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“Insularity is the foundation of ethnocentrism and intolerance….”

October 30, 2014

This fall has been splendid. Yesterday was in the 60’s and today is in the high 50’s. Gracie and I get to go to the dump later. I haven’t told her yet. She just gets too excited. Right now she is looking out the front door hoping, I think, for something to see. I’m sorry to say she’s out of luck. My street is always quiet.

I wonder what encyclopedia salesmen do now, the same with TV repairmen who used to come with a toolbox and a box of tubes. My father was a pinsetter at the local bowling alley when he was in high school. My mother used to get blocks of ice delivered to her house. When I was little, I had to tell the operator the number I wanted. I remember our number started with ST for Stoneham. My father never got just gas but also got his windshield and back window washed, and if he wanted, they’d check his oil. Kids had newspaper routes. Adults in cars deliver now. Shorthand has gone the way of Latin, a dead language. I don’t remember the last time I saw an elevator operator. The guy at the corner who used to sell papers is gone. Now you put your money in a box and take out a paper. When I plan a trip, I hunt through the internet for the best price. The travel agent used to do that for me.

The loss of people to people occupations have made us all far less connected. We are becoming more and more insular though I still smile at people and some smile back. The rest are probably wondering what I want by that smile. The world is becoming a colder place.

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“Clothes make a statement. Costumes tell a story.”

October 28, 2014

Today is one of those fall days we all remember from when we were kids walking to school. The morning air has a bit of a nip, but it will get warmer as the day gets older. You can just feel it. The sun is shining through the leaves and branches of the trees in the backyard. It is a muted sun, not the bright sun of summer. The year is moving along.

Halloween was always the topic of conversation around this time. With only a few days to go the planning got intense. It was time to scour the house for the perfect costume. We all knew being a ghost was the fallback. We wanted more. We didn’t have zombies back then or I would have been one. Frankenstein made a few appearances. Walking with your arms straight out was part of the look. That gave the hint as to which monster you were. Hobos were easy but not at all scary. Cowboys needed only a hat and a gun belt. I was never the fairy or ballerina type. I remember one year my sister wore her tutu. Fake blood and scars on your face were a must. The scars always had black stitches. My mother did the make-up. She also hunted for the parts for our costumes. The only thing she usually bought in Woolworth’s was a mask for each of us. The best one was like the Lone Ranger’s because you never got hot and sweaty wearing it. A pirate was a good costume, and every pirate I knew only had one eye. Boys sometimes wore dresses and hats and girls had jackets, ties and fedoras. I remember being a hobo with a stubble on my face and wearing clothes which had seen better days. We usually carried pillow slips instead of bags.

At the neighbors’ houses we stopped the longest because they chatted and pretended not to know who we were. The little kids didn’t go far afield. My brother and I wandered all over town. When the house lights started to go out, we went home with our treasures. It was time to do inventory.

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“But mothers lie. It’s in the job description.”

October 27, 2014

My outside clothes are clean and have all their buttons and no holes. The colors match even down to my socks; however, my mother would be embarrassed by my inside clothes. If that accident she warned me about countless times ever happened, the holes in my socks and the torn elastic of my clean, but falling apart, underwear would have her humiliated. She and I were world’s apart in our underwear theory. I believe that what’s hidden is of little importance. She didn’t. I figure no one sees it anyway, and if that accident really happened, I suspect the doctor would be too intent on my injuries to criticize my hole ridden socks and underwear.

My mother was the font of all wisdom. We always believed her. I never swallowed gum. If I had, I’d probably still be digesting it as we were warned the gum stayed in our system for years. I imagined a giant pink ball of bubble gun sitting in the middle of my stomach growing bigger and more menacing. My mother told us our tongues turned black when we lied. I’d look in the mirror and see my regular pink tongue. Only mothers could see the black tongue was the reason. I swallowed that whole story. If she asked me something and I’d lied, I wouldn’t show her my tongue. Little did I know I was implicating myself. I never went outside with wet hair. I didn’t want pneumonia. I never ate watermelon seeds. I didn’t want a garden growing in my stomach. Besides, it would have had to fight for room with the bubble gum ball. I never went blind or even blurry eyed sitting close to the TV.

