Cards from Mom .

I was going through old stuff the other day, deciding what to throw out, when I found some cards my mom sent me last spring when she was still living at Waterbrooks, her beautiful home in South Conway, New Hampshire.

We moved her and my dad down to South Deerfield, Massachusetts last August.

"Dear Stephen," she writes in her crabbed hand, "My Pumpkin survived all winter under snow but now the great sunshine is cooking it! So how are you? I miss you and hope you're coming here when the snow is gone.

"We might get up in your town in May when the memorial for Eileen Driscoll takes place.

"So - Have a happy spring

"Love, Mom + Hi from Dad" (she made that up)

The second one reads, "Dear Steve, Spring is here + so is the beginning of summer, so I hope we'll see you soon. You can tell me about St. Anthony Fund - Those two things came last week to Conway. [mail from a college fraternity that had my home address]

"As you know you'll see us soon in Massachusetts -- in some new house up there. But I'm not happy to lose our house right here.

"Maybe you can cheer me up.

"Love, Mom"

When I got those cards, I was still thinking of my mom as an adult, but now I can see she was already reverting to the little girl I have come to know in the past year, and I couldn't help but think how frightening it must have been for her, in this beautiful setting among her lovingly manicured gardens, to see that she was losing her mind, while my father, debilitated by a stroke, and by severe anxiety and depression, emerged from his room to take his meals and then invariably announced that he was going to take a nap.

I did go as often as I could, and she had great friends up there, two pals she went to school with, who really stepped up. All the same, it must have been really frightening, and I wish that I had known then that she wasn't my mighty mom I had known all my life, but a very sad and lonely little girl whose world was falling apart.

This whole vision came over me when I read those cards. And I just wished I could have done something.

When I'm with her, there's really no time to think about these things. We just think about having fun. There's no time to think about how unfair it is that this wonderful person, this professor of literature, this friend and mentor of so many other pilgrims and scholars, should be stripped of her reason and her dignity.

It's just not fair.

.  ¶ 7:53 PM 1 comments

  An Addendum I have to add an addendum to my earlier post about how travel discombobulates my life. I already mentioned the benefits of discombobulation, but then I went on and on about how hard it is to write stories, and that's really just half the story.

When you're putting something out wth your name on it, you have to work on it and polish it, that's true, but the end result is so worth it.

Once I write them, these stories become a source of delight to me. I confess I love to reread them and travel back to the hill forts of Ireland or the tiny islands in the Gulf of Maine. And guess what? I'm never sorry I took so much time and trouble writing them. I never wish I had dashed it off or mailed it in.

I hope these stories say a lot about the places I visited. That's the purpose, after all. But they say a good deal about me, too. So they become little footprints on the sands of time.

So I might be fretting and fussing and pacing around the room, but it doesn't mean I'm not having a great time.  ¶ 9:01 PM 1 comments

  Looking for Osman I think a good book is part of any good trip. It gives you a chance to turn off the data-gathering sensors and and enjoy someone else's journey. On my trip to the Gulf Coast I took along Looking for Osman by Eric Lawlor, about his travels in Turkey.

It's a very enjoyable and informative book. Lawlor has that sense of balance that travel writers develop between talking about yourself and talking about the places you are visiting.

The idea is to tell the reader enough about yourself to enable them to understand your story, but not a lot more. You don't want to 'overshare.' I hear that's a real word now.

Lawlor shares, but doesn't overshare, and he takes the time to really get to know at least one person in every place he visits. It's a great way for an outsider to start to begin to understand Turkey.

He also quotes from nineteenth-century accounts of travel in the Ottoman Empire, and this helps the reader understand the history of the country, and of the cities and towns he writes about.

Then there are amusing stories about his fellow travelers, leather-clad German motorcyclists and kick-boxing Norwegian teenagers.

A storm comes up on the Black Sea while he's taking a ferry to Trabzon and this woman in the next cabin is shrieking and her husband asks him to help calm her down:

"Her husband looked at me pleadingly. I was expected to offer solace, something I'm not very good at. I become deranged when people get upset. I never say the right thing.

