Reflection

A very poignant piece and lovely poem / lyrics by the late John Denver.  I know exactly what Josh Brown and Denver mean.  Ah, the stories to be told, but now, they've been mostly told to me as I could practically reverse the digits of Brown's age in stating mine.  But 37 is a great age, a time to feel fabulously alive; then I was running a publishing company, feeling pretty much like Josh, waking up excited by the forthcoming day, and the week if it was my favorite day, Monday.  But just wait, Josh, if you think time is accelerating at 37, well, you know what I'm about to say, so, instead here's some advice from a septuagenarian: enjoy every day -- you'll never get one of them back!  Finally, although someone else might be looking back at me in the mirror, my mind says he's a stranger; I'm still eagerly looking forward to the coming day.

New Year's Day

It was brilliant and warm here on Jan. 1, 2012, a perfect day for venturing to our new go-to destination of Munyon Island on our boat where Ann, Jon and I had the beach pretty much to ourselves. Not much to do there but as it was a Sunday, we had the New York Times to keep us company, relax, and watch the yachts go by on Lake Worth. We decided to return home via the Earman River.

As our home is actually on an island, we have two ways of reaching Munyon, the northern route via the Intracoastal or the southern route via the Earman River. This screen shot from Google, showing our home (circled at the west portion of the shot) on the North Palm Beach Waterway and the Munyon docks (circled on the east), speaks for itself. Further east beyond Munyon is MacArthur Beach State Park on Singer Island and then the Atlantic.

Returning via the Earman we went past a man jet skiing with his dog. It was an absolutely perfect ending to our New Year's Day of boating, a Florida moment, bringing a smile to everyone's face.

But what would New Year's Day be without friends, other than man's best friend? Years ago half the day would be spent on the phone with friends but now there is email so I caught up with many via that route. Still, I have had a long standing agreement with my old friend and colleague Ron to avoid email on that special day so we had a marathon talk when I returned from Munyon. Naturally our conversation moved from remembering other colleagues in publishing, to the state of the industry (particularly the impact of eBooks), to politics, and finally to our families. His "kids" are doing well as are mine and we both recognize the truth of "you're only as happy as your unhappiest adult child." In Ron's case there are also grandchildren -- in Washington DC --and he is lucky enough to live fairly nearby in North Carolina.

I also "spoke" to my old friend Ray through his wife, Susan, as Ray was in the bilge of his boat all day repairing a generator. He and Sue spend the winter in Boat Harbour, Bahamas on their boat (which is their year-round home). We see them when they briefly visit on their way to or from the Bahamas and in Norwalk, Connecticut where we both live on boats during the summer.

On New Year's Day I also think about my dear friend and colleague Howard who died at such an early age more than three years ago. I used to speak to him on New Year's Day so that is such a void. He was a brilliant, talented person (click onto this link to see his superb carvings of a Manatee and Koala Bear), gone but always remembered by me. I also keep in mind, with great respect, another friend and colleague, Peter, who has now been out of my life, but not memory, for nearly twenty years now.

Finally there was some surprising news that arrived by email on New Year's Day. But first brief background information. My first job out of college in 1964 was at a division of Academic Press, Johnson Reprint Corporation. I was hired by the Vice President at the time, Fred, who was living with his partner, Michael. I remember when he hired me, thinking he's so old, 35. Ha. About six months later he also hired a "sassy dame," and she showed up at a New Year's Day party that Fred and Michael threw, I think it was Jan. 1966. She was wearing a backless dress right down to the tip of her derrière and believe me, even though I was there with my 1st wife, I took note as she moved to the music. Later she became wife #2 (Ann). So that little intersection of time and space changed my life and hers, thanks to Fred's astute hiring practices.

Here are Michael, Fred and me sometime after I had turned 35.

Well, Fred and Michael have stayed together all that time and, as Fred put it, they "finally tied the knot after 54 years," a civil union performed at New York City hall at the close of 2011! What better way to start the New Year?


Life is Company.....

Phone rings, / Door chimes, / In comes / Company!
No strings, /Good times, / Just chums, / Company!
All those / Photos / Up on the walls--
"With love." / "With love" filling the days,
"With love" seventy ways, / "To Bobby with love"
From all those good and crazy people, your friends!
Those good and crazy people, your married friends!
And that's what it's all about, isn't it?
That's what it's really about, isn't it?
That's what it's really about,
Really about!
From Company, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.

King Time

What better way of ringing in the New Year than writing about the past? In my case, there is much more of that than the future. Sounds like a downer, but it's one of those facts we all have to own up to. Nothing like a good book to get one thinking about such things.

So, it was about time that I read Stephen King's new book about time, 11/22/63.

First, a confession. I am one of the few people on the face of the earth who had never read a Stephen King anything. Maybe it is my abhorrence of the horror genre or maybe it is because my literary taste finds me eschewing most books that make the best seller list. So why turn to King, later in his career and late in my life?

It took one of our habitual long summer Florida/Connecticut commutes to change my mind. We usually pick up a few books on tape (well, now, on CD), swapping our used ones for "new" used ones at a local used-book store (yes, they still exist, thankfully). On a whim, as I am interested in the art of writing, I picked up Stephen King's On Writing. It was good, in fact spellbinding, King being able to weave memoir with mentoring -- a no nonsense guide to being a good writer (simply put, hard work). I thought it fascinating, maybe because I was a captive audience driving along I95 for hours and hours, but thinking, hey, if I had instead invested those mega hours of my publishing career into King's prescription for becoming a published writer....what if? It got me thinking about the past. But I've always lived with nostalgia on my brain (witness many entries in this blog).

A slight detour in King's usual genre finally brought me to his fiction. I liked science fiction as a kid. In high school, before my senior year when I discovered Thomas Hardy, I had thought, as a nascent reader, that the epitome of fiction was H. G. Well's Time Machine. So, after hearing King's On Writing, I thought I'd like to read something of his if only he would depart his horror / suspense thing. And as if my wishes were granted by a paranormal power, along came King's 11/22/63, more historical and science fiction than anything else.

