When the Saints Go Marching In

Hi,

Today is Nagasaki Day and here in the Northeast of the United States it is raining gently. I can hear the drops sursurrate upon the leaves of the trees and I can see the raindrops, white and distant, across the pond.

Nagasaki Day is, of course, the anniversary of the day the atom bomb was dropped on the city of that name. For whatever reason, it gets much less attention than Hiroshima Day. I suppose that is an insult added to injury, to be not just bombed but to have your bombing forgotten about in favor of another.

I've been thinking about these two anniversaries a lot lately, because I decided to do an entry on it for my other blog--one of the characters there (that blog is fiction) is a Japanese-American interested in history, so I figured he would have something interesting to say about it. I, for the most part, had nothing interesting to say about it, so I did a little research. I was trying to find essays about it written by Japanese-American writers, but was surprised to find none in my Google searches. I would have thought that perspective would be an important part of the national processing that has gone on for the past sixty-eight years, but all the writings I could find on the American experience were on the white American experience. I imagine there is not a dramatic difference, overall, since most Japanese-Americans would have been, like everybody else, glad to end the war. But there was such a racial subtext to the situation--German and Italian immigrants were also interned, but generally on admittedly spurious suspicion of individual wrong-doing. Only for people of Japanese descent was there a forcible relocation of American citizens purely because of their ancestry. I've just looked up the matter online,but the real reason I know that there was no such internment of Europeans is that if there had been it would surely have caught my family; my father wasn't born yet, but his parents and older sister were living in New York City and his parents were the children of immigrants. Surely if the American children of Japanese immigrants were relocated away from the west coast, the Italian-American of New York would have been taken by any equivalent program? They weren't. My family has its secrets, I suppose, but internment is not one of them. So anyone of Japanese descent in America at the time, no matter how thoroughly assimilated, would have known that to merely look Japanese was to be identified with the enemy. We all become, to some extent, what we are treated as. What we see in the mirror becomes our faces as we know them. How could Japanese-Americans not have taken their government's genocidal ambitions personally?

And I mean genocide. American policy was to kill as many Japanese civilians as possible, in order to lose as few American soldiers as possible. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the only cities deliberately destroyed; Tokyo was fire-bombed in much the same way Dresden was, and--I just found this out--had the Manhattan Project failed, plan B was to use chemical weapons across Japan. The chemicals had actually gone into production, churned out and readied by a factory in New York. I don't particularly care about whether any of this was justified either morally or strategically--I'm not going to start re-inventing American foreign policy sixty-eight years after the fact. What would be the point? But the pain, the human toll of all of this. It just makes me more than a little sad.

But the reason I know about Hiroshima Day and Nagasaki Day to begin with, the reason I know that these anniversaries are, to some extent, commemorated, is that I remember, as a teenager, being involved in commemorating them one year. And that memory has nothing to do with Japan, or politics, because while I was well aware of both I was kind of distracted at the time by the inside of my own head. I suppose most teenagers are, to one degree or another.

And the inside of my head was not pretty that year. I felt horrible that summer, because I couldn't seem to do anything right. I didn't do anything dramatically wrong, either, though a lot of people around me were angry with me most of the time--and I still can't figure out if they had any reason to be. I made small mistakes. I was easily distracted. I was desperate to redeem myself, from what I did not know, but I assumed at the time it was real and quite justified. I expect that desperation may have been the very thing that ticked the others off so seriously. At the very least my company would have been a bit boring and stressful. But my life became like one of those nightmares--do you get them? I do, and I suppose everybody must--where nothing goes right, like you show up for class and realize it's finals day and you haven't been studying.

And into all this mess came the holiday of Hiroshima Day, a holiday from my self-involved suffering, because I was allowed to join a small dance-performance one of the faculty at my boarding school had created.

He was oddly uninterested in dancing in the normal sense of the word--skilled movement of the body to music. Instead, he was all about choreography, using movement to make a point, to tell a story. One didn't have to be particularly coordinated in order to do it. I had two roles: I got to be part of a river, carrying paper lanterns to the sea, in memorium; and I got to be a spinning planet. As a part of a river I laid upon my back and kind of swam or scooted across the floor with the rest of the river. A child placed a lantern upon my belly and I scooted across the stage with it. As a planet I spun around to an Indigo Girls song, in company with other planets, or maybe we were atoms, while another girl assembled a model of the solar system on the floor using variously sized balls. And then, with the whole thing assembled, she used a croquet mallet to knock the whole line of balls to pieces in one chain reaction.

