Harrumph!

After a glance, my uxorial unit declared the backyard looks like a field of Marshmallow Fluff®.  That’s how winter should be, and how it is in my childhood recollections.

We’ve been a week with scant new snow. We had a pathetic dusting last night, sky dandruff. Yet, the air has been colder than average and not modulated by that famous ocean effect that Boston gets. Our 18 inches up on this hill stays a solid foot, even after several sunny afternoons.

For much of my childhood, I spent vacations and for a few years lived in the Eastern panhandle of West Virginia. To my memory, snow that came stayed.

Romney is in the mountains and on a plateau surrounded by them. The huge apple orchards and corn fields overlooking the Potomac were white from the first flakes, on and on, with regular new snows.

Normally in-town snow in Boston, if it deep enough to cross-country ski in, stays that way one to three days. Temperatures above 30F, bright sun, and no new snow quickly reduce the good stuff to intermittent grass decoration and junk that sticks to skis.

I’m quick to grab the skis (sometimes snowshoes instead) and head to one of my Boston ski resorts — the Arnold Arboretum, Franklin Park’s golf course or the nearby Blue Hills Reservation in Canton/Milton. Alas, I used to walk to the Forest Hills Cemetery when we still lived in Jamaica Plain, but two years ago, the management there got grumpy, nasty and non-accommodating.

It’s not a huge deal to drive 45 minutes or even a couple of hours to get to a bona fide cross-country course. They have groomed trails, warming houses or huts, places to pee and such. They do charge say $20 a person, but the big thing is that they are OUT THERE. It’s fabulous to ski Boston. I have an odd pride in being able to do so, even hitting someplace twice a day or more than one location.

So, I’ve been grokking the cold weather keeping the deep snow for my amusement and sport. Tomorrow again will be bitterly cold — more obvious in the arboretum or particularly on the Devine golf course, which only means faster skiing and no slogging in the gummy stuff.

If global warming means hotter summers and colder winters, at least the second part keeps my fluff deep and hard enough for play. Bring it on and keep it on the ground, if you please.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, skiing, snow, Boston, West Virginia

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Wanda’s not here and she’s not in the box. You might say my mother has become furniture or un objet d’art.

It is, however, a fine box. I went shopping for one worthy of holding half my mother’s ashes and found it in a small town in New Hampshire.  Oddly enough, it was hand made and hand inlaid not there, but in Comanche County, Oklahoma. I was born there in Fort Sill Station Hospital.

My mother, of course, was there at the time, busy allowing me into the larger world. Now the buff, heavy ashes of half of her cremated remains are sealed in that box. The box sits on a bookcase in my home office, highly visible at waist height.

Four years on, it is past time to allow them into the larger world.

I did not ask for half of the remains and I would not have. Instead, a call from my brother-in-law in New Mexico informed me they were on the way. His wife, my sister, just knew I’d want them. She’d keep half and send the other to me. As I recall, when Richard told me of the pending delivery, my only response was, “Why?”

Zydeco legend spoke Clifton Chenier to my attitude of mortality with, “When you live, you live. When you’re dead, you’re gone.” On a higher plane, I can play Socrates, as recounted in Phaedo. While I don’t have his faith in an immortal individual soul, I concur with his conclusion when asked what he wanted them to do with him after his death. He said the they could do whatever they wanted with his body because he was not going to be there.

So wife and family can toss my remains or absentmindedly leave them in a fine constructed box — dust on both inside and outside — or bury them. That’s whatever suits their emotional state and needs.

Plato quoted Crito as asking the dying Socrates, ” And in what way shall we bury you?” The response included”

In any way that you like; but you must get hold of me, and take care that I do not run away from you…Be of good cheer then, my dear Crito, and say that you are burying my body only, and do with that whatever is usual, and what you think best.

My mother was of that thought, asking only that there be no funeral and minimal expense. She definitely did not want a burial plot and probably would not even have approved of the fancy box.

When the frightfully heavy bag of ashes arrived by UPS, I fretted. I turned to my sage, aged adviser, UU Minister Farley Wheelwright. Over the past seven decades, he’s buried and married quite a few folk, parishioners, friends, family and strangers. He set me straight immediately.

