Finding Fair Hope

My Grandma Moses Book

2011-07-30T12:06:00.000-07:00

I moved back to Fairhope in 1988, expecting to live out my days there. My mother was nearing 80 and my husband, 17 years my senior, was having a hard time in retirement and was suffering from a terrible disease: Alcoholism. I thought Fairhope would be a good place for all of us.

The twenty years I lived there proved full of changes for us. I found myself through the 12-Step programs (mostly Al-Anon; but six months in AA was a huge help as well), but my husband didn't. He died at the age of 78. My mother lived many more years and made it to 92. In the meantime, I discovered Fairhope's history through working at the Marietta Johnson Museum, and dedicated myself to the recovery of the School of Organic Education as well. I did the best I could, but the school suffered one of its most traumatic periods during this time. All the while I was watching Fairhope change and savoring my memories of what it once was, and learned its deeper nature. I started this blog and continued writing as constantly as I had all my life; poems, journals, letters--and collaborated with Robert E. Bell on a book about Fairhope memories called Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree.

I began to think it would be nice to live out my old age like Grandma Moses, but instead of painting charming primitives I would write novels set in Fairhope in its early days, little word pictures of the kind of people who once moved to the utopian village with an eye to changing the world for the better. Marietta Johnson would be a peripheral character in these books, as would E.B. Gaston, the single tax advocate who founded the town with a goal of demonstrating economic reform, but the books would be about other people and their adventures in the village in bygone days. Fairhope didn't last for me after both my husband and my mother died there, but it haunts me in my new home and I still have a need to write about it.

I wrote The Fair Hope of Heaven, another non-fiction book about Fairhope and some of its eccentrics and nonconformists, which I had to self-publish and has just about made its nut back. It's still around, at the local Fairhope bookstore Page & Palette and on amazon dot com. I tried to place it in independent bookstores in faraway places like Montgomery but was told that nobody in Montgomery had any interest in Fairhope. I've given and sold copies to friends all over the world who never heard of Fairhope and they love the book, but they are friends so they're probably just being nice. I thought it was kind of a Lake Woebegone Days with a single-tax slant, but publishers think otherwise.

Now I'm giving fiction a try. My first Grandma Moses book has the working title of That Was Tomorrow, but is my second choice of a working title and it too may be changed. I'm in the first rewrite stage, and damned if it doesn't read sorta like a Grandma Moses painting--quaint and maybe a bit awkward, but with heart and an old-fashioned style, and a certain sense of the place. I tried to marginalize Mrs. Johnson, but she has become a major character in spite of my best efforts. I may cut a great deal before an agent or an editor sees it, but I do not plan to self publish under any circumstances. (Famous last words)

Grandma Moses painted her first picture at the age of 78, because it was easier than baking a Christmas gift for the postman. When her work was discovered years later in the window of the local drugstore (at $3 and $5, depending on the size of the work), she was lucky that the art dealer who snapped them all up didn't say, "Very good work, but it would never be of interest to anybody outside of Hoosik Falls!"

Maybe I'll be lucky this time.

Living in a Magical Place

2011-06-21T08:17:00.001-07:00

Photo by Susan Stein

I just saw a movie about life as it once was, as it was conceived by its Creator to be, and as it is. This is the profound The Tree of Life, which got me thinking about my own book.

The Tree of Life was set in a little Texas town in the 1950's; my book, That Was Tomorrow, was set in Fairhope in 1922. There is not really any similarity between the two works, but as an author perhaps I can be forgiven the indulgence of imagining my little novel being made into a little Indie movie one of these days. In my mind I've cast a few of the leading players, and I did that as I wrote. The hardest part of my movie project would be to recreate the Fairhope of 1922. I suspect it would have to be built from scratch on a Hollywood back lot.

The Fairhope of today really doesn't look anything like the one of 1922. In those days the population was under 500, and the houses were literally few and far between. The streets were not paved, there were few automobiles, and there were few shops. There were several guest homes, hotels, and hostelries, as Fairhope was a retreat for intellectual Northerners in the winter. There was a pier stretching out into Mobile Bay, where steamers docked after ferrying people from the city. There was a main street, Fairhope Avenue, and it was crossed by Section Street. At that corner were some of the businesses in town--a pharmacy, a harness shop, a general store, and next door a millinery and gift shop. As you walked down the hill--no sidewalks, just packed dirt--there was the office of the local weekly newspaper, The Courier, the doctor's office, and then, on Church Street was The Gables, a large wooden hotel run by Capt. and Mrs. Jack Cross. A few more guest houses, a cable car running down and up the hill to the bay, and the Colonial Inn on the corner of the street running parallel to the bay and Cliff Drive. Cliffs and gullies. Satsuma trees everywhere. Little kids climbing trees and playing in the gullies.

The Tree of Life was filmed in Smithville, TX. So was Hope Floats, and apparently many other movies with a nostalgic setting. For a moment during the film, when I saw a shred of Spanish moss on the trees, I thought it might make a nice backdrop for That Was Tomorrow. But really not. When they walked through town it was a typical, town-square-in-the-middle, layout from days past. In Fairhope there was Knoll Park, azaleas, wisteria, and all the beautiful beach parks. My characters have a number of cookouts on the beach.

Sonny Brewer, author of The Poet of Tolstoi Park, a novel set in roughly the same place and time as my book, said they considered Bayou La Batre, AL when it was under consideration for a movie. How they'd get the sun to go down in the East I don't know, but in Hollywood, all things are possible.

As a matter of fact, I'm still in dreamland myself. The book has been sent to three friends for evaluation of the first draft. If the reaction is good I still have a lot of work to do, depending on their suggestions. If the reaction is universally not good, the book project will be set aside indefinitely. Probably I'll become a more active blogger again.

In the meantime, if you can think of any location that's a little like Fairhope would have been in 1922, let me know.

Spring in Fairhope, 1922

2011-05-17T19:36:00.000-07:00

This is an excerpt from the novel That Was Tomorrow, which takes place in Fairhope in 1921-22. It centers around the bohemian community of Fairhope of those days, particularly the teachers at the School of Organic Education. The protagonists all moved to the town as disciples of Marietta Johnson, who was a world-famous proponent of the progressive education movement, and had founded her school as a demonstration of that educational theory. "The Sieve" is the nickname the two young women, Amelia and Avery, have for the cottage they are renting, which has a very leaky roof.

It was still March, but Fairhope was already in the full bloom of spring. Days were sunny, the sky was light blue with little puffs of clouds here and there, and flowers opened their faces on footpaths, roadsides, and in the trees. The first blossoms had appeared as splashes of mauve on redbud trees, but the neighboring dogwoods, with their layered branches now shelves for their white four-leaf blooms, completed the look of lacy color dotting the town.
Years before, the locals had gathered in a civic group to plant azalea bushes around the perimeter of Knoll park. At at this time of year the big, raggedly uneven bushes came into bloom all at once, as if blanketed in pink. Color was accented by large azaleas in white, and there were shades of pink that bloomed in sequence, finishing with the stylish deep, almost red shade known as “Pride of Mobile.”
A wisteria vine, planted on a magnolia tree adjacent to the school’s library, broke into a profusion of lavendar blossoms which exuded a heady sweet fragrance into the breeze. The vine actually connected two trees, and would one day grow big enough to climb on; already it provided a seat between the trees, and the flowers opened with a sweet, springtime smell that would be unforgettable to generations of school children.
Although the temperature usually hovered in the low 80s, humidity was not so high as usual, and it felt at if one could inhale spring itself. The air had a lightness to it that seemed to transfer to the mood of people.
More and more often, Jim Holloway was a visitor to The Sieve. As his romantic relationship with Avery grew more intense, Amelia was more comfortable avoiding the intimate vision of them together, leaving the place to them to go to watch the sunset on the pier, then take a walk around town, sometimes with a book, sometimes taking a notebook to write down ideas for class projects. Some evenings she spent at The Gables, talking with Capt. Cross, who could answer many questions, particularly about history. He recommended books to her, and lent her his copy of Tolstoy’s short stories.
This night, when Amelia came into the parlor at The Gables, Idella Cross presented with an envelope, with her name on it, in Maxwell Taylor’s unmistakable handwriting.
“Mr. Taylor asked me to give this to you,” she said.
“Max? How strange!” Amelia said.
“Oh, I wouldn’t think strange,” Mrs. Cross said simply, and walked away, into the kitchen.
“My Dear Amelia,” read the letter. “I must talk to you. Please meet me at the northeast corner of Knoll Park, Magnolia and Bayview, at 8 P.M. Maxwell Taylor.”
Amelia was somewhat anxious reading this. There could be some bad news that Max wanted to reveal, or some personal situation. Perhaps he was going to be called away for a family emergency, or perhaps he was in some sort of trouble at the school. It was half an hour before the appointed time and there was nothing for Amelia to do but bide her time at The Gables until then.
Capt. Cross was working on a Mozart sonata on the piano, and she had a Rousseau book to read about the nature and needs of the child. She chose her favorite chair in The Gables’ main room, a threadbare old carpet rocker which had the smell of years of musty dust to it. All the same, the book was hardly relaxing, and Capt. Cross’ struggle with Mozart did little to ease her tension.
It was hardly a five-minute walk to the spot designated by Max’s missive. He would be coming from the cottage at Bancroft and Pine Street where he rented a room. She decided to walk down Fairhope Avenue to the Knoll Park corner. It was dark now, a night not unlike when she and Max walked this way to Marie Howland’s, when she got her first look at the little town illuminated by Southern moonlight.
Max was standing near a dogwood tree at the edge of the park. When she got close enough, he said, “Good to see you.”
“Hello, Max.”
What was he going to tell her? Tree frogs were deafening for a moment.
“I see you got my letter,” he said, with a smile curling one corner of his mouth.
There are people, she thought, whose faces are simply not designed for smiling. He fixed her with his eyes, although they seemed to be trembling in a strange and inexplicable way. All she knew to do was look back at him firmly, hoping a steady gaze would relieve the anxiety he seemed to be feeling.
“Yes, although the postal service might be disappointed at the loss of revenue.”
I never thought of that.”
Again there was silence but for the frogs.
“I thought this would be a nice place to meet.”
“And so it is. The night reminds me of our first meeting, walking Marie Howland home.”
He nodded, and clearly began to think about that night.
“This is different,” he said after a pause. “That was before I loved you.”
“Oh, Max!”
“Now let me speak.”
She took a breath and nodded.
“I’ve given this a lot of thought. It was not something I was seeking. ‘It’ found me instead. I’m kind of a solitary fellow, pretty much independent and I’ve always been happy with that—depends upon what you mean by happy, I guess. I was content with it; I didn’t expect more—this damned town—”
“Maybe it’s all these flowers,” she said.
“Flowers and springtime, is that what you think?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“Well, let me tell you something then. It’s not flowers and springtime! It’s—it’s a wistful scarecrow at Halloween, a pair of eyes glowing in the reflection of firelight, the music of a laugh at a folk tale. It’s delicate hands comforting a weeping child, and feet skipping with children to a tune for a pageant.”
He was warming up now.
It’s camellias and roses for Christmas on a warm day. It’s sunsets on the pier. It’s ‘A Long Long Trail A-Winding.’ It’s the accidental grasp of a hand doing an English country dance. It’s the scent of pine and wisteria in the breeze. It’s this damn, irresistible crazy quilt of a town—but most of all it’s you, my beautiful Amelia. Oh, dear God, let me say that at last. My beautiful Amelia. Okay.” He took a breath, then he launched into an imitation of Ethel Barrymore. “That’s all there is.”
“There isn’t any more?” Amelia picked up on the imitation, which was current in the day, lines in a play the actress had spoken years before. Maxwell at his best was all about the theatre.
“No?” he said, making it a question, imploring her to take it as more than he had said.
“That’s a great deal, Maxwell.”
“Yes. It’s profound. Not so deep as a well, maybe, nor so broad as a church
door—”
“Now you’re quoting.”
“Well, at least I quote from the best.”
“I liked when you were being original.”
“You did?” Now he looked at her, hopeful for the first moment.
“It’s like being in a play.”
“There are times when life is,” Max said. Now he was staring at her, trying to fathom her soul.
“This is new to me,” she said. She was not sure how to capture in words the confusion of feeling that swept over her. But she knew she had to say something.
“Dear Max.”
He stepped over to her and put his arms around her. Amelia did not resist. She knew he was going to kiss her and she would not resist.
The world of sunsets and wisteria blossoms and firelight and folk tales came crashing about her as she responded to his gentle, long kiss. There was a crescendo of tree frogs when he stepped back at last and looked into her face, still with his arms around her. She was unsteady on her feet. Caught in the moment, she could not speak. Her mind was flooded with conflicting thoughts and she felt stirrings and tingling throughout her body that she had never felt before.
All at once Max was laughing.
“You dropped your books,” he said. He picked them up from the patch of grass.“Ah, Tolstoy!” he said, looking at the top book. “How appropriate!”
“Can you blame me?” she said. “About dropping them I mean, not about the books. I feel—a little foolish.”
“Ah no, not foolish, I hope. I did my best—”
“I didn’t mean that. You did very well.”
“Yes, I know,” he said.
“I think you are more accustomed to being in plays than I,” she said.
“You know this isn’t a play.”
“What is it then?”
“It’s real life.”
“Please, Max,” Amelia said. “This is going to take me some time.”
“Oh, ‘please,’ yourself,” he said. “Do not think so much. Do not make this a problem.
I kissed you in the park, I said some things. You liked it.”
“Yes.”
“I shall walk you home now,” he said. “And then I’ll dance all the way to my own humble abode. Then tomorrow…”
“Tomorrow?”
“That’s the one one-word question to which there is no answer,” said Max.
The two walked up Bayview, through the big old oak trees, both of them moved by the moon as it shone through the Spanish moss. He held her hand.
“Avery and Jim are at The Sieve,” she told him.
“That’s good, I think. They are at The Sieve, and you and I are walking down the street. Life goes on.”
She wasn’t sure if Maxwell understood the significance of Jim being with Avery.
“They are a couple.”
“Well, yes, I had hopes. Jim has had his eye on her for months, even before the
departure of the volatile Sarah.”
“I hadn’t seen that,” Amelia said.
He said nothing.
“I shall drop you at the door,” Max said. “I don’t know that I’m able to take any more excitement tonight.”
She turned to him as they reached the door and he leaned down and kissed her cheek.
“Promise me,” he said, “that you won’t think too much.”
“Not an easy promise to keep,” she said.
“Sure it is. If your mind races, just insert thoughts about Tolstoy and Rousseau.”
“And Marietta Johnson?”
“Well, Marietta Johnson too—but I think the distant gods are more comforting than those close to home.”
As she climbed the stairs, Amelia heard his voice in her head, repeating, “Tomorrow is the one-word question to which there is no answer,” and she felt the memory of the kiss suffuse her body with tingling hope.
When she got into her bed a few minutes later, she had not noticed whether or not Jim was still in the house. She wrapped her arms around her spare pillow and wished for her old teddy bear.

Looking for Mikey

2011-01-23T06:55:00.000-08:00

It was a beautiful, chilly Saturday morning, and I could have skipped the memorial. I knew plenty of people would be there and that I would not have been missed. But when I considered other options, my inner child kept prodding me, saying that she wanted to say goodbye to Mikey. I had to go.

Mikey Jones was a man about town in a unique way; he owned the town and lived in every inch of it. It would seem that everybody in Fairhope knew him—and loved him deeply. That might not be easy to imagine if you never met Mikey, but if you had met him once, it was perfectly clear.

Mikey radiated joy in everything he did. It was as natural to him as breathing. To say he was friendly isn’t saying enough; he made a friend of everyone, it was his job. Once he told me that he found it funny that people assumed it was his only job, walking around town and smiling at people, doing odd jobs for them, hugging them, making them laugh. In fact, he said, he was in the oil business and traveled all the time; it was just that when he was in Fairhope he was not at work and he could do what he loved. What he loved was life itself, and people of all ages, sizes, shapes and colors. He was one of the world’s great huggers, also one of the world’s great smilers and caregivers. He cared about people more than anyone I’ve ever known.

At his memorial service, his business partner spoke, saying he had never known anyone like Mikey, and thanked God he had had the privilege of his long association with him. He made the congregation laugh when he told us that he’d never known anybody who would get to know every person who was with him on a short elevator ride. I had never been in an elevator with him, but do not doubt that for a minute. And we’re not talking about a superficial acquaintance either; he was as likely to get a name and information about a person he met in an elevator, and remember it when he saw him years later, as anywhere else.

Gina Lanaux said in her eulogy, “Mikey left a legacy of love, inspiration and passion. His many friends called him the ‘unofficial mayor of Fairhope.’ He had an insatiable appetite for good food, women of all shapes and sizes, travel, gardening, restoration of old houses and the preservation of all things Fairhope. Everything he did was about his love of life, his love of people, and he shared his positive energy with everyone.” She pointed out that every one of us in the crowded church had a wealth of Mikey stories, and I knew that, having two or three of my own, she was surely right about that. I said to my neighbor on the pew, “She nailed it,” and she, shaking her head responded, “She sure nailed it.”

He was ten years old when he moved to Fairhope from Barbados. He befriended Tommy Yeager, who shared at his memorial descriptions of life as a boy with Mikey as a friend in the most Tom Sawyer kind of way. This new boy had come from an island Tommy had never even heard of; he taught him how to explore the bay in ways he never could imagine. They swam in the bay grass and checked out the fish. They made logs into missiles they could ride through the water. Tommy was proud that he knew a few things Mikey didn’t—but Mikey caught on quick. “I had a way of finding anything we needed,” Tommy related. “He would mention wanting something and before he thought of it again, I would appear with it. What I knew was the schedule for curbside garbage pickup, which became our free yard sale.” This scavenger talent, no doubt, was a source for adventures in creativity for the two for years to come.

Girls who knew Mikey as a teenager remember that joyous charisma. When he surfed or swam he was at one with the water. He cut a dashing figure. Grace, balance and athleticism came naturally to him, and girls came naturally to him too. Once he made up his mind, however, he settled on a perfect mate, Dee Wilson of New Orleans, who married Mikey and took to his life—and loved it with him.

Tears were flowing in that beautiful church, tears of joy that we had known him and tears of recognition of how much would be missing from Fairhope now that he was gone. He had suffered a crucible for the past several years, having fought a painful personal battle with cancer, endured chemotherapy and gotten a little better for a time, and then relapsed for the inevitable end. A valiant soul and an extraordinary lover of life itself, he was as adept at facing death.

Thinking about Mikey will always be a source of strength for those of us who were blessed by his acquaintance. After the service, we were invited to join the family for refreshments. I debated with myself about whether to go and again my inner child chimed in. “Mikey would say, ‘Do anything you want,’” came the voice inside me. I went to the luncheon.

With any new problem we might have to face, we can think how Mikey would have handled it, and we will have our answers. It makes me smile to think of that.

Fairhope's Winter Visitor

2010-12-16T14:13:00.000-08:00

Last year I spent the month of February in Fairhope. By the time I got back to Hoboken the brutal weather was about over and I made a decision I'd come again in 2011. So as I prepare for Christmas in upstate New York with my family I'm mentally packing my bags for a jaunt to warmer climes for the month of January.

Decided to push the date forward a month, choosing January instead of February, largely because of the events surrounding the Wharton Esherick events. Mark Sfirri, woodcarver, professor, and expert in the Modernists of the Philadelphia area in the 1920's, will be talking about Esherick at the Fairhope Library at 1 P.M. January 8. As noted in previous blog posts here, I met Sfirri at an Esherick symposium at the University of Pennsylvania in October and he was very intrigued by Fairhope and the role it played in the life of Esherick, his family and friends of that period. He'll show some of Esherick's art work and sculpture and put it in the context of Fairhope in that time frame.

The next week I'll speak at a tea at the Fairhope Museum of History on the history of theatre in Fairhope, which will cover the old Shakespeare Festival, the many informal theatrical events of the 1920's and 30's, the Fairhope Little Theater of the 1940's, and the birth of Theater 98 in the late 1950s, as well as Tom Pocase's Theater 8:15 and other theatrical projects including the Equity Jubilee Fish Theater of the 1990's. I'll talk to the Baldwin Writers' Group on Jan. 15 about how I got my two books, Meet Me at The Butterfly Tree and The Fair Hope of Heaven published in the early 2000's, and I'll be signing books at Page & Palette from 2-4 that afternoon.

My vacation month is fast filling up. I hear that an old friend may be getting married and several who have moved away are planning to be in town for the event on the 22nd. Haven't seen some of them in two or three years, so that will be nice.

I thought I'd spend most of the time doing research on a novel set in Fairhope in the 1920's. Hope there's time--but even if not, it will be a productive and great getaway. And there may actually be better weather in January this year than February, and no matter how cold, it'll be balmy compared to here.

A Time in Old Fairhope

2010-10-13T06:34:00.000-07:00

From the novel I'm working on, That Was Tomorrow, here's an excerpt about The Gables, a hotel run by Capt. and Mrs. Jack Cross:

The first settlers, who had moved from Iowa and other parts of the Midwest, had not been farmers, but were eager to learn how to grow enough food to feed their families, and they had assumed this gloriously warm climate would provide a garden of Eden for them. By now they had learned that the soil of Fairhope was sandy and alkaline, not ideal for many crops. But they endured in a spirit of cooperation and optimism, and many had accepted conventional wisdom that citrus, particularly the new Japanese satsuma orange, might be the salvation of Fairhope’s economy. The growing season was indeed a long one, and they experimented to extend it even longer if they could by growing and preparing vegetables and fruit unknown to them before their move to the South. There was a bounty of okra, which was quite tasty when you got used to it, and there were varieties of peas, beans and nuts which they came to enjoy over time.

That initial visit, Amelia stayed at the Gables, a simple two-storey wooden building, which Mrs. Johnson had recommended to her. The Gables was a little less fashionable and less expensive than the Colonial Inn, which sat a few blocks west, on the bluff overlooking the bay. The Gables, on the other hand, was right in town and just a few blocks from the school. The Gables was run by Captain and Mrs. Jack Cross. Mrs. Cross was a busy, funny lady—and her husband a raconteur with an English accent, who held forth with his pipe and a cup of tea on the front porch every afternoon, as cronies and neighbors stopped by to discuss the fate of the world with him. They often talked about the politics of the village, and about the future of the single tax system, and about books they were reading and authors they admired. The elders of the town stopped by to air the latest issues they were dealing with—even E.B. Gaston, the editor of The Courier and virtually the founder of Fairhope—stopped by on his morning walk to exchange pleasantries with the Crosses. It seemed to Amelia that this little hotel was the hub of the community, but the more she got to know her way around, other such hubs were revealed to her. There were three or four little cafes in the village of about 1,500, and about 15 hotels with dining rooms, and coffee urns all over town were hot with fresh brew all day long.

“Wherever there’s people in Fairhope,” Mrs. Cross said to her, “There’s coffee. Or maybe that should be, wherever there’s coffee, there’s people.” She made tea for her husband and his friends, but there was always hot coffee as well. The Crosses, both devoted to the cause of single tax, had moved to Fairhope with the idea of running a farm, but, like many idealists who had never farmed before, changed their minds after a year or two, at which time they had taken over the management of the Gables Hotel, where Mrs. Cross cooked and supervised work inthe kitchen. She laid an old-fashioned boarding house type of table, which was popular with locals as well as transients.

Amelia found both the Crosses fascinating people, and their visitors from town were a certain breed—earnest, wordy, and wise, with one central agenda, which was how best to put Fairhope on the map and change the world through single tax philosophy.

They hadn’t yet realized that the wave of the immediate future of Fairhope was actually Amelia and those like her who were moving to the town to participate in Mrs. Johnson’s school. Seven years before, the famed educational philosopher John Dewey had come to Fairhope to review the school for a book he was writing. His visit had set the little village on its ear with excitement. The children, informed that the only day Dr. Dewey had available to observe the school was Christmas Eve, voted to keep the school open its regular hours that day so that he might get a fair picture of it in operation. Mrs. Johnson took some of them outside, as was her custom so often, to teach a class, Dewey’s daughter photographed the scene which became the frontispiece of a book.

The Old Oak

2010-10-05T17:13:00.000-07:00

I used to live on Bayview Street directly across from this oak tree. People who had grown up in Fairhope told me when they were kids growing up they would climb to one of the welcoming lower limbs and sit for hours and read. This came from at least two people of different generations, making the oak symbolize to me the mood of Fairhope of a former day, when children climbed trees to read and spent hours just exploring, playing, and dreaming. Marietta Johnson once said, "The little child should have much time for play, and even for dreaming. If one may not dream in childhood, when will time be found for this accomplishment?"

The oak came to evoke the heart of Fairhope itself to me--like a sturdy, comforting friend. That venerable tree had held growing children in its limbs when they still had time to read and to dream. I never passed it without feeling a nostalgia for its embrace even though I had never felt it. It is something I visit when I go back to Fairhope, just to scope out the neighborhood, just to confirm my hope that some good things don't change.
This woodcut, produced in the early 1920's by Wharton Esherick, looks like the same oak tree to me. Over the years it's had a limb or two pruned, and it has lost its Spanish moss, but it continues to grow and spread and be the best tree it can. I sent a copy of the top picture to one of the lecturers from the symposium and he says without a doubt it is the same tree. I hope we're both right, and that Esherick saw his own children climbing in it, and maybe lingering with a book in its sturdy branches. It is a remnant of the best of Fairhope.

Wharton Esherick and Fairhope

2010-10-04T06:47:00.000-07:00

For the current inhabitants of Fairhope, the name Wharton Esherick is rarely remembered. But in his day he had some impact, and there can be no doubt that the years he spent in Fairhope (1919-1920) changed him forever.

I heard from my friend Chock McInnis about a symposium on Esherick at the University of Pennsylvania October 1-3, and we both planned to go. He was bringing some people from Fairhope, he hoped, and had great expectations for the conference. His special interest was in learning something about Sherwood Anderson, the writer who was Esherick's great friend in Fairhope, and picking up more information about Esherick himself. the symposium promised sessions on the many influences on Wharton Esherick, and Chock and I both knew he had always said he got his start as a woodcarver in Fairhope. I knew that Esherick had come to Fairhope to teach art at the School of Organic Education, and left with a new set of carving tools that was to change his life. But there was much more to learn.

At the prestigious UPenn symposium, I was astonished to hear "Fairhope, Alabama" ringing clearly any number of times in almost every lecture about Esherick. The picture these talks painted was of a Bohemian Socialist-leaning settlement in a remote and seductive place. I yearned to jump up and take the lectern to throw in a few choice facts myself. I had learned of Esherick when I worked at the Marietta Johnson Museum in Fairhope some ten years ago. A picture he had painted of Marietta Johnson hung in over the mantelpiece at the School Home, but I never knew that. It was not a flattering likeness, and as I child I always secretly hoped it wasn't her. Esherick was not very successful as a painter, but when he learned to carve he became known as the country's premier wood sculptor. His woodcuts are elegant and simple; his furniture is breathtakingly bold and practical as well. His relationship to his medium seems organic and fundamental. Along with a few other artists, he was present at the birth of what has come to be called Modernism.

Chock, Marlene Cavanaugh and I were all pleased to introduce ourselves at the coffee breaks to those who would listen by saying "We're from Fairhope!" although I had to qualify it since I no longer live there. At last Fairhope emerges from the shadows as more than a classy retirement community--a place that nurtured an artist who came to be in the vanguard of the Modernists. We watch Power Point presentations that showed snapshots of his family, him working in his woodshop, and samples of his paintings, woodcuts, sculpture, furniture, utensils, and even houses, designed by Esherick. His amazing oeuvre has a whimsical personality of its own, both practical and unique. It in many ways embodies what I think of as "old Fairhope," created as he himself evolved and lived what he thought of as an organic life. A very stimulating two days that left me with a wish for more--more recognition for Esherick and more information as Chock and I separately seek to research the Fairhope of the past.

Meet Marietta Johnson

2010-08-07T12:11:00.000-07:00

My sister-in-law, Maggie Mosteller Timbes, has created a video with herself as Marietta Johnson, the visionary educator who founded Fairhope's School of Organic Education in 1907. Maggie is director of the museum, which is one of the oldest buildings in Fairhope, located on the School Street side of Faulkner Community College campus in Fairhope. As you'll see from the video, it's worth a visit!

To view and hear it, just click on "the video" above.

Remembrance of Things Past

2010-06-25T06:30:00.000-07:00

You can’t think of Fairhope today without grieving. The oil slick lies ominously close; a tropical storm is churning in the southern Gulf; hurricane season will begin in a matter of weeks, and the town is working feverishly in 95 degree heat to ward off the almost certain effects of the gushing spill. Will boom work, will barges, fences, and committed citizens be able to keep the oil from Fairhope’s precious resource—Mobile Bay? We who live afar watch in horror and fear for the outcome.

If you’ve never visited Fairhope, you may not comprehend fully the enormity of the disaster, no matter what is done. In my book, The Fair Hope of Heaven, I wrote this of the beach in Fairhope:

You can see the old pictures all over Fairhope today – ladies in their modest bathing suits, gentlemen wearing neckties and straw boaters, gleeful children leaping into the warm unpolluted waters of Mobile Bay. Before 1928 the only way to arrive in Fairhope was by bay boat from Mobile…surely those were the days Fairhope was a paradise of summer joy, centered on the bay with its public pier, its sandy beach, its casino (not, as some would have it today, a gambling house, but a barn of a building with a big dance floor and showers and changing rooms for bathers), its little wharf restaurant, and its inns on the bluff overlooking the water -- with wide porches to catch the breeze.

There were once dance pavilions scattered along the beach front. Local bands played music you could dance to – the baker who moonlighted as a bandleader was dubbed “Buns Lombardo” by his buddies who wanted to capture all his talents with one moniker. The first ice cream factory in the state was at the north end of the beach, where the duck park now is. There were sliding boards off the pier; there was a track that took the “People’s Railway” up the hill – uptown to the center of business. Fairhope was a town of talk in the winter – of ideas, meetings, forums, plans, and visions – but summers belonged to the beach.