And the Indigo Girls song, the first of theirs I'd heard, was "Galileo." I think they used it because it includes the phrase "nuclear annihilation," though I'm not sure that the song is really about the bomb...I'm not sure what it's about at all, actually. But the repeating line "how long till my soul gets it right" was perfect for me at the time, and it calmed me.

How long till my soul gets it right?
Can any human being ever reach that highest height?
Call upon the resting soul
of Galileo
King of night vision
King of insight.

I still don't feel like I've gotten it right. I have moments where the feeling that I might not ever get it right threatens to overwhelm me in blind panic. I live on faith, but I'm well aware of its limits--the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had faith, too, I suppose. You never know when your life will turn the corner and get better, but you never know when a sad ending might drop out of a clear blue sky, either. The difference is that now, as a grown-up, I no longer care all that much about whether I ever get it right. I expect I'll always feel like this, at least sometimes, no matter what success or failure I may reach--I've heard that a lot of people do, even the most admirable and successful among us. And in the meantime I will live until I die. The desperation is gone, at least.

But I like that song. And I like the idea of calling upon Galileo, a saint of insight and the willingness to see the truth.

It sounds funny, of course, to speak of him in such terms, as he is, perhaps, the archetypal scientist, and scientists are, by definition, mostly the oil to religion's water. How could there then be a saint of science? But of course science has both moral and spiritual implications, which is why the Catholic Church tried to silence Galileo. The Church has not been categorically anti-science; the Vatican owns a very powerful telescope, so I've heard, and many trail-blazing scientists were also priests.And if priests have occasionally impeded the march of knowledge, the knowledge of scientists has occasionally had morally questionable results--I'm thinking here of Oppenheimer, even Einstein.

I think, as well, of the scientists I know--not whether any of you might be quietly inventing monstrous weapons, but whether any of you might also count as saints. You'll laugh, I know. You'll role your eyes. You'll protest that you are an ordinary person, but of course Galileo was an ordinary person as well. He made wine, he liked candy, and he had three children, two girls and a boy. Curiously, he never married their mother, though he was an active and involved father, a detail that seems to have been a complete non-issue at the time. The girls both grew up to be nuns, a common and well-respected role for women of the day. The older one, Virginia, took the name Maria Celeste when she became a nun. She was devoted to her father and wrote him letters, some of which, from the period of his trial, survive. She admired his intellect and read his books, and the fact that he was forced to recant by the church seems to have bothered her not at all. I've read translations of many of those letters, and her only concern appears to have been for his happiness. She never expressed any worry that her father might have done something wrong, to be so accused, or that the Church, to which she had dedicated her life, might be doing something wrong to so accuse him. I imagine that in a wholly Catholic society she swam in her religion, and in her admiration of her father, the way a fish swims in the sea, and she questioned neither.

I can't quite relate to that.

-best, C.

Oh, say can you see?

Hi! Guess what?

The phoebes fledged--obviously that was a few weeks ago now, it's taken me a while to write you again. I'm proud of myself though, because I totally called the fledging day. The previous evening I’d seen the chicks getting much more active, even standing on the edge of the nest and flapping, and their flight feathers looked long enough to hold them. So, while I was not certain, I parked myself and my computer right there with a good view of the nest…and they flew while I was looking at my computer. Poo.

Not all the birds had flown away, though. One fledgeling remained, perched on a loop of wire about two feet from the nest, looking confused and bedraggled. It cheeped, almost forlornly, from time to time, and fluttered its wings, the way songbirds do when they beg for food, but the sound wasn’t the dry, rasping begging but rather a whistled cheep, a single note, calling, I think, for its parents. They did not come.

After a few minutes it flew to another perch, staying in the shelter of the porch, and flew again. It seemed to be trying to escape the porch, but couldn’t get around the lip of the roof. It kept trying to go up to get out, but up was the wrong direction. Poor bird. It’s only sixteen days old, and doesn’t know very much. Eventually an adult did return, but it flew to the nest and looked in, then flew away. Parent and chick were just feet from each other, but did not interact or even look at each other. The fledgeling did not go to the nest, nor did the adult go anywhere else but the nest. They repeated this several times. The fledgeling continued its mournful cheeping. Its tail was so short as to be stumpy, its body feathers rumpled, and after its short, confused flights I could see its sides heaving. It must not be in good shape yet. If it was really in trouble, what could I do? Probably nothing. But I’d want to do something. 