I ordered it from Amazon so Ann could give it to me for Christmas, but it arrived on the 48th anniversary of 11/22/63, soon after I had just posted a brief piece recounting my dark memory of Kennedy's assassination.

One of King's themes is that the past is harmonic -- that there are events that seem to reflect one another, or rhyme, in one's own life when juxtaposed to others. I guess I took the arrival of the book on that very day as a providential sign, an harmonic event, it was meant to be that I should start it immediately, even though I was in the middle of another book.

I will not dwell on plot here other than to say what any reader of the legion of book reviews already knows -- that the main character goes back in time with the intention of preventing Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating President Kennedy and thus (he thinks) change history for the better. And I am not going to go into detail concerning the conceit he uses to rationalize the mechanics of Jake / George travelling back and forth from the present to sometime in 1958. Let's just call it a time portal.

King's writing is all about his characters and in 11/22/63 the tale is told as a first person account by our stalwart hero, Jake Epping (as he is named in the "Land of Ahead") AKA George Amberson (in the "Land of Ago"). It is as if Jake/George pulled up a chair and tapped the reader on the shoulder and said "I have a fascinating -- no unbelievable -- story to tell you, but it's true, so listen to every word" and you, the reader, feel thoroughly compelled to do so. King's tale is a page turner, moving along with an alacrity that makes the 900 or so pages fly by.

And while much of the book is almost conversational, there are those moments when King shows his mastery of suspense and horror, such as when George first returns to the past and decides, as an experiment which will ultimately lead to his main purpose of changing history, to prevent a murder that he knows is going to happen in the late 1950's. For me the most engaging invention of the novel was the invitation to live in the past once again. The scenes King paints are familiar ones, a land without cell phones, computers, color TVs (or any TVs at all in my case, remembering our first TV, a Dumont the size of Asia with a tiny screen, that arrived sometime in the late 40s in our household), seat belts, and when lyrics like "wop-bop-a-loo-mop alop-bam-boom" and "itsy, bitsy, teenie, weenie, yellow polka-dot bikini" wafted the radio airwaves. Or to put it another way, gas that was 20 cents a gallon, and a pack of cigarettes costing about the same.

When George first goes to 1958, he has to board a bus: ."I let the working Joes go ahead of me, so I could watch how much money they put in the pole-mounted coin receptacle next to the driver's seat. I felt like an alien in a science fiction move, one who's trying to masquerade as an earthling. It was stupid -- I wanted to ride the city bus, not blow up the White House with a death-ray -- but that didn't change the feeling."
While King's supernatural / horror themes may be more latent in this book, they are nonetheless subliminally there, reminding us that we're all in this ship of time together and none will get out alive. There is a foreboding feeling to 11/22/63, all those moments of the past, all the choices that lead to the present, with the future becoming a smaller and smaller percentage of all of our lives.

King deals with several elements of what he thinks time travel might have involved, all interesting and plausible. Among these is his theory that time's "resistance to change is proportional to how much the future might be altered by any given act," something he mentions earlier in the novel and sort of foreshadows what eliminating Oswald might mean.

He also deals with the "butterfly effect." As his fellow time traveler, Al, puts it, "It means small events can have large, whatchamdingit, ramifications. The idea is that if some guy kills a butterfly in China, maybe forty years later -- or four hundred -- there's an earthquake in Peru." (More foreshadowing.)

And the butterfly effect is the reason why, as George stalks Oswald, he decides to do nothing to even cross his path before it is time to act (that is, if he does act -- no spoiler here): "If there's a stupider metaphor than a chain of events in the English language, I don't know what it is. Chains...are strong. We use them to pull engine blocks out of trucks and to bind the arms and legs of dangerous prisoners. That was no longer reality as I understood it. Events are flimsy, I tell you, they are houses of cards, and by approaching Oswald -- let alone trying to warn him off a crime which he had not even conceived -- I would be giving away my only advantage. The butterfly would spread its wings, and Oswald's course would change. Little changes at first, maybe, but as the Bruce Springsteen song tells us, from small things, baby, big things one day come. They might be good changes, ones that would save the man who was now the junior senator from Massachusetts. But I didn't believe that. Because the past is obdurate."

At his most eloquent, King philosophizes about the "harmonics" of time watching as Jake/George - teachers both past and present - observe two students, Mike and Bobbi, dance the Lindy as had George and Sadie (the gal he falls in love with in the past): "The night's harmonic came during the encore...It's all of a piece, I thought. It's an echo so close to perfect you can't tell which one is the living voice and which is the ghost-voice returning. For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark."

It is also a well researched historical novel, with King mostly playing down the conspiracy theories while nonetheless providing for the remote possibility. He makes his historical characters real -- this is a Lee Harvey Oswald you get to know as a flesh and blood person (not someone most would want to know, but a real person). One especially feels sympathy for his wife, Marina, an abused woman in a strange land. In fact George draws a parallel (harmonics again) to his love, Sadie, thinking about taking Sadie to the future with him: "I could see her lost in 2011, eyeing every low-riding pair of pants and computer screen with awe and unease. I would never beat her or shout at her -- no not Sadie -- but she might still become my Marina Prusakova, living in a strange place and exiled from her homeland forever."

And it was satisfying to hold the book itself, an impressive tome with a fabulous jacket, one side depicting the past as we know it and the other the past that might have been. In On Writing, King insists that writers must be readers. 11/22/63 is a book to be read.

November 22, 1963

People our age remember certain moments with such clarity they seem like yesterday. Noon, November 22, 1963 was such a moment as I was passing the Student Union building on Flatbush Avenue, hurrying to class. It was a clear, crisp day. Suddenly, a friend came running toward me. "Did you hear, Kennedy was shot?" Incredulous, I rushed to my dorm to listen to the radio. It was true.

We had tickets for a concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that night, one of the few cultural events in New York City that was not cancelled. An unrehearsed version of Beethoven's Egmont Overture was performed rather than the regular program. We filed out, silent, stunned, weeping openly. In quick succession Oswald was apprehended, and while we watched it on TV with others in the dormitory, Jack Ruby assassinated him.

It was a horrific weekend of anxiety, bewilderment, and profound sorrow. Such high hopes for our young President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. These hopes were dashed by what would become the first of other assassinations in the turbulent 1960s, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy.