A Matter of Place

Farley said not to have even a passing thought that the content of the box was or had ever been my mother.  Instead, the ashes are just that. They are as symbolic as I choose but no more.

His own attitude about such matters is rather casual, even to himself. I stood in for him at a family funeral at nearby Forest Hills Cemetery here. There’s a spot in the same grave for his ashes as well, the last in that grave. He’s fine with that.

He did ask jocularly for me to drop by from time to time to visit. That seems to be the real utility of such burials, a locus.

Actually, I had created as much in my back garden many years ago for my beloved grandfather. I took a photo of him and a few small objects of his and buried them in a tin. He was a highly skilled gardener, equally of flowers, vegetables and fruits. He and I worked many summer days weeding and harvesting. Putting my version of him a few feet from the house was soothing.

He was my touchstone and ideal. He was always there for me when I was happy or troubled. Without judgment, he would answer, agree or discuss. I can still have one-sided conversations.

Now I think I need a trip to the Eastern panhandle of West Virginia. My mother and I each learned to swim in the South Branch of the Potomac. We each wandered the mountains surrounding Romney as youths and adults. Her ashes — half of her ashes — should become one with that symbolic home.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, death, ashes, mother, grandfather, burial

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I’m not sure how I feel about the inclusion. Google’s van has been around my neighborhood and made street-level pix of my house. Is that intrusive, flattering or just inevitable?

This morning, I got directions to the Mass Mutual convention center in Springfield. I’m headed to the state Dem Party convention Saturday. I’m  not a delegate, rather leading a workshop on blogging for the real delegates.

I often find Yahoo maps to give better directions, but I started with maps.google.com today. Suddenly there was the house across the street, for the first time. Sure enough, clicking the directional arrows, I was looking at my wife’s not so old van and my old car in front of our house.

Zooming in was fuzzy quickly, but the locale and accessories were unmistakable. From the looks, the image was pretty recent.

Previously, views of our neighborhood near the bottom of Boston  were overhead and not too definite. Now it’s personal. We live in what we locals would identify as the Woodbourne section of the Forest Hills area of the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. We don’t have points of interest like government buildings or even restaurants. We were understandably low on Google’s image-acquisition itinerary.

I think I liked that, being under the Borg’s radar. Now you can cruise up and down all the streets in Boston with the string bourne in them.  We’re there and you and tout le monde can peek at us.

I suppose the antarctic camps will be the last mapped.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, Google maps, privacy, Woodbourne

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Here are some more particularistic churches. Few have websites and these may or may not be functional if you visit.

However, these are dynamic and many find new preachers and sometimes new flavors of religion, while still serving a hungry public

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Comments	Church Front
Greater Victory Temple 1218 Blue Hill Ave., Mattapan
Lily of the Valley Baptist Church 1248 Blue Hill Ave., Mattapan
Blue Hill Missionary Baptist Church 1258 Blue Hill Ave., Mattapan
Deeper Life Full Gospel 1078 Blue Hill Ave., Mattapan
International Outreach Ministries 4 Hyde Park Ave., JP
Iglesia Reformada Emanuel 3140 Washington St., JP
Antioch Missionary Baptist Church 1082 Blue Hill Ave. Mattapan

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One of our in-town ski resorts may require stealth access. From Woodbourne, we are within walking distance of three undesignated cross-country ski areas — Franklin Park’s Devine golf course, the Arnold Arboretum and Forest Hills Cemetery.

The city owns the golf course and the dirt and roads of the arboretum (the plants belong to Harvard), but the graveyard has been private since it opened in 1848. However, FH is the second U.S. garden cemetery, meant for more than corpse storage. Unlike the nearby necropolises, St. Michael and Mt. Hope, FH was a park from the beginning, meant for contemplation, passive recreation and such human bonding as picnicking. It is also a sculpture garden with works by some of the nation’s most noted stone cutters and metal artists.

Pic Click Trick: Click on the thumbnail for a larger view or see a few more here.

