Teen Amazes With Video-Game Skills

He's seventeen years old, he's completely and utterly blind, from birth no less, and he'll kick your ass at video games.

I love this story. Now, playing Mortal Kombat without being able to see it doesn't make you Mozart, or Ray Charles even. But it does make you extraordinary.

Think of the trial and error, think of the concentration that this required. The hours and hours of groping, over and over, looking for that next rung on the ladder to: you can't beat me. And what is trivial becomes sublime, when it's done in this fashion. He'll whup you, with his back turned.

We live in a world prosperous enough to  support professional skateboarders, never mind baseball and  football players, and where Tron Guy becomes an instant celebrity. It's enough these days to simply capture the imagination of a great many people, however you might do it, because the internet can open up a great audience to you, hungry to be amused, or amazed, or feel part of a community, or look at Brice, in his darkness, and say: "Compared to him, I'm a shirking piker"

And for all you in the audience who say, big deal, it's just video games, they're not important, I say, yeah, not important? Compared to what?

July 27th-

Hail fellow well met.

Let's talk about something important. Joe.

Oh yes. Coffee Joe. Java, jamoke, kaffa, kahveh, sludge, silt, bilge, mud and a shot-in-the-arm. Mud in your eye. Hojo, qahwah, latte, moche,  just gimme that coffea whatever you call it.

Look, I'm not fooling here. Listen to me. Coffee is not a beverage. Coffee is the eighth sacrament. Gimme Gimme Gimme.

Ray Charles knew:

In the morning when the sun comes up

She brings me coffee in my favorite cup

That's how I know, how I know, Hallelujah I just love her so.

A blind man could see it. Howsa 'bout a cup?

Let's lay down some rules. First and foremost, we lay a pistol on the table for anyone that approaches with anything decaffeinated. You pod people that drink that dyspeptic dishwater stay clear, I'm warning you. I need that jolt, and I don't mean soda.

Second, there was a period of time in this world when the idea of instant coffee made a certain amount of sense, I guess. People watched two guys named Neil walk on the moon, and were inspired to drink Tang and so forth, and the idea of Nescafe didn't seem all that strange. At the time, you'd have to go to a disreputable diner to get a cup of ready made coffee, and it was probably fresh during the Truman administration, and been warming since, or you'd have to get out a real percolator, grind some beans, and make your own.

They are now opening up Starbuck franchises in the Men's Rooms of Dunkin Donuts. You can drive up to every other window in any city and get coffee thrust out at you. Men named Neil do not trod the moon any longer. Outlaw instant coffee. Bring back the death penalty for serving it. Perhaps an amendment to the Constitution is in order. They want to amend the Constitution to prohibit flag burning. I say, give an exception if the burning flag is used to heat water for joe.

I prefer Dunkin Donuts to Starbucks. I go in, I say: Give me coffee. They say: Give me money. It happens. I leave. We are both content.

Go into Starbucks. You are disoriented. The signs tell you you can get a pineapple chutney lotus blossom chive and dill brisket rhododenron flavored latte grown at a "fair trade" plantation where the inmates eat gruel twice a day, instead of once like everywhere else, I guess. I didn't know I wanted that. I thought I wanted coffee. But if you go up to the counter, the girl with the jewelry in her nose snorts at you if you order coffee. I'm not sure I'm supposed to order coffee from her anyway. Her name tag says she's a "barista," and I assume that's Spanish for lawyer, because she seems put out by my request for coffee. I look for people behind the counter with aprons and coffee urns, but they are scarcer than non-relatives at the barista's indie band shows.

Hie thee to Dunkin Donuts. Approach the counter. Hold out five quarters. I guarantee you will walk out with a cup of joe without saying a word.

Some lady spilled coffee on her lap once, and sued McDonald's. She won a pile in the misery lottery. She said the coffee was too hot. Now, I drink my coffee cooler than most. I prefer the european method of brewing,  with water well below boiling to make the  coffee, and it's about ready to drink when it finishes its journey through the glorious beans.

McDonald's makes American coffee. Bubbling hot. God bless'em. Some people like real hot coffee, and some people add milk, or cream, and so forth, which cools the coffee. Coffee to go is often transported to remote locations before being enjoyed, and it's really not possible to serve it too hot, as if you prefer it cool, as I do, you can just wait a little. But if you like it hot, it's gotta start hot.

McDonald's doesn't serve superheated nuclear power plant reactor coolant with a lump of lava in it. It's not even boiling water, which means it's less than 212 degrees. If you stab yourself with a spork is that McDonald's fault? If you eat the fish sandwich with the wrapper on it, and get indigestion, is that McD's fault? I say no.

There may be a circle in hell for people that sue over the mundane, if it's not  already full of lawyers. But hell in the afterlife is not good enough for her, the old lady with the hot lap. She needs punishment now. And I decree: NO MORE COFFEE FOR YOU. That'll learn you. Your money won't buy you happiness if it won't buy you coffee.

When I was a wee laddie, shopping was a rough go for my mother. She had four kids, and we ate like we were in a contest throughout most of our waking hours. Pre-made food was expensive, and rare, and mom bought raw materials, food ore that needed smelting, not frozen pizzas. She's take us on her shopping expeditions, and had to make many stops to get all she needed. I remember one to this day. The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. That's the A & P to you young folks. The place looked vaguely Victorian, and there were flies buzzing around mounds of lettuce and so forth. But you'd buy coffee beans there, raw, and as you were checking out, there was a grinder right in the checkout aisle.

I imagine that  when I'm a million years old, and I've forgotten who I am, and everyone I know, and every other thing that ever happened to me, and everything that happened to everyone else, I'll still remember that glorious aroma, and be content.

Then I'll eat the puzzle in the Nursing Home community room.

July 26th-

Mr. Pom Pom

Hello.

As I told you, we were at Lake Winnepesaukee last weekend. The was more than just frolic, however. There was meaning too. I learned a little about hope, courtesy of Mr. Pom Pom.

Main Entry: [2]hope
Function: noun
Date: before 12th century
1 : archaic : TRUST, RELIANCE
2 a : desire accompanied by expectation of or belief in fulfillment

Bah. Now that I look at it, "hope" won't do. Because the desire we all shared for Mr. Pom Pom had no expectation of or belief in fulfillment. It really seemed hopeless, for a time. Let's try something else:

Main Entry: [1]faith
Pronunciation: 'fAth
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s):  plural faiths /'fAths, sometimes 'fAthz/
Etymology: Middle English feith, from Old French feid, foi, from Latin fides; akin to Latin fidere to trust —more at BIDE
Date: 13th century
1 a : allegiance to duty or a person : LOYALTY b (1) : fidelity to one's promises (2) : sincerity of intentions
2 a (1) : belief and trust in and loyalty to God (2) : belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion b (1) : firm belief in something for which there is no proof (2) : complete trust

There, that's better. Lots of people had faith in Mr. Pom Pom, but they had faith in something else too, and went through the motions of "hoping" when the "expectation of fulfillment" of their wishes seemed very remote indeed. And Mr. Pom Pom taught us all a lesson: Sometimes you do the right thing because it's the right thing to do, and  goodness is its own reward and all that; because sometimes unlikely things happen and it's best not to take your eye off the prize just because you're likely to be disappointed.

Now, who is Mr. Pom Pom, and what did he do, exactly? The first question is easy. Mr. Pom Pom's dad is my good friend Steve. Steve is the most productive person I've ever met, and more fun than Mardi Gras, and a good father to Mr Pom Pom, and his big brother Flapdoodle too.

Mr. Pom Pom used to be Mr. Po Po, and I'll always think of him as that. Mr. Po Po is one of those silly names you call your kid, or he calls himself that seems to stick for a while. One day, Mr Po Po had gotten mildly older, and decided that the sobriquet "Mr. Po Po" wasn't very dignified, and announced that he no longer wished to be called "Mr. Po Po."

Call me Mr. Pom Pom.

Much more dignified. They say every man has the right to decide what he is called, but no man chooses his nickname. Mr. Pom Pom did both, which is rare indeed. .

O.K., but what did he do? Mr. Po Po, um, I mean, Mr Pom Pom?

He played the drums badly on Saturday night.

You see, Steve was playing music in a band with his friends for the assembled throng of his New Hampshire neighbors on that Winnepesaukee beach Saturday night, and his sunny disposition shined right on through those songs, and entertained us all. Steve's been playing in some permutation of that band for most of his life, but now the fires of celebrity are banked low in his furnace of music, and they perform only with a lot of begging and pleading. But he's lost nothing off his fastball. He still "does the show."

I first met Mr. Pom Pom back when he was still little Mr. Po Po, and I was hanging around with Steve as he was practicing for a show. Mr. Po Po, who couldn't have been more than three, came into the empty nightclub with his brother and mother, listened to his father play for a minute, and announced: "It's too loud in my ears," and left.  Kids are smart. Mr Po Po was no exception.

But Mr. Po Po, um, er, I mean Pom Pom, is exceptional, I guess. He's a big old teenager now, and a year ago or so, he wrecked his car. Really wrecked it. And he wrecked himself in the process. Really wrecked himself.

When Steve told me about it, I could offer nothing, no words of encouragement, nothing I can remember saying that was any use to the guy. Mr. Pom Pom might not live. If a miracle happened and he did, he probably wouldn't be more animated than the furniture he was placed in. What could you possibly say to help a person deal with that?

Well, we all said lots of useless things. Mr. Pom Pom and his family are loved and respected by all and sundry and the outpouring of concern and grief and help, such as you could give, was outstanding. Still, there's nothing but faith, and when no one's looking, hope too.

Prayer is a kind of hope. When you ask an unseen, unknowable thing to help you, when you hurl your little troubles into the maw of a universe of hurt, you know in your heart that prayer's not a lever you pull and out comes the candy. You are making your peace with the idea of what might happen, with the faith that it all meshes into something worthwhile somehow, and you're simply saying: This is not up to me. Help that boy.

So you hope, even though no one's peddling hope anywhere near the kid. And he lays there, mute, bruised, bleeding, gone from sight; and his parents, his family, his friends- they wait.

I don't remember when the encouragement and love you saved for his parents was transferred over to Mr. Pom Pom himself; maybe it was when you saw him in a picture, still a mess, but eating ice cream in the hospital cafeteria. It was a long slog, but not so long as it might have been, and where would we go? We had hope, you see.

And so Mr Pom Pom got up on stage with his brother, in front of  his beaming father and the assembled throng that knew him, and where he had been, and how he had returned, and he played a few songs, just  like he'd done before any of this hope was necessary. The scar was still bright on his forehead, and he walks ever so slightly stiffly, and sometimes there's a little hitch in his speech, but not so's you'd notice. This too shall pass, it's only been a year.

And they call their makeshift combo: "Those Amazing Vegetables." Steve used that as a joke band name after he saw it on a nutrition poster in a Doctor's office many years ago. It must sound wry and tasteless, and a little like whistling past the graveyard, if you didn't know it predated Mr. Pom Pom's accident by many years.

He was almost a vegetable. Now he's just amazing.

July 25th-

G'Day

We traveled to New Hampshire this weekend, to Lake Winnepesaukee. Or as my son calls it, Lake Hockeypesockey. It's a long haul from Marion, Mass, but a new wonder has appeared on our horizon. In a fit of benevolence, generosity, and good sense, The Big One's Nonni (Grandmother for all you non-Italians) gave a portable DVD player to him for his birthday present, and to celebrate his scholarship this last term. She has re-discovered fire, or a close approximation of it. Because one run through The Spongebob Movie and The Rutles, and we were already at the Lake before the kids even knew we had left home.

Alexander, Caesar, Magellan, Columbus, Newton, McCormick, Edison, Einstein- pfffft. All pikers compared to Nonni, and whoever got up one morning, drove to work, and said to the people in the cubicles outside their office: "Let's make a DVD player you can take in the car. Have it on my desk by close of business Friday."

The lake's a whole different animal from the ocean. It's really enormous, so the scale of it doesn't suffer, but it's a "power boat" place. Sailboat types don't care for power boats, and vice versa, but you "get" the whole power boat thing at Winnepesaukee. Walk to the end of the path, walk to the end of the dock, step on board, and blast out to the middle of the lake. We did just that, in the middle of our first night, with only the full moon for our illumination, and were safe and content, and owned that lake from end to end, or so it seemed. There's really no sound more pleasant on a hot summer night than shutting off the motor on a boat, and drifting across the moonlit water, the gentle windblown waves lapping the side of the skiff, and the sound from countless lakeside homes drifting out across the lakes, soft and indistinct, but recognizable as the sound of laughter and conviviality, and, well, fun.

During the day, swimming, and jet skis, and waterskiing, and the dumb fun of being dragged on an inner tube. The Wee One sits in the water to his waist, and splashes, and giggles, while the Big One practices his backstroke swimming lessons ten feet further out: Eagle, Soldier, Monkey, Eagle Soldier, Monkey... The Queen watches both easily, as the beach is filled with people just like us, and everybody is everybody else's friend instantly, and the children drift easily into hijinks with their numerous new compatriots. No one is really a stranger, if they have children and a mortgage. The rest is details.

At night, there was a party, right there on the sand, and a band played everybody else's favorite song, and wasted no time with anything obscure and nothing angry sounding. Music that sounds fun is rarer than it should be these days. The music industry has become a competition to see who can express deep emotional scars and trumpet dissonant lifestyles to go with the dissonant chords, wrapped in chainsaw sounds and screaming, and forgetting that life's really not all that bad. I've noticed that among people who's lives truly aren't easy, they never listen to depressing music. Life's too short to have misery for entertainment too. Teenagers like nasty sounding stuff, but I suspect that people with four square meals a day, a summer house, and a jet ski have little to complain about, and must enjoy snarling pop music mostly as a change of pace from their easy life. I suspect that ghetto music has become nastier as life has improved there as well. Forty years ago, it was no picnic to live in a Detroit slum, and they listened to Motown. Now rappers spit out venom, and live like pashas. Such is life.

The Motown still sounds, fine, if you're interested. We heard some, on Saturday, and it still encapsulates our shared experience, and the pleasure of a simple melody, well sung:

I've got sunshine, on a cloudy day

When it's cold outside- I've got the Month of May

I'd guess you'd say- What can make me feel this way

My Girl

Perhaps as you get older, and the number of funerals you attend begin to outnumber the weddings, and you've tried to catch the curve balls that life throws everyone, rich or poor, and dropped a few, you begin to value the person that can distill a smile, or better still, a pat on the back or a hopeful dream, and can sugar-frost that mental medicine with music and recharge your batteries.

I don't need no money- Fortune or fame

I've got all the riches baby- One man can claim

I'd guess you'd say- What can make me feel this way?

My Girl

How did those men from Detroit know all about my wife, and sing about her, four months before she was born? It's a mystery.

July 22nd-

Hi.

The weather is perfect. Warm, dry, sunny.

We're delivering some furniture to Wrentham Antiques Marketplace today. They were featured on Boston's Channel Five "Chronicle" newsmagazine last week. Chuck McStay had some sound advice for people shopping for home furnishings: Buy what you like.

The hosts of the show discussed that approach at the end of the show for a little while, like it was a revelation to them. It's funny how far out on an intellectual limb you can climb out before the advice " stop sawing" starts to sound good. The idea that you should fill your home with items that you chose yourself because you like them is news? All good advice sounds like news, I guess, since it's so much rarer than bad advice. Chuck and Kathy are charming and their store is elegant and fun. Who knew they were so smart, too?

I've written about Wallace Nutting here before. I have a great regard for his insight into American furniture. His injunction: "If it's new, it's no good." would seem to be at cross purposes with "Buy what you like."

It's not. We are not blank slates, but neither are we all finished before we start. We can get advice along the way, and take it or leave it as we see fit. We have a catalog of misfortunes and triumphs, attempts and retreats, information and bunkum in our head that we use as our ruler to measure the world. We get into trouble when someone has The Answer, and we end up with a leopardskin chair that looks like a giant shoe in our living room. And we wonder: What was I thinking? The short answer is: You weren't. You were following some advice you got, or intuited, that this was the Hot Thing, and it wasn't tempered by the idea that this might not be look so swell to me in a few years. Months, maybe. Actually, It kind of struck me funny while I was unwrapping it.