At last the fledgeling stepped off its perch, dropped down a couple of feet, and flew unerringly out from under the roof and away. I don’t suppose I’ll ever see it again, and wouldn’t know it if I did. It won’t be back. So far as I know, songbirds are not sentimental about their nesting sites, though they may retain a fondness for the general area. One imagines a yearling migrant approaching its second spring, starting to feel a longing for home, a nostalgia that brings them back to the same kind of habitat later. But the nest itself is just somewhere the young one used to be. Chick and parent may stay in touch—at least initially they need to, as the chick as no idea what it’s doing—but they don’t look for each other at the nest anymore.

It’s been a while since I watched birds grow up, and never before have I watched a single bird family so closely. I was very struck by how itchy the chicks in the nest seemed towards the end. They spent a lot of time scratching their wings and the bases of their tails with their bills. Did they have bugs? Or maybe, do growing feathers itch? I bet they do. I bet you know. If anybody does know, you would.

Last time I watched baby birds was, as I said, years ago and far away. We did not have eastern phoebes there. We did have another phoebe species, similar in shape but darker in aspect, I forget the name, but I never found any of its nests. I am not a birder, since I am not fascinated by the act of seeing and identifying birds. What interests me is their lives, their stories. I like watching them grow up and interact--more than I like watching plants grow, actually. I do not automatically look at plants with an eye toward time, though I've learned how to do so from other naturalists. I see a tree and it is, for me, present tense, attractive to my eye for its tree-ness, not its story. With birds, and animals generally, it's the reverse.

I'm this way with human animals, too, actually. When I meet someone I might forget their  name, and I will probably forget their face, but I'll remember their story, what of it they choose to tell me. I remember yours, what you have chosen to tell. I do not learn stories in order to tell them, though I love to tell stories, and I think I do so well. But not all stories should be told. The birds I watched grow up, for example, in the Sonoran Desert--I did not betray the locations of their nests. Yes, my fellow researchers knew, but we did not tell the ravens. We even searched imaginary nests, occasionally, just so our activities could not be used as evidence against the chicks. The ravens got some of them anyway, though. And now those nests, fledged or failed, are long forgotten, lost in the anonymity of getting through the day--except by me. The nests are gone, the birds are scattered or likewise gone, but I remember where they were. I could find the places, if I needed to, if I had reason to. I remember the stories because I think somebody should.

Speaking of stories--and this is also old news, for I'm writing this letter well after the fact--Chris and I finally went to see "The Old Homestead,"a bizarrely popular play that most of Swanzey is named after,one way or another. The play was written by an actor named Denman Thompson in the late 1800's. He also starred in it, and while I'm not sure if he really did anything else of note, he performed the play hundreds and hundreds of times across at least two countries and became very wealthy. Both he and the play are set in Swanzey, and it is still performed a few times every year. My personal opinion is that as a play it is nothing special,but as a community event and an item of local history it is worth seeing.

They performed it outdoors in a kind of natural grassy theater with a large, weather-beaten stage at the bottom. A local band played before the show and during the intermissions, the conductor dancing a bit as she worked, real, live oxen paraded through one of the scenes, and the yellowish spotlight looked like the rays of the setting sun upon the backdrop painted with recognizable white pines. The scene in the backdrop did indeed look just like the real Swanzey around us. Music was important to the play; in addition to the band, there was a men's chorus of extras who performed periodically during lulls in the action, underscoring the sentimental fondness for rural life that was the theme of the entire play. 

But what really blew me away was not actually part of the play at all, but something that happened immediately before it. 