For a quick spin, we’ve skied in FH for many years. The arboretum can seem like 128, with all its Brooklinites and surburban types unloading from their SUVs. The golf course is farther, but definitely less crowded and equally as rural in the snow. FH is right there and when the sidewalks haven’t been cleared, it’s an easy ski from Woodbourne, no car needed or wanted.

(Cue threatening music.) A couple of snows ago over the end-of-year holidays, we got the bum’s rush from a control-freak security guard. He wanted us to leave and not bring our skis back. The snowshoers, cars, trucks and bikes were okay, but no ski, no way.

He insisted skiing was forbidden, not passive recreation (did he think they had tiny motors hidden underneath?). We skied around and avoided him, but he looks like trouble.

Judgmentally, I figure him to be ex-military, but Army and not Marine from his unkempt sideburns. He was definitely a rules-are-rules type who will take charge until there is a superior officer at hand.

I can’t say I was amazed after several conversations along that line with a neighbor who has spent his career working there. He says when the crew puts the snowplows on its Jeeps, the operators hate cross-country skiers. The running joke over there is that cross-country skiers make nice hood ornaments.

We can set aside that:

• No skier has ever been hit or run into a Jeep or caused any accident.
• The cemetery has lots of traffic — motor vehicles, walkers, runners, dog people, cyclists.
• Anyone operating a plow has open vistas making it easy to see any of those visitors well in advance.
• Skiers there all seems to pay attention and there’s next to nowhere that a hill would let a skier travel fast onto a road.
• Unleashed dogs are far more common and more likely to cause problems than a couple of skiers.

The point is that the employee folklore disses skiers. FH management would be stupid to ban skiers. After all, they are in the business of marketing their plots, which includes keeping FH a pleasant place to spend time, maybe a very long time.

We may have run across the one sour guardian. Alternately the perceived wisdom of occasional plowers may bubble up to the FH office. TBD

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, skiing, Jamaica Plain, Forest Hills Cemetery

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To my 9th grader, parental cruelty seems both innovative and relentless. On Saturday, for just one example, he had a new most-hated activity — snowshoes.

He is recently at a numerical disadvantage. There’s one of him and two of us. He goes on more arbitrary and abusive trips with his evil parents than before his closest brother went to college at the end of last summer.

That was long the fate of the elder of his two brothers, who was an only child for 11 years, outnumbered the whole time.  That one accompanied us to restaurants, theater and more in Manhattan and Boston. Our behavior with and expectations of him were such that he was well behaved from toddlerhood, speaking as a peer with adults and never disrupting.

My sister had warned me that having more than one child in the house at a time changed the dynamics, shifting power to the children. Too, too true. They want to cut a deal or even strike against plans. Wheedling can give way to yelling and worse.

Let’s consider three of our tortures.

• Snowshoes. Tromping around shin-high snow in abutting Forest Hills Cemetery should be a bucolic and pacific prolonged moment. There’s stillness, abounding nature from the trees to snow to hawks, and there’s the joy of using your body. Or, there’s boredom, discomfort from toe to hip, an open-ended chore when there’s Guitar Hero awaiting, only parents to relate to, and always and ever the lifting of one metal flipper after another. Take-away, “I hate this more than anything I’ve ever done!”
• Opera. The son of my wife’s college girlfriend was finishing his cello degree at Juillard and we converged to attend Aida at the Met. Not only do I love opera, but it was a weekend in my old (and favorite) town. To our youngest, it was four hours of inconceivable agony. For four hours, not even the little translating screen on the seat-back amused him. The elephants may as well be paper cutouts. Take-away, “Why would anyway pay to listen to that screaming!”
• Ballet. When the Kirov came to town, you can be sure we were there. Our youngest had been one of the lucky students given free lessons by the Boston Ballet; recommended by his teachers for his physical skills, he had learned and enjoyed — until peers teased  him out of taking ballet lessons. We had gotten him to agree to the course and when it was over, it was over. I mistakenly thought that a few sword fights, some intense masks and lots of jumping about would work for him. Take-away, “This was the worst night of my life!”

