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Camping Was the Way to Travel

          I had expected to travel regularly after retiring, but Covid-19 has laid waste to those plans. It is hard to think about future trips not knowing when or if I will feel comfortable traveling again, so I have started reminiscing about past trips. I think back to those times when the spouse and I had few funds beyond those for the necessaries, and travel seemed impossible. We had a car but trip expenses–hotels, motels, restaurants—were inconsistent with paying our rent. So, in the spirit of Judy and Mickey, even though we had not done so before, we said, “Let’s go camping.” If we didn’t pay for a motel but slept in a tent, if we didn’t eat in restaurants while traveling but cooked at a campsite, if we didn’t fly but drove, we could … well, travel.

          We had the Dodge Dart, but we needed other things. We had to forgo our few luxuries for a while and gave up occasional dinners at a Mideast restaurant, replaced bottled wines with jugs, and delayed the purchase of a new sweater and tie in order to buy a tent, sleeping bags, a camping stove, lantern, and air mattresses.

          We had two weeks for a trip, and there were so many places we had not been. I don’t remember how the decision was made, but we decided to go to Nova Scotia. It’s a long drive, and there was a car ferry from Bar Harbor, Maine, to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, which would have cut hours, perhaps even a day, of driving off the trip, but the ferry’s cost put it out of our range. And, we enjoyed driving and had never seen Maine or New Brunswick. So, Nova Scotia the long way ‘round it was.

          On the first day of this first camping adventure, we drove from Brooklyn to Ogunquit, Maine, and pulled into a campground where we had reserved a spot, using in those primitive days a book (from Rand McNally?) that listed campgrounds around the country on the left side of the pages followed by all sort of symbols describing the place. Through the years we got quite good at scanning the symbolic trees, showers, and tables to find the sites that we might like, but this was a learning adventure for us.

We were camping, but we were not looking for a primitive backwoods experience. We were not backpackers. Our camping was a substitute for more expensive accommodations, and the campgrounds we mostly stayed in had a building with public toilets, sinks, and often showers, as this one did. Our tent was meant to substitute for a small motel room. It was not a WWII pup tent clone but about eight feet square and its center just high enough to stand up in. Luxurious, right?

You might think that we would have practiced putting up the tent before we had embarked, but no. This was our first time, and tents did not then simply pop open like an umbrella. We had to assemble poles and drive tent stakes, which took some effort because we had yet to learn that a three pound hammer was better than a regular one for the job. Although erecting the tent might have been a severe test of a marriage, we got it up, and through the years we developed a good, efficient routine for putting up and taking down the tent. Yeah, this camping idea was a good one.

Although we were not going to be backpackers off alone in the woods, we thought that our camping was going to keep us in touch with nature more than other travelers, but we immediately found “camping” meant different things to different people. A few sites over from ours a “camper” was parked with wires going into and out of it from all angles. A man in a lawn chair, beer in hand, was watching television (!). We did not get the point, but through the years, we saw the equivalent of this many times and always felt a self-righteous superiority to them, but of course, backpackers had a similar reaction to our camping.

We had stopped in Ogunquit because the spouse knew a colleague who had a family place there. It was my first visit to a seaside, summer resort, and I was seeing stuff I had never seen before. We all went out to dinner, and I had my first taste of lobster. Our camping was doing what I hoped that it would: giving us new experiences.

We continued up the beautiful Maine coast the next day into New Brunswick. Our gas station map was mostly blank showing few roads other than the waterfront one we were on. As far as we could tell, New Brunswick was mostly uninhabited forest land. We passed an elegant, old summer resort. We talked about how wonderful it would be to stay there someday, but we never really expected that we would ever be able to afford it.

Setting up the tent for the second time, we damaged a tent spike, and a significant portion of the next day was spent in search of a replacement. It wasn’t exactly a survival moment, but we learned that a large part of camping was coping with the contingencies that arose—where could we buy milk, hamburger rolls, insect repellent, ice, firewood, tent stakes? But this was a good thing because these quotidian matters happily displaced concerns about jobs, political news, and family problems. Nevertheless, tent stakes were a perennial problem. They were aluminum and seemed to break or bend easily. Finding places to buy spares was not a simple matter. Being quick studies, we soon learned to purchase extras in advance.

This was a time not only before podcasts but even before cassettes. At the campsite we blissfully did not have music or news or sports broadcasts, but in the car we sometimes searched for local radio stations. Close to the Nova Scotia border, we found a French one. It came from a little French-speaking town. I, of course, knew that French was spoken in Quebec, but I did not know that there were French-speaking pockets throughout New Brunswick, and I wondered what it was like to grow up in a town of a few thousand surrounded by those speaking another language. Travel, I learned, could free the imagination to consider such things.

