Scarlet runner beans and Fred Webster

 

It had been a strange day. I looked with no success for scarlet runner bean seeds at Agway. They used to grow to 12 feet in the children’s garden at the Old Stone House, where they sported red flowers and enormous pods with multicolored seeds. Somebody whose name was Billy Currington was singing a country song: “Jesus is great, beer is good, people are crazy.” Now that’s a lyric. I’d stopped by the Old Stone House for the first time in months and someone said that Fred Webster (see my post of May 3, 2010) needed a pacemaker, and that, at age 91, he was thinking about selling everything for $200,000. And it was worth a lot more than that.

 
I hadn’t seen Fred for a very long time. Now he was 91 years and thinking about selling everything! The report was scary.

 
The next day I drove to Fred’s farm on a high hill. Clouds were lifting, the world was shining the way it will after spring rains. The Phish stage Fred had saved a few years earlier from the last Phish concert, stood like some fanciful castle on wheels, directly past a scribbled sign a neighbor had put up: “Who shot my turkey?”  Why would anyone shoot the man’s turkey, I wondered, and left with no answers, dismissed the sign’s conundrum. The huge barns, showing a few more years of wear, still standing despite themselves, with a monumental history of farming spilling out the doors, were where they’d always been. The farmhouse looked as it always had, worn, and a little haphazard.

 

I pulled in and went to the door. On the other side of a screen door turned dark with shadows, Fred was sitting at the kitchen table eating a Reese’s peanut butter cup. His wife, Vivian, was napping in the living room, he explained, giving me one of his sweet hugs. I guess he looked older, but not by much, and not as if he needed a pacemaker. His hair was standing straight up as it sometimes does. Hearing that it was me—she’s always liked me, I think, because she likes anyone who likes Fred a lot—Vivian suggested we all sit in the living room, where a clutter of old things was spread across the walls and all over the floor, and where “Murder, She Wrote” played soundlessly on the TV screen. What’s this about a pacemaker, I asked, as I coped with one of the Reese’s cups  Fred handed me. Apparently, there was no rush, and Fred wasn’t sure he’d ever go for something like that. “But I am going to die someday,” he said. “No. I won’t allow it,” Vivian declared. She explained that a couple of years ago, after a whole rash of tests, the doctor had said to Fred, “As far as I can see, you’re good to go for another twenty years.” She was holding the old man to it.

 

 

And, contrary to the alarming report of the day before, the guy who had offered to buy everything for $200,000 and take it all down to Plainfield for another and, I presume, neater agriculture museum, hadn’t shown up the day before. Fred was just as glad because he didn’t want to sell. “Am I wrong?” he asked. “I don’t want to sell anything. It’s not the money. I just can’t do it.”

 
What Fred really wanted to talk about was a typed manuscript from Jack Lazor, an organic farmer well-known in Vermont. It was a hunk of white paper full of detail about his farming methods and to Fred it was all a delight. A year before Fred had been inducted into the Vermont Agriculture Hall of Fame, and he thought Lazor should be next. Most of all, he wanted to talk about the tine weeder that the man described, because he had a tine weeder. He could show him an old one. I’d never in my life given a thought to tines, so he and Vivian slipped on jackets and we went to see Fred’s tine weeder, dodging muddy puddles, tripping across thresholds, wooden wheels, machinery made lame by time, parts spilling out into the aisles. The metal roof rattled; the walls groaned. The tine weeder was missing a leg, but the tines all seemed to be there. Vivian took a picture of it, then another, with Fred smiling and pointing.

Now, he said, he wanted to show us something else. Vivian and I followed him down one aisle and up another to a veritable patchwork of tines. “Do you see what these are?” he asked, grinning. “They have tines,” I said. Vivian agreed. “Tines.” “These are all hay forks,” he said. Vivian set about taking photographs of hay forks. I didn’t quite get the point, but I was pretty sure Jack Lazor would when he saw them.

 

 
We navigated the muddy banks of several ditches that Fred, his son and whoever had dug to divert water from one place to another. A man, his wife and a barking dog had taken over a bit of trailer that had served as a tool shed, and electric wires had been jerry rigged to turn it into a temporary home. I didn’t get the story, but I always come away from Fred’s with more questions than answers. He’s been reading Bacon’s “Vicissitudes,” he said. That’s the kind of writing he really likes to do, not just words about one generation’s tools and then another’s, not just careful descriptions of the evolution of everything from milking stools to tine weeders. He likes wise words about life, especially when they’re funny, and in Fred’s life there are many of those.

 
I left then. I didn’t stay for tea. I never got around to eating the second Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, but it was good to know that Fred Webster’s life is as full to overflowing as ever.