I patted Mrs. Locke on the hand.

'Oh, drowning's not so bad,' I said, trying to sound jolly. 'I almost drown myself once, and believe me, I've never been so unmoved by anything. All that stuff about mortal dread and quaking with fear? Nonsense, all of it. Drowning is boring.'

Mrs. Locke gazed at me as if she couldn't believe her ears. Still, she had stopped howling. Drawing encouragement from that, I pressed on.

'But for some reason' -- and here I laughed lightly -- 'my parents could never be convinced of this, and for years afterwards the word water was banished from the family lexicon. No mention of water or water biscuits or watercolors or water beds. But that was just the start of it. In time the ban was extended to anything connoting water: Beaches, fish, irrigation, shampoo, umbrellas, dehydrated milk, tear ducts, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

'I remember a friend of my father's coming to dinner one evening, and he mentioned Jacques Cousteau. One casual reference. That's all. But that was enough for my mother. He was never asked to the house again. A strange woman, my mother. I once saw her drown a cat. I was very young -- no more than two or three -- but I've never forgotten the noise it made.'

Mrs. Locke grabbed feebly for her husband's hand and was struggling to say something. She looked utterly drained.

'Get him out of here,' she said in a whisper. 'Get him out before he kills me.'"  ¶ 8:57 PM 0 comments

  Thank Goodness I Was Safe in Galveston The Texas Gulf Coast just got clobbered by two hurricanes in a row, Rita and Ike. And then people remember the devastating storm in Galveston in 1900, which cost 6,000 lives and was on a scale with the San Francisco Earthquake and the Great Chicago Fire -- Mrs. McGillcuddy's cow, or whatever.

Now people around the country are saying, "Well if there are so many hurricanes, why do they go on living there?" And that's ridiculous.

Since 1900, the Gulf Coast has had destructive hurricanes every fifty years or so, the same frequency, more or less, as ice storms in the Northeast or tornadoes in the Midwest or wildfires in California.

During my visit to Texas, the winds from a microburst in Sunderland, Massachusetts, picked up a tobacco barn, carried it fifty feet and plunked it down on the exact stretch of Route 47 where I ride my scooter to work. Thanks goodness I was safe in Galveston. I could have ended up like the Wicked Witch of the East.

Remember her? All we saw was two striped socks.

There are places on the Gulf Coast where it may not make sense to rebuild, but these are a few places that got exemptions from building codes under "grandfather clauses." Not coincidentally, these were the places that national TV news crews went to get hurricane damage footage.

For buildings that met new hurricane codes, the damage was like water in the basement. The Hotel Galvez lost their new million-dollar basement spa, but I'll bet you an Indian-head nickle that won't happen again. The spa is being reconditioned as we speak, and it will be ready for you if you go there, and you should if you know what's good for you.

The Galvez fronts boldly on the gulf of Mexico, and suffered no other damage. Built in 1911 by the businessmen of Galveston to show that the city had rebounded from the devastation of 1900, it stands as a symbol of the indomitable spirit of the island.

The Grand Theater in Galveston had to have a lot of seats reconditioned, but they were up and running two months after Ike. They also had to recondition an elevator that was left on the ground floor. If only someone had pushed that button and sent the elevator up. I confess I never would have thought of it.

Turns out the Houston Symphony Orchestra, during a previous hurricane, left an elevator in the basement with a grand piano on board. Ouch!

I guess the point is, everybody's learning. Six months after Ike, nearly all the businesses on the Gulf Coast are up and running, and the rest will be in a month or two. The chocolate store in Galveston we went to said they had reopened only the week before and had the best weekend in their history.

The brave new hurricane-proof construction on the sea wall in Galveston? All I can say is it performed as advertised. I'd be happy to go reside there throughout the next hurricane season.

Schlitterbaum's Water Park and other major attractions hardly missed a beat. They were back in rebuilding as soon as they were allowed to.