(concluded February 22)

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Snippets

Talk all you want about Tom Brady, LeBron James, or Mike Trout, but isn’t Mikaela Shiffrin the best American athlete competing today? Or is it Simone Biles?

With all the hospital mergers, institutions end up with strange and seemingly impossible names. Thus, not far from me is the New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital.

          On a diet, one is supposed to eat slowly. So, at the farmer’s market seafood stand, I bought my diet food—oysters. It takes me fifteen minutes to open each one.

          How often in the coming years do you think Ivanka and Jared will socialize with people who unironically wear MAGA hats?

Although I don’t like to be out in one, I like to hear the term because it sounds poetic: Wintry mix.

We had a winter storm, which raises the questions for boys of all ages: Can you write your name in the snow? Sometimes it is better to be Bob than Randolph.

“It was evening all afternoon/It was snowing/And it was going to snow./The blackbird sat/In the cedar-limbs.” Wallace Stevens.

I read online an article from The Federalist. At the bottom of the article, it said: “The Federalist, a wholly independent division of FDRLST Media.” Can it be “wholly independent” and a division of a larger company? Perhaps someone can explain to me what “wholly independent” means.

Sometimes I am surprised at a lacuna in the spouse’s knowledge. She does not know who Aaron Rodgers is. That prevented me from discussing with her the burning topic of whether he is overrated.

At my age, an aphorism that no longer applies: “A pessimist is a man who thinks all women are bad; an optimist hopes they are.”

Overheard on an elevator at the Whitney Museum, this truism and puzzler: one young man social distancing from another, said, “Taking care of your mother while she dies is an opportunity of a lifetime.”

I did not sleep well on the night before a stress test necessary for an important medical procedure. I had discomfort in my lower abdomen with an occasional sharp pain. As I lay in bed, I convinced myself that I had a kidney stone. My mind raced. Should I go to the emergency room? Maybe the stone would pass naturally with a bit of pain and blood. Did I know of a doctor to go to? Did the spouse? Could I postpone my scheduled stress test? Would this postpone my valve replacement? Surely, I had to deal with the kidney stone first. Finally, I fell asleep but fifty minutes later I was awake again with a racing mind. What should I do about the kidney stone? How do I cancel my heart procedure appointment? Finally, back to sleep again but awake an hour later. So it went all night long until I finally got up to go up to the hospital for the test, and the worries about the kidney stone dissipated. I came to the convincing, and loud, conclusion that it was only gas.

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That Anthem Again (concluded)

Ordinary sporting events have ordinary displays of patriotism. However, the Super Bowl has had extraordinary expressions of patriotism. Trying to live up to my pledge to give up football, I did not watch the Super Bowl this year, but a few years ago I was paying only partial attention to the opening ceremonies of the game as I was preparing dinner for the wife and the NBP (I am a modern sort of guy). Listening with half an ear, I thought I heard portions of what seemed like a five minute narration by Johnny Cash about the flag, and there was a trio singing, I think, “America the Beautiful,” and then a sprightly version of the national anthem, followed by the flyover of military jets flying in close formation low over the stadium just as the National Anthem ended.

I have no idea when the flyover ritual started. I am always amazed by it. How can the timing be so precise? My most memorable flyover was combined with another patriotic display, the flight of Challenger. This Challenger is a bald eagle, and I have seen him in action several times at Yankee Stadium. My memory is that the bird was originally released outside the stadium during the National Anthem and would fly to the pitcher’s mound or home plate where he would land majestically on his handler’s wrist. As time went on, Challenger would be released from right in front of the center field fence for his flight to the infield. It is magnificent seeing an eagle fly in the wild, and I always found Challenger’s flight nearly as thrilling. The last time I saw him (I say “him,” but I don’t know whether the eagle is male or female), however, was different. It was a playoff or World Series game because the rosters of both teams had been announced and were lined up on the first and third baselines. Challenger was flying in from the outfield as the National Anthem was concluding, and then the flyover came. This time the planes flew really low. I was in the fourth row of the upper deck, and my knees buckled a bit from the vibrations. (How do the residents of the Bronx respond to this patriotic display? Many must not know it’s coming, and perhaps think New York City is under attack again.) Challenger was not prepared for the flyover. He had been about to land on his handler’s wrist, but the jets seemed to knock him out of the air. It was as if he hit an air pocket, and he dropped like a stone for about ten feet. He then seemed disoriented. He swooped around the lower deck and returned to the playing field where he had Derek Jeter and other players ducking out of his way. He did not land on his handler. He finally settled unceremoniously on the infield grass and appeared very sad and discombobulated. His handler had to walk over and collect him.