To have borne witness to them all is almost dreamlike, but Friday, November 22, 1963 is emblazoned in my mind's eye.

Brooklyn

I've written about my old "home town" before. I lived in downtown Brooklyn and in Park Slope for almost eight years before moving to Manhattan and finally Connecticut. But Brooklyn was a special place for me, where I went to college, met my first wife, and had a son. To the right is a picture of Chris and me on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade in 1965.

So it was no wonder I picked up the novel Brooklyn by the Irish novelist, Colm Tóibín. It is a coming of age novel about a young Irish woman, Eilis Lacey, who immigrates to the US soon after WW II, settling in Brooklyn -- in fact near Fulton Street where I lived. There are similarities to the work of Henry James, contrasting the old world to the new, and written by a man about a female protagonist -- a remarkable novel well worth reading. One cannot help but contrast Brooklyn to James' Portrait of a Lady. Eilis having to make choices of suitors as did Isabel Archer.

Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street called Bartocci's, but it might as well have been the old Abraham & Straus also on Fulton Street. What Eilis is told by the bosses' daughter the first day of work embodies the essence of the American immigrant experience: "Brooklyn changes every day...New people arrive and they could be Jewish or Irish or Polish or even coloured. Our old customers are moving out to Long Island and we can't follow them, so we need new customers every week. We treat everyone the same. We welcome every single person who comes into this store. They all have money to spend...You give them a big Irish smile."

Eilis is the reluctant immigrant at first, being sent to America by her mother and sister so she could have a better life and employment which was then so difficult to find in Ireland. She knows no one there except a Priest who sponsors her. Eilis finally embraces the experience (falling, she thinks, in love with an Italian boy, never being quite sure) before she finds that she has to return to her home for a few weeks (don't want a spoiler in this brief synopsis so will leave it at that). Her old home in Ireland now seems foreign to her but over the weeks she begins to feel that she cannot leave (thinking she is now in love with someone else). It is now Brooklyn that is feeling foreign although she has put down deep emotional roots there.

The resolution is somewhat surprising but Eilis is constantly reinventing herself for whatever situation. One can imagine what it must have been like for an immigrant, especially a young woman, to make her way in a strange land after WW II. It can stand with Gish Jen’s novel about the Chinese immigrant, Typical American

Tóibín skillfully takes the reader on Eilis' journey, a truly unforgettable portrait and lovingly rendered by the author.

The More Things Change….

Perhaps it is merely wishful thinking that certain values such as loyalty, conscientiousness and dedication can persevere. There is anecdotal evidence to the contrary in today’s world, perhaps exacerbated by the computer chip which has effected all forms of communication, even changing how we think and write (140 character tweets is the modern attention span LOL). No longer are there jobs that last for decades (when there are jobs at all) and popular culture has supplanted most of the fine arts. There is not even a pretense of courtesy or refinement and all one has to do is get on an airplane – as we are about to do -- to observe that point. So in this oasis we now call the modern world, I went back in time to get ready for an overseas trip. More on that trip when we return in a few weeks, during which time this blog will be silent.

My time travel took me to the barber shop I used to frequent when we lived in the Westport area. I went there for more than 30 years and my sons as well when they were children. I normally now buzz cut my own hair and as we live at our marina nearby Westport only in the summers, I see them but once a year, usually before a trip such as the upcoming one. Tommy has been the proprietor of Westport’s Compo Barber Shop since 1959. I always had my hair cut by his sidekick Felici who is from Italy and still speaks in a broken accent.

On Friday morning I walked into the shop. Tommy was sweeping the floor and Felici was getting ready for his next appointment, mine. How often does one embrace his barber? Hugging both Tommy and Felici seemed to be the appropriate thing to acknowledge my kaleidoscopic visit. It also was mutual acknowledgement that we are survivors, not only in the corporal sense, but as sojourners from another era.

Tommy proudly displays photographs from the Westport Historical Society in his shop as well as ones of himself cutting the hair of multiple generations of the same family. I looked up and down the Post Road where his shop has been all this time and noted that the neighboring stores are all different. The stores come and go but Compo Barber Shop has been a bulwark in the community. It is a throwback to small town America, one that Richard Russo often chronicles in his novels.

I obviously have some special feeling for the camaraderie between a barber and his customer, a unique male bonding that I’ve written about before, particularly as my childhood barber, Joe, literally became my Uncle Joe.

So after I settled in the chair we covered the checklist of typical barbershop banter: our respective health, how the “kids” are doing, the weather and the recently departed storm, Irene, what the country coming to, the tragic shape of the economy, and the sadness I feel having seen my publishing business in town finally come to an end. With my now perfect haircut I went to the cash register to pay but they would not accept payment. I protested, but understood that some things are more important than money. Just seeing me was enough for them and that feeling was reciprocated as I said “see you next year,” and hopefully the next, and many more after that.
Photograph courtesy of WestportNow.Com

A Meaningful Life

We just returned from Sicily where we attended the wedding of the son of my wife's best friend, Maria. In fact, Ann had been visiting two weeks before my arrival and when I arrived for my brief four day stay, we took residence in an ideally situated downtown hotel in Palermo so I could squeeze some sightseeing of the city as well. The wedding was held in a Palermo church constructed in the 16th century and then we went to a reception at a private castle-like Villa on the Mediterranean outside of Palermo. I'll write more about this experience when I have a chance to work on the photographs, so consider this Part I which is mostly about the book I read on the plane, a flight from hell (Miami to Rome to Palermo) on Alitalia, perhaps the worse airline ever. It starts with their web site which has no record locator, no means of choosing seats, everything must be done by phone with harassed agents whose main job is to dismiss the call as quickly as possible.