So, there you have it. He already knows what he hates most. He’s already experienced the nadir of his life. It can only be up from here.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, Forest Hills, children, abuse, opera, ballet, snowshoes

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…a very little miracle…

The signage elves came this morning. Six days after requesting a constituent service from my city councilor, it was done.

We had driving rain for two days and bitter cold for several others. Yet, my little miracle happened.

I am new to this and am impressed by John Tobin and Anna Sylvester’s work. I might conclude that he gets things done. I might also conclude that I should occasionally ask for the easily achievable. Probably both are right.

I am wont here and on other blogs to speak for high-minded and expansive aims, for righting big wrongs. I think a stop-sign replacement holds a lesson for me.

The short of this includes:

• A couple of years ago, some driver sheared the stop sign post.
• Rather than do the right thing, the city crew put the old sign on the street-sign pole at Bourne and Walk Hill Streets.
• The stop sign was then obscured by the fence until Northbound drivers on busy Bourne Street were literally on it. They stopped in the intersection, blocking it and stranding left turning cars and bikes facing Walk Hill traffic bearing on them.
• Seeing Councilor Tobin for his coffee-shop hours, I asked on the way out what city agency I should ask for a replacement.
• He said he and his aide would do it.
• They did.

I guess they came from good stock too. Sylvester sent me email saying she had requested a replacement post back 15 feet from Walk Hill were the old one was. She also mailed a hand-written note saying it was in the works. Also Councilor Tobin and I swapped a couple of short emails.

Seeing local cynics, particularly in the Herald,  I wondered whether this would become an amusing avocation. I planned to report on the progress and when the crew finally showed to photograph them and see how long it took.

Well, that’s not going to happen. Howie Carr or those other old rich kids masquerading as working-class champions aside, I rolled up Bourne this morning to see the new sign in the old place.

I watched five motor vehicles. They all did the typical Boston stop — that is rolling half a length past the stop-sign before stopping. However, because the sign is a car-length back from Walk Hill, they weren’t actually blocking people turning and were safer in spite of themselves.

I had asked for a stop line, which Sylvester said she’d request. I’m sure that would be part of a batch job when a crew is out re-striping around here next.

That would be another visual cue to stop short of where moms with strollers walk and old men such as I bike. In concert, the sign is now visible two blocks away, no longer hidden by  the privacy fence.

I view this like when I taught swimming. We learned to tell beginners to keep their legs straight in the flutter kick. The best kick is really slightly bent legged, but say that and most people would practically put their heels in the middle of their backs. It’s better to use a little trick and end up with the right thing. Likewise, a stop sign 15 feet before the street gives people the sense they are on the edge in half-way passing the sign when they are where you want them.

So, there’s no tale of a negligent Councilor. There are no absentee public works employees. There’s nothing but good to report.

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Oh what, oh what do you get the dead for Christmas or Hanukkah?

Our Forest Hills is not quite Paris’ Père-Lachaise cemetery (cimetière de l’Est), where admirers leave booze, lingerie and more on the stones of singers and actors. Being Boston, we do have our own low-tone versions though.

Two I stop by on occasion are poet e.e. cummings (EDWARD ESTLIN CUMMINGS on the stone) and playwright Eugene O’Neill. Clearly, others have preceded me.

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Finder Tips: Their corpses rot less than 100 yard away. Directions to the Cummings site are here. The O’Neill plot is off Chestnut Avenue at the bottom of the H on the same map fragment.Tucked in rhododendrons, the large, erose stone is not easily visible. Look instead for the SEARS/ROBBINS/LOREY marker. Eugene and Carlotta lie beyond that.

Cummings is the sentimental favorite here. O’Neill was clearly brighter and the better literary artist, if far inferior in tapping into public themes as well as promoting himself. His work was almost entirely brilliant, but far less accessible to the love-rapt and to the melancholic.

Snark aside, I have always enjoyed Cummings and can quote quite a few of his lines. In addition, I find him almost Japanese and haiku-like in his seasonal and nature references. In a few often odd but not strained words, he can link emotion and environment.