Is there truly a connection between such patriotic rituals and the sports events that follow? This question brings back a memory of Rocky Graziano, who won and lost the middleweight championship within a year during the heyday of boxing. After retiring he wrote an autobiography, Somebody Up There Likes Me, which appealed to my schoolboy fantasies and was made into a successful movie starring Paul Newman. Later, he did the talk show circuit telling amusing stories in heavy Brooklynese. On one of them he said that he hated “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Merv Griffiin or Mike Douglas or whoever it was looked at him incredulously and asked why. Graziano replied quite logically, “I knew that whenever the national anthem was over, someone was going to try to knock me unconscious.”Those of us who are sports fans have heard the National Anthem countless times at stadiums and arenas and on broadcasts, but last year there were months when we had no spectator sports, and we weren’t getting the usual doses of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Did we become less patriotic with its absence or is that ritualistic singing irrelevant in having a love of America? I had hoped that with the pandemic, we might reassess the connection between sports and patriotism. That seems to be what the Dallas Mavericks were doing, but just as there is “cancel culture,” there is also mandated culture. In this land of the free, you can apparently be required to act in a way some deem patriotic.be

Of course in the olden days when I first started going to sporting events, the venues did not have the fancy screens and scoreboards of today. Just imagine, you were expected to sing the national anthem from memory instead of reading it off a giant display. What does it say about the level of patriotism or the level of education of sports fans today that it now seems essential to provide the words to the spectators?

And I was taught back then not to applaud after the anthem to show it proper respect. That aspect of decorum is gone. If there is a connection between the singing and patriotism, then sports fans should love this country much more than those who do not know what a pick-off move is. Or at least sports spectators who are not golf fans should. I have heard it said that professional golfers are the most conservative of professional athletes and that golfers in general are more conservative than those who indulge in other pursuits. I do watch golf on television. Unlike every other televised sporting event I have seen (except maybe for tennis, another upper-class sport), I have never heard the national anthem as part of a golf telecast. May I assume that those at a golf event are less patriotic than those at a football game?  I wonder if our previous Golfer-in-Chief ever sang “The Star-Spangled Banner”—assuming he knows the words—before he plopped down in a golf cart for his frequent eighteen holes. Perhaps if he had sung the National Anthem more, he would have supported the Capitol Police.

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That Anthem Again

The Dallas Mavericks stopped playing the National Anthem before their home games. When news outlets reported this, the National Basketball Association proclaimed that all its teams must play the patriotic music before each game. That got me to thinking back to something I posted in 2017 and some other things since then. In slightly modified form, this is the post from April 23, 2017.

The Nationalism Pastime

It is always moving when the audience stands before the opera begins and sings the National Anthem. My patriotism overflows when the movie is paused at the two-thirds mark to allow us to sing “God Bless America.” And it is thrilling that every outdoor bluegrass concert I have attended starts with an adrenaline-boosting flyover by Air Force jets.

Of course these things don’t happen, but why not when such patriotic performances and displays are routine occurrences at sporting events?  Why is it that nationalism is a part of baseball, football, and NASCAR, but not “cultural” performances? Is it thought that operagoers differ in patriotic fervor from a Minnesota Vikings crowd? If the cultural audience cares less about our country, isn’t that all the more reason to have “The Star-Spangled Banner” before Lohengrin in hopes of increasing national identity? And if the opera audience is already patriotic, surely they would want to sing along to the National Anthem.

I have never researched the history of the National Anthem at sporting events, but a law professor of mine, Harry Kalven, a devoted Chicago Cubs fan even during the decades when you had to be a bit meshugganah to be a Cubs follower, said that it started during World War II. That seems likely, and I guess that once a patriotic ritual starts, it seems unpatriotic for it to end. Thus, we continue to hear the Anthem before the first pitch and now at every sporting event. 

The National Anthem may have been played at sporting events since WWII, but its performance style has changed. Once we had only straightforward renditions that zipped right along. For example, for years “The Star-Spangled Banner” was performed by Robert Merrill at Yankee Stadium—sometimes live and sometimes on a recording (occasionally nowadays a Merrill recording is still used). It clocked in at under two minutes. Now we regularly have versions that seem to be in a contest to see how slowly and with what added emotion the anthem can be sung. Soulful interpretations of the song have been traced back to a particular moment—Marvin Gaye’s rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the 1983 NBA All-Star Game. Since then we have had many take-your-time idiosyncratic versions of it. (Gaye’s version was over two-and-a-half minutes long.) For me, however, it really started with Jose Feliciano at the fifth game of the 1968 World Series. I thought his version was moving and made me hear the song anew, but to many it was offensive because this dark-skinned, blind guy had the nerve to sing it with a fresh insight and in a non-standard style.

