The fall was a wash. Sigh. Nothing new since the end of August. Double sigh.
Still, 2015 wasn’t a bad year. I didn’t spot Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Nevada, Alaska, Nebraska, and North Dakota, but I did spot my first Montana since 2011. Wonder of wonders, I spotted a second Montana in the last week of the year, and right outside Up-Island Cronig’s. That has to be a harbinger of something interesting.
Last year my first Nebraska likewise appeared when I’d given up hope. Maybe fate tried to pull off the same feat this year, but forgot I already had Montana. ‘s OK, Fate. Good try. I appreciate it.
My buddy Don Lyons, he who got me started on this game around 1988, said he found North Dakota in the hospital parking lot this past summer, and South Dakota on the same day in the same place. I’m thinking of staking out the hospital parking lot next summer, or at least making regular passes through it. I spotted Montana and West Virginia there this year, good catches both.
So I’ve printed out a blank map for 2016. Massachusetts and New York are already on it, and without my getting in my car or doing more than crossing a paved road.
Here’s what the map looked like when 2015 rolled over into 2016. Here’s to a full map in the coming year.
“What is a fascist — other than someone you don’t like?”
That’s how the great Jack Reece (1941–1997), my Modern European History professor at the University of Pennsylvania, opened his lecture on Nazism and Fascism.
Nervous tittering rippled through the room. We were veterans of the antiwar movement, the civil rights movement, and union organizing battles, not to mention the ideological feuds that then as now seemed endemic in the left-of-center. In those days we were gleefully watching the loathed Nixon administration disintegrate under pressure from the Watergate revelations. Who among us hadn’t, probably more than once, dismissed someone whose politics we didn’t like as a fascist?
With help from the class, Professor Reece then wrote on the blackboard some of the characteristics of Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany: totalitarian, anti-democratic, nationalistic, authoritarian . . .
Professor Reece’s question remains deeply rooted in my head. In the years since, I’ve occasionally heard the word “fascist” come out of my mouth to describe people I don’t know whose politics I don’t like, but usually I manage to stop myself. “Fascist” binds complex ideas and circumstances up in a deceptively neat package.
Religions and ideologies — the packages — are fascinating, but I’ve long been at least as interested in what goes into the package as in the package inself. From the outside, the packages look monolithic. They have flat sides and clear borders. The people inside the package may cop to the same label, but once you get to know a few of them, they turn out to be a wildly diverse lot.
When we share experiences — tell each other our stories — we nearly always find that we have a lot in common. If we’re put off by the packaging, we rarely get that far.
So in the U.S. we’re well into the 2016 presidential campaign even though the election won’t take place till next November. Words like “fascist” and “socialist,” “liberal” and “conservative,” are being lobbed back and forth like snowballs. Wouldn’t I sometimes love to jump into the fray and, like Professor Reece, ask “What is a fascist / socialist / liberal / conservative — other than someone you don’t like?”
On Facebook the other day I saw a meme — one of those ubiquitous little graphics with pithy or funny quotes on them — that defined “conservative” as fearful, resistant to change, and a few other negative things that I would characterize as more reactionary than conservative. It’s a good bet that this particular meme is being circulated by self-styled liberals and progressives, and it’s an equally good bet that they haven’t thought too hard about what “conservative” actually means, literally or historically.
Many liberals and progressives are also fond of circulating memes paraphrasing the Iroquois counsel to consider the next seven generations when making decisions. A version quoted on Wikipedia includes this sentence: “Look and listen for the welfare of the whole people and have always in view not only the present but also the coming generations, even those whose faces are yet beneath the surface of the ground – the unborn of the future Nation.”
Got news for you, people: This is a conservative approach. It doesn’t fear or resist change, but it doesn’t rush headlong into it either. It’s mindful of potential consequences. It thinks ahead.
Fascist, socialist, liberal, conservative — these words all mean something considerably more important, and more interesting, than “someone you don’t like.” They’re useful shorthand for describing big-picture ideas or one’s own general political perspective, but when applied to other people, they obscure as much as they reveal. They lull us into thinking we know more about someone than we do. They make us complacent. They may even make us smug.