During my working days, I regularly flew business or first class, so finding myself in today's economy class on an eleven hour flight with screaming babies, half dressed people, and four rest rooms for the entire economy class, came as a shock and gave new meaning to the word squalor. Diapers were being changed on nearby seats with all the attendant odors helping to create an excruciating environment. Towards the end of the flight some lavatories were unusable as whatever didn't fit into the toilet wound up on the floor. The food was indecipherable at times. I recognized my pasta "dinner," but the "snack" before landing was some sort of a gooey bread, with a kind of cheese and onions baked on top served without utensils. Who cares, wipe your hands on your seat, if you can find a spot as it must be the smallest seat and space of any airline's economy class . I've had flights on commuter airlines with more space. No seating etiquette as well, as the person in front of me took it upon himself to recline all the way, leaving the tray nearly in my chin.

Fortunately, I packed my noise cancelling headphones with my iTouch and listened to music the entire flight as I read a recently reissued novel, A Meaningful Life by L.J. Davis originally published in 1971. This is a forgotten classic, the kind I used to seek when I was in the reprint business, my major find having been Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road. Kudos to the New York Review of Books for discovering this one.

Two years ago I reviewed Sam Savage's The Cry of the Sloth and I have to wonder whether Savage had read Davis' A Meaningful Life. The two protagonists seem to be the same person confronting the dilemma of "a meaningless life." At the time, I said Savage portrays an inexorable path for our protagonist, a fascinating, tragicomic portrait of isolation and personal failure, in the tradition of Gogol and Kafka." Davis did the same for his protagonist, Lowell Lake, more than thirty years earlier. A Meaningful Life is written in the finest tradition of the black comedy and I think if Woody Allen and Franz Kafka teamed up, this could have been their collaboration.

The novel is set in my familiar 1960's, the same decade I married my first wife while we were still in college and lived in Brooklyn. Hopefully, that is the only similarity between Mr. Lake and myself. Lowell drifts into marriage in college, gives up his scholarship to graduate school, mostly to show his new wife that he is in charge of their lives and to prove it further, decides to move from California to New York City, where he will write a novel and she will work, over her objections (knowing Lowell to be unrealistic). His wife's mother also objects to Lowell right at the start (he's not Jewish; her daughter is). Her father simply entreats Lowell to call him Leo and that is about the extent of their relationship. Early in the novel Lowell fantasizes his future life as being a subject for the law and at the end this fear rears its head again. Davis' description of Lowell's wedding pretty much sets the timbre of the writing:

"The moment Lowell took his place at the altar, a fog of terror blew into his mind and few things sufficiently penetrate its veil to be remembered with any clarity afterward. He hadn't been nervous that his voice would break or that he would fart loudly -- but he was scared now, and scared he remained. He was changing his status in the community of man. He was in the hopper of a great machine and he could no more get them to turn it off than a confessed and proven murderer could change his mind about his trail...The law had him and there was no way out, or least not a nice or easy one: it was a matter for judges and courts, his wife testifying about the length of his prick and the dirty things he whispered in her ear when he was drunk ...the judge scolding him, alimony; he could see it all. The other way out was murder or moving secretly to another town, changing your name, losing all your friends, denying all your accomplishments, a kind of suicide....He was going to be a grown up now, and there was no stopping it."

On their drive to New York, he makes a wrong turn and winds up in Brooklyn, foreshadowing Lowell's eventual involvement in the borough. But before that denouement they endure nine years of "marriage," Lowell at first "working" on his novel, which turns mostly to gibberish and both Lowell and his wife retreat to drinking when his wife daily returns from work. Their days are filled with the details of living, more like surviving, watching sitcoms, drinking, while Lowell slides down the vortex of a meaningless life, without any purpose. Why even dress?

"At the end of six months his wife systematically began to throw away his clothes. True, his clothes were showing a few signs of wear; Lowell had never been particularly interested in clothing, bought it as seldom as possible, and wore it as long as he could, often developing a stubborn affection for certain items. It was also true that his underwear was a disgrace, his Jockey shorts hanging in soft tatters and his undershirts so full of holes that wearing them was nothing but a formality; on the other hand, it was kind of startling to go to the suitcase that served him in lieu of a bureau and find that his possessions had been weeded again, the supply growing shorter and shorter as the days wore on, the time fast approaching when he would go to his suitcase and it would be empty. Worse than that, it was kind of sinister to have laid out your shirt and pants before going to bed and then wake up to find one or the other of them gone, the contents of its pockets heaped up on the table beside the typewriter. He always intended to buy replacements, but he never got around to it, and meanwhile no amount of grumbling would make his wife stop. She had a case and he didn't, and that was that; his clothes were really wearing out-perhaps not quite as fast as they were being thrown out, but that was purely conjectural and largely in the eye of the beholder, especially when it came to arguing about it-and he really did forget to buy new ones, so when you came right down to it, he had no one to blame for his impending nudity but himself. If a kinder fate had not intervened, it was altogether possible that Lowell would soon have been totally naked, hovering thin and birdlike and obsessed above the typewriter like some kind of crackpot anchorite. Although this state of affairs would have precluded ever leaving the apartment again, at least alive, that would have been all right too."

Reaching the bottom, he symbolically fears he does not even exist. His wife was to blame once again in his mind, a mind now totally disheveled and lack of purpose:

"One day, in going over his papers, he discovered that his wife had thrown out his birth certificate. There was no proof that she had done so, but the damn thing was gone, and he knew instinctively what had happened to it. It was a blue piece of crackly paper with all of Lowell's statistics arranged in graceful script above a gold medallion and the signatures of the delivering physician, the resident, and the director of the hospital, just like a diploma. It not only proved that he had been born, but the fact that he possessed it proved that he was a grown-up....He rifled the shoebox where these things were kept, he scoured the room, searched the wastebasket and then the garbage cans outside, but it was nowhere to be found. His wife had thrown it away, just as she occasionally threw away scraps of paper on which he'd scribbled some important thought. It was gone."

Finally, Lowell admits to himself that his "novel" is nothing but a means of passing time with booze. Through the shadowy connection of an "Uncle Lester" -- his wife's uncle -- he gets a job as a copywriter for a plumbing trade journal, neither knowing anything about plumbing, nor having any interest in the subject. He took the job with the understanding (his, not his employer's) that it would only be temporary (sort of like his life itself). As soon as he got the job, "his wife settled down almost as if a wand had been waved over her, bought a black garter belt, and never chewed gum again."