A sorrowful commentary

Albert Camus wrote sorrow into his political and social commentary. I decided to give it a try. It’s not hard to do.

 
In the 1980s, I had lunch almost daily with people whose work was all about worrying about the world—its violence and its peace, its injustices, its mercies. One of our number was my close friend, Wes, who by then was an old man, though he rarely mentioned age. It was when he died a year or two late that we discovered he was 79.

 
During one particular lunch, we were comparing our visions of the future. “Seven years,” he said. “I give it seven years before nuclear war erupts.” I tried to argue, but really, what debate points could I have put up? The Cold War was still raging.

 
I forgave Wes most things. He was a lovely friend. But I never quite forgave him his prophesy. It was easy for him, I thought. He was unlikely to live that many more years. But what about the rest of us?

 
Now, I’m faced with my own waning years. The world is in critical condition and, as in the past, what is most threatening is mostly ignored. We the people and our leaders argue about politics and economics and call each other ugly names, at the same time as many of us deny the world is dying and others of us hold our breath and hope that it won’t, that the climate won’t heat up quite so quickly as it seems it is, that the rivers aren’t all that poisonous, that our ravaging of the earth won’t mean the end for this lovely, lovely planet.

Victim of drought. Mongolian gazelle – Gobi Desert. 2001. Photo by Mark Heard. Calgary, Canada. Creative Commons.

I look at the younger people around me and feel sad, and guilty. Wes’ nuclear war didn’t happen. I hope an environmental apocalypse won’t happen. But we’re leaving a deeply wounded world to our children and children’s children. And most of us, not enough of us, aren’t paying all that much attention.

There are words, and then there are words….

Not very long ago, I found myself at a friend’s 75th birthday party, despairing aloud about the deluge of words that engulfs our world. A somber, very sober, man leapt to the defense of  language and good writers. There’s nothing I respect more, he said, than a good writer who can clarify and inspire.

Well, I like good writing and good writers too, I retorted….  but he wasn’t interested in anything I had to say. I was obviously some kind of philistine, or at the very least stupid.

He’s probably right. Not about the philistinism or the stupidity, but about words. Only words, well-crafted, beautifully put together, will be able to help us. No wordless vision, no great symphony, not even a Kumbaya, will do.

Albert Camus, 1957. Library of Congress.

I was reminded of this when I ran across an Adam Gopnik article on Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre in the April 9 issue of The New Yorker. Gopnik argues for the superiority of Camus’ journalism to his fiction or his philosophy. In a time in France that was nearly as chaotic as our own, Gopnik writes,

He struck a tone, not of Voltairean Parisian rancor but of melancholic loft. Camus sounds serious, but he also sounds sad – he added the authority of sadness to the activity of political writing. He wrote with dignity at a moment when restoring dignity to public language was necessary, and he slowed public language at a time when history was moving too fast.

How beautiful is that? Where is our Camus?

Writing in a world awash in words

The New York Public Library, where books congregate

Years ago, when I went to college in San Francisco, I was distressed by the numbers of people who wanted to write. My writing was to be special – more stylish, more moving, more profound than theirs. Besides, I had an important need to write. But when I got on with life I discovered that I didn’t have the mojo to make it happen.
Now that I’m at it again, the world of books has gone all peculiar on me. Today, as then, everyone is writing or expects to. The difference is that now, in much greater numbers, they can publish. Most of them, now as then, aren’t honest-to-god writers, not the way I dreamed of writing. But today everyone can publish books without the scions of the publishing world passing on them. And, somehow, I think that’s probably all to the good. Even if it does make me feel sometimes that the world is awash in words. Too many words.
Among these, are some that warn of a world where the digital book will not only kill off all the lovely paged books with colored covers that we adore, but books themselves. Even the ones on Kindle and the Nook will cease to exist. Everyone will have learned to express themselves in 140 characters or less. Sometimes, the critics just mean to prophesy the end of fiction, but that’s hardly less dire.
Ann Patchett, who is one of the nation’s finer fiction writers, recently wrote an op-ed in The New York Times complaining, as a writer and a reader, of the failure of the Pulitzer Prize Committee to choose a work of fiction this year. “… Either the board was unable to reach a consensus, or at the end of the day the board members decided that none of the finalists, and none of the other books that were not finalists, were worthy of a Pulitzer Prize.” She went on to name six or seven books she thought were worthy,* and to worry that the Committee’s failure to name any of them was a loss to all of fiction. The Pulitzer Prize is important because of the publicity and public celebration it creates. It stirs up “the buzz that is so often lacking in our industry – Did you hear about that book?”
We live in a time of transition, of chaos, of confusion. And nowhere is that more obvious than in media of every kind, and especially in fiction.
I’ve come of age. It’s taken a very long time, but I’m finally ready to write. But what’s happened, what’s happening, to the world?
All this to say that I’ve placed a small ad for the first book I’m publishing in this odd era. It’s to your right on this page. You’ll see that I’ve decided to become, among other things, a cozy mystery writer. In future posts, I’ll talk more about writing and writers, and especially the elderly among us. I’ll create another page on this blog to advertise and present samples of “The Body in the Butter Churn,” and eventually of other books. I’ll continue to help fill the air with words, words, and more words. I really have no other choice.