Just before the play started, the band played the National Anthem, so everybody in the audience stood and faced the flag, probably erected there just so people could face it. I stood likewise, but with vague irritation. I've never gotten into flag-worship, nor any other kind of symbolic patriotism. I know some people, even friends of mine, might be put off by that, might ask, aghast, "but don't you love your country?" But the truth is I neither love nor fail to love it. The United States as such does not register emotionally with me, and never has. I do not know why. It's not as simple as my awareness of its many crimes over the years, slavery, institutional sexism, genocide, etc., for I am equally aware of all that has been done right here. I am aware, too, that sometimes harm and right are done at the same time or by the same people. My hero, John Adams, not only made the defining argument in favor of American political independence, he also, years later, signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which were frankly unconstitutional. But no--it's not that I'm having a problem of ethics with the American flag; I'm having a problem of scale. I feel little to nothing about our country for the same reason that fish probably feel little to nothing about water. If I am sentimental, it is to whatever nest I have most recently flown out of. I'm like that bird, who persisted, cheeping there, for a while, before flying off.

But all that being said, I like the song. I like the National Anthem. It's a great story, for one. Imagine being Francis Scott Key, standing on the deck of a ship, unable to do while the fate of his country hangs in the balance--not that he hadn't been involved, not that he hadn't done any good, but at that moment he was sidelined, waiting, in the dark, as the terrible battle roared around him. And then--just for a few seconds--the same battle that is threatening the flag momentarily illuminates it. The same bomb that could force the flag down by morning proves that the flag is still there. And then--dawn. Dawn and silence. The battle is over, one way or another. I don't know if this is exactly what happened, but this is the image the song clearly conjured. It's dawn and the battle is over, and its outcome is now clearly visible in the early morning light, still grey, perhaps, pearly, before sun-up itself. But Key can barely stand to look. Fear mixes with hope too strongly. So he asked someone else to look for him. He says does the flag still wave? Oh, say you can see the flag still waving!

And that's the other reason I really like the song. Because while I may not be emotionally patriotic, I understand America the Idea, and that idea matters to me. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. complained that our National Anthem is "nonsense sprinkled with question marks," but I love the fact that our theme song takes the form of a question--or, at least the first verse does, and most people probably aren't even aware that there are other verses. Because while the fact that the flag is waving is no longer in doubt, the question has a second interpretation, one that must be continually asked, asked without ceasing.

I remember song lyrics easily, and so I know that words to the first verse of the National Anthem. So, that green evening in Swanzey, before the play, although there was no one appointed to sing, the words were clearly in my head. Oh, say can you see....

But they were so clearly in my head. It was like the music was shaping the words, like I could hear the words in the music the way ripples can be perceived upon the surface of the sea. Could the instruments themselves be singing?

Only a few seconds more and I worked out the answer; the audience members around me, some of them, anyway, were singing, but singing under their breath, each one quieter than the next, like they didn't want anyone to notice, they didn't want to stand out, yet they were singing anyway, almost like they could not help themselves. And so the sound, the words, swelled with the evening, the song singing the people, as natural as breathing.

The flag waves undeniably, but the question is--what sort of country is it waving over? Does the flag still wave over the land and the free and the home of the brave?

The answer remains yes, despite whatever this country has and continues to do wrong, only to the extent to which people continue to ask the question.

-best, C.

Of Mockingbirds and Phoebes

Hi,

I suppose you’ve heard the news? What’s his name, the man who killed Trayvon Martin, has been acquitted. Predictably, certain people are calling foul. Maybe it’s just that I haven’t been following the courtroom drama minutia, but I suspect their outrage has less to do with Zimmerman’s guilt or innocence individually, and more to do with the fact that, had he been found guilty, it would have proven that a white man could be convicted of killing a black boy for racist reasons. Since he has been acquitted, the jury must remain out on society at large.

Obviously, I’m white. I’m also politically naïve; I was raised by white liberals, among the children of other white liberals, and we were educated by white liberals (I was about to specify my childhood education, because I’m talking about my formative experiences, but I just realized I’ve only ever had two non-white teachers, a black woman and a Chinese-American woman, both in high school. At both levels, all my college professors were white). I was taught to abhor racism, but I was not taught to notice it. I knew very few black people. About the only think I know about racial politics and the American black experience of it is that I know nothing. Therefore, while I don’t tend to seek the subject out, when something written by a black person on race passes my gaze I stop and pay attention.