Nutting wasn't being rigid in his thinking, just generalizing. He was also very careful to point out that just because something was old, that didn't make it good. It just meant it was still around. He was very incisive in his judgments between one antique and another, and set the tone for really good decorating advice from professional appraisers since.

Good decorating advice is an attempt to inform and lead, not shove. Home decoration is a very personal thing, and trying to bend your life into a rigid framework of another's making is a recipe for disappointment. And discomfort.

Nutting knew that furniture design in the past had been based on the three big legs that hold up the furniture world: Commodity, Firmness, and Delight. In other words, is it comfortable, is it sturdy, is it lovely? Ask your self that question every time you purchase any item that will add or subtract from the sum total of your happiness. Faddish items almost always lack at least one of the three characteristics, and sometimes two, or all three. We live in a society unknown to our forefathers, where making things deliberately ugly, and making people uncomfortable, is considered artistry. Eventually, decorators and furniture makers pushed as far as you could go, and variations on the theme of Commodity, Firmness, and Delight were tougher to invent.

There was only one easy way to be a trailblazer: I'll make it ugly, on purpose. I'll exaggerate its proportions, to disorient the viewer. I'll make it uncomfortable, to challenge the user. I'll make it flimsy looking, to unsettle the user, or actually flimsy, who cares if it lasts? And I'll use my iconoclasm to aid in my self-promotion, and bad will be good, and I'll be unusual. I'll make music that sounds like a china closet being pushed out a window onto a herd of dyspeptic elephants. At least no one will say I was trying to copy Mozart.

Apply this sort of thinking to the other aspects of your life. Why not bathe in lava? Water's so yesterday. Why not eat poison ivy salad with motor oil vinaigrette? Insalata mista is on too many menus already. I must do something new! Why just get two breast implants? Three would be better. Three is better than two, right?

What Nutting was talking about, and what Chuck McStay was talking about, and what Mary Richards and Peter Mehegan were talking about Chuck talking about, and what I'm talking about talking about talking about, is using the old approach to serving humanity to choose the items that ennoble and lend interest and comfort to your life, and your backside if they're upholstered.

Commodity, Firmness, Delight.

July 21st-

Hola amigos

I'm rereading a book about houses in 18th Century Williamsburg. Strangely enough, it's called "The Eighteenth-Century Houses of Williamsburg." by Marcus Whiffen. If it was published today, it would have a cover that said something like:

"Torn From Yesterday's Headlines-The Exciting True Story of the Heat and Passion of our Passionate Hot Forefathers and Mothers:"

"The Desperate Bodice Stitchers of Williamsburg!"

Or something.

It was published in 1960, so they just told it like it was. I'd rather read one book like this than a metric tonne of fiction anyday. The only bodices that get ripped are because they  caught them on a stray nail while burning quicklime in a brick kiln, but I can do without the "excitement." It's interesting enough as it is.

Colonial Williamsburg seems like an interesting place, one that I might like to visit. I've been to Washington DC's monuments, and Mount Vernon and so forth, but never Williamsburg. We'll have to wait until the Wee One is a little older, I think, as he will no doubt try to single-handedly re-enact the sack of Washington by the British during the War of 1812, and discommode the passersby, but we'll get around to it eventually.

John D. Rockefeller Junior bankrolled the collection and restoration of the houses there, if I recall correctly, and good for him. I always insist that the history that truly matters is not military history, but the march of events in the life of the great mass of citizens of a great nation that defines its progress. The clashing armies are important in that they define the ability  and willingness of a society to defend itself, and its will to do so. What they are defending is just as interesting to me.

How did people live? Dress? Labor? Raise children? Learn? What did they sit on, and what kind of dwelling did they live in? Places like Williamsburg catalog just these quotidian details, and bless them for it.

Really dry books like "Houses of Williamsburg" have the scholarly details that lend perspective to our own lives, when we see how far we have come, but also how much we still retain. I found one particularly telling detail in it. It's a contract for Indenture between an orphaned boy and a bricklayer. Here it is:

This Indenture Witnesseth that John Webb an Orphan hath put himself, and by these Presents doth voluntarily and of his own free Will and Accord. put himself apprentice to William Phillips of Williamsburg Bricklayer to learn his Art, Trade, and Mystery: and after the Manner of and Apprentice to serve the said William Phillips from the day of the date hereof for and during and unto the full end and Term of five Years next ensuing during all which Term, the said Apprentice, his said Master faithfully shall serve, and his Secrets keep, who's lawful commands at all Times readily obey; He shall do no damage to his said Master, nor see it to be done by others, without giving Notice thereof to his said master. He shall not waste his said Master's Goods nor lend them unlawfully to any...

To the modern eye, this looks like two paces from slavery. But not to the modern tradesman's eye. Because what you just read was essentially the same as the situation my peers and I entered into when we entered the building trades in the seventies. It wasn't written down, but it was spoken, or understood. I'll serve you faithfully if you teach me a trade is the bargain we all struck with someone older, wiser, and more experienced, but didn't mind having a seventeen year old around to pick up the 90 pound sacks of cement for him. And the only two questions asked of the prospective applicant were: Will you work hard? and: Will you stick around long enough to make my investment in your learning pay off? Answer yes, and you'd be pointed to a stack of something heavy that very minute.

In a very real way you were adopted like this fellow was. You were talking to the tradesman in the first place because you were his child, or nephew, or neighbor, or the son of  a fellow churchgoer or lodge member. Somebody had vouched for you before you ever got to stand nervously in front of the guy, while he wondered if those little arms of yours could lift what he needed lifted.

"Art, Trade, and Mystery" is wonderful. I've never heard it described better. Good construction work is an art, and so many poor souls flounder around these days because they learn the "art" in a desultory fashion, get stars in their eyes, and go out on their own without learning the "Trade" which refers to the business end of the deal. "Mystery" is the magnificent capstone to the trio of benefits. Specialized skills and knowledge are the heart of any trade, and customers know better than anyone that hiring a tradesmen to do anything for you is a descent into mystery. The plumber knows the mystery of making the contents of the toilet bowl disappear, and for that mystery you're glad to pay him.

There's sound advice for the young man later in the deed, (it is a deed we're reading from, just like title to a piece of property) although it's more than just advice in a contract like this:

He shall not committ Fornication, nor contract Matrimony within the said term. At Cards, Dice, or any other unlawful Game he shall not play whereby his said master may have damage...He shall not absent himself day or night from his said Master's Service, without his leave, nor haunt Alehouses, Taverns, or Play Houses, but in all Things behave himself as a faithful Apprentice ought to do...

If I had a nickel for every fellow tradesman I knew, whether working alongside me or employed by me, that had ignored exactly this kind of advice and ruined their lives, I'd be rich as Croesus. Tweak it a bit, and make it the first week of instruction in Vocational High School, and you'd have my support.

What's in it for the Apprentice?

...said Master shall you the utmost of his endeavors to teach, or cause to be taught or instructed the said Apprentice in the trade or Mystery of a Bricklayer and procure or provide for him sufficient Meat Drink Cloaths, Washing and Lodging fitting for an Apprentice during the said term of Five Years...

So at the end of five years, the young man would know everything he needed to know to be his own man, and be able to go out in the world and make his living. It's interesting to note that he's promised what is essentially a living wage for single young person and an education, nothing more, but nothing less either. He's not promised the 1700's version of and I-pod, or bachelor pad, or a bitchin' truck, or a sports car, or Nike shoes, or restaurant meals, thrice a day.

The employer has some serious obligations as well, alike in kind and importance to the contract. And I doubt the interdiction against gambling, booze and monkeyshines with girls is prudery, it's probably rooted in the knowledge that your clumsy  efforts won't support that kind of easy living for a long time yet, or egads, not a wife and family yet, so knock it off.

Anyway, there were no snout houses at Williamsburg, and no public welfare housing for people on the dole. Both the plans for the houses and the contracts for the workmen were drawn up by amateurs, not professionals, and they're ten times better than what we have for the same things now, drawn up by legions of professionals and lawyers.

There's a lesson in that somewhere. I'm not exactly sure where. I'm an amateur philosopher, not a professional. But I assure you, in 1975, I would have signed that document, and been the better for it.

July 20th-

It's been hot here. Sticky hot. The Queen takes the children to the beach each day. It's at the end of the street we live on, just a few miles. The beach in our town is an afterthought, really; the town's anima is centered around being on the water, not in it. But the Big One has swimming lessons at the beach, and the Wee One sits in the gentle lapping waves, up to his waist, and dredges sand through his fingers, and is content.

The beach has a lot of rules. I think the beach should have one rule: DON'T BE A JERK. That would about cover it. But things are never that simple anymore. People get together and start laying out the rules landscape, and forget when to stop. After a while, the rules, and especially the impetus behind the rules, starts to conflict with itself. And after a while, you could sum up the rules as: DANGER -WARNING -NO FUN ALLOWED. GAMBOLERS WILL BE CHASTENED.

Safety is paramount, to an idiotic degree. There's a float you can swim out to, and rest a spell, and swim back. Woe be it to anyone who dives off the float into the water. This is strictly impermissible. A few years ago, a youngster broke his neck diving into the water, and the town, with an eye towards lawsuits, forbade diving. But as I understand it, the poor fellow that hurt himself did so because he didn't dive off the float, he dove off a rock near the shore, into shallow water. If he had done what is now proscribed, he would have been fine. It's curious.

Judgement and reason are assumed to be beyond the capabilities of the average person here. And the idea that children should be policed by their parents is apparently no longer current.

Any plastic device for amusing yourself is not allowed. Now, I understand why the sign says: No Glass. Accidents happen, and broken glass at the beach I can live without. But glass is easily replaceable by other containers, and so no ox is gored. But the interdict against boogie boards, and inner tubes and so forth extends to water wings. They're  plastic, so no dice. In other words, safety is paramount to the nth degree- someone might get hurt!, so everything is banned, but taking a chance on a tot drowning  for the lack of two little rings of airfilled plastic is preferable to allowing some barbarian to show up with anything so declasse as, well...plastic anything.

Dogs are banned, of course. But why? It's not because the dogs really can't go to the beach and coexist with bathers; it's because civility has broken down to the point where people can't be expected to take responsibility for their animals. People bring really mean animals to public places now, and take pleasure in  menacing people. They always put you off with a "My dog doesn't bite," if you ask them to restrain their pit bull named "Satan" because he's menacing your children. And he leaves the brown, cylindrical objects in the sand that smell disagreeable when you step in them, and his owner can't be bothered to clean it up, or bring the dog off the beach when he's in the grunting mood. So no dogs. More rules, because no one remembers the Golden Rule. No not that one, the one I just coined, the new one: DON'T BE A JERK.

The beach is mostly empty these days, although the steamy heat has driven that Demosthenes of Boston, Hizzoner Mayor Tom Menino, to the radio each day announcing a weather alert and telling us in mumbled spoonerisms to drink lots of water and look in on shut-ins. Thanks for that, really. I was planning on sitting in front of the open oven door all day in a ski parka until you warned me off it.

 Note to Tom: After Demosthenes cured his faulty speech by filling his mouth with pebbles and yelling over the sound of the surf, he took the pebbles out. You seem to have left a few in there.

I read in the paper that eleven people have died of heat related causes in Phoenix this week, and it reached 116 degrees on the thermometer there. If you investigated a little further, you found that ten of them were homeless people, and you can't force them to stop drinking dehydrating liquor and come in out of the sun, there's a rule against that, and they died of heatstroke. The eleventh person was an elderly woman who was found in her apartment, which was equipped with air conditioning, which she had turned off. Waste not, want not got her.

So maybe mumbling Tom has a point. But people who used to look after the elderly, like their friends or relatives, did so because it was the right thing to do, not because the Mayor told them to. We live in a time where the national legislature feels the need to pass legislation called "Good Samaritan Laws," making it a crime to see someone in distress and refuse to help. But isn't it all the other laws and rules and codes and statutes that they passed, and the insane litigation that they turn a blind eye to, and sometimes encourage, that made us so distant from one another in the first place? People are afraid to interfere in anybody's affairs, not through an aversion of being a busybody, but because they're afraid of being sued. Or assaulted.

The Queen and the Wee One and the Large Child settled themselves on the blanket in the sand yesterday, and tried not to break any rules. Another party settled down beside them. They had brought a nuclear powered boom box, and felt no compunction to respect the wants or wishes of others a few feet from them, and blared rap music at flight deck volume. No one ever seems to blast Respighi at that volume, I've noticed.

Now my wife could go to the authorities in town, and dutifully, in a few days, the DPW would come on down to the beach, and add another line to the "Prohibited" sign, to specify music. And so the worst of us will make it impossible to have any music at the beach, which is unfortunate. That's not the way it should be done, and they'll find another way to annoy everybody next time, anyway. Because rules are for squares you know, the people who don't need rules on civility and parental probity in the first place. You know, people that don't want to listen to hateful misogynist singsong or death metal at the beach. Rules only apply to the people that need them least.

I say: Take down the sign with the laundry list of real and imagined threats to civility and safety.  Replace it with a smaller one:

DON'T BE A JERK

And give the lifeguard a pistol. Problem solved.

July 19th-

Buon Giorno.

I've done construction of one sort or another at a lot of houses. I've seen good, bad, indifferent, and superb architecture. I've worked on brand new stuff, as well as houses where people hid during King Philip's War to avoid a severe haircut, and everything in between. And I've seen the march of events in housing, framed with the perspective that comes with experience with what came before. And I have a library card.

Anyway, I think America has the best housing in the world. In almost any category you wish to measure, we live in the most comfortable and spacious digs on the planet. The average person in America has better and more reliable services to support that house to boot. Potable water comes out of the tap. Losses of electricity are rare, and usually of a short duration. When you flush the toilet, it goes somewhere. The phone always works. And we take these things for granted, and woe be to anybody who lets that reliability slip. A California governor tried an experiment a few years ago in intermittent electricity, and he's standing by the side of the road now holding a sign that says: "Will Run A State for Food"

The way Americans seamlessly integrate the manifold blessings of the world's factories and laboratories into their lives exceeds even the Victorians. Computers, voice mail, cable television, satellite television, satellite radio, game consoles, e-commerce, e-mail, flat screen monitors,  i-pods, compact disks, DVDs, and on and on. People find useful things, well, useful, and, well, use them, and don't give them much thought. Things are not the same everywhere.

When I visited Italy six years ago, we visited some long lost Italian relatives, who were considered very middle class by Italian standards, had no where near the creature comforts we enjoy here in the States. They had one little 21 inch television. He drove what was considered a big car in Italy, a four door Peugot that I could put in the back of my truck. My Italian cousin's teenage boy coveted a cell phone, and peppered me with questions about how much a cell phone cost in America. Now, something may have been lost between my pidgen Italian, and his third language English, but the gist of the conversation was that a cell phone cost a fortune in Italy, and there was an involved procedure to get one.  I explained to him that not only was the cell phone I had free, but the person who gave it to me for signing up for a monthly pittance of a service delivered it himself, to my home, for free, the day after I ordered it.

He looked at me like I was Baron Munchausen, telling tales. I think they counted the spoons when we left.

I invited my relatives to visit us in America, to try to reciprocate for their hospitality to us, but they weren't interested, and seemed to have the impression that America was something along the lines of the Wild West, and was too scary somehow. Not violent scary exactly, although there was a hint of that too, just too rollicking, or fast, or big or something.

Yes, yes we are.

How fast do things move along here? Here's some perspective:

Seven years ago I worked on a new big house near here. It had about 15,000 square feet of living area. That's big, isn't it? And it wasn't just a big old plastery space inside either; it was elaborately appointed as well. The owners were people I had worked for many times over the years, and are terrific people, generous and pleasant, and were raising a big crop of delightful children. The father of the brood had made a pile for himself by excelling in his field, and they decided to build a big old house with all the bells and whistles. It was pretty opulent.