I think Ann Patchett’s list of books worthy of a Pulitzer is fascinating and, in the interests of doing my small part in the project to give them publicity, I’ve listed them. I’m afraid I haven’t read any at this writing. The first three were on the Committee’s short list.
“Train Dreams” by Denis Johnson
“Swamplandia!” by Karen Russell
“The Family Fang” by Kevin Wilson
“Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories” by Edith Pearlman
“Lost Memory of Skin” by Russell Banks “Salvage the Bones” by Jesmyn Ward
“The Marriage Plot” by Jeffrey Eugenides
“The Pale King” by David Foster Wallace

Drumming

Korean drummer performing at Langley International Festival 2010. Photo by dance photographer, Brendan Lally.

Years and years ago, I had a part in producing a United Methodist Women’s Assembly in Cincinnati. There were about 10,000 people there and I can’t remember which night–it might have been the opening–but it was, at any rate, for me, a never to be forgotten event when several small Korean women drummed the opening. The sound was loud, amazing, passionate….. and I’ve never forgotten it.

 
Since then, I’ve seen drummers and known women who drummed, but I had no idea that drumming is spreading among seniors in centers and homes, that it’s enabled the participants to make music, to share a beat, to build muscle, to make community. I wish my mother, lost in a world misshapen by Alzheimers, had been able to drum. She’d have drummed her anger until she felt empowered again, strong, and oh, so loud.

 
Someday, I think I’ll go drum. I’d like it to be with a community of people of all ages. I’d like some of them to be wonderful musicians. It would be another world, like meditation, but big and noisy.

Lonely and narcissistic on facebook

I missed the death of Yvette Vickers, a past Playboy playmate and B-movie star, known for her role in “Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.” She would have been 83 last August, but no one knew how old she was when she died. It was apparently a big story in Los Angeles, not because of the way she lived, but because of the way she died.

She had been dead for the better part of a year when a neighbor noticed the accumulating letters in her mailbox, and forced her way in and through the junk that littered the house. When she found the woman, she was mummified, near a heater that was still running and in front of a computer that was glowing in the empty space.

The last e-mails on her computer weren’t to friends or family, but to fans who had seen her as “the 50 foot woman” years before. Her “web of connections had grown broader but shallower, as has happened for many of us….. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are,” writes Stephen Marche in the latest issue of The Atlantic. It’s a fascinating and powerful article, well worth reading. The author focuses on the social media, and especially Facebook, citing studies and stories  that demonstrate that more and more of us are lonely at the same time as we’re more connected than we have ever been. He argues:

Our omnipresent new technologies lure us toward increasingly superficial connections at exactly the same moment that they make avoiding the mess of human interaction easy. The beauty of Facebook, the source of its power, is that it enables us to be social while sparing us the embarrassing reality of society—the accidental revelations we make at parties, the awkward pauses, the farting and the spilled drinks and the general gaucherie of face-to-face contact. Instead, we have the lovely smoothness of a seemingly social machine. Everything’s so simple: status updates, pictures, your wall.

Then, he came to the point I found especially persuasive, possibly because it intersects with my own amazement and confusion over the contemporary end to privacy, and the profound need people seem to have to put themselves on display. Facebook is one more place where we perform, where we are on stage, day after day, almost continuously. 750 million pictures are uploaded over a single weekend.

More than half its users—and one of every 12 people on Earth is a Facebook user—log on every day. Among 18-to-34-year-olds, nearly half check on Facebook minutes after waking up and 28 percent do so before getting out of bed. The relentlessness is what is so new, so potentially transformative. Human beings have always created elaborate acts of self-presentation. But not all the time, not every morning before we even pour a cup of coffee.

Yvette Vickers’s computer went on and on without her.

I have a wooden woman flying from my ceiling in my study. She’s got wonderful wings, or are they fins? She also has a fish tail and a lovely face. What sets her apart from others of her genre is that she’s looking in a mirror and combing her hair as she flies. I always thought she represented vanity, but the other day it came to me that she represents much more than that. She’s the creature as narcissist, so busy looking at herself she’s not concerned about where she’s going. Self-presentation is what’s important, not her destination or even how she’s going to get there.