For this reason, I read an article in The Sun this past week, written by a man named Ross Gay who is apparently a college professor, a hobbyist bee keeper and gardener, and a black man. He writes movingly about being stopped by police for some debatably legitimate and thoroughly minor reason (his license plate light was out) and treated like a suspected criminal. He was asked whether he had drugs or guns in the car, whether he had been drinking, etc. Later, his friends told him he was lucky the cop hadn’t searched the car, “tossed” it and left him to clean up the mess. He writes of being embarrassed by how minor the intrusion really was, in comparison to what happens regularly to other black men, embarrassed by the fear that took hold of his body and later spasmed his muscles, physically immobilizing him as he bent to harvest garlic in his garden the following day.

This man is a teacher. I have a bit of a thing about teachers, as you may have noticed; I have always believed them to be people inherently worthy of a great deal of respect. They were my allies when I was small, when I was a little geek of a girl who didn’t fit in anywhere. If a teacher is to be treated as a criminal, there’d better be a damn good reason, and turning up with a license plate out does not qualify. I think that’s what angers me the most about Ross Gay’s story—not simply that the cop ignored Gay’s humanity in favor of his race but that even the elevated social status the man had earned did not prevent him from being treated like a second-class citizen, like no citizen at all.

But, of course, as Gay points out in his article, there is no way to prove that the intimidation attempt, for that’s what it was (just asking “do you have drugs?” is a nonsensical way to screen for criminal activity) was racially motivated.

Just as the cop didn’t say, “Since you appear to be of some African extraction,

I would like to ask if you have any drugs or weapons in the car.” He just asked

I had any drugs or weapons in the car.

Gay was writing about his experiences as a black man in order to write about mercy, in order to expose some societal hurt, to lay hands upon it, to be honest and brave and kind. I really like his article, and I suggest you read it—there is an awesome passage about bees near the end, too. The magazine is for sale at the Co-Op, if you want to check it out. It’s the July issue. But however much I really like that article, today I’m not interested in writing about mercy. I’m interested in writing about guilt.

Because there was no way to prove that Trayvon Martin’s death was racially motivated, either. Zimmerman apparently used no racial epithets in describing Trayvon, either when speaking to the dispatcher that night or in his subsequent testimony. He never said “I’m scared of this boy because he is black, so I’m going to shoot him.” He just shot him. Whether the bar on the definition of self-defense might be too low, whether Florida has somehow reached a point where people can be legally shot because other people are simply frightened, is another, equally worthy, topic, but the debate apparently centered, not on whether Trayvon was shot because he was dangerous, but whether he was shot for being black. And there is no way to know, unless someone has a legally admissible recording of Zimmerman saying so, which apparently nobody does.

And it is true that sometimes white people find other white people unaccountably scary. It is even true that sometimes teenagers, of any race, are in fact genuinely threatening. Maybe Trayvon would have died even if he had been white. Maybe Zimmerman actually did shoot in legitimate self-defense. It’s worth pointing out that it’s hard to imagine that shooting an unarmed teenager could have prevented a crime worse than the actual tragedy that took place. But there is no way to prove, in isolation, whether Zimmerman did anything unfair.

Because this sort of thing only really shows up in the aggregate. As Gay points out, eighty percent of the people stopped in New York’s stop-and-frisk program are black or Latino. New York’s population as a whole is only fifty percent black or Latino. Is this disparity more than what we would expect by chance? Can we reject the null hypothesis that New York’s finest are fair? I don’t know, you tell me. But I do remember that’s the right question to ask. And I have a definite hunch as to the answer.

But statistics can’t say whether any individual police or vigilante action is unfair. Flip a coin nineteen times and get nineteen heads and you might begin to suspect the coin is rigged, but flip it a twentieth time and you can’t say the resulting head couldn’t have happened anyway because the chance of any individual coin toss coming up heads is still always fifty-fifty.

And what if statistics aren’t even available? What if Gay had been white, and part of no other definable, disenfranchised group, and had still been treated like a criminal? Would that have meant the situation was fair? No, because sometimes even white guys are treated badly. Maybe he’d had an argument with the cop earlier that day. Maybe he’d gotten involved in some kind of unrelated political issue.  Maybe someone he’d inadvertently pissed off along the way had bad-mouthed him and the cop had heard, believed it, and acted legitimately based on an accusation that was itself illegitimate? All these things are possible. And yet, you confront the cop with your questions and the cop would say “I don’t know what you’re talking about. The man had a busted license-plate light. I ask everybody I stop about possible illegal activity. What’s your problem?”

