Lance Mannion

Night Orchard Peaches

Mined from the notebooks and adapted from the Twitter feed and Facebook news feed, Tuesday, August 18, 2020. Posted Sunday morning, September 6.

Ain’t she a peach? Mrs M at Lakeside Farms, Tuesday, August 18, 2020.

Another note from the Department of In Search of Lost Time, by way of catching up with my August blogging:

Just back from another long explore. This one took us back out to Lakeside Farms again, and of course we had to stop in for pie and...peaches!

Not coincidentally, we picked up a peach pie.

A proper social distance to our left, a cheerful old couple in their seventies waited at the counter with us. He was white-haired, tall, taller than I am, but bent over his cane; still looking trim and dapper in a brown and white plaid shirt and sand-colored shorts, white socks pulled up to his knees. She was short, came up to his chest, blonde, all in denim blue. Both wore white cloth masks. They were buying vegetables. He eyed our pie box as the cashier set in on the counter. “What time should we come over?” he said.

“Anytime,” I answered. “We’ll be home all afternoon.”

When we finished cracking ourselves up, he asked what kind of pie we were buying. He approved our choice heartily. I asked him what kind they were getting.

“No pie today,” he said with not totally mock-disappointment. “Just the vegetables, I’m afraid.” He sounded as if we’d be disappointed to hear it. I was. “I’m sorry for providing the temptation,” I said, and again, I was. He and his wife paid and left chuckling. Well, he was chuckling. His wife was just giving him one of those looks.

Our turn to pay. There was something I was curious about. The sign out front of the market advertised “Night Orchard Peaches”. I asked the counter woman who was taking care of us---a sturdy, broad-shoulder blonde in her forties with a confidently smiling expression behind her mask and glasses---what “Night Orchard Peaches” are. I was wondering if they were a kind that were best picked at night or ripened overnight. Turns out they come from an orchard on a nearby farm owned by a family named Night. Live and learn.

Peach pie was one of Mrs M's specialties back in her baking days. She won awards! Sadly, these days pie baking is still beyond her. But the Lake Side Farm pie, made with Night Orchard Peaches I’m assuming, will probably do.

Filed under Sketches from the Album. Related post: "Liberals Bake Here".

One Church Garage

Posted Sunday morning, October 6, 2019.

If I was Paul Theroux, novelist and grumpy travel writer, I’d be headed for church this morning. Not our church. This church…

What church, you say. That’s not a church. It’s a house. Where’s the church? Where’s the steeple? Which doors do we open to see all the people?

Back here…

More wayside chapel-sized, I think. I’m not sure the pastor considers this a church. The name on the other side of the sign on the front lawn is The Way Family Christian Center. 

But they do hold worship services on Sundays. 

I passed the place Friday morning, coming in this direction. The sign caught my eye but the fact that there was no actual church to go with it made me pull over to investigate. I was hoping somebody would come out of the house and ask me what I was doing in their driveway taking pictures. I wasn’t going to tell them the whole truth. I was prepared to do some Theroux-like dissembling. If they wanted to know I planned to tell them the signs had caught my eye and I was interested in attending services. That’s almost the truth.

Theroux doesn’t feel honor-bound to tell people he bumps into randomly on trains, in the streets, at bars or in restaurants that he’s working on a book and they’re likely to turn up in it.  He does arrange and conduct formal interviews, but I think he’s a believer in the observer effect. This is a feature of all journalism. As soon as your sources are aware they’re going to appear in the news they adjust their language and their memories in order to say what they think they’re expected to say. This is why so many serial killers and mass murders were quiet types who kept to themselves and whom neighbors never would have expected would do what they did. This is an unavoidable occupational hazard but it doesn’t matter all that much when the sources are telling you how it feels to have won the big game or when they noticed the house next door was on fire. 