By the 1950’s, when I was a teenager, there was as yet little air conditioning in our world. Our bodies adjusted to climate changes. We played outdoors all year long and found no displeasure in being hot in the summer, because, after all, summertime was when you got to go outside, climb trees, explore gullies, and swim in the bay every single day. Most everybody went to the Yacht Club to learn to sail and to win races. The public tennis courts were near the gully’s edge across from the University of South Alabama theater (at that time St. James Episcopal Church). Now there is a parking lot where the courts were. One of those early dance pavilions, Burkel’s, had become a roller rink by the 1940’s and was a popular place until it was destroyed by fire in the early 1950’s. Burkel’s was located on the beach at the foot of Pier Street.

Even with excessive heat and humidity, we went to the beach. We didn’t perceive the heavy air as a sweltering damp blanket, but as a comforting mist-forest that reminded us that it was summer in the most wonderful life we could imagine.

Citizens of Fairhope are bracing today--and have been for weeks--for what is to come from the leaking geyser of oil off the coast of Louisiana. Here they are demonstrating "Hands Across the Sand" to protest further deepwater drilling. Diehard opponents of government intervention are begging the president to do something to help, not trusting that he is certainly doing all in his power. Lovers of the profit motive and the large corporations who fought for and achieved lack of oversight and cost-cutting that led to the spill are hard put to defend them at this point. But most of all they are working through the grief process and its five inevitable steps: Denial, anger, bargaining, sorrow, and acceptance. Things will never be the same.

Some, mostly those who moved to Fairhope because of what they describe as its pristine perfection or its storybook charm, will choose to leave as suddenly as they came. But those who stay will discover the real Fairhope, the soul of the brave little settlement which was founded on an idea of perfecting the human race, and not just providing comfort and aesthetic charm for it. Fairhope will survive and come out a strong and fine place, the place it always was. Much will be different, but a great deal will be the same and perhaps better.

Readying for Re-Entry

2010-02-28T05:31:00.000-08:00

February 28, 2010

This is Sunday, the last day of my one-month vacay in Fairhope. It's been by turns edifying, exhilarating, stimulating, and disappointing--but I'm leaving with a sense of accomplishment and eagerness to get back to my life in New Jersey. By far the best part of the vacation was the escape to moderate temperatures in a February that may go on record as one of the most brutal in the Northeast since they started noting such things in weather history.

I'm starting to get packed, and hope for a marathon tutorial on my new Mac today from the person I refer to as my Mac-friend, who has the patience of Job and knows the equipment literally from the inside out. When I sit at a computer I tend to think of it as a glorified typewriter, and ignore many of the features and programs that would make working on it easier and more effective than the old Smith Corona. Maybe I'll get some new information that will bring me more in line with the 21st Century. However, knowing computer-geeks types under the age of 60, I may not see him at all today and will be on my own with the electronics.

I tell some of the story of this month on my other blog, Finding Myself in Hoboken. It will be months and perhaps years before I actually know what I got out of this month, but I am already trying to address its significance. The weather factor is really what brought me here, but Fairhope itself imposed its will on my journey by throwing a few people in my path and exposing me to the ambiance unique to the town. The family homestead in Montrose seems to have been sold (with a closing date set for mid-March) and my brother and I were drawn closer in our mutual dealings with the absent sister who has all the cards. I did not have time to accomplish all the things on my own agenda, but none was crucial, and, being on vacation, I did not push myself to do anything that didn't come rather easily.

I took out a temporary membership at the gym at the hospital and kept up my exercise program as well as I could--going at least three times every week and usually four, as I do in Hoboken. I tried to watch what I ate, but have no doubt will have gained a few pounds. I went to a lot of dinner parties and even gave one myself.

Being in Fairhope changes people a little, and I hope I have changed for the better this time. I reflected on why I left and why I still enjoy the place when I return, and why I look forward to leaving and also look forward to a return visit next year. Just thinking about all that will change you a little. Fairhope means more to me than it might to most people, because it ignites inner conflict ("You can't go home again") that may never be resolved, or might actually have been resolved years ago. My book The Fair Hope of Heaven describes this pretty well, I think.

I visited with so many people, way more than I do in a month in Hoboken. Most of them assume I've got at least one more book in me, and all who do beg me to write about something other than Fairhope. I came here with the intention of starting work on just that, and have not written one word of it.

Starting work as a writer doesn't always mean writing. What is buzzing around in my brain now may well become a book in coming years. If so, I think it will be a good one. And I think Fairhope will have a place in it, if only because of my own back story, having grown up in Utopia (apologies to Paul Gaston, who has a recent and excellent book about Fairhope with that title), left it, and never stopped looking back.

The House I Built

2010-02-24T14:19:00.001-08:00

February 24, 2010
Today I was driving in Montrose, the village where I lived until the age of 19 when I left to get married, the village that is now almost completely swallowed up by Fairhope itself. I decided to whip out the digital camera and get a photo of the house I built in 1999 and lived in until about 2003.

It was based on plans from Southern Living Magazine for a "Gulf Coast Cottage." Our mother gave the three children lots off the back of her property and each could do what he or she wanted with it. I wanted to build a house that looked and felt like the old-fashioned houses that had graced "old" Montrose in the years I grew up there. There is a large central hall and equal-sized rooms at the front on either side. I had the time of my life buying antiques to fill it, buying antique architectural elements (the front door, for instance) to enhance its connection to the past. It was a wonderful house to live in.

Houses I Have Owned

2010-02-20T13:44:00.000-08:00

February 20, 2010

Driving back to my little cottage this morning I noticed that I was not only taking the long route, the scenic route, I was destined to pass three houses that I had owned when I lived in Fairhope. I looped around the long end of Bayview Street, once named Bayview Avenue (a name more melodious, and rhyming to boot), passed the curve, and saw the little creole cottage I once occupied with my late husband Jim Adshead. The once small one-storey has grown over the years and now looks rather imposing from the street, but still says "old Fairhope" with its situation on the lot and the oaks surrounding it. Then I crossed Fairhope Avenue, drove over the filled-in gully where the street replaced what had once been a little footbridge, and on my right was the beautiful bungalow where I last lived in Fairhope, the house I called "The Captain's House," because it had been built by Capt. Roberts, one of the bay boat pilots from Fairhope's early days. I've written much about the captain's house on this blog--using the little search window you can find many descriptions of it. Much of my heart is in both those houses.As I neared my rental, three houses away as a matter of fact, I came upon the house I once owned on the corner of Liberty and Pine Crest. Small and compact, this is a little 1950's cottage, like so many in the "fruit and nut" district (so named because of the preponderance of streets named for fruits and nuts), that doesn't look like much outside but has a lot of charm once you cross its threshold.

All these houses have been extensively remodeled since the days I lived in them. They look spruce and bright, and beckon the passersby to come in for a visit. In many ways I wish I could do just that, but I also know that my time in each of them has passed and I am off on another journey. Happy houses. Beautiful day.

The Winter Cottage

2010-02-17T12:57:00.001-08:00

When I was asked what distinguished my rented cottage my answer was, "Nothing. From the outside it looks exactly like all the houses in the Fruit and Nut District."You enter into the adorable 1950's kitchen.Then you come into the cute little 1950's Fairhope livingroom.There is a charming "cottage" master bedroom.And a sunny second bedroom.There is, in fact, a little dining room and a nice back yard. Only one bathroom, but it's shiny and comfy for all practical purposes.

This house is typical of the kind of places that were built to be affordable, in the years roughly between 1955 and 1970, in a neighborhood with streets named Pecan, Kumquat, Orange, and Fig. All are not named for fruits and nuts--there is Pier Street, there is Liberty, there is Pine Crest. This particular house is not far from the bay, and the picturesque geography of Fairhope itself adds interest to the situation. It's cozy and livable. Notice there is a camellia bush in the front yard, and it has blossoms in February.

I may make this winter vacation a yearly habit. So far, it is working out well.

An Adventure in Florida

2010-02-10T06:33:00.000-08:00

A few months back I was invited to talk to a book club at the Santa Rosa County Library in Florida about The Fair Hope of Heaven. This library is in Seaside, and apparently Fairhope has a lot of fans in Seaside. (Seaside's developers are said to have made a number of visits to Fairhope when in the design phase.)

I was in Hoboken, where I now live, when I got the information that the book club in Seaside had read The Fair Hope of Heaven and wanted to meet me. I already had plans for a vacation in Fairhope for the month of February, so the talk was arranged. I had been through Seaside before but had only a vague idea of where it was in relation to Fairhope. I figured it was just a hop the other side of Pensacola, which is an hour's drive. Joan Head, the organizer of my excursion, arranged a night's lodging for me in the carriage house of her friends, Ralph and Ann Bogardus. (Ann said, "Joan calls it a carriage house. We call it a garage apartment.")

The talk was set for Tuesday after my arrival in Fairhope the preceding week. I was to spend the night in the carriage house, make my talk at 10 A.M., join Joan and the Bogarduses for lunch, and then drive back. Anticipating a drive of about two hours total, I packed and left in the late afternoon Monday. I drove and drove. Crossed the bridge to Pensacola beaches, drove through Gulf Breeze, Navarre, and on and on. I was sure I had gone too far. I pulled into a little Gas 'N' Go and showed the man behind the counter my directions. He shook his head and said I hadn't gone nearly far enough, that I was headed in the right direction, and just to keep driving.

It was dark. I was hoping to be there by 7 P.M. because Ann said that Ralph was making jambalaya. I always get antsy when I think I've driven too far, and that happens usually when I haven't driven long enough, so I knew this was just a much longer drive than I anticipated. Still, I wasn't clear about when to make my turn, so I pulled over once again. This time the man behind the counter knew nothing of where Seaside was or how to get there. Luckily, there was a customer in the store who told me I still had about 20 miles more to drive.

I made a turn at the appointed spot, then drove for a mile or two with nothing in sight, so I was sure I was going the wrong way. This time I went for my cell phone and called the Bogardus number. Ralph was friendly and told me to turn around. I did and came to the end of the road and realized I had been going in the right direction in the first place. Hoboken friends and acquaintances will recognize from my many posts about being lost in New York City and in Hoboken that this is becoming a pattern with me. I don't have the best sense of direction in the world, and, as a matter of fact, even when I'm going the right way I tend to think I'm not.

I found Ralph and Ann's house, and Joan was there with her husband Bob, all awaiting the jambalaya and a visit with the befuddled author. We hit it off as if we'd known each other for years. I spent a nice night in the garage apartment, wondering if I'd have anything to say about the book or about Fairhope when I spoke the next morning.

I needn't have worried. The book club was a very friendly audience. Most had read my book and loved Fairhope, finding its history very interesting. I was comfortable telling them about the book, why I wrote it, and answering questions about Fairhope today and yesteryear. Had my lunch and went back to pack for the return trip.

Now I was prepared for the almost-four hour drive, I shook hands with Ralph and Ann and thanked them for their hospitality and said, "If you're ever in Fairhope, come and see me."

It wasn't until I was about half and hour on the highway, with a Frank Sinatra CD playing in the car, that I realized I don't live in Fairhope any more.

A Bountiful Trip To Fairhope

2010-01-25T05:56:00.000-08:00

January 25, 2010

Got my suitcase out, just checked the weather forecast for next week in the Mobile area, and am getting in the frame of mind to spend the month of February in a furnished cottage in Fairhope. It won't be like the trip to Bountiful, of course, where the old lady remembers a glorious farm of her childhood and yearns to return, only to find there is nothing there any more. I know exactly what to expect as I was there for two weeks in November.

But there is some nostalgia involved. I lived in Fairhope in my childhood and teenage years and then returned for 20 years, moving back to the Northeast in December of 2007. I spent the 20 years trying to connect with the Fairhope I remembered, and if possible to change it back, finally realizing that the "new" Fairhope had won out and I would either have to accept its reality or move. I moved, and am adjusting to what Fairhope has become from a distance. Maybe by vacationing there I can come to accept, not only Fairhope, but life in the 21st Century everywhere.

I've noted a number of people find this blog by Googling "Fairhope Utopia." The dichotomy of Fairhope today is that even though it has been transformed from the utopia of its founding, it is still being discovered by people who regard it as a utopia. It's not surprising that we are still looking for Utopia--Thomas More's 15th Century concept of a community that is as close to heaven as we earthlings can get. Even though Conservatives use the words "utopia" and "idealist" as negatives, they still strum on the heartstrings of people everywhere.

I've written two books about the utopian ideal that was responsible for Fairhope's creation. My first, Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree, was a nostalgic trip taken by me with Bob Bell, who had written an enchanting novel set in Fairhope entitled The Butterfly Tree. In my second book, The Fair Hope of Heaven (note I spell Fairhope as two words, as in the name of this blog and as seen in Paul Gaston's beautiful little history Women of Fair Hope)I expand on the theme of utopia to bring Fairhope into the present day.

All these books can be found at Fairhope's indie bookstore, Page and Palette, and more information about those I wrote are described on my website Finding Fairhope. I need not tell those who are not near Fairhope that the books can be found on amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. The best book about growing up in Fairhope and then facing the larger world is Growing Up in Utopia, by Paul Gaston. If you want to know more about that one, scroll down in this blog.

For a month I will be ensconced in a little furnished house in my old neighborhood, which is known as the Fruit and Nut District because the street names are almost all either names of fruits or names of nuts. There were never many fruits or nuts living there; it is a very conventional neighborhood that grew populous in the 1950's and looks it. My cottage will have all the comforts of home.

I expect to do a lot of reading and writing on this vacation, and a lot of visiting with people I've known for years. It will be a more social life than I have in my cocoon in Hoboken, which is so close to the city life of Manhattan yet so isolated and self-involved. I'll make a few book talks and do some work with the Marietta Johnson Museum. I'll bask in balmy weather (I hope) and check out the daily sunsets. I'll meet with realtors about the family homestead. I'll try to avoid talking politics and focus on what I want to write and how I want to write it.

Much will probably appear on this blog--yet I don't want any blogs to steer me off my bountiful track. Stick with me and let me know what you think.

The Pies of Christmas

2009-12-20T10:28:00.000-08:00

December 20, 2009

I just posted this at my other blog, "Finding Myself in Hoboken" and felt the readers here might like to see it too. It actually belongs on my food blog, but I think I've done enough with it.

Apple pie is appearing here and there in my life these days. My daughter is an expert baker of them, and Christmas with her and her family promises that I'll get a couple of chances to taste them. I have my own recipe; she has hers. My favorite was baked by the cook employed by a family friend in Alabama years ago. It had a lattice top, and seemed to us the perfect ratio of cinnamon to brown sugar. I find that in the North people are less likely to use quite enough of either for my taste, but I've spent a lifetime trying to duplicate that one I had so many years ago.

My favorite apple pie story came from Jim Adshead, my husband who died nine years ago. He was a G.I. in World War II, fighting in France and harbored in farmhouses, basements and barns with his buddies when the need arose. It must have been Christmas of 1944 that the guys were being sheltered by a sympathetic French farm family.

They were roused by the family with joyous cries in French that it was Christmas Day, and, although none of the boys could speak French, they knew they were being invited to the family's only day of celebration for years. It was a hungry and grateful group that joined the family to see the pride of the best feast they could scrape up, which was an apple pie. They could tell the mother, who was the cook, had prepared it especially for them, knowing that apple pie was an American favorite. They were thrilled to get any food at all, but the apple pie they were served was certainly not like any they'd ever seen in the States.

When Jim first told me the story he said it was a pathetic excuse for an apple pie, obviously made from dried apples and very little sugar--much less cinnamon, butter, or the spices they expected from an apple pie. But the boys were so touched by the gesture, and their hearts so warmed by the work involved, that they were effusive in their thanks and their gratitude for home-baked food was genuine and heartfelt.

Some forty years later Jim and I were living in Geneva and we were often exposed to the French version of apple pie. He then realized that this was the pie he was served that Christmas Day so long before--not, as it had appeared, made with dried apples, but the thinly sliced, artistically arranged, apples as preferred by the French, cooked with very little sugar and coated with apricot jam as a glaze. It's a pie, but it ain't American apple pie.

The French also make a tasty caramelized apple pie known as tarte tatin, which is tastier (if you like caramel) and made by browning the sugar in the pan, placing a crust on top, and then reversing the whole product using very deft hands. I've made it, just to see if I could, but the fact is I like to taste a bit of cinnamon in my apple pie.

And I did find a way to get just the right crunch of caramel on the lattice top of a pie not unlike that Alabama pie of years ago: You dot all the holes in the lattice with butter and sprinkle the top of the pie liberally with white sugar. The butter will melt and the sugar will brown and crisp--and the pie will be sweet enough for any Christmas guests you may have, even a barn full of half-starved G.I.'s.

The Book About Fairhope and More

2009-12-09T07:36:00.000-08:00

Paul Gaston at the Organic School Centennial Celebration, 2007
December 9, 2009
We aren’t all lucky enough to have been born the grandson of a 19th Century reformer who founded a Utopian colony. We weren’t raised in that colony, nor did we all attend a school that provided us with a lifelong love of learning and a feeling that, if the world needed changing, we were the ones to do it.

But Paul Gaston was. In Coming of Age in Utopia/The Odyssey of an Idea, he gives us a look at the elements that made him what he became as a result of his extraordinary birthright and upbringing. It’s a book by turns educational, inspiring, and even charming; revealing the thoughts and motivations of a truly elegant mind. It tells in readable prose the story of his life: Growing up in the little town of Fairhope, Alabama, saturated with the economic philosophy of Henry George as interpreted by Gaston’s grandfather, Ernest B. Gaston.

It was a heady place to begin. In those days the town was paradise for the boy, the only son of parents who encouraged him always to be himself. Further, he was educated in the town’s remarkable School of Organic Education, which emphasized the growth of the whole child and taught, along with the traditional academic subjects, dancing, singing, and athletics—all without the pressure of performance measures (grades) or the prospect of failure. Gaston acknowledges his debt to his parents for his commitment to social change as an end and his school for the education and personal balance to achieve what he might.

Coming of Age in Utopia takes the reader from a small-town, sheltered existence to an impressive, productive, and highly visible life as a citizen of the world. Gaston’s talent as a scholar and historian takes him on travels to Europe and lands him in a career as a professor of Southern history at the prestigious University of Virginia. Along the way he builds a loving family with the seemingly perfect wife—the beautiful and brilliant Mary Wilkinson of Frogmore Manor, Frogmore, South Carolina. The couple are deeply involved in the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s, and Gaston sees as part of his personal mission the need to touch the minds and hearts of young Southerners who come to his University classes with a fixed notion of honor and tradition, and to challenge them through exposure to the reality of history and enlighten them with a broader vision.

Gaston chose to teach Southern history at a Southern university at a point in time at which the very past seemed to be changing. He chose U VA and stayed there because he was confronted with a peculiarly "Southern" mindset--the tradition-bound kids who felt it necessary to preserve every vestige of the Old South (read "segregation") in their power. They were to have some power, being born to it in Virginia, and had been indoctrinated in the Gone With the Wind side of things. As a professor of history he had a unique opportunity to clobber them over the heads with the real history, and being the gentleman he is and always was, he didn't clobber but engaged their minds and challenged their cherished heritage through facts.

Because of the time and place, he was called upon to go public with his knowledge and to stand by his principles. He joined protest groups and was president of at least one anti-segregation activist organization. His classes influenced countless students, probably in many cases against their will. At Charlottesville's first sit-in, he was hit in the face and later found himself facing the hitters in a court of law. The tires of his car were slashed, and his family's life was disrupted by hateful telephone calls at all hours. In the meantime he met with Julian Bond, Dr. Martin Luther King, John Lewis and other stars of the early Civil Rights struggle as they worked together to make positive changes in the South and throughout the country.

Coming of Age in Utopia shows a natural progression of the man who was raised in Fairhope to honor its purpose of changing the world through economic reform; and educated at the Organic School to fulfill his own goals of opening minds, all the while (and equally importantly) living as fine a life as he found humanly possible. He examines his own motives at times, expresses regrets, and duly accepts the many honors and accolades that come his way.

It is a compelling tale, filled with important events, peopled with powerful characters, and revealing insights gained through study and experience. It is a good, solid book to read, transporting the reader from a place called Fairhope in a certain halcyon time to the larger world at a crucial point in history.

Written with optimism, good will, and grace, Coming of Age in Utopia is a book about a great deal more than the little town of Fairhope. It is about the finding and fulfilling of a personal mission, living a full and happy life--and leaving the world a better place.

Finding Me in Fairhope

2009-12-03T08:46:00.000-08:00

December 3, 2009

I keep popping up in Fairhope, as if I still lived there. The fact is, I'm now in Hoboken again and trying to adjust to the culture shock. It's nice to be here, but I am planning a month-long visit to Fairhope in February, where I'll escape the cold and perhaps explore the "new" Fairhope further. I know, I know, it gets pretty cold in Fairhope in February, but I can promise you it won't be as cold as where I'll be coming from.

I found myself in the Fairhope Courier recently. Friends have advised me of the terrific article by Mike Odom, and I found it online here. Check it out and see if it doesn't just make you itch to buy my book.

I hope you scratch that itch.

Fairhope from a Distance

2009-12-01T18:28:00.000-08:00

I'm back home in Hoboken now, cogitating on the trip I just made. While in Fairhope, I bought Paul Gaston's autobiographical book, hot off the presses, in which he deals with the phenomenon of returning home--and the home is Fairhope. It's a lovely book, Growing Up in Utopia, and when I've finished I'll review it here. For now, I urge you to make your way to Page and Palette and buy a copy.

I've rented a little furnished house on Pine Crest for the month of February. This was not a clear-cut, easy thing to do. I found myself conflicted about everything in Fairhope still, yet something in me felt the pull to spend at least one more February there. I've had two Februaries in Hoboken, and, wintry as the month might be in Fairhope, the weather will be balmy compared to here. There will be the warmth of friends, the ease of the pace, to say nothing of some unsettled real estate affairs in neighboring Montrose--and the eternal magnet of Fairhope to attract me once again. Just when I decide there is nothing more to do there, a small part of me wants or needs to go home again.

It's not that I want to be part of Mardi Gras. I can't believe that tradition has made its way to Fairhope at all--in fact it is in many ways symbolic of what conflicts me about the direction of the little tourist town. Too many pointless imports, and not enough respect for the tenets of the utopian founders. Well, that's a battle over and lost, no matter how many diehards like me turn up to complain.

There's a new Fairhope now, and I certainly know it. The old one is not quite buried yet, however, with this last trip I for one was able to identify the source of my conflict about the place. When I lived there I carved out as my mission the education of the new people about the place; after over 18 years I realized I was talking to myself. History is not high on the agenda of a town on the move and on the make. New people are not interested in the old ways, even if they were radical and would be avant garde today. The new who have come to Fairhope would be even less interested in the radical and avant garde.

Let me wind up with a positive line from The Fair Hope of Heaven. "No matter where people move, they look for the tribe they can relate to, and there is a sense of inclusiveness in the many tribes of Fairhope. They are pleased to meet and work with new people. And the tribes reflect a myriad of interests which may catch a person off guard and may trigger new enthusiams."

There is still a chance for me, then in the new Fairhope. I still have a tribe there, and it is not one of those staging or attending Mardi Gras festivities. There are writers and artists I haven't yet met. There are people I know and trust from years past. And there is always the coastline of Mobile Bay with its spectacular sunsets and instant solitude and peace.

Here's what one writer was inspired to say in a book about Fairhope: "And somewhere in a gully on a particular day in a certain season, the fortunate wanderer will actually find a tree covereed in butterflies...It should not be a surprise, even if it is not expected, if a shadow dances among the leaves, a face appears (or seems to), even a community of phantoms from the past. Here you will find answers, questions, and a host of stories."

That writer was me. The book is called Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree. And somewhere in my heart I retain the belief that that magic might happen only in Fairhope.

One Foot in Another World

2009-11-25T06:21:00.000-08:00

November 26, 2009

I've been back in Fairhope for just over a week and the dust of Hoboken is still on my shoes. My work is cut out for me, with the help of friends and family cleaning out the old family homestead and getting it rented or sold. I leave Tuesday morning and will probably return to Fairhope for the month of February. After a Thanksgiving holiday I'll have to hustle to get the last things done.

It isn't easy going back into a former life and facing the emotions of loss and regret. The house I grew up in has become, after our mother's death, a sore point for my brother, my sister, and I. There is the question hanging over us as to what we do with the property. We three have considerable difficulty looking at the historic house as a property instead of "home," with all its positive and negative connotations. The three children are at odds and it feels like the rift may not ever heal.

This has caused a stalemate at the house, which has been on the market since early February. Not that it isn't clearly a beauty of a home, but it was left abandoned and does not show well. I came here to take care of that and to come up with a plan to do right by the house itself. With the help of my brother and his wife, we have begun the painful process of setting the house to rights and working out a plan to move forward. Our sister lived in the house for several years, and announced without consulting us that she was selling it when she moved out, leaving considerable junk in every room and moving to Portland, Oregon. Walking into the place, deprived of the talk, laughter and love that had warmed it for so many years, my brother and I experience emotions that could only be described as equal parts of sorrow and anger. For my brother, who lives so near, this heart-tug has been almost unbearable.

I saw my job in coming here as taking charge of the project (being the middle child, always the negotiator) and keeping the lines of communication open between the brother and sister. This sounds fine and commendable, but there is the matter of my own response to the dear old house, the space that seems to put its arms around you when you step inside. So far four truckloads have been carried off to the dump and to local charities. The brother has taken charge of cutting through the jungle of overgrown weeds and plants put in place by our mother so many years ago. It's hard to think of that backyard without picturing her out there, digging, pulling up, and planting--her constant occupation and the source of comfort and pride for her lifetime. She collected driftwood and fashioned it into lamps and tables, hung some of it on walls "as is." It took on a significance for her that is not always easy to understand, but with her eye for the decorative, she was able to show the beauty of driftwood objects to all. Now the whole property is littered here and there with elegant pieces of driftwood. We have found a local artist who loves to work with driftwood and given him free rein to take what he wants. Mama would be pleased with that.

My sister was always a bookworm, preferring mysteries and the work of English writers like P.G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh. She took her best books, of course, but in bookcases there were still yellowing paperbacks of Dickens and Agatha Christie, and many many more. It was hard to heap them into the cartons to take them away, but, knowing that she left them we could assume she didn't want them any more, and certainly condition problems would have kept them from being attractive to anyone else.

With all the work we are doing it is impossible to exclude the element of emotion. I shall take this day of Thanksgiving off from thinking much about it, and just be thankful that I once had this house to live in, that I now have the life I do, and that we'll soon reach a solution for the house itself. It seems to be asking me to take care of it, and I know that, with the support I have, I'm up to the job.

That's all we all can be thankful for, at the heart of it--the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to accept the curves life gives us. Today I'll be able to recharge the batteries among friends and loved ones, and tomorrow I'll do what must be done about the house.

Book Tour Information

2009-11-14T13:08:00.000-08:00

I'll leave Hoboken Tuesday (November 17) for the launch of my book The Fair Hope of Heaven in paperback. Enterprising readers may have already ordered it from amazon.com in that format, but I held back its general release to the Fairhope reading public until now. It was first published in hard cover in January, and I went to Fairhope at that time to get it into the local indie bookstore. It will retail for a mere $16.95 in paperback, as against $26.95 for the hard cover.

I've written a lot about the book on this blog, and on my other blog "Finding Myself in Hoboken," and on my website. It seems much of my life is devoted--when not finding myself in Hoboken--to finding Fairhope.

Even though the book has the words "fair" and "hope" in the title, I never thought of it as a book about the town of Fairhope until market forces--read that to mean publishers--informed me that it was. I thought it was about the way history and events transform people and places, reflecting on this through my memories of a unique childhood in the kind of nonconformist environment that Fairhope, Alabama, offered in the middle of the 20th Century. I included character sketches of people I knew, thinking for all the world that I had created a new Lake Wobegon Days, and, although knowing it would appeal to others who shared the memories, I felt that my book was universal in scope. Part of me would still like to believe that--but the reaction from publishers was that it was charming but limited to readers in Fairhope. I hope sales of the soft cover may still prove me right.

So I'll get on the plane Tuesday and plan to visit old friends and see the new construction in the town where I spent much of my life. I'll investigate the possibility of taking control of the old family homestead.

My schedule of public appearances include book talks at the Fairhope Museum of History, 2 P.M. Thursday, November 19 and the Marietta Johnson Museum, 2 P.M. Friday November 20, and signing the book at Page & Palette Sunday November 22 (at 2 P.M. also). I'll have Thanksgiving with a couple I've known for at least 60 years, with their friends and relations. I'll see family and classmates and people I worked closely with before I moved to Hoboken in December 2007. I'm no longer distraught at how many of the old building and funky cottages have been destroyed and replaced. Like a newcomer, I'll be refreshed by balmy weather and sunsets on Mobile Bay.

From The Fair Hope of Heaven: "The coastline of Mobile Bay with sunset views is just one part of the equation. Its calming effect cannot be denied, and the transcendent, everlasting quality of that particular body of water and its constant gentle motion is a source of comfort and serenity to all who live anywhere near it."

I look forward to this trip. Indeed I do. I hope I see you there.

Ready Or Not, Fairhope: Here I Come!

2009-11-04T05:46:00.000-08:00

In two weeks I'll be cooling my heels in the very town about which I've written two books and innumerable blog posts: Fairhope, Alabama. I've released The Fair Hope of Heaven/A Hundred Years After Utopia in paperback, and will be signing copies at the beloved indie bookstore Page and Palette November 22 from 2-4 P.M.

If you've followed this blog at all, you know about The Fair Hope of Heaven. My original title was When We Had the Sky, and much of the material was contained in the first books, Meet Me at The Butterfly Tree, but this book really came to life after I had lived in Hoboken for several months and read a delightful little book called Utopia, New Jersey. It inspired me to take a more positive look at Fairhope's utopian origins and compare them to the Fairhope of today. There is much history of the real Fairhope in The Fair Hope of Heaven, and some conjecture about its present and future.

