What is Love? I watched a smarmy romantic comedy last night, and for some reason it reminded me of a smarmy scene in a play I once wrote that was lost in a housefire in 1998. I have the scripts of the rest of the play, but this scene was lost altogether.

Without going into details, the scene is this: there's a girls-only party at the restaurant owned by the bride's family, and the friends of the bride are a little inhibited by the presence of the "maiden" aunts.

So then the bride opens a present from the groom's old girlfriend: a case of size C batteries. Ha, ha, ha.

Then one of the "maiden" aunts begins to talk about her life, how love is where you find it, how she's not going to (in my grandmother's words) "die wondering," and in this way she gains the confidence of the bride and her friends.

My grandmother, Esther Kimball Hartshorne Megargee, aka Essie, who really inspired this scene, had an apt expression for everything. A gay man was a "confirmed bachelor," and she had a funny limerick about "William Fitzpatrick" and "Patrick Fitzwilliam."

Essie also liked the joke her friend who went to Gloucester every week to get scrod.

So the "maiden" aunt tells a story of when she was a little girl and was left alone at home with her mother's sister, while her sisters went to a ball, and she was too young to go. She has heard her sisters talking about love while they got ready, and she's curious, and she asks her auntie, "What is love?"

I had names for all these people at the time, and I can't recollect them all, but the "maiden" aunt takes the little girl upon her knee and explains that all her sisters and all their beaux will live out their entire lives without ever knowing what love really is.

"If you want to know what love is, come here, child, and I will show you," and she gives the little girl a big hug.

"That's what it feels like," she says. "Once you know it, you'll never forget it."

So if you never get to see 'Neath Greenville Tower' in its grand entirety, at least you know the most poignant scene.  ¶ 9:07 PM 0 comments

  A Ripping Good Read When he was eight years old, John P. Parker was taken from his mother, chained to an elderly man and forced to walk from Norfolk, Virginia, to Richmond. There he saw the kindly old man whipped to death.

Then he was chained to a group of slaves and forced to walk to Mobile, Alabama. Think of it! Eight years old.

By the time he was 18, he had gained his freedom, he moved to Ohio where he worked in a foundry and for fifteen years led a double life as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, crossing into the South to bring slaves to freedom and often fighting fearlessly against their pursuers.

When the Civil War came, he liberated hundreds of slaves to serve in the Union Army.

After the War he became the owner of a foundry and a machine shop and an engine factory, and he patented a wide range of inventions including a plough, a clod buster and a tobacco shredder.

He raised a large family of successful children and his granddaugher was the first African-American graduate of Mt Holyoke College.

What a story! I've just started his autobiography His Promised Land, and it is one ripping good read. Parker had a visceral hated for those who were cruel to weak and helpless slaves, and he lashed out at them with anything that came to hand. As a child he escapes again and again, but even when he's cornered, he never gives up. He's like a feral cat.

The hounds, the swamps, the sheriffs, the jails, the chains, the beatings, his life is incredibly dramatic, and I haven't even got to the part where he becomes a conductor.

We would probably never know John Parker's story but for the fact that a reporter named Frank Moody Gregg had a fascination for the character of the slave Eliza in Uncle Tom's Cabin, who made her way across the breaking ice of the Ohio River with her baby in her arms.

Eliza was a lot like Anne Frank -- with all the inhuman carnage and unspeakable human tragedy all around, she captured the public imagination.

So in the course of his research, Gregg found Parker and interviewed him, and this amazing book is the result.  ¶ 7:02 PM 0 comments

  The Surly Bonds of Earth I'm getting a lot of enjoyment and inspiration from a booklet put out by the South Deerfield Congregational Church, where I go with my mom. Every year during Lent they collect reflections from as many members as possible. What a great idea.

The booklet is called "Finding God in Unexpected Places" and every entry reflects something wonderful about the world and the human race and the Great Spirit.

One submission was a poem called High Flight by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

Back in the olden days when I was a kid, before they invented infomercials, television stations used to go off the air. For some reason they played the national anthem just before putting up a test pattern or just dissolving into snow.

But some stations had these thoughful signature signoffs, and one station in Boston used Magee's poem with footage of a fighter jet.