But after nine years of marriage (Davis describes their marriage as a cross between Long Day's Journey Into the Night and Father Knows Best), his life amounted to "an endless chain of days, a rosary of months, each as smooth and round as the one before, flowing evenly through his mind. You could count on the fingers of one hand the events and pauses of all that time: two promotions; two changes of apartment (each time nearer the river); a trip to Maine, where he realized that his wife's legs had gotten kind of fat-five memories in nine years, each no more than a shallow design scratched on a featureless bead. It was life turned inside out; somewhere the world's work was being done and men were laboring in the vineyards of the Lord, Khrushchev was being faced down on the high seas, and Negroes were being blown up and going to jail, but all Lowell did was change his apartment twice, tell his wife to put on some pants, and get promoted faster than anybody else on the paper -- a tiny, dim meteor in an empty matchbox."

But at this time Lowell discovers the biography of Darius Collingwood, a tycoon and ruthless raconteur of the 19th century, a person as opposite of the passive Lowell as one can be. He becomes mesmerized by his life, especially by the discovery that Collingwood had built a mansion in Brooklyn, one that was for sale in the Fort Green/Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, which in the 1960's looked more like Berlin at the end of WWII. Vagrants, bums, and all sorts of unsavory figures occupied empty disintegrating buildings. Lowell becomes fixated on buying the old Colingwood mansion and renovating it, not knowing anything about real estate, carpentry, plumbing, electrical repairs and with some savings he had secretly put aside from his "work" he plunges into a nightmarish version of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.

The real estate closing with a "Mr. Grossman," the seller, reveals his ignorance:
"[He never did]... get to see Mr. Grossman, who was represented at the closing by a lawyer of such intimidating respectability that he made Lowell feel like some kind of meek crook whenever he spoke to him. Sometimes Lowell wondered if Mr. Grossman existed at all, if he wasn't the creation of real-estate interests, doing voice imitations over the phone in order to collect rents and fight off city agencies and sell houses to people like Lowell. Anything seemed possible, even probable. Sitting there in the lawyer's office above Court Street with sleet rattling on the windows, money changing hands, and a great deal of incomprehensible but threatening nonsense going on all around him, he felt like a mental defective on trial for rape and witchcraft: he couldn't understand a word of it, but he had the distinct feeling that it would not end well. Papers were produced and signed; Lowell wrote checks, and they were taken from him; men conferred in glum, hushed voices with their heads close together, continually referring to Lowell as 'him.'"

So, with the first found enthusiasm of his life, Lowell begins work on his crumbling edifice.. He evicts the squatters in the home. He buys tools. He has them stolen. He buys books about renovation and understands little. He seeks out a neighbor who had renovated a similar property (unsuccessfully) for suggestions. He is demonically watched by the so called residents in those slums. His wife helps for a while, but then goes to her mother's, but returns to their apartment where she lives a chaotic life. He finally gets to the point that he has to hire a contractor but only two show up to quote, the first of whom just walks out and the second, a Trinidadian by the name of Cyril P. Busterboy who agrees to take on the job with his crew. Lowell calls him Mr. Busterboy. Mr. Busterboy calls him Mr. Lake. Gradually Lake hangs around Busterboy and his crew, buying them beers and most of the work stops as they all get drunk during the day. Lowell is so drunk one night he sleeps in the remains of the building's master bedroom, on a tarp on the floor, hears a noise downstairs and confronts a shadowy figure. Lowell, with a crowbar in hand, and still in a drunken stupor, successfully bashes the intruder's head in like a crushed watermelon. He deposits the body in the dumpster and throws other trash over the body, leaving blood all over the room. The dumpster is picked up in the morning, Lowell convinced the police will come, but no one misses the intruder whose life was obviously as meaningful as Lowell's. Mr. Busterboy tells him not to worry, that his men will clean up the blood. This is covered over with sterile new plaster. He loses the house, but does not care, "contemplating a future much like his past, he realized that it was finally too late for him."

Although a literary work, it is more a profoundly disturbing philosophical piece. How does one define a "meaningful life?" Lowell is a caricature in the extreme, simply being swept along by forces over which he has little control and when he does participate in the decision making, he inevitably makes the wrong ones, not realizing consequences. He simply has no interests, and therefore no real friends. Time erases all, but Davis' novel is a reminder to find one's passion -- and for most people that means meaningful work, or an avocation, something Lowell miserably fails at. Depressing? Yes, but Davis sees it as the modern dilemma.

More on Sicily later. But, as a preview, a panoramic view of Castellammare del Golfo, outside of Palermo, the birthplace of our friend, Maria. There fishermen gather to pursue their livelihoods as they have done for centuries, work and camaraderie providing a meaningful life.

A Boating Tale

June 30 is an anniversary of sorts. On that day twenty one years ago we had a challenging boating experience, one of many in retrospect, but I had written something about this particular one at the time so there are details I had completely forgotten until coming across the article in my files. Much of it happened at our favorite anchorage in the Norwalk Islands, long before the advent of the GPS and boats that can be handled with bow thrusters and joysticks. That same anchorage today is even more crowded as the GPS has diminished "local knowledge" as a factor and joysticks and chart plotters have reduced the entry level barrier to handling a larger power boat without previous experience. It makes me want to stay at the dock nowadays.

Ironically, the article makes reference to friend's boat, a 39' Chris Craft which now is the boat we live on during the summer, having bought that classic from a friend he sold it to. And we are still good friends with Ray and Sue who figure prominently in the story so there are threads of continuity between then and now. Our boat at the time of the article was a 37' 1986 Silverton, one we had taken all over the Long Island and Block Island Sounds, Buzzards Bay, and the Vineyard and Nantucket Sounds. We were more adventuresome then.

So here is what happened on that day in 1990:

It was a Saturday like so many others we experienced at our customary anchorage in the Norwalk Islands, but what would evolve that night was like no other we have ever lived through. We arrived as the sun was setting the night before. Our friends, Ray and Sue, on their 38' Ocean, 'Rascel', had already arrived, and as ideal weather was forecasted for the weekend, we were reassured that rafting with their boat would be secure and tranquil.