Cummings is buried between his mum and Marion Morehouse, who may have been his third wife.  His quickie Mexican divorce from Mrs. #2 was not U.S. legal when he and the model wed. It terms of relative immortality, it pays to be the last spouse.

By the bye, UUs claim everyone who tilts a head our way more than once. Cummings did more than that.

Like bus and subway riders, Cummings and O’Neill pilgrims differ. In the case of those who visit the graves, they bring and leave disparate objects. I have seen and heard folk reading Cummings poetry at his grave, often giggling and often being, well, young. Scholarly types are more likely to visit the playwright, and do so less frequently.

It’s obvious that many more visit the poet’s site. While the grounds crew does remove gifts/debris, they are not janitors. Expect to see coins, beads, tiny river stones and pretty good sized rocks. This week, a sad, wilted, tiny poinsettia was there; it plainly did not care for the cold. On either side were two copied Cummings poems (into the strenuous briefness), each decorated with simplistic flower drawings and held ephemerally by a rock.

The offerings too differ for these masters. Those on O’Neill’s marker is similar to the Holocaust memorial downtown. The typical artifact is a respectful stone, a traditional and somber mark of respect. There are no gifts around the stone, only on top.

Otherwise, at this cemetery there aren’t many notables with gifts, even at Christmas. For example, Albert Augustus Pope’s crypt is there. He created the usable bike and the industry, but I never see pedals left for him. He’s a stumble away from restaurateur Jacob Wirth, but that tomb doesn’t have leavings of beer steins.

Instead, if you travel down north a couple hundred yards to the new section near Morton Street, there’s offerings galore. The Asian-American (and some Italian-American and African-American) stones have lots of goodies. Chinese descendants particularly get paper representing heaven money and many such traditional treasures. Personal notes and artifacts appear, at least temporarily, on others.

In death everyone can be famous, at least to those who already know them.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, Cummings, Jamaica Plain, Forest Hills Cemetery, Eugene O’Neill

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This is a test of your Elected Official Effectiveness System. Will Boston City Councilor John Tobin (WR/JP) make my intersection safe? If so, how quickly? What’s a reasonable period for replacing a sheared stop-sign post — a season, a month, a week?

I didn’t really mean to put him on the spot. That came as a throwaway question at the end of a session with him at JP Licks. When I asked where in City Hall I’d go to ask for this, he said “We’ll do that.” In that case, joining him in the booth was Legislative Aide Anna Sylvester, to make a we.

Here, I say:

• Tobin is high-energy, deep integrity. I expect him to do what he says.
• If your city councilor (or equivalent where you vote) holds regular open office hours, go from time to time.
• If your officials don’t, ask them why and point to folk like John Tobin as examples.

Almost every month, my guy has two open sessions. One is at his West Roxbury office and the other floats from coffee shop or ice-cream joint, generally in JP. That way, he is close to both neighborhoods in his district. He announces them in the local weeklies as well as on his personal website. By the bye, you can also trundle down to his City Hall office, nominally from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., five days, but call first because he may be doing Council biz elsewhere.

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He may or may not get takers at a session, but he’s there.When you’re there, you’re the only person he sees in front of him. That’s the right kind of intense.

This morning, there were two of us, with an elderly woman as well as I. I would gladly have shared the booth with her, but she waited until I finished. Perhaps she came with a specific request she wanted to deliver privately.

One of these open meetings a year ago is where I chatted him up and got him to come onto our Left Ahead! podcast. The full one of that is here and the short version concentrating on his term-limits for Boston officials is here.

We had a free-ranging chat today because I didn’t come with any planned business. We touched on the status of his citywide Wi-Fi proposal (he’s still pushing and sees it as an equalizer for poor families and kids), arrested-for-corruption Councilor Chuck Turner (they got off to a bad start, but Turner ended up supporting his run for Council president later, and Tobin wants Turner to have his say/day in court), and why he seems to have a ton more ideas and proposals than the other councilors (he modestly claims most come directly from activist JP residents).