The wife supervised the day to day activities as the house took shape, and we'd see the husband from time to time when he arrived home from work and looked in. One day, when the house was nearing completion, he visited the site, looked over the progress and the bills for that progress, and joked to us: "I gave my wife an unlimited budget for this place, and somehow she exceeded it." We all laughed, and he did too. Such is construction, no matter how much you're spending.

I never saw him really irate about any aspect of the proceedings, except once. The kitchen cabinetry was being installed. It was extremely well designed and made, and won't be out of style or worn out anytime soon. The kitchen featured everything kitchens in a house that elaborate always had: Granite counters, Jenn-Air grill, SubZero refrigerators- two, side by side; trash compactor, two dishwashers, big stainless range; in short, the high end of the spectrum, and lots of it.

The architect was there. He and the wife were planning on a location to add a wine refrigerator. The husband became perturbed, and then visibly and audibly angry. He considered a wine refrigerator an expensive and superfluous item. He said it was extravagant, and he had ten thousand dollars of refrigeration available already, and his wine could go in there. The house had a mahogany paneled dining room, a library, a conservatory, and murals on the ceilings, but it wasn't going to have an extravagance like a wine refrigerator. And so it was excised from the plans.

I was in Home Depot the other day, and I noticed a pile of wine refrigerators stacked to the ceiling. They were having a special on them. They cost well under $200.00. Here's a link to Price Grabber.com; they have one for $99.00. I am beginning to see them in two bedroom ranches now.

Seven years.

July18th-

Howdy.

We attended The Queen's family reunion over the weekend. She has a large extended family, and they gather once a year at one home to gab and gambol and make googoo eyes at the newest babies. It's quite pleasant.

There is a stale Hollywood and literary  formula about gatherings such as these, always highlighting internal tensions and conflicts. Everybody's  always dysfunctional and fight like scorpions. Well, it just ain't so. Everybody loves one another at the one I attended, anyway. They have an appetite for simple games that can be played in the yard, like horseshoes and badminton, and everyone jostles and chats amicably, all eased by the simple fun of the activities, and the cold can. 

And because I married into it, I am slightly less involved than those born to it, I guess. They make me feel welcome, of course, but I get more of an outsider's perspective. And it occurs to me that the stale formula I mentioned might be spot on for the kind of people who write movie scripts. They go through the motions of reuniting with their family, but it's a hollow and staid occasion, there's no feeling of blood, and kin, and shared experience, and commonality that enlivens the gatherings of families who really do care for one another like my wife's family does.

The only really familial situations Hollywood finds interesting anymore are mob weddings and poolside gatherings at porn movie makers' homes. Meh. They never seem to find "family" where it actually is.

Because I was not part of the "war effort," the important business of seeing that everyone was fed, and covered in sunscreen, and so forth, I was able to wander away unnoticed for a time, and walked the street in the host cousin's central Connecticut neighborhood. It was a languid, hot, sunny day, more Alabama than New England, and since the street has no traffic,  you could walk right down the middle of the hot pavement, and watched out only for  morning doves in the trees.

The street's lined with small ranches, built in the fifties and sixties, all cared for by their owners, who would wave as you passed before returning to their flower beds. I was struck by how little the houses had changed in the intervening fifty years since being constructed. There might be a satellite dish next to the TV antenna it replaced on the roofs, and there were no Dodge Darts with push button transmissions on their dashboards in the drives anymore, but it was about the same as it ever was. It looked like the sort of place where people who got on with their lives, got on with their lives. No pretension, but nothing gone to seed either. There are rooms inside my house  messier than the flower beds I saw. It looks essentially like where I grew up, preserved in amber.

Then I heard it. I hadn't heard it in so many years. I thought it was a joke, some hipster had it for a ringtone on their phone or something.  Ice Cream Man Music.

It was real, alright, and I traced the progress of the music and the unseen truck through nearby streets like a bloodhound. Pavlov couldn't come up with anything that talked to me, that affected my very brain stem, like that sound. Every single hot, dusty summer day in the sixties came rushing back to me at the same time, my friends' manifold noses lifted to the air like dogs to a scent; the whispered question: Did you hear that? And the shushing, and waving, and the faraway gaze with the head cocked to capture the sound and use your inborn direction finder. And the crazy tune all those trucks played would come into range, and you'd all sprint for home, to ululate at your mother:  The Ice Cream Man, The Ice Cream Man, Hurry up Mom,!  I mean, can I have a quarter? Hurry, please please please.

And you'd gather in the scrum of kids at the window of the truck, and get a popsicle, and it was like water in the desert on Christmas Day for five minutes. And when you were done, you'd sharpen the popsicle stick to a point by dragging it back and forth on the curbstone, and show it to your friends; and that was all the danger you'd ever have in that little neighborhood.

I went back to the yard, and everyone of a certain age commented on the Ice Cream Man, and how long it had been since they'd heard it, and how wonderful it was to recall their childhood instantly from that little tuneless tune those trucks played.

Someone got a bright idea and said: "Hey kids, the Ice Cream Man is coming!" Let's go!

The kids turned, and looked at us like we had enrolled them in Latin classes at a Reform School.

They had ice cream in their refrigerator, every day, ten kinds, and watched DVD movies in their cars on the way to the party. They were swimming in a pool we would have coveted fiercely when we were young, and bounced on a trampoline we couldn't have even imagined having in someone's yard 40 years ago. They had whirligigs and cameras, (film, what's film?) and fifty delicacies laid out  to try to tempt them to eat just one more.

And I realized that Ice Cream Man Music is only used in the soundtracks to bad horror movies these days, when someone's reaching for a carving knife, not a sharpened popsicle stick, and no kid in their right mind who's got a freezer full of Ben and Jerry's wants to haul ass out into the street to get a Creamsicle made by the low bidder, served to them by a moody loner who's registered at the police department, and has an GPS ankle bracelet.

Time marches on. I am glad for the easy prosperity I enjoy, and our children have. But I wonder what will be my boys' version of the Ice Cream Man music. The actual thing ain't cutting it.

July 15th-

Howdy.

I wish to tell you a story about humility. It won't take long.

The Big One was in the fourth grade this last year. By a trick of the calendar, he is the youngest there. If he was born three days later, he would have been in the third grade this last year. He's bright, and a tall drink of water, you know, so the 11 months between him and many of his schoolmates doesn't show much.

He attends what we used to call a parochial school. They're a little more interested in academic excellence there than in the local public school, and a lot more interested in the character of their charges, so we pony up the money and his mother schleps him the ten miles or so to school every morning, and back in the afternoon. The building he sits in all day isn't much to look at, and if it was the public school in town, it would have been replaced by now with something more elaborate. The world is upside down from when I was a child; now the private school just scrapes by, and the public school is palatial and new.

This might sound a little simplistic, but I asked my wife only one question about the school after she first found it and toured it with an eye to enrolling our boy: Are the desks in rows, or are they arranged in circles? Rows, she said. Case closed.

He likes it there, and he thrives.

Now, The Large One got excited about his science fair. It's a big one, he intoned. In the gymnasium. The whole school displays at once. Judges of knowledge and stature form the surrounding environs, including engineering students from the local college. I must win.

Winning's hard, I warned him. Everyone wants to win. It's in the trying, that we learn about winning, I told him, and pulled up short before lapsing into "giving 110%" and "stepping up," and so forth.

He'd have none of it. He had to get the ribbon, or perish trying.

He really did exert himself. I'd never seen him pay attention to anything except Playstation like this project. He went to the library, and picked his topic and books. He had his mother cart him over to Staples, to get poster board and such, and then to the supermarket, where he bought cooking oil, and molasses, and drew a few stares at the checkout line. He returned home, and went over his experiment. What in the blue sky are you doing I asked?

Why exhibiting and measuring miscibility on water of various common substances, father, he said in the tone of profound condescension I didn't expect 'til he was shouting in my ear trumpet, after he put me in a home in forty years.

What made you pick that?

Idunno.

I wish I could spell out the way he says I don't know. It's all one word, said in a comic fashion, and sounds approximately like I ugh no or perhaps ightno, and pronounced by a slav with a sore throat. It's his all purpose term for I dunno, and whatever, and so be it, or perhaps que sera, sera as well as occasionally: Don't bug me about whatever you're buggin' me about any more.

But he usually says that when you ask him how his day at school was while he's conquering the universe with his thumbs. It was jarring to hear him tell me, by inflection, that he was busy with his experiment, and wasn't interested in being questioned about it right now.

And he showed how the oil and the water didn't mix, and the density of the molasses made it fall to the bottom of the glass of water, but eventually dissolve, and something about emulsification I can't remember now for the life of me, that makes me think it won't be as many as forty years before I'm in that home. He did it all himself.

The he took out the poster board, made a triptych, and started scrawling all over it in his childish hand. The Big One's smart, but his penmanship is AWFUL. And he showed his hypothesis, and his procedure to test it, and his data, and his results and conclusions, and you needed a sort of infantile Rosetta Stone to decipher it. Is that an A, or an N?

God he was proud of it, and we couldn't help being touched by his earnestness. And then I forgot all about it.

The Science Fair is tonight Dad! You forgot. You have to go! I'm going to win!

I had forgotten, and had to rush around to make myself presentable and get him there on time. The Queen stayed home with the wee one. The Wee One, who is two, would have performed a different kind of experiment at the science exhibit. What happens when I tear all these things into little pieces and break them all into bits, and stomp on them, I wonder, and run around like a cave man troglodyte road raider?

So it was me and The Big One.

We entered the big room, and I was taken aback. Every exhibit looked like it was made by PHDs, with help from a team of Fine Art Majors, and a Computer Graphic specialist on standby. Well, every exhibit but one. My boy's stood out, that's for sure. Someone had slaved over choosing the fonts on the laser printed charts on the surrounding exhibits, and it showed. Miles still had magic marker on his fingers from scrawling his runes on the cardboard backboard. He had performed his experiment multiple times for his peers and the judges, and I leave it to your imagination what it looked like after a nine year old boy had mixed cooking oil, molasses, and water, over and over again, with his own unsteady hands. It looked like someone had been testing all natural hand grenades at this exhibit, and had to hose it down afterward.

The principal got up and started reading the list of winners. The winners would have their pictures taken for the local paper. The Big One was electrified. I'm going to get my picture in the paper!

 The Principal droned on. The prizes were being distributed lickity split.

I looked at my son's Great Molasses Disaster of 2005, and glanced up and down the aisle at the other exhibits. They were all magnificent. Someone had an entire solar system, in a slick black box, with each planet rendered beautifully in full color, and had managed to get the strings suspending the orbs to disappear. I couldn't see how they had done it. Another produced static shocks for the participants, and looked as though it could charge a quarter a play, and people would line up for it.

I thought I'd better temper The Boy's enthusiasm, lest he be too disappointed. Before I could say anything, he says: Dad, only the blue ribbon for the best of show overall is left, we should stand down front so I can go up to get it right away!

 And he took off, leaving me standing there with:

 "Son, you know there's no shame in ..."  half formed on my lips.

I hustled up to the front, amongst the scrum of expectant children and parents, and my boy.

Of course he won.

I was agog. More exactly, I was sticky from molasses, and I was agog. The Boy walked up and got his prize, and said a few inaudible words two feet below the microphone, and I was, well proud of him, but humbled.

Because the judges had seen what I should have seen and didn't. My boy had done it himself, and it showed. Boy did it show. But no matter. His experiment worked. It showed the properties he was trying to show. He drew the right conclusions, and scrawled them on his display. In short he did it, when others had it done for them, and the judges recognized it.

But the real lesson was learned by his old man. I'll never doubt that little urchin again.

July 14th 2005-

Good day to ye.

Let's be positive today. Nary a discouraging word, as they say.

O.K. I'm positive that Hollywood hasn't made ten movies as good and entertaining as "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House" in the intervening 57 years since it was made. Yup, I'm positive.

Hollywood is in a slump, according to Variety. People don't plunk it down reflexively at the box office any more. Lots of head scratching up and down the Sunset Strip. Well, let me give you some hints, over there on the west coast, about why we're not buying as much of this piffle as previously: It's because it's crap.

It always was crap, I know. When I was a kid, TV was in black and white, and had three or four channels. You watched whatever was on it. Period. And if you were home sick from school, propped up with pillows in the bed, fortified with those wonder drugs, aspirin and ginger ale, the one treat you got was the 11 inch black and white TV at the foot of your bed, and bad movies all day long.

TV, with only those three or four channels, still didn't know how they could possibly fill all those hours. They'd show any drivel: Candlepin bowling for a couple of bucks, or maybe just a gift certificate. Community Auditions. Anyone who's ever seen Community Auditions can't watch American Idol. Once you've seen the spectacle of an overfed adolescent in a tutu twirling a baton to a lounge combo version of a Sousa march, nothing else will do.

But of all the dreck, Dialing for Dollars was king. Dialing for Dollars was a local show, where a bad radio announcer would host an interminable movie in the afternoon, and occasionally pause to pick bits of a shredded phonebook out of a rotating basket, and call the phone number on the scrap. At first, the available technology didn't even allow you to hear the person being called, making the tableau seem even stranger than it was. If the person was home, and watching the movie, and could identify the movie, and knew the exact amount of cash they were giving away, they won a few bucks. Think of those odds. The unintentional comedy factor was pretty high; picture watching, watching mind you, a bad emcee count on his fingers and intone: One ring. Two rings. Three rings. Four Rings...

People would actually answer their phones back then, and talk to whoever was on the line. No call screening. No unlisted numbers. No cold call salesman. No answering machines yet. Hell, the host would still reach party lines occasionally back then. For you youngsters, a party line was a phone circuit that served several homes, because phone lines used to be precious, and expensive. The phone would ring slightly differently for each user, and your neighbors could pick up their phones and listen to your conversations if they felt like it. And so occasionally the host would be talking to three shut-ins at the same time, none of whom were watching his movie.

The host would mostly get elderly ladies, who didn't know what day it was, never mind what the movie was, and started talking to the guy as if they were restarting a conversation they had started in 1936, and he'd sit there, politely trying to get an interjection in edgewise, always failing, and looking at the camera like it was an oncoming freight train. Finally, he'd get the question out, and the women would say:

"What did you say your name was, again?"

And he'd always say: "Buh Bye" sweetly, and they'd add ten bucks to the till, and he'd PUT THE PHONE NUMBER BACK IN THE BIN. Try, try again, indeed.

The more upscale local station tried a bit of class by showing the same dreadful movies at midnight on the weekends, but with a host in a tuxedo. He'd stand on a set reminiscent of a Busby Berkley musical, in bow tie and tails, and try to find something interesting to say about the movie. There was a problem. The fellow hosting the show used to be Bozo the Clown on Saturday mornings, and we all knew it. And try as he might to be urbane, many of us would always look at him and smirk. That poor fellow spent his whole rest of his life trying to be suave and sophisticated,  but the greasepaint and fright wig always showed somehow, like a tattoo you got when you were young and drunk, and regretted for every waking moment for the rest of your life. 

Off topic perhaps, but I met his son once. I attended a party at the local junior college, the summer between high school and college. The college had always had the reputation as a place where wealthy people send their ne'er-do-well children to dry out and be babysat by the faculty, until they could ram them back into the real college that had expelled them for partying too much. My friends and I were just the poor local schlubs, very out of place, and must have looked like the dead end kids to these little inebriant fauntleroys. We were the guests of a lovely young lady who was dating a friend of mine. The movie host's son was there, drunk as a lord, and began hitting unmercifully on my friend's girlfriend, right in front of him. My friend could have disassembled the little blighter into his component limbs, and stacked them like cordwood if he'd had the mind to, but he was a gentle sort, and slow to anger. The little cretin eventually brought out what I'm sure he thought were his big guns: Do you know who my father is?

I butted in: "I sure do. He's Bozo!"

This was not the answer he was looking for. He withdrew.