Claiming the rhetorical high ground, defining the situation before the other guy can, may be the only recourse. If there is no way to prove what you know, that the boy in the hoody with the Skiddles, that the college professor heading home to tend his bees, is innocent and got a rather bad deal, then maybe the only recourse is to act on what you know and cannot prove. This is, in fact, what Trayvon’s supporters have been doing. It is how they got Zimmerman to trial in the first place, whether or not the trial itself was fair. A generation or two ago, even that would not have happened.

This tactic carries a risk, the risk of its own kind of unfairness. As some people have pointed out, Zimmerman might not have been tried at all had he, too, been black. That may be true, I don’t know. I am, as I said, naïve. I’m hesitant to speak up even this far, for fear I’ll say something accidentally stupid or offensive. As regards the politics of this topic, I really don’t know what I’m doing. But I do understand fairness as a general principle, and I say that as a general principle the burden of proof should always be laid at the feet of whoever it is had the gun.

Because Trayvon Martin is dead. His friends and family will never see him again, and any good that he could have spent his time doing while he was here will not now be done. Rightly or wrongly, that is what  Zimmerman did. He should have to account for himself. If there were a way to somehow make Trayvon not dead, that would be ideal, but, failing that, there should be a way to make sure this doesn’t happen again—even if there is no way to be sure that “this” happened this time to begin with. And maybe the best way to do that is to make sure that any time anyone with power acts against someone of lesser power, even when the other had his own resources and might possibly have offered some kind of genuine threat, that other people ask “why.”

And do not stop asking “why.”

The phoebes on the porch have hatched; three or four little fuzzy heads, three or four raspy little voices. They don’t know or care about any of this.

-best, C.

Exiles

Hi, again,

It’s been awhile since I’ve written, obviously, but it was good to run into you the other day, to speak briefly. I think I know what you meant, but I’m not sure if you understood me. Still, it was good to see you.

Let’s see, what is new. There’s a bird nest under the roof of the porch at the camp store—a phoebe, I think. I only see one adult, a female, I assume. She sits on the nest sometimes, so she must have eggs. She’ll fly to the nest only as long as nobody is looking. I hope she doesn’t abandon her nest with all the celebrations this week—the campground is having a big to do, and there will be a lot of people on the porch. It’s a good location, apart from the people, and so I hope she learns to ignore us utterly; the only thing she has to fear is fear itself. I’ve noticed that the last few times I’ve found a nest on an occupied dwelling it’s been a phoebe, or what I think it a phoebe, anyway. Do they like our buildings particularly? I’ve been meaning to ask you.

Prairie Home Companion broadcast from Tanglewood this past week, a place I’ve just learned you have a connection with, though it’s an utterly different connection from mine. Tanglewood is only two or three miles from the campus of my old boarding school. We used to walk there sometimes for exercise—usually we didn’t go on the grounds themselves, we just used the entrance as a turn-around point for the walk. I also saw three performances there, and sometimes from campus we could hear music from Tanglewood, faintly. B.B. King played there once and I heard him, muffled, in the distance.

One of the performances I attended was some Bugle Brass Band I had no interest in whatever, but at least we got off campus to the pretty Tanglewood grounds for a while. They are green and full of rows and spinneys of trees, as you know. Another time we went to see Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger, two performers I admire greatly, but I happened to find their performance kind of boring that day, for whatever reason. Arlo Guthrie also went to boarding school in Stockbridge, did you know that? Same campus but different school, years and years ago. That’s why the events of Alice’s Restaurant occurred in Stockbridge; he was there visiting friends from school.

Ah, but the best concert I went to at Tanglewood was Peter, Paul, and Mary. I grew up listening to them, I knew most of the songs they sang, and singing along it felt very much like I was singing with them—it wasn’t like at a rock concert, where if you sing along it feels very much like singing along to a recording. There was very little sense of separation between performer and audience, it was like we were all just sitting around a campfire singing together, except that the fire circle must have been huge because there were thousands of people, and mostly I couldn’t even see the three who happened to have the microphone—Peter, Paul, and Mary themselves. We had lawn seats, of course.

That was the summer I turned sixteen, but I hadn’t turned sixteen yet because it was the Fourth of July—twenty years ago yesterday. Twenty years ago yesterday, I sang with Peter, Paul, and Mary at Tanglewood and then watched fireworks explode over the Stockbridge Bowl. I was high as a kite on life and nothing else, the memory of the familiar music still in my ears as a kind of balm against the chronic, low-grade hurt of being away from my family among people whom I did not really understand.