Feliciano’s version did not inspire copycats, however, because his career was damaged by it. For incomprehensible reasons, people labeled his rendition unpatriotic and disrespectful, and many radio stations refused to play any of his songs after that. (Question for your history discussion: Is there more division and hate in the country now, or was there more in 1968?) Feliciano’s version, while slower than Merrill’s, was faster than Gaye’s at a little over two minutes. (A joke my father told me which was not stale back then. A Latino boy new to the United States made his way to the stadium for a game. The only seat he could get was in the distant centerfield bleachers under the American flag. He knew no one and was feeling lonely, but he felt welcomed when everyone before the game began, stood, looked at him, and sang, “Jose, can you see?”) What was shocking and outrageous in 1968 is accepted or at least tolerated today, and now we have all sorts of “modern” arrangements of our patriotic hymn. (What does it mean about the connection between patriotism and sporting events that you can place bets on how long the national anthem will take at the Super Bowl? Perhaps to the surprise of many, the under has won the majority of times in the last ten years.)

And now at baseball games we also get “God Bless America.” This started in the aftermath of 9/11. I went with the NBP to a Yankee game not too long after the attacks, and that was the first time I heard it, in the recorded performance by Kate Smith, during the seventh inning. (I wonder how many there recognized her voice. You have to be my age to remember her fifteen-minute TV show.) That made perfect sense then, as did the delay of a different ball game that autumn to hear a speech by President Bush. And, as I said, once started, it is hard to stop a patriotic ritual.

I probably object more than most to “God Bless America.” Baseball games drag on long enough without the song, which does hamper the between-inning routines of the game. Of course, they could get rid of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” which comes right after the patriotic song, but since I go to the park for baseball rituals, I want to hear “Root, root, root for the home team.” (Never, never, never get rid of “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” which plays at a different time in the game. Love it.) Perhaps I would object less if I did not find “God Bless America” so insipid. The best I can say is that it is a step up from the Kars for Kids song, but not a big step. (Have you ever wondered why the Kars for Kids folks don’t tell us with any specificity what the money from the car sales goes for?) As a kid, well before I understood its left-wing political implications, I thought “This Land Is Your Land” was a much better song (still do), and I would be happier if at least some of the time, it were performed in the seventh inning, which I am told has happened at Baltimore Orioles games.

(concluded February 15)

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First Sentences

“That Dodge City was the gateway to the Great American Desert probably does not seem to be much of a recommendation for it.” Tom Clavin, Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town in the American West.

“The day before Mrs. Starch vanished, her third-period biology students trudged silently, as always, into the classroom.” Carl Hiaasen, Scat.

“It was a foul autumn morning in Jaffa when the pilgrims came out of the church.” Dan Jones: The Templars: The Rise and Fall of God’s Holy Warriors.

“The Government still pays my wages but I no longer think of myself as a bureaucrat.” Gita Mehta, A River Sutra.

“Chief Tecumseh had every right to be vengeful.” Jared Cohen, Accidental Presidents: Eight Men Who Changed America.

“They are watching me, thought Rupert Stonebird, as he saw the two women walking rather too slowly down the road.” Barbara Pym, An Unsuitable Attachment.

“Enough water, like enough time, can make anything disappear.” Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and Last Trial of Harper Lee.

“Peter Crowther’s book on the election was already in the shops.” Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty.

“The Great War had brought Paul Lewis into the navy in 1918 as a lieutenant commander, but he never seemed quite at ease when in his uniform.” John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History.

“The ugliest truth, a friend once told Myron, is still better than the prettiest of lies.” Harlan Coben, Live Wire.

“When Michael Joyce of Los Angeles serves, when he tosses the ball and his face rises to track it, it looks like he’s smiling, but he’s not really smiling—his face’s circumoral muscles are straining with the rest of his body to reach the ball at the top of the toss’s rise.” David Foster Wallace, “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Limitation, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments.

“I was never so frightened.” Sarah Waters, Affinity.

“In 1957 legendary CBS newsman Walter Cronkite—lauded as the most trusted man in America—stared into the camera and told viewers that the ‘greatest engineering feat of our time’ was under way.” Dan Egan, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes.