Maybe most important of all, they make it hard to recognize potential allies. In his discussion of Nazism and Fascism, Professor Reece drew a picture on the blackboard: the leader, the Führer, Il Duce, stands on a pedestal in front of row upon row upon row of people, all of whom are entirely focused on him, none of whom are paying any attention to the people on either side. The people are united by their focus on the leader but they have no connection with each other.
It’s a terrifying vision, and an all too plausible one.
Deer Week has rolled around again. As noted last year in “Blaze Orange,” Deer Week is almost two weeks long — this year it runs from Monday, November 30, through Saturday, December 12 — and it’s not the only time deer can be hunted on Martha’s Vineyard. Archers could hunt deer from October 19 through November 28. Hunters who favor “black powder” firearms get their chance from December 14 through 31.
I open my blaze orange vest to reveal my malamute-puppy sweater. Note grown-up malamute’s nose at lower left.
Deer Week, or Deer Almost-Two-Weeks, is the only time deer can be hunted with shotguns. I stay out of the state forest during Deer Week, and avoid large tracts of land where hunting is allowed. Last year a friend gave me a blaze orange vest. I donned it a little sheepishly, having survived all these years without one, but I’m wearing it again this year.
It’s odd to be writing this in the wake of yet another mass shooting, in San Bernardino, California, but after I moved to Martha’s Vineyard 30 years ago, the thing that changed fastest was my attitude about guns.
In Washington, D.C., where I’d lived for the previous eight years, guns were carried by cops and criminals, both of which groups I was wary of. If anyone I knew kept or carried a gun for self-protection, I didn’t know about it. Plenty of women I knew did carry some form of tear gas. When I was a kid, maybe 10 or 11, I did some target practice with my father’s .22. I earned several NRA riflery patches at summer camp. As a grown woman, I saw guns primarily as weapons that had been used against people I knew and might be used against me.
On Martha’s Vineyard it wasn’t long before I started meeting people who hunted, and people whose family members and neighbors hunted (and who occasionally benefited from the bounty). Likely as not, they had first gone hunting with their fathers and uncles and older cousins. (Yes, nearly all of them were men.) In the process, they’d learned more than marksmanship: they learned to know and be at home in the woods. What they killed went into the freezer and eventually wound up on the supper table.
They were, in short, neither cops nor criminals. They were friends of friends and people I ran into regularly at the post office or the grocery store. They were neighbors. They weren’t scary.
In the years that followed, and especially as my online world expanded to include a variety of people living in all parts of the country, I noticed that when guns and gun control came up, the city people tended to have a different take on the subject than rural and small-town people. I came to believe that this had much to do with our personal relationship not necessarily with guns but with people who used guns. If you associated guns primarily with cops, criminals, and men violating restraining orders, you leaned heavily toward stricter gun controls and even a ban on personal firearms. If you’d grown up around hunters, knew hunters, and maybe were one yourself, you tended to lean in the other direction. City people are less likely to know hunters than small-town and rural people.
The rhetoric around guns has grown ever more extravagant, and what passes for debate ever more polarized, but underneath it all I do believe there are millions upon millions of people whose experiences and perspectives may be very different but who are still willing and able to take part in a civil discussion. On one hand, guns can do more damage in less time and from a greater distance than any other widely available tool. On the other, the malaise that afflicts this country isn’t going to be cured by a ban on firearms, even if such a ban were desirable or enforceable, which it isn’t.
That’s enough for now. I’m donning my blaze orange vest and going for a walk with the dog.
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics” is a cliché. For the record, Mark Twain attributed it to Benjamin Disraeli, but the attribution is unverified and other plausible sources exist.
Pity the poor statistics: they aren’t lies, and they don’t lie, but like other facts they’re easy to manipulate. Compared to human memory, however, they’re rock-solid reliable. When someone tells me some particular summer was the driest ever, or the driest she can remember, I remember the summer it didn’t rain from June 1 to September 1 and the grass crunched under our feet — and I go looking for rainfall statistics to back me up.