Anyway, eventually you saw every movie ever made- good, bad or indifferent. Occasionally they'd show a good movie like "Blandings," by mistake perhaps. And you got a perspective on how hard it is to make a really good movie. It must be difficult, there's so many of them, but so  few  worth watching.

What I suspect, however, is that recently they're not really trying to entertain us anymore. They really don't seem to care that a vast majority of potential viewers, me included, don't need to see another movie about a hit man with a heart of gold. Forty five of them a year for the last ten years has fulfilled my need for comic murderers, thank you. I'd rather see stories about interesting and attractive people, like the Blandings.

 "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House" was made in 1948. It was essentially remade in the 1980s, with uneven effect, but still with enough of the original's luster to shine on through, as "The Money Pit." Tom Hanks and Diane from "Cheers" made a good comic team, and we own that one too and wqtch it occasionally. But Blandings is king.

Cary Grant is da bomb. Cary Grant is a movie star. Picture Tom Cruise sitting on a couch across from Jay Leno. That's a very small picture, even if you have widescreen television. Now picture Cary Grant sitting across from Johnny Carson. They're both too big for the screen, no matter how big it is.

Everybody in Hollywood is a homunculus compared to Cary Grant. He's dead, and in black and white, and my wife still reminds me: "You know, Cary Grant is a babe."

Grrr. Yeah, I know.

And unlike modern actors, he can act. Not Olivier acting.  I mean, "Hamlet" isn't in danger of breaking out in the middle of one of his movies.  But you only need so much Hamlet in your life; somebody tell a joke, will ya? Cary Grant knew how to.

And Myrna Loy was a babe. She had the looks of the woman you would marry, and stay that way. She started her career as a vamp, but morphed into a matron eventually. The vamp always showed, though, like a glimpse of garter, and I still remind my wife: "Myrna was a babe, you know."

Grrr. Yeah, I know, she says.

And Myrna knew how to deliver her lines for their full comic effect. Most actresses today sound like they're reading that shredded phonebook I mentioned earlier, aloud. Without their glasses.

The story is and interesting cultural artifact about city folks building their house out in the countryside. It's funny to hear them talk about Western Connecticut like it's out on the prairie, and bucolic as Vermont. Mr. Blanding's house would fetch tens of millions of dollars today. But the story is universal, for anybody that builds a house, and raises children, and works at a job. The humor is the sort that's a lost art these days. It's quiet, and self effacing, and subtle. Mark Twain used to rail against people that "told jokes." He knew how to be funny, which is to tell a story in a humorous way, and avoided punchline fodder. And a movie, a comic movie, is just telling a story in a humorous way, isn't it? It should be. This one is.

And it's interesting to look through the actors who have small parts in the movie. They all know what they're doing, and push the story along nicely. Only a a fetishist would recognize more than a few of them by name, but they all look familiar. Then you look up their resumes, and are amazed:

Louise Beavers, who plays their maid, and comes up with the advertising slogan that pays for that house, was in 163 movies!

Harry Shannon, the well driller, who has the best scenes in the movie, appeared in 149 movies. I vaguely remember him shooting at John Wayne, or shooting at the someone else with John Wayne, a few times.

Nestor Paiva, who plays an appraiser for 30 seconds in the movie, was in 186 movies.

And Jason Robards (Senior) knew how to work. He appeared in no fewer than 206 movies, and then had a son to be in a few hundred more.

And you know why they worked like that. They were professional, and people that knew how to write and produce movies knew enough to use accomplished and dependable actors, and tried mightily to entertain us. They still do entertain us,  though they're all dead now.

It's the live people in Hollywood that have forgotten how, or never knew.

July 13th 2005-

Greetings and salutations, my compadres.

You know me pretty well by now. You know I can't leave this "Best Places to Live 2005" thing from CNN/Money alone. I've got to crawl underneath it, check the hoses, look for hidden rust and concealed damaged, and maybe loosen the oil drain plug a little before I come back from under there, just for mischief's sake.

I'm not alone in this, I see. I've seen this thing referenced all over the web, and I'm sure that's why CNN/Money goes to the effort of rating places to live and then hunkering down under their desks in anticipation of  people disagreeing with their findings and throwing crockery.

My favorite item from the horde, perhaps, is this: "Pa. Town On 'Best Towns' List Does Not Exist." Apparently, Wexford, Pennsylvania is simply a Post Office designation for areas of four suburbs of Pittsburgh. There' s no such place, as it were. I will leave the effect of its non-existence on its suitability as a place to live up to the reader. I expect it's a terrific place for you to live with your imaginary friends from preschool. What's that? You had real friends in preschool? Well, get off the internet right now, this is a place for lonely shut-ins, not you. I also expect that despite the fact that the town doesn't exist, you'll still end up in jail if you don't pay your property tax to somebody.

I noticed Barrington, RI, is number six on the list. That's a short drive from where we are in Marion, Massachusetts, and that seaside town looks a lot like ours. I've got no beef with that one.

It's number three that really caught my eye, though. Naperville, Illinois. I was in Naperville two months ago. I have friends in Naperville, who moved there from Marion. A few years back, I directed the construction of two big service stations on the tollway there as well. Well, my friends took CNN/Money's advice, before CNN/Money even offered it, and moved to Naperville. And I'm in a position to tell if they've lost their minds, or lucked out.

Naperville is as far outside Chicago as Marion is outside Boston. Chicago is a great city. I'm not using "great" in the fashion of modern parlance, you know, swell, or nice, although it is a swell and nice city. I mean Chicago is a big, important city. I knew a lot about Chicago before I ever set foot in it, because I study architecture, and Chicago might be the most important architectural city in America. Louis Sullivan invented skyscrapers there. Frank Lloyd Wright annoyed the locals in Oak Park for a while, before spraying architecture all over the map, from Tokyo to Iraq and back. There are a lot of well known and notable buildings in Chicago. Boston is a great city, too, but it's very insular and small compared to a place like Chicago. Hell, there's only about 600,000 people living in all of what's called Greater Boston, which includes lots of suburbs. There's 130,000 people living in Naperville, never mind Chicago. Chicago is a big, booming, jostling, lively, friendly place. Even the panhandlers are polite. In Boston, even the beggars have a 'tude.

Well my friends have been in Naperville for a little while, and have meshed into the life there fully, and showed us around. They're not strangers to the midwest, and there's no fish out of water or Green Acres vibe to their story. They liked Chicago, and they sold their tiny house in Marion and bought an enormous home in Naperville, with money left over. They live on a quiet street, with neighbors who all share their approximate worldview, which is more important than many people think. Variety is not always the spice of life, and if you must get up to go to work at 6:00 AM, and your neighbor is hosting MTV video type parties outside your window every night, neither of you is going to be happy. He'll be dead, and you'll be in jail for killing him, or vice versa, eventually.

Variety isn't even always variety, now that I think about it. The guy annoying you next door might just be a jerk, but he might not even be an exotic jerk. And I often find myself more in tune with people who don't look much like me, at  least as far as the census takers think. America, thank god, has always been a place where you left tribalism at the door, and coalesced into communities and institutions voluntarily, with people whose company you enjoyed. And everyone seems to be enjoying each other's company in Naperville.

Naperville had a very important story to tell city planners as well. The story is: mind your own business. Naperville got as big as it did because two big highways were run right through it, and made the bustle of Chicago available to it. My friend, oh, let's call him Mr. Smith, works in Chicago and lives in Naperville. CNN/Money had a few trite and ill advised comments on how Naperville is tainted by the big roadways filled with megastores that have sprung up next to the highways. What nonsense. Here's their own words:

Drive for two minutes out of town in any direction and you're likely to be sitting in traffic on an ugly highway.

Duh. It's that "ugly" highway that makes the whole thing possible. I cringe when I hear stuff like that, and it's everywhere, you've seen it too, I'm sure. The only bosh worse is seeing people in print refer to wilderness or farmland that's "lost" to development. "Lost?" Was it ground into powder and shot into the sun? Is there a black hole where it was before?

The word they should use, and never will, is converted. But converted doesn't have that pejorative connotation that "lost" does, and they think it's a shame that other people, people like the Smiths, have a comfortable, convenient and safe place to live. There's a whiff of "Let them eat cake" to the term "lost to development." Or maybe: "I've got mine, and to hell with anybody else." I disagree with the sentiment, and I don't like cake.

By the way, farmland is never "lost" to development. Any time you want, you can buy 100 or so of those houses, bulldoze them, and plant potatoes again. What's stopping you? What's that you say? That would cost over $100,000,000.00 to do? Well, maybe, just maybe, the land is being used for a more cost effective and important use than growing potatoes now. You'd have to grow A LOT of potatoes to make that 100 mil back. And this may be a surprise to you folks that think we're "losing" farmland, but out near that highway that you find so objectionable, there's dozens of supermarkets that I imagine you find objectionable too, surrounded by parking lots that I imagine you find objectionable as well, filled with decent, hardworking, busy people that you probably find objectionable to boot, and there's still plenty of potatoes in those supermarkets for you to buy. And everything else from kiwi fruit to bok choi. So put a sock in it.

That last paragraph made me realize it's probably unwise to ask a guy named Sullivan about potatoes.

Where were we? Oh yes; the real story in Naperville, besides the solid and decent Mr Smith, and his vivacious and attractive wife, and his four boisterous and lovely children, is the downtown. There's a walkway along the river, which allows you to promenade, and sit a spell, and cool yourself on a hot day by sitting in the shade, and get away from the cars, but  still get to dozens and dozens of interesting places. The City of Naperville didn't try to pass laws against big box stores and all the other big businesses people love to profess hatred for and then shop at anyway. They zoned them out by the highway, on what we used to call "the main drag" around here, away from the downtown, where the acres of asphalt for multiple lanes and parking are a blessing, not a curse, because you drive there, and Napervillians can get what they need conveniently.

And those stores did what everyone fears they would do. They wiped out the little downtown businesses that tried to complete with Wal*Mart, and Home Depot, and all the rest. But why try to compete with those places? To extend that logic further, why not grow your own food? Get water from a well? Why not write plays and perform them in your back yard instead of watching TV?

Anyway, Naperville shrugged, got on with their more convenient lives, and used their tax money, including the massive tax receipts from those big stores by the highway, to improve the infrastructure of the downtown, and blessedly didn't try to put the area on life support.

 And pillar to post, downtown Naperville is a wonder. Really good restaurants, one after another. Upscale, downscale, ethnic, coffee shops, everything; and you can walk all over, because the real traffic is out near the highway, where it belongs. Antique stores, really good bookstores, one after another. Real clothing stores, not just places with acres of drop ceilings above and linoleum below and polyester in between. Pastry, candy, toys, stuff and junk, store after store. Nightspots you might like to visit, if you could find a babysitter, and you can, because you live in a neighborhood where everybody knows each other. In short, the precise thing that every planning board, zoning board, and conservation committee in the country is trying to legislate, and never seems to achieve. And nobody's on business welfare, and they don't exist because they have enough pull to legislate competition out of their town. They are there only  because they Naperville public likes what they offer, and patronizes them.

I could live in Naperville, and I'm fussy about where I live. I bet you could too.

But there's no ocean. Never mind.

July 12th-2005-

Ahoy there, mates.

CNN/Money Magazine is out with their "Best Places to Live 2005" extravaganza, and as usual, it's a lot of laughs. I look forward to it, and tinker with its search and statistics features, and just generally enjoy myself with "what if" scenarios, and jape a little at what CNN/Money thinks makes a place swell.

Now, they've chosen Moorestown, New Jersey, as the best place to live in the US. I must admit, I've never been to Moorestown, at least I don't think I have, but I've been all around it. It's down near Philadelphia, and not too far from NYC, and looks OK from the profile on CNN/Money. But that's not good enough, is it? So I went to Moorestown on the web, their own  town page, and looked around.

It was refreshing to see how humdrum the place looked. No big ideas here. Big ideas are usually bad in the quality of life arena. No one is trying to save the earth, or mankind, or get everyone to march in rows in black shirts, giving a stiff armed salute. They just want you to know when the trash is being picked up, and where to find the field hockey practice, and to thank a town employee for years of service at their low visibility job. And that's how you can tell that good people are having a good life in Moorestown, and places like it elsewhere. They keep away from the excitement of having a Supreme Court case on eminent domain named after them, and let people get on with their lives, it appears.

The "top places" page has an interesting matrix on the right side of the page. It lists 8 preferences you can specify, from not important to very important, in categories like crime rate, pollution, available leisure activities, and so forth.

Now you know I just have to monkey around with this, don't you?

First, I play it straight. I play along, and put in my preferences. Crime's bad, right? I thought so. let's see, Low auto insurance? Please, I'm from Massachusetts. Auto insurance here is the financial version of a hostage situation, so anywhere's better than here, right? Fiddle with Cultural Options, whatever that means. I guess they mean if you just have to see a woman in a run-down theater, smearing herself with chocolate and reading a phone book, and occasionally yelling Vagina!, nothing else will do. Although I did notice Moorestown was doing Oklahoma. Good for them.

I checked the box that leaves out Frostbite Falls, Minnesota, and other such places where flashers just describe themselves to passersby in the winter, instead of opening their coats. And the answer is: Apparently I want to live in Hawaii.

No I don't.

Well, let's try beating on this thing. Let's say I'm a big deal. Money's no object, since I don't have any. Let's put "Very Important" next to every item, and see what it says:

25 places in New York and New Jersey.

I think this thing is telling me more about the people that wrote it, than about where to live. I noticed some places where I'd keep one hand on my wallet, and another on my sidearm, when I was was out promenading. Maybe it's just me.

I know, let's try saying: I'm a narcoleptic drunk with a trust fund, and don't care where I live. I'll never leave the house much. (Don't laugh, in Massachusetts, a narcoleptic drunk can become a Senior Senator). Let's put in CNN/Money's version of "I don't care about anything." Crime, pfft. Pollution? Love Canal has lovely rainbows in the water. Things to do? I'm gonna lay on the couch in my shorts and eat bon-bons and drink from an amber bottle all day, who cares? So we fill it in with: I don't care about anything, and voila:

The same 25 cities in New York and New Jersey.

 In fairness, they do seem to be in a different order, at least here and there, and so I figure my internet connection still works. But you people from CNN/Money need to get out more. I mean from that office building in New York.

So here's what we know so far: If you demand the finest of everything that the United States of America has to offer, move to Tenafly, New Jersey, or thereabouts. And later, when you become a disillusioned and nihilistic misanthrope, and don't care a fig where you live, you won't have to move. CNN/Money said so.

I looked up Tenafly on Google images. Real Estate listings come up first, as they often do when you enter a city and state. Behold what Google thinks Tenafly looks like:

The CNN/Money search engine needs one more button, to make it more useful to me. Right under the button that says no cold weather, which does a grave injustice to entirely salubrious places filled with wonderful people like Minnesota and Wisconsin, I need one that says:

No Snout Houses

July11th-2005-

Well, (announcer voice) The 76th Annual Summer Classic, Baseball's All Star Game (end voice) is tomorrow. Try to curb your enthusiasm.

I'm not going to watch the dratted thing, are you? Don't get me wrong. I like baseball. There was a time when I'd watch the All Star Game. But the game itself used to seem to mean a lot to the players, and their enthusiasm rubbed off on the viewers. But the players don't care a fig for the thing now, and treat an invite to it like something that they picked up on their shoe, and that's what rubs off on the viewer now.

I think it was Seinfeld that observed  that we don't root for anybody in sports anymore, we root for the laundry. I agree. The biggest mistake any sport can make is to put the player's names on the jerseys, and they've all made that mistake now. Professional athletes are creeps.

There was a behavioralist and philosopher named Huizinga, that analyzed the British schools' use of sports like rugby to instill moral values in their participants, and tried to explain the mechanics of organized sports. He said, "Play is the school of rules." And before the advent of big time, organized sports, with big money involved, he was right.