Tanglewood’s presence in my life was so mundane, then. It was the famous neighbor most of us had never heard of, and which most of us ignored, no different in stature from the other landmarks around us: the high ridge behind the school that colored up like Fruity Pebbles in the fall; the Stockbridge Bowl, that lake that froze in winter so you could walk on it, an odd thing for a kid from Delaware to see; or the Kripalu Yoga Center, a kind of unacknowledged sister institution to ours, given that both were vaguely cultish at the time. They were all just there, like furniture in the mind.  I can see that ridge of trees even now, if I close my eyes.

And way led on to way from there until, eight years ago, I was sitting alone on a lawn in Maine, my earphones tuned in to Garrison Keilor, and suddenly out of the dark of radio bloomed Tanglewood.  My sweet old someone, as he sings. It’s Saturday, the band is playing, and for the first time in years a person speaks along Rt. 183 and I, through the medium of live radio, can hear.

It was not, of course, Tanglewood itself that had me feeling nostalgic, but its proximity to that old school, that place where I never did fit in, and which finally asked me to leave, but which nevertheless registers emotionally as a kind of home.

Yes, they asked me to leave. I admit that I was probably difficult to deal with, but I did nothing either fun enough or nefarious enough to warrant being kicked out. While I was ultimately glad to get out of there and get on with my life, I still sometimes wonder why it happened the way it did.

Sometimes I think that Michael, the headmaster, asked me to leave because he knew I needed to go, that I would learn more by leaving than by staying, which was certainly true. Other times I think my being escorted to the gate had a lot more to do with the fact that I was on full scholarship—that I had become too expensive to remain as a square peg in a round hole any longer.

But whether my being asked to go was an act of faith or an act of faithlessness on Michael’s part, either way I was expelled just as if I had done something horrible—marched to the gate and barred from further contact with current students, lest I sow dissention in the ranks. Because there was only one procedure for asking someone to leave, and, as incredible as it sounds, the little school that prided itself on creatively meeting everybody’s individual needs couldn’t figure out how to ask me to leave without treating me like a virtual criminal.

All this was many years ago and far away. I don’t think about it much anymore, except when something, like a voice on the radio, reminds me. The school, as I said, is gone.

But the campus is there, in Stockbridge, right where it always was. I don’t know what is being done with the property now, maybe nothing. Maybe, the next time you go to Tanglewood, you could take a walk up the road and go to campus, and if nobody is there, there will be nobody to stop you. You’ll see a steep, squared off embankment, maybe ten feet high at the corner, visible from the road but maybe a few hundred feet in. It was grassy when I knew it, but it’s probably overgrown with brambles and tree seedlings by now, if nobody’s been cutting it. And, if nobody has been cutting it or digging in to it, you might find, at the base of this embankment, among the other growth, dark, flat leaves, like grass but thicker. 

If you find these leaves, please tell me. Tell me the daffodils I planted still grow.

-best, C.

Northing

Hi!

Spring has sprung, as they say. The trees, most of them, burst their leaf buds about a week ago. It seemed like they went all at once, instead of species by species, though some seem slower than others. The oak leaves are still very small, although the red maple, I just noticed, are nearly full-sized. And I'd hardly noticed the oaks blooming at all before they started to leaf out, which surprised me. The forests are turning green, but it's still a sort of young, fuzzy green, and the canopy is still mostly open. I looked out the window the other day, and the young leaves on the shrubs and saplings, like fat green flakes, fogged up the previously clear forest understory like wet snow.

The silver maples are rapidly maturing their winged seeds, though their flowers only finished up a few weeks ago. Norway maple seeds don't mature until fall,or maybe late summer, though they bloom in late spring. I think silver maples, being river trees, try to get their seeds onto river banks bared by spring floods. Or maybe they're actually water-dispersed? They lean over the water, when they can. The sweet gum flowers, little pyramids of green, plush balls, are starting to fall, those that weren't fertilized, I guess. Cherry is flowering, though I don't know what kind yet, and all sorts of grasses and lawn plants are. The front steps are covered with little discarded vegetable scales, green with brown tips, that I guess popped off some species' buds when they burst, like training whewels discarded.