We never questioned my mother. We believed everything she told us. My entire generation waited an hour after lunch before we went back into the water. My mother had a direct line to the North Pole and Santa’s ear. Fright made us good before Christmas.

I have no idea what works on kids today. Google has put an end to watermelon gardens and giant balls of bubble gum.

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“Sunday is the core of our civilization, dedicated to thought and reverence.”

October 26, 2014

The morning is lovely, sunny and seasonably warm. I filled my bird feeders earlier so now there is a line waiting for turns on the perch. I watch from the window over the sink as the different birds fly in and out. The male goldfinches have almost lost their bright colors. The chickadees grab a seed, fly to a branch and tap to get at the kernels. The blue jay fills his cheeks, if birds have cheeks, with several seeds. My deck is littered with sunflower kernels.

Sunday may not be what it used to be, but it is still a quiet day. People tend to stay close to home. The roads are clearer. Some stores are even closed.

I remember those childhood Sundays. My dad watched football. He was a pre-Patriots Giants fan and was most expressive during the games. He’d yell loudly and curse a bit and ask, “What the hell are you doing?” Rhetorical questions are common when watching any game. Name calling too is part of the experience. “You idiot or what an idiot move,” was one of my father’s favorites. It was reserved for stupid plays, interceptions and fumbles. My father always watched alone, and he sat in the big, comfy chair. I sometimes sat on the living room floor and read the comics. My mother spent the morning in the kitchen getting dinner ready. I remember her standing over the sink peeling potatoes. The oven was always on and whatever roast we were having for Sunday dinner was cooking. The small kitchen got warm. I never liked Sundays with church, homework and an early school night bedtime. Its only redeeming factor was the family dinner.

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“It is a rare and beautiful moment when you find love among people and in places that are so completely different from anything you’ve ever known.”

October 25, 2014

We have sun for the first time in days. The morning is chilly the way fall mornings are. The rain and the wind blew pine needles and leaves off the trees so the lawn, the driveway and the deck are covered. The leaves are yellow.

I hope my memories of Ghana and the Peace Corps don’t make you yawn. They appear here often because they are still so much a part of me, even after all these years, and much of what I think, love and respect came from those years. Living for a little more than two years in Africa is mind and soul expanding and that never disappears.

I think I was destined to be a Peace Corps volunteer. When I was eleven, I made a vow to travel. When I was in high school, I joined groups like SNCC believing we all had social responsibilities. In college, among other things, I picketed for the grape workers, marched against the war and tutored Spanish-speaking kids in English. The Peace Corps seemed a perfect fit.

I applied in the fall of my senior year in college. The application was multi-paged and took what seemed forever to finish. When it was sent to Washington, all my hopes and dreams were in many ways attached. The answer didn’t take long. In January the all important letter came inviting me to train to be a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa, in Ghana. I sent my acceptance the very same day even though I had no idea where Ghana was. The worst part in the process would be next, telling my parents.

I called home.

My mother said little. My father said it all: no more money for school if I choose to go, Africans stink, and he forbade it. Okay, that last one gave me a chuckle. The phone call ended when I hung up on my father because of his anger. It would take a while but he did finally accept my choice.

I remember how nervous I was leaving home on the flight to Philadelphia to staging and then on to Ghana. I was twenty-one.

Training wasn’t easy. Coupled with homesickness, eating strange foods and suffering from a variety of ailments I sometimes had the urge to leave, but I didn’t. I chose to stay. During training, after our live-in, we had to make our way to the next training site by ourselves. That was when I started feeling like a Peace Corps volunteer. I was on a bus with mostly Ghanaians and traveling for hours to go south, and I got there with no problems. I ate food sold alongside the road, drank water from dubious sources and peed in a hole.

I thrived in Ghana. I came to love Ghanaians, sweet, warm people always willing to help. Teaching was difficult at first but then got easier as I learned to teach. If I needed to, I could travel anywhere by myself and often did to get to Accra, 16 hours from where I lived, to Togo, the country to the east of Ghana, and to what was then Upper Volta.

I was at ease in Ghana, confident in myself, and loved being there. My homesickness disappeared. I felt at home.

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“There was an edge to this darkness…. A cold wind was blowing out of the north, and it made the trees rustle like living things.”