Then professional sports became very big time, and lucrative for more than the owner and the concessionaire, and the paradigm was blown all to hell. You can't learn or teach anything  about good sportsmanship, team play, effort, the benefits of regular practice, or anything else productive by observing professional team sports of any kind. And they're all professional sports now, or function as minor leagues for the pros. The reason people are assaulting each other at T-Ball games these days is they think their kids are gonna get somewhere in the sport as a pro, if they just yell at him enough and get the coach to let him play every inning, instead of taking his turn like the rest.

And all that's a joke. Pretty much everyone that plays big time sports these days is a physical freak. You can practice all you want, but if you can't turn the bat around on a 95 mile an hour curve ball, and get your bat on it too, all the effort and desire in the world won't help you. And some guy like, let's say Cecil Fielder, who absolutely refused to do much more than show up, and for who "training" consisted of missing his third breakfast for a few weeks in the spring, got paid all that money because he could do it, and you couldn't, and that's that. And as they say in basketball, you can't teach height.

And I don't want to hear anything about the charity stuff. Ted Williams used to sneak across the street from the ballpark and look in on  little sick children when no one was looking because he was a decent human being. Now a publicist calls the local paper, two dozen photographers, and a couple of television stations, and breathlessly tells them to make sure they hustle over to the hospital, a celebrity athlete will deign to lay hands on whatever sick children they can find, and their magnificent importance will no doubt cure those children, and don't forget to mention that the big celebrity's foundation donates almost 4% of the donations it receives to.. to... well, we forget what the affliction is, but I assure you the celebrity cares deeply about being a Big Deal around it, and playing golf in its name.

But I still enjoy listening to a baseball game on the radio. The game is perfect for the radio. You can picture the whole thing easily with a little description, and the lazy pace doesn't bother you if you listen to it while doing something else. Football is made for the TV, basketball too, but hockey shouldn't even be allowed to televise its games, go to the rink. And turn on the radio for baseball.

If there is a broadcast medium appropriate for women's basketball, or bicycling, or soccer, I haven't seen it, and I imagine only dogs can hear it.

But let's celebrate the All Star Game in our own way. Baseball players have always been the dumbest of all professional athletes, and that's saying something. They say funny things all the time. Unintentionally funny usually, but funny nonetheless. When Yogi Berra is your elder statesman, you're not exactly the halls of academe. So let's let them entertain us, without having to listen to any drivel about giving 110%, and "stepping up." We'll restrict our efforts to players from the distant past, because I'm not that interested in why Albert Belle ran over trick-or-treaters, or why perhaps Sammy Sosa feels he needs both steroids and a corked bat.

On Sportmanship:

"No, we don't cheat. And even if we did, I'd never tell you."

Tommy Lasorda

"I've played a couple of hundred games of tic-tac-toe with my little daughter and she hasn't beaten me yet. I've always had to win. I've got to win."

Bob Gibson

"How you play the game is for college ball. When you're playing for money, winning is the only thing that matters."

"If I were playing third base and my mother were rounding third with the run that was going to beat us, I'd trip her. Oh, I'd pick her up and brush her off and say, 'Sorry, Mom,' but nobody beats me."

Leo Durocher

"If you know how to cheat, start now."

Earl Weaver

"I didn't begin cheating until late in my career, when I needed something to help me survive. I didn't cheat when I won the twenty-five games in 1961. I don't want anybody to get any ideas and take my Cy Young Award away. And I didn't cheat in 1963 when I won twenty-four games. Well, maybe a little."

Whitey Ford

"I'd always have it (grease) in at least two places, in case the umpires would ask me to wipe one off. I never wanted to be caught out there with anything though, it wouldn't be professional."

Gaylord Perry

"When I began playing the game, baseball was about as gentlemanly as a kick in the crotch."

Ty Cobb

On Race Relations:

"I don't care if the guy (Jackie Robinson) is yellow or black, or if he has stripes like a god-damn zebra. I'm the manager of this team and I say he plays."

Leo Durocher

"I don't think baseball owes colored people anything. I don't think colored people owe baseball anything, either."

Bob Feller

"In a world filled with hate, prejudice, and protest, I find that I too am filled with hate, prejudice, and protest."

Bob Gibson

"I'm coming down on the next pitch, Krauthead (Honus Wagner)."

Ty Cobb

"They've got so many Latin players we're going to have to get a Latin instructor up here."

Phil Rizzuto

"I don't see why you reporters keep confusing (Brooks Robinson) and me. Can't you see that we wear different numbers?"

Frank Robinson

On Charity:

"He'd (Reggie Jackson) give you the shirt off his back. Of course he'd call a press conference to announce it."

Catfish Hunter

On Humility:

"After Jackie Robinson, the most important black in baseball history is Reggie Jackson, I really mean that."

Reggie Jackson

"The only reason I don't like playing in the World Series is I can't watch myself play."

Reggie Jackson

On Teamwork:

"The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided."

Casey Stengel

"The more self-centered and egotistical a guy is, the better ballplayer he's going to be."

Bill Lee

"Gee, its lonesome in the outfield. It's hard to keep awake with nothing to do."

Babe Ruth

On Religion:

"God watches over drunks and third baseman."

Leo Durocher

On The Love Of The Game:

"All last year we tried to teach him ( Fernando Valenzuela) English, and the only word he learned was million."

Tommy Lasorda

"When we played, World Series checks meant something. Now all they do is screw up your taxes."

Don Drysdale

"The will to win is worthless if you don't get paid for it."

Reggie Jackson

"These days baseball is different. You come to spring training, you get your legs ready, your arms loose, your agents ready your lawyer lined up."

Dave Winfield

On Physical Fitness:

"They say some of my stars drink whiskey, but I have found that ones who drink milkshakes don't win many ball games."

Casey Stengel

"The good Lord was good to me. He gave me a strong body, a good right arm, and a weak mind."

Dizzy Dean

"When I came over here (the National League), I always heard it was a stronger league, with amphetamines all over the clubhouse, but all I found was Michelob Dry."

Dan Quisenberry

"I'll promise to go easier on drinking and to get to bed earlier, but not for you, fifty thousand dollars, or two-hundred and fifty thousand dollars will I give up women. They're too much fun."

Babe Ruth

The Intellectual Side of the Game:

"He (Branch Rickey) must think I went to the Massachesetts Constitution of Technology."

"The doctors x-rayed my head and found nothing"

Dizzy Dean

"How can I play baseball if I'm stupid? If I was stupid I wouldn't have pitched in the World Series. I'd be playing ball in Mexico or Yugoslavia or on Pluto."

Joaquin Andujar

"Reading isn't good for a ballplayer. Not good for his eyes. If my eyes went bad even a little bit I couldn't hit home runs. So I gave up reading."

Babe Ruth

"Baseball is ninety percent mental. The other half is physical."

"I'm not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did."

Yogi Berra

On Motivation:

"A manager should stay as far away as possible from his players. I don't know if I said ten words to Frank Robinson while he played for me."

Earl Weaver

On Effort:

"He (Darryl Strawberry) is not a dog; a dog is loyal and runs after balls."

Tommy Lasorda

"I think about the cosmic snowball theory. A few million years from now the sun will burn out and lose its gravitational pull. The earth will turn into a giant snowball and be hurled through space. When that happens it won't matter if I get this guy out."

Bill Lee

"All I had was natural ability."

Mickey Mantle

"I know I'm the world's worst fielder, but who gets paid for fielding? There isn't a great fielder in baseball getting the kind of dough I get paid for hitting."

Dick Stuart

On Dreaming of The Big Leagues:

"You got a hundred more young kids than you have a place for on your club. Every one of them has had a going away party. They have been given the shaving kit and the fifty dollars. They kissed everybody and said, 'See you in the majors in two years.' You see these poor kids who shouldn't be there in the first place. You write on the report card '4-4-4 and out.' That's the lowest rating in everything. Then you call 'em in and say, 'It's the consensus amoung us that we're going to let you go back home.' Some of them cry, some get mad, but none of them will leave until you answer them one question, 'Skipper, what do you think?' And you gotta look every one of those kids in the eye and kick their dreams in the ass and say no. If you say it mean enough, maybe they do themselves a favor and don't waste years learning what you can see in a day. They don't have what it takes to make the majors, just like I never had it."

Earl Weaver

July 8th- 2005-

I wish to give you a gift. Think of me as your Salvation Army. I have something that I can no longer use, that I wish to give to others so it does not go to waste. I want you to have, and enjoy, and share, my Linguine con Gamberi.

Now it's not really my Linguine con Gamberi. But I've made it so many times, with so many variations, that people began to associate it with me. It's really Anne Casale's recipe. But since the architect doesn't get to live in the house, he just draws the plans, I think I can get away with calling it "mine"

I've included a link for Anne Casale's "Italian Family Cooking" in the left column. I assure you, it is the most useful and best Italian Cookbook you can buy. Page 89: Linguine con Gamberi. I did that from memory. I haven't looked up the recipe in 15 years, but I remember the page number. So you know it will make an impression on you, if you remember it like that.

Gamberi refers to the shrimp. I loved shrimp. When my beautiful wife and I were first married, we were broke. We lived in a crummy apartment, and worked a lot, and had little disposable income. And for a treat, we would get a quart of ice cream, and watch Northern Exposure, and were blissfully unaware that we needed anything more. And we would very occasionally scrape up enough money to eat in a good restaurant. We would never eat in a bad restaurant, or egad, a fast food restaurant, because we would rather eat spaghetti and marinara sauce night after night, and peanut butter every noon, and hoard our "little all," than dissipate it willy-nilly on bad restaurant food. And because we never dared risk squandering our little treat by risking eating at unknown places, we found the finest meal we could think of, and ate it at the same restaurant over and over.

Legal Sea Foods had a few places within a half hour of our home, and we took advantage of it. They were first well known for a no-frills- picnic table- paper napkin kind of unpretentious fish house vibe, that had to yield when a simple lobster began to cost over twenty bucks. Twenty years ago, twenty bucks was a pile of money to pay to eat an enormous boiled cockroach no matter how much drawn butter came with it.They became more upscale, as did we all, and now the soul food fish shack vibe is long gone. The food's still terrific. At least I think it is, I have to avoid it like a leper colony now.

We'd sit and wait for a table; not too long, that's important, but long enough to let the ice work on your  Bombay Gin and tonic and make it perfect. Why, yes, I think I could do with another, my fine man.

Then to the table, and 1/2 dozen really fine oysters on the half shell, with horseradish and tabasco. My wife would wonder who the hell the maniac she married was when I ate those, and had the cholesterol  soup fish chowder while I slurped the awful things down. Sometimes we had calamari, sliced into ringlets, battered and fried, mixed with little rings of hot peppers, a dish I bet you can find at coffee shops now, but new and wonderful a few decades ago. And then, we'd both order the same thing for our entree, every time, and elicit stares from fellow diners when we offered each other bites from our identical dishes, for the love of sharing I guess, or perhaps on  the off chance our own was only sublime, and the other's  was better still: Shrimp and garlic, on angel hair pasta.

It sounds so simple, and trite, but all really good food is simple, just made well from very good ingredients. White wine of course. Then black coffee, and Bon Bons, little frozen dollops of ice cream, coated with really fine chocolate. And you'd sit there, when it was all done, spent from the exertion of enjoying yourself, and glowing  with the effects of a really fine meal, shared with the person you love above all others, and looking in wonder at how appetizing even the little pool of olive oil and garlic in your empty dish looked. 

Shrimp is the king of all seafood, I think. And I can't eat it any more.

The doctor said it was like a switch being thrown somewhere in my body. Could've happened anytime. Couldn't have been predicted. I said: mmmmffglloffffmmmnfrp. My face was the size of basketball, my heart was playing the drum solo from In A Gadda Da Vida, (the extended version,) I had hives with their own zip codes, and the emergency room nurse had to place a rubber glove filled with ice between my eyes, or I wouldn't have even been able to see the doctor. Diagnosis: Anaphylactic shock. Cause: seafood and shellfish.

 Treatment: No more Linguine con Gamberi.

Well, we adapt, don't we?  I have friends who to this day ask my wife, when we're all out to dinner, sotto voce,  if it's OK if they have shrimp, they don't want to depress me by having it brought to the table. That's a friend, I tell you. Go right ahead,  I don't mind, really I don't.  And I'm going to prove I don't mind, by giving it to all you lovely people too.

Page 89. Don't forget the Pinot Grigio.

July 6th, 2005-

No offense, but you people are getting predictable. I already know what you're going to say, for instance, when you see the picture I've got today: "Oh my god, he's lost his marbles, he's got a picture of a fireplace in July."

Yes; yes I do. And unrepentantly. The Sippican cottage fireplace is the locus around which our whole domestic world revolves, and it's about time I told you about it. Try to put that bathing suit from yesterday out of your mind for a moment.

I've read that San Diego, California, and a town in southern Italy, I forget the name, have the ideal climate for human beings. That's wrong, I think. Don't misunderstand me, I've been to San Diego lots of times, and lolled about in Balboa Park, and annoyed the animals in the zoo, and it really is a swell place. My mother's side of the family hails from southern Italy, and the landscape and the people there are no strangers to me. I visited the middle of the peninsula in the dead of winter, and needed only a sportcoat and the occasional shot of grappa to keep me warm. But I fear that the people who figured that those two places were the most salubrious in the world, were doing a little arithmetic, when they should have been doing calculus.

They figured room temperature, the one where the most people feel at ease, is 72 degrees. San Diego and fill in the blank Italy are 72 degrees outdoors, or the closest to it on this planet the most often.

 But that's not the whole story.

If you're in a room, and the temperature is neither too hot or too cold, you're not comfortable, you're just not hot or cold. Comfort is a complicated thing, and it entails more than avoiding standing in front of the open refrigerator for too long, or sticking your head in the oven when it's on. Comfort is the feeling of physical and mental well being that we strive for, and talk about, and seek, but can't define easily.

The days are long, and sunny and warm, here in early July in Massachusetts. But the idea that the winter will be welcome when it arrives isn't that crazy, and enters into even my mind, the guy that loves sailing and hot weather, if just because I know it will kill all the mosquitoes. 

Ellsworthy Huntington, in 1925 wrote something that Paul Johnson, the magnificent historian, brought to our attention in his "A History of the American People:"

"The evidence shows that human beings function most effectively outdoors at temperatures with a mean average of 60-65 degrees Fahrenheit, with noon temperature 70 average, or a little more. Mental activity is highest when the outside average is 38 degrees, with mild frosts at night. It is important that temperature changes from one day to the next: constant temperatures, and also great swings, are unfavorable- the ideal conditions are moderate changes, especially a cooling of the air at frequent intervals"

Well, hello Marion. And hello Mr Hearth:

Look, they're reading by the fire. Mental activity is highest, etc. etc.

There simply is no substitute for fire. We are cavemen in suits and ties, nothing more. And just because we're clever enough to kill all the sabre tooth tigers by the water hole before they eat us, and later invent Play Station 2, doesn't mean we're done with being earthy. I've seen precious little TV lately, but what I have seen just seems like little more than  a substitute for the flicker of the fire for us Cro Magnons in casual but tasteful attire to huddle around. I'll take the real fire, every time.

The old Yankees used to dust off the old saying: Firewood keeps you warm twice- Once when you split it, and again when you burn it. It's like many tired old sayings, it got trite because it was absolutely true, and universal.

I am amused when folks go all squishy for any exotic ceremony, and ignore the perfectly serviceable ones in their own tradition. I don't go all wobbly in the knees making tea, like they do in Japan, or London for that matter. Drinking shots of snake venom like they do in Hong Kong seems less exotic if you've ever had real still whisky, drunk from an old milk jug. Eating only with two fingers on one hand in Morocco is another; Yawn. Chopsticks, anyone?

It only seems interesting because it's alien, and you get the outside view of it. Re-examine this little ceremony:

A little paper, torn in strips. under the grate, in the ashes which are never removed, but do not grow. Our newspapers are virtual now, like what you're reading, and that explains the glare you get from me when you ask me: "Paper or plastic?"

Paper dude, paper.