The Question of God and Evil

 

I hadn’t realized it, but April is Holocaust month, a time to remember and think about the unimaginable events that marked our history in the last century.

Ron Rosenbaum, writing in “The Chronicle of Higher Education,” (The Naked Truth), wrestles with the meaning of the Holocaust. Wikipedia tells me that in the ’70s and ’80s, he spent years researching Adolph Hitler, finally publishing Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil in 1988. His  life as a Jewish man, and a thinking, feeling human being has been haunted by the Holocaust. It, more than any other single event, has raised the question of evil and God.  The study of the question even has its own field of study, called theodicy. How, it asks, can a God who is worshiped as an all-powerful, all-knowing, and loving deity,a God who  is able to intervene in history and has time and again, be reconciled with the evil that pervades our world? Why would such a God permit the Holocaust?

 

Rosenbaum takes the attempts to answer this question one by one, and finds them empty, sometimes obscene, and always unconvincing. More, he agrees with the renegade Rabbi Richard Rubenstein who wrote, “Jewish history has written the final chapter in the terrible story of the God of History. And the pathetic hope of coming to grips with Auschwitz through the framework of traditional Judaism will never be realized.”

Or, as Bob Dylan put it, “hitler did not change history. Hitler was history….”

Rosenbaum’s essay in this instance has to do with his passionate opposition to every attempt to explain away this awful God, and the offense one of his listeners took to his words.  My concerns take another direction.

When I finished reading Rosenbaum’s piece, I looked at the comments that followed–dozens of them, pursuing the same convoluted debates the author had already taken apart. Rosenbaum had been talking specifically about the God he knew as a Jew, the creator-God who acts in history, but most of the ranting men and women professed no such faith. And that’s why I wondered why none of them entertained the answer I’d given to the question of evil years ago.

I’d studied philosophy of religion on the undergraduate and graduate levels, so it wasn’t a question I hadn’t thought about. If God or the Divine couldn’t be both good and all-powerful, then it seemed to me it was obvious that the Divine was love and goodness, and not all-powerful. I think the point of the crucified son of God is exactly that: a demonstration of  Divine love rather than power, God as one with humanity, weak, meek, with another kind of strength perhaps, but not that of the thundering Deity of the Old (and New!) Testaments.

Certainly, that answer isn’t original with me, so why, I wonder, why didn’t any of those ranting letter-writers consider that possibility? For those who believe, does God have to be all-powerful? By definition? Is our culture hung up on the idea of power? I could go on, but I’d love to hear what my readers think!

The old and the news

Mike Wallace, June 10, 2007. Photo by Terry Ballard. Creative Commons.

Has anyone noticed lately that there seems to be a growing number of old people on television, especially in the news, and especially on CBS.  I’m reminded of that fact by the death of Mike Wallace at 93. He retired from “Sixty Minutes at 88.” Andy Rooney was well into his nineties when he left the same show. Morley Safer is in his 80s; Bob Simon is 70; Steve Kroft is 66; Charlie Rose is 69.

On the distaff side of things, Lesley Stahl is 70, and Barbara Walters, who appears mostly on ABC,  is 74.

Maybe, just maybe, the American public will get used to looking at old people doing important things on TV, even though many stations seem to have a raft of youngish women news anchors I have trouble telling apart. And I don’t mean to forget the old days and people like Walter Conkrite and Harry Reasoner.

Probably most impressive to me is Elizabeth Palmer (also CBS), who is fifty-something and who has reported from many wars in the last year or so. It’s so wonderful to see a woman reporter who looks different, who has an older woman’s voice, and who is so obviously intelligent.

As our numbers grow, some of the clichés about older people will inevitably disappear. I hope.

In the center of a Florida swamp

White Ibis on the St. Johns River. Photo by Mwanner. Creative Commons.

There I was, in the center of a Florida swamp—encircled by oak trees, water cypress and cabbage palms filled with wading birds. Egrets, wood storks, herons, ibis and spoonbills—all of them were perfect miracles—arching their long necks, reaching with their great golden bills, tripping like dancers on stilted legs, their great wings rustling. Hundreds of birds gathering branches and Spanish moss for nests, birds hunched over eggs or hatchlings, water birds perched in the trees like exotic fruits, waiting, watching. And below them—us, gawking people. We could almost touch the birds. And below us, in the water, alligators by the score, their snouts raised, reaching for their nightly feast. Not the birds, not us, but something bought for them by the St. Augustine Alligator Farm.
I’ve always been suspicious of tourist sites whose names end in “Farm”—Rattlesnake Farms, Bear Farms, Moose Farms….