But it does matter when the story is about life and death political issues, which makes it a fatal flaw in elite political journalism in which the usual practice is to make a day-trip to the Heartland (wherever and whatever that is) and interrupt the usual suspects at breakfast in the local version of Lake Woebegone’s Chatterbox Cafe to ask them a short list of leading questions.

Theroux has an advantage here. He’s not a platformed journalist who has to deliver his stories on deadline to editors and producers who’ve assigned them with the expectation they’ll tell the story they want told. He’s a well-known and highly-regarded writer with a publisher’s advance in his wallet that buys him the time to explore a place in-depth and the freedom to find and develop his own point of view of that place and the people he meets along the way. Not having any pre-existing "narrative" to support, he's free to develop his own later, when he's done with the leg-, train-, car-, and occasional boat-work. He can let conversations go their own way and the people he talks to be themselves. A consequence of this in his last travel book, “Deep South,” ( He has a new one coming out this week.) is that racist and gun-nutty white folks feel free to show themselves at that gun-nuttery and racist worst, and he feels no compunction about portraying them that way. It’s not his job to flatter a coveted audience or mollify Republican friends and neighbors back home who don’t want to know they’re on the same side as bigots and yahoos. (Note: not every white Southerner he meets and writes about in "Deep South" is a bigot and yahoo. I'm just pointing out the difference between what he's up to and what political journalists get up to.)  And because he wasn’t looking for a particular type of Southerner, Theroux was also able to find and talk to people you wouldn’t know exist in the Heartland (again, wherever and whatever that is) if all you had to go by were the reports from Real America by elite political journalists---black people. 

In “Deep South” he spends extended time talking with, among people of all sorts and conditions, black farmers in Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. They knew he was a writer and what he was up to. And the key here is that he doesn’t interview them. He talks with them. In their conversations they talk about the things they have in common with white farmers---their practical concerns, their work ethic and habits, their economic anxieties. They don’t do this by way of comparing themselves to their white counterparts. They do it because they’re farmers and these are the things that weigh on farmers’ minds. And Theroux isn’t interested in making the case that Gee, they’re just like white farmers, because, for one thing, they aren’t, because being black in America, especially in the South, is a hardship and a handicap no white people face or seem obliged to understand, and, for another, Theroux is more interested in the people he talks to as people---people living in a particular landscape and affected by it but not as representatives of all people living in that landscape.  And that’s what I was curious about. I wanted to know about the pastor and his ambitions not about what brand of Christianity he preached, except in how it informed his thinking and how his thinking informed his preaching.

There were a few clues that his was a more or less liberal brand. The BELONG banner over the garage door looked to me like ones I’ve seen on many a mainstream liberal church. The red letter, all caps, exclamated WE WELCOME YOU! message at the top of the west-facing side of the front sign reminded me of the sermon Father Bob gave the time before last when I was up north visiting the Old Mannion Homestead and took Mom Mannion to mass. 

The signs don’t give the pastor’s last name, just his first name---Felix. That implies to me he’s Hispanic, which doesn’t signify. There’s a large evangelical following among Hispanic Americans and in Latin America, and some of its churches are likely conservative. Still, it’s hard for me to imagine many American Hispanics being politically conservative these days. There are some, though.

The red pickup parked over to side of the driveway with the oversized sticker on the gate---

---advertising the center's food pantry didn't signify one way or the other. Food pantries are a regular offering of even the most Right Wing of Right Wing churches, along with clothing drives, soup kitchens, and fundraisers for various charitable causes.

The message below WE WELCOME YOU! on that side of the sign could signal either way too. 

“1. First Christ,” it says. “2. Then Change. 3. It’s all about Jesus! It’s really that simple.” Then at the bottom, in red letters again, “We believe that a person first comes to Christ and then, change comes!”

Change, I suspect, means quitting---getting clean and sober, whatever your addiction is. Again, this isn’t conclusive. Self-help is a mission of many conservative Evangelical churches, What I’m wondering is if Pastor Felix is a former addict himself. I’d have found a tactful way of asking him, although I suspect it would be something he’d volunteer in the course of describing his ministry. 