Kindling now, atop the grate. Split shingles, leftover wedges from tapered legs, little bits and pieces of kiln dried lumber left from any construction project. You arrange them randomly, but exactly in the fashion you remember from the first fire you lit that didn't  take ten matches. One match is the zen.

It's cool outside, so you pull on a little coat, perhaps gloves, or you just brave it in your regular clothes, knowing the fire will seem that much better if you're chilled a bit. In February, this also lends a certain sense of urgency, believe me.

The wood pile, early in the season, is neat as a pin; all the split baulks are lain bark side up to shed the errant raindrop. You pick the logs with a complex calculation of time, and shape, and size, and combination, that rivals good cooking. Places like LL Bean sell any number of elegant and useful carriers for your logs, ranging from canvas slings with leather handles, to wrought iron trees with a carry handle. If you live to be a thousand, and become the richest man in the world, you will never use anything other than a plastic five gallon pail. Two hours of blessed warmth just fit.

The logs are Oak. Several years old. Split after drying for one season. Oh sure, occasionally you get other wood in there, perhaps the odd Maple, Birch, or Holly. Never Pine. It's gummier than an oil spill. Leave it for the weevils.

Put those logs on the kindling, arranged so the flames will lick up between them some, and give you the show you're looking for, and will collapse on themselves when the greedy fire eats them half away instead of rolling out on the floor and discommoding the cats.

One match only.

And then the sun comes right out of those logs, from where the July sunshine hammered itself in, and warms your bones, and your family, and your hearth. Read by the fire, and the author is improved beyond all measuring. Eat your dessert by the fire, and the cook begins to recommend themselves to Paris, not the pastry aisle. Drink a glass of wine by that fire, and it makes you wittier, and the warmth of the fire spreads like ink in a pool.

And if you're lucky, that hearth is the center of the world for two, it could lead to...well...er...um...two children, or so I hear.

July 5th, 2005-

Good day to you. I trust you all had a wonderful time celebrating the Fourth of July. The weather was extremely clement yesterday, and the yard beckoned, and we answered. Lovely.

But now, is the thrill gone? I feared so, and began to wonder- What is the Fifth of July an anniversary for? Anything? Bueller?

Well, I didn't really mean anything. I meant something really notable, or fun, or important. I looked around, but it all seemed trivial, all the July 5ths through the ages:

 In 1687, Sir Isaac Newton published his Principia Mathematica. But Einstein shot that all to hell and ruined it for the rest of us.

In 1830, France invaded Algeria, lord knows why.

 In 1920, Algeria declared its independence from France, lord knows why. But  they've got that going for them.

In 1954, Elvis made his first recording, "The Blue Moon of Kentucky." I didn't hear that being covered at Live8, so I guess he's not noteworthy, huh?

In 1884, Germany,  no doubt envious of the Garden of Eden the French had found in Algeria, invaded Cameroon. They must have lost interest in the place on one of the other 364 days of the year, July 5th calendars are mute on the subject.

In 1811. Venezuela declared its independence from Spain, but waited until 2004 to declare its independence from any form of work not based on oil receipts and warmed over Castro politics.

In short, I was going to have to think of something else to bore you with on July fifth. Until...

Omigod. 1946. THE INVENTION OF THE BIKINI. Hosannahs and ululations! Cinco De Mayo, Independence Day, gosh darnit, Christmas is nothing compared to that! Before 1946, ladies bathing suits were designed by the Taliban. And then- France, still stinging from their expulsion from Algeria, no doubt, decided to attract some attention to themselves the old fashioned way, by disrobing, and c'est magnifique! they gave us the most expensive garment per square inch in the world, and worth every penny, I say.

Now, to be a real bikini, we've got to look at that belly button. Various two piece swimsuits had been in vogue in Hollywood, for instance, before 1946, but It took Louis Reard, in Paris, France to get the girls out on the beach properly in a getup worthy of tanning in. Here it is, fashioned by one of the few women brave enough in 1946 France to model it. In 2005, we're having trouble getting anyone to wear at least this much when sunbathing:

Click anywhere on the picture (no wise comments, you) and you'll be transported to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, and read all about Monsieur Reard and ol' Michele Bernardini, the model, and lots of other interesting stuff about the Bikini Atoll, the islet in the Pacific the garb is named for, and our now thankfully forgotten habit of dropping atomic bombs on it.

And for all you Haute Couture weirdos infesting Paris right now, here's my two cents: That picture was taken in 1946. Miss Bernadini looks quite fetching in that rig, and comfortable to boot. A woman wearing that suit would feel feminine, and attractive, not exhibitionist. And men don't really need to see any more than that to get the general idea. So the next time you people get the urge to reinvent the bathing suit wheel again, like you do every year, and make it look like your model is wearing a bag, or a couple of bottle caps, or a window screen, or little boy's pants, or little more than postage for an undersized envelope, look up this picture, and repeat after me:

Quit while you're ahead.

Fourth of July, 2005-

Hello all. I'd like to wish each and every one of you a pleasant Fourth of July. For all you lovely folks who live on the other side of the national dotted lines, celebrate along with us, because after all, the United States is just the whole world, living in one place.

Many years ago, I used to live in Medfield, Massachusetts. Medfield is a nice place. It's considered a  fairly affluent and desirable place to live these days, but when I first moved there, there were abandoned fifteen room victorian era homes on the main street in town. Make an offer. I made a living in the town and neighboring burgs, read both books in the library, and suffered through "Medfield Day" celebrations for the better part of a decade. Off topic perhaps, but when did face painting and getting brochures from car dealers become a "celebration?"

There is a little five and dime in the middle of town, which is a rare thing these days. It had become the repository for All Things Medfield, perhaps by default. If you wanted a jersey emblazoned with the insignia of the high school team, that's where you got it. And I found myself in there quite often, searching for the little things you need that you didn't know you needed until you needed them, if you catch my drift. If you had to have a stamp, or a pencil, or a map, or a box of bandaids, or a light bulb, they had it.

One day, I had one of those moments in the store, where you get a vision of your surroundings as if you were a complete stranger, which is rare and useful. I was standing in line at the checkout, passing the time looking at the wares displayed near the register, a textbook example of the retailer's first line of attack. And they had a pile of garments emblazoned with "Medfield," and for a picture, they had a sailboat. A big one.

Now the ocean is a solid  hour from Medfield. The only water in the town is the Charles River, which meanders all over the map through eastern Massachusetts, and for the most part is so inconsequential you can jump across it, plus a little pond near the "Old Mill," and Herve Villechaise couldn't drown in that. Hence the moment. What was Medfield about?

The repository of All Things Medfield didn't know. Neither did I. And I began to think, I didn't want to live in a town that didn't know what to emblazon their shirts with. I had no "anima" it was a place you slept until you went to work, and that's it, I guess.

Now, I intend no disrespect to my former brethren in Medfield. I always found the place to be infested with just the sort of salubrious and pleasant people you'd want for your neighbors. But I guess I needed to go where the sailboat made sense.

And we moved to Marion; and the sailboat, and the little victorian village by the sea seemed to make all the sense in the world. But did it?

When you move, you look around for what the locals do, and do likewise. But forget the sailboat in Marion. My sailboat's in Fairhaven. A mooring in Marion costs only $50.00 a year, if the price hasn't gone up since I looked into it ten years ago and gave up. I pay twenty times that, and have a ten mile ride as an added penalty to the financial one. Whah?

Well, since the price of moorings is set at 1/20 of what it's worth, almost no one ever gives one up. They lie, and cheat, and hoard, and tie unused boats on them, and give them to their progeny, but they never let them go. There's a waiting  list of course, but people who've moved to the town five years after I did have got their hands on the few moorings that have come open, because the fellows at the town hall who know when the list will have an opening tell their friends when that will be, and they rig it so they're first in line when it does. Marion took some federal money to dredge something or somesuch a long time ago, and so the list cannot be limited to Marion residents only. And so the harbor, the central theme of the town, is forever clogged with the boats of people from out of town, and the politically connected, and the aroma of that sort of people keeps me from coveting a spot there too much. It's funny what people will tell you at your children's baseball games, when they think you're in on it too, instead of slightly appalled by it.

But beautiful flowers often bloom easiest on a cowpie, and the dearth of space in Marion's  harbor drove us to Fairhaven, and as I told you in "What's New" a little while ago, it's the best sailing on the planet, and so I am content. And the only aroma there is from the ocean at slack tide, and the sweat of the brow; it's not redolent of "Le Grande Fromage," and the mildewed rich.

But Marion had another thing that made it special and remarkable, and required no waiting list: The Fourth of July fireworks.

Now, we went to them initially because there's precious little else to do around here. There are no restaurants to speak of, and the three places with liquor licenses in town aren't exactly the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel. And when we heard about the Fourth of July Celebration,  we drove a little, and walked a ways, down the street we live on, spread our blanket, and sat down like a banquet for mosquitoes, and were prepared to settle for "not much."

It was spectacular. The pyrotechnics company knew what they were doing. The fireworks were shot right out over the harbor, from right in front of us, and the open horizon improved the sightlines. The band played real patriotic music, Sousa marches and such, and reminded me how tired I was of laser light shows and bad rock music. It is useful to remember that Sousa's real name was John Philip So, and he wanted to really americanize it, so he added the letters USA to it. I appreciate the gesture, and his patriotism, and never tire of his marches. And here I was, participating in the life of the locality, celebrating the birth of the nation, by the seashore I loved, with my family. And I was content.

We made a point of contributing to the fund for the display each year after that. The display was put on by private donation, not public funds, which added to its luster. This was truly by, for, and of the people. And every year the show was a little better, and it began to define what it meant to live here for our family. My oldest son was so captivated by it, when he was just a toddler, I painted a little mural of a fireworks display over his bed, and he fell asleep looking at it every night of his life, until his little brother displaced him, and he moved to another room. His little brother will never see the real thing, however, just the painting. I'll get to that. 

The crowd at the display began to grow, and it added to the frisson of the display with the feeling of an "event," and I was gratified to see my brethren from the surrounding towns, some of which had displays of their own, coming to participate in ours, and ooh and aah and eat ice cream and distract one or two of the mosquitoes from biting only me.

A year ago, a strange thing happened. My wife went downtown, to purchase something, and she returned home to inform me that an enormous crowd was streaming into the downtown. That's strange, I thought, it's only July 3rd. In its finite wisdom, the people running the show had decided to change the celebration of Independence Day to July 3rd, because they ostensibly feared that there were too many displays on July 4th, and they would distract from their show.

I was agog. I refused to go. I refused to participate in the extinction of the reason for the display in the first place. Had they forgotten the real reason for our fete? I thought so. And so the most central commemoration of our common bond, our raison d'etre, had become subservient to a fireworks display.

It got worse, dear reader. For there will be no fireworks display at all this year. I was puzzled to hear that, for I had watched last year with interest as the thermometer-shaped sign on the lawn of the Town Hall  tracked the progress of the donations and easily topped out. But it was cancelled. I was mystified, but only a little, because but I figured  if they forgot why they were celebrating, they certainly would forget how, sooner or later.

I never did glean the reason for the end of it. I heard some stuff in the local paper that didn't add up, about the cost, which seemed odd, as it was paid for by private subscription. No one ever seemed to cause any trouble at it, and the police blotter never showed an arrest at one that I noticed. It couldn't be lack of interest, I've never seen anything in the town with that level of interest.

The fellows at my older child's baseball game were most instructive about this topic, after educating me, unknowingly, about moorings. The Thurston Howell wannabes, the lotus eaters, the mooring holders, the twenty five people who go to Town Meeting and when nobody's looking, decide things, didn't like what they considered the riffraff from the surrounding towns walking past their waterfront homes, and enjoying their fireworks. And that was that.

And so we forgot what we were celebrating, and why, and then, how.

I think I'll start selling Marion T-shirts, with a picture of Medfield on them. I don't know what else to put on them any more.

7/1/05-Friday-

Gone Fishin'

I moved to Los Angeles in  the late '70s, on a lark. When I say on a lark,  I'm not referring to driving there on a little scooter for the elderly and infirm, I mean I went with no idea why I was going. I went along with my older brother, who knew why he was going, and lives there to this very day, pestering the state with music. I simply succumbed to wanderlust, and returned after a few years.

Driving across the country was interesting, and instructive. People  in print and on TV who worry a lot, worry a lot about the homogeneity of culture in the United States. I have no idea what they're talking about. Everywhere I went in the US seemed different than the last place by a wide margin. There was a commonality of a sort to the whole business, but not the kind that matters if you're talking about people, not things, I think. It doesn't matter that there's a McDonald's restaurant in Houston. The people behind the counter are from Houston, not from Oak Park, Illinois, after all. And they inhabit it in a Texas sort of a way, even if the paper hats look the same as in New Jersey.

I like to see the shared values and interests of my brethren as the cake, and enjoy the different icings we each put on that make us interesting to a stranger, but not strange to someone familiar. The nervous nellies screaming at each other on panel shows think that because potable water comes out of the tap everywhere, and you get the same dial tone on every phone in the country, we're becoming a Stepford nation. They spend too much time in Europe, I suspect, where using the telephone is like gambling, both for the reliability of connecting to the party you are trying to reach and the possibility of enormous financial loss, and ordinary people conduct biological experiments daily, like an MIT scientist, by drinking the water and waiting for the "results" to come in, in a bathroom that doesn't work. Note to TV talking heads: People are all the same to you, because you only talk at them, and it's never occurred to you to ask them a question, and listen to the answer. Room service queries don't count.

Anyway, I worked in El Monte, California, for about a year, and fit right in when I learned to eat burritos off the lunch truck instead of BLTs, and started putting "R" at the end of my words, which to this day occasionally makes people in Massachusetts, the place of my birth and domicile for 45 years, say: "You're not from around here, are you?"

I had heard a lot about surfing in California. In my grammar school days, I had a friend who's father's job took them to Southern California in the summer, and back to Massachusetts for the winter and the school year, the worst possible permutation I can think of.  He'd appear at my door each fall, his hair gone white from the sun, his winter freckles connected into one huge cocoa overlay, and tell me about surfing in California. And we'd listen to Beach Boys music. Not that "fifties car song" crap. "Sail on Sailor," and "Sloop John B," and "Wouldn't It Be Nice," and "Darlin," you know, when Van Dyke Parks took over and stopped the adenoid problem off-key falsetto screeching in the background for a while.

So I moved to LA, and listened to an alternate universe through my car radio, one with a "surf report" and not a "schools closed due to snow report" every morning, and was content.

At least until the 150th straight day when the announcer would intone: Bad surfing today. No one ever went surfing. I'd see them at their desk at work, wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with "Zog's Sex Wax" and huarache sandals, but they never went surfing. Because it was no big deal to them,  they only went when it was really good. I can assure you that finally, after months of "Bad surfing today," the announcer said: "There's a terrifying and destructive storm lashing the Hawaiian Islands- whoopee! wax your boards" and the next day, tumbleweeds were blowing up and down the aisles at work.

You can ski in Vermont in May, even June, if you want. Killington make a point of leaving a couple of hundred yards of slush open to the public for thrill seekers who want to say they went skiing in their bathing suits, but no one that likes actual skiing would bother, only someone from California would want to go.

And so you really only learn about the vagaries of  the people in various parts of this great land when you live among them for an extended period of time, and learn what they've become blase about, which seems exotic to others. When my California brother brought his young sons to visit Massachusetts, they wanted to go sledding, and for the life of us, we couldn't figure out a place to go and do it.

I've spilled a lot of ink in this space about sailing. And if you live in Nebraska, the idea of gliding along the ocean, propelled only by the breeze and cold beer, must seem exotic. I've gone as far as building a boat. (How are your plans coming, are you ready to buy the lumber?) And I'm here to admit to you, I haven't been sailing yet this year. Not once.

Look,  I'm busy making furniture. The wind was from the North a lot. Bottom needs painting. No one to go with. Looks like rain. Red tide. Motor needs tuning. Big One has a baseball game. Little One has a cold. The wind's from the East. Too cold. Too hot. More furniture. Family Reunion. Tide's all wrong. Is that a thunderhead cloud?