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Snippets

Congress relieved Marjorie Taylor Greene from all her committee assignments. Is this a big deal? When was the last time that a congressional committee did something that was legislatively important?

What do you think MTG will do with all her extra time? Constituent services?

“Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” Barry Goldwater said that, causing a controversy. Today conservatives say something different. Complete this sentence: “Defending extremism is . . . .”

Mitch McConnell, referring to Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, said, “Loony lies and conspiracy theories are cancer for the Republican Party and our country.” Before you start thinking warm thoughts about the Senate minority leader, remember that he is the person who concocted a reason why Merrick Garland would not get a hearing on his Supreme Court nomination and then concocted a reason why the Garland concoction did not apply to the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett. He’s also the person who told us that the tax cut would not increase the deficit. He has said things time and again that indicate not a belief in conspiracies but just a lack of integrity. I point you to the words of Robert G. Kaiser in his marvelous book Act of Congress: How America’s Essential Institution Works and How It Doesn’t about the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act. When the Kentucky Senator backtracked on various pledges, Senator Dodd tried “to shame McConnell and the Republicans who were supporting him—not an easy task.” “Loony lies” apparently depends on who is  singing the tune.

If you thought that the passive and claims of leadership are inconsistent, you have not been paying attention. Marjorie Taylor Greene, in disavowing prior beliefs before the House of Representatives, said, “I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true.”

A reason this is not a unified country: According to Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, in a recent poll, about two-thirds of Dems had an opinion of Marjorie Taylor Greene, while only 44% of Repubs did. Perhaps this is the reason why: In January, Greene was in 472 fifteen-second clips on CNN; 393 such clips on MSNBC; and in 31 on Fox News. It isn’t one country.

A news report of a heated meeting a week before Christmas of Trump and his advisors said that the “entourage went upstairs to the Yellow Oval room, Trump’s living room. Staff set pigs in a blanket and little meatballs on toothpicks on the coffee table.” Two of the best foods every made. Pigs in a blanket! Tiny meatballs on tiny skewers! This could get me to rethink the Trump White House, especially if they got those items from Costco.

The headline: “More Than 760,000 Pounds of Hot Pockets Recalled.” Let the jokes begin.

“There is no such thing as a pretty good omelet.” French Proverb.

Is it true that when Marjorie Taylor Greene was told that the restaurant cut their pizzas into eight pieces, she replied, “Please cut mine into six—I couldn’t eat eight slices.”?

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Sweet Home, Ashland, Alabama (concluded)

Ashland, Alabama, where the spouse’s grandmother lived, felt like the South for many reasons. One was its number of churches. There were a lot, but I am used to that. Wherever I am in Brooklyn, I am almost always within three or four blocks of a church, but in Ashland, as far as I could tell, they were all Protestant ones, and probably more than half were some sort of Baptist or Methodist. I don’t remember seeing a Catholic church, and the nearest synagogue was a county or two away. Mom’s house was literally surrounded by churches. Out her front door and across the street was her Southern Baptist church. (Mom was clearly pleased that I, although not a Southern Baptist, was raised in the Baptist tradition. (See post of June 22, 2020.)) Out her side door and across the street was the Methodist Church.

One Sunday when we were visiting Ashland, that Methodist Church was welcoming its new pastor. The spouse and I were out and about that afternoon and cutting through the Methodist parking lot on our way to somewhere when we realized we had been spotted by the new minister and his wife. The couple looked like a caricature out of certain kind of movie. Neither seemed old enough to drive. Both were thin, and I expected to see acne on him as he approached with what appeared to be a brave smile. His white shirt might have had some cotton in it, but it was too big and gapped at the neck. His suit was also too big and looked as if it had been bought two days before from the southern equivalent of whatever was two steps down from Robert Hall. And if the tie was not a clip-on, it sure fooled me. The wife was tiny and retiring, but also had a brave smile fixed in place. They looked like a newlywed couple dedicated to the new path on which they had embarked. As he approached, he started to introduce himself, but we interrupted saying with big smiles, “We are from out of town. You don’t need to spend time with us.” It was as if a wave passed over them both, and in an instant they looked more relaxed but also incredibly tired. They thanked us and told us that he had performed his first service as the new pastor and had been meeting people all day. After a few moments of pleasantries, we parted. I had wanted to tell them, “You look like you need a drink.” But this was neither the right town nor the right couple for such a suggestion.