October 24, 2014

Today is much like the last few days, rainy and dark. The wind is still here, steady and strong. The oak leaves and the pine branches sway from side to side. The deck is littered with pine needles and yellow leaves.

Today we will venture, Gracie and I. We have five stops starting with Gracie’s second favorite place, the dump. Her very favorite place is Agway where dogs are welcome and where I buy her food and treats and food for the cats, and it too is on the list. Gracie will be a happy dog.

My backyard has lights wrapped around tree trunks. The palm tree is on the farmer’s deck. The fir tree in the deck corner has a single set of lights which are lit always. I think my yard has a touch of magic. I look out the window even on the darkest nights and see those spots of color beaming and radiating. Winter will come when night will last longer than day, but in my yard, there is always some light.

The house is quiet. All the animals are having their morning naps and all of them, all three of them, are in the den here with me. Gracie snores now and then and breathes deeply. The cats sleep soundlessly. How exhausted they all must be after a good night’s sleep. I remember sitting in school on dark, rainy days. The old school with its tall windows was the best spot to watch the rain, and I’d be drawn in by the sound of drops hitting those windows. We were quiet on day’s like today as if the rain had a dampening effect on all of us. During lunch we tended to whisper. We bemoaned our fate, stuck with no recess, no chance to let go of the energy stifled by sitting at a desk.

The basement bathrooms were four sets of wooden stairs away from the room, and those stairs were the only exercise on a rainy day. The nun herded us down in two lines, the boy’s line and the girl’s line, one on each side of the steps. At the bottom of the final set boys went right and girls went left. None of us ever dawdled. We’d finish and join the line to go back upstairs. When we were all done, the nun walked us back to our room. Nobody ever made a sound going up or down the stairs. We didn’t dare.

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“A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.”

October 23, 2014

The visit was spectacular. We laughed and reminisced. We ate the great food Peg brought and I had made. We went up Cape sightseeing, stopped at the Coast Guard Museum, the Old Jail and in Sandwich for lunch. The weather cooperated, and we missed rain everywhere. They left yesterday afternoon and the house got too quiet. I miss them. Gracie does too. She loved her walks with Bill.

We always easily connect. I think it is the friendship of years and the experience we shared in Ghana. The other night we listened to a song called Poop in a Hole about being a Peace Corps volunteer. The country wasn’t Ghana, but it didn’t matter. It was a universal experience we all accepted and mastered. The three of us laughed several times. I have no other close friends who would think that song funny, gross maybe, but not funny. Bill, Peg and I are experts at pooping in a hole.

Last night the rainstorm and the wind were tremendous. As I was going to bed, I saw lightning through the windows on the front door. The thunder was next. It was loud and it rumbled often. The rain was heavy and I could hear it hitting the windows and the roof. When I woke up this morning, it was sunny, but now it is cloudy again. It is warmer than I expected.

Pine needles cover my grass. They are all brown and would have fallen eventually but they were rushed by the wind. For some people on the Cape, pine needles are their front lawns. They buy and spread them mostly at seasonal homes. Crushed white sea shells too act as lawns. When I was young, there were very few lawns. Keeping them healthy and green was just too much trouble. The house I lived in had a weedy front yard so it was a lawn of sorts, the same with the back. I don’t know remember when grass reared its ugly head and having a beautiful lawn became a matter of pride. It was like importing suburbia. I do have a beautiful lawn now, but I also have a landscaper who takes care of it. I write a check and take compliments on how green and lush my lawn is: that’s my only contribution.

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“The best mirror is an old friend.”

October 19, 2014

Today is cloudy and chilly. Gracie and I are heading to the dump later. Right now she is having her morning nap and snoring up a storm. Fern is napping beside her on the couch rolled in a ball. Tonight is predicted to be as low as 35˚, sounds like turn on the heat and bundle under the comforter weather to me.

One small item caught my eye in the paper this morning. It seems a teacher from Maine has been put on a 21 day paid leave so she can voluntarily quarantine herself. This was done at the request of some of the school’s parents. It seems the teacher went to a conference in Dallas. The closest she got to the hospital with ebola cases was 10 miles.