When I finally realized the woman had sneaked into the booth behind me and was waiting for her audience, I fired off the stop sign question to wrap up. He promised and Sylvester took the intersection info. I’ll update here.

As background, this must be like many requests councilors get. It is a simple matter, but one that affects pubic safety. The basics are:

• The stop sign at Bourne and Walk Hill Streets is on the street-sign pole.
• The stop-sign post had been sheared and some easy-way-out crew moved the sign.
• The octagon  is 14 shoe lengths (roughly 15 feet or a car length) north of where it should be and was. (The red arrow on the sign pic shows where the pole used to be.)
• The adjacent property fence obscures the sign until a north-bound vehicle is nearly at Walk Hill.

Cars race up Bourne and with typical Boston manners, stop just past the sign. That puts the front several feet of the vehicle into Walk Hill.

Any vehicle, but particularly bicycles, turning left onto Bourne, often find themselves stranded in mid turn by a car or truck blocking the intersection. If the stop sign was where it belonged, the tendency for drivers to go beyond it to stop would put them a safe distance back.

The car  in the image to the left is still moving. It is in the typical place at the intersection, with bumper into Walk Hill and blocking turning vehicles. The suddenness of the stops here are particularly dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists simultaneously approaching the corner. Both Walk Hill and Bourne are very busy, so such coincidence is common.

More than once, I have almost been hit on my bike and stopped to point out the problem to the drivers. I know what to expect and am always cautious here, in car or on bike. Two of those times, homemaker types in newish SUVs have sworn at me in very coarse terms. The out-of-my-way-Jack and I’m-important-no-one-else-is types need their visual cues to act decently.

It will be far easier to install a new pole in the old place than to teach locals what their parents didn’t model or say. I’ll update this when the mini-drama plays out.

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The old Pez-container newspaper boxes will soon be gone from the T, says Boston Phoenix/stuff@night Circulation Director Jim Dorgan. I was way off on the meaning of the deli-counter-style clear plastic versions I’ve suddenly seen at the Forest Hills T stop. He was kind enough to fill me in.

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So, I imagined that:

• The freebies’ circ staff found a cheaper or sturdier box type.
• Heavy traffic Forest Hills would be a logical test location for weather and door-slammer durability testing.
• They wouldn’t go on the street locations until they proved themselves there.

It turns out that it’s no test, nor is it a cost-saving effort by the Mindich crew.

Instead, we’ll be seeing and seeing through many of these and the Phoenix/stuff team is only an early adopter. according to Dorgan, the MBTA is requiring that all publication boxes on its property be easy to check visually — basically transparent. He said that this is an outcome of the Democratic Convention when cops and Homeland Security folk realized how easy it would be to high nasty devices in the ubiquitous dispensers.

The idea is that a security sort can walk by a row of these and scan them for evil objects from a distance.

He asked what I thought of the new boxes. As a former biz-mag type, I noted immediately that the branding was an issue. I knew that orange boxes were for the Dig and red, tall, rounded-edge ones were for the Phoenix.  He admitted that was a concern, but noted that the MBTA will permit putting a copy in the front-door clip for customer convenience. Also, the box bases are subtler, but still distinctive. The Phoenix one, for example, has that wonderful garish red I associate with it.

He said that this is an added expense for his papers and not any cost saving.  The old boxes will be used on the street, either in new locations or as replacements as needed.

They just began putting them in T stations a week ago, but will sweep the area very soon. Expect the same from the laggard pubs.

Follow-up on 12/8/8: The Association of Alternative Newsweeklies links here in its 12/5 posts and reports that “Boston Phoenix circulation director Jim Dorgan tells AAN News that the policy goes into effect next Friday, Dec. 12. He says that, as a result of the new regulations, the Phoenix and its related publications had to purchase more than 200 new boxes, which each cost $85 more than a regular news box. He also says the MBTA is requiring the boxes be chained, and that 12 inches of space separate each box. The Weekly Dig‘s Jeff Lawrence tells us that while his paper will eventually buy some clear boxes and put them in MBTA stations, for the most part, distributing outside on city streets is still cheaper and the best strategy for the Dig. “

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