You, of course, probably don't care about any of this, being as they're plants you can't identify (yes, they're all angiosperms--you'd get that part, and you'd be right. There is no shame in accurate vagueness). One you might not even have encountered at all; the American hollies are dropping their old leaves, now. Your hollies are deciduous, and bare their winter branches in wet and frozen places. Ours are evergreen, their leaves thickened, leathery, lobed and spined, and their old leaves fall at the same time as their young leaves spring, giving our yard a fresh carpet of stickers. I walk around barefoot anyway, I don't care.

What I think you might care about is what I saw on the Weather Channel yesterday, a radar image of the Mid-Atlantic region with an angry-looking red and green ball, what looked like a round and very intense storm over the middle of Delaware, and almost half the size of that state. It was, the weatherman explained, a flock of migrating birds. He'd been following them on the maps all evening, and they were headed north while the wind blew towards the southeast. A flock of birds like a storm, all of them on a mission, and forty miles wide.

The weatherman also pointed out that the satellite image beneath the clouds showed real color, and where we are that color was green. The green lapped against the bases of the mountains to our west and ran north to a line that crossed New Jersey a little more than halfway up. Beyond that, the ground was greenish grey. Spring, sweeping North. It's made New York by now, I'll bet.

I'll be sweeping north soon, too, to New Hampshire and then, briefly, to Maine. I wonder if Spring will beat me there or not?

And it's almost a week now since another traveler went winging. Chris and I walked down to the little beach so we could watch the launch of the largest rocket yet to go up from Wallops Island. It was a test of a rocket that they hope to use to resupply the International Space Station.

We didn't make it to the beach in time, because we left the house too late, but we made it to the earthen causeway that links what used to be Cropper's Island to the mainland. We sat out on the cement fins that line the water there, and looked south.

And you know, we almost missed it. I was expecting, you know, something that looked like the shuttle going up, or virtually any rocket I've seen in the movies; a needle rising at the top of a column of fire and smoke, a line of smoke linking the distant rocket to its launchpad out of sight below. We didn't see it. I spotted what looked like an airplane, oddly reddish-orange and trailing a quickly-dissipating stub of a contrail. I dismissed it and looked away. Then Chris cussed, saying "Oh, f___, it's the rocket!" And indeed, it was; it had caught his eye by producing a true contrail as it passed through some appropriate layer of sky. As it rose higher, it stopped leaving the trail. What I'd seen was the exhaust fire itself.

Through binoculars, it shown a rising white needle, with a double feather of fire behind, one feather ahead of and outside of the other. They were reddish-orange, the same color that iron filings burn, if you drop them in a Bunsen burner flame. We watched the rocket for eons of seconds and it was totally silent, rising. It looked like it was moving horizontally across the sky, but it was really rising, probably vertically, or almost so, and as it approached the center of the sky, the zenith, it foreshortened until I could hardly see the rocket at all, only the glow of its fire at the back. And then it vanished. It had shrunk to a point, but it did not shrink smaller, it just went out, like a light. I had my binoculars on it when it did it, and I didn't lose it, it was in the middle of my field of vision. It just vanished. The sound had just reached us, a low, roaring growl, a huge sound.

That sound went on for several minutes, longer than we thought it would. Eventually it, too, vanished, and we continued our walk.

Later, we looked it up online and learned that the rocket's first-stage burn had lasted four minutes and that it had started to power down fairly abruptly at about  three minutes--on the video we saw online, filmed by a camera actually on the rocket itself, the red fire largely went out at that point, the exhaust turning clear grey, except for occasional flares. I'm not sure, but we could have watched it for a few minutes. Accounting for the time it was in flight before we saw it, it's possible what I saw when it vanished was the engine powering down. It's possible we heard all four minutes of sound. And the thing is, when that video showed the engine start to power down, the sky from the rocket's position appeared black, and the Earth curved below. Is is possible I heard a sound from the doorway of space? from the last possible moment before sound itself stopped in the air thin to vanishing?

I'm not a big fan of aerospace. It's not my kind of science, and except for communications and scientific satellites (pointed at Earth) and the search for potentially dangerous asteroids, I regard the space program as a waste of resources. And noise pollution, apparently, as it was astoundingly loud.

But that rocket sure was pretty.