I could almost recite it from memory. I heard it hundreds of times. It was a beautiful recitation, but with this poem, how could you miss?

Oh I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, -- and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of -- wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air...

Up, up the long delirious burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where lark, or even eagle flew --
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

Makes me think of my favorite writer Sony Stark, aka PilotGirl.

There's another entry about a woman with "old-timers" like my mom who for one wonderful day comes back and recognizes her family and talks about old times. It's very heartening to find out that's possible, and it fits in with what I've been observing.

I've met a lot of people who have gone through the "old-timers" progression and they generally don't say too much because they don't want to be the one to have to tell you. The future is not too bright, and we're already seeing signs of that.

But forgetting just about everything (except that the forks go on the left) also brings a lot of freedom and a childlike openness to fun. Surely Sally, in her way, has slipped the surly bonds of earth.  ¶ 9:34 PM 0 comments

  A Prodigious Work of Scholarship One Sunday morning in 1973 I took a canoe ride on Conway Lake in New Hampshire. I was about to start my senior year at Yale and I was getting three credits for an independent study project on the Aaron Burr Conspiracy in the newly-formed American Studies Department.

Professor Edmund Sears Morgan had a little cabin on the lake, and I decided to drop by and ask him for suggestions on where to start digging.

I beached my canoe at his tidy little landing and went up and knocked on the cabin door. He was reading the Sunday Times, but he was gracious enough to set it aside and take some time to recommend some really good sources. One was Beveridge's Life of Marshall.

This is one prodigious work of scholarship about the young American Republic. Because Marshall presided over Burr's trial for treason, I found more information about Burr in this life of Marshall than I found in all the biographies of Burr that I could find, except the one by Peter Abernethy, which is another story altogether...

In the February 1955 issue of American Heritage, which I picked up for a quarter, I found an article by Vice Admiral Wilson Brown, who served as naval aide to Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.

It's full of the homey White House details that make history real for me -- how Coolidge got seasick, how Hoover loved to ride horses, how Roosevelt used his upper body strength to get around without revealing his handicap. It gives a lot of insight into the domestic life of these historic figures, and tells you so much about what kind of people they were.

When Coolidge was Harding's vice president, a lady comiserated with him about having to attend so many state dinners. "Gotta eat somewhere," he replied.

So in the summer of 1926, Admiral Wilson and the duty section of the White House staff are lodged in the general store in Plymouth, Vermont, (the rest are at the Woodstock Inn) while President Coolidge (sworn in after the death of President Harding) and Mrs. Coolidge stayed for the first time at the house they had just inherited from his father, who had died the previous winter.

Obviously they had a lot of important family decisions to make about the house and all the stuff.

Anyway, Wilson had no duties to speak of except to "be on hand in case something turns up." So there wasn't much to do.

"While the Coolidges were intent upon their own affairs, the Staff and members of the press loafed in the shade of a fine old tree just outside the country store -- pitching pennies, spinning yarns discussing everything under the sun. For all of us there were many dull hours.

"One afternoon I took off down the lane away from the crowd, within sight of the house and store where I could be called if needed, to become completely absorbed in reading one of the four long volumes of Beveridge's life of John Marshall.

"I was aroused from my concentration by a familiar voice at my elbow saying, in clipped tones, 'Well, Captain, studying navigation?'

"As I started to climb down from the rail fence where I was perched, he headed me off with, 'Don't disturb yourself. I was just looking around and wondered what you were so interested in.'

"When I told him, his comment was, 'A fine book. Every American ought to read it. You couldn't spend your time to better advantage. Go ahead with your reading,' -- and walked off.

"Years later when I praised the Beveridge work to Franklin Roosevelt, he disagreed completely, denouncing the book as 'fusty volumes that thought only of property rights and worried little about human rights and public welfare.'"

It was interesting to get these presidential perspectives on a work I found so valuable. I think Coolidge is right that people should read it, but I also think they should keep in mind what FDR said about it, because he obviously read it, too.  ¶ 8:45 PM 0 comments

  Am I Allowed to Talk to You? I thought a lot about whether to write this entry, because it's about a lesson I learned about dementia/Alzheimer's which might be of value to someone else.