A lot of business owners who leased their properties were unable to get back in until the owners could settle up with the insurance companies, and we heard a lot of jokes about what was wind damage and what was water damage, and delays of this kind held up some reopenings.

But it's amazing how fast delays of this kind are swept away when they are costing people money. Galveston is an indomitable island, and like the rest of the Gulf Coast, they're back in business.

And it's a truly happening place, kind of like the Lower East Side, Texas style.

I'm known as the guy who never goes anywhere, but I'm making serious inquiries into ways I could spend the month of February in Texas every year. It's something I could get used to very easily.  ¶ 8:01 PM 0 comments

  Travel Discombobulates Your Life I hate to travel, and I especially hate to travel outside New England. Why? It discombobulates my life.

It takes a week to recover. I miss the yard sales on Saturday and church with my mom on Sunday. And then I have to sit down and write articles.

But I also love to travel. Why? It discombobulates my life. There's such a thing as getting stuck in a rut. And a good discomboblulation is often just what the doctor ordered.

And then I have to sit down and write the articles. Editing is fun. Writing, not so much. The concensus among GoNOMAD writers is that writing sucks, and as a general rule, I agree.

Because it's hard. You stay at luxury hotels and dine at five-star restaurants, and that's very, very nice. But then you have to make it all work, and that's tricky.

I remember when my daughter Sarah and I visited her 'grumpa' Russell Banks years ago, and he was working on an article for Conde Nast about the best beaches in the Caribbean.

"It's work." he said, and I so did not understand until now what he was talking about.

It's work alright, but it's the kind of work you want to look for. Like they say, "You pick your problems." That one evening in the Hotel Galvez in Galveston was way worth all that work and more.

I have to say I'm having a much easier time with my Texas Gulf Coast trip thanks to the paradigm developed by my brother Shady when he visited Arizona for GoNOMAD: If you have a huge story, split it up into manageable chunks.

While I was in Texas, Shady was in Huntsville, Alabama, throwing out the first pitch in a minor league baseball game, and Sarah was in Louisiana writing up some music festivals that I've heard are pretty good.

Sony Stark has been in Tunisia and Kent St. John has been all over the place, as usual, most recently Brazil and China.

So these guys tend to take their sweet time about sending stuff in, and we like it that way, as long as they can keep it fresh. You can't time creativity.

But whatever their rate of incubation, it looks like we're going to have a tsunami of great stories on GoNOMAD, including three Texas stories by yours truly. Like everyone else I hate writing. I'd much rather edit.

But I do it once in a while, just to remind myself how hard it is and increase still more my admiration for all the great writers who send their stories to GoNOMAD.  ¶ 6:48 PM 1 comments

  Time is Endless When we were students at Yale back in the 1970s, my friend VJ and I liked to climb around on the rooftops and find our way through windows into interesting places.

We weren't larcenous. We just wanted to see what we could see. VJ might have purloined the pipe of a college dean, I can't remember rightly. But that was it.

And one of the most interesting places we found was right next to our college courtyard, where you could climb up a couple of rooftops to an open window where there was a beautiful old pool table and nobody around. So we started playing pool there.

Then one day VJ ventured downstairs and came back with a pitcher of beer! Turns out there was a bar down there and noboby around there either. Naturally we wound up playing pool there quite a bit.

Then one time we went through the window and there was a guy there in GI trousers firing pool balls into the pockets like a Russian sniper. Instead of calling the cops, he introduced himself and invited us to join the club that owned the building, St. Anthony's Hall, and we did.

It had been, traditionally, an exclusive secret society like Skull and Bones, where you have to wait to get 'tapped', but while we were there, anyone who wanted to could join. This was a time when revolution was in the air and many students, myself included, were inclined to run through the streets yelling "Silence is consent." At the time, it needed yelling.

Anyway the guy who invited me and VJ to join St. A's was a guy named Geoffrey Walker, whom I just had the great pleasure of visiting at his stately home in Houston, Texas.

It was Geoffrey who introduced me to M. Armand Dupre, who worked at St. A's for many years and was a great friend to all of us. He once told me, "You think too much," and boy was he right.