In addition to chapters about Upton Sinclair's brief life in Fairhope, and that of E.B. Gaston, the founder of the village, there are chapters about the eccentric Communist Willard Edwards (who left Fairhope for what he expected to be greener pastures in Soviet Russia under Stalin) and Dian Stitt Arnold, who built her own utopian life around horses, dogs, and children. I'll be discussing Fairhope history and the earlier chapters of the book at the Fairhope Museum of History at a tea (made from Fairhope-grown tea leaves) on November 19 at 2 P.M. and reading the chapter on Dian Arnold and her mentor Blanche Brown at 2 P.M. November 20 at the Marietta Johnson Museum.

If you are in the Fairhope area, I hope you'll come to one of the events. If you don't live anywhere nearby, the book is available at amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble.com. I'd love to meet you and talk with you about the Fairhope I remember and the Fairhope you want to get to know.

Fairhope, A Storybook Town

2009-08-08T00:26:00.000-07:00

It has come to my attention that Fairhope is billed in the promotional literature as a “Storybook Town.” It has also been called such things as a “little Norman Rockwell town,” and a “Disneyland town.”

Aargh. I am doing what I can, by harping on the subject of Fairhope history on this blog, to keep it from becoming any of those things.

When I first moved back in 1988, there actually were some remnants of Norman Rockwell cottages, little houses that had been built between the two World Wars -- modest houses that looked as if nice families lived there. Fairhope had an undiscovered quality that I would hardly have called “storybook” in the sense of the charming little Tudor homes of California or the New England farm houses, or the Midwestern carpenter gothics of the 1800’s. It was almost unreal in its quietness. The last of the fabled hotels of the town, The Colonial Inn, stood decrepit in its prime spot overlooking the bay, all but abandoned, awaiting the wrecker's ball.

There was very little to do on a Saturday night. There were a few eateries, but only one really nice one, a remodeled old farmhouse out behind the new shopping center, known as Dusty's. It was owned by a local character who had had a career as a cocktail pianist and had a young, creative wife who put the restaurant on the map, thereby giving parched little Fairhope a first-class place to take visitors or a special date.

A novel had been published in 1959, written by a young man named Robert E. Bell, who had been so entranced by what he called the magic of Fairhope, that he set his story in a fictionized version of the town, renaming it Moss Bayou, and smothering the setting with such phrases as "Somewhere after a turn down the street, he saw a glimmer of water, gold-flaked through the trees; the frond-dragging palms bent with the curve of the road which heat-danced ahead of him, charging the sky with its electrical glare." The title of the book was The Butterfly Tree, and it was not the last book to drench Fairhope in the mysteries of the imagination of an outsider.

An insider, I worked with Bob many years later on a book that I hoped would present a more realistic picture of the Fairhope I knew, incorporating his lyrical prose describing a town projected from his memories with my own workaday knowledge of what it was like to grow up in the little enclave that I found neither magical nor romantic. The book we collaborated on reflected two sensibilities and embraced Fairhope from two sides. Its title was Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree, and if you've read much of this blog or if you click on the link, you'll know almost all there is to know about it short of actually reading it.

Both those books may have contributed to the myth that Fairhope was some kind of ethereal, enchanted locale, a Brigadoon that only appeared in the line of vision of the fortunate few. Charming as that image might be, it simply isn't true. My second book, The Fair Hope of Heaven/A Hundred Years After Utopia, seeks to dispell the mythology as much as possible.

Fairhope was a very real town, founded on the principle of providing economic parity, especially in housing. Land was available on a 99-year lease basis, with a low “rent” or tax, to be paid to the Colony yearly, to be determined by what would be considered fair market value. Each family could build what it could afford on the land leased from the Colony. Little houses were built by the impecunious couples who wanted to participate in the Utopian experiment known as the Single Tax Colony, and these houses were expanded room by room as the families grew. That is why so many of the early cottages had small rooms and lots of them. Those little affordable abodes grew with the families that inhabited them.

The Single Tax experiment could hardly be called a rousing success, especially after the Federal Government established an income tax on all citizens in 1913. It was a sound principle that eventually was proved wildly impractical, perhaps especially in Fairhope, the town that was created in order to prove the opposite. Apparently greed is human nature, and the selflessness required to ensure cooperative individualism -- the term used by E.B. Gaston, Fairhope's founder to describe his ideal economy -- was soon overshadowed by the wave of opportunists who learned how to exploit the very land he fought to preserve.

If Fairhope is a storybook town, the story has been rewritten too many times to be of much consequence. Even the historical cottages, for the most part, have been demolished and replaced by monuments to the prosperity of their owners -- huge, ostentatious houses that compete with each other for attention and blur the landscape that was once authentic, meaningful and charming in spite of itself. That it is still a storybook town is the greatest fiction of all.

Before Fairhope Was Precious

2009-06-03T10:27:00.001-07:00

I've written a lot about my memories of Fairhope, both on this blog and in two books. I lived there as a child and again when I moved back in 1988 until I left for good in December of 2007.

Others are compelled to write about Fairhope too--from Sonny Brewer with his lyrical The Poet of Tolstoy Park to Rick Bragg in the current issue of Smithsonian Magazine.

It is Bragg's latest that inspires this post. He is, like many of us, somewhat conflicted about Fairhope. He writes that he loves the bay, the surrounding geography of what is now Fairhope, but that he finds it "too precious" to be a comfortable place to live. It's a tourist town now, and an extension of Mobile, and his article, which you can read here and post a comment on if you wish, has generated much response across the board. There are those who love Fairhope and think Bragg got it right, others who love Fairhope and think he didn't, and those who just love everything Rick Bragg writes and don't know anything about Fairhope.

If you want to read some about old Fairhope, you can find a post on this blog "In Praise of Old Libraries," or one with a picture of the Christian Church, one of the first structures in town, or one about the corner of Fairhope Avenue and Section Street, which I call "The Center of the Universe."

There was a time when I thought I'd live out my days in Fairhope. But life has its way of changing, and the time came when I didn't want to live there another day.

But I still love to visit, and I still cherish all the memories I have of when it was simpler and less self-conscious, less precious--simply an extraordinary little town peopled with unusual, special, thinking folks. I recommend that Fairhope. You'll find it in the writings of those who knew it long ago, including myself in Meet Me at The Butterfly Tree and The Fair Hope of Heaven. Newcomers and visiting luminaries tend to write about the little city as if it held the answer to all questions, the fount of all wisdom, and as if it is the magical Norman Rockwell town they've always dreamed about. Fairhope has a great many pleasant qualities and a few drawbacks. It is in transition now from a haven for intellectuals to some new incarnation, but it is situated in one of the most beautiful spots you'll find. Just don't expect too much. There is more to Fairhope than meets the eye, but it isn't all pretty.

Real Life and Real Estate

2009-05-30T05:12:00.001-07:00

There's a house for sale in Fairhopeland, Montrose to be exact. Practically the last historic house standing in what used to be a quiet, mysterious village on the Eastern Shore, rife with stories about days dating to the early Spanish explorers. This example of Creole Cottage architecture was built from timbers and on the foundation of an early Catholic church and has housed many a complex and happy family, including Morris Timbes and his adorable wife and delightful and brilliant children (one of whom was me). Today the bids are flying, and the house is coveted by at least one delightful family with hopes of someday occupying it. Don't these endearing people just touch your heart? Don't you wish every story in real life had a happy ending?

The Latest News of the Fair Hope of Heaven

2009-04-30T06:26:00.001-07:00

Don Noble, Alabama's premier book reviewer, wrote some very nice words about my book The Fair Hope of Heaven/A Hundred Years after Utopia. His review, which was aired on Alabama Public Radio, can be read at this link. Click on the blue letters and read what the nice man said.

I love Don's thoughtful interviews on Alabama Public Television, and am angling for an appearance next time I'm in the state. Right now it looks as if that will be October. Whether I get a booking on the show remains to be seen. Watch this space for further information. In the meantime, go to amazon.com or Barnes and Noble.com or go to Page and Palette in Fairhope and buy the book.

Also, this was published in John Sledge's book column in the Mobile Press-Register on Sunday: "...Mary Lois Timbes is also inspired by memories of growing up in a simpler time and place. In The Fair Hope of Heaven, she has expanded and updated her earlier reminiscence of Fairhope, Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree. Her new effort features more stories and more characters. 'All little towns of the late 1940s an early 1950s were simpler and more nurturing than they are today,' she writes, but this particular one had a history of and until recent years retained a faint whiff of the bohemian.'

"Included in this delightful volume are portraits of such Fairhope icons as Ernest Berry Gaston (the founder), Marietta Johnson (of Organic School fame), Winifred Duncan (author of Webs in the Wind, a book about spiders) and Craig Sheldon (sculptor). Also highlighted are the bayside burg's more quirky facets, like the nudist colony that once flourished around 1910.

"Despite all the changes since Timbes' youth, Fairhope's magnificent natural situation remains impressive, and she gives it due coverage. The modest architecture and colorful, outsized personalities have mostly gone, but the sweeping bay views, dramatic gullies and warm evenings remain constant, and continue to draw visitors and new residents from far and wide. 'Fairhope may have changed as the world has changed,' Timbes concludes, 'yet it retains remnants of Utopia at its heart.'"

I've posted a great deal about the book on this blog, so if you want a taste, browse the blog. You can read more reviews here, and once you've read the book, you might post a review of it yourself!

Education Reform? It Started in Fairhope

2009-03-11T02:32:00.000-07:00

President Obama is committed to a deep reform of the educational system. I hope while investigating options his experts will take a look at what they call in Fairhope the Organic School.

Founded in 1907 by visionary educator Marietta Johnson, the Organic School was based on the same kind of reform that Fairhope itself was, and it fit in the little village like a glove. It was to work hand-in-hand with the Single Tax Corporation for its first years of existence, and the two institutions shared many of the same benefactors and local support.

The principles of Organic education remain radical. The basic premise is that education is natural to life (Mrs. Johnson used to say that education is life), and that children's curiosity and love of learning is to be incorporated in the process of teaching. She wrote two books on the subject which are incorporated into a slim volume called Teaching Without Failure now for sale at the Marietta Johnson Museum.

That's a daunting title. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of her system was that Mrs. Johnson believed that no child should be allowed to "fail" at education. The concept of failure was turned on its head; if the student didn't grasp the subject, it was failure of the school rather than the child. She solved this dilemma by simply eliminating measurements from the equation.

How, then, said the education Establishment, are we to know what a child is learning? The answer is that "we" don't. Any child can cram facts and pass a test, but has he really learned? Only the student in question is capable of knowing how much he has learned. In today's obsession with test scores, this is the most difficult aspect of Organic education to sell to the public.

Today, many of Mrs. Johnson's tenets have been softened at the school. It was essential to her system that students begin at the earliest year possible and remain in the school through high school. If an unfortunate child had to transfer, he had a big adjustment to make to adapt to the atmosphere of adversity in a traditional school, but soon emerged victorious, having been imbued with a basic love of the learning process. Now it is seldom that a student remains in a school from kindergarten through high school. The Organic School itself goes only through the eighth grade at this point.

But there is much to be learned from the school, which Mrs. Johnson considered a demonstration of the direction for all education. When travelling in Progressive Education circles, she was often challenged about her idea of education. "It sounds lovely," she was told, "But it could never work."

"Come to Fairhope and see," was what she answered. Many did, and many took away ideas which have become part of the schools of today.

There is a lot written about this unique approach to education reform. Read my books about it, which are at Page and Palette Bookstore in Fairhope or at amazon.com or Barnes and Noble.com, or drop by the Marietta Johnson Museum on the Faulkner campus for information about Mrs. Johnson and the school, or go to the campus on Pecan Ave. east of Section Street.

Or look it all up on the Internet!

A Look at Fairhope, Bare Feet, and Heaven

2009-02-18T10:10:00.000-08:00

February 18, 2009

Rupert Schmitt, a friend who spent a night or two in my garage during the 100th Reunion of the Marietta Johnson School of Organic Education, wrote this as kind of a review of The Fair Hope of Heaven:

"Mary Lois Timbes is a skilled biographer.

"Upton Sinclair, the author of The Jungle lived in a cottage on the beach. He served raw food banquets. The Jungle exposed the meat packing industry and caused the passage of the meat inspection act. Today we need a peanut butter inspection act.

"Clarence Darrow visited the town two years after the Scopes Trial debated evolution in Dayton Tennessee. Imagine a trial with cheering and jeering.

"One lady, Emma Schramm had the freedom to live in a tree house 12 feet off the ground.

"The Fair Hope of Heaven reminds me of a place where students had the freedom to go bare footed to school. One boy, Paul Gaston, now a professor, went barefooted for an entire year. The Organic School principal John Campbell had the freedom to stand on his head. The Organic School, founded the same year as the Montessori School, emphasized students. Marietta Johnson would spin in her grave upon hearing of today’s educational values. Her school acted Greek Myths during hikes to gullies. Her students climbed trees while barefoot. Required classes included folk dancing, music, and arts and crafts. The children enjoyed school. 'Her school did not grade its children or have periodic tests or examinations.' John Dewey visited the school. A chapter in Schools of Tomorrow covered the Organic School.

"Fairhope was developed in Alabama by single tax Utopians from Iowa. The town was a magnet for free thinkers including Sherwood Anderson who some years later introduced Gertrude Stein in Paris to Ernest Hemingway. Northern liberals, including my father, stayed in the Colonial Inn while vacationing in Fairhope.

"Not all of the people espoused complete freedom. Bill Edwards, one of the teachers, never spanked his children: 'Punishment for their infractions was that they would be required to run up and down the stairs twice.' His students in woodshop built a 36-foot ketch. 'They had to tear a wall out of the Arts and Crafts Building to extract it and take it to the bay for a trial run.' After the stock market crashed, Bill moved his family to the U.S.S.R. Disillusioned, he returned to the U.S. in 1935.

"The Organic School is still open for business, however because of liability issues, the students of today must wear shoes."

Rupert's comments give only a taste of the many stories you'll find in The Fair Hope of Heaven. Willard Edwards, the chap who moved to Stalin's Russia, had much more impact than the building of the Osprey or the move to and from Russia--and there are other characters, including Blanche Brown and Dian Arnold, Gretchen Riggs, Verda Horne, and the ubiquitous Craig Sheldon in the book.

I hope more of its readers will respond here and tell us their favorite stories from old Fairhope. If you don't have stories of your own, you're sure to find many in The Fair Hope of Heaven!

The Fair Hope of Heaven--Reviews Trickle in

2009-02-09T11:11:00.000-08:00

February 9, 2009

Reviews for my new book The Fair Hope of Heaven/A Hundred Years After Utopia have begun to trickle in on amazon.com

See for yourself:

Some dreams are realistic, some are utopian. I would almost put in the latter category my dream of someday writing a book with the exquisite timing of this one. One day, we find ourselves living in the very prototype of an advanced capitalist society; a few months later, Newsweek adorns its cover with the inscription, “We Are All Socialists Now.” And indeed, that "S" word is now on everyone's lips. But when you read Mary Lois Timbes’ newest work on Fairhope, Alabama, you might not use the word socialist quite so glibly. This is a charming, breezy read about a town founded roughly a century ago on the belief in the idea of Henry George, who believed that land is the only commodity that should be taxed at all, and all citizens should share equitably in the fruits of those taxes.
Yet, as Ms. Timbes tell us, Fairhope was not socialist. It was, in fact, the model of an individualistic society in the sense of celebrating the diversity and accepting the eccentricities of its residents—the kind of characters who typically would be ostracized in small towns and lost in big ones.

Reading about Fairhope would be a delightful experience at any time, but it is especially valuable now, when we are all questioning some of the assumptions upon which our social and economic thinking has been based. Get ready to experience a place where you probably wished you could live, but never imagined existed. You?ll revel in the outstanding accomplishments of its residents of yesteryear and wonder why its current residents haven't been interested in returning the town to the glories of its past. Perhaps after reading this book, they just might.
This was written by Washington D.C. attorney, blogger and author Dan Spiro.

Dr. Paul M. Gaston, author of a number of books about Fairhope, writes:
With insight and sensitivity, Mary Lois Timbes recalls and reveals the Fairhope utopian colony as it once was and has become. The biographical sketches of some of the colony's unique characters will delight those who knew them and attract those who meet them here for the first time.

This from Perdita Buchan, a writer and teacher of writing, whose own book Utopia, New Jersey, inspired me to get back to writing this, my latest opus:
The Fair Hope of Heaven is a charming evocation of the town on Mobile Bay that began as a utopian experiment - and of the many unusual and appealing characters who made it their home from its beginning in 1894 to the present. Eccentric they may have been, but they lived lives valuable to themselves and the community. And it is valuable to have them remembered.

I'm told by John Sledge that there will be a review of the book in the Mobile Press-Register as well. If you want to find out about the book first hand, it's for sale in Fairhope's Page and Palette bookstore.

Upton Sinclair, from The Fair Hope of Heaven

2009-01-04T08:42:00.001-08:00

January 15, 2008

Upton Sinclair moved to a cottage on the beach in Fairhope in 1909. He was a famous novelist at the time, having written The Jungle three years earlier. I have a chapter on Sinclair in The Fair Hope of Heaven. Sinclair was a man looking for the perfect place to live, and for a time he tried Fairhope.

Most of us remember the name Sinclair Lewis from American Lit classes in college, but this is the other Sinclair. Anthony Arthur said that Upton Sinclair once remarked, “Maybe we should just both take the name Upton Sinclair Lewis.”

Upton Sinclair was a Socialist, an idealist, a food faddist, and a complex and interesting man who wrote books whenever he felt the world’s ills needed correcting, which meant that he wrote books constantly. He lived during a period in which like-minded idealists banded together, often in colonies, not unlike our own Utopian Fairhope. After camping in inadequate shacks since their marriage, with money from The Jungle Sinclair and his wife Meta had bought an old private school building on the Palisades in New Jersey to house the artists’ colony that was his dream. He called the project Helicon Home Colony, after the Greek muse of the arts, Helicon. John Dewey, also a figure in Fairhope, visited his colony and even the young Sinclair Lewis, a Yale student, helped out with janitorial duties.

Helicon Home Colony burned in 1907, and with it went Sinclair’s hopes for his own personal ideal world. From there he traveled with wife and baby David to Carmel, where he experimented with health foods and wrote books and plays intended to convert mankind to his two pet causes: health diets and Socialism. He wrote books about raw food diets, fasting, vegetarianism. He and his family were to spend time in Battle Creek at Kellogg’s and health guru Bernarr MacFadden’s establishments, and other such enclaves, before they moved to Fairhope to try it out.

Raised by a puritan mother and an alcoholic father, Sinclair early on thought of himself as a genius. His personal heroes were Shelley, Hamlet, and Jesus Christ. He was convinced that he was ordained to write the Great American Novel, and he made at least 60 attempts at it, most of which sold very well and had literary merit while succeeding best at presenting his latest propaganda soapbox.

As a Socialist, he would have been well-acquainted with the Single Taxers, and Fairhope had a strong attraction to those who sought a heaven on earth, as many did in those days. Young David, well-read in the books of his parents’ choosing, was getting old enough for school, and the Sinclairs probably saw the need for some life with other children. David Sinclair became one of the first children enrolled in the Marietta Johnson School of Organic Education.

In his 1932 autobiography, Sinclair wrote: “For the winter (1909-10) I took my family to the single tax colony at Fairhope, Alabama, on Mobile Bay. Since I couldn’t have a colony of my own, I would try other people’s. Here were two or three hundren assorted reformers, having organized their affairs according to the gospel of Henry George; trying to eke a living from poor soil, and feeling certain they were setting an example to the rest of the world. The climate permitted the outdoor life, and we found a cottage for rent on the bay-front, remote from the village.

“…I was overworking again; and when my recalcitrant stomach made too much trouble, I would take another fast for a day, three days, a week. I was trying the raw food died, and failing, as before. I was now a full-fledged physical culturist, following a Spartan regime. In front of our house ran a long pier, out to the deep water of the bay. Often the boards of this peir were covered with frost, very stimulating to the far feet, and whipped by icy winds, stimulating to the skin; each morning I made a swim in this bay a part of my law.”

In The Fair Hope of Heaven I have included some lovely diary entries by the young bride of Sinclair’s secretary – Dave Howatt, also a raw-food advocate – describing the scene in Fairhope of those halcyon, idealistic days. These pages deserve a blog post of their own, offering an enchanting portrait of a young woman in love in another era, in a bayside village that is long gone.

The marriage between Upton and Meta Sinclair, unlike the Howatts', was not to last much longer. Meta's physical passion had been more than he bargained for, and he sought to quell it in any way he could, at last inviting her to bring her young lover, Alfred Kuttner, to join them in Fairhope, where such liaisons were not unheard of. It was in Fairhope that Sinclair wrote his autobiographical work, Love’s Pilgrimage, allowing Meta to pen the portions concerning Corydon, the female protagonist.

Probably the member of the Sinclair family to benefit most from his brief time in Fairhope was David, who was enrolled in the Organic School, and loved the life out of doors, later becoming a scientist and probably early on imbued with the free spirit of Fairhope in those days. There is a charming excerpt from Sinclair's description of himself and David sleeping on the outdoor porch of their beach cottage. I'll leave it to you to find the description yourself in the book.

The Fairhope to which Upton Sinclair repaired a century ago is a very different one from the one you'll find today. Most of the beach cottages have been replaced by large, imposing and impressive multi-million-dollar homes. People no longer move to town for escape from the tribulations of modern life, or for the intellectual pursuits in planning a better world. But they move there because they love its possibilities, still. They want the best place they can find, and they very often find it in Fairhope.

Plot of the New Book Thickens

2008-12-17T11:34:00.000-08:00

December 17, 2008
I posted here a few months about about the publication of my new book, the one you see pictured. I was excited to have completed it--I thought in time for Christmas publication--and expected to be in Fairhope early in November for booksignings.

Things do not always go as expected. There was a snag somewhere. I had misunderstood the publisher's timeline. Or just maybe they had misunderestimated their own ability to get the thing in print fast. I'm now expecting to have a book in my hand in early January, and to be signing copies of it at Page & Palette January 24 from 2-4 P.M. Thicker than the first book, it will be hard cover, and will retail for about $25.

The Fair Hope of Heaven is similar to Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree. It has some of the same chapters--most expanded to include more information--and a lot of new ones. It deals with the history of Fairhope, with chapters about Clarence Darrow and Upton Sinclair, along with some about other interesting Fairhope characters like Dian Stitt Arnold who rode horses and raised six children and always wore miniskirts and cowboy boots and Willard Edwards who moved his family to Stalin's Russia during the Great Depression, finding Fairhope not Socialistic enough.

I'll get the publicity out, am putting together a new website, and will be seeing you at the bookstore.

The Man in My Garage II

2008-12-05T11:10:00.001-08:00

December 5, 2008

Before I left Fairhope I participated in the 100th anniversary reunion of the Marietta Johnson School of Organic Education, one of the city's venerable and venerated institutions. People flocked to town from all over the country to celebrate the lives they had lived and thank the school itself for all the possibilities that had been opened for them.

I obliged one of them, Rupert Schmitt, by putting him up in the spare room in my garage. At the recent reunion of the Marietta Johnson School of Organic Education, a.k.a. The Organic School, people came into Fairhope from all over. I expected to have a couple sharing one of the little bedrooms upstairs in my cottage, a student teacher in the other, and a man living in the little room at the back of the garage for the duration. The only one who could make it was Rupert.

Playing hostess to him as well as partaking of all the events of the reunion weekend and giving something of a lecture at one of them (plus reading a chapter from Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree at another) gave an offbeat dimension to my participation in the proceedings.

He turned out to be in some ways typical as a product of our unconventional school, but for the main part, a man like no other. He likes to go which ever way the wind blows him, and this has taken his windblown persona in many directions. A delightful raconteur and observer of details, he carried big blank notebooks with him wherever he went, asked questions of everybody, and wrote down almost every damn thing anybody said. He was quick with a quip, but quizzical about many of the answers he got. I had a wonderful time with him.

Now Rupert has published a book of poetry called The Interview. I commend it to you. Written by an observer of animals and nature, it has cat poems, bird poems, leaf poems, and poems about his family and his outlook on life.

As a writer, Rupert is whimsical, tangential, and utterly charming. He captures many facets of a life lived for its own sake, full of love and the adventure of small events and odd creatures. He looks at the world with wonder, humor, and sometimes anger. He is always original, not always 100 per cent satisfying -- but always delicious. The book can be ordered from amazon.com or iUniverse.com. I searched for a Fairhope poem but found none, unless you count the overarching old-Fairhope tenet that nature is nearby and it is our fairest hope to do our best by it, a mood which pervades all the poems in his book. I'd like to think Rupert learned some of that at the Organic School.

A (Fairhope) Book Is Born

2008-08-09T05:10:00.000-07:00

August 9, 2008

This blog was created to draw attention to a book I'd written about Fairhope which I thought related to the world at large. Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree was just printed and I'd put up a website to promote it. A few visit the web page every day, and even now a few come here having seen it. If you haven't yet visited the site, all you have to do is click on those blue words and read more about me and my book than you ever dreamed you wanted to know.

Although this blog came to discuss life in general, philosophy, art, love, and the afterlife, I still plug the book from time to time, and spend what time I do here writing about the Fairhope in my mind. My own life is unfolding its chapters in Hoboken, New Jersey, and I have a very active blog detailing my adventures there. Check it out!

In the meantime, also mentioned at length on this blog, I had written a second book about Fairhope called When We Had the Sky. Where Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree was a memoir of people I'd known in the 1950s in Fairhope, When We Had the Sky goes back in time to chronicle the Fairhope's founding days in which its visitors included Clarence Darrow and Upton Sinclair. It expands the first book and continues with memorabilia from Fairhope's past.

Not able to find a publisher for When We Had the Sky (it got super rejection notices from the University of Alabama Press and River City Publishing -- both suggesting it was an excellent book but that there would not be enough of a market for "another book about Fairhope" for them to put money into printing it) I let it go for a couple of years.

Then I moved to New Jersey and read a book called Utopia, New Jersey, which inspired me to combine the two books and put the story of Fairhope into the context of the spate of utopian communities that spawned it. I omitted the contributions of Robert E. Bell, who collaborated on Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree, wrote a new chapter on the Fairhope's utopian origins, and selected a few of the favorite other character sketches, put it together with When We Had the Sky, and have come up with a NEW BOOK.

I'm working with an online publisher with whom I'm working to get the book for sale in store -- and online, of course -- in time for Christmas.

Watch the Fairhope papers, y'all, for news of the new book. It will be entitled The Fair Hope of Heaven/A Hundred Years after Utopia, and will be bigger and far better than the sum of its parts, which is to say better than either of the other books. I guess it won't be better than both, but it will be better than either.

I'll be in Fairhope to hold booksignings, I hope in November. I look forward to seeing you then.

The Captain's House Has New Owners

2008-07-01T05:48:00.000-07:00

July 1, 2008

Yesterday the deed was done; numerous papers were signed, a check was signed and handed across the table (and deposited in the bank), and it's official. The house in Fairhope is no longer mine.

I live in Hoboken, New Jersey, for real.

It's a good feeling to be free of the worry that I may be paying taxes and various bills on that house for years to come. It's an even better feeling to have met the new owners and to have found them to be parents of three small children. They have plans to add a bathroom, which the house sorely needed, and to remodel the interior to suit their needs -- but they truly love what the house is and was and they know it's in the ideal location for Fairhope. They'll get to view the fireworks from there on the 4th (or at least to walk down the hill to the bluff and not have to drive around looking for a parkin space). They'll be able to walk their daughter to the K1 Center when she starts kindergarten in the fall. They'll allow their children to play outside without fear of traffic or kidnappers.

And I'll live in Hoboken, for real.

Finding My Way to Fair Hope

2008-06-21T10:37:00.000-07:00

June 21, 2008

Look out, Fairhope! I'm coming back for a week!

Wednesday afternoon I should be back in Fairhope; the captain's house has been sold, and I'm gonna be at the closing on June 30.

I decided to give myself a week to look around, check out old friends, and maybe even say goodbye. I have been away for seven months and with the sale of the house I can leave with impunity. In fact, I've already left with impugnity, but this trip offers me an almost final look around.

Notice how I said almost final? I have family in the place, and I've just completed a book about Fairhope, so there seems to be no end to it.

I published Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree in 2001, reprinted it in 2005, and finished a second book which I called When We Had the Sky -- also about Fairhope in the past -- and couldn't find a publisher. Reading a book called Utopia, New Jersey inspired me to rework both books, combining the two and adding more historical information about Fairhope's history as a utopian community.

I'll bring along a copy and see if it flies in Fairhope. Maybe I can find sponsors to pay for the publishing, and, if that happens, I'll be back in Fairhope many times to promote the book.

Maybe I'll see you in Fairhope this trip, or the next, or the next. Look for me.

Brad Pitt in Fairhope

2008-04-07T15:42:00.000-07:00

April 7, 2008

A noticeable spike in readership of this blog Friday revealed that the attendants all used the search words "Brad Pitt in Fairhope."

I once posted on a mythical remake of Gone With the Wind, suggesting Pitt as a candidate for the role of Ashley Wilkes. I still think that's a pretty good idea. That mention of the actor was the only reason for those seeking information about Brad Pitt -- and possibly Angelina Jolie as well -- in Fairhope last week visited this blog.

Not knowing anything about whether or not the couple actually came to Fairhope (and not living anywhere near there any more) I made contact with a few who might know. Two out of three had heard nothing about it, but the third wrote, "Yes, he's here for the first Fairhope Film Festival and the rumor must be true, but I haven't seen the dude, but maybe I'll drop in on tonight's movie. He is probably here because the festival showed "Forgotten Coast" this afternoon at USABC, so, it's not really much of a stretch for him to come over from N.O. where he has a pad out on St. Charles."

Later the press got into the picture. Reporters sought out Pitt by following the leads they had gotten from others, but nobody had seen him.