There was one more thing I wanted to know. If he had plans to build a real church.That's something I'd like to sit down and talk about with him at length.

But the house remained closed up. It was nearly nine in the morning. A little late for the whole household to be sleeping in. And the fact there was only the one truck in the driveway and it was parked off to the side suggested that the residents were out on their daily business. The answers to my questions are probably waiting for me at the worship service. If I was Paul Theroux I’d be on way there now. But if I was going to church it would be to our church to take Mrs M and Ken to mass as I do most Sundays. They’re giving mass the skip today, as it happens. It’s a cold and gloomy day here and rain is predicted, so we’re staying close to home. I’m about to make us all a breakfast of scrambled eggs. That’s considered a sacrament by our congregation of four. 

Maybe next week...

Some keep the sabbath by going to church. I keep it by making empty promises to God and my readers.

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"Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads" by Paul Theroux is available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.Theroux's newest travel book, "On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey", hits the bookstands Tuesday, October 8, 2019, when it will be available at Amazon in hardcover and for kindle.

Farmer Franklin

Posted Thursday morning, October 3, 2019.

Signs of a working farm: They may look like oversized seasonal decorations but these hay bales on the grounds of the FDR Library and Museum get put to use. Hyde Park, New York. Wednesday afternoon, October 2, 2019.

Mrs M and I have been making regular trips to Hyde Park lately. It’s a pretty drive across the river and home of our new favorite diner. (Mrs M is not eating regularly these days. Diner breakfasts are the only full meals she’ll eat. That’s been a worry since she came home from the hospital, but that’s another post.) But after breakfast, we usually head over to the FDR Library to sit in the garden by the visitor center, relax a bit, and enjoy the weather, which, by the way, has been beautiful. We’ve been having the best of all falls here in the Hudson Valley. Thing that’s had me wondering, though, is these giant rolls of hay in the two fields bracketing the upper grounds of the estate. Springwood was Roosevelt’s mother’s home until she died and he inherited it. But before that it belonged to his father who managed it as a working farm. FDR grew up there, and was, technically, a farm boy. That mattered a lot to him, all his life. As an adult he liked to list his occupation on his tax returns and in the town directory and on censuses as farmer. And, again, technically, he was. He took an active part in the management of the farm and his practical knowledge of farming informed his programs for the New Deal, including the CCC, which was not a make-work program---it was a conservation, forestry, wildlife, soil management, and farming program, and FDR had enough experience with all of those endeavors that he could rightly consider himself as expert enough that he wasn’t getting in the way of the real experts who ran the program with his advice and instructions. But that was a long time ago. The estate has been what it is since he died, the immense front lawn of the library and the house, or depending how you look at it, an outdoor museum itself. And that’s what had me wondering about the hay: were the rolls museum displays or were they put to use and if so, was there livestock somewhere on the grounds I had never heard were there? I decided to find out.

No, I didn’t Google it. I did what civilized human beings do. I asked another human being. Specifically, one of the U.S. Forest Rangers who work as guides and caretakers there.

Here’s what he told me:

The hay bales aren’t just there as decorations. Every year at the end of the growing season local farmers are invited in to cut and bale the hay. The bales sit----decoratively---in the fields until winter when the farmers come back and haul them to their farms to feed their livestock over the winter. 

So there you have it.

Still a working farm...

Overseen by the ghost of Farmer Franklin.

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Most everything I know about FDR as a conservationist I know from reading Douglas Brinkley's "Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America" which is available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.

Driving in Boston even though you're not in Boston

Posted Thursday afternoon, August 29, 2019.

Traffic on Storrow Drive in 2016 . Joe Difazio for WBUR.

Mannion Rule of the Road: If you’re routinely weaving in and out of lanes looking for advantage and seeing every open space between the cars ahead of you as an opportunity to get ahead of the pack and get there faster, you are a menace to traffic and bad driver and a maniac or…

You’re in Boston…

Where everybody is a bad driver and a maniac.