He taught us the fine points of cribbage and casino and gin rummy and shared the insights of a full and interesting life that began in an orphanage in Quebec. Once in a while, he expressed his regret at not having children.

I don't know if this is a poem. It's just something Armand said and I wrote down:

Time is endless.
Time is precious.
It makes things better
And it makes things worse.
But most of all,
It gives the little boys
A chance to play with the little girls.

.  ¶ 11:06 PM 1 comments

  Texas Gulf Coast, What A Great Time Know where I was yesterday morning? Mission Control in Houston -- during a Space Shuttle mission. It's a really great story, but I'm saving it for last in my series on the Texas Gulf Coast.

I think it's going to be three stories: The Gulf Coast, featuring Beaumont and Orange, and then Galveston and then Houston, but there are a lot of excellent opportunities for sidetracks into feature stories.

Here's a travel writer's dilemma in a nutshell: You go into the Stark Museum in Orange, Texas, and you can see immediately that this is a great place to spend the entire day, then you're off to a tour of the Stark Mansion, where you get the exact same feeling, and then you're off to a life-changing experience at a Buddhist temple in Port Arthur.

You have to grab a sample of these 'whole-day' experiences in 45 minutes or less. But that's the business. And then you have their email so you can work out all the details later when you work up your story.

In four days on the Gulf Coast I found at least fifty great places to spend the whole day. And I experienced several historic firsts: first taste of alligator -- really good, somewhere between a scallop and an octopus, with some very interesting flavors all its own -- first pomegranate martini made with Tito's Texas vodka, first taste of jickima, a cross between a potato and a radish, first mango marguerita.

I met the guy who saved the gators stranded by Hurricane Ike -- there's a whole story there -- and took a tour up the river with a wildlife biologist, and then visited an environmental center and botanical garden called Shangri-La, where I would gladly spend three days.

Then I met a monk in Port Arthur who changed the way I think about absolutely everything. Then I helped eat a tray of crawfish at Larry's Cajun Cafeteria. And then in the elegance and grandeur of the Hotel Galvez in Galveston, my heart found a home.

Saw the art car parade in Houston, saw some cool exhibits at the Contemporary Art Museum, dined with the conductor of the Houston Symphony Orchestra -- there's just too much to go into at this time.

Except to say I was with a wonderful group of writers and we had a gracious and indefatigable guide from the Texas Visitor's bureau who took care of absolutely everything.

I'm so exhausted, I'm gong to sleep for week, and when I wake up I'll tell you all about Texas hospitality.  ¶ 10:20 PM 2 comments

  Fun With Frederick Law Olmstead in the Slave States Everyone knows Frederick Law Olmstead as the designer of Central Park in New York City, and of many, many beautfiul parks all over the place. I used to take a walk every day in a lovely little park he designed in Concord, New Hampshire.

But he was also a travel writer, and he traveled extensively in the South in the 1850s, so his writings are a valuable historical source. These personal observations present a lively picture of what life was like there.

I can't begin to describe all the insight he provides about slavery. He stays with planters who have freed all their slaves and are doing better than their slave-owning neighbors. He talks to one guy who has kept in touch with the slaves he has freed and sent to Africa or to the North.

He helps them purchase freedom for their family and friends. He tells Olmstead about going to Philadelphia and running into one of his former slaves ten years later:

"She recognized him immediately, recalled herself to his recollection, manifested the greatest joy at seeing him, and asked him to come to her house, which he found a handsome three-story building, furnished really with elegance; and she pointed out to him, from the window, three houses in the vicinity that she owned and rented.

"She showed great anxiety to have her children well educated, and was employing the best instructors for them which she could procure in Philadelphia."

Now there's a wonderful story. Other stories we get from Olmstead are not so pleasant. He uses census data to document what everyone knew or ought to have known, that the eastern slave states were 'exporting' about 20,000 slaves per year to the cotton plantations in Alabama and Mississippi. They were a giant human breeding farm, disgusting as it may sound.