My mom and dad have moved to Deerfield from their home in New Hampshire. My job has been to keep Sally happy, a relatively small one compared with running their finances or dealing with Medicare and their long-term health insurance provider, etc. etc.

When we went to church last Sunday. Sally said that the minister had talked too much and that she (Sally) "wanted to choke her." And I said that was mean. She was a nice lady and a thoughtful preacher, and she (Sally) had no business saying a thing like that.

We talked about it later at lunch and she said she was going to find something to go around her neck, which means committing suicide. And I said I just wanted her to be nice to the minister if we were going to go to that church.

But Sally makes remarks like that every week. The difference was I hurt my back on Saturday and it hurt a l0t getting in and out of the car... not an excuse, just a bit of background.

So usually on Wednesday I make dinner for Bob and Sally, and I went over -- usually I see Sally at lunchtime Monday and Tuesday, but I was in bed with my back injury.

She sat on the couch in her parlor and asked, "Am I allowed to talk to you?" Three days later!
I had just wanted her to be nice to the minister. She had remembered something for three days -- sadly something negative. Clearly the emotional memory is much more powerful than the intellectual memory.  ¶ 9:36 PM 0 comments

  More Pretty Girls
  ¶ 6:06 PM 0 comments

  So How Did Slavery Finally Come to an End?

Labels: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sally Hartshorne

  ¶ 8:44 PM 0 comments

  Notes on Democracy I'm having lots of fun with a great new volume of H.L. Mencken's Notes on Democracy by Dissident Books. They have taken the time and trouble to present the work with all the notes that are needed for the 21st century reader to properly understand it.

Mencken, who famously covered the Snopes Trial, was an expert on ignorance and its immense political value, and he wrote about the ways in which it was exploited in his time -- people arrested for reading the Bill of Rights, musicians beaten for playing Beethoven.

And he challenged the idea that the common man is the source of the greatest wisdom.

But as you read this book, you realize that he is so much of a curmudgeon that you cannot sign on to all his ideas.

For one thing, he seems to have an irrational contempt for all farmers, which I don't share, and for another, he seems to have no confidence in the promise that Jesus made that the meek shall inherit the earth, which I do.

He really dislikes "inferior men" and I don't like assigning people to that category. But I know what he is talking about.

You have to remember he was writing in one of democracy's darkest ages -- the Harding administration -- although the work wasn't finished until 1926. Had he met Barack Obama, I believe, he would have retracted a lot of what he said about the promises of democracy and of Chistianity. But that's pure speculation.

After drawing these lines, it's just a matter of enjoying great writing that reflects great thinking with a lot of annotations to bridge the historical gap for the modern reader.

Mencken makes the point - a true one - that the "common man" has fought tooth and nail against liberty throughout the ages. And he describes in detail the process by which the modern politician exploits his ancient fears and prejudices.

Mencken proves in this work what Winston Churchill expressed so well: "Democracy is the worst system of government in the world -- except for all the others."

In the end, he says, it's not up to him to come up with a better system than democracy.

"All I argue," he writes, " is that its manifest defects, if they are ever to be got rid of, at all, must be got rid of by examining them realistically -- that they will never cease to afflict all the more puissant and exemplary nations so long as discussing them is impeded by concepts borrowed from theology."

In a brief afterword, Pulitzer-Prize winner Anthony Lewis argues that if we had had an intellect like Mencken's in the White House Press Room, it might have been harder to sucker the American people into a disastrous war half a world away. I sure can't argue with that.

Because, after all, Mencken loved democracy. "I enjoy democracy immensely," he writes. "Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down."

  ¶ 8:48 PM 0 comments

  Arundel Gets Promoted When I pick a book for the sauna, it has to be a durable, inexpensive edition. My latest one is a rare 41st edition copy of Kenneth Roberts' Arundel from the Rundlett Library, wherever that is, so it has a nice durable cellophane cover. Roberts works were hugely successful all over the world and you can find copies all over the place.

I read Rabble in Arms, about the American Revolution, many years ago, and I enjoyed it so much I decided to read the 'prequel' Arundel, but never got around to it, but at last I found a copy and tucked in in my gym bag.








  ¶ 7:57 PM 1 comments