If you came because you thought you'd learn more about Brad Pitt in Fairhope, I hate to disappoint you. If you know something I don't, please make a comment and enlighten me and my readers.

And a New Reader Sends Me a Valentine

2008-02-13T18:37:00.001-08:00

February 13, 2008

Received this picture with a message attached from a reader who used to live in Fairhope and has bought a copy of my book. Message: "had to put the book down and take a sip.
'ghosts constantly confront me in fairhope'
more later..."

Ah, yes.

Fair Hope for the Clueless Blogger

2007-11-16T06:25:00.000-08:00

November 16, 2007

Yesterday I created a new blog and today I find a lot of stuff intended for the old blog changed on this blog. If you're confused, join the crowd! I thought I was creating a profile referencing my Hoboken persona, only for the Hoboken blog but here it is, all over this one. I dunno if there's any way my different blogs can have different profiles, but if not, the Finding Fair Hope of the past will merge with the Stranger in the Night future, and the world will just have to figure it all out.

The blogger site doesn't seem to know how to. Or maybe it's just me, the blogger. Patience is a virtue, I'm told.

Finding a Place to Blog

2007-11-15T09:24:00.000-08:00

November 15, 2007

I've done it, friends! I've created yet another blog the world has been waiting for...or at least a few people in the vicinity of Hoboken, New Jersey, who may be wondering what all this flap about the new blogger in town is all about.

You can get there by going to Finding Myself in Hoboken which I launched today, having nothing else to do but pack up a lifetime of belongings and clean up and move from here.

Check it out, and bookmark the page. There will be less and less on this one in days to come.

The Biography of a Blog

2007-11-09T05:41:00.000-08:00

November 9, 2007

This blog was born early in 2006, at a time when I had a new toy -- a Mac laptop. A friend mentioned that Apple had informed him the new machines had blog capability, and I knew writing a blog would be duck soup for me.

I contacted another friend who lived in faraway Virginia and I knew to be pretty good with computers. He went to the Blogger home page and walked me through the process, starting his own blog (mendacious mouse) at the same time. For a period of about six months in 2006 the interaction between our two blogs kept us both afloat. At that time this blog became reflective and philosophical, and I aired my views about the meaning of life and the existence of God, right upside the movie reviews and what is known as entertainment trivia (but to me is a mainstay of life as I know it). I had notified a list of friends about the existence of this blog, and many, including artist John ("John Sweden") frequented both blogs and stirred up controversy as he educated us all about the many faces of art.

But Finding Fair Hope had been designed as a vehicle to sell my book Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree and my constant references to the book and to the town of Fairhope in which I had grown up were really not particularly helpful to sales of the book. I wrote about the book less and less, even as I posted daily on the blog until November of 2006.

Along about that time I became tired of the daily posts. I decided the blog itself was sapping my time and energy, and posted that I would cease the blog. Yet every few days I was inspired to post, and post I did. I never went back to once a day, but I was posting at least three times a week after I had announced that the blog was dead. My friends John Sweden and the blog-mentor "benedict s." began posting comments less frequently. Finding Fair Hope became the one-person wank job that a blog has a tendency to be. I know those are strong words, and in fact I'm rather proud of what I've written here, but I must admit that when you're writing just to expose your inner thoughts on myriad topics, you can get, shall I say, self-indulgent.

I still think this is an extraordinary place to browse. I do it myself sometimes. Just click on any post listed at the left, or on any given month in the past, and scroll down to topics you find intriguing. It's pretty damn good, if I do say so myself. The author has an interesting, quirky voice, and a wellspring of opinions.

Shall I continue this blog after I am no longer finding fair hope in Fairhope? Not quite. I have thought about it a lot lately, as I sort, pack and discard the detritus of my life for a move. But it becomes clear to me that I'll blog again.

I could rename this blog. A reader suggested the clever "Finding Fair Hoboken," which makes me smile just as this lovely person does when I think of her. But I've decided I'll create a blog called Finding Myself in Hoboken, describing the adjustments I must make in a new environment, the surroundings of Hoboken itself, and the changes in my life as I go forward.

I could just rename the blog and keep the address, but I think I'll find a way to make the address closer to the new blog title. I'd like to keep all the works here on the new blog, and if I figure out a way to do that I'll let you know.

There are not only second acts in American life, there are third acts. I come from the tradition of theatre in which the third act is when everything comes together, sometimes working out for the good. I hope that happens here.

My Left Great Toe Is the Center of the Universe

2007-11-04T14:44:00.000-08:00

November 5, 2007

I've got so much to do in packing to leave Fairhope that it's too bad all I can think of is my own toe. A friend admonished, "Quit whining! It's only a toenail!" but I must say of everybody who heard about this surgery situation he is the only one who couldn't manage even a sympathetic swift intake of breath between the front teeth in empathizing the pain of toenail removal.

Every move I make is dictated by the raw meat that stands where there once was a proud and beautiful toenail. Yesterday I dropped a stack of catalogues I was transferring to the recycle bin on the toe. I also hit that foot against the unnoticed metal bottom of the bed when showing the room in the garage to potential buyers of my house. I was carrying silverware from the dishwasher to the drawer when a knife hit the floor, barely missing the toe. I have become temporarily obsessed with this little square inch of my body. I am grieving the toenail, big time.

But I am planning the move anyway. I contacted the airline on the Internet and reserved my one-way flight. I am assembling moving cartons and looking at them, growing more anxious by the minute. Not anxious that I might be making a mistake, but anxious that I'm making such a big change.

Then there is the matter of saying goodbye. My friends are conferring: How are we to allow this? One wrote the other, "What shall we do when ML leaves, big toe and all. A font of information is gone!!!!" and the other forwarded that comment to me in an email.

He who received the "font of info" email wrote back, "Having met her as we did, and her accepting me and [my wife] as we are, makes her very special to me. Somehow, otherwise we would have never crossed paths. Like her blog intro says, a brainy woman ready for adventure, open to many things. I have not a clue really why she puts up with me, but I have enjoyed it for five or six years. I will miss having the opportunity to be in her company occasionally, and the hope of working together again. She's gotta go, ya know. So far there is none other and may never be. So, me reading a blog and her making rare posts will be something. And, do without,
I guess. [The wife, a Fairhope native] and her growing up friends that are here know stuff but not in the same sorta way, the organic way. She'll have her toe with her, nail or not, seeking new adventure in new surroundings more to her liking."

I suddenly felt like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz , getting in that balloon with Toto and realizing what she was leaving behind. Was this friend my Wizard, or my cowardly lion? Not the scarecrow or the tin man, I am certain of that. But I could see my group of friends in all those roles. And I remembered being quoted in a newspaper interview when I first returned to Fairhope 19 years ago, saying, "I feel like Dorothy returning from Oz -- there's no place like home!"

Now Fairhope is Oz, and I'm getting in the balloon which has Delta written on its side at the Pensacola airport on November 30, to take off for unknown lands as well as known ones.

I would be abnormal indeed if I didn't have some apprehension amid the excitement of change coupled with the rush of a new phase of my life all at once. I'll have a sore toe, but I can deal with that. I'll have a lot of new tasks to face, and I can deal with them too even with the toe condition.

But what will I do when I'm looking for a familiar face among all the new ones? What will happen in Hoboken to diminish the magic of Fairhope?

Where have all the munchkins gone?

One-Way Ticket to Palookaville

2007-11-01T06:43:00.001-07:00

November 1, 2007

My mind is occupied with too many things to blog these days, little personal things like buying a round-trip ticket with intentions of using only one half of it, filling the house with packing cartons and coaxing friends to buy the bulk of my furniture before I move. Then this afternoon there's the matter of having a toenail removed, perhaps permanently, and curiosity as to how debilitated I'll be, and for how long. The doctor's office people say I'll be able to drive home. Hope I'm able to get to the drugstore, too, for those prescription painkillers.

The movie On the Waterfront was filmed in Hoboken,
the old Hoboken that still had a dock, stevedores, Unions, bosses, and a visible presence of the mob. In the film, Marlon Brando, playing a boxer down on his luck, accused his brother who was also his manager of buying him "a one-way ticket to Palookaville." Hoboken itself has wrongly been accused of being the "Palookaville" of which the magnetic young actor spoke so disparagingly.

I have my one-way ticket now, to the new Hoboken, full of high-earning young investment bankers, many artists, writers, displaced Manhattanites and a few old New Jersey diehards, and I'm here to say, if it ever was Palookaville, it isn't any more. And it never was, by the way. Palooka was the old word for run-of-the-mill prizefighters, and Terry Malloy, the Brando character, was talking about his being denied the big time because his manager made him take a dive. Palookaville was never a place, but a state of mind.

Hoboken may be a state of mind, but it's not for losers or the world-weary. It's almost Manhattan now, maybe not quite, but a small, upscale town near enough for a round trip ticket to the big time.

Hoboken Journal: Day Three, Over and Out

2007-10-25T05:22:00.000-07:00

October 25, 2007

Having completed my business in Hoboken in just a matter of hours -- if you don't count the commute back and forth to the Motel Essex Regency -- I found myself with two days to kill just exploring the place. I'll sum those two days up in one post and prepare to retire the Finding Fair Hope blog once and for all as I wind up my time in the little town I came from.

I had signed the lease on the third floor walk-up and was waiting only to receive my copy signed by the landlord, and the key. But the plane I had booked was for noon Monday and it was Saturday morning. The realty agent had told me that the nearest shopping center was at the Pavonia Newport stop, so I decided to explore that, not expecting much. At least, I thought, I'll find a decent coffee shop and have breakfast. When I came out of the subway I wondered what planet I was on, or at least what country I was in. I was surrounded by glassy towers, wide streets, clean, classy architecture. I could hardly believe the shabby Motel Essex Regency which looks pretty much like we unenlightened think everything in New Jersey looks was just a subway stop and a $7 cab ride away. This could have been some modern corner of Europe; or, more accurately, it could have been Chicago. But it was Jersey City. What a delightful find. I snapped the photo you see and an attractive woman in a police uniform came up to me and said, "I don't know if you took a picture or were just looking at your pictures -- but you aren't allowed to take pictures in here." I must have given her a blank look because she repeated the sentence word for word, with a sweet smile, and I said to her, "All right. I won't take pictures in here," and put the camera away.

I browsed through a very upscale branch of Macy's and walked through the glittering mall, not jostled by crowds of overweight teenagers (or anybody else). I was fairly floating on air, hoping that when I move to New Jersey I can afford to shop in that mall from time to time.

Then I decided to go back to Hoboken and explore the neighborhood where I would be living. I took the "Light Rail" train, which is different from the subway, and takes you to a different part of the station. The trains are clean and travel mostly above ground. When I detrained I was in a real train station, just like in Europe, or like Grand Central.What do you know -- the Hoboken station is celebrating its Centennial, just like the Marietta Johnson School of Organic Education! Beautiful mahoganny benches and old chandeliers in a truly awesome timewarp-station.

I walked up Washington Street, which I've decided is one of the major thoroughfares of the world, and I'l tell you why I think that. It's a huge, wide street, well-lit at night, and the sidewalks are as wide as a normal street. This makes it a natural for the sidewalk cafés and the constant buzz of city life they inspire. It was a perfect October day, a little breezy and the sky a bright blue, as I walked up Washington Street (it seems to be just about impossible to take a photo of that street without half of the street being in shadow, by the way) and saw the people chatting on the sidewalks, pushing baby strollers, and drinking coffee in the many sidewalk venues. There was a happy, outgoing American attitude in what was essentially a Old Town atmosphere -- a very appealing combination.

I had a salad at a restaurant with tile floors and again the dark wood walls, and walked up to the new building where I found a tenant going inside who let me in to look at my new apartment and investigate where the electrical outlets are and walk the room for rough measurements so I could decide what furniture to bring. I stopped in the office of one of the realtors I had spoken with on the phone to tell her I had found a place and wouldn't be needing her services. She had found a place she wanted to show me in Guttenberg, but I was sure I could never love Guttenberg. She gave me a map of Hoboken and when I told her the buildings I loved she recommended I look for the library. When I heard her say, "We have a beautiful library!" I thought of how many times I'd heard that exclaimed about the unappealing structure that is the new library in Fairhope, and my heart sank.

I needn't have worried. Historic preservation has a place in Hoboken. The library there was probably built in the 1880's; it is small, Victorian and cozy. It smells of books and only has two computers. I hope it has friends, friends that don't think the best thing you can do for a library is make it five times the size you need "to allow for growth."

Hoboken, known as the Mile Square City, is actually two miles square, but it cannot grow because it is enclosed by neighboring cities. It has a historical museum which is ironically in a new building, and the display there now is of Hoboken's musical heritage. There is a corner devoted to favorite son Frank Sinatra, of course, and displays of the poster from Hair (authors Gerome Ragney and James Rado, who were hippie actors in the 1960's, lived in a warehouse loft in Hoboken when they wrote the show.) Stephen Foster apparently lived in Hoboken for a time. It was an interesting show, and I had a good time browsing through it.

On my travels through town I actually did meet a bona fide curmudgeon, a man with shoulder-length hair who had set up a table with old books and records for sale on the sidewalk in front of his apartment. We talked about the books and records, and he told me "Hoboken isn't what it used to be," and he gave me an inside track about the corruption in politics and the snobs who have moved into town. I know where he lives and plan to stop by again when I'm in the neighborhood.

Since I've started posting about Hoboken here, I've gotten lots of traffic and lots of email from Hobokenians too. It's as if my new life is calling to me. Now for the next three weeks I've got a lot of packing to do.

Day Two, Mission Accomplished

2007-10-24T02:29:00.000-07:00

October 24, 2007

The next morning I arose from the scratchy sheets of the Motel Essex Regency and managed a shower in what must be referred to as the bathroom. This turned out to be less an ordeal than I had anticipated, as there was plenty of hot water and the little coupon-sized towels sufficed if I used all three to do the job of drying. There had not been as much noise in the night as I expected, even though a crowd of three or four people did decide the space in the parking lot directly outside my room was the best place to start their party. Lots of shrieks and loud laughter gave me the impression there was alcohol involved. I was certain that this meant in a few hours the laughter would turn to noise, arguments, misunderstandings and probably a good bit of creative profanity. Fortunately for me, it didn't really happen, but the intermittent car sounds from the nearby expressway never abated.

I had to get to Hudson Street by nine. This meant having the motel page a cab to the Jersey City Terminal to take a train to Hoboken. A hyper little man with a cell phone was also waiting for a cab. Apparently he was late for a meeting. He owned the business, but the customers can't stand to be kept waiting. I told him I was on my way to Hoboken to look for an apartment. He quickly started scrawling something on a piece of paper from his pocket, telling me he had a nephew who was in real estate in Hoboken and to call him about getting me a place. We were joined in the cab by a black woman who looked to be nine and a half months pregnant. I thought we might have to make a side trip to the hospital.

The little man, who looked like James Caan in a way, kept talking on his cell phone and identifying himself as Jerry to the person on the other end of the line. He ended up following me through the turnstile and standing with me on the platform as I explained the way to get to Hoboken -- getting off the train at a stop called Pavonia Newport, and waiting for the next train on the same track which would be to Hoboken. I thought Pavonia sounded like one of those mythical kingdoms in an old operetta, but decided to keep this notion to myself. On the train from Pavonia Newport to Hoboken, an Asian couple with a decidedly unresponsive baby sat across from Jerry and me, and Jerry did his best to engage the baby in a little across-the-aisle kootchie-koo, waving and making faces, to no avail with this dullard infant. The question in my mind was if Jerry were Jewish or Italian, and his behavior with the baby cinched it. Italian. Also, as we parted at the Hoboken station, he said, "Call me," reminding me of the piece of paper with his phone number on it. I said, "I think I have a place lined up," and he again said, "Call me." Italian.

I went into a little bagel shop for breakfast. This place specializes in square bagels. Apparently it is a marketing tool in Hoboken to do something different with your bagels -- smashed bagels worked, so why not square? What I ended up with was kind of an Egg McMuffin on a square bagel and a glass of orange juice. Then I was ready for the trek up to 6th St. and Hudson.

The apartment was on the 3rd floor, on a beautiful block of a very nice street -- as reported, the nicest Hoboken has to offer. Across the street is Stevens Technical College, which happens to have a beautiful theatre space used for local productions of all kinds. A block away is a nice little park, Elysian Fields, and the local Little League ballpark. Just the other side of that is Frank Sinatra Drive which borders the river and one of the exquisite views of Manhattan Hoboken offers.
You will note in the picture there is a For Rent sign on the stoop in front of the second building from the left, and also a For Rent sign in the window of the third floor apartment of the building. Neither of those signs is there any more. I took the apartment after very little deliberation. The accommodating realtor drove me to Jersey City where he had another place for rent and we drove past two buildings I was considering. After I looked at the apartment he was renovating in Jersey City, and generally got an impression of Jersey City, I knew it had to be Hoboken for me, and that the Hudson Street place was just about perfect. It has one large room (10 x 20 feet), a tiny side room -- known as a "hall room" in brownstones, fine for a little bed and/or my laptop office; a big, eat-in kitchen, lots of closets and windows. There are actually three big windows in the kitchen, from which you can see the rooftops of Hoboken at sunset.

By noon my fate was sealed. I had written the requisite checks and signed the application form, called the realtor with the basement place. I celebrated by having lunch at Benny Tudino's (known as the best pizza in Hoboken, as long as you order it extra-crispy) and exploring Hoboken, including the library which is small, compact, Victorian in vintage and utterly beautiful, until I was ready to drop. I bought a sandwich and a banana and two bottles of water at Blimpie's and took them to the motel for supper and an early bedtime.

I slept fitfully on the hard mattress (and the sheets were no less scratchy than the night before) and wondered what I would do for the next two days.

Hoboken Journal, Day One

2007-10-23T05:59:00.000-07:00

October 23, 2007

I just got home from four days in Hoboken. Let me tell you what happened on the first day.

My flight left Pensacola at 7 A.M., which meant leaving the house at about five. I only needed a few changes of underwear and a hairdryer so I was able to travel with only a carry bag and my purse which holds a multitude of small objects and papers, none of which I can find without a lot of fishing and fuming. I included a little digital clock because I was going to be staying in a cheap motel in Jersey City, and cheap motels seldom have amenities like clocks. More on that motel later.

I arrived at La Guardia at 2 P.M. To get to New Jersey from La Guardia, which is in a different state, is quite a trick but I had instructions from the motel guy when I made reservations. A cab from that airport to anywhere in Jersey is at least $90. Instead I took the airport bus to Grand Central and started walking to the subway station known as the PATH (Port Authority something) which goes to New Jersey destinations. I called the realtor who had been so nice to me on the phone and he said he could show me the apartment whenever I got to Hoboken. He said, "Welcome home!"

That's the news, folks. This was not a pleasure trip. This was part of a plan to move from beautiful Fairhope, in the lower part of Alabama, to Hoboken, a city of undiscovered delights that has been calling to me since I first laid eyes on it last June. Convenient to Manhattan -- a ten-minute ride either by underground railroad or on the speed-ferry -- and crawling with local history and lore, Hoboken is the place I want to be next (and probably last).

Where was I? Oh, yes, the trip into Jersey City. I was standing in front of the New York Public Library, having walked from Grand Central, when I realized I didn't understand where the PATH train was. I hauled out my heavy old Nokia cell phone, virtually unused in Alabama, and called my nephew who lives in Manhattan and knows all about the transit system. After the pleasantries -- his surprise to hear my voice and learn that I was standing in front of the NY Public Library, and my revelation of my mission and need to know how to get to New Jersey from where I was -- he gave me the info that the PATH train is in the Herald Square station, just below Macy's.

This was a cinch. I took the #4 bus which goes down 5th Ave. to 34th and turns to take you to Macy's, and from there walked under the streets of New York until I found a sign that said "Journal Square Trains." Per instruction from the motel guy, I took that train and from there, now safely in the arms of New Jersey, got a taxi to the motel that cost $7.

So far, so good -- until I saw the motel and my room. More on that in another post. Now I'm going to tell you what else happened on my first day of this journey.

I checked into the Regency Essex (I've changed the name to protect myself from lawsuits brought on by later comments in future posts), and got another cab back to the train, hopped on a train to Hoboken, and found my friendly realtor.

The place he showed me was very pleasant. The ground floor of a row house lately made condominiums, this was a convenient place on a nice street. The realtor and his wife owned a condo above, and he had "saved" this place to show me because he thought I would be an interesting person to have in the building. I had a little problem with space -- there were closets, but they were small, and being on the ground floor it was essentially a basement apartment, with a dark central room but windows on either end, in the bedroom and the kitchen. There was a washer and dryer in the apartment. There was access to a nice little backyard. Such apartments are referred to as "garden apartments," because that sounds nicer than "basement."

I liked the realtor, liked the possibility of living in the building with him and his wife above me, and didn't dislike the apartment. I began mentally fitting it out with my furniture. Then my creaky old cell phone rang, and it was another realtor. He had a place on the top floor of a brownstone on Hudson Street and could show it to me the next day. My realtor informed me that Hudson Street was the prime location in Hoboken, "the Park Avenue of Hoboken," he said. "The mayor lives there." He said I should look at the other apartment before making a decision. He also told me that there had been so many calls about the apartment I was standing in that he had raised the price by $45 per month, but would give it to me at the price advertised if I wanted it.

We shook hands, and as we were taking leave he asked me how I'd liked the Orient Express. I was thrown by that -- what could he have known about my trip on the Orient Express some 25 years ago? He said when I told him on the phone I was a writer he'd Googled me and found my website He wanted to know if the lady who'd gone canoeing in the nude was a figment of my imagination or if she had been a real person. I told him the truth of the matter: She was a real person, and she did all the things I report in Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree -- and quite likely a great deal more.

I had time for a drink or two before finding a place for dinner and finding my way back to Jersey City. I stopped off in an appealing old bar called Busker's, which inside made me think of the old White Horse Tavern in the West Village. It was crowded mostly with men, apparently business guys, jovially talking sports and the like. There were about four flat-screen tvs at the bar (I was to discover this is a must for Hoboken bars). There was a pretty young woman mixing drinks like White Sangrias by the glass, and when a customer approached, she said, "What do you want from my life -- besides a Heineken's draft?"

From there I found a place I'd read about in a Hoboken blog as a jazz bar, "You'll find it from the English phone booth in front." I had a long conversation about cell phones and the possibility of a Frank Sinatra festival in Hoboken with a nice looking young man, finished another glass of Pinot Grigio (which he paid for), and then went looking for the Hudson street address. There I saw the beautiful street itself, looked at the outside of the building (very nice), found a good Italian restaurant, and took a cab from Hoboken to my Jersey City motel for the night. I spent the night decorating two apartments in my mind, one of which I hadn't even seen.

Tune in tomorrow. Decision time.

The Man in My Garage

2007-10-13T14:05:00.000-07:00

October 13, 2007

At the recent reunion of the Marietta Johnson School of Organic Education, a.k.a. The Organic School, people came into Fairhope from all over. I expected to have a couple sharing one of the little bedrooms upstairs in my cottage, a student teacher in the other, and a man living in the little room at the back of the garage for the duration.

As it turned out, the only one who was able to make it was the man in my garage. Playing hostess to him as well as partaking of all the events of the reunion weekend and giving something of a lecture at one of them (plus reading a chapter from Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree at another) gave an offbeat dimension to my participation in the proceedings.

He turned out to be in some ways typical as a product of our unconventional school, but for the main part, a man like no other. He likes to go which ever way the wind blows him, and this has taken his windblown persona in many directions. A delightful raconteur and observer of details, he carried big blank notebooks with him wherever he went, asked questions of everybody, and wrote down almost every damn thing anybody said. He was quick with a quip, but quizzical about many of the answers he got. I had a wonderful time with him.

As it turns out, he's a retired environmental consultant who has decided to relocate from the grey Northwest (Anacordes, WA, where he says "everybody is nice nice nice -- so nice I had enough,") to the desert country of Azo, AZ, to be part of an artists' community and develop his talents in art. He lives quite comfortably on almost no money, reads omniverously, and writes all the time too. He was complimentary about my writing, and made good suggestions too. He read When We Had the Sky and suggested some rewrites I shall use.

He and I had long talks in which we enlightened each other on the ways of the world. We both have had varied and amusing experiences and enjoyed each other's company enormously. I took him down into one of the gullies that once were so popular for youngsters in Fairhope. I introduced him to a local restaurant where he warily ordered crab gratin and was amazed that it actually had a lot of crabmeat in it. He said in the Pacific Northwest they don't put crabmeat in their crab dishes! Hmmm...that must be quite a trick. I introduced him to the Lower Alabama specialty of fried crab claws and he was quite taken with it.

Mostly he was looking for himself, the young self who had boarded at the school in the 1940's. Some women remembered having had dates with him and told him how much fun he used to be -- one time he went to the Country Club with one and walked a few miles in the wrong direction going home until somebody found him. Reunions are good for this kind of exploration, and he is nothing if not an explorer.

He's been married a few times, has grown sons, and takes a lot of time off to visit old lady friends and make new friends of all ages. He says his exposure to Organic Education put him on the path of discovery that has been his life. He didn't want to leave the school by the time his parents decided he didn't need it any more, but it really never left him, and he seems to be searching for more than the old landmarks and contact with people now shadowy in his memory.

I enjoyed the diversion of having this character in my garage. He stayed on a couple of days after the reunion broke up, and after he left I received a phone call at 9 P.M.

"I'm in a youth hostel in New Orleans," said the voice. "I'm having a wonderful time. It's $17 a night and full of young people. We're all drinking and singing."

Wherever he is, I'm sure he's having a wonderful time.

And Now for Something Completely Different

2007-10-11T07:07:00.000-07:00

October 11, 2007

I'm not accustomed to linking with such as this, but Jerome Murat is new to me and I think you'll find this fascinating, as I do. Please watch it all; it goes from interesting to absolutely astonishing. Just click here, sit back, and wait to be amused. I'd love your comments.

Just Relishing Fairhope

2007-10-08T02:19:00.000-07:00

October 8, 2007

There are moments when all the petty complaints about the changes in Fairhope, or the changes in the world, its new generations, the erosion of a way of life -- all just disappear as we are surrounded by loved ones banding together to share memories of the past and hope for things to come. The Centennial Reunion of the Marietta Johnson School, the Organic School, was just such a time.

We gathered Friday night, as you see above, at the former campus of the school. Some of us were standing in spots where we had played in some 50 or 60 years before, in that longed-for childhood of our memory. But Friday night was a time to look into faces almost forgotten, erase in our minds the wrinkles and white hair, see the essence of eternal youth, look into the spirit of the grown person before us and cherish the fact that we were back together for a moment. At any reunion there is always the bittersweet phrase in the back of our minds, "Maybe for the last time..."

After the first gathering we went over to the new building that replaced our beloved Fairhope-tile Arts and Crafts Building, an auditorium with all the charm of the wedding chapel of a Holiday Inn (not my phrase, but I had to steal it here), and recited the prayer of the school, probably written by Marietta Johnson herself:

Give us thy harmony, oh Lord,
That we may understand
The beauty of the sky, the rhythm of the soft wind's lullaby,
The sun, the shadows, of the woods in the spring,
And thy great love,
That dwells in everything.

I read a chapter of my book Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree, to trigger memories and kick off the event with a positive punch. A speech of gratitude followed, and I was surprised with a beautiful silver bowl, engraved to me for the work I've done in holding the school together in recent years. I could not have been more surprised and touched, and will keep this trophy in a place of honor.

The feel-good events continued without a break from then on. We had a varied potluck supper and time to mingle until late in the evening. The next morning the new library hosted a talk by Dr. Paul Gaston about the role of the school in his life, and the place of the school in the context of the educational system. He is a gentle, wonderful speaker, a citizen of the world and a favorite son of Fairhope (whose grandfather, E.B. Gaston founded the town). Afterwards, people all over the hall spoke up about their memories, capped by a dynamic comment by the indomitable Elsie Arnold Butgereit summing up the need for continued support and attention to the school as well as personal heartfelt gratitude for the benefits all who attended it, however briefly, have reaped all their lives.

There was an Open House on the campus, managed by a dynamic group of younger people who happen to have children at the school today. The students demonstrated the folk dancing that they have been taught by Melanie King, a sprout from the Arnold strain, who happens to have a daughter in kindergarten. Melanie is a single mom whose child is being raised, not only by her and her huge, loving family, but by the village that is the Organic School.

Saturday night we all folk danced at a party in the Methodist Fellowship Hall. I went to that one with some trepidation, but as soon as I heard that familiar music from the past, you couldn't stop me dancing.

We wound up with a brunch, more mingling, hugging, and the reassuring news that we had reached our fund-raising goals for the time being.

I went in to the Museum, expecting to stay an hour, not expecting any traffic. There was someone waiting there when I arrived, and just then Edna Rockwell Harris showed up to donate some pottery made at the school in the 1940's by her and her cousin Helen Baldwin Telfer. Then Dr. Donald Rockwell dropped in to see if we could scan his graduation photo. Everybody was sitting around chatting when Shaw Smith Waltz came in with her husband to see if we needed any of the things she had saved, including a 1945 Organic Merry-Go-Round (the school's mimeographed newspaper), which we didn't have. Then two young ladies, one who had attended the school in the 1ate 70's and 80's, came in. The graduate confessed that in 1983 she had checked out a book about Shakespeare and Francis Bacon from the school library and then came in to return it. We looked at the old volume and noted it had been published in 1916!

Everybody began strolling out when Malcolm Campbell (SOE 1942) and his wife Jeanne dropped in, and we all had a wonderful chat.

It was quite a day, the end of a wonderful weekend. I'm still too tired to sleep, but don't worry. That will come.

Oh, I forgot to mention this. I sold two books.

Selling a Dead Book

2007-10-06T15:17:00.000-07:00

October 6, 2007

I had great expectations for my book Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree when I paid for the reprinting of it a couple of years ago. Luckily it's a pay-as-you-go online operation that gives me a chance to order books on demand. Luckily, because the demand has been dwindling over the years since the book sold its first thousand copies in late 2003. A little book of memories of an odd little American town in the 1950's, it apparently has not all that much long-term appeal.