November 18, 2015: first ice disk of the season.
Some people I know keep meticulous records of things like rainfall and temperature, the date of the last frost of spring and the first frost of fall. I am not one of those people. However, when I woke up one morning last week to the first ice disk of the season, I couldn’t help checking my ice disk file for the winter of 2014–2015.
Last November, I unmolded the season’s first ice disk on the 16th. The year before that it was the 13th, but I can’t tell you about the year before that because I didn’t get into ice disks until the middle of January.
All the same, I think I’m seeing some consistency here. I’ll go out on a limb and hypothesize that the first ice disk of the season generally arrives at my address in West Tisbury in the middle of November.
Snowy ice disk, November 13, 2013.
My photo for November 13, 2013, tells me that along with the ice disk we had a little snow. I had forgotten that.
This morning I donned longjohns for the first time this year. Now that the second ice disk of the season has arrived — and is still hanging in there at one in the afternoon — it’s clearly time to put flannel sheets on the bed and replace the screen insert in the storm door with its heavy winter version.
In 2014, it wasn’t till the very end of December that the cold hung around long enough for two ice disks to coexist. (Sunlight is tough on ice disks.) In 2013, however, I had a pair on the 21st of November. Not this year. I’m not ready to make any hypotheses about the average date of paired ice disks at this address. This morning, November 24, brought the second ice disk of the season, and if it lasts till tomorrow morning, I’ll be surprised.
November 24, 2015: second disk of the season.
November 21, 2013. I was getting a little artsy with the maple leaf.
I won’t put my winter lights up till the solstice — unless I get into serious procrastination mode, in case that’s as good an excuse as any to do it a little earlier — so by way of a preview here are some highlights from the winter of 2014–2015. I can’t help noticing that I was rhapsodizing about statistics around this time last year, on November 18 to be precise, so maybe this will turn out to be an annual thing.
Ordinarily I don’t do awards, but hey, recognition is good, especially when it comes from a peer one respects, so thank you for nominating me, Charles French, whose blog, Charles French: Words, Reading, and Writing, I’m a faithful follower of.
I have two blogs, this one and Write Through It: On Writing, Editing, and How to Keep Going. This one, started in July 2011, is the older of the two. I started it, well, because Martha’s Vineyard. I’ve lived here long enough to see the world through a Vineyard lens, and I lived elsewhere long enough to see the Vineyard through an elsewhere lens. This blog helped inspire me to start writing fiction again, which is why I post here so irregularly, but it’s all good. Really.
My advice to bloggers: Your blog is my window into your world. That’s enough. You don’t have to try to sell me something.
Here are my nominees, in no particular order. All these blogs expand my world, albeit in different ways. Some of these bloggers don’t do awards, but check out their blogs anyway. They’re special.
The TomPostPile • Tom lives up the road from me. I already knew he was a musician and a master sign painter, but until he started his blog I knew nothing about Wishetwurra Farm. Here’s your intro. He also takes wonderful photos of both here and “away” — sometimes as close as Woods Hole but other times considerably more distant.
Charlotte Hoather • Charlotte Hoather is a gifted young soprano pursuing her music studies in Scotland. She also writes wonderfully.
Cochin Blogger • I “met” Cochin Blogger on an international editors’ list we both subscribe to. His words and wonderful photos have introduced me to daily life in Kerala, which is where he lives.
The Immortal Jukebox • Thom Hickey’s “blog about music and popular culture.” Every post is a musical adventure, complete with embedded videos.
Evelyne Holingue • Evelyne is a novelist who grew up in France and now lives in the U.S. She’s witty, observant, and perceptive, and she blogs in both English and French. Earlier this year she worked her way through the alphabet, looking for the English equivalents of common French idioms. Her readers joined in. It was wonderful.
The Glass Bangle • Thoughtful, perceptive, funny — this is my window into the world of a writer, poet, and avid reader in India who’s raising two daughters.
MV Obsession • Joan has known the Vineyard for longer than I have, but she sees it from the perspective of someone who doesn’t live here year-round. When I start getting snarky about “summer people,” I think about Joan and all the others who have their feet in the mud of this place too.
What Matters • Janee Woods doesn’t post all that often, but everything she does post is essential reading for anyone trying to understand how privilege works and why dealing with it is important.
Off the Beaten Path: Hikes, Backpacks, and Travels • Just what it sounds like. I’m a lifelong East Coast girl, and Cindy’s wonderful photos of wildlife, mountains, and places you can’t reach by car transport me to parts of the U.S. that I may never see in person.
Alex Palmer: Your Man in the Field • Sports is terra incognita to me, mostly by choice, but Alex writes so well that I might turn into a sports fan in spite of myself. He just launched this blog a few months ago, so check it out. P.S. Not only does Alex live on the Vineyard, he grew up in the same off-island town I did.
Veterans Day 2015. Blustery and wet on Martha’s Vineyard: the parade was cancelled, and the annual ceremony was moved inside to the VFW hall in Oak Bluffs.
November 11 was my uncle Neville’s birthday. He was a gentle, soft-spoken guy, generous to a fault; an electronics wizard, he made things that would help people out, like the “baby crier,” a device that translated sound into light so deaf parents could “hear” their baby crying.
Nev never married. He lived with his mother, my grandmother, until she died. The family story was that his great love had died, or left him, or something like that. In his generation, there were a lot of such stories circulating about uncles and aunts, great-uncles and great-aunts, whose lifelong marital status was single.
Another family story had it that he was shell-shocked in World War II. Both he and his older brother, my father, went off to war. My father came back, not unscathed, but at least physically and mentally whole. Like so many of his peers, he almost never talked about the war. After I read Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 for the first time,I think when I was still in high school, he told me that of all the books he’d read about the war, that one best described his own experiences.
Catch-22, I just learned, was published on November 11, 1961.
At some point, probably when I was a college student organizing against the Vietnam War, it dawned on me that November 11 was both Neville’s birthday and Veterans Day. The two have been melded together ever since. Every year I remember Nev, who died some 25 years ago, but I don’t “celebrate” Veterans Day.
It’s not that I don’t respect those who’ve served in the military. No one had more credibility for me and my antiwar comrades than veterans who had returned from Vietnam, some of whom were still on active duty when they spoke at antiwar meetings and rallies. They had survived what most of us could barely imagine. They made it real for us in ways that the evening news alone could not.
And they were trashed for it, as were just about all of us who fought to end that war, and to end or avoid subsequent wars. Those years introduced me to the mindless, or maybe not so mindless, viciousness of “support our troops” sloganeering. Then, as in every war the U.S. has been involved in since, “support our troops” comes with a powerful subtext: “Criticizing the war doesn’t support the troops, so don’t even think about it.” When I see one of those bumper stickers that says “If you love your freedom, thank a vet,” I always wonder what they mean by “freedom”: the freedom to STFU and “support our troops”?
My father’s war, the war my uncle came home shell-shocked from, was the “good war,” the one where we really were fighting for freedom. Subsequent wars have been ethically and politically dubious, but how could fighting Hitler have been anything but good?
Wars don’t come out of nowhere. Generals and politicians don’t wake up in the morning and say, “Hey, nice day for a war! Let’s do it!” Hitler didn’t come out of nowhere either. Was Hitler inevitable? Trace the threads back in time and soon enough you’ll come to the punitive reparations forced on Germany by the treaties that ended (hah!) the First World War. Economic havoc resulted, the Weimar government took the fall, and the Nazi movement took root and grew. Would Hitler have come to power if he hadn’t had that havoc to capitalize on? We’ll never know, but I attach a mental asterisk to “the good war” whenever I hear the phrase.
So when Veterans Day rolls around, I remember my uncle Neville, the terrible cost of war, and the ease with which we use platitudes like “support our troops” and “if you love your freedom, thank a vet” to silence others and avoid thinking too hard about any of it. “If you love your freedom, use it,” say I. “If you don’t, you’ll lose it, not because someone snatches it away from you but because freedom takes practice, ongoing, never-ending practice.”
My $35 (?) handbag in its customary place, leaning against the end table I got at a yard sale about 25 years ago.
No, this is not about the security guard at an all-night agricultural establishment, and the individual was not charged with rustling sheep. Midnight Farm is an upscale boutiquey sort of shop. IIRC Carly Simon once had something to do with it. Maybe she still does. I wandered in a couple of times when it was still located where the hardware store used to be. It contained a variety of items I wasn’t interested in, at prices I could barely imagine, never mind afford. Among the items the former manager is said to have returned after she was apprehended were an $834 handbag and a $500 scarf. You get the idea.
Midnight Farm has since moved to the higher-profile place on Main Street, Vineyard Haven, formerly occupied by Bunch of Grapes, a fair-to-middling bookstore that probably wouldn’t have survived had one of the big chain bookstores ever set up on this side of Vineyard Sound. It moved across the street to the rustic-looking building that was once home to Bowl & Board, which sold useful housewares at reasonable prices. This is probably why it went out of business.
One could chart the decline or gentification (depending on your perspective) of Martha’s Vineyard by tracking the evolving occupancy of a few commercial properties. Midnight Farm’s former home, the one that was once a hardware store, now houses the health-food annex of Stop & Shop (which used to be the A&P, which is why some of us call it the Stop & P). Fortunately the hardware store survives and (apparently) thrives almost a mile from the town center, where there’s plenty of parking but getting out of the parking lot can be a challenge in summer, when State Road is gridlocked almost to the Tashmoo overlook.
But I digress.
It is said that everyone on Martha’s Vineyard knows or at least knows of everyone else. This is not true. I did recognize the name of Midnight Farm’s owner; I may have been in the same room with her once or twice, but we do not move in the same circles. I did not recognize the name of the woman charged with, according to the Gazette, “larceny more than $250 by single scheme, shoplifting more than $100 by asportation, and larceny more than $250; false creation or use of a sales receipt; and possessing a class E drug (Xanax).”
I didn’t recognize the word “asportation” either, so I looked it up: “a carrying away; specifically: felonious removal of goods,” says the online Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged. It’s not in the (abridged) Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate or the American Heritage Dictionary, so you know it’s not an everyday word. I can’t wait to work it into a sentence.
But I digress again.
What I set out to write about wasn’t crime, the community, or island economics. What I wanted to mention was how when this news item was shared on Facebook — of course that was where I first heard of it — a couple of commenters expressed surprise that the thefts weren’t discovered sooner, because they may have taken place over a two-year period and because Midnight Farm is not a corporate giant whose right hand doesn’t want to know what its left hand is doing.
The comment thread was long and getting longer (it’s probably still growing). No surprise there: incidents like this touch us in different ways, and wrestling with them in a more or less public space helps us make sense of them. I read and reflected and finally posted: “Hindsight is 20/20.”
What’s driving my novel in progress, one of the questions I’m struggling to answer, is “What do you do when it’s too soon for hindsight? How do you know when to act, and if you think you should act, what do you do?”
The scenario in my novel involves a sixth-grade girl. Her stepfather may or may not have sexually abused her in the past. He may be abusing her now. A handful of people outside the family begin to suspect that something is wrong, but they don’t know what. They can’t know, either because the girl doesn’t have full access to her own memories or because the “don’t tell” imperative is strong or, quite possibly, both. Their suspicions grow, but the price of being wrong is very high — the stepfather is a powerful figure, and a lawyer to boot — and if they’re right, then what?
The dog in the novel is based on Travvy, but with a whole different backstory.
The novel also involves the rescue of a dog. The dog wasn’t being abused, but he was being seriously mismanaged and was on the verge of getting shot when my protagonist and the sixth-grade girl intervened. The fate of the dog becomes a matter of some public concern, including a selectmen’s meeting.
Not so the fate of the girl. The fate of the girl is in the hands of two people who aren’t sure they trust their own perceptions, have no way to confirm them, and know the price of being wrong is unthinkably high.
Hindsight, I’m discovering, may be 20/20 but until you get to where hindsight is possible, it’s more like picking your way through a swamp at twilight, where you glimpse ripples and flashes of light but don’t know what’s making them.
Well, I saw Alaska but it was on Route 28 in Falmouth so it doesn’t count. Boo-hoo. No change since the end of August, in other words. Well, since I caught Nebraska at the very tail end of 2014, I have not given up hope of snagging one of the Missing Ones — Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Nevada, Alaska, and North Dakota — before 2015 closes its doors, but here we are for the record:
A few short (and ever-shortening) days after fall comes to the clothesline, it’s time for the semiannual Great Seasonal Clothes Swap. I live in a studio apartment. Both closet space and drawer space are limited. Off-season clothes live in the closet in two big plastic containers.
Right: Winter clothes coming out of hiding. Left: Summer clothes going in. The storage boxes are underneath. My clothes piles are not that big.
The swap is enough of a hassle that a week or two or three generally pass between “it’s probably time” and “it really is time.” My bed is the main transfer station for clothes moving out of and into the boxes. If the swap isn’t accomplished in one day, I can’t go to bed.
Travvy can’t nap on the bed either. Travvy is the reason why no matter which direction the clothes are moving in, most of them have dog fur on them.
In case anyone’s wondering why all my clothes are garnished with fur . . .
On Sunday I realized that I was wearing my last pair of jeans. I hadn’t worn shorts for almost two weeks. Short sleeves had given way to long. I was wearing turtlenecks again. The time had most definitely come.
I wear out my turtlenecks. I wear out my jeans. I don’t wear out my long-sleeved shirts because I don’t wear them that often. Shirt cuffs have to be unbuttoned and rolled up before I can do the dishes, wash the car, dig in the garden, or do anything else that might get my hands (and probably my wrists and forearms) dirty and/or wet. With turtlenecks, sweatshifts, and sweaters, I can push the cuffs back to my elbows and get on with it.
I acquired a bunch of long-sleeved shirts back when I worked for the Martha’s Vineyard Times and had this idea that I shouldn’t wear the same clothes, especially the same shirt, five days in a row. I left the Times 16 years ago, and some of my shirts are a good deal older than that — and still in good condition because (you guessed it) I don’t wear them much.
During the Great Seasonal Clothes Swap I confront myself: OK, Susanna, you really like this shirt, but you never wore it last winter or probably the winter before that, and it’s highly unlikely you’ll wear it this one either. If you were a shirt, how would you feel about spending all your time either in the closet or in a box?
Shirts in waiting to go off to the Dumptique
So on Tuesday, a dump day in my town, I took four shirts on their wire hangers to the Dumptique, which is a 5- or 10-minute walk from where I live. Fare well, shirts. Here’s hoping you’ll find someone who’ll let you out of the closet once in a while. Maybe I’ll see you around town.
The other question that comes up during the Clothes Swap: How tatty does a turtleneck have to be before I throw it out?
The answer is “Pretty damn tatty.” Most of my turtlenecks have frayed cuffs and frayed necks. Some of them also sport little gaps in the seam or holes in the fabric. Still wearable, say I. I usually wear turtlenecks under something else, a shirt, a sweatshirt, or a sweater. I do like to have a couple of unfrayed T-necks in the closet at all times, in case I have to go somewhere people notice these things.
Add that to the “10 Reasons Why I Like Living on Martha’s Vineyard”: Here, if people notice that your cuffs are frayed or your sweater has holes in it, they generally won’t say anything. On the other hand, when I go out in a skirt or, gods forbid, a dress, someone will invariably stare as if they’ve just seen a two-headed cat. On the whole I think it’s good not to be too predictable.
So in the U.S. we’re well into the 2016 presidential campaign even though the election won’t take place till next November. Words like “fascist” and “socialist,” “liberal” and “conservative,” are being lobbed back and forth like snowballs. Wouldn’t I sometimes love to jump into the fray and, like Professor Reece, ask “What is a fascist / socialist / liberal / conservative — other than someone you don’t like?”
From the Seasonally Occupied Territories . . . 