Signs of trouble

Posted Saturday morning, November 25, 2017.

Not sure where this was. Got lost on my drive. Somewhere out in the country northwest of here. It’s off a two-lane road that winds through farmland, woods, abandoned fields, and forlorn-looking town centers that have no real towns centered around them. I pulled off the road onto a lane narrower than most driveways and parked next to this building which was once a garage and filling station, I think. To fit the whole side of the building in the picture I had to step off the pavement on to the edge of the large lawn in front of a restored farmhouse. Just as I was taking my last shot I heard a voice calling urgently, “Sir? Sir?” A man in his forties, wearing an orange hunting vest over his Carhart overalls, with a ball cap riding easily on top of his sandy hair was hurrying down the lane from the direction of the main road. Turned out to be the owner of the building and collector of the signs.

“I don’t mind you taking pictures,” he said mildly but with a tension in his voice, “but I got to warn you, my neighbor doesn’t like anybody on his property, and he’s one of those people always looking for an excuse to be mad.”

I was already on my way back to the car, but I assured him I was done and apologized as if he was the neighbor himself. He didn’t relax, and he seemed in a hurry to get back to whatever he was doing, and I wondered if he was anxious to be caught out in the open by the neighbor. He didn’t stick around long enough for us to chat a bit and for me to find out he doesn’t collect old signs anymore and why he doesn’t. Can’t afford it anymore. The picker sites have priced him out of the market.

He was referring to online dealers in antiques, collectables, second-hand goods, spare parts, odd lots, and, well, junk offer their wares to the highest bidders among anyone with a computer or the right app on their smart phones with too much money to spend---and a lot of people have way too much money---and the owner of the signs was not one of them. He’d despaired of ever being the highest bidder and considered himself priced out of the market.

We finished with a few pleasantries and then he hurried back up the lane and across the road to his place of business, an analog picker site that had exploded out the doors of the old barn that housed it and into the lot around it, filling the lot with old furniture, machine parts, car parts, tables of knick-knacks, and unidentifiable…well, junk, and suddenly the root of his un-neighborly neighbor’s un-neighborliness was clear.

Bad enough, from his point of view, he had to put up with tourists stopping to gawk and take pictures of the roadside attraction next door. Imagine looking out the front windows of your meticulously restored Nineteenth Century farmhouse and have the view filled with a junkyard.

Stealing away to sea

Photos taken Sunday morning, May 21, 2017.

On the north bank of the Mohawk River, Alplaus, New York, about 8:00 this morning. Sunday, May 21, 2017.

If you’re familiar with the geography of New York State, it might strike you at first glance as funny that, one hundred and seventy miles from the nearest salt water, on the north bank of the Mohawk River, not far upstream from that famous seaside resort town of Schenectady, there is a Capital Region Maritime Center. Calling it the Capital Region Riparian Center would seem to make more sense. But when you think about it…all you need to do is put your boat in the water out back, sail due east for about fifteen miles, steer hard to starboard just above Albany, follow the Hudson down to New York City, and there you are, out on the open ocean. Which makes this poem on the backside of the sign not just a landlubber’s dream.

So that’s what I did this morning. Drove myself and my coffee down here and, for an hour or so, in my head, I stole away to sea…

George Washington didn't hybridize here

Posted Sunday, April 16, 2017.

It’s old but not contemporaneous. Probably dates from the late 19th Century. Washington didn’t sleep here either or, to be precise, in the house nearby. Teddy Roosevelt did, when the place was owned by his Attorney General, Philander Chase Knox.

Ruined greenhouse. Philander C. Knox Estate. Site of Maxwell’s Headquarters. Valley Forge National Historical Park. 9:15. Easter Sunday. April 16, 2017.

Protest

Posted Sunday morning, February 5, 2017.

There was a protest rally in Poughkeepsie yesterday afternoon.

Poughkeepsie isn’t that far from here.