Although we had the anchorage nearly to ourselves that Friday evening, by late Saturday morning, with the tide nearly at high, thus allowing easy passage into the anchorage, other boats began to join us. Our friends Tony and Betty on their 39' Chris Craft dropped their hook nearby and other boats, unknown to us, made their way into the spot between Copps and Chimon. A stately, classic, two-masted schooner set their anchor somewhat to our starboard, while smaller powerboats were spotted here and there. A 30' catamaran skimmed in on the surface like a water bug, anchoring well behind our stern, and a descending plow anchor and chain announced the arrival of a 42' Grand Banks to our port.

The anchorage began to take on a party atmosphere, anticipating the evening, as the late afternoon sun shimmered over the Long Island Sound. A sea breeze had picked up and small white caps could be seen in the haze towards Eaton's Neck. I turned on the weather radio as we were expecting guests for dinner, and it would be far easier to run into the Norwalk harbor in my new Achilles dingy than to take our boat in. There, in the harbor, I could pick up our son's Boston Whaler, meet our guests and then, as the sun sets, bring them back to the dock, and return to the anchorage in the Achilles raft.

The weather radio announced complete cooperation for this plan: some thunderstorms to the north, with little chance one might drift over the Sound and a 10 to 15 knot breeze out of the southwest overnight. Since our anchorage is well protected from all directions except east, I lowered our Achilles and its new 4HP engine, and prepared to run into our marina, only about a mile away.

The new dingy and engine performed flawlessly and the 4HP engine even enabled me to effortlessly plane, making my time back to Norwalk less than expected. I tied up the new dingy at our slip and went to the one in which my son's 13' Whaler was berthed, Its 40 HP engine started without much coaching and I awaited our guests.

The run back to our anchorage was uneventful, and my wife's usual culinary feast was appreciated by all. So, the waning hours of the hazy sun were consumed by good food and talk. As the sun began to slip below the horizon, I readied the Whaler for the return trip. The southwest breeze had now picked up to 15 -20 knots.

After tying up the Whaler I got into the rubber dingy and started up her engine. The sky had changed from its usual sunset red and amber to a foreboding autumnal and stormy gray, laced with red. Worse, the wind had changed to the east so I tried to hurry back, getting up on plane well before the 5 MPH marker to return to our boat, on which my wife was on alone, still tied up to the boat of our friends, Ray and Sue.

Before completely exiting the harbor I was stopped by the Norwalk marine police. Although I assumed I was being stopped because of my speed, they said "where are you going, haven't you heard that there is a storm that is supposed to hit this area?" The increasing wind and the prematurely black sky in the west gave credence to their warning. So much for the promised tranquil weather as announced on the weather band.

I explained my predicament to the police. "You better get out there fast," cautioned the police. I resumed my flight on plane, with difficulty as the easterly wind now easily surpassed 20 knots.

Many years of experience at the same anchorage told me that within a short time it would become a maelstrom where we are anchored. In a westerly flow, it was a paradise. Out of the east, our pond became the ocean. It was important to get back to my vessel soon. Approaching the northern end of Chimon Island, in the gyrating water of the easterly wind, the outboard engine died. Repeated attempts to coax the engine to life were fruitless. With no anchor, my only hope was to make some headway by rowing to a sailboat anchored about 100 yards upwind. The time seemed to be interminable, but eventually I was able secure the dingy to the sailboat's stern. In the distance in the west the lightening lit up the descending night.

No one was on the deck of the sailboat so I knocked on her hull. A very inebriated women stumbled to the deck, entreating me to climb on board. Luckily, a more sober gentleman followed and I explained my predicament to him. I needed a few minutes to work on the engine and to get back to my boat.

As I had a handheld in my bag, I decided to call my wife or Ray on 72, our unofficial station for communication. As I suspected, the weather conditions, combined with my long absence, resulted in my near hysterical wife standing by.

Ray got on the radio offered to get into his dingy and come around the island to possibly tow me. I asked him to standby 72 and let me work on the engine for a few minutes. I thought that even if I couldn't start the engine, at least I was safely ensconced and the most important thing is that our boats do not go unattended.

So, as the storm meandered its way towards Norwalk, I tried to diagnose the problem. I went through every possible way of starting the engine, but without success. Maybe salt through the air vent had clogged the fuel line. Disconnecting the fuel line, I pumped some fuel overboard, and reconnected the line. Once primed, I pulled the cord again, and it started. At the same time Ray came around the sailboat in his dingy. "I said I would call if I needed help," I cried over the rising wind. "Why did you leave the boats?" This was a rhetorical question, knowing Ray would not miss an opportunity for an adventure.

We began to make our way in the dark around the island, knowing, from the muffled thunder, rising wind and flashes of light, that we had little time to return to our vessels. Finally, we arrived. As I suspected, the unrelenting easterly wind had churned up the anchorage and the, now, low tide had made us and the remaining vessels captives of the anchorage. We would all have to ride out whatever nature intended to deliver.

We dodged a bullet this time as the threatened blow never fully materialized. Thunder and lightning was followed by a brief, intense shower, but the fireworks we had sometimes the misfortune to experience at this very same spot were absent. While the storm passed, the east wind refused to abate. It foreboded an uncomfortable evening as our rafted vessels lurched and pitched in response to the seas. But we were tied well and had plenty of fenders out, and we felt sufficiently exhausted to sleep through anything so we bedded down for the night. At least our intention was to sleep for no sooner than our heads had touched their pillows the uncompromising sound of fiberglass clashing with fiberglass filled our ears. The scraping and the gashing sound said this was not a simple problem of a fender popping out between our boats.

From the cockpit I made my way in the darkness along the gunnels to the bow to witness the enmeshing of our bow pulpit between the railings and gunnels of the 30' catamaran which I had remembered setting its anchor well to our stern in the, then, more cordial westerly breeze. Now that the wind had shifted nearly 180 degrees, it had broken anchor and was now totally impaled by our bow pulpit.

It was that night when I learned how imperfectly matched a catamaran, broadside to the wind, was with a powerboat at anchor, our boat rising as the cat fell. Remarkably, in spite of the smashing and scraping of the mismatched fiberglass, my wife and I were the only ones on the bow witnessing this spectacle. I speculated that the boat was unattended. We were calling out for our friends who, later I learned, were busing watching a movie, their generator contributing to drowning out all other sound.