Perhaps we would have chatted with the new couple in town longer if their church had been Mom’s church, but on Sundays Mom headed out her front door. I only remember one time that the spouse and I went with her to the Baptist church across the street. The spouse’s sister and her husband were also in Ashland at the time. The brother-in-law is Jewish, although not religious, but he looked quite nervous as we all got ready for the morning service. I told him to relax, no one was going to know about his religious heritage, explaining that probably they all thought Jews had horns, and they would not see them on his head. I added, however, that perhaps his quite luxurious head of hair was hiding them and perhaps I ought to give him a trim first. He did not see the humor in my tremendously clever wit.

I remember little of that service, not the sermon or the Bible readings, but I do remember the hymns, or really the introduction to them. As we got to the point where we were to rise and rejoice in song, the minister announced that the usual choir director was away and was being replaced by “Shotgun Miller.” I was only half paying attention and was not sure that I had heard it correctly, but “Shotgun” just seemed to hang in the air. What looked like a solid Ashland citizen stood up and led us in song. At the second hymn, the minister merely said, “Shotgun,” and I could not help smiling. At the third hymn, when he said, “Shotgun,” I had to restrain myself from chuckling out loud, and I thought to myself, “Are they just messing with this northern boy, bringing out the clichés, and giving a good show?” But I knew they weren’t.

I shouldn’t mock Mom’s church, however. She was a wonderful person—warm, caring, amusing, charming, tolerant, accepting. She seemed at peace, and part of the reason for that was her religion. When I think on some of the bad aspects of religion, I think of the spouse’s grandmother and what her religion and her church gave to her. From her, I know that for some people religion is meaningful and life-supporting.

I don’t want to seem as if I am mocking Ashland, the South, or small-town life in general. Mom lived until she was 97, and at least in the last twenty years of that time, she resided about half the year with the spouse’s mother in Florida and the rest of the time by herself in Ashland until her final illness, which was short. She could live by herself in her house because she was not really alone. Every day people from the town would look in on her, make sure that she was all right, and ask if she needed some lemons from the grocery or aspirin from the pharmacy. Many people cared about her enough to make efforts on her behalf in ways that I do not expect will happen for me in Brooklyn. She could remain where she wanted to be in a place that held memories.

The visits to Ashland, however, did not make me want to give up my big city life. On the first day of our first visit to Ashland, the spouse and I were heading off to the town square. Without thinking Mom said, “Now ya’ll be careful. It’s Saturday. It’s market day. There is a lot of traffic.” And then she stopped and smiled and said, “But you live in New York,” and laughed at herself.

After seeing the courthouse, we wandered around the square and went into a few shops. In each and every one, an owner or clerk said, “You aren’t from around here. Who are you visiting?” We would answer and explain our relationship to Ms. Herren. They would ask where we were from. Each one of them would comment on how far away, how big, and how foreign New York seemed, but how much they liked seeing it on the Today show. And when we were leaving, all of them said, “You all have a blessed day” or “You give Ms. Herren my best.” By the fourth or fifth exit, I started muttering expletives when I got to the sidewalk. Their sweetness, their niceness was getting under my skin. I knew I was a Big City boy. I was longing for some of New York City’s curt anonymity.

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Sweet Home, Ashland, Alabama

The spouse and I differ on the route we took on my first trip to Ashland, the tiny town in Alabama where the spouse’s grandmother, “Mom,” lived and where the spouse spent childhood summers. (See post by spouse on January 15, 2021.) I thought we had driven through the Midwest visiting friends in Columbus, Ohio, and Peoria, Illinois, and then headed south. The spouse remembers heading south first down the eastern seaboard and heading west after camping in Georgia, on what we refer to as the “demented locals” experience, but that is another story. Part of the reason our memories don’t coincide is that we went to Ashland several times and did not always take the same route.

 Similarly, I can’t say on what trip certain impressions and experiences occurred, but on each and every trip to Ashland, I felt that I was in the South, capital S. Before going to Alabama, I had only been south of Washington, D.C., to Miami, and while that felt different from what I had experienced in Illinois and Wisconsin, it was not The South that had resonated in my mind. Ashland, however, was in that region I had read about in William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty. It was the South I had seen on television when watching scenes of Selma and Greensboro. It was the South of broadcast televangelists.

Ashland physically fit my image of a small southern town. Its population was about 2,000, and I gather that it remains about that size. There was a town square, and a courthouse was at the center of that square, and that courthouse itself was a square. When I first went there, after going up a few steps to an entrance, I had to step over a dog sleeping in the sun on the landing outside the door, and I had to walk past a Dr. Pepper machine to get in. I almost laughed. I thought maybe the southerners were laying on the clichés to play with this northern boy. I took a picture of the courthouse because it looked just like an old southern courthouse ought to look. I enlarged and framed the picture, and for a long time it hung at the top of the steps in my house, but somehow I have lost it.