However, I refuse to believe that its chances are dead. You can find out about the content of the book by clicking here. When I wrote it I thought of it as a low-key kind of Lake Wobegone Days that would reach out to people who had never heard of Fairhope and had no interest in the economic theory from which it sprang. I thought the characters I remembered would resonate generally and entertain audiences I could hardly imagine.

Over time there has naturally been less interest in the book, which stirred a great number of people after its first publication in late 2001. I thought, however, that the best place for a final splash would be at the reunion of graduates and former students from the Marietta Johnson School , an event that has been in the works for over six months and is taking place this very minute.

We expected 200 visitors to town for the reunion, but the guest list turned out to be more like half of that. Each event during the weekend has drawn a different crowd. The shocking thing is, with all the pats on my back by all the people attending -- they even gave me a silver bowl for service beyond the call of duty over the past 9 years -- not one book has been sold.

I tell myself they all already own copies. They have bought enough for gifts that they don't need to stock up on any more. I tell myself the readers for this book haven't really found it yet, and they will, one by one, year by year.

I also remind myself that there are two more events as part of the reunion -- a folk dance party tonight and a good-bye brunch tomorrow. Maybe they're just waiting.

Or, maybe I'll become one of those authors with a box of 50 unsold copies of her only book, a little treasure that she once wrote about her home town. Maybe I'll lug those copies around for the rest of my life and start giving them away at every opportunity. I know this sounds churlish, so much so that I am reluctant to post it at all. But you just don't know how hard it is to sell a book whose time has come and gone.

Why People Don't Move

2007-10-02T02:03:00.000-07:00

October 2, 2007

Here I am all up in the air about another life change and wondering if that means there's something wrong with me. I remember a lifelong friend, when we were in our early 30's, saying to me, "Have you ever noticed that every five years you change your whole life?"

Psychiatrists say there are a finite number of personality types. Surely this tendency to overturn and uproot is an aspect of one -- "the mover," perhaps. "The hysteric," perhaps. "The seeker," perhaps. I and other movers would probably prefer the latter -- it sounds so lofty and poetic.

I've lived in Fairhope for 19 years now, having lived my first 20 here and then taking off to other climes for a good 40 (divided not in five-year increments, but close to it if you count the moves-within-moves). Over this recent period of time in Fairhope I've lived in six different abodes. I really thought The Captain's House would be the last in my life, and that I'd stay here until I was ready for assisted living. I thought I'd stick it out for another 20 years or so. I spent considerable time and money feathering this nest with furniture and accessories that I felt enhanced the Fairhope ambiance of the place, from Mission antiques (the furniture style I remember from older homes here in my childhood) to the addition of air conditioning for 21st Century needs. I attended yard sales, went to Thrift Shops, antique auctions, and actually invested in a few rather expensive antique pieces over 20 years.

Now that I'm fixin' to move again I'm beginning to think it's other people who are wrong. They are bound to stay in the same place year after year for one main reason. Going through their stuff -- editing, purging, and just plain cleaning up -- is too damn hard. I watch "Mission: Organization" on HGTV, and "Everything Must Go!" on BBC America, and I see the kind of homes most people live in; I see their attachment to their stuff. In recent days have conditioned myself to look at every piece in my house individually and decide if I can live without it, and if so, put it in the yard sale pile or plan to give it away. I put all the small things into cartons, and deal with the cartons one by one, picking up every piece of paper, every object, looking at it, and making a decision.

It ain't easy, but in a way it's kind of fun. It's a wonderful feeling to be shed of the piles of stuff in the closets. I don't know how many cartons, files, and drawers full of papers I had labelled "Writings," I have found in my recent purges. I don't know what makes people today think they need so many clothes. I don't know who will want to buy my pottery collection, or my Mission furniture, but I don't see any of it fetching much in the marketplace. I'm even going to sell my car and travel by the great New Jersey rail system, saving money on insurance, upkeep, and gasoline as I go forward into the sunset.

And I don't care what anybody says, it's the people who don't move who are missing something. If you're standing still you're probably not getting anywhere. I may not be either, but staying here is going backward. I know why people don't move.

On a Clear Day You Can See New Jersey

2007-09-26T02:27:00.000-07:00

September 26, 2007

I can see it all now.

Yesterday it was a bit murky, being that there is no traffic in the real estate market in Fairhope these days, and I have not heard from my broker how he can rework my account so that I have income instead of what is laughingly referred to as growth. I checked the real estate listings in Hoboken daily and it looked moreso than somewhat iffy that I'd be able to afford the monthly rent on a spacious apartment with charm and a view of the Empire State Building. Especially if my house didn't sell.

I had hit a wall. I was discouraged. It didn't seem too bright to try to rent out this house and still have to pay taxes on it and taxes on the income I made from it, plus the maintenance of shoring it up and making repairs as necessary. I felt stuck; I felt trapped.

So I thought, what part of this equation can I change? What part can I keep? What must I keep? What I realized was that Hoboken, despite its intrinsically humorous name, is one of the jewels of New Jersey. It is the center of new growth, of young and upscale new residents (who work in Manhattan), of old charm and new money. Rents therefore are higher than its neighboring cities -- you pay for those views, those parks, that short commute to the city.

So I started browsing Craigslist New Jersey for rentals in neighboring Jersey City Heights, Weehawken and Union. All of these places are just a jump on the train from Hoboken, and some are almost as close to Manhattan as Hoboken is. What I found is that the rents are more in line with what I can afford and I could get more space for the money. I have walked those streets and found them very pleasant. They didn't compare in charm and convenience (and happiness-vibe) to Hoboken, but they were close enough. Okay, some of the pictures are downright depressing -- but all of them aren't. Some are knockouts.

I can see it all now. A year from now I'm comfortably situated in a quaint apartment somewhere, walking tree-lined streets after buying some groceries at Montclair's Whole Foods or the Portuguese supermarket in the Ironbound of Newark. I'm sitting on a bench in a park across from my apartment. An elderly lady sits down next to me and we look at the view of the Manhattan skyline. We are having a gentle chat about the neighborhood and the history of the city where I'm living, be it Hoboken, Jersey City, whatever.

She says to me, "All you new people are the same, you know. You move to a place because you find it quaint, and then you tear down what's there and replace it with something modern. You should have seen this town 50 years ago. It was really special then."

The Slap of Reality

2007-09-25T11:15:00.000-07:00

September 25, 2007

My decision to relocate from Fairhope was a long time coming. I look back at posts on this blog over the last 12 months and can see it coming, ever so slightly. My good intentions of informing the newcomers to Fairhope of the history of the place began to slide about a year ago, as I saw that not only were they not interested, most of them were happy believing that it was their job to improve this little village by bringing it up to date with all the amenities they had left behind in other towns and cities.

Their idea of preserving Fairhope's heritage consisted of protesting the construction of a Wal-Mart just outside the city limits or waving placards in front of the building that once was a high school and has long since been outgrown as a public school kindergarten.

I had a hard time talking with these people. I have come to see Fairhope as a Rorschach test for people looking for something. They see in Fairhope what they want to see, and if it's not there they talk each other into building it, from an almost-unused bike trail to a pretentious and unneeded library. They are hostile to the Single Tax Corporation, which was Fairhope's own raison d'etre, and indifferent to the Marietta Johnson School of Organic Education, which was once Fairhope's principle attraction. They have removed the funky little cottages which gave Fairhope its unique, patchwork charm, and the city is now awash in huge, expensive-looking houses that show nothing of period or taste.

A brush with New York City last winter was all I needed to make up my mind to leave. I am well aware that the world, as well as little Fairhope, has changed. But New York has changed in many ways for the better; it is cleaner, safer, more beautiful and more livable, even though it's too expensive. I got to thinking -- "How can I get back here, where I can find the kind of people I like and the kind of vital situations that I miss?"

How, indeed. I have a house which I hoped would sell quickly. It is one of a kind, a treasure of "old" Fairhope, on a lovely double lot convenient to the center of town and to the bay. It has been on the market since the first of July and has been seen by two people. The first pronounced the rooms too small, and the second pronounced the price too high. As of this morning, I've dropped the price once more and am willing to go lower if that will mean anything.

My plan is to move to Hoboken, the little jewel of a town that's just ten minutes from the West Village, my favorite section of Manhattan. Hoboken, the town with the amusing name, has a great deal that appeals to me -- old neighborhoods, a historical society, a lively night life and good eating places, to say nothing of delis and street fairs. What it also has, unfortunately for me, is high rents, and the fixed income that I can barely make it on in Lower Alabama will not do it for me up in the high-tax, high maintenance Northeast, particularly if I'm counting on getting on the train to Manhattan to keep up with the latest art shows, plays, and watering holes.

I'm discouraged today, but not to say depressed. I've talked with my broker about rearranging my IRA investments to provide dividend income until my house sells, and I've told my realtor to drop the price again. The Fairhope reality there just is no traffic in the real estate market at this time, and a hell of a lot of inventory. I'm probably not going to make any money to speak of on the house, but owning a property in a distant location makes no sense. I've got to unload it as fast as I can.

My realtor tells me not to extrapolate doom and gloom from the current real estate situation here, as is the wont of the financial pundits who are having a field day doing just that. As the weather gets better, there are always more people "discovering" Fairhope, and deciding to move here and improve it. I just hope some of them appreciate a particular Craftsman cottage and have a little money in their pockets.

In the meantime, I can simply downsize my dream. I don't have to live in Manhattan; I don't have to live in Hoboken either. To meet my needs I could find a bigger apartment in adjacent locales like Paulus Hook in Jersey City, or even Weehawken. I would consider something in the Ironbound of Newark, which has a special ring to it and is almost as convenient to the city as Hoboken. George Clooney wrecked his bike in Weehawken last week; if I had been living on the same street I would have a story to tell.

While my heart was set on Hoboken, all of the above have more appeal to me than the Fairhope of today. As my realtor said to me, all I have to do is be patient.

My Second 50 Years

2007-09-23T02:27:00.001-07:00

September 23, 2007

I was 48 when I moved back to Fairhope from New York City. I remember the feeling of exhilaration I had -- it was like having a chance to start over from where I had begun! I was fond of saying I was looking forward to my second 50 years, at the same time hoping I would know better than to make the same mistakes as I had made in the first.

I'm 17 years into my second 50 now. It's like being 17 again, having stumbled a time or two, having achieved a thing or two, and deciding, just as I did when I was very young, that New York was where I'd rather be than anywhere in the world. I've watched Fairhope itself change before my eyes from a sleepy village on the verge of growth to the upscale, socially-upwardly-mobile (and maybe that "mobile" should be capitalized) enclave it now unabashedly is. It has lost all but a trace of its reformist heritage; it has replaced the bohemians with the artistically pretentious. One or two real artists live here, but they are surrounded by self-congratulatory arrivistes who proclaim the ambience of Fairhope to be elegant and beautiful.

I have really lived in this town. My best friends are affluent enough to take long trips and some have second homes in other parts of the country. But I lived here. I committed myself to the betterment of the community by founding an artistic venture (the ill-fated Jubilee Fish Theatre), joining in an effort at historical preservation (defeated), participating in community theatre (hardly my finest hour), and working to shore up the unique school that was one of Fairhope's original, earth-shaking visionary institutions. I wrote a book of stories of the Fairhope I remembered from the 1950's.

All the while I have grown increasingly despairing of conveying the message to the newcomers who have taken over the town -- the message, "Okay, you love it here. Then don't remove its reason for being." To my right and my left the cottages have been demolished and replaced by oversized, empty houses, void of charm and even life. Most are owned by empty nesters whose dream, apparently, is to run a hotel for grandchildren -- or perhaps to impress each other. I don't know. I don't get a whole lot from these people, but they seem to view Fairhope as a generic little town upon which they can impose their own image of Norman Rockwell's America. They do not care to know that there was something real here before they came to replace it with the phony.

I wrote a post a few months ago about the way time was whizzing by as I prepare to depart for the Northeast. I used the word "whizzing" and the search engines sent me a few (probably 11-year-old males) looking for information on "whizzing." I used the term in its old-fashioned comic book sense, that is to say, "speeding." Time has indeed sped by as I prepare for my next chapter, whether or not I use up the whole 50 years. I'll relocate to quaint Hoboken (don't laugh), which is a ten-minute commute to Manhattan, small enough to be manageable, and considerably cheaper than the Big Apple.

In two weeks the school will celebrate its Centennial with a reunion -- see the post below -- and before the end of the year I'll have organized my finances in order to make my move. It doesn't look as if there'll be buyers for the Captain's House, so I may try to rent it for a year or two, until the real estate market awakens here. I only hope I don't have to tear it down and sell the place as two vacant lots, but I'm considering that possibility. Nobody moving to Fairhope seems to want an old house, and there is plenty of new construction.

I have a good feeling about my next 50 years. I'm still in good physical condition and all the things I love most are in New York City. I have a few friends left there, and the city looks great. I like the vibe in Hoboken. It has a historical museum (and a very interesting history to boot), a yearly Italian Festival, lots of music, restaurants and night life. I don't expect to be hanging out in the bars, but it's fun knowing they're there (and I'll bet there are some great AA meetings!). And I'll be able to get into the city for matinees, street fairs, concerts, and movies that never come to this area. I may not even own a television set.

I'm going to sell off most of my furniture and rent a one bedroom apartment -- maybe a studio apartment for a time. I'll buy what fits, and what I need. I'll downsize; I'll have a couple of monster yard sales and give away most of my clothes.

I'm going to have a different life. I hope I don't make the same mistakes I did in the first 50 years.

Return of the Natives

2007-09-21T05:01:00.000-07:00

September 21, 2007

The Bell Building, Built 1904, First home of the Marietta Johnson School of Organic Education

In a Utopian community itself barely 106 years old, it’s not many an institution that can claim to have thrived for 100 years, surviving two world wars, an economic depression, the death of its founder, and years of struggle for its own place in the education sun.

The Marietta Johnson School, a.k.a. the Organic School, is such an institution in Fairhope. Founded by visionary educator Marietta Johnson, the school is poised for a reunion which will celebrate its one hundredth year of continous operation. Visitors, including graduates and former students from all over the country, are expected to convene here October 5-7 to reunite with old friends, check out the activities at the school, and learn some of the many stories their classmates have to tell.

The school was founded as one of the first progressive schools in the nation, and it has never closed its doors although it has endured financial crises, leadership shifts, petty disputes a certain amount of negative publicity throughout its lifetime. The negatives now in the past, the school is going forward this year with increased enrollment and an alumni base eager to help secure its future.

People are expected to begin arriving for the Centennial Reunion as early as Thursday morning from Massachusetts, Arizona, Ohio, New Jersey, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida and many locations in Alabama. Organizers say the pre-registration of graduates living in the Fairhope area is surprisingly low, but expected to be up to 200 by the time the events begin.

The Centennial Reunion will include an Open House at the school’s new campus on Marietta Drive (east of Section St.) at Pecan Avenue. At this, the buildings will be open and students will show visitors what a day in the life of the school is like. Current students will be assisted by graduates who are now of high school and college age, armed with videocams to record stories related to them by some of the older alums. This battery of roving reporters will add to the afternoon fun, which will include a pottery demonstration by Organic graduate and well-known local potter Tom Jones, a cake walk, and the graduates will enjoy a folk dance party Saturday night.

Beginning with Registration at 4 P.M. Friday, the old campus of the school -- now Faulkner Community College -- will be abuzz with activities including talks by Dr. Paul Gaston, Maggie Mosteller-Timbes, and Leslie Mulcahy, Director of the School. Being a graduate of the the school myself, I will probably be very visible on the scene and have a word or two to say to the assembled myself.

Events are open to the public and may serve to help inform the new Fairhope of its heritage. At least that's my hope, and a fair hope it is.

What Made Fairhope Fairhope?

2007-09-15T06:00:00.001-07:00

September 15, 2007

Marietta Johnson in 1938

There is an ongoing parlor game in Fairhope about "what makes Fairhope Fairhope." I know I used the name a lot of times in that brief sentence, but I did it because I had to. Fairhope is nothing if not self-obsessed, particularly the new people who've moved in to what they consider a magical little town that seems to have appeared just to provide them with a sense of wonder.

But the elements that came together to create what may appear to be a thriving little Disneyland town are really quite different. Fairhope was once a reformist enclave which has now been all but swallowed up by a modernity gone very wrong. Its last shreds of idealism, the Single Tax Colony and the School of Organic Education, are hanging by slim threads indeed.

The importance of the Marietta Johnson School of Organic Education to the development of Fairhope as a colony of artists, intellectuals and reformers cannot be measured. In its early days, at least half the families of Fairhope had children in the school, which added to the village’s cachet of individuality and self-actualization.

Organic Education is education designed for the whole organism – body, mind, and spirit. Behind the theory is the knowledge that children love to learn and therefore school should be a pleasure to them. This is an extreme departure from traditional education; though begun as a demonstration school in Fairhope one hundred years ago, it is as extraodinary today as it was when the school was founded.

Marietta Johnson, a teacher in the normal school system in Minnesota, discovered Fairhope through fellow Minnesotans who were interested in Single Tax. She was newly married to a farmer and carpenter who was described as “a tall, handsome Swede” by those who remembered him some fifty years later.

Franklin and Marietta Johnson made their first trip to Fairhope in December of 1903, leaving St. Paul in the middle of a snowstorm and arriving in the kind of beautiful weather so often found in Fairhope in early winter. Ardent devotees of the Single Tax theory, they were enchanted with the town and hoped to buy and work a farm nearby. However, destiny had other plans for the couple.

The Fairhope of the early 1900’s was decidedly different from the city it is today. With a population hovering between 300 and 400, the town had been founded to demonstrate the validity of Henry George’s theory. Still a small enclave – only reached by boat – Fairhope had no paved roads, no automobiles yet, and a struggling but idealistic economy. In spite of its out-of-the-way location, little Fairhope was acquiring a reputation as an excellent resort area for intellectuals from the Northeast, the Midwest, and California.

Fairhope’s citizens were interested in new ideas from all quarters. At the dawn of the 20th Century, they believed great things were about to happen, and they also believed Fairhope to be the ideal location to demonstrate the efficacy of new ideas. Many of the Utopians who founded Fairhope, including E.B. Gaston himself, had children of school age and were interested in new ideas about education.

Marietta Johnson, trained as an elementary school teacher, had long been studying the new disciplines of Early Childhood Development and Child Psychology. She dreamed of a school that would be geared to the stages of development of the child rather than the old approach of forcing the child to fit the school system. In those days it was revolutionary to assume that children are radically different from adults – and it was even more unthinkable to imagine that their natural curiosity results in a natural joy in learning. The more she talked to people in Fairhope, the more inspired she became that she was on the right track in starting a school to benefit the revolutionary attitude of Fairhope.

She was obsessed with education, and her enthusiasm led her to believe that everyone who heard her theory would understand and agree. She was convinced that a demonstration school in Fairhope would reform the whole school system in America and the world.

Mrs. Johnson reinvented herself once she moved to Fairhope permanently – and she was 42 years old at the time. With zeal for her educational philosophy, she became a spellbinding lecturer, an accomplished fund-raiser, and a trainer of teachers who flocked to Fairhope to the school from all over the country. Mrs. Johnson and E.B. Gaston became friends and colleagues in proselytizing for both Fairhope and the school, and he and his wife enrolled all four of their children there.

Mrs. Johnson’s approach to education was as profound as it was simple. She knew that children learn as they play, and she felt that play was one of the most important ways a child could learn. While offering the traditional academic curriculum along with its program of activities in the fresh air, music, art, and handwork, the school did not hold one study as more important than another. The Organic School did not grade its children or have periodic tests or examinations. There were no dress codes. The artistic and crafts courses were required. Liberal use was made of Fairhope’s natural resources in the education of the children. Field trips to the gullies, the beach and activities outside on the beautiful 10-acre campus (now the home of Faulkner Community College) were part of the learning experience.

Children acted out the Greek myths on their hikes to the gullies. They came barefooted to school and climbed trees at recess. They sat outdoors for classes. In other words, they loved going to school. It was basic to Mrs. Johnson’s theory that this atmosphere offers an ideal situation for learning.

Today you meet many people from “old” Fairhope who will regale you with information they learned at the Organic School. The school – founded on the theory that hands-on projects are the best way to learn any skill – peopled Fairhope with generations who could build houses, throw pots, dance, paint pictures, write stories. Among their number are also doctors, lawyers, educators, military men, as well as entrepreneurs in the business world and practitioners of the arts.

In the 1920’s, the Marietta Johnson School was a magnet for the community. Its existence changed the history of Fairhope. In the process, one child at a time, the Marietta Johnson School has been at the heart of what makes Fairhope and its people unique. Those who supported the school, and the children who attended it, had (and still have) sincerity, innocence, and an eagerness for learning – their whole lives long. It’s the Fairhope attitude, and, more to the point, it’s the attitude of Organic Education.

Once Upon a Time in Fairhope

2007-09-13T04:09:00.000-07:00

September 13, 2007

Edward J. Kearney, Sam Guncler in I Hate Hamlet

One of the prospects that enticed me to move back to Fairhope from New York in 1988 was that I could start another theatre company, as I had in Switzerland with the American community group we called the Little Theatre of Geneva. Fairhope seemed a good location for the first Equity theater in the southern part of the state, due to the huge success of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, first in Anniston and then in Montgomery, where it sat, and still does, in the middle of a 40-acre tract of land with a physical plant that cost something like $50 million.

If people from Fairhope would drive nearly three hours to see Shakespeare, I reckoned, would they not go across town to see a little Neil Simon, Noel Coward or Tennessee Williams? The Grand Hotel offered us space in the loft of their golf club, and I used the sale of a little scrap of land as seed money to create my theatre.

I named the company the Jubilee Fish Theatre, in an attempt to be, as I stated in the flyer, "imaginative, innovative -- and fun!" My husband tried his best to talk me out of the name, but the locals enjoyed it. Someone from Fairhope (perhaps me) will explain to you sometime what is meant by jubilee fish, but anyway I liked saying we were the only company in the world with that name. It definitely wasn't pretentious, and it definitely set us apart.

The first season consisted of four plays: A.R. Gurney's The Middle Ages, The Price, by Arthur Miller, The Deadly Game, and Somerset Maugham's The Circle. I scouted Montgomery for some of my first actors, including the dynamic young man named John Preston, who went on to become a favorite at Alabama Shakespeare Festival, playing, among other roles, an unforgettable Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew. I made contact with a New York agent who sent his beginning actors to me, and we worked for years together, with him supplying me with appropriate members of the actors' union for my plays.

We did such new plays like Beth Henley's The Miss Firecracker Contest, pictured here with Jed Dickson, Martina Vidmar, backed by a cast of onlookers including Carter Inskeep, Sarah Benz Phillips, Mary Margaret Thomas (mostly hidden), and Tina Hightower. At the end of that production one of my regular audience members took me aside and asked plaintively, "Why do you keep doing these comedies that are so sad?"

It was kind of a trademark at Jubilee Fish Theatre, comedies that had some sadness, or serious plays that had some laughs. I had to keep the casts small because of the space in that loft, and I never made a cent at my chosen profession, but kept pouring my own money in to keep it going. At the end of nine years I was losing about as much as I did on that first event that launched the company. My daughter was in New York City and pregnant with my first grandson. The theatre no longer seemed a viable profession, at least not for me.

So I moved on, and have now boxed all the memorabilia I can find into cartons for packing. In researching this, I found I had kept alarmingly little, and vital bits of information about my casts and my seasons seem to have been discarded over time, and over the recent purge of papers as I pack up to move. You can't keep everything, but there are moments in one's own once-upon-a-time when remnants of past projects will light up your heart. Just thinking about the days of Jubilee Fish Theatre make me a little happy, like a comedy tinged with sad moments.

Six Years Ago

2007-09-11T05:28:00.000-07:00

September 11, 2007

A few months ago I was in New York City, a city still bruised by the terrible events of six years ago when a few deranged types, led by a fanatic, chose to take the lives of over 3,000 innocent people for no reason other than that they were Americans. In my walks around the city, I would pass firehouses with plaques commemmorating the brave men from their ranks who had given their lives in the effort to save lives. We are too close to it to comprehend the vastness of this wound to our nation and to one of the greatest cities in the world, but everyone says we are on our way to healing.

The families who lost their loved ones are still in shock, but trying, as mourning families must, to find a path to take in order to move on. The city's mayor, the very competent Michael R. Bloomberg, has done a great deal to rebuild the city and take it forward in spite of the crucible his constituents have endured.

In September, 2001, I was a different person, in a very different place for where I sit today. This is what I wrote in my blog a year ago:

I was on the first real vacation I had taken in years, beginning with a trip to Northern California for the big outdoor art show in Sausalito over the Labor Day weekend. My stepdaughter Amy had a booth at the show, and I went with her and her husband Phil to stay in a sweet little in in San Rafael. During that leg of the trip I had managed to hook up with an old boyfriend, himself also single again, in San Francisco. He took me on a wondrous tour of the nighttime city -- wandering into haunts in Chinatown, catching the music in a great jazz club, and eating cioppino at a garlicky little restaurant.

I then went for a week with a friend I had known in junior high at the Organic School and had not seen since. Neil and her husband Neal -- yes, that's their names -- turned out to be delightful grownups, gourmets, nonconformists, and living in the Silverlake section of Los Angeles. They only had one car and they had no television set. They had a charming little storybook cottage with no pets except for the feral cats who lived in the backyard. Neil and I had been having one of the nice catching-up visits that old friends sometimes are lucky enough to experience. I was scheduled to fly back home through Pensacola on September 13.

On this morning five years ago Neil came in to wake me up at about six a.m. L.A. time. She told me of the terrible situation in New York. Remember, we had no tv to watch; she and Neal were listening to the radio. Then their friends began calling, realizing that they didn't have a television set, and thinking that would be the only way to learn about what was happening. Neal had worked at the World Trade Center only a few years before; he was beside himself with worry about friends. Neil and I worried about our own safety, and I knew there was no way I was going to fly back home in two days. But I wanted to get out of Los Angeles as soon as I could. Neil assured me that she had a sixth sense about these things and didn't think Los Angeles was going to be hit. Never mind that, no airport felt safe; I had to get home somehow.

Someone suggested the bus. Nothing sounded safer than a Greyhound Bus at that time, the big old lumbering behemoths that used to take me from Fairhope to Mobile on a Saturday afternoon to watch a movie. I knew it was going to be a hell of a ride from Los Angeles to Lower Alabama, but I cancelled the plane tickets and went to the bus station. Neil and I looked around and the little station looked clean and all but empty. This was going to be rather nice. I'd just get off when I got weary and find a nearby motel and get on the next bus going east when I got up in the morning.

Of course it was not that pat. The first bus from the clean little station took me to the main bus terminal in Los Angeles, which was teeming with humanity, and scared humanity at that. Luckily I had lived for 14 years in Manhattan and knew how to finesse myself to the head of a line while all the rest milled around looking confused. I felt a little guilty doing that, but not much. I knew to pack a small carry bag with enough stuff to get me through three nights and check the big bag straight on through to Mobile. I got a decent seat and stayed on the first miserable bus for an hour or two and got off when it got dark, at Blythe, on the California border. I spent the night at a really cheap hotel, as if I weren't scared enough, had breakfast at daybreak at a nearby McDonald's, and watched a glorious sunrise on the next bus. And so it went. This was followed by a tour of the Great American West, looking at sunrises and flags. Once a kid in uniform got on and sat next to me. I said to him "What are we going to do?" and he said, "Make a parking lot out of 'em." Bless his heart, I thought, he has no idea.

I went through Arizona and New Mexico, and then came Texas. Neil had packed a little food for me, and a bottle of water. She lent me two books to get my mind off things. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and The Liars' Club. Ya Ya worked best, because in its way it spoke of home, and supportive women, and an unrealistically competent heroine. I climbed into that book and stayed there the whole trip; I never did finish The Liars' Club, a far better book.

I stayed on the bus, sleeping through Texas, rather than prolonging the trip at that point. I did enjoy seeing familiar Southern scenery in Louisiana, marshes, bayous, and Spanish moss. I was getting toward home. I spent the night in a nice town, had one of the best breakfasts in my life, I'll think of the town soon. Most of it was washed away in Katrina, but those people at the breakfast restaurant are still there; I know they are.

It was a sobering trip. I was glad to be home. People wonder what has changed now that everybody is saying that the world has changed. This is it: I have. The props were knocked out from under me and I am not the same person that went to that art show and heard jazz in San Francisco. Everything I do is tinged with the knowledge that this should not have happened, and that it happened because of mistakes our leaders had made, mistakes for which our country is responsible.

Unfortunately, since that day the mistakes have been compounded over and over until there is no credibility for our country's existence anywhere in the world. Those who say we need to wage more wars, do it better, stay the course, are just rationalizing the original error of our ways. There will be no way out in my lifetime, and no hysterical behavior on anybody's part is going to change a thing. All I can do is live my own life, keeping some distance in my heart from the country that raised me to trust it. Even the village that raised this child has become a place I don't recognize. If I can make my own space better by doing my best, all I can do is hope that it will have some effect on the betterment of others. That's fair enough.

Halfway to Hoboken

2007-09-07T06:00:00.001-07:00

September 7, 2007

I just read a news story from the New York Times webpage: 11 Arrested in New Jersey Corruption Inquiry. Blogger Craig from the Hoboken page of nj.com writes, "How many of them are from Hoboken?" and claims to have breathed a sigh of relief (perhaps tinged with surprise) that the answer was, "None."

The news story, however, is quite an eye-opener for someone accustomed to the good-old-boy Southern brand of political one-hand-washes-the-other, bumblingness of the local city council. This is big time, movie level stuff. In Fairhope, the meetings behind closed doors are more likely to be about plans to finagle land away from the city to build a new library or extend a bike trail. We get excited about it on both sides -- and amazingly I was decided opposed to both those projects -- but nobody gets whacked and the big bucks do not disappear.