The intention was to break up families. Olmstead tells the story of a New York man traveling through Virginia:

A man entered the car in which he was seated, leading a negro girl, whose manner and expression of face indicated dread and grief. Thinking she was a criminal, he asked the man what she had done.

"Done? Nothing."

"What are you going to do with her?"

"I'm taking her down to Richmond, to be sold."

"Does she belong to you?"

"No, she belongs to _____; he raised her."

"Why does he sell her -- has she done anything wrong?"

"Done anything? No, she's no fault, I reckon."

"Then, what does he want to sell her for?"

"Sell her for! Why shouldn't he sell her? He sells one or two every year; wants the money for 'em, I reckon."

Olmstead reports that nearly everyone he talked to had read Uncle Tom's Cabin, although it was banned in the South, because they all cited parts of it that were wrong.

I think Harriet Beecher Stowe would get some satisfaction from that. She rocked their bleepin' world. They hated her guts but they read her book. They had to. It was a worldwide best-seller about them.

But then I have to add something that surprised me -- tho I guess it shouldn't have -- namely that many of the earliest and most effective organizers of the Underground Railroad were former slave owners from the South.

And all these historical conclusions aside, it's fun to ramble around with a good writer like Frederick Law Olmstead.  ¶ 7:59 PM 2 comments

  Camilla and Bullwinkle
  ¶ 7:24 AM 1 comments

  Spirits Rising From the Grave
  ¶ 6:41 PM 1 comments

  The Sad Silly Death of a Chessmaster I love reading Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe books, and I read them again and again, because I love visiting the old brownstone on 35th Street. My dear departed grandmother had a brownstone on 37th Street or somewhere thereabouts.

The plots can be thin, and somewhat contrived, but the overall experience is always so delightful. The food is great, of course; it's always fun reading about that, and then there's the ego-superego dialectic between Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe.

I just rereread Gambit, and I have to say, the plot is really brilliant. It's a variation of the old closed-room mystery. It opens with Wolfe, in the front room of the brownstone, at the ony working fireplace, burning a dictionary because it suggests that 'infer' and 'imply' could be used interchangeably. I agree 100 percent.

Fumes from the burning dictionary stultify Wolfe's mental processes, and he agrees to accept a fee from the daughter of Matthew Blount, a prestigious businessman in jail accused of murder.

Turns out Paul Jerin, a young chess master, was invited by Blount to play six blindfold matches against the members of a prestigious New York chess club.

Jerin drinks only hot chocolate while he's there, and he's taken to the hospital where he dies of arsenic poisoning, and only certain people at the club have had access to the hot chocolate, and naturally they're the suspects, especially Matthew Blount, who brought him the chocolate and then later took the pot and the cup and rinsed them carefully.

This naturally looks very suspicious to the cops and they arrest Blount for murder. Turns out also the chessmaster has been "seen" with Blount's daughter, and there's your motive there.

The billiant twist is, Blount did poison the chocolate, with a comparatively harmless drug that would impair the chessmaster's abilities but not kill him. And of course Blount would rather be convicted of murder than admit this.

This is a good chance for Nero Wolfe to earn a hefty fee by exposing the murderer without giving away this secret that would embarass the rich client.

Come to find out, Blount's buddy, Dr. Avery, knows Blount is going to poison Jerin, because Blount had asked him what drug to use, so when he (Avery) comes to treat the ailing chessmaster, he poisons him with arsenic. The doctor is not suspected because the victim was feeling sick before he (the doctor) even came on the scene.

Dr. Avery knows nothing of Paul Jerin, but murders him to get Blount convicted of murder. The chessmaster is sacrificed like a pawn in a chess gambit, hence the title.

Why? Dr. Avery wants to marry Blount's wife. That's a little thin, but we hear she's pretty captivating (and doesn't even know it!). Now there's a motive for murder.

Thin motives aside, this book really is brilliant and eminently enjoyable. Another great Rex Stout book is The League of Frightened Men.

.  ¶ 8:23 PM 0 comments