I think of that building as the courthouse, but it was probably more than that. Ashland is the county seat, and no doubt the structure held county offices in addition to courtrooms and judicial chambers. The jurisdiction is Clay County, and I was struck driving into town by the red clay landscape. For a moment I wondered if that gave the county its name, but then I put Clay and Ashland together and realized that the county was named after Henry Clay and the town after his Kentucky home, Ashland. But if there is a memorial to that early American leader in Ashland, Alabama, I never saw it.

I never saw a memorial either to the town’s most famous native son, Hugo Black, the Supreme Court Justice. Born just outside of town, Black was raised in Ashland and had his first law office on the town square before moving to Birmingham. But at least during his lifetime, Ashland did not want to claim the justice. Hugo Black wrote Court decision after Court decision upholding civil liberties and equal rights and most important to many Alabamans is that Black was on the Supreme Court that ordered the desegregation of public schools and other public facilities. The spouse’s grandmother told us years after Brown v. Board of Education that Hugo Black on a visit to Alabama picked a flight that had a layover in Birmingham so that he could see his son who lived and practiced law there. The son got word to his father, “Don’t even get off the plane; it will be too dangerous for you.” (A famous KKK leader of the 1920s and 1930s was born in Ashland, but as far as I know, there is no memorial to him either.)

The spouse, however, noted some racial changes since her childhood days. We spotted a Black state trooper, Blacks at the public swimming pool, and a Black man in a spirited tennis game against a white opponent. The spouse said these sightings would not have occurred in the Clay County of her youth.

Signs of the old South, however, still lingered. Looking out the window early one morning, I saw a wagon being pulled by a mule as a Black man was going to tend fields. I felt as if I had seen this scene before in a picture from the South of the 1920s or 1930s. And then there was the time that we stopped to get gas at a one-pump station and waited for someone to come to fill the tank. I had only seen Stepin Fetchit’s shuffle in the movies, but now I saw it for myself as it seemed to take five minutes for an old Black man to make it from the building to our Dodge Dart twenty feet away. I understood the walk’s origins, but I wanted to shout, “You don’t have to do that. We are white, but we aren’t from here.” However, some remnants of the old South benefited us. The wife’s metal leg brace had cracked, and we asked the gas station attendant if he knew of a welder and explained the problem. He immediately said that the blacksmith could help and told us where the smithy was. We went there, and the man in an old, old shop did a creditable repair, not charging us much money.

Ashland was also different from other places I had known. This was hammered home when we were driving into the town with the spouse’s mother in the back seat (why we had the mother-in-law with us remains a mystery to me). She commanded, with an uncharacteristic urgency, that we pull over to a small store. It was the last place to get alcohol before arriving in Ashland. Clay County was dry.

(concluded Feb. 5)

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

The Arizona Republican party censured Arizona Republicans Governor Doug Ducey, former Senator Jeff Flake, and Cindy McCain for showing insufficient loyalty to Donald Trump. House Republicans want to strip power from the Wyoming Republican Representative Liz Cheney because she has shown insufficient loyalty to Donald Trump. Tom Rice, a Republican Representative, was censured by his South Carolina Republican party for being insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump. Remind me again: What is cancel culture?

I am reading Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Nobel Prize winning Svetlana Alexievich. This book of oral history contains moving and frightening memories of what happened to Soviet communists who showed insufficient loyalty to Stalin and whatever he proclaimed as orthodoxy.

For years upon years, Republicans claiming a mantle of orthodoxy had tried to drum others out of the party with the epithet RINO (Republican in name only). Remind me again: What is cancel culture?

One of the counts in the Arizona Republicans’ censure of Cindy McCain said: “WHEREAS, Cindy McCain has condemned President Trump for his criticism of her husband. . . .” Remind me again: What are family values?

“You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.” John Morley.

I have been avoiding the news programs, but almost every time I do see one, Anthony Fauci is on. When does he do the job for which he is paid?

The sign commanded me to “Seek Unity.” “Really?” I thought. “What has most unified us over the last four years is an obsession with Donald Trump.”

I have seen it reported that neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden drink alcohol. What does that say about whether I, too, should abstain?

“What is said when drunk has been thought out beforehand.” Flemish proverb.

Conservatives proclaim a deep belief in capitalism and free enterprise and an opposition to the regulation of businesses. Yet they now have twisted knickers because of actions by social media companies even though those acts are products of the free enterprise system by capitalist companies. Extensive government regulation would seem to be necessary to prevent these companies from taking such actions in the future. Where are those fundamental conservative principles now?