To paraphrase Yogi Berra, we did it all the time, so we didn't do it at all.

6/30/05-Thursday-

Things ain't what they used to be and never were.  Will Rogers

We're back rooting around in the Library of Congress, and we're back in the kitchen again, a different one. It's the depression again, or maybe the forties.

My wife loves this picture. What's not to like? When you're on your final leg of the race of  life, recalling things past, aren't these the sort of things that you'd ruminate on? Dimly remembered, perhaps, but at the same time you might remember the feeling you had, the smell of the detergent, or your mother's perfume, or perhaps the drip of a faucet. Something to make it real, to frame it and make it a picture in your mind.

I'm nowhere near boneyard age myself, at least actuarily, but I occasionally already find myself transported to images of my oldest child when he was a baby, just by seeing some humdrum item he used to idly finger, and wouldn't be seen dead with now. You could videorecord every waking hour of your children's exploits, and watch them over and over, and not capture your imagination like a little sigh they let out when they rolled over in their sleep. You do watch them while they sleep, don't you? I can't be the only one.

When I was a young man, I visited my older brother. He had gotten on with his life, and begun to raise a family, while I was still wearing leather jackets and driving too fast. I found something compelling in hanging around his house, and seeing him and his wife minister to their sons' daily needs. Everything seemed so mundane, and pleasant. He was washing his little boy's hair in the tub after a long day of toddler folderol, and he summed it up for me when I asked him about the kind of dedication it took to raise a child. Dedication had never been my strong suit, and I was genuinely curious. He shrugged, and called the daily rituals, blessings, and ablutions "Pleasant Chores," and I've never heard a better term for it. I owe my brother and his wife a great debt, for when I had forgotten or taken for granted the simple pleasures of a family, he showed it to me, like this family showed it to the cameraman, in the room but not participating, and demonstrated a framework I longed for and duplicated for the best part of my life.

Washing dishes is not fun. I remember how much work it was when I was a child, to wash a family of six's dishes after the evening meal, before we were able to afford a dishwasher, and it took some effort. Washing dishes is a chore we can all relate to, because at some time or another, we've all done it. Well, it's a chore, but it looks like a pleasant chore in that picture. There's no leaves on the trees outside the window, and I bet that stove was also the heat for the room, and standing next to it for a while probably felt like a towel right out of the dryer too. Mmm. And mom doesn't have the "isn't that precious, get the camera" look on her face, she simply looks kindly upon her charge, so no doubt this is a daily occurrence, a "Pleasant Chore"

The caption of this picture mentioned the race of this family, and it was jarring to think they were fixated on that when looking for things to notice. If this picture doesn't capture something universal, I'm in the wrong universe.  I remember reading that seventy five years ago, Old Yankees generally hated the smell of garlic, and they must have wondered how the garlic eaters lived, and hence the picture. Well, I'm a garlic eater. My father is Irish, so I'm only half a clove of garlic eater, and if I went to the Italian  American Club, I would only be allowed to go in the pool up to my waist, but her ancestors would be no strangers to mine. And if you're still wondering out there, at the Works Project Administration, about garlic, it tastes a lot better than Haggis.

I sell little steps not unlike the one the girl is standing on, and every one that goes out the door makes me smile to think it might be part of a ritual of some sort, to each family its own, that binds the family bricks with the mortar of shared daily activities.  Children always ask their parents to play with them, but secretly they always covet working alongside them better, I think.

I bet that dress the little girl was wearing was made by that woman at the sink, and the curtains too. Everything in the tableau is neat and orderly, and speaks to a kind of salubrious monotony that families need to make children feel secure, I think. Familiar things, at familiar times, from familiar people- "Pleasant Chores." indeed.

6/29/05- Wednesday-

I want you to look at a picture. The picture is in the Library of Congress, don't ask me where. If I had to find it in their archive again, it would take me until The Statue of Liberty got down off her pedestal and roller skated.

The picture is from the 1930s. The government was hiring all kinds of people to do all kinds of things back then, and I suspect when they got towards the back of the line of people waiting for a gummint job, they said things like: "What do you know how to do?' and whatever you answered, they said, go out and do it, and good, bad, or indifferent, we'll archive it, and you'll eat three times a day.

Well some guys had cameras. And they remind me of the Japanese tourists I saw in Europe. Don't be fooled by the numerous movie and television references you've probably seen about Japanese tourists, in shorts, black socks, and wing tips, taking pictures of trash cans, and light poles, and sewer lids, and so forth. By, "don't be fooled," I meant, don't be fooled by the ubiquity of the jokes into thinking it isn't true. It is true, I've seen it.  They'll take a picture of anything but something interesting. Well, they had nothing on these depression era boys, because they went out into the landscape, and pointed that lens around  like a dowser at a waterpark, and blasted away.

No detail of everyday life was too mundane for them to capture. And you wade through the thousands and thousands of mostly black and white photos and marvel at what a wonderful thing 70 years of distance has done for the whole pile. I could look at them until AARP calls me, and not get bored by their boredom, because it's a history of a life that was going, and one that was coming, written in lightning on film. And for once, no one in the pictures is important. By important, I meant prominent. Because the archive is filled with the only people who are really important in this world, which is everybody.

Look at this:

Now, I'm going to forgo maundering on about the good old days, because this is thirty years before I was in the game, so to speak, and I don't have a dog in that fight.

But look at that room. It's glorious. You'd kill for a kitchen that pleasant to be in, and we'd get you to sign the closing papers before you noticed there isn't a dishwasher, unless you count the girls in the chairs. Please keep in mind, this is not the rich folk's house, or it wouldn't be here. They were just regular folks, like you and me, or maybe just me; you might be an Admiral or Rock Star or somesuch,  I don't know.

Let's go over what they knew about a kitchen then, that they don't know now.

First of all, look at the light. I'm referring to the light emanating from the yellow orb in the sky, which rarely gets into houses these days. The big girl on the right is reading, and that looks like a great place to do it. Two things bring in that light. First, the ceiling is high enough, but not vaulted. Designers vault rooms willy-nilly now, and make gloomy, echoey, medieval caverns out of rooms that should be close and homey. Kitchens get it a lot these days. You generally need four or five hundred thousand million watts of lighting in a vaulted ceiling kitchen to approach what they've got here, streaming right in. ( I might be a little off with my calculations on footcandles there, but I stand by the gist of it.)

That ceiling looks nine feet high. You can get a fairly airy ceiling by simply specifying full eight foot studs for the first floor wall framing of your house, and gain 4 inches, for a few bucks. You'll save people like me from getting cracked in the head by your inexplicable ceiling fans on a 7'-8" ceiling that way. 

The ceiling would undoubtedly have been white calcimined plaster, to reflect the light. Calcimine was a form of paste used un lieu of paint on ceilings, that you had to wash off before recoating. Everyone forgot that eventually, and painted over it, and it peeled forever. Your recollection of endlessly peeling Victorian and WWI vintage house ceilings generally traces back to calcimine. In the fifties, peopled stapled asbestos and cardboard tiles over the flaking paint, in the sixties they tried acoustic drop ceilings, the seventies tried swirled sand textured paint over the mess, and the eighties tried the judicious use of the wrecking ball. 

But everyone's forgot to make the ceiling high enough to make the room proportionate to its length and width, allow the windows to be tall and stately, and let in extra air and light. Your present kitchen is almost undoubtedy larger than this, and I ask you, could you fit those four children in yours while you worked at the sink? (Count the shoes, there's four, trust me) The designer knew enough to put windows on two walls in the room, and not just one. It's possible to get natural light into a room with the windows ganged on one wall, but its hard to do, and unlikely you'll manage it. Lighting your face from one side alone makes for interesting Beatles album covers, but it's no way  to live.

Look at the pantry cabinet on the facing wall. it's niched in, to allow you to get around the room, with a nice flat counter to display what is obviously a prized possession, with room to spare for day to day use as a work surface. Lovely. Now, even expensive kitchen cabinets are really crummy these days. They're more often than not made from particle board covered with plastic woodgrain paper with a design imprint that looks like someone who liked Lawrence Welk a lot drew it originally. The only real wood on cabinets now is the doors, and they always are overlaid on the face, not inset like the picture. They are overlaid to save the manufacturer trouble, not give you a better looking thing; these cabinets have the doors inset into the frame, which is fussy, and looks terrific, and is not like most modern cabinets. The modern version  looks more like the box a cabinet comes in  than a cabinet itself. 

The cabinets here are painted, probably glossy white, looked spiffy, reflected the glorious light some more, cleaned easily, and could be refurbished when they got to worn by a conscientious homeowner. Nowadays, since you've ponied up all that money for your cabinets, they're probably solid hardwood faces, with uninteresting grain, dark enough to soak too much of the light up, and make you add still more lightbulbs to try to see in there. They're sprayed with a thin couple of coats of nitrocellulose lacquer, which is tough as nails, at  least until it isn't, which is fairly soon, and can't be rejuvenated by hand, and end up in the trash every ten years, no matter what you paid for them.

That fridge is really small, but the homeowners probably had spent their childhood with an icebox, or some without even that, and thought it was a marvel, no doubt. And it has the supple streamlined corners and clean white metal baked enamel glaze that says "clean" to me. You wouldn't feel the need  to put wood panels on the front of your refrigerator if it looked that, well, cool.

The simple checked floor is terrific. Really underrated, that kind of simple decoration. The photographer is probably standing in the door that leads to a dining room, or a hallway or parlor if the house is small. The homeowner has hung a pretty little mirror on the wall, canted just so, so she can see behind her when she's at the sink, or alternately look out the window. People still make the mistake of making the sink a sad, lonely place to be, and occasionally make it even worse than bad, by running the cabinets right across with no window, and doom the user to hours of staring at nothing, their back to everyone, whether you have a dishwasher or not. For shame!

You all know me by now, and know full well that I'm going to steal the design for that gate leg table in the middle of the room. Oh yes. It's the perfect work island for food prep, and presto, open it up and you're eating the finest meal in the world, which is  placed on the table direct from the oven or stove,  by Mother's hand, surrounded by your loved ones, the clink of glass and china and cutlery a domestic symphony, the beaming faces of the children arrayed around the round table, with the late afternoon sun beaming in and the family beaming out.

Get some of that lost kitchen, as much as you can find, fit, or afford, and I'll bless it for you, right here and now.

6/28/05-Tuesday

Well, we've broken out the Summer logo for the masthead. Spiffy, ain't  it? You can tell just how lazy I am by perusing the site and seeing how few pages it's on. I'll get to it, before Fall, anyway. There's that rose again, right from our garden.

Now I hear from many folks because of this here internet thingie. And some of you poor devils don't live anywhere near a proper ocean. No, no, not the Pacific one, that won't do. I get confused every time we visit my brother in Los Angeles and go to the beach. I get up from the blanket and run inland- the water's on the wrong side of the sand. I'm talking the Atlantic Ocean. And sailing on it.

Now many people get out on the water these days, in every kind of craft. Bass boats, canoes, skiffs, kayaks, boogie boards, water wings, you name it. But it all begins and ends with sails for me. Breeze buckets, the power boat guys call them. Where are you gonna get in one of those, they jape at you. Nowhere. That's the point.

If you're relying on a motor, you're commuting, not boating. I'm trying to get nowhere, slowly, at great expense. And I've discovered the best place in the world to do just that. West Island, Massachusetts.

Now it's not like I deserve credit for discovering this. I came home late one night, with plenty of tonsil polish in me, and announced to my wife: Honey, we're boat owners! Well, that's one half of the old saw: the two happiest days in a boat owner's life are the day he buys a boat, and the day he sells it. There's some truth in that one. But anyway, I had been talked into adopting a 24 foot sailboat by a friend. who didn't need it any more, because he was even dumber than me and got a bigger one.

I'd sailed before, and liked it. I sailed a few real wooden boats in Boothbay in Maine, and remembered how strenuous and cold it was. Fog, mist, blastng winds, huge granite mounds jutting up from the ocean floor to put you in debt to the boatyard, or the funeral home. The wind would consider your sailing acumen for a moment, and then come at you like a pack of dogs, from all sides seemingly, and push and pull you all over the water. You'd see seals on the granite islets as you heaved past, and they'd look at you like you owed them money, and an explanation.

I sailed in Marblehead, on the coast just north of Boston. The eeriest thing I ever experienced was riding in the skiff from the boat to the dock, in the dead of night, in a moonless fog. The pilot knew his way, and we were never in any danger, I guess; but the feeling that some great beast would rise up out of the soupy fog and inky water and take you down into the sea was the the creepiest misplaced  feeling I've ever had. A boat at night in the fog has the same disorienting effect as weightlessness, I imagine; sound is stolen from your mouth, and the person next to you can't understand what you say, but you hear a dog bark 15 miles away, and can count the tags that rattle under his chin when he does, to boot.

And then some damn fool produces a light, and at first you shine it into the fog, and does you absolutely no good, the fog eating the beam, and spitting it back ten thousand fold. And then you make the mistake of shining it straight down in the water, and you see every beast, creature, bug, and wraith you ever imagined living in the ocean, plus ten you couldn't conjure up before,  all invisible in the sunlight, but  everywhere, doing everything, at night. Like the maps used to say, there be monsters here. The only equal of the creepy feeling of seeing the ocean floor illuminated at night is sleeping in the desert, in a tent under the stars, and hearing a truck on a highway miles away like it's coming throught the tent flap, and waking in the morning and folding up the tent, and seeing the wriggle marks in the sand, showing where every creepy crawly thing  in the desert slept underneath you, for the warmth,  and left before you woke.

Cape Cod is famous for sailing, and I've sailed on the cold bay side, warm enough to sail on, but not swim in, as well as the open ocean side, warmed by the gulf stream. It's warm enough for sharks.

My son Miles, the Big One, always adored sharks. He'd draw pictures of them in kindergarten, and plead for us to buy tome ofter tome for him with pictures of them, their huge, gaping mouths and dead eyes creeping out us adults, and delighting him. We could never go through Boston without his little voice from the back seat, bang on cue as we passed the exit: "Can we go to the Aquarian?" He slept with a little stuffed shark pillow for years.

One day, after sailing, we walked up the ramp from the pier past the rude table where lucky fishermen gutted beautiful striped bass and other assorted "keepers," the term for a fish big enough to take from the ocean. Miles was transfixed by the silvery shimmering scales, and the mad scrum of seabirds when the knife expertly flicked  the fish guts to the side. He was so transfixed, he didn't see the rollaround trash cart parked next to the scene, with a different sort of cargo. I called him over and said, check this out. There was a magnificent six foot long blue shark, mouth agape, teeth glinting in the sun, with a little teeny hole on one side of his head, and a great big gaping one on the other side where the fisherman had persuaded him to lie quiet on the floor of the boat and make no ankle trouble, with a sidearm.

I had blundered. This was not a board book. This was not Disney. This was the real deal, and bigger than his father, and it was the last shark I saw my son interested in for a good long time. And for a while, he became somewhat circumspect about the ocean, and the bathtub too, for that matter.

But back to West Island. West Island is a marvel. It's between New Bedford and the mouth of the southern end of the Cape Cod Canal. And it was the only place for 100 miles in either direction I could get a mooring for my boat. Earl's Marina is behind the island, and protected from the open ocean by it and the causeway that connects it to Sconticut Neck. At anchor, the shoreline is jolly with little seaside shacks, worthless and expensive, and boats and boats and boats. You have to pick your way around the island through a little channel, to get out to Buzzards Bay and the sailing, but it's pleasant, like an overture to a familiar opera, a hint, a taste of fun to come.

And then something nice, and unusual happens. You get around the island, and everyone's gone. The island is a bird sanctuary on the ocean side, and there isn't one structure anywhere in sight. You feel exactly like an explorer, sailing along an unknown coast, and half expect to see a Wapanoag Indian in a feather headress wander out on the sand, instead of the seagulls and plovers.