I expected a zoo full of dried up prehistoric looking creatures of immense girth. After all, they don’t exactly ingratiate themselves, do they? They sleep most of the time, and when they overcome a lethargy that looks a lot like big dead lizard, they only do so to eat.

But, in the flesh, so to speak, there is something monumental about them. Camouflaged, they look like the earth they sleep on. Just another log, another rock. Their stillness is deeply impressive. Not a blink of an eye. Not a breath. Until it’s time to eat. The “Farm” housed hundreds of these silent, patient monsters. Waiting, and for what?

This was no farm; it was another universe. Above us, teenagers were on an obstacle course, gliding above seven acres of live alligators, crocodiles, birds and lemurs. Occasionally, a mother, father, or pint-size sibling would look up, recognize one of their own, and cheer the child on.
Every April through July, the birds in the swamp rookery come to roost above the alligators, knowing that the creatures will keep tree-climbing predators away. And the teenagers? Who knows?
It’s all quite extraordinary, isn’t it, how we and our fellow creatures live together on this bizarre, watery planet?

Tri-colored heron. Photo by Dan Pancamo. Creative Commons.

Fu–Manchu, the Other

Because Kindle offered “The Classic Mystery Collection” for $9.95, I’ve been reading Sax Roehmer’s Dr. Fu-Manchu mysteries. The name was only a strange appellation to me before. I had a vague visual image of a Chinese man with a remarkable mustache and long fingers and even longer fingernails. But I’d never given the fellow much thought.

Except for some early Sambos in old bookstores, I’ve never encountered anything quite so thick with racial stereotypes in my life as these books. In the two I’ve read, the whole East–Near and Far–is yellow, with huge emerald green eyes or utterly black ones, and irremediably Evil. The story-teller is Dr. Petrie, a sort of Watson to Nayland Smith, a Sherlock Holmes who was, it’s said, actually Holmes’ nephew. Smith acts  something like Holmes but he’s not nearly as bright. Nearly every adventure in the two books I read happens in warehouses on London’s waterfront which were really fronts for opium dens; houses with eerie histories, where the moon never shines at night and there’s nothing to see until Fu-Manchu’s creatures appear, whether as poisonous spiders or snakes, dacoits brandishing scimitars ( a bandit, usually Indian or Burmese) , exotic women whose charms are the devil’s own, or Dr. Fu-Manchu himself. Though, to keep the stories sufficiently mysterious, his appearances are rare,as well as extraordinary. He’s tall, robed in yellow, with a presence that’s so overpowering, he needs only look at his victims and they’re lost. He is invested in taking over the world. He is the yellow peril.

“In the high-backed chair sat Dr. Fu-Manchu, wearing a green robe upon which was embroidered a design, the subject of which at first glance was not perceptible, but which presently I made out to be a huge white peacock. He wore a little cap perched upon the dome of his amazing skull, and with one clawish hand resting upon the ebony of the table, he sat slightly turned toward me, his emotionless face a mask of incredible evil. In spite of, or because of, the high intellect written upon it, the face of Dr. Fu-Manchu was more utterly repellent than any I have ever known, and the green yes, eyes green as those of a cat in the darkness, which sometimes burned like witch lamps, and sometimes were horribly filmed like nothing human or imaginable, might have mirrored not a soul, but an emanation of hell, incarnate in this gaunt, high-shouldered body.”

Fu-Manchu and his kindred are the unholy others that we seem to require. They’re much more and much less than human beings. There’s something animal about them at the same time as they have intellects and powers we can only marvel at.

 
When, during World War II, the Chinese were briefly our allies, entertainments about the Doctor were discouraged. We have, many times in our history, created, destroyed and recreated stereotypes of the other: Mexicans, Asians of every kind, the Irish, Jews….. Another book on the same Kindle special is a World War I novel by Mary Roberts Rinehart where Germans, who by then formed a large part of the American population, become the enemy. They were the Communists of their day, but worse, they were that because of features characteristic of the race: their reverence for authority, their love of order….

 
It’s much harder today to stereotype with the kind of abandon Sax Roehmer lavished on his characters. Many of us are fastidious about our language. Bill Maher’s jokes are subjected to scrutiny, politicians leap at every conceivable breach of political correctness; racial epithets and jokes are best kept private. I’m glad. But I’ve had fun reading Fu-Manchu. I wonder if  the love of vampires and the interest in science fiction are fueled in part by our need for “the other.” For someone to laugh at. For someone to hate. For someone to blame for everything that goes wrong in our lives.