Their anchor line kept the stern of the cat in abeyance from their own boat. I pounded on the side of our friends' boat, who finally heard our clarion call for help and joined us on their bow. Since the cat seemed to be abandoned, Ray was preparing to board their boat off my pulpit between the pitching of the sea when, suddenly, a dazed woman emerged from the cat's cabin. She made the leap to hysteria in a few short moments. Her impulse was to fend off our bow by planting herself on her gunnels and pushing off with her legs, failing to realize that the windage of the cat's pontoons was acting like a sail to the strong easterly wind abeam.

The force was beyond the ability of even a small army to extricate the boat that way. The lurching and pitching of the bow, the anchor hanging from the pulpit and smashing the gunnel of the cat created the danger of breaking this poor women's legs but screaming warnings to that effect went unheeded. Ray hollered "lady if you don't get out of there I'm going to get over there somehow and drag you away." She retreated.

Finally, a man emerged from the cabin and perhaps, now, we had enough hands on deck to figure something out -- if nature gave us enough time before serious damage was done to our vessels. The anchor line was caught by the tiller of the cat so we thought that if we could release their vessel by raising the tiller, we might be able to make some headway in untangling the boats. Meanwhile, the incessant pitching and crashing of the vessels reminded us that time was of the essence.

"Raise the tiller" we shouted to the new deck hand who was stunned, trying to take the picture in which his vessel was a prominent co-star. "I can't, I don't think I have the strength with all the pressure on it from the anchor line," he cried back. Now, it was our turn for hysteria.

In a voice that I last seem to remember coming from 'Rosemary's Baby,' our friend Susan growled, "Mister, get your ass over the tiller and pull!" Ray jumped on to their boat and was able to disentwine the line from the tiller. By this time, our bow and their railing had become such good friends, they still refused to part. It was now apparent that the only way we are going to break was for us to untie from our friends and to try to drop back. This was going to be very difficult for with an easterly wind, our stern was not more than 15 feet from a rock which was very much apparent at low tide. I fired up our 350 crusaders; no time to run the blowers or check the bilge, I thought.

We began to untie our lines and I realized that as soon as I dropped back, we would be abeam of the wind and immediately would have to get the bow into the wind. Thankfully, we disengaged from the cat which looked like a locus predator as it slipped away from my bow. As expected, we rapidly progressed toward the rock while abeam of the wind. With port engine forward and starboard in reverse, I steadily increased the throttle on the port.

The vessel pitched in the rolling seas and began to slowly respond. Too slow, I thought, and I continued increase the port throttle. We cleared the rock by less than 5 feet as our bow turned into the wind and began to make our way through the anchorage while the cat also was free.

Now our enemy was the dark night and the crowded anchorage. We threaded our way upwind, seeking a spot to drop our own hook; it would be dangerous to try to retie to our friends downwind, so close to the rock. We had never fully appreciated our windless, one that could be operated from the bridge, until that night. The choppy seas, combined with the darkness of night, made going on the bow dangerous, so dropping the hook from the bridge was not a luxury, it was a necessity.

The anchor was successfully lowered, letting out as much scope out as feasible, given the wind and the room in which we had to swing. Finally, we were able to rest. In the clear light of morning, it seemed as if we were on a different planet. The east wind had departed in favor of the more friendly, westerly flow. There was no sign of the commotion of the night before, other than our exhaustion.

I dingied to the bow of my boat and inspected the damage. The bow pulpit took most of the hit but there were some gelcoat scratches on the bow. The catamaran was now anchored, again, to our stern, perhaps by 100 yards. At 7: 30 AM there was no one awake. I circled the boat, 'Gull Wind,' and saw that my anchor had bent their bow rail and had done some damage to their port gunnel. Later, by 9: 00 AM, the owner aroused and, once again, I went over to discuss the incident. We exchanged names and address. He agreed to pay for the repairs which surprisingly turned out not to be extensive given what we experienced.

Boating is a inexplicable way of life. In how many other recreational activities can a leisurely pleasure turn into tumult without warning? The day and night of June 30 showed that while we might be able to take what the seas might dish out, there is no way to prepare for all contingencies.

Cruise to Canada and New England

Although we lived in the northeast all of our adult lives before moving to Florida, and still spend the summers there on our boat, we had never taken our own boat north of Nantucket, so this summer we planned a trip to the Canadian Maritimes, but on a cruise ship, leaving the driving to someone else. And although we had navigated New York harbor on our own boat, there is nothing like leaving New York on a 93,000 ton vessel, where you pass Lady Liberty at eye level and

the entire panorama of New York slowly unwinds as you leave the pier at 55th Street and 12th Avenue and make your way towards and under the Verrazano Bridge, barely clearing the bridge in such a vessel. Passing Ellis Island stirred stories in my memory of my ancestors who were processed there, arriving from Cologne, Germany before the Civil War and afterwards building a photography business on the Bowery in lower Manhattan.

Having departed NY in the late afternoon, we emerged into the open waters of the Atlantic on way to the first port of our itinerary, Halifax NS. Our departure coincided with the arrival of Hurricane Igor in the Atlantic and although we were no closer at any time than about 1,000 miles, the storm stirred up the seas, resulting in considerable swelling. But for old salts such as ourselves, the 8 to 10 foot seas were very tolerable, particularly in such a large stabilized vessel. I felt sorry for the passengers who were wearing their wristbands and their patches behind their ears to ward off mal de mare, real or imagined. One could easily recognize such people from a slight glaze of fear in their eyes.

This first leg to Halifax took a full day and night from NY and we entered the harbor early in the morning, a special moment for me as several years ago I edited a book, New York to Boston; Travels in the 1840’s, which included selections from Charles Dickens’ American Notes (1842). Halifax was Dickens’ first stop after transiting the Atlantic Ocean on one of the early steamers -- and in January no less. One can understand his relief at arriving in Halifax, writing the following about his Atlantic journey: “Imagine the wind howling, the sea roaring, the rain beating: all in furious array against her. Picture the sky both dark and wild, and the clouds, in fearful sympathy with the waves, making another ocean in the air. Add to all this, the clattering on deck and down below; the tread of hurried feet; the loud hoarse shouts of seamen; the gurgling in and out of water through the scuppers; with, every now and then, the striking of a heavy sea upon the planks above, with the deep, dead, heavy sound of thunder heard within a vault.”