Fairhope is committed to adorableness. That seems to be what is drawing the new people in and keeping them. They don't care about history; they care about ambiance, which can mean anything from theme restaurants to retaining the dilapidated old school building that faces the new kiddie park. Mothers marched for this a year ago, with banners reading "Save the K-1 Center," and when they learned it would not be demolished (or were told so) but remain a school, they were placated and pronounced themselves victorious. That would be easier than to accept that the deal was done years before their march when the area was negotiated by the University of South Alabama to be a part of its Fairhope branch. These are the same people who marched to protect Fairhope from wicked WalMart -- another failed project because it was too little, and way too late. The efforts to "Keep Fairhope Fairhope" always win, because it's one thing that cannot be refuted. Whatever Fairhope becomes, it will still be Fairhope. Even I can't argue about that.

I'm going to move to a grittier town, no doubt about that. While Fairhope celebrates its pelicans tonight, Hoboken's Italian Festival is in full swing. This means Italian food, bands, jubilation and a lot of noise, scraps and scrapes and general disorder all over the streets. If you live anywhere near the action, it may be difficult to sleep. But you are living near the action, and that's the price you pay. I wish I were there already.

An open house for realtors will be held here on Tuesday. It's fall, sort of (temps in the high 80's, at least 10 degrees lower in Hoboke), and the real estate market is supposed to pick up any time.

Sooner or later, one way or the other, I shall make the move. It becomes increasingly more difficult to focus on what I love about Fairhope, when my heart has been stolen by a feisty little Yankee town, ten minutes from Manhattan.

Political Curmudgeoning

2007-09-06T04:39:00.000-07:00

September 6, 2007

I had Jay Leno on last night, tuning in just after the beginning of the monologue. Couple of Larry Craig jokes, a riff on Brad Pitt's stalker, then the announcement that the guest would be Fred Thompson, so I grabbed for the remote and searched for something interesting.

I was aware that Thompson would be declaring his candidacy this week, but not here, not now. Wouldn't have crossed my mind, even though Schwartzenegger used Leno's show for the announcement of his run for Governor of California. You expect it from Arnold -- he has been a talk show guy since his steroid days on early Merv Griffin -- but, when a debate is held by the Republicans on the same night, to come on Jay Leno to do an end run around your own party seems a bit callous. Seems Thompson's handlers used to work for Schwartzenegger.

And I'm not sorry I missed the announcement. Usually something of a political junkie, I cannot warm to this particular candidate, as I described in an earlier post. If he can beat Hillary Clinton, more power to him, but as far as I'm concerned their contest will be one of Lilliputians who will fight to say less with more air time than ever before in history. I guess you might call it a beauty contest, and Thompson may come out prettier. I shall probably seek a Third Party to vote for -- too bad Bloomberg has ruled himself out. But Ralph Nader is always lurking in the wings, waiting for another chance for an entrance.

I have become a curmudgeon. If it wasn't clear by my boycott of President Clinton's opportune hawking of his new book on Today and The Larry King Show yesterday, the switch to Danny De Vito on David Letterman rather than watch the dull Thompson (not withstanding the fact that it didn't occur to me it would be his first bid for the Presidential nod) should make it clear.

I am never a bellweather of things to come in politics. I seldom pick the winning candidate, and usually go for the one who says the most to me. This year none of those I find interesting have the chance of a snowball in hell of making it past the first primaries. My lack of interest in either leading candidate probably indicates that it's going to be a exciting year, with a great deal of joy on both sides. To me, it's just that the world has truly dumbed down.

Marrying a Gay

2007-09-02T05:42:00.000-07:00

September 4, 2007

In the recent flurry of publicity about homosexual men brought down from high places, the figure in every scenario who always appears most enigmatic seems to be that woman by his side. How could she not know? What kind of person could she be?

I had lunch with my friend Carol, one of the most Southern of my acquaintances, a couple of years ago and the subject of how our generation of women had almost no choice but to marry by the time we were 20. She and I had both done so, and neither marriage survived very long.

Carol mentioned a friend who had also married very young, tried to make the marriage work against all odds -- discovering, after some years, that her husband was homosexual. Carol said, "I don't know what it is about us in the South, so many of our first husbands turned out to be gay. My first husband was gay too."

This brought me up short. I seldom discussed this matter, but this time I wanted to. Because I was also one of those young women who married a homosexual in the 1960's.

I said, "Gay guys were the type of man our mothers approved of. Leslie Howard as Ashley Wilkes. Nice, sensitive, presentable. And what did we know?"

What, indeed. I had been very sheltered, even as I pursued a career in the theatre. I knew Tommy to be gentle, offbeat and witty; I knew him to be seeing a psychiatrist; I knew he came from a small, conventional Alabama town, yet was a fan of the arts, especially grand opera. But, although he was attractive to the gays in my theatre group in New Orleans, they, like I, assumed him to be straight.

When we moved to Atlanta I worked for a while in Emory University's hospital as an aide in the psychiatric unit. This was a huge learning experience for me as I was required to confront some of my own psychology both through work with patients there and through relationships that developed from the intense closeness of the psychiatric assistants to each other as well as to superiors on the medical staff.

There was a favorite patient who was a history professor at the college. He was brilliant and had a warm personality. He also was suicidal and paranoid, a married man with a tendency toward homosexuality. This duality was a revelation to me; he clearly loved his wife and hated himself for not being able to be true to her. She and he were trying to work things out. I could not help but wonder what life would be like with a husband who was a homosexual.

In those days homosexuality was defined as a mental illness, considered to be caused (or at least exacerbated) by a dysfunctional family of origin situation -- probably an aggressive mother and a passive father. I noted that Tommy had both, but still could not connect our sexual problems with anything but my inability to be irresistible. We had a child to whom he was devoted. It seemed to me he liked everything about being married except me. And, to give him credit, a great deal of that was my fault. Or at least the fault of my ignorance and my built-in denial system, and the insecurity that led me, like Princess Diana years later, to expect a fairy-tale outcome to a match that went unexamined. Just being married was supposed to provide the answers to everything.

How little I knew of relationships, least of all that most complicated one of long-term romance between a man and a woman. It never occurred to me that a marriage were to be negotiated, carved out over time to suit its individual participants and their complexity. Hillary Clinton, the survivor of one of the most confusing marriages of recent memory, opines that no one understands a marriage except the two people in it.

And how little any of us understand the homosexual male psyche, particularly when he is driven underground by a strict sense of propriety and the need to be accepted in society. The Larry Craig case is compelling because it is so paradoxical. Even though Senator Craig denies that he is homosexual, and even though he has professed to despise the very act, he was undoubtably caught in some extraordinary behavior in an airport men's room if he is not pretty hip to the gay pickup scene. His denial and subsequent anger is only a part of the already distorted and sad story.

But wives like Dina Matos McGreevey (wife of the gay former New Jersey Governor James McGreevey) and Suzanne Craig were probably blindsided because they thought the problem had something to do with them. Ms. McGreevey is particularly bitter, as a wife would be if her husband suddenly dropped her with no warning and emerged with a glamorous trophy wife, callously negating the life he had lived with her. Mr. McGreevey was playing a role and, probably unknowingly, used her as an accessory in the picture of normalcy he was desperately trying to present to voters.

Mrs. Craig has yet to be heard from, but I'm fairly certain my case was different from both of these. I did not leave my husband because he was gay; in fact it was many years before I actually faced that fact. He moved to San Francisco on business and I refused to go. The divorce was final over a year later. My daughter grew up with doubts about her own lovability because of his apparent rejection -- which had a great deal more to do with me than it did with her. She and I didn't figure out what her father's real problem was until she was grown and visited him from time to time. He and I lost all contact, although I did everything in my power to refrain from negative talk about him. As to the clues about his sexuality, I had pushed them all to the back of my mind, steadfastly holding on to the belief that it couldn't have been so.

In college, Alison took a semester off to be with her father after he was diagnosed with AIDS. She never reconciled her conflicting feelings about him. Now that I think of it, neither have I. He effectively cut the two of us out of his life as he became another person. When he died in the early 1980's, we had not spoken for over 15 years.

It was a different world, and I was a different woman. If I had known what I now do, and had not been so very young and inexperienced -- and if the world had been more broadminded in those days -- I might have had the courage to negotiate a better marriage and a more comfortable life for my daughter. All of that is useless conjecture now. My first husband and I went very separate ways, as, as usual in such cases, it was the child who suffered the most. That she is now a mother, and a good one, is a sign that some people can overcome the bleakest childhoods to live normal lives with an expanded consciousness and a loving heart.

I empathize with those women who try to make the most of a bad deal all around. I have hopes for Larry Craig, and for Suzanne, but they are only fair hopes -- their problem is only now beginning to find its name.

Law, Order and Politics

2007-08-31T10:52:00.000-07:00

August 31, 2007

They say that Tennessee actor/politician is going to make the announcement of his run for the Presidential nomination of the Republican Party next week. Republicans, once jubilant at the prospect of another actor in the White House, seem to have cooled on this particular thespian, and I can see why.

Like most Americans, I have devoted quite a bit of time to watching the tv series Law and Order over the past 15 years or so. I watched the stage actress S. Epatha Merkeson play a police supervisor all this time; I watched when Michael Moriarty had the Sam Waterston role; when Jerry Ohrbach so convincingly played the troubled recovering alcoholic police detective Lenny Briscoe; when a trail of beauties from Angie Harmon to Carey Lowell worked in the D.A.'s office.

I still lament the exit of the best District Attorney New York ever had, the complex yet avuncular Steven Hill. Hill was one of those solid New York actors seldom seen on the screen, a founder of the Actors' Studio and an early proponent of Method Acting. His own personality melted into the characters he played, and his mental acuity and intensity permeated his every performance. In Law and Order, the character he played was based on real life New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, whom he is said to have captured perfectly in his nuanced and elegant style. His Adam Schiff was a man you respected without question, a man of integrity and wisdom, and, although a bit jaded by his job, a man with a big heart. He was detached without being bloodless.

The actor was one of the most interesting men ever to work in television. Born Solomon Krakovski, he was appearing as Sigmund Freud in A Far Country on Broadway when he confronted his own heritage. A character screamed the line "You are a Jew!" to him in the play and the experience sent him right back to his roots. Hill realized the impact of his Jewishness and embraced it by becoming strict Orthodox -- he began observing a kosher diet, wearing specially lined clothing,and strictly observing the Sabbath. This made Hill unavailable for Friday night or Saturday matinee performances and effectively ended his stage career and closed many roles to him in the movies most notably The Sand Pebbles.

Nevertheless, Steven Hill has had a good career without ever becoming a household word. He felt that artists needed to take breaks from their work for years at a time to refresh and he practiced what he preached.

He had undergone one of those long breaks before taking on the role in Law and Order, and it served him well. His work on that show was a seamless as a bolt of fine fabric. He was as real as an actor can be. If you missed the show under his reign, try to find a re-run that old. He was just wonderful.

Law and Order replaced him with Dianne Weist, an excellent actress who never seemed at home in the role. It was a rare misstep for both the show and Weist, who just didn't have much gravitas and was somehow unconvincing as the boss of the heavy, knowledgeable Jack McCoy as played by Waterston. Of course, her biggest problem was that she was being set up as a replacement for a man who had owned the show for some ten years.

In comes stolid Fred Thompson to replace Weist. Here is an actor with so little range, so little charisma, so little energy that he seems to have gotten the role just based on the fact that he looks likes everybody else. That is, there is nothing about him that looks actorish (like, say, Ronald Reagan), or nothing about him that seems wise (like Steven Hill) or even anything that looks complicated, like Dianne Weist.

I await his political announcement. I would love to hear something original from him, something that would put a spark in the upcoming Presidential race. Unfortunately, I don't think it's coming. Even his credentials as an actor are in question. The charm that usually goes with that territory is decidedly missing. If the election were to be held tomorrow, I'd probably write in Steven Hill.

A Fateful Day

2007-08-29T10:04:00.001-07:00

August 29, 2007

I knew I was in for it. Today I had an appointment for a second mammogram, and that had never happened to me before.

I told myself it was probably the wrong file. Or, if it was my actual x-ray, there was some smudge on the film or some technical error on the part of the hospital. Then I tried another tack: If this was it, the big one, then I'm as ready to go as I'll ever be. I've had a good long life, longer than some of my best friends, and now I would have the chance to see what actually happens next.

There was a backlog of patients at the hospital, so I had nearly an hour's wait divided between the downstairs waiting room, with its dogeared old Time Magazines and disconnected sections of today's newspaper, and the smaller, cozier room upstairs with a few Better Homes and Gardens and Mobile Bay Monthlies. Time to think about how I really felt about this and how I didn't. But what seemed most important was to keep busy reading everything I could in those publications. An old People told of Kate Hudson breaking up with Owen Wilson, and declared that they're still friends. That's good. I wouldn't want either of them to take a life challenge too seriously.

Then I went to the mammography room. Here I know the drill pretty well; after all, I was just there two weeks ago. A very exciting moment was when the technician showed me the previous mammogram -- there was actually something visible there, a whitish spot in an otherwise clean x-ray. "Let's get a really good picture this time," I told her.

"We sure will, and then you'll go down to get a sonogram," she said. Neither of us sounded a bit worried. I wondered if this was it for my future, more hospital dates, more procedures, more lab results. For the next ten years. A little pain, then a lot, then lights out.

Others had been there before me. Friends who had had to have lumpectomies, mastectomies, hysterectomies, and lots more. All this time I had been sure nothing like this would ever happen to me. There is no family history -- no, wait a minute, my aunt Gladys died of cancer, and so did her son my favorite cousin Kevin. For all I could remember her sister Adah did too. But I had gotten most of the genes from my mother's side of the family. Most, but maybe not all.

What would the world do without me? What would my grandsons grow up to be like? I have always counted on my departure being quick and painless. Was it, instead, going to be a lot of hospital visits, operations, medications, and long illness?

I was waiting for the sonogramist. (Is that a word? Oh, well, I won't need to know, where I'm going.) More magazines. Oprah tells me how to love my life. Oh, there's a letter here from a lady who says a sonogram saved her life. That's good. Maybe this will do it. Here she comes, and here we go. I'm wearing a little hospital gown that they've offered to tie down the back, and the sonogramist asks if I want to put another one over the open area at the back. What do I care? We're just going down a hospital hall. But she prevails and I am duly covered.

She tells me to uncover the offending breast and lie on the stretcher. "Have you ever had a sonogram before?" When I said no she assured me it was the easiest test I would ever have. That it was, beginning with a hot gel and ending with her telling me she didn't see much "except for a little cystic area," and she would take it down for the doctor to examine.

When she came back about five minutes later she said the doctor didn't think there was anything to worry about but that he might want me to have another sonogram in six months.

I felt fine when I got home. You might say, a little euphoric. I stopped on the way home to buy some of that delicious homemade Granola at Greer's, and I started eating it in the car. By the time I got home it was almost gone. But I had to do serious grocery shopping so off I went to the supermarket, and before I left I took a glance at the ice cream aisle.

Now I haven't had ice cream in over a year. I'm on a diet, you know. But Haagen Daz was on sale 2 for $5 and I had to try the new Sticky Toffee Pudding flavor. So I bought one of those and my all-time favorite ice cream flavor, Crême Brulée. I am compelled to eat ice cream as soon as I get it home, while its still a little soft, too see if it's toxic or for some reason must be returned at once to the store, so as soon as I got in I opened the Sticky Toffee Pudding and put the other carton in the freezer. I would try the Sticky Toffee, but only have a bite or two.

Half the carton is now gone, and I'm lucky all of it isn't. I'll have a nice salad for lunch, but I've been munching on everything I can get my hands on ever since I got in. A handful of walnuts, some more of that Granola, maybe just another bite of that ice cream...

I'm learning something about myself. Well, I guess I always knew this: I eat when my mood is heightened. I eat when I'm happy, I eat when I'm anxious, I eat when I'm relieved. I eat when I'm depressed too. But now I'm feeling very good. I wonder if I'll ever get around to making that salad.

Breaking the Guitar

2007-08-24T05:29:00.000-07:00

August 24, 2007

The phrase "breaking the guitar" may not mean what you think it does.

I had it explained to me on a lovely spring evening at Michael Rosenthal's apartment on West 4th Street in New York in the 1960's. From Michael's front window was a perfect view of the apartment across the street.

"Used to be a couple of English girls who shared that apartment," Michael said to me. "I'd see them coming and going, and I'd think about what they must be like, what their lives were. I ached to meet them.

"Then one day I was at the deli when I saw one of them come in. I invited them both over for drinks. They came, I gave them some nice wine, we talked a little. Very little. It was boring. They were ordinary. I really had nothing to say to them; they weren't what I expected. I had broken the guitar."

I told him I had never heard the expression "breaking the guitar."

"Well, I used to have this guitar. It was my life. I worked at it. Tried to learn how to really play it. It was a shining symbol to me -- my life as a guitar player. Man, I loved that guitar.

"I loved it so much when I got really mad at the way things were going I would say, 'I'm gonna break that guitar!'"

"The day came when I could control my rage no longer -- rage at something relatively insignificant, I might add. I said, 'I'm gonna break that guitar!' and I did it. I smashed it.

"Trouble was, then I had no guitar. It wasn't satisfying to break it either. The reality of a broken guitar was that I now had a useless guitar. No point."

For years I used the expression "breaking the guitar" to describe a dramatic action that disappoints. A big, longed-for gesture that brings no satisfaction except in the fantasy before it happens. But whenever I talked about breaking the guitar, I had to tell the Michael Rosenthal story, and then explain it. Nobody ever seemed to understand. I gave it up until now.

If you've broken the guitar, or been tempted to, maybe you'll get it. I don't use the expression much, but I would if it had caught on, or if my listeners had. I offer it to you to see if its time has come. Otherwise, I've just broken the guitar by telling the story.

Hurricane Season

2007-08-17T16:26:00.000-07:00

September 2, 2007

No matter what the hurricane pundits declare, the official hurricane season begins when the first storm heads through the Gulf toward land. Officially and unofficially, that means that with Hurricane Dean on the 18th of August, hurricane season 2007 began.

We who live on the Gulf Coast get a little blasé about these storms -- by "we" I mean those of us who were raised here (Newcomers totally freak out). If it's not coming our way we wait until the one that is before we get worried.

Now we have Hurricane Felix, which at this point it has yet to touch a corner of land anywhere, and has the Yucatan Peninsula and the Bay of Campiche to terrorize before its trek across Mexico or its turn through the Gulf. Forecasters have come up with an intriguing visual device they dub "the cone of uncertainty" as they track the projected path of a hurricane -- a path that stretches wide enough in both directions to give them a huge margin for error. We in hurricane country are well aware that this cone has little to do with the reality of whether or not the storm will come our way or not. The cone allows for, but does not help predict, the size or direction of the wobble a storm almost always makes right at landfall. The wobble, we who await the wrath of a hurricane know, the wobble is the determining factor.

I go back to the days before hurricanes were identified by categories -- even before they were given names. When they began naming them, it was decided by some naming bureau or other to give them women's names, then I suppose Women's Liberation sensitized the guys at the bureau and they decreed that the names should be divided equally between masculine names and feminine ones. I remember a column by Mobile's beloved newspaper man Mike McEvoy suggesting the storms be named after medicines, like "bicarbonate of soda" or "castor oil." I remember the column but don't remember the point. The bureau would have run out of generic names soon enough if they had tried that, and manufacturers would not have appreciated having hurricanes named after branded products. Let's just say it was a lousy idea. Kinda like, a few years back, when the bureau came up with the French Georges for a hurricane's name. Local weathermen in Mobile had a time with that one. One pronounced it George's, as written.

A reader inquires why natural disasters occur. What is God's plan in such random acts? I've been over this territory before, but this particular reader, a self-identified "oaf," still implores me to explain it, since I seem to think I'm so smart.

One more time. The earth is a natural place with its own laws. There is a higher power which, you might say, owns the property. Man is a tenant -- and not a very good one -- who sometimes oversteps the boundaries. This higher power, and I won't say "God" this time for fear it will call a picture to your mind of a bearded man in the clouds with lightning bolts in one hand. There is not a man at all; that image, as pointed out by Margaret Atwood, was based on ancient drawings of the pagan god Zeus. It is not Zeus, doling out punishment by causing earthquakes, tsunamis and Hurricane Katrina. On the other hand, it is nature doing what we know nature does. We, mankind, have these brilliant scientists who tell us in February that there will by 19 hurricanes beginning in June (although Joe Schmoe on the street in Mobile can tell you there's not likely to be any activity before August) but those scientific experts are not quick to point out that man should not be living in cities below sea level, and that if he is, he'd better attend to his levees and have evacuation plans in place before the first hurricane of any season hits.

In other words, we ignore what we know to be a fact, that certain localities on the planet, while affording beautiful views (or tasty ways with seafood), may not be suitable for permanent year-round residence. We are convinced that we can control nature, and that if we are good the man in the clouds will protect us from harm.

I have said this before: It doesn't work that way. This does not mean there is no god, no power greater than us. It means that we have to work to be in tune with this power and have the good old-fashioned horse sense to get out of the way of an oncoming catastrophe, whether it comes from above in the form of rain and wind or is of man's own devices as in the train wreck. There are risks we take. We have our own decisions to make. Most of us are aware that we are as likely to be hit by a drunk driver as we are to get killed by a hurricane, excessive heat, or other forces of the weather. We live in our own cones of uncertainty. But we take our chances and we name our poisons.

The laws of nature allow us to do just that. If we think there is a power that will keep all problems at bay if we just learn to manipulate it, we are in for a lot of big disappointments. If devising a belief system that works for us, say, "There is a reason for everything," we'll spend a lifetime looking those reasons, tons of them, and end up with the inevitable, "There are some things we are not meant to understand."

As hurricane season goes into full swing -- around here at any rate, largely because the law of averages works in our favor this year -- we have a fair hope that we'll dodge that bullet -- for now. This wisdom is lost on insurance companies, who now refuse to cover anything close to any waters, it would seem. Hurricanes have real effects, whether or not their damage hits home.

Dog Day Morning in Lower Alabama

2007-08-16T08:35:00.001-07:00

August 16, 2007

It's just one of those almost-unbearably-hot days that August brings to Fairhope every year. Too hot to be alive, the locals say. But we're alive anyway, kept moving by air conditioning and gasoline (fueling the air conditioned cars), and, although productivity is low, everything else is moving along.

It's too hot to sell a house because nobody is buying houses. The heat has something to do with it, and if you have a little oddball house like mine on a wonderful lot but without the Viking Range in the kitchen and even without a second bathroom, the market would be slow in the best of times. The right buyer has yet to have a look at it. In fact, the house has been on the market for over a month and only two people have looked at it. The first proclaimed the rooms too small and the second wasn't really ready to move at all.

To say nothing of the stock market, real estate mortgages, the War in Iraq and all the other reasons that people are staying in their air conditioned houses waiting for a better climate to walk out the door. Our TVs inform us that hurricanes have indeed begun to churn up in the Gulf. All this and Elvis is still dead.

Then there's the Imus thing. He got a settlement from CBS who broke its contract with him, and now he's being sued by one of those basketball players who says she wants her life back. I wish I could sue somebody to get my life back too. I'm sorry to say the litigation-happy lady (woman? girl?) is the same Kia Vaughn who did so well the first time around in this little charade, saying "Unless there's a new definition for the word 'ho' then that's not who I am." Now she says having been called that -- even once, even by a man who has apologized publicly and privately, over and over -- has ruined her life and a little monetary compensation is in order.

I've been wishing Imus could get his life back too, and be back on morning tv putting the screws to the politicians courageous enough to appear on his show, and working on his ranch for children with cancer and his fund-raising for the S.I.D.S. Foundation and for autism. He may indeed get back on the radio, but those days of that edgy and often offensive wake-up show are gone for good.

Well, let's all take our power back. A little hot weather won't hurt us. We can survive a little drop in our investment portfolio; a little less tv and more personal creativity might be good for us. And even though Elvis is still dead, at least Johnny Depp is still alive.

Unlike the people in Mark Twain's day ("Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it), we can do something about the weather. We have seen the worst of hurricanes and survived. We can find fair hope that we shall again. And that all of this shall pass, leaving us to reminisce about warm weather and the lazy days of summer.

The Host Who Would Be Guest

2007-08-13T04:44:00.001-07:00

August 13, 2007

I was sorry to hear that Merv Griffin had died. He was on the list of people I would have invited if I could have one of those cosmic dinner parties with a guest list of people I would invite if I could. This mythical party has been in my mind for years and includes people from all walks of life, people you really want to spend more time with, people you want to have in your home for a good time.

I used to have Merv Griffin in my home every afternoon in his early talk-show days in the 1960's. He was intelligent, charming, always ready for a laugh -- and really "into" his guests. He seemed to ask the questions I wanted him to ask. And he had such a lineup of interesting people to interview, from Richard Pryor to Orson Welles. I wrote in blogposts over a year ago about his getting into the discussion of duende, Garcia Lorca's concept of the mischievous quality later to be called charisma. Who had it and who didn't became almost a parlor game after duende was introduced to the American public by Griffin's show.

He surprised Richard Pryor by inviting his drama coach from childhood, the recreation director at the community center who pulled Richard out of the ghetto by believing in him. She was smart, no-nonsense and her meeting with Pryor made for great live television. Griffin asked pointed questions of people in politics without really getting political. He had that Irish gift of being genuine and loving to laugh that made him easy to watch and sometimes amazing by what he was able to get people to reveal.

I learned from today's New York Times obit that liquor was served up in the green room of his show, loosening the lips of many a guest. They were willing to say things to this man that they might not have said without it, certainly not before an audience of thousands. They all became our friends and neighbors, over for an afternoon chat.

In those days the talk-show format was, unlike today, more talk than commercials. A segment with any one guest might go on for much longer periods of time. And without the annoying, shrieking commercials, they had a natural, easy feeling. They were like little parties.

And -- with all the other achievements of his lifetime -- Merv Griffin was one of the best at the genre; with a gift for intimacy, a personal charm (and, yes, some duende of his own), and a non-threatening intellect that seemed to really care what his guests were saying. Even though he hadn't done a talk show for decades, I always missed him. I'll miss him more now.

The Way We Were

2007-08-10T03:12:00.000-07:00

August 10, 2007

It's not just an ordinary picture, you must admit. It's a photo made when I was in my late 20's, by Roy Schatt, the show business photographer whose biggest claim to fame was that he had palled around with James Dean when they were youngsters struggling in New York and gotten some great shots of the kid.

I was a young hopeful when someone recommended Schatt to me as one of the best to get some good headshots. Abysmally unphotogenic, I was pleased with a number of the pictures he got. This one was the best of the lot and probably the most astonishingly flattering picture ever made of me. I thought, when I get old I'm gonna want this one. Not that it looked that much like me, but that I could at least tell people it did.

Then it went missing. I submitted it to be used in a brochure and the printer lost it in the early 1970's. Years later I tried in vain to find it. I was living in Geneva and felt a yearning for a look at that picture that showed me the way I wasn't and had never been except for that instant that the shutter snapped. I got a friend in New York to call Schatt and ask him if he still had it on file. He said he didn't keep pictures that long.

I had kept the contact sheet, waiting, I suppose, for personal computers to be invented. Yesterday I looked through the box of old pictures of myself to cull the best to keep and I remembered this one. I remembered the whole story, but was sure I still had the contact sheet.

Long story short -- here it is, folks. That was your author. Something happened over time; the eyes got smaller, the lips got thinner, the face got considerably fuller, the nose got a little bigger; that girl got swallowed up by the passage of time, lost to her own self-obsession. I try not to dwell on what I used to look like, so let's just say that's it. Once and for all.

Worth Repeating: A New Day

2007-08-09T03:07:00.000-07:00

August 9, 2007

This, a post from June of last year, which I called "A New Day Dawning":

I just got to thinking...what if this were 100 years ago? This house wouldn't be built yet -- it went up in 1916 -- Marietta Johnson's school was not yet a reality -- it was to begin in the fall of 1907 -- the unpaved streets were full of chickens, goats and other livestock -- and there weren't many trees, since the area had been timbered out in recent years.

A scraggly little town, built on the Utopian dream of a few who had relocated from Iowa just 12 years before, Fairhope palpitated with possibilities. But it was probably a warm morning, the first day of summer, 1906, no hope of turning on the air conditioning later in the day, and no idea of where the fair hopes of the original colonists would take the town in its first century.

As I write, the sun has come up and there is a little puff of a pink cloud turning orange against the blue sky. It could have been that kind of dawn a hundred years ago, with sound effects of the cackle of the occasional chicken and bleat of a goat. I can hear an owl myself -- maybe his ancestor was here.

Marietta Johnson was a frequent visitor at this time. She and her husband, a farmer, had bought a pecan farm in Mississippi, and they discovered Fairhope through Socialist friends in St. Paul. They had begun visiting Fairhope in the winter of 1896, and she had become fast friends with Lydia Comings, who urged her to move here and start the school she dreamed of. Mrs. Johnson studied the writings of Rousseau, Frederich Froebel, and the work of her contemporaries, John Dewey, C. Hanford Henderson and Nathan Oppenheim. These latter names are those leaders who were creating the study of early childhood development, and advocated redesigning the school to suit the nature and needs of the child rather than trying to force the child to conform to an arbitrary mold defined by a group of adults. Mrs. Johnson, a lifelong teacher, saw the simple elegance of this notion and advocated nothing less than a retrenching of the whole educational system to make it operate this way. She thought she could achieve this by starting a school based upon that principle. It would be a year more of talking (and she was superb at that) to make her dream of such a school a reality.

The town had a library with books donated by the former bohemian Marie Howland. Mrs. Howland was now a settled old lady in her sixties, having sown her wild oats in the 19th Century among the free thinkers, social reformers, and feminists in New York and in France in a commune that purported to be the wave of the future, with one large house encompassing many families but no kitchen. She left reformist colony in Mexico disenchanted with its Puritan strain which scowled on her tendency to bathe nude in the sea for the revolutionary Single Tax enclave in Fairhope.