My friends are coming tomorrow so Coffee is going on hiatus from today until Thursday. They are friends from my Peace Corps days, and I met them during staging, the first time we were all together, in Philadelphia. They were supposed to be posted 100 miles from me, making them my neighbors, but Peg was pregnant and Peace Corps wanted them close to Accra and the office. I always stopped to visit them on my way home from Accra. They were on the second floor of a house with no water. It was a run to the outhouses in the backyard. I was impressed when Bill used to carry his own water in buckets. During our second year, they transferred to my school and we each lived on one side of a duplex. We had motorcycles and made lots of trips together around Bolga. When we did, I carried Peg on mine and Bill carried Kevin, their son, on his. We had supper together every night and most nights played word or card games and had an ongoing paddle ball championship until the elastic on the red ball broke. We could each paddle well into the hundreds when that happened. We were ready if it ever became an Olympic sport.

We share a love for Ghana and for each other. The memories of our time together are sweet.

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“sometimes music isn’t just a bunch of sounds and lyrics, sometimes it’s more than that: a time machine…”

October 18, 2014

Last week was summer. Today is fall but it is a beautiful fall day with lots of sun, a deep blue sky and a breeze which is strong enough to bend limbs and blow leaves. I can hear the mower in my front yard. The grass was high and several pine needles had already fallen. Before long they will cover the lawn, and I’ll hear the blower making piles. I miss the sounds of rakes. Every Saturday this time of year I could hear rakes from just about every house on the block. That scratching sound is one of my strongest memories from this time of year.

Remembering the rakes got me thinking about sounds which have disappeared. I remember the rotary phone and how it clicked before the dial circled back around so you could finger in another number. My father would always tell us we’d break the TV dial if we moved the channel selector really fast. It clunked as it moved from station to station. Snow was often the annoying background sound on our TV. It was like a hissing, and it did kind of look like snow when the picture disappeared and those black and white dots replaced it. When TV programming when off the air for the night, snow or the test pattern was what you’d find.

My mother had a hifi. I used it to listen to my 45’s. I’d load the records on the top over the chunky middle piece you had to use for 45’s then I’d turn the button. First I’d hear the record falling then the clicking sound of the other records as they moved down to fill the now empty space. The arm moved onto the first grooves of the record which made a sound almost like a click then the music would begin.

I know some old houses probably still have radiators, but mine doesn’t. When I was a kid, there was one on the wall opposite the bottom of my bed. I could hear the water run through it then the hissing of the steam as it was released. Woolworth’s used to have a cash register with clunky keys and bells. Typewriters had great sounds from the clicking of the keys to the sound of the bell when the carriage was moved. I still have my typewriter. It was my high school graduation gift.

Of all these sounds, I miss the raking the most and my Dad the raker.

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“I did NOT have three thousand pairs of shoes, I had one thousand and sixty.”

October 17, 2014

We are still in that warm cycle of weather. I have my front door and a couple of windows opened. It rained all Tuesday night and most of yesterday. Lots of leaves fell in the wind so the lawns and sides of the streets are multi-colored. Today is sunny and a bit breezy. The streets are drying.

Getting a new pair of shoes was a big deal. Usually I’d get two new pairs a year: one for back to school and one for Easter. My school shoes were always sturdy and practical while my Easter shoes were dressy, sometimes patent leather. After Easter, they’d morph into church and special occasion shoes. I never wore my school shoes anywhere but to school because they were expected to last the whole year. In late August my mother would herd us all to the shoe store. Until it was my turn, I’d wander the store looking at the shoes on the racks. If I found a pair I liked, I’d bring one shoe to my mother who would decide whether or not I could try that pair on. Back then, most of the shoes were tie shoes and sturdy didn’t usually mean fashionable, but I was young enough not to care about fashion. My mother stretched her budget and bought expensive shoes for us because they were more likely to last. I remember Buster Brown and his dog Tige and the picture of them on the inside heel of the shoe. I never did question the long hair and the funny cap. That was just Buster Brown.

I loved looking at my feet in the x-ray machine and having the shoe salesman measure them with that silver slide. He’d sit on the odd-looking stool which was close to the floor and close to feet. It had a front part where you put your foot to be measured and where the man would put the shoes on your feet when it came to trying on the new pair.

I walked up and down the length of the store to decide if the shoes felt good on my feet. I’d also stop at the foot mirror to see how they looked. If they passed both tests, my mother would buy them for me. I was thrilled to carry my new shoes home. They made me feel proud somehow.

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