His ship went aground entering the Halifax Harbor and after being reassured that there was no danger of the ship sinking, or rolling over as the tide was on the rise, Dickens went to bed at 3:00 AM. Upon awakening the next morning, he wrote: “When I had left it over-night, it was dark, foggy, and damp, and there were bleak hills all round us. Now, we were gliding down a smooth, broad stream …the sun shining as on a brilliant April day in England; the land stretched out on either side, streaked with light patches of snow; white wooden houses; people at their doors; telegraphs working; flags hoisted; wharfs appearing; ships; quays crowded with people; distant noises; shouts; men and boys running down steep places towards the pier: all more bright and gay and fresh to our unused eyes than words can paint them.” They finally got off the ship for the first time in fifteen days, Dickens describing Halifax as follows: “I carried away with me a most pleasant impression of the town and its inhabitants, and have preserved it to this hour… The town is built on the side of a hill, the highest point being commanded by a strong fortress, not yet quite finished. Several streets of good breadth and appearance extend from its summit to the water-side, and are intersected by cross streets running parallel with the river…. The day was uncommonly fine; the air bracing and healthful; the whole aspect of the town cheerful, thriving, and industrious.”

I include Dickens description as remarkably it mirrors our own impression of Halifax, and I could not help thinking of his visit while there. Of course, things are more modern now, and the fort he referred to as being unfinished, The Citadel, was completed in 1856, fourteen years after Dickens’ visit.

It was a clear chilly day with nary a cloud in the sky when we were there, the wind having whipped around from the north after the passage of Hurricane Igor far to the east. We walked the extensive hills of Halifax. In some ways, it reminded us of a small Vancouver, with many ethnic groups, Halifax’s Pier 21 having served as the “gateway to Canada” as did Ellis Island in NY.

Our departure followed Dickens into the Bay of Fundy, but his ship went directly to Boston whereas we were on our way to Saint John, New Brunswick, on the north shore of the Bay of Fundy and at the mouth of the St. John River. The Bay of Fundy has always fascinated me because of its extreme tidal changes, an unthinkable fifty-five feet along with the strong currents that accompany such change. As a boater, I wondered how one would navigate and tie off to fixed docks for such a change (answer: time activity to avoid low tide or just sit on the bottom waiting for the tide to rise). Intent on seeing as much as we could of this phenomenon and the caves gored by tidal action, we wanted to travel parts of the Bay of Fundy trail and therefore we booked a private guide to be driven to all the highlights.

This turned out to be a fascinating part of the trip, not because of the scenery per se, which was not as memorable as we had hoped (we were there at the wrong tide, closer to high than low) but because of our driver, a woman in her early forties, and her unusual and remarkable life story.

She was born to a French-Canadian father and a mother who is part native Indian and actually was raised on a Reservation. In fact, her Uncle is currently a chief of one of the Micmac tribal villages. Our guide has twelve half brothers and sisters, all fathered by different men! Her mother had problems, too personal to go into detail here. But remarkably, our driver raised many of her half siblings from her early pre-teen years, and her own two sons and a daughter as well, completely on her own. Through much personal sacrifice and hard work, they have become upstanding citizens and she is currently a very proud homeowner and successful in her business, and is reconciled with her parents who rent a room in her house!

So while we toured and she explained the various sites, we were equally fascinated by this larger than life person, and her perspective on living in St. John, a beautiful part of the world.

From St. John the ship moved on to Bar Harbor, Maine, my friend Emily’s favorite place. Although our son went to Bates College in Lewiston, and we used to visit him there, regretfully we never found our way to Bar Harbor, a town that reminded us a little of Nantucket. Emily’s “go to destination” in town is Sherman’s Bookstore where she advised Ann to buy, Contentment Cove, a novel written by Miriam Colwell, which although she actually wrote in the 1950’s was published only four years ago. Ann loved the book, finishing it during the rest of the cruise (I was reading Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom)

Acadia National Park, with its striking views of the Porcupine Islands and much of Maine’s extensive coastline was a special treat. Before the fire of 1947, Bar Harbor had large, Newport-like “cottages” but most of these were consumed in the fireball that was fed from the Acadia woods by a dry strong wind. Today Bar Harbor’s 4,000 resident population grows ten times that in the summer. One can see why.

From Bar Harbor we cruised overnight to Boston, where we eagerly anticipated seeing our son, Chris. We decided to meet at The Institute of Contemporary Art where we were treated to highly interesting and imaginative work of Charles LeDray, an exhibition entitled workworkworkworkwork, “consisting of handmade sculptures in stitched fabric, carved bone, and wheel-thrown clay.” These are all “smaller-than-life formal suits, embroidered patches, ties, and hats, as well as scaled-down chests of drawers, doors, thousands of unique, thimble-sized vessels, and even complex models of the solar system.” The gestalt was to make the viewer’s life feel tiny in the continuum of time and space. This exhibit will tour, so be on the lookout! Afterwards, we had a wonderful lunch overlooking the Boston Harbor. The sun set over Boston as we departed.

The last port was one we had once visited on our own boat, many years before, Newport, RI. Here is one of the most beautiful, venerable NE seafaring towns, with its “cottages” for the rich and famous. Newport always has a breeze blowing and I remember having to back our boat down a corridor at the old Treadway Inn, currently another hotel, its docks now rearranged for mega vessels, with a crosswind that made the boat almost unmanageable. I think I made a mental note to avoid Newport thereafter, at least on our own boat. Nonetheless, I love the architecture in Newport.

Returning to New York early the next morning was dramatic as we caught the dawn and then the sunrise. The Williamsburg Bank tower in Brooklyn as well as the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges marked my return to an area I had spent a good part of my early adult life.

It was strange to see these landmarks from the perspective of the ship, four decades later, almost as if I am now a stowaway from another land.

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