There was already a Fairhope Courier, then published weekly and sent around the world to proselytize for the Utopian colony, and Marie Howland had a regular column in it. Her feminist leanings would make her quite at home in Fairhope, where women always had the vote (on local issues) and, according to Paul Gaston in his little book Women of Fair Hope, she stands out in Fairhope history "for her advocacy of cooperative living, kitchenless homes, and scientific child-rearing as means of liberating women from household drudgery and male exploitation." She was to become a great friend to Marietta Johnson.

A hundred years ago there would be no cars driving by. What was at one time the Gaston Motor Company at that time was a livery and harness shop. It is now a trendy restaurant. There have been so many transmutations of the "uptown" area that it is pointless to make note of them now. There was a bluff park, a municipal pier, a grassy knoll just to the east of the bluff, always called "Knoll Park." Knoll Park stands hardly changed, although I have noted a sign on the park's perimeter in recent weeks indicating some rearrangement of the natural landscape is imminent.

There is a genuine log cabin on the other side of Bay View Street (once more felicitously "Bay View Avenue") from me that was built in 1900. That would have been there, among the stumps, stubble and trees of 100 years ago. It is for sale, and will surely be torn down.

As it was 100 years ago, a new day is dawning. There is good news from the Marietta Johnson School, new board members eager to take on the task of helping turn the school back to what it once was, and an increase in enrollment. The local potter now on the Board, graduated from our school promises to be very helpful in helping restructure our Arts and Crafts department. Another is a City Councilman. Another is a relative newcomer whose wife is a Fairho, (see Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree for a definition of that one) and who has taught woodshop and stagecraft and is one of the general all around artisans the like of which used to help out at the school all the time.

I wake up full of ideas, plans, and half-finished grant proposals. I am going to spend the afternoon taking care of things at the Marietta Johnson Museum -- which always affords the opportunity for a little personal research, and is welcome respite in a beloved old Fairhope building that feels like home. Good things will come of all this.

That's essentially what I wrote a year ago, with the updates of a mention of the work beginning on the untouched old Knoll Park, and a link to my webpage for a definition of "Fairho," which is to be found in my book. The fact is there have been many changes in Fairhope in the last year. The new library is completed and functioning, to mixed reviews -- Walmart is up and running with a lot of I-told-you-so's -- and many more McMansions dot the landscape as the developers have scooped away the quaint cottages one by one.

But you can't change history, and I still like to think about it. It will be rewritten over and over to eliminate all vestige of the reformers and dreamers who made the town prosper in its early days. The time for reform is gone, and those who believed in it are too. I am witnessing the plowing under of the heritage they left, and others will reap the tasteless harvest.

The Phone Whisperers

2007-08-08T04:28:00.000-07:00

August 8, 2007

I rented a movie called Zodiac over the weekend, and it took me back to the 1970's. Someone in the newspaper office flashed a page of political cartoons at our hero -- there were caricatures of Richard Nixon on the page. The movie was full of scenes of people making urgent phone calls from phone booths.

And every once in a while a big clunky phone actually rang -- you remember, "Ring? Ring? Ring?" and when its receiver was picked up and listened to there there was nothing but heavy breathing coming from the other side.

Everything about this movie was pretty close to authentic. Without being maddeningly precious about it, costume and set-wise, people looked pretty much like they once did. (Now that I think about it, I didn't see any men in sideburns or bell bottoms, but going that far would be jarring today.) It's an intense little thriller about a real situation in San Francisco when serial killers were still in the shadows and even the term was not yet in general use.

There are excellent performances. I always admire Robert Downey (and of course my mind always goes to how much I hope he's really past his addiction). In this one his portrayal of an addict with a wasted life is chillingly spot-on. One scene in the newsroom when he is functioning but literally falling-down-drunk is especially well done.

Jake Gillenhahl gives an engrossing performance as the newspaper cartoonist who gets drawn into the murder trail because of his fascination with codes and puzzles, and hangs on to his detective work long after all else have shelved the whole deal. He seems to have the case solved by the end of the film, but there is no real conclusion.

Zodiac is not a chick flick. Not to say that a woman wouldn't enjoy this movie -- I was totally taken in by it -- but there are only a few female characters in it as sort of wallpaper, worrying about their men. The actresses are as good as the actors, and I would say I loved the first-date scene; but this is a movie about men doing police work, on the fringe of the old newspaper world. There is a faint smell of booze, cigarettes and sweat about it. There isn't much light to find your way around. But it captures a real situation in a real time and place and presents us with a constellation of good actors doing their jobs.

Mark Ruffalo plays the police detective who is said to have been the man the movie Bullitt -- there's one to see again! -- was based upon. Brian Cox does a wonderful turn as attorney Marvin Belli, who has the one laugh line in the movie. And the odd Charles Fleischer will scare your socks off. The film's lead suspect is well defined by an actor I never saw before, John Carroll Lynch.

All through the film I was reminded of the little technological advances that have subtly changed our everyday lives, and for some reason when the hero starts getting phone calls with heavy breathing, I remembered how prevalent those "breather" calls used to be. Why isn't anybody breathing heavy on the phone any more? Even 19 years ago, when I first moved back to Fairhope, people were still getting those calls. I got one at my old house on North Bayview. Now I have "Caller ID" which tells me at least the phone number -- or "Unknown Number, Unknown Caller," before I pick up the phone.

Think of all the advances in police work -- phone records, even DNA -- that have made this kind of movie a quaint period piece. And eliminated all those obscene phone calls.

Walk to Town and Bay

2007-08-03T03:16:00.000-07:00

August 3, 2007

Walking distance to downtown Fairhope and the bay! Beautifully landscaped yard with stone walkways will lead you to the front door of this enchanting 1916 cottage. Tastefully renovated, yet has lost none of its original charm.

All of the above is in the description from the flyer created by my realtor for my house. Rhapsodic realtor language, you'll notice, but all true. And there's more. The 1,926-square foot cottage sits on a double lot so there's room for your pets and children to romp before strolling with you to the nearby ice cream shop, or down to the bluff to greet the statue of Marietta Johnson and watch the waves on the bay.

It's a well-built old house (old for Fairhope, that is: built in 1916) with sturdy walls and heart-pine floors that don't creak. It was the cat's meow in its day, an airplane bungalow with two small bedrooms upstairs and a charming one downstairs. There is a spacious front porch from which to watch your neighbors jog by in the morning while sipping your coffee and reading the Swampscum Daily Ooze, the local nickname for Mobile's newspaper. People drop by to ask your opinion on stuff or to comment on local situations, political or otherwise.

Walking back inside is like receiving a warm hug from the past.There is a huge fireplace and beadboad ceiling in the 14 x 28 living room. There are the original Craftsman details and built-ins -- along with moldings and trim around the doors and windows, and hardwood floors throughout the house.

There is a light-filled sunporch which can be used as a dining area and is my favorite room in the house, surrounded by three walls of windows, from which you can see trees and shrubs and life in slow-paced, small-town America.
At parties, it's the area where everyone congregates. My friend Paul Gaston tells me that when he dated the Captain's daughter (the Captain built the house) in the 1940's, there was a juke box on that porch and there were teenage dance parties all the time.

It has been said the only problem with the house is that there is no master bedroom. Originally the Captain's bedroom was the whole cockpit of the airplane -- that is to say, there was only one room with a bathroom upstairs, but later that was partitioned off to make two bedrooms in the days when families of four could tolerate only one bathroom. A second bathroom could be added up there. What I used as a bedroom, with a walk of about six feet to the bathroom lovingly remodeled by yours truly is this little 11 x 14 gem on the ground floor.

Enamored as I am of the house, it is for sale by owner, as I have left the area. If making such a big cross-country move is daunting, think about living in the little town that so many think of as a storybook place, the small town U.S.A. they've always dreamed of -- Fairhope. You'll find many Internet sites describing it, and it is often cited as one of the safest retirement communities in the country. Maybe it'll be the perfect place for you.

If you want to discuss this further, contact me at: marylois@gmail.com

The Long and Short of Goodbyes

2007-08-01T08:57:00.001-07:00

August 2, 2007

I caught just the ending of the 1944 classic National Velvet on Turner Classic Movies yesterday morning and discovered that that sweet film contained a great deal more wisdom than I'd ever realized. When Mi (played by Mickey Rooney) decides to leave, he has a short scene telling Mr. Brown that he's not good at saying goodbye. He says, "Tell Velvet goodbye for me, would you? And Mrs. Brown?" and after a few more words he walks off into the MGM sunset.

When Velvet discovers he's left, her mother explains that it was his time to move on, and he had done so. This is a beautifully written and played scene of parental advice -- elegantly dispensed and actually being taken -- yet Velvet has one more thing to tell him, asks her mother's permission. When she gets it, the girl mounts her steed and rides off to end the film with an exciting canter and finally two silhouettes in the distance. It is a hokey landscape, but it works.

I'm not too good at goodbyes myself. Not for Mi's reason -- being a young fellow and English to boot, he couldn't stand sentimentality, and probably was more than a little uneasy about tears -- with me it's just that I don't really accept the finality. I'm always certain that departing person will always literally be a part of my life, even though I've learned that there are some people I shall never see again. I have a cocoon of denial that gets me through difficult moments, and it sometimes lasts for years. Looking at the photos of the actors from Geneva, say, or recalling some office highjinks from Fairchild Publications in the 1970's, the cast to characters of my memory are as vivid to me as if they had just stepped into the other room for a minute.

I imagine I can find their phone numbers, or look them up on Google -- and reconnect in an instant; and all the intervening years will be wiped away. In some cases I can and have done so. However, more often, although people tend to be cordial and at least give the appearance of being pleasantly surprised to hear from me, I usually soon learn that I am opening a door that may have been better left closed. In my pantheon of old friends, I have to restrain myself from the urge to embrace them all.

I love reunions, and look forward to the upcoming one in Fairhope, but before it happens I must learn to lower my expectations. I must see things from other people's side. I must move on, like Mi.

Although saying goodbye was difficult for Mi, it's the moving on part that is difficult for me. I spoke with an intimate friend of ten years ago on the phone just a few weeks back, trying to catch him up on my life and my plans. Although we occasionally -- perhaps once a year -- meet for drinks or lunch, this time he was cool, and there were background noises from his side that sounded for all the world like giggling young women. He rang off saying, "I'll call you next week." When I hung up I realized I would never hear from him. This sentence resounded in my head: That train has left the station. How long it took me to realize it I'm embarrassed to say, but maybe I learned something with that conversation. Ever since, I catch myself thinking "That train has left the station too."

There are long goodbyes and abrupt ones. The final goodbye of death is easier for me to accept (but not without the requisite stages of grief) than the reality that this person is still walking the earth, but once and for all no longer in my orbit. In my heart, those, "Have-a-nice-life" goodbyes never really happen. But I'm learning to believe in them as I learn to empathize with people who are somehow less needy for their own past.

I don't think it's a bad trait to have the ability to go forward and leave baggage behind. I just say I haven't mastered it yet.

One More Time: Revive Us Again

2007-08-01T01:28:00.000-07:00

August 1, 2007

This, an update of a post placed July 13, 2006:

Every so often a venerable institution undergoes an upheaval followed by a revival of interest, a rebirth, and a reaffirmation of its reason for being. This is slated to happen very soon for a school that was once at the very heart of Fairhope.

The Marietta Johnson School of Organic Education, often referred to as the Organic School, was founded in Fairhope by the visionary educator whose name it bears in 1907. It's about to have a Centennial, and will definitely have a big all-class reunion in October, giving us a chance to talk about a revival.

New things are happening, detailed on the website linked above. The web page may not quite capture is the mysterious spirit that surrounds the school and its offspring. (I think offspring is the right word here; you wouldn't say graduates, because many who love the school the most went there a year or two, sometimes just a semester.)

The Organic School gave us the feeling that school itself may be just a kid's daily job -- but that some days miracles happened. And every day in school was thrilling to some degree. We didn't think about it consciously (unless we observed a miracle) but there was a process of osmosis called learning by doing that accompanied every textbook we read, every map we looked at, every project we worked on. In addition to that, which occurs in every school, was the unstated component in our school that we learned because we wanted to.

In high school, I remember, we put together a newspaper because we wanted to. The students before us had done it and we felt it was our turn. We didn't even have a faculty advisor. Someone showed us how to cut stencils and operate the mimeograph machine, some of us just naturally did the writing, and we had a newspaper. We would stay after school and work on it. Sometimes we came at night and worked until 8 or 9 P.M. to put the paper to bed. Nobody told us to do this; if we hadn't, nothing would have happened. We just never thought of not doing it.

Another example of what Marietta Johnson called "organic education" was when I was in Junior High, probably 7th grade. There was what was laughingly known as a library at the school, containing lots of decrepit old books left there by previous generations. I would read them sometimes just for their time-capsule quality. One I remember reading was about a young lady who was driving a roadster and it got stuck in the mud. I couldn't help thinking how funny it was to read about getting your roadster out of the mud -- and relating to the young people of the 1920's reading this book seriously and thinking of the life they must have had. (A lot of roadsters in Fairhope probably did get stuck in the mud; streets weren't fully paved until the 1960s.)

Anyway, back to the 1950's -- we're browsing around in this antiquated library and we see a bunch of copies of worn playscripts of the works of Shakespeare. There was As You Like It, I remember, and The Merchant of Venice.

It was not a big leap, seeing that there were copies enough for the whole class, to ask the English teacher if she thought we would get anything out of reading those plays. Sure, said the English teacher, and we set out to study them one by one. We wrestled with the verse, wrote essays about the plays, and nobody thought twice about what was in the Alabama Course of Study for 7th or 8th Grade. I remember years later coming on a theme I wrote at that time entitled "Why I Like Shylock." Wish I had saved it. I wonder why I liked Shylock. I think I was just trying to be shocking, but maybe I made a valid point or two in the process.

Now flash-forward again to the Organic Revival. What lies in the immediate future is a reunion of all classes, to be held over the October 5-7 weekend. Marietta Johnson's birthday -- officially Marietta Johnson Day in Fairhope, is October 8. There will be events all weekend, from the pot luck gathering Friday night until the last visitor leaves on Monday. We'll hear talks about the history of Fairhope and the school, students armed with videocams will record our memories of what we got from our Organic Educations and what we can do to ensure a solvent school for the next few centuries. It means a great deal to a lot of us.

We have a fair hope of success for the future, and a spirit and heritage of miracles from the past that cannot be ignored. If near-term coming events help boost a revival, hallelujah! We are saved, brother. Revive us again.

The Autobiographical Urge

2007-07-28T13:09:00.000-07:00

July 28, 2007

A year ago I was approached by a man in his late 80's about ghostwriting his autobiography. He had lived a rich and varied life and loved to tell stories of his accomplishments and crises. He had coped with great success and tragedy, and about all he had not done was chronicle the events.

He had known lots of interesting people and been in very high places in his day; he sent me a packet of snapshots and newspaper articles about his life. Pictures revealed that he was a good-looking man, movie star good-looking in his youth, and the articles told of the fortune he had made in dealing with big corporations, selling the rights to his inventions and occasionally suing for large sums when his invention ideas were stolen. I was interested in his story, and felt that I would be good as a ghostwriter. I was up for the job. I encouraged him, admonishing only that he would have to be very open with me about some of the life situations in the newspaper items, situations that still might cause him some pain.

He would have had to relocate to be interviewed, or pay for my expenses if I had to travel. He would have to be candid. I would agree to work for him at a fixed rate for about six months, including writing time, and then submit what I had written for his approval. I would not be the salesman for the work, but I felt certain that with his lively personality and his truly unusual life story we could come up with a book that would sell.

I laid out the proposal and waited. Time passed, and he passed off my radar screen, by not acting. He probably thought better of the project and did not want to be under this kind of stress at this point in his life, no matter how strong his urge to be immortalized in print. I never received a refusal, but I had lobbed the ball to his court and it had not been returned.

I didn't blame him. For years he had probably regaled friends and acquaintances with tales of his childhood inventions, his successes and near-successes, and the odd and unexpected turns his life had taken. He was probably told by many an acquaintance, "You really should write a book about all this," but the reality of such a venture was not one he could handle.

An urge to write hits us as we grow closer to what we perceive as the end of life. There is a need to get it down in black and white, this little life, before it's gone. I can understand this myself, hacking away at a daily blog and thinking of books I must get done. My mother, always an admirer of writers (and married to a first-rate one), spent years researching a family history that including anecdotal tales going all the way back to family members who gave Robert the Bruce of Scotland a ride across the river in the middle of a war -- being awarded in later years with a coat of arms that read "I Saved the King." She completed her family history in the and self-published it in 1994 after almost 20 years of exhaustive research, and the result is a book that reflects all the charm of its writer and is constantly used as research by her three grown children. She printed copies for all living members of the family and distributed this work to as many of them as she knew.

Her little book is a treasure trove of information about our ancestors. It was a project that consumed her as she edged into old age, and a copy of it is in her bureau at the nursing home. She sometimes mentions it ("the book I wrote") and we sometimes pick it up to confirm a birth date or year, or cause of death, or any little piece of family information we could get nowhere else.

It is good that much of mankind is equipped with this autobiographical urge. Blogs are a great tool for this very thing. As to those who are not compelled to write, of course they create and contribute in many ways. But the actual stories, even with a very personal slant, are the stuff of life and the best we can do toward carving a place in the mythology of generations to come.

Real Woman, Fair Hope

2007-07-27T01:26:00.000-07:00

July 27

I think it’s time for a real woman to be President of the United States. I say this somewhat defensively because it is assumed that since I cannot support Hillary Clinton, I am one of the ones who is somehow just not ready.

I have a certain amount of respect for Senator Clinton. I don’t deny that she has great intelligence and drive. I like to see the pictures of her laughing, and I don’t doubt that she enjoys a good joke every once in a while. She has presence and self-confidence. She is tough. But try as I might, I cannot find one thing authentic about her.

She speaks in platitudes (or, as they say, soundbites). This means she seems to be talking but nothing definitive is said or clarified. It’s designed to be clipped out and run on the evening news.

She never makes it clear where she stands on issues – any issues. She’s just being a politician, her supporters say. The Right paints her as a flaming Liberal, the Left as a middle-of-the-roader; in reality she will say whatever it takes to seem reasonable. But she doesn’t convince me. I can’t say I know anything about where she stands on matters vital to the leadership of this troubled land.

Take the war. She voted for it because she was lied to, as all of us were. Why is it so hard to say that vote was a mistake? Is she afraid to be called a flip-flopper? What kind of nonsense is that? “Flip-flopper” is a Madison Avenue term that means no more than a person who has changed his or her mind. It’s no disgrace to change one’s mind; in fact, that is an admirable trait as long as it doesn’t get out of hand. In my lifetime I have seen the birth of a new phenomenon – politicians being led around by the nose by their ad agencies. It is these ad agencies who created the phenomenon of focus groups to take the temperature of the public on every product in the marketplace, including, God help us, people who happen to be running for office.

I have been ready for a woman President long before most people can remember. For years there have been a few strong women pretty highly placed in political office. One even ran for President.
I’d have supported Shirley Chisholm if had lived long enough to run today even though she wrote, when she ran for the office in 1972: "I am a candidate for the Presidency of the United States. I make that statement proudly, in the full knowledge that, as a black person and as a female person, I do not have a chance of actually gaining that office in this election year. I make that statement seriously, knowing that my candidacy itself can change the face and future of American politics — that it will be important to the needs and hopes of every one of you — even though, in the conventional sense, I will not win."

Ms. Chisholm was wise, charismatic, brilliant and brave. She did not evade when asked where she stood on the issues. She was the right person, but at the wrong place in the wrong time. She was unique and the country was not ready for her. I’m sorry to say that, since I had voted for Dick Gregory in the 1968 election and was persuaded by my colleagues that my vote had put Richard Nixon in the White House, I chose McGovern over Chisholm in order to get Nixon out. Seeing how successful that kind of thinking was, I have voted my conscience ever since, almost never going for a candidate from either major party.

I’d love to see someone like Bella Abzug back in politics.The country’s first Jewish Congresswoman, she didn’t worry about how she looked or what group might be offended if she opened her mouth. She was a true Feminist who didn’t worry about appearing feminine. She shot from the hip, and got more flack about her hats than about her policies. She once said, “The inside operation of Congress -- the deals, the compromises, the selling out, the co-opting, the unprincipled manipulating, the self-serving career-building -- is a story of such monumental decadence that I believe if people find out about it they will demand an end to it.” If she had had focus groups her candidacy for anything would have been dead on arrival – or she might not even have arrived.

A few years later I supported Arizona State Member of the U.S. House of Representatives Pat Schroeder in her short-lived bid for the Democratic nomination for President. Schroeder couldn’t raise sufficient funds, and apparently didn’t have the fire in the belly necessary to stick it out. She was bright, inspiring, and witty, coining the phrase “The Teflon President” about Ronald Reagan. She also said, “America is man enough to elect a woman President.”

I agree with that. But let’s wait until a real woman runs.

The Heat of Summer

2007-07-26T03:32:00.000-07:00

July 26, 2007

If you once lived in Fairhope and have relocated to somewhere else -- anywhere else -- you wonder how anyone ever tolerated the hot summers we have here. I remember talking to an old friend in the mountains of Switzerland. He then lived in Rhode Island.

I said, "It was so humid there! I don't think I was ever completely dry until I was 30 years old."

He said, "I remember one night in particular."

"Oh, yes!" said I. "It was even hot at night! People don't believe me when I tell them how hot it was at night."

"One night I couldn't sleep. We had fans, we had ice water, wet towels, showers, everything we could think of. But this night I woke up so hot nothing worked. I went out in the yard, looking for a breeze."

"I did that too! I remember doing that one night!"

To put a pinpoint on it, this night was probably in August of the year 1951. Maybe 1952. The weather service would have records. I've had the above discussion with a number of friends, all roughly of my vintage, and we all describe one sweltering night long after our families were asleep and we were suffering from the unbearable heat. We walked out into our yards, wailed at the moon, or prayed to God for relief, fell into the hammocks or the lawn furniture, yearning for a spot somewhere that was not so still and hot. All the county, to hear us describe it, must have been swarming with lawns full of little kids falling into hammocks or leaning on the tire swings and moaning.

It is now the middle of July. We can expect that kind of weather for weeks to come. It's just that when it gets here, it stays. There is no "cool snap." Summer has come like a warm damp blanket and you are trapped.

At least today nobody suffers. There is air conditioning. Nobody would dream of going outside looking for a gust of breeze, not even an ignorant little kid. We don't go into the natural air except for emergencies when we have to brave those few moments between the air conditioning of the house and the air conditioning of the car. Outdoor living, pictured so elegantly in the catalogues for outdoor furniture and television shows which feature recipes to be cooked on the grill, is not even attempted in the buggy, muggy Deep South. Our porches tend to be glassed in.

The weather forecast suggests lows in the 70's at night. We will probably keep that air conditioner going at night. Because with the humidity, if you don't want to end up out on the lawn in sight of a lot of little phantom moaning little kids, you're going to need conditioned air all the time if you want to sleep.

It's summer in the deep South.

Manhattan 2 Hoboken, Commute Delayed

2007-07-20T03:47:00.000-07:00

July 20, 2007

I wonder sometimes what the difference is between living in Fairhope and living in Hoboken -- besides the obvious one of looking across the river at the Empire State Building and looking across the bay and barely being able to discern anything like a skyline.

This reminds me of the time I showed Martin Platt, then Director of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, around Fairhope. His first reaction -- and this was in 1990 -- "This town has a case of the cutes," but he later said Fairhope would be livable "If only that were Toronto on the other side of that bay."

But I digress. In Hoboken, it's better than having Toronto across the nearby water. You have the city that never sleeps, the home of heart of the arts and commerce of America, the crown jewel of our country. (Okay, there are some drawbacks to NYC; there are problems. But give me a little leeway here. It's more interesting than Mobile.)

I am boning up on Hoboken. I'm checking out its history on the web. I'm reading the Hoboken blogs. Yesterday I found a very interesting post on a solid blog called Philly2Hoboken that described the ordeal of living through the steam pipe break and trying to get home to Hoboken. It brought it back to me what living in the city is like -- the uncertainty, the uneasiness in crisis, and the general atmosphere when you and your neighbors are drawn together in a way that nobody likes. I lived in New York in the 1960's and 70's and the worst situation we had to deal with was a blackout or two. Who knows what will be next, or how bad it will be?

The writer of Philly2Hoboken wove his way by cab to the ferry, trying to get over the river in the most expedient way possible. His commute is usually little more than ten minutes; on this day it was over two hours. But after enduring the inefficiency of waiting in long lines, looking for a ticket machine that didn't exist, he enjoyed the cool breezes on the ferry, and, although it docked at a place a long way from where he lived, he was able to get a bus to his home with no trouble.

A bus to his home! We don't have things like that in Fairhope or even Mobile. I can shed my car before I leave. I can get a train into and out of the city most days (and have the ferry option in certain emergencies or just when I feel like it).

Reading his blogpost, I could feel his relief at getting home to Hoboken. I can almost feel how I'm going to feel in the same situation.

Progress

2007-07-15T10:27:00.000-07:00

July 15, 2007

When does the Fairhope Walmart open? Ah, that is the question.

About ten years ago I was on the Fairhope Historic Preservation Committee. I've mentioned this before on the blog.

Our purpose in those days was to celebrate the history of Fairhope and preserve its look of early 20th Century America. We created a tour of homes, showcasing the cottages that once exemplified Fairhope's early days. We saw change coming, but all the new people professed to love the little bungalows and the charm of the patchwork nature of the streetscapes. Some of us remembered the days when all the streets were not paved and children played in the gulleys in their many spare hours.

We found the preservation of the houses and old buildings themselves a hard sell with the business community of Fairhope, so we vowed to elect a mayor who was sensitive to Fairhope's past and try to get a few of our own members on the city council.

This did come to pass in the mid 1990's. A long-term Comprehensive City Plan was devised with the help of consultants, and a historic preservation ordinance was presented to the mayor who promised to help us get it passed. It was in the Comprehensive Plan that the city would be zoned to encourage neighborhood stores and no "big-box" stores would be built within the city limits. All this was considered a coup for our side, creating a small town of walkers, getting exercise in the fresh air and not impinged upon by the dreaded Wal-Marts and other chains. Ultimately all these good intentions came to naught.

The Historic Preservation Ordinance was cast into the wastebin as soon as the mayor heard a few objections. Cottages were demolished and replaced by very large, very expensive homes, almost all designed by the same local architectural firm, and all looking very much alike -- way too big for the lots on which they sat, very imposing and designed (totally unlike the Fairhope equalizing philosophy) to impress the neighbors and the world at large.

By the time the new Walmart was announced, just outside the city limits, a few people, maybe as many as a hundred, picketed with homemade signs announcing "No Walmart in Fairhope" and a great deal of media coverage accompanied them. Technically they didn't have a leg to stand on since the Walmart was not actually "in" Fairhope. A Sam's Club was on the way up in nearby Loxley, and another Walmart is slated to be built in Robertsdale, which will certainly meet with a warmer reception than the one here.

The most hits I get on this blog these days come from the search words "When does Fairhope Walmart open?" I can report that I don't know exactly when it will open. It hasn't been in the newspapers (or on television) yet. But I've been out to the site to snap the photo above, which shows the building completed and a lot of activity therein.

I am not against this development any more than I am "for" it. I don't much like Walmart, and don't frequent the one in nearby Daphne, but I have no doubt this one will have a lot of traffic and that most locals will be pleased to have it so convenient. It's not one of my causes, as historic preservation was. It's just a fact of life. And it will be a fact of Fairhope life any day now.

The Little Theater of Geneva

2007-07-09T07:57:00.000-07:00

Reg Bird, Mary Lois Adshead in Forty Carats
July 9, 2007

They're all in boxes now, photos of the many plays I worked on in Geneva back in the 1980s. It started as a lark, a Monday evening activity at the American Women's Club, sitting around a table reading plays. After a few months of this, one of our regulars suggested, "It's time to mount a production."

If memory serves me it was Bob Hinely, a personnel guy at the Du Pont company and longtime amateur actor, who made that suggestion. He said, "Reading plays is fun, but if this is going anywhere, we've got to get a stage and put on a show."

He was right. I had been an actress in New York, studied with Peggy Feury and her mentor Lee Strasberg, and had been in plays since I was a teenager in Fairhope. I had worked backstage a little, but what I really wanted to do was direct -- so all the pieces fell in place to get something started. I had been on the board of Geneva's English Drama Society (GEDS), but when I didn't get re-elected to that I decided to produce American plays with the American Women's Club.

We started with an evening of one-acts, which went off pretty well. Then we held auditions and began planning a full-scale production. The play I chose was the old chestnut The Man Who Came To Dinner. It had a cast of 28 people! This was a way to get ourselves known in the American community of Geneva -- I cast the minister at the American Church as a delivery man, and the Vice President of the American Women's Club as a television newscaster. I updated the script ("Hamilton Fish" became "Prince Andrew," "Gertrude Stein" became "Frank Sinatra," that sort of thing). What I didn't know when doing that was that every single celebrity name dropped in the play became a laugh line in the show -- and there were lots of them. Here we see Dorothy Watkins as the actress charming Keith Kentopp as Whiteside.

After that first full production, Geneva glowed with a new energy. I heard people talking about the play at cocktail parties, I had a huge crowd audition for the next play, and the Little Theatre was on its way. We did The Little Foxes and Forty Carats that first season. Our mission was to provide American theatre for "the tired businessman and his wife," emphasizing comedies and including Jim Buckner, Dorothy Watkins in The Little Foxes

one show for the whole family every year. I was going through my boxes of photos in preparing for the move and there it all lived again -- from Mr. Whiteside's "I may vomit" through the real tears from Reg Bird in his monologue in Tribute and the ebullient participation of Julian Finn, an executive at one of the inter-national orgs that make up Geneva's economy. Some people became directors -- Ronnie Cohen, who organized me and often stage-managed. Reg Bird, Julian Finn in Tribute

Ronnie later directed a first-rate production of Deathtrap in Geneva. We all had great fun.