Remember: Conservatives were the ones who got rid of the fairness doctrine.

Posted on by rjonakait

Lessons from Henry Aaron (concluded)

All sports fans learn that players and teams fail. But because sports teams were integrated, I, and perhaps other boys my age, were too optimistic about race relations. My baseball team, the Milwaukee Braves, also brought home to me another lesson not confronted by all sports fans. I encountered it when I was in college, that time when adulthood was supposed to be upon me, but aspects of boyhood still lingered.

At my college in those days, baseball was not considered cool. Few of my classmates indicated an attachment to a team. I did not broadcast that I was a Braves fan, but every day I sought out the box scores from the previous evening to see how the Braves, and more particularly, Henry Aaron, had done. This often took some effort because the eastern school got early editions of New York City newspapers, and they often did not have the box scores from games not played on the East Coast. This would keep me scrambling to find later and later editions. Until I could find out what happened the night before, I felt something like I do now when I have not had my regular quotient of morning coffee.

Then it changed. A Chicago-based group bought the Braves, and they determined that they could make more money if they moved the team to Atlanta. In what increasingly became the norm for sports, television and radio revenues were the controlling factors. While attendance in Milwaukee had dropped off since the Braves’ early days there, the crowds were still respectable. The Braves’ broadcast market, however, was limited to Wisconsin with no way to grow (Chicago had its own teams), and this was a fraction of the market available to an Atlanta team that could hope to capture fans, and ears and eyeballs, throughout the South.

I had assumed without really thinking about it that I would be a Milwaukee Braves fan all my life and that this would always bring back the joys and agonies of my boyish summers. Of course, I knew that money was involved in the game. Players got paid; admission got charged. The essence of baseball, however, was competition, the matchup of pitcher and batter, sunshine, cool evenings, radio voices, a community of fans.  Now I saw it differently. A community may have seen the Braves as their team, but they were wrong. It was not a communal team. Ownership and money triumphed over community.

 A court order required the Braves to stay in Milwaukee one more year, and I kept hoping that the move would not happen. I went to some games in that forlorn year and got some more baseball memories: I saw Don Drysdale hit Mike de la Hoz in the chest, producing a crack like a pistol shot. I watched Maury Wills get picked off first base twice in an afternoon. But it was all sadness, and at the end of the season the Braves decamped.

The Braves had taught me about ups and downs, human failings and successes. They taught me about the optimism of waiting until next year. They taught me that to succeed one had to risk failure and that everyone fails some of the time. But now the Braves set me on another path of understanding. I began the lifelong search for understanding the power of money and ownership.

When I viewed the Braves not as a baseball team, but as a profit-driven corporation, it made me more sensitive to other corporate decisions, especially the decision to move a factory out of a town.

On the one hand, such corporate moves are usually done for a reason different from the one given for the Braves move out of Wisconsin. The factory is relocated not to increase broadcast revenues, but because wages would be lower in the new place. And the moving of a plant does not dash the naïve fantasies of a boy, because few boys fantasize about the ups and downs of a factory. Nevertheless, the move of a factory, I came to realize, was quite similar to the move of a sports franchise. In both cases, those who have the money want to improve their bottom line; they simply want to have more money. And just as a sports team produces a community, a factory also produces a community that includes those who work there, their relatives and dependents, and others who more indirectly depend on the factory workers, such as owners of diners, taverns, gas stations, and grocery stores. The move of a factory so a few people can make more money crushes a community. A lot has been written about the moves or retention of sports franchises; not enough has been written about the moves precipitated by other corporations, and their effects on communities. (One insightful book about the effect of a factory closing on a community is Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein.)

The Braves left, but even so, the Milwaukee Braves are still very much a part of my boyhood memories. Those thoughts, however, seem isolating sometimes because they are shared by so few. If I tell a baseball fan that the best lefthanded pitcher, perhaps simply the best pitcher, of my lifetime was Warren Spahn, I am likely to be met with a blank look. I can talk about Bob “Hurricane” Hazle, and the listener has no idea who that is. But the memories, even if not widely shared, are still important to me. They are an integral part of my life. When I look at that picture of Eddie Matthews and Henry Aaron on their last walk off the Milwaukee baseball field, I see the end of my childhood, but I also remember the many thrills those two men gave me; They still hold the career record for home runs hit by a pair of teammates. That white man and that black man walking off together also remind me that there is still hope of racial accord. They were a part of my life that I still remember with joy.

With the death of Henry Aaron, I have been looking at the picture even more than I used to.