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December 31, 1999 |
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dispatches from a cultural wasteland |
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Today's Bird Sightings:
Today's Reading: Winter from the Journals of Henry David Thoreau edited by H.G.O. Blake, From Ponkapog to Pesth by Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Copyright © 1999, Janet I. Egan |
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Tom and Julie are staying home playing Scrabble tonight. Ned is going to two parties. Nancy and I are nursing our respective illnesses in separate sick beds. I can tell this is going to be a rousing New Year's Eve. That's OK, when we finally have the winter meeting of the Tom Mofford Appreciation Society in Ned's basement we'll have all the millennial excitement we need. Laptop man was telling Tom and me the other day that he's
having that We tried to tell laptop man about the lively poetry scene in Andover , lots of poets writing and reading all over town. And a contingent of world class Latino poets came to Lawrence a couple of months back. Since laptop man is a guidance counselor at Lawrence High, I assume he has enough Spanish to follow world class Latino poets. maybe we should invite him to the next meeting of the Tom Mofford Appreciation Society in Ned's basement. Ned's basement alone is a cultural resource.
This morning I was listening to a repeat of a Connection show with some guy who wallowed in low culture for a year and wrote a book about it - I mean if you hate it that much why wallow in it? How do we know what's good and bad? His main premise seemed to be that all the bad stuff out there is way worse than we ever knew. It's unclear why we need to know this though. He spoke as if anybody with the tiniest bit of sophistication or "culture" would know not to eat at Red Lobster or the Olive Garden or see John Tesh live in concert, and if we don't automatically know that we aren't worth bothering with. So if we already know to stay away from these things, why does he have to tell us? And is it all that clear cut what's culture and what's not? Through the whole show I never got a sense of what the guy approved of, only what he disapproved of. But I'll bet the guy who wallowed in Red Lobster meals and John Tesh concerts for a year would have trouble finding a common cultural touchstone with laptop man. The blue sky still beckoned and now besides cabin fever I
had a case of cultural wasteland phobia so I fled Main
Street deep in the Merrimack Valley for the Merrimack's
outlet to the sea. Right off the bat as soon as I got to the
refuge I spotted two horned larks pecking around in parking
lot 1. They were so intent Just past parking lot 1 I recognized a short eared owl in my peripheral vision just by the style of its flight. I really like short eared owls. They are so cool to watch with their extremely floppy flappy flight. This one was hunting low over the marsh and would disappear into the grass briefly and then appear again. I didn't see it catch anything, but it may well have eaten whatever it caught while down in the grass instead of carrying it off somewhere for a more leisurely meal. Another treat was the sight of 10 robins in a tree. They looked like autumn leaves. I don't often see robins in winter. I know they're around but they're not as obvious as in the spring.
From the boardwalk on the way back to the car, I spot a northern shrike on top of a tree opposite parking lot 7 in exactly the same place where I saw a northern shrike last winter. Same tree. Same place on the same tree. Family groups seem to be a theme today. Instead of walking on the beach at Salisbury, they're rollerblading in the parking lots. There are more horned larks at Salisbury Beach too - in the boat ramp parking lot - they really love parking lots - what is so attractive about asphalt? Just after I snapped a picture of one of them a rollerblading family of 5 skated right through the flock of larks. They scattered every which way and then settled to earth again about 5 feet away.
Nancy and I were both too sick and tired for much reading aloud from Thoreau's journal the past two days, so now that I feel a little better I went back and picked highlights from the 29th and 30th to read. There's one on the 29th about snow buntings that I'm glad I went back for. He mentions, quoting Wilson, that the Swede's call them hardwarsfogel "hard weather birds". Nancy asks is that the Wilson of Wilson's phalarope? Joan-west called. Another country heard from. We're still trying to come up with a plan to make up for the canceled trip to hear the Dalai Lama in Milan. Boris Yeltsin has always had a flare for the grand
gesture, hasn't he? Elliot Richardson died today, one of the last of those old style Yankee Republicans who looked on politics as public service. My Dad's aunt (my grandaunt) was a servant in the Richardson family home for some years. She used to tell us stories about young Elliot's wild college days at Harvard (nothing that would even show up on the scandal meter nowadays). Anyway, he was always nice to her long after she stopped working for the family and became a waitress at the Harvard Club. He always greeted her warmly and graciously. So besides being honorable enough to stand up to Richard Nixon, he was also nice to the servants. Bet you can't say that about too many among the current crop of Republican politicians. And that's the story from the cultural wasteland on the eve of the millennium... |
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I'm
not good at being sick in bed. I lasted until about noon
lounging about the house in my pajamas and drinking hot
beverages. Then I got cabin fever. The blue sky called out
to me and I answered. First with a simple trip to the post
office. From there it's only a few short steps to Starbucks
to see if any of the coffee buddies are hanging out on this
eve of destruction. Tom had a great table near the window
and Julie was due back from errands around Main Street any
minute. He saved a seat for me and I stood on the infinite
line for gdknows how long to order some coffee. We had a few
minutes of nostalgia for The Coffee Connection and a few
minutes more for Ford's and took notice of the fact that Tom
was sitting in approximately the same spot as he did when it
was Fords and he was eating breakfast at the counter. Tom's
been coming to the same spot for his coffee for 14 years or
so. The place just keeps changing out from underneath him.
ideation about his real life being in Greenwich Village
again. We thought he'd gotten over that. He says New York is
full of culture and there's nothing in Andover. Really, he
said there's nothing in Andover. Tom bristled at that and
started to defend Andover. As suburbs go, Andover is luckier
than most because of stuff associated with Phillips Academy.
OK, so the Addison isn't quite the leading world class art
institution it was when Jock was curator there, but the last
two major exhibitions were stuff Jock put together before he
left, and the current show of the work of six contemporary
artists is damn good. And the 
I
remember Paul describing Kerouac's early literary life at
the reading, talking about how the Merrimack Valley was not
a cultural wasteland in the 30's and was Kerouac not
suddenly surprised with culture at Columbia. It's not like
Kerouac discovered poetry in New York. He'd had some poems
published in Alentour, a national avant garde literary
magazine centered in Lowell. So even then the Merrimack
Valley had a literary scene, and it still kinda does. OK so
there's no opera company in town and laptop man is a big
opera fan. Guess you do have to go to New York for that
unless you want to move to Italy or something.
on pulling specks of grass out of the cracks in the pavement
that I was able to get close enough for a picture. Not a
great picture, mind you, but a picture. Horned larks are
among the handsomest of the winter birds. That yellow and
black mask makes them look both festive and formal, like
they're all dressed up for a gala New Year's Eve party.
Then
I'm walking on the beach realizing I'm tired and sick and
should go home but I have to feel the wind sting my face. A
small flock of eiders skims low over the waves just past
Emerson Rocks. Herring gulls are energetically dropping
mussels onto the rocks to break them open. Hordes of people
in family groups are walking and beach combing too. As I
look around I see I'm the only person who's not with someone
else. How weird. Usually on winter days I see mainly lone
walkers. There may be lots of 'em but each one is alone. I
guess it's because this is school vacation week and New
Year's Eve. 
My
last bird of the year is a tree sparrow, actually two tree
sparrows in a shrub in the Salisbury Beach campground. The
light was fading, it was almost too dark to see them. I got
a good look at them just before a rollerblading family of 4
in matching parkas scattered them too. Did a lot of people
in Salisbury get rollerblades for Christmas? It is
kind of funny that the same surface that attracts
rollerbladers attracts horned larks and American tree
sparrows.