And you tug a few lines, and set the sails just so, and open something cold, and arrange the cushions, and just lay your leg over the tiller, and dabble your hand in the water, and that boat just slides on across Buzzards Bay, without any effort. Because the wind only comes from one direction at West Island, all summer,  the southwest, and if it's coming from another direction, or there's too much of it, you don't go sailing anyway because it only does those things when the weather is beastly.

And when you get to Cape Cod, you turn around and the wind comes over the other beam, and you tug those lines once, and you're done working again for another  hour.

And that sublime blue ocean rolls under your keel, and every once in a while another lazy, lucky man drifts by in another boat and always waves, because we share the same creditors, I imagine.

And you go home, pacified and recharged, and sunburned and tired from doing nothing, and think:  It cost too much damn money. Summer's so short. The bottom needs painting. Gas for the skiff outboard costs a ransom at the dock. I'm gonna sell that boat.

Maybe in the fall.

6/27/05- Monday-

When I was young, I went to a real lumberyard. The Large Orange Place is not a real lumberyard. The Large Orange Place did not exist then anyway. Do not misunderstand me. I am not one of those people who chain themselves to the construction fence at the new Large Orange Place and sing "We shall Overcome" because we think they're despoiling the earth by offering off-price ceiling fans to the masses. But The Orange Place is not a real lumberyard.

At a Real Lumberyard, the clerks know more about the lumber than you do. You must know what to ask for at the desk of a Real Lumberyard, you cannot drag people down the aisle and point at what you want. You must know the magic lingo, or you will forever feel like an outsider there. You will never be treated discourteously, but you will sense it: I do not belong here.

But magic things happen at the real lumberyard. When you order $20,000.00 worth of framing lumber, you don't have to load it all on an orange cart with a bockety wheel and then strap it to the roof of your car. It gets delivered, of course, because the real lumberyard is not for pawing through piles. A lumber yard is an extension of the true problem of building a dwelling, which is 99% logistical, and a little measuring. Honestly, anyone can do residential carpentry, but knowing how to wrestle a sheet of plywood into place on roof framing 35 feet off the ground and nailing it and not your foot, after knowing when to do it, with what, and all the while going as fast as possible, is the trick. And when the lumberyard brings you the that five figure pile, with another to come in the afternoon, the piece you want is on the top, magically, without asking, because they know.

It was necessary for the layman to subject himself occasionally to the test of wills of the Real Lumberyard  when I was young, because there was no other way to get your hands on a sheet of plywood, or a piece of pine. And now that I am an old hand at the lumberyard, and am met with hearty hellos there like Norm entering Cheers, I reflect back on the striking similarity of the operation to the one I saw, in tow with my parents, in the late 1960s. Of course that lumberyard couldn't have dreamed of the fax machine, or Nextel radios, or Good God! the Internet back then, but like the Victorians integrating all the fruits of the industrial revolution, the Real Lumberyard just used the technology, and kept the daily rituals.

I visited the same Lumberyard recently. It was pretty much the same as I remembered it. It barely noticed the opening of  a half dozen Big Orange Stores within easy driving distance of their location. They just kept on doing what they were doing, and doing it well, and slept soundly at night.

There was a sign on the wall at that lumberyard, behind the counter. It read:

Dear God, just give me one more building boom. I promise not to fritter it all away this time.

I laughed when I read that. I thought of all the home builders I knew, or knew of,  that had gone  belly up since I entered construction in the seventies. I knew fellows that employed 75 electricians one day, with a big office filled with secretaries and  fleets of trucks, and summer houses to spare,  and when their biggest customer went belly up in a real estate bust in the late eighties, they had to go back to working out of their parent's garage again. I worked for a guy that bought a house for $70 grand in a little suburb, got the real estate bug in the eighties too, and in the span of a year and a half or so,  flipped it for a more expensive house two towns over, sold that and built a house two towns over from that, sued his site contractor when his new house ended up settling into the unsuitable soil  he had demanded the poor guy work in, took the settlement and his equity, and moved back a few doors down from his first home, the $70,000 one. $250,000 later, he was essentially back where he began. I know others who have risen, fallen, and risen from the ashes again and again. It's a hard business sometimes.

Most of the United States is now served by large corporate builders, like Centex or Pulte or Toll Brothers, but the majority of the homes built in the Northeast are still built by small developers, the kind of people for whom that sign about a boom is more than a laugh.

Recently the papers are filled with armageddon predictions about a" housing bubble." I read them with interest, because it is an industry that I know something about, and is dear to me. And I can't help but notice that the people writing about this imminent domicile doom have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. Now that doesn't mean they're wrong, I have no idea about that. A busted clock is correct twice a day after all. But if they are right, they don't know why they're right. Because the price of housing is based on lots of things, and the ways people pay for them dependent on a lot of other things, and those reporters  never seem to know anything about any of those things, or show any interest in them. So as far as the Big Bubble Story Frenzy, I figure, This too shall pass. One way or the other.

It also makes you wonder if they're just as mistaken and lacking in inquisitiveness about all the other subjects you don't know anything about, and depend on them to tell you about.

But I must tie the Bubble stories in to the sign at the lumberyard; I know I can do it. I searched my mind, trying desperately to conjure up any recollection of that place from the eighties, or even better, what if it that sign was there in the late sixties, that would put a sweet finish on the story and give perspective to the doom and gloom prognosticators. But I couldn't for the life of me remember if I'd seen it before. So I asked the clerk how old the sign was. He couldn't remember exactly.

The 1940s sometime he thought, maybe earlier.

6/23/05 -Thursday-

Well, well, well. you never know, do you? We revisited the 100 Greatest Americans website, to see how they're doing these days. As you might recall, we were one of the many who were scratching their heads over the list of ephemeral and trivial personalities that were included in the original list. The list's detractors were a little too quick to dismiss the whole process, I think. I was pretty harsh about some of the contestants too, but I really do like the list thingies, as I suppose you do too. Yesterday, the American Film Institute did a list of their own, about famous and notable movie quotes, and when I tried to see what all the hubbub was about without actually having to watch the proceedings, the webserver turned me away because the traffic was too high. These are people who are in the publicity business in a BIG way, and are turning away onlookers. So don't tell me you aren't paying attention to this sort of thing. Someone, or many millions of someones, crashed that server. And Matt Lauer's salary is getting paid somehow, to host Discovery/AOL Greatest Americans.

There were some aberrations on that original list, no question. And those aberrations made people who were interested in American History, me included, cringe. I pointed out that Ellen Degeneres was on the list, but James Madison, who did most of the heavy lifting of the US Constitution, was not. And I suspect that if you could ask the people who put her on there if they really meant that Ellen represented a more potent cultural force than James Madison and his legacy, I bet they'd say no, they just thought she was swell, and didn't give it a lot of thought.

But I find a refreshing lack of worship of government figures is at work here, and was gratified to see people who championed or improved the mundane and everyday aspects of the general population's lives for the better were included on the list in substantial numbers, along with those that commanded great armies or legislated over large swathes of the political landscape. Because history isn't just a string of Waterloos to memorize, is it?  It's also what we're all doing, while no one's looking.

And you know in your heart that Rosa Parks, for instance,  who makes a great story, isn't one of the most important persons in our history. But people put her on the list, I suspect, because she encapsulates the aspirations, and dreams, and hopes, and plain good sense and dignity, of a vast multitude of people, and her name is a kind of shorthand for them.

And so I was gratified to see, when the list was winnowed down to five personages, how notable was  the good sense of the American public, when push came to shove, in choosing them.

Ben Franklin

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Abraham Lincoln

Ronald Reagan

George Washington

Now the list just before this one, the Dick Clark sounding Top Twenty Five, was populated with some some comparative lightweights, if you ask me. But when push came to shove, Americans chose five very important and interesting people.

And I'm going to run a string right through all of them, and connect our American dots.

Washington, in case you're not paying attention, is the most important person in American History. And not because he launched the dental profession into overdrive on a new continent, either. There was a tremendous amount of heavy lifting involved with the birth of this nation. and he did the lion's share of it. It's easy to forget that Washington became the nation's first chief executive only after winning the war that made that nation possible. He served two terms, and was the first, last, and only chief magistrate with the throw weight to keep both sides of the political spectrum together and working for the common good. When you have both Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton yammering in your ear simultaneously, each pushing hard for a completely different vision of your barely existent nation state, and you keep both their energies harnessed for the greater good of the country, you're a better director than anyone before or since.

It is useful to recall that many of the movers and shakers of the pre-Constitution American Colonies offered to make George Washington the King of America, after they threw off Mad King George III, and he turned them down flat. Ruminate on that. Not many man in his position would have the intellectual vigor and moral rectitude to do the same.

Remember also, two things:

 When Washington had to choose, finally, between supporting Hamilton's vision for a mercantile, financially modern, practically educated, federal powerhouse of a nation, and Jefferson's rural, guild driven, decentralized governed, and classically nostalgic framework based on the savvy but uneducated yeoman farmer,  Washington chose Hamilton, and modernism.

And when his two terms were over, he retired to private life, to let others administer the country he loved and had risked his fortune and his skin for, the very first time in the history of the world a chief magistrate's  position was changed by ballot and not bloodshed. The man in public life that doesn't find himself indispensable above all others, is a rare thing.

Benjamin Franklin is a superb example of what was made possible by American ingenuity and effort, once Washington made the whole thing possible. I grew up in a town named for Benjamin Franklin, and spent countless hours in the first public library in America, founded by the town on a collection of books donated by the great man himself.

He was the father of the post office, an innovative inventor and especially tinkerer, the first in a long line of extraordinary tinkerers in American history like Whitney and Colt, and McCormick, Ford, and Edison.

He was also the first American Dr Phil, god forgive me for calling him that. His witty aphorisms, based on the simple but elegant logic and morality of the ages, are as true today as the day he wrote them, and as universal. He is the father of Whitman, Emerson and Alcott, and the funny papers too.

He was a godsend to agriculturalists, and championed commonsense approaches to solving horticultural problems still mired in medieval thinking in farming. He was America's first real publisher, and tilled that soil with the seeds that would sprout to eventually publish Irving, Hawthorne and Poe, and Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

In short, he represents the varied and forward looking activities of all American citizens, when freed from the mire of autocracy, to make their way in the world by their intellects and their efforts. He is a distillation of all Americans.

The fight between the ideals of Jefferson and Hamilton had to simmer, but implicit in the Declaration, is the coming cut of the Gordian Knot of Slavery. Without the simple moral genius of Abraham Lincoln, it all goes to pieces. And the edifice that Washington erected, and people like Franklin expanded to the horizons, would have disintegrated without Lincoln. Lincoln did it, when no one else would even hazard the attempt, and paid for it with his life. Lincoln's is the only monument in Washington that features the honoree seated, and rightly so. He's earned the rest hasn't he?

Martin Luther King Jr. belongs in this pantheon, and right after Lincoln, because when the promise wrung from the blood of the Civil War was diminished by Jim Crow, King was the catalyst for the idea that all men and women should participate equally in our society, in word and in deed, and his religious fervor encapsulates the driving force behind so much of the best of America's instincts. He first represented a portion of the population, but ended  up uniting the whole population, no mean feat.  Like Lincoln, he paid for his bravery with his life.

There are many that will not like seeing Reagan on that list. His memory is too recent, perhaps, and the people in opposition are still alive. But let's not bring modern axes that need grinding to the history book. Reagan embodies American exceptionalism, both in his own rise from obscurity, and his political career. Reagan is the figure of  the mature America, self assured, generous of spirit, with the simple wisdom of middle america in his bones. And like Washington, a little, he had the support of many that could agree with each other on nothing else. Reagan Democrats united with Roosevelt Republicans. No mean feat.

When half the world had lived under the oppressive gloom of the Communist hammer and sickle for seventy five years,  and the best  the most gifted statesman and generals could do before Reagan was make an accommodation with it, and try to keep it from overspreading the entire globe and making slaves of us all, Reagan said the world could do better.  And he had grown used to being out of step with conventional but ephemeral wisdom, and saw things as they might be, and uttered the simple thought that needed a complex approach to achieve: "Tear down this Wall."

And if you saw that hated wall being battered to bits by the people from both sides of it, simultaneously, and were unmoved, and didn't see the hand of the United States there, and his shadow, I don't think you were paying attention.

And so we've chosen people who embody:

Making a nation

Expanding the nation's horizons

Preserving the nation

Ensuring that all the possibilities of the nation are available to all of its citizens

Offering the help and friendship of the nation to others internationally who might follow in our footsteps and enjoy the same liberties and prosperity as we do.

After all the foolishness,  the acrid smoke from the ears of the partisans, and the empty TV pageantry, Americans know who mattered. They were us, sort of. Only more so.

6/22/05- Wednesday-

Last day of school! Yippee!

OK, not for me. But the Big One is transported with joy. Some of it was bound to rub off. The Queen is more circumspect. Practical as ever, she applauds the respite from schlepping the Big One to school in the morning and fetching him in the afternoon, while wondering what could possibly mesmerize the Wee One into napping in the afternoon like a short car ride does, on the way to get big brother. Of such tradeoffs, Motherhood is constructed. We will thank his teachers, and mean it.

Well, now, yesterday was fun. It turns out the ugly couch page, besides being a load of fun, is made by and for nice people who mostly live down the street from where I did, when I was a young man. But I'm afraid I don't know any of them. Of course, when you work third shift in a factory while going to school, you don't make a lot of friends who aren't vampires. Well, as I said yesterday, the Internet has many wonderful by-products. One was the ugly couch page. One was at the top of the ugly couch page.

There was little Melanjelly. I don't know her, or her family, but her story is universal, so that's not important. She's two and sick. And when someone is two, and sick, her family friends and neighbors look out for her, and her family.

Now people are always asking for dough for charity. I must admit I've always been a soft touch even for panhandlers, never mind other pleas for donations. And because of that soft spot, coupled with a complete lack of judgement, I've gotten taken advantage of countless times. Because I'm afraid it's getting harder to find the people who really need your help amid the sea of opportunists that really want your money. And after you've been "touched for a fiver" over and over and later found out the fund used the money to buy breast implants or jet skis for themselves, you get discouraged. It's disconcerting, and changes your world view, when you first find out that man on the corner won't work for food, and will actually throw food back at you if you try to give him some, in lieu of the cash he craves for booze.

I am reminded of a story of James Michael Curley, who reminds anyone who knows much about him of hundreds of stories. For out-of-towners and youngins, he was the genial and corrupt Mayor of Boston, and sometime congressman and Governor of Massachusetts, who died around the time I was born. The Spencer Tracy movie "The Last Hurrah," is based on his life. And he earned the nickname, "The Mayor of the Poor." Because for all his faults, he was a generous man. Usually with other people's money, but no matter. One of his cronies, and there were many, all on the payroll, recounted a story about "the Curley," as my venerable Irish relatives would call him. I've included a link to buy his biography in the left column, if you're interested. It's the best written biography  I've ever read, about the most interesting public figure in Boston history, and that's saying something on both counts.

As I was saying, the story goes that Curley would work late in the evening. Night comes fast and early in the winter in Boston. Curley would spy a disreputable looking man turning the corner outside his office. Curley would shrug on his coat, and hustle out the door, and be standing on the next corner before the man would get there. Curley would feign every time, to save the man embarrassment, that he just happened to be there waiting for his car, and hail the fellow like a lost brother, and gently slip him some money. After witnessing this charade numerous times, Curley's crony protested that this man was undeserving of pity or charity, as he was a bum, and would surely spend the money on booze, and diminish the value of Curley's generosity. Curley answered that it was still charity even if  someone really didn't deserve it.

That is very American. Americans are very generous, and give and give, knowing full well that much of their charity might miss the mark, but content in knowing that some of it might reach someone who really needs it. They carry a bucket of cool water over hard ground, as it were, hoping there's a cupfull left at the end of the trip for someone who's really thirsty.

Well, there's a little girl, sick in a bed, in the same hospital that my parents brought me to when I was two, and I figured that maybe she could use some help. So be an internet neighbor, be an American, and click on the link for Melanjelly.

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