The Little Theatre changed lives. Reg moved back to Michigan where he and his family produce summer theatre on Torch Lake. Ronnie has written plays and movie scripts. More than that, we offered something unique in Switzerland, and we had as almost many Swiss in the audience as we had Americans. There is nothing quite like the theatre of a country and how it represents everything about that country. We were an outpost of American culture as well as the best of the American attitude that if-you-want-to-do-it, you-can! We made friends and we made memories.

I hope someone looking up Little Theatre of Geneva finds this blog post and adds a comment. Wherever you are, you remember all that we did. It's one project that will live in my memory, and that I'll always be proud of.

Friends in New Places

2007-07-05T02:46:00.000-07:00

July 5, 2007

I've still got one foot in Fairhope, but I've got the big toe of the other in Hoboken. I check Craigslist every day to see what's for rent there -- even though it will be months before I'll have any need to follow up; we all have our little compulsions -- and I go to the official Hoboken website and many of the blogs serving the area to get a feel for the place.

I get the distinct sense that there's a lot of testosterone in Hoboken. There is an air of conflict and aggression about the place, an atmosphere not prevalent in small cities in the South. I've visited a couple of Hoboken blogs and made comments there. I've gotten responses. One of them even posted about my plans to move and that elicited a few advice comments.

The writer of that blog, Jeff Fario, wondered if my attraction to Hoboken was a mistaken association with New Orleans. Hadn't thought of that at all -- it seemed sort of European to me, with that wide main street, and all the shops and neighborhood bakeries (and Catholic churches), which New Orleans does, but more distinctly Italian-American. It had more diversity than Fairhope, and more youth. It had a lot more bars, but my days of hanging out in bars for any period of time are pretty much behind me. (Thank God and AA I survived!)

The shop above, with Xmas tree lights and hanging pots, plus its very American sign above the door, spoke to me of Hoboken. You wouldn't see that around here in Lower Alabama. It had a blatant tackiness that was charming without trying. It didn't look like somebody's idea of Art, but it got my attention. There are lots more picturesque views of Hoboken, more elegant ones and more upscale ones. But here and there are touches of a simple bygone day, like the sign in shape of a hand pointing to "The Clam Broth House," which is no longer there. I hope they leave the sign up forever. (If I were running an Italian restaurant, what would make me think to celebrate clam broth anyway? What's so great about clam broth, in the galaxy of tasty Italian food? Maybe somebody in Hoboken will be able to tell me.)

There's a chance I won't meet any of the guys who write Hoboken blogs. Or that if we do we won't particularly hit it off. I just like knowing they're there, and I like their feisty, macho Hoboken take on things.

And the fact that they're in cyberspace lets me visit my own virtual reality of Hoboken while still living amid the spectacular sunsets and painted pelicans.

Cottage For Sale

2007-06-30T02:52:00.001-07:00

June 30, 2007

As of next week, it will be official. The Captain's House will have a For Sale sign in front, be listed on the local MLS, and the traffic of looky-loo's will begin in earnest.

The 1,900-square-foot cottage is a genuine Fairhope treasure, not that that means much these days. Built in 1916 by Ed Roberts, one of the bay boat pilots, it was solidly constructed and has an ambiance of bygone days that suggests the comfort of a warm hug. I've lived in it for four years and put more money into shoring it up and bringing it up to date than I like to think about. The house has meant a lot to me, and I thought it was likely to be where I ended my days -- until I woke up one day and my life had changed so I decided to put it on the market.

I'm not being realistic about the price, because I hope someone will really appreciate the house and its location. Like everyone in Fairhope, I don't believe in the principle of Single Tax any more, particularly when it comes to selling my own house. Part of this is because I know if I don't ask top dollar, a buyer seeking to flip the property will end up buying low, tearing the house down and selling high, and I will be the loser. Fairhope itself has been the loser in this game for many years now. If it doesn't look as if I can sell the house for my price, down will come the house and the beautiful two lots will be sold separately for a pretty penny. It might as well be me who gets the penny.

I don't feel one way or the other about this. Ever since I moved in I've sought to make an example of the captain's house: This is what old Fairhope looks like. You can do it too. Buy an old house and bring it gently up to date. I've been happy in hog heaven -- making a statement by the way I lived and hoping that statement would set an example in the town I grew up in and once loved. Seeing the fallacy of that has been frustrating almost to the point of heartbreak. Of course Fairhope is not what it used to be, but it is what it is. It is in a transition, becoming something else entirely. I just don't choose to stay around and be a part of it.

You'll read more about this here in days to come. In a way I wish things were different. But for me anyway, they will be. I'm moving to Hoboken.

The Pelican Legend

2007-06-28T12:37:00.001-07:00

June 28, 2007

Fairhope is known as an artists' colony. It never was one, but it once had a few real artists. Now it has an Art Association, mainly made up of hobby artists and offering classes in painting, sculpture and pottery to the general public. This club is very successful, and has spawned a few artists, to be sure. It's just that their idea of art does not quite coincide with mine.

An offshoot of the Art Association is a committee called the Committee for Public Art. This came into being after the Marietta Johnson Museum raised funds for a statue of Marietta Johnson, a very simple, tasteful piece with three figures, slightly larger than life, one being Mrs. Johnson herself and the other two being children who are learning from her. After the erection of this statue the Committee for Public Art went into action and raised money for a statue of "The Spirit of Fairhope." This work, an abstract, three-pronged piece in blue, stands at the entrance to the town, just across the street from the Art Association building. The committee has sponsored a number of projects, including sculpture of a couple of dolphins, a sea horse, and I don't know what else. Until the pelicans.

In the days when Fairhope didn't think of itself as an artists' colony, but rather a Single Tax Colony, we had an artist-craftsman in residence named Craig Sheldon who made his living in the construction trade. Craig was a wood-carver who occasionally got commissions to create sculpture. He created whimsical animals and occasional political whimsies out of wood, and built his own house in the form of a tiny castle, out of local tile, stone, and found objects. He raised three children and lived a rather astonishing life in his little corner of Fairhope.

At the end of his life -- I believe he was in his 80's and suffering from Altzheimer's -- he was commissioned to create a sculpture to go in the new fountain at the community college. The result is the statue of pelicans you see above. It was not Craig's best work, but it had a sense of wonder about it -- those soaring birds with their command of the sky -- as did everything he created.

He's been dead some ten years now. The Committee for Public Art had an idea to use molds of his pelicans and give them to some of their members to decorate artistically and put up all over town. Here's just a small sample of what they came up with. The effect is a Disneyfication of town, punctuating the corners of the toney, flower-bedecked village with little exclamation points of painted pelicans, looking for all the world as if they wished someone would wash them of their overwrought designs and set them free as they once were.

Word has it that one of the painted pelicans has been stolen from its perch. Someone says this is worse than stealing a Stop sign. Someone else says whoever said that is insane. Whether they are art or not they are all over town, these profaned pelicans, these tarted-up waterfowl that once made a simple statement by a complex man in the place he wanted them.

I knew Craig Sheldon, and I think I know what he'd say about the painted ladies. A temperamental man with the soul of a poet and the tongue of a sailor, I don't think he's resting in peace these days.

Okay, Hoboken: Freeze!

2007-06-17T07:10:00.000-07:00

June 17, 2007

Freeze, Hoboken! Don’t let the developers in to tear down your glorious old buildings on Washington Street and put up something cheaper and tackier. Stay as sweetly raffish and wise as you are today, with Italian restaurants, bakeries, and row houses all over. The casual observer sees Catholic churches everywhere, and a beautiful Tudor style Episcopal church (with an announcement on its board outside of a celebration of the history of Gay Pride Week) as the main street becomes residential and trees crop up.

The Hoboken "attitude" is well-known. The surprise after actually visiting is how small-town nice the place is. One short shot on the train and you're in the West Village, in New York itself, but ignoring that, the small city of Hoboken (pop. 38,000, one mile square and so tightly bound by Newark on one side and Jersey City on the other, unable to grow) has a personality all its own.

Hoboken abounds with websites and blogs. Just Google it. There is an annual Italian Festival, a reknowned Music Festival, and Saints' Festivals galore. There are three theatre companies, one producing Shakespeare (de Vere) in the park. The Hoboken Library is said to have a special section of CD's of its favorite son, Frank Sinatra.

The view of Manhattan from Sinatra Park is spectacular. Sidewalk cafés flank the fancy apartment buildings that face the river and the park. Beautiful people sip pretty drinks and see the mommies with with strollers across the way.

Stay this way, Hoboken. I can't stand to see one more important little American town lose its heart and soul.

Oz

2007-06-13T03:34:00.000-07:00

June 13, 2007

I’ve had quite a trip, navigating the subways and looking for a neighborhood that hit me between the eyes. In the process I’ve discovered that I still love New York, and the city itself has been reborn into a safer, cleaner place than the one I lived in from 1964-1988. Even the transportation system has changed, been updated, expanded, and made more convenient. Living in New York used to be an endurance contest with a lot of perks. Now it’s even more perks -- and less endurance is required.

Overall, it has a lot more to offer – but the price is way higher than it used to be, which is to be expected. Well, New York, you’ve changed. I’ve changed too. (That’s a line from a 1970’s ad for a now-defunct bank.)

I’ve been to neighborhoods I never heard of in the old days: Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Long Island City. I’ve been to places that have been washed down, cleaned up and scaled up. I’m staying in a neighborhood that was once full of dirt, homeless men, and prostitutes – and is now one of the prime residential areas of the city, with elegant brownstones sporting roses in front and power-washed facades.

But nothing struck me like the neighborhood I found yesterday. I had heard about it but nobody I asked was clear how to get there. Everybody had heard of it, heard good things about it, but seemed to think it was remote or difficult to find. I was determined. With a moniker like “Dumbo,” how obscure could it be. There’s TriBeCa, SoHo, NoHo, and Dumbo, which stands for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. There is some question if there even is a Manhattan Bridge overpass, but everybody has heard of Dumbo.

I made my way via the subway to Brooklyn, went a stop too far, but I hadn’t wanted to get sidetracked into Brooklyn Heights, a beautiful neighborhood I already know pretty well. I asked a cop where the bridge was and was pointed in the right direction with the instruction, “It’s a good little walk.”

As I approached my destination, I took this picture. The sight of that activity in view of the bridge literally took my breath away. This is it, folks, Oz. The section of Brooklyn, overlooking the city with converted warehouses, great restaurants, parks, and apartments that recently were deserted offices and storage buildings. I had found Dumbo, and I loved it at first sight.

An Evening with Piaf

2007-06-11T03:55:00.000-07:00

June 11, 2007

How could a bioflick about the tragic French singer Edith Piaf be anything but depressing? I said something similar to my nephew Will yesterday at brunch, while we listened to the lovely singer Pamela Luss at the Mannahatta lounge/restaurant in SoHo. We were talking about the new movie La Vie en Rose and discussing whether or not either of us would go.

But then I had an evening with nothing to do, and knowing it would be unlikely the film would ever make the screens at cineplexes in Lower Alabama, I opted to catch it at a screen a few blocks away, on West 23rd Street.

I knew what I was in for – a grueling retelling of a life as full of heartbreak and trauma as the voice of Piaf herself, the trembling “little sparrow,” who could fill a stage with the strength of her pain and the glare of her sheer human endurance. French actors have a gift for capturing the ordinary and making it as compelling as it is beautiful. You can see all the way through the eyes of these performers to their hearts, souls, and the national character of La France itself. Marion Cotillard, a beauty I had not seen before, transforms herself to the singer from the streets of Paris who came to be an icon for a generation of French.

The film plays tricks with time and surprises us with bits of plot information too late, but the overall effect of seeing it is that of travel to the Paris from the early through the mid years of the 20th Century. Here we meet a sickly girl, raised in a brothel and nurtured by whores, pushed by her street-circus-acrobat father to sing to hold the crowds. The first time out, she essays Le Marsellaise and does herself proud. This being her song, we see that she herself is a metaphor for France’s indomitable, tortured soul, and we see why the French responded to her with adoration to the point of idolatry. Never mind that the real Piaf was 4’8” and wraithlike, that her voice was a piercing, trembling, emotionally wrenching shriek from a heart begging to be broken once more. Never mind that the real Piaf had a life of success, adulation, and was mentor and lover to Yves Montand (among others), and died not of overwork or neglect as the film suggests, but of cancer, at the time married to a 26-year-old man who adored her. This movie dwells on her tragedy, and bathes us in it.

Having said that, I know it’s weird to admit I liked it. Americans will be reminded a bit of Judy Garland, and rightly so, but Piaf was herself, and she was Paris. The movie is beautiful, Cotillard is breathtaking, and you leave the theatre being thankful to be ordinary.

Hiatusville

2007-06-06T02:50:00.000-07:00

June 6, 2007

Tomorrow I leave for a vacation in New York. I'll take my laptop, but my dance card is pretty full and I don't expect to be posting on the blog.

It may be hard to understand that writing for a blog is (for me anyway) as much an addiction as reading blogs probably is for you. It's a public journal, an archive of life. As you get older you need to leave some traces of your work in a public spot -- whether it be graffiti scrawled on a wall, a poem in a scrapbook, a file folder of letters or essays, or even a baseless lawsuit that somewhere in your heart you consider your ticket to immortality.

Am I a writer? I started the blog because I had published a book, and I thought anyone reading the blog would be intrigued enough to buy a copy. The book did little to sell books, but it made me a host of new friends who drop by occasionally and sometimes even make themselves known. I see that I have visitors from the UK, drawn to posts about "Andy Worehole," which was the name one of my commenters used on one of the many posts about Andy Warhol. It's a phonetic spelling that the English might naturally use on Google, and I'll bet this is the only blog that particular entry takes them to. Others come from nearby Huntsville or Covington, for what motives I can't imagine, but I have regular readers from Jacksonville and the guy with bananas for a name lives out in California somewhere. At one time my regulars were from Madison, Virginia (benedict s.) and Sweden, and there were some heated and exciting mental battles between them. I still get frequent hits from a favorite oaf in San Jose, Costa Rica.

I don't know if I'll continue the blog when I return. I say I don't know because I don't. I tried to kick the habit before Christmas of last year, but I kept my hand in. Up until that time I was posting every day, sometimes quite well if I do say so myself. I suggest you browse past posts if you're interested. You'll find posts on specific movies and on the meaning of movies themselves, as well as the meaning of God, the meaning of life, and the philosophy of Marietta Johnson. Seek and you'll find. Use the little search tool at the top of the blog, in the left hand corner, or scan the months linked on the side. The blog was begun in March of 2006, but the first few months were deleted through an error of the blog administrator -- me.

I only know this. I'll keep writing, and I have a lot of writing to do when I get back on June 18. The blog may be one thing too many in the future.

Then again, it may not. It doesn't do any harm, does it?

My One and Only Love

2007-06-03T11:25:00.000-07:00

June 3, 2007

I thought that title would get your attention. Actually, the subject of the blog is the popular song by that name, one that had eluded my attention until it was recorded on Rod Stewart's "American Songbook IV" CD. Even then, I didn't think much of it.

Rod Stewart? Moi?

I admit I hadn't discovered the aging rocker until he began recording corny old songs and singing them on tv with an unabashedly straightforward style. I bought the CD for tunes like "My Funny Valentine,""I Wish You Love" and "Thanks for the Memory" -- the latter of which Stewart rescues from its permanent association with Bob Hope, who introduced it in his first movie, The Big Broadcast. Even typing the movie's title, The Big Broadcast, makes me feel like an old windbag. But while I'm at it, I recommend that you see the movie, or at least Hope's duet of the original "Thanks for the Memory," which he sings with great charm.

I'm still in the process of transferring my vinyl to my laptop, whence it will go to an MP 3 or an iPhone or something really sharp and impressive up-to-date. However, the music that's being transferred has a certain nostalgic tinge -- records I've had since I was a teenager, which was many years ago. I have some of my father's old jazz albums, a smattering of Rosemary Clooney and Tony Bennett, a ton of Frank Sinatra, my late husband's Count Basie, my old Kris Kristofferson, Tom Paxton and Joni Mitchell.

I even have a gang of Christmas music albums, including one I bought in Switzerland that has many of the old French carols we sang when I was a child at the Marietta Johnson School (I am bored stiff by secular Xmas music). I have transferred a few favorites from original-cast Broadway show albums: Have you ever heard Ray Middleton since "My Defenses Are Down" from Annie Get Your Gun?

It's an emotionally draining trip, re-recording all this stuff, because you have to listen and make powerful decisions to discard huge and emotional parts of your life. I've described it here before. I still love the music, but I don't need all this vinyl; I need less stuff. I'm more than halfway through, but I had to stop because it was too painful. Now I've started up again so that I can finish the job.

I picked up one of Jim Adshead's albums, "George Shearing: Blue Chiffon." I had saved "Velvet Carpet" since the mid-1950's, with its sweeping, swooping string-background to Shearing's inventive jazz noodling (Who can recover from "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" superimposed on top of "Dancing on the Ceiling"? I ask you!), but hadn't liked the "Blue Chiffon" as well, so I didn't familiarize myself with it all that much. I decided to listen to a side and see what I thought of it. The next decision was, can I live without this particular rendition of this particular tune? Okay, I like the tune "I'm Old Fashioned," and don't have it in my collection, and Shearing's version is very nice. Then I came upon "My One and Only Love," a song I knew only from Rod Stewart's CD and didn't much care for, with its contrived rhymes and banal sentiment. But Shearing's version was gorgeous. Not too lush, not too fiddly, but a beautiful melody elegantly jazzed up. I had to have it.

My nephew Will Friedwald is a jazz historian, and the author of a book called Stardust Melodies which gives the "biographies" of a dozen popular songs. He'd probably know the story of the birth of "My One and Only Love," plus the background of its writers and all the people who ever recorded it. I contend that nobody did it better, and that it comes off as well by Shearing as it ever did by anybody. I'm glad to have it.

As to my own one and only love, that'll have to come in another post.

Good for a Laugh

2007-06-02T04:07:00.000-07:00

June 2, 2007

Say what you will about the National Spelling Bee. Movies have been made that touch people's hearts; movies about little kids learning the joy of achievement, about adults learning from children; movies about the pressure, tension, and the miracle of a child being held to some arbitrary standard and transcending the challenge. Broadway plays that win Tony Awards have been produced about spelling bees. I've said a lot about the spelling event over the years. I once wrote an angry letter to the editor of the local paper about it. As a matter of fact, I'm ag'in the whole thing.

We used to have spelling bees in school as a way to drill correct spelling into us. As such, they were harmless, and did get us to focus on a list of words and rules that would help us in a world before the Spellcheck feature on computers did it all for us. But the "national spelling bee" concept erased any real learning value in spelling bees and made it a showcase for children, a new arena in which parents could micro-manage their children's lives and the media could make a hero of a child, after months of memorization, repetition and focus on a single activity would happen to be dealt a list of obscure words that he had worked on learning to spell and not crack under the pressure by actually spelling the last one right.

It's no coincidence that most winners (including this year's) are home-schooled, where they are given full-time to focus on the one important thing in life: learning how to spell the words they might be given in the bee.

Usually the winning word is one that adults don't know the meaning of, and the child will likely never have the need to use. This year is no exception there, although the word itself does not seem to be a very difficult one. As in most tests, winning the spelling bee has more to do with guessing right than anything else.

But this year there was a treat in the contest.
It seems that most of the serious young spellers are normal, well-balanced kids after all, as exemplified by the adorable moment replayed most often on the tv news after the event. An 11-year-old from Terre Haute named Kennyi Aouad was given the word "sardoodledom" as his spelling word. Don't tell me he's not a good speller; he's had to go through life spelling both Kennyi Aouad and Terre Haute. Well, the word sardoodledom was one he'd never come across before -- except maybe on his spelling list -- and hearing it pronounced cracked him up. He knew how to spell it, but just saying he did struck him as funny. He would lose it every time he had to pronounce it. If you didn't see the footage of his spelling the word, look for it on YouTube; it's surely there, and it will give you a laugh today and a smile forever.

Can't help but love this kid! Can't help but hope that he knows how much joy he gave us jaded curmudgeons who hate the National Spelling Bee but love the spellers.

Whizzing Chunks of Time

2007-05-29T03:57:00.000-07:00

May 29, 2007

Okay, so I had a birthday. If you are a regular occupant of the Internet, which I assume you are or you wouldn’t be reading this, you’d realize I’m getting pretty old. Not yet 70, but pushing it pretty hard.

I can tell you that at this point life is experienced as whizzing chunks of time – a projected future that keeps coming at you and then disappearing. You spend a lot of time dwelling in places and time zones in which you used to be. The past, I mean. Other voices, other rooms, another place and time. And sometimes it's instructive.

Then again, you anticipate what's coming next. I decided to give myself a party on the weekend before the birthday. This would make it not quite a birthday party, and the less said about age the better. This would give me something to do for a rather manic two weeks as I got ready, including cooking, straightening up, getting the right dishes and glassware out, selecting appropriate attire, etc. Now that's over. The guests have come and gone, the food has been consumed, and the dishes washed and put away. It was an excellent party, actually, with little mini-events and minor scenes, a lot of laughs, and the chance to see beloved friends all in the same place. I drank champagne, but with the adrenaline level I never felt it. I have to keep reminding myself why I bother with champagne at all.

Now comes the next chunk of time: planning a vacation in New York beginning a week from Thursday. All of us in the know are aware it's not really a vacation, but a business trip in which I'll explore the underpinnings for my next life-phase, yet it will be a vacation as well. I need to know my way around the residential areas surrounding the city so as to help with my big decision. I need to eliminate certain neighborhoods and concentrate on those that hold the most appeal for me.

You'll hear more about this whizzing chunk as the time draws closer. I will not make any firm decision until after the big Marietta Johnson School Reunion in early October. Planning and preparing for that big party will occupy most of the next timechunk.

Any birthday makes me aware of all those things that have changed within -- and without -- myself. A look in the mirror almost always causes a pang of regret and grief for a loss of something I didn't even know I had. But I also know that, as the chunks of time whiz by with greater alacrity, almost all the old feelings are still under the surface, that inner child and former nymphet are ready to appear in the older, wiser and flabbier person's body.

Sometimes I forget what's in the mirror and react as the adolescent. In spite of the wisdom of the years, I drop everything I've learned and succumb to the call of my former, reckless and carefree self. I make a decision to change my whole life once again.

When you get to be my age, if you're lucky, you may learn a lesson that transcends the reflection from the mirror and the preoccupation with things you cannot change.

Another Look at Memorial Day

2007-05-28T05:54:00.000-07:00

May 28, 2007

Memorial Day, I was taught, was started in the South after the Civil War. Widows, mothers, and others who loved men who had lost their lives in the defense of the South in that tragic war went to cemeteries often and put flowers on the graves of their beloved men. It became institutionalized as Confederate Memorial Day, in a few years co-opted by the bereaved on both sides. At first the women of the North had their day for decorating graves, and they called it Decoration Day; but over time the two sides came together to honor all who died in the Civil War under the appellation of Memorial Day, and one day was set aside.

In the South, where many diehards still reside, there are pockets where Confederate Memorial Day is observed on various days in the year, but let us face it, there have been many more men lost in many other wars, and the memories of the Southern cause have been blurred by so many re-inventions that there is absolutely no point in defending anything about that particular war.

Imagine my surprise in reading this in an article by Adam Cohen in today's New York Times:

Memorial Day got its start after the Civil War, when freed slaves and abolitionists gathered in Charleston, S.C., to honor Union soldiers who gave their lives to battle slavery. The holiday was so closely associated with the Union side, and with the fight for emancipation, that Southern states quickly established their own rival Confederate Memorial Day.

He gets his information from an impeccable source, Dr. David Blight of Yale University, who has written several award-winning histories espousing this theory. In fact, Dr. Blight's take on that particular war has helped shape our perceptions of our wars, our history, and our racism.

Well and good, and I hope I'm not considered a racist (but I feel certain I would be by Dr. Blight) because of what Memorial Day means to me. I don't love the holiday (except that it usually falls, as it does this year, on my birthday), and I certainly don't love the Civil War or the Southern cause. I Googled Memorial Day and found many an entry, not all of which support the idea that the day itself has helped the country to proceed with ignoring civil rights. This one I found quite fair and balanced, partly because it re-tells the old old story I grew up with, true or false. Don't miss the page on Mrs. Logan.

Let us observe the day with not receiving mail, finding the bank closed, thinking of the real meaning of each and every war, and also not forgetting that it's my birthday.

Graduates Aplenty

2007-05-26T05:38:00.000-07:00

May 26, 2007

This time of year we all seem to be thinking of graduation...getting dressed for somebody's and/or remembering our own. At the Organic School (aka Marietta Johnson School), we've been honoring special people who graduated in past years since January. We send a picture to the paper and a few paragraphs about the honoree. And then they don't run them. Never mind, these are people dear to our hearts and important to the life of the school.

Above we have the very colorful Mordecai Arnold, USMC Ret., retired educator, and leader of many cake walks; looking at the award given to Helen Porter Dyson, Class of 1926,and his former kindergarten teacher. He himself will be Graduate of the Month of June. The next picture shows State Representative T.Joe Faust, class of 1959, receiving his award as Graduate of the Month of May from yours truly, President of the Board of Managers, and not incidentally Class of 1958.

For more information about the previous Graduates of the Month, just click on this. This site gives info on each of the graduates of the month, and lots more. You'll love it.

A Time To Love

2007-05-23T03:14:00.000-07:00

May 23, 2007

A few months ago, maybe as much as a year, there was a lot of activity on this blog concerning questions of love and what it is. There still appears to be interest in the topic.

At that point we had a regular reader (“benedict s.”) who was always suggesting that we all read Spinoza, because he believed the philosopher had as many answers as we had questions. I believe he’s not blogging himself any more – and he seldom visits here, because, he tells me, he’s completing his book on Spinoza.

While I attempted to define love, or at least to confine it, isolate it and break it down, he gave us Spinoza’s simple and felicitous definition “Love is joy attached to an object.”

Being sometimes a contrarian, I thought I could do better. It never seemed to me that joy was synonomous with love, although joy could at times be a component of the complex emotion.

I reminded him of something I’d written several years before:

Love is a word that has baffled those of us whose mother tongue is English ever since there was such a language. For one word to encompass all the meanings of love is probably as limiting to the emotion itself as it is to the attempt to define it. This impoverished vocabulary may actually have contributed to the emotional restraint of the English. Mother love, romantic love, love from a grandchild, love of life, love of God – are these things the same?

Love is not necessarily an emotion. It is more likely the substance of the heart, the source, the sustenance of the spirit, the food behind all that is positive in human existence. It is unquestioning sacrifice, unrequited mercy, unsolicited grace.

In later discussions, the reader calling himself “Officious Oaf” asked what homosexuality was all about, and did it fall in the realm of the “normal” or was it an illness, aberration, or what.

I responded that to my way of thinking it was all about love.

Love itself is hardly usual, but it is normal. Normal madness, perhaps, that eventually evolves into comfort, support and well-being in the presence of a particular other person. I wouldn’t agree with Spinoza here, that it could be defined as “joy attached to an object,” since there is so much conflict within love that “joy” is only one facet of it. How about “madness attached to an object”? Clever, but hardly sufficient. Such a definition would have to incorporate the reality that, with time, the madness of true love abates to a dull roar and then spirals into acceptance.

The Spinoza disciple wrote this comment:

On a less serious note, what's this business with love being madness? I've heard poets say that, but just put it down to license. Love always seemed a joy to me. Still does. But there are sometimes confusions that attach themselves to particular loves.

I know a guy who has had three wives -- not at the same time -- and still loves them all. Same guy has had several other loves that he still loves. And I can tell you for a fact, all his loves still give him joy. Madness? Maybe. But in his private madhouse, they feed well.

To which I wrote this comment:

Love is passion, conflict, chaos, pathos, cosmos, peace, hope, sanity, madness, sorrow, and joy too. It engages and confronts every emotion possible, including desperation and pain. Not all love, of course, is any one of these things, and seldom is it all -- and probably never all at the same time unless it is really madness. Shall we say it is a complex emotion and leave it at that?

I have one more tangent to go onto here before I leave love behind this time, however – the concept of obsession. A sometime addict of the Dr. Phil show, I was intrigued at the mentally unbalanced man stalking his own wife as shown on the program over the past few weeks. His possessiveness and paranoia had driven her away from him, and yet he persisted in deception of himself and everybody surrounding him, in and outside the rehab facility Dr. Phil sent him to, all the while calling it “love.” I am reminded how often real madness is attributed to love, and how seldom, in our rush to allow everybody one love for his or her own life, we have screened the use of the very word love. There are those of us who are tied to people for a lifetime through obligation, dependency, or need – at times theirs rather than our own. Sometimes when we say “I love you,” we actually mean something else entirely, but we are more comfortable normalizing ourselves with the one emotion everybody is expected to understand.

Few of us really do understand it. I had an emotional crisis myself about 15 years ago. I had been “in love” many times in my life but had never quite gotten my mind around what was happening in my heart. I was attracted to people who had no love to give, yet I assumed what I was getting was enough. Worse, I assumed it was the best I could have. In my therapy and support groups, I tried to understand and recapture the feeling of love, to identify it. My heart’s search kept taking me back to the same time, place and people – my grandpa and my auntee (great aunt), and myself the toddler on their knee. Then I thought of my own daughter. I knew the closest I had ever had to love came from these sources and I cherished that reality. That would always be love for me.

Now I have two grandsons, and when I think of them I am overwhelmed with how much love there is in the world. They show me love with every movement, and I love the opportunity of loving them. The love that goes back and forth between us has a great deal of joy in it, but it is enriched by concern, tenderness, and commitment.

As a single person, I admit there is always the possibility of romantic love around some corner -- the hope of ending my days with the love of my life. Ah, come on, I say to myself. The days you have left are few and the possibility of a certain relationship – a one and only – ever coming on the horizon lessens with every passing year. And what on earth would you want that for now? All the questions keep coming back.

In all the previous discussions, I seem in all too big a hurry to drop the subject. If someone cares to elucidate the topic for the rest of us, I’ll keep it afloat as best I can.