Just across the river. Forty-five minute drive.

So I had no excuse.

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The little boy in the second photo with his “Don’t Be a big Bully! Trump” poster probably isn’t a Black Bloc anarchist. He was just dressed for the weather. It was 30 degrees with a stiff breeze.

The dangerous doctrine of the Reverend Abijah Peck

Posted Saturday morning, November 26, 2016.

This is the cemetery behind the old meeting house of the Clifton Park Center Baptist Association Church. According to the historical marker in front it was built in 1833 but it must have been on the site of a previous meeting house. The cemetery opened for business in 1801, and  presumably the first customers didn’t have far to travel to their final resting place.

We're visiting the Old Mannion Family Homestead for Thanksgiving and early yesterday morning, in what has become a routine when we’re up there, I set out on a drive that took me out of the suburban precincts in which I grew up and out into the countryside on the north side of the Mohawk River. My usual practice once I’m out among the woods, cornfields, and apple orchards is to decide what roads to follow by mentally flipping a coin at the intersections. Friday’s coin flip took me out to the church, which caught my eye and roused my curiosity for its being so plain and austere.

The congregation was founded in 1794 by Reverend Abijah Peck, a veteran of the Revolution and a weaver by trade. There was no church building to start. Rev. Peck preached out of his house and his original flock was composed almost entirely of his wife and children and a few friends. When the congregation grew a bit, drawing in some of his neighbors, Peck moved operations out to his barn. A regular meeting house was built in 1801---I don’t know which was dug first, the foundation or the first graves---and it served the congregation for thirty years until this one was built. Abijah Peck lived to see it and then some. He was ninety-one when he died in 1848. He’s buried out back with his two wives on either side. His first wife and the mother of his children, Mindwell---I’m guessing pronounced as an admonition, Mind Well, her parents apparently thinking it prudent to bring her into the world with a scolding---died when she was in her early fifties. His second wife, Lydia, was a middle-aged widow, twelve years his junior. He outlived her by a couple of years.

Peck became “the subject of divine grace in his twenty-fourth year” and right off began to make himself a pest to his friends and neighbors with his God-bothering or, as his eulogist put it, “almost immediately after his conversion, he began exhorting the people upon the great concerns of the soul.”

Peck was born in Connecticut in 1758. That would have made him twenty-four in 1782. He went on as something of a lay preacher for twelve years before he moved to Clifton Park Center, then part of the village of Halfmoon, and “collected a few scattered lambs of Christ” and founded his church. He was not an ordained minister at the time. He even put off accepting ordination for a few years on the grounds of “personal unfitness.” I don’t know who or what persuaded him he’d grown fit (or to get over his false modesty) but he was finally ordained around the time the new brick meeting house was ready.

Peck had apparently long since retired as pastor when he died. He was still an active member of the church and the pastor at the time seems to have liked him very much or thought highly of him.  That pastor was effusive in his praise of Peck in his eulogy.

“As a man, the deceased was well-known for industry, integrity, and punctuality; as a Christian, for consistency, humility, and benevolence; as a pastor, for untiring zeal, fidelity, and devotion to the interests of the Redeemer’s Kingdom.”

“With small advantages of education, he acquired a considerable amount of general knowledge, rich stores of spiritual wisdom, and was might in the scripture. His preaching was characterized by plainness and force. A holy unction seemed to be upon him, and he was generally successful in communicating to his hearers. His sermons often displayed much and vigorous thought. His mind was naturally strong and his judgment correct. He was in truth a peacemaker...such confidence was placed in him that in church difficulties and family contingencies, he was often selected as the only judge in the case and his decision was law.”

“He was a great friend to the young minister. He took him by the hand and led him along,giving him encouragement to press forward. To the pastor of his own church, he was all that could be asked as a friend, a brother, a counselor, and a comforter under the various trials incident to the pastor in the discharge of his responsible duties.”

[Editor's note: See below for the source of the quotes.]

Sounds like a fairly decent fellow and probably was a good pastor in his day. But I’m more interested in the younger pastor and the curious about the church politics of his tenure.  Whoever he was, he had a satirical eye and there was somebody in his experience he felt deserved satire.  Felt it enough that he couldn’t resist putting it into his eulogy for Peck, whom, like I said, the younger pastor genuinely liked and admired. But Peck seems to have shone brighter in his estimation in comparison to somebody else the pastor definitely did not like.

That somebody is in the eulogy as an aside justified as a description of what Peck was NOT:  A meddlesome, gossiping, backstabbing troublemaker who, it sounds like, had had his pastorship voted away from him and then took his revenge on the church by making life as difficult as he could for his successor, who wrote:

“How unlovely is the conduct and unenviable the lot of that minister in like circumstances whose conduct forms a perfect contrast with his noble example. Regardless of the march of improvement, he hold onto his pastoral charge until the church to preserve its own existence or to prevent the young, enterprising, and well-informed of the congregation from abandoning their place of worship is constrained to obtain a more efficient and enlightened minister. Then he ascribes the conduct of the church to pride and popularity, looks with an envious eye upon his successor, magnifies his faults, misconstrues his motive, indulges a spirit of jealousy and distraction, tell how little he requires for preaching and what a salary this proud young man demands, although the brother by whom he is superseded may give himself wholly to the ministry, studying, visiting, preaching, praying, conversing, and abounding in the work of the Lord seven days a week; while he receives but a scanty support, he charges him with indolence, love of money, and seems to delight in counteracting his influence and destroying the peace of the church over which he presides. The very opposite was true of Abijah Peck.”

That’s the story I want to hear told. The story of Abijah Peck’s young minister friend and the young minister’s predecessor. Sounds like something out of a novel by Anthony Trollope.

There’s another story I’d like to read. But it’s part of a story I have read a number of times in a number of histories. The story of the religious history of the United States and why we’re not a Christian nation. It’s because the founders didn’t want there to be a state religion like the one that had driven many of their ancestors out of England and to North America, where they could be free to worship according as their consciences and faiths dictated. The key word in that sentence being faiths, plural.

Members of the various Christian sects that set up shop in different parts of the colonies thought theirs was the one true faith. Some of these sects were more tolerant and more kindly disposed towards the others than the others were towards them. Most of them were most of the time actively hostile towards one another. As has too often been proved by history, the persecuted are often eager to persecute in their turn.

By the time the Bill of Rights was written, things had settled down to the point that it was mostly a matter of sectarian squabbling but discrimination and outright persecution were still vexing problems. And as it happened, Baptists were still subject to suspicion and hostility from all sides when Abijah Peck move into the area.

Word of his imminent arrival and his intention of starting a church went ahead of him, and he wasn’t welcomed with open arms.

“At the time of his coming to Clifton Park, few persons were found professors of religion in the community, and among these there existed a decided opposition to the Baptists and their sentiments.”

Which sounds like there weren’t many residents who were interested not just in what Peck was preaching but in any preaching so he couldn’t expect to draw crowds. But it was the believers who were out and out hostile.

“When it was learned he was about to remove to the place, the people were warned of his dangerous doctrine and were told he would rock them to sleep in the Devil’s cradle.”

Another case of Christians prejudiced against other Christians.

When the founders came up with the Establishment Clause, they weren’t just trying to prevent an American version of the Church of England. They were trying to keep Christians from going after each other’s throats over the question, if we’re a Christian nation, whose version of Christian are we?

They didn’t succeed.

Here we are, more than two hundred and twenty years after Abijah Peck brought his “dangerous doctrine” to Clifton Park, and Right Wing Christians are still forcing us into the argument, which they feel they’ve won by treating it as a settled question.

Who’s version of Christian?

Theirs.

The idea that a nation that includes millions of Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and Shintos, not to mention deists, agnostics, and atheists, and whose second largest---or largest. I keep finding differing statistics---brand of Christian is Catholicism, which the Right Wingers, truth be told, don’t regard as truly Christian, and whose fastest growing church is the Church of Latter Day Saints--- the Right Wingers regard the Mormons as practically Satan-worshippers---is a “Christian” nation, and a fundamentalist one to boot, is ignorant and bigoted, of course. But it’s also something else.

Unchristian.

Not to mention un-Amercian.

No wonder the young, enterprising, and well-informed are abandoning their places of worship all over the country and there are to be found fewer and fewer professors of religion in the community that is the United States.

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I cribbed the history contained in this post from the website of the Clifton Park Baptist Church and from a YouTube video posted by the Baptist History Preservation Society. The video is of a tour of the cemetery and the quotes are from the tour guide's commentary. It doesn't make for scintillating viewing and I don't recommend it, but it's there if you want to check on how well I did my homework. The Clifton Park Baptist Church doesn't hold services in the old meeting house anymore. They have a fairly new looking mega-church complex which I think you can see over and behind the graves of Mindwell, Abijah, and Lydia Peck. The co-pastors of the church are a young married couple. I don't know what that says about the church, if anything, relative to other Baptist churches. I do know that the Baptists people generally associate with Right Wing Evangelicals are Southern Baptists and the Southern Baptists have been at odds with each other and with other types of Baptists ever since I can remember or at least as far back when I first read To Kill a Mockingbird in high school and the scene in which Miss Maudie distinguishes between mainstream Baptists like herself and "foot-washing" Baptists like Boo Radley's father. And Jimmy Carter broke with the Southern Baptists in 2000:

''I have seen an increasing inclination on the part of Southern Baptist Convention leaders to be more rigid on what is a Southern Baptist and exclusionary of accommodating those who differ from them,'' Mr. Carter said today in a brief interview. ''In the last couple of years, this tendency of the Southern Baptist Convention leadership to ordain their creed on others has become more onerous for me and more difficult for me to accept.''

So for some folks the argument isn't just over whose version of Christian. It's whose version of Baptist?

The founders knew what they were doing.

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I think somebody never came home from the war

Posted Tuesday morning, October 18, 2016.

This morning. Around 8:30. Saw this in the parking lot of McDonald’s as I swung through the drive-thru to grab some coffee---Yes, Chris. It’s still the best coffee in the world. Stickers may be a little hard to read. I need to get a real camera. Let me help you out with a sample…

The one down on the right hand corner of the bumper says “Welcome to America. Now Either Learn English or Leave.”

Up in the right hand corner of the rear window: “NRA Stand and Fight” and that’s a picture of a .45 automatic next to “Piece Be With You”.

Here are some others:

“The Best Homeland Defense is an Armed Citizen”

“Communists Now Call Themselves Democrats”

“Bring Home Our Troops. Send the Democrats”

“Save Freedom. Stop Hillary.”

“What Do You Feel When You Kill a Terrorist? Recoil.”

And, incongruously---or maybe not: “Cats. Nature’s Little Speed Bumps.”

All the stickers look as though they’ve been on there for a long time, weathered, faded, peeling. The "Save Freedom. Stop Hillary” one looks as though it could be left over from 2008 or even from her last Senate run in 2006, although I don’t think the truck itself is that old. All I think this means is that these are long-standing sentiments for the owner and not necessarily feelings ignited by this election. I think we can guess who this guy’ll be voting for, but he seems to be a single-issue voter. Guns really matter to him.

You might be asking yourself, as I did, who could be so frightened and paranoid that he needs to express his gun-nuttery like this? You might also be asking yourself, as I also did, who would mess up an otherwise handsome pickup with all those ugly stickers? Never mind what they say. They just ruin the look of the truck.

Actually, I have a pretty good idea who owns the truck or, at any rate, I’m fairly sure he’s one of a half-dozen or so regular customers, a group of men, white men, in their 60s, I see here from time to time. They like to talk politics. Which is to say they like to complain about how the country’s going to hell in a handcart and it’s all THEIR fault. One of them talks very loudly. But I don’t think he’s the owner. Tell you why.

He talks like one of Limbaugh’s dittoheads which makes me think he’s like Limbaugh himself. Somebody who’s always been all talk, no action. The owner of the pick-up has seen action.

One of the stickers says: “Death Smiles at Everyone. Marines Smile Back.”

Down in the left hand corner of the bumper: “USMC Sniper.”

I have a feeling the subtext of all the stickers is a lot sadder than simply "Vote Trump".

It never goes away. Never.

Whipple Bridges

May 16, 2016.

A Whipple Cast and Wrought Iron Bowstring Truss Bridge crossing a section of the old Erie Canal Vischer Ferry, New York. Monday morning. May 16, 2016.

Picking up from my post from earlier this morning, Listen: Lance Mannion has come unstuck in time, another odd thing about what I remember about that passage from Player Piano that isn’t actually there for me to remember. Beside the fact that it isn’t there for me to remember. I remember it as containing a detailed enough description of local geography that I could tell right off that Vonnegut had reversed the map and put General Forge and Foundry on the opposite side of the river from where General Electric’s located and that his line of commuters were crossing the bridge from the east instead of the west, which of course is what the line of cars I passed on my drive out to Alplaus were doing.

Funny how mind and memory work. Like I said in that post, even though I now know that passage is a work of my own imagination and not Vonnegut’s, I still remember it. Not only do I remember it, I can see it. I can picture the words on the page and the page in the book and the book in my hands. Don’t worry, though, I’m not going to write any more about that now.

I’m going to write about how the rest of my morning drive across the river went.

As I mentioned, my high school girlfriend’s house isn’t my destination on these drives. It’s my turning around point. But I don’t head straight back to Mom and Pop Mannion’s, just as I don’t drive straight out there. I take the scenic route both ways. I’m never sure what the scenic route is until I’m on it.  I make myself go find it, more or less deciding where to go looking for it with mental coin flips. This morning it was heads north, tails east. Came up tails. I drove east from Alplaus, following the Mohawk on the same side, and found my way to Vischer Ferry, six miles down the river, a self-advertised “Greek Revival Erie Canal Village” that actually dates from about ninety-years before Clinton started digging his ditch. Pretty little town but I continued on through until I came to the A.C. Stevens Nature and Historic Preserve a couple miles down the road, six-hundred acres of woods and wetlands mostly spread out along the banks of the Mohawk but separated from the preserve’s main entrance by a section of what remains of the original Erie Canal.

I didn’t venture far into the preserve. I couldn’t. I'm still that gimpy. But I did manage to hobble a couple hundred yards out and back. Probably the longest walk I’ve taken in two years.

The Audubon Society of the Capital Region’s website has a checklist of the types animals and birds that make the preserve their home or a stopping-off point on their migrations. I wouldn’t have been able to add many check marks if I’d had the list with me. Saw some robins and blue jays. Red-winged blackbirds. Pair of cowbirds on a telephone wire. What could have been a belted kingfisher skimmed the tops of the cattails and reeds out in the canal but it was far out and flew fast and I couldn't be sure. Might have been just another blue jay. Several families of Canada Geese waddled their separate ways through the tall grass along the canal bank and back out by the road. The goslings were in that awkward adolescent phase, still cute but cute in being adorably ugly. They were downy, scrawny, long-necked, stubby-winged. Regularly they’d give their featherless wings a furious flapping, not looking as if they expected to take flight but as if they were mad at the slowness of their development and saying to themselves, “Grow, dammit!” On the underside of their wings I could see actual gooseflesh. The morning was chilly---forty-five degrees---and blustery with thick, low gray clouds. I kept one hand in my pocket but my bare camera hand froze.

To get from the small parking lot into the preserve you have to walk across a short iron truss bridge that a bronze plaque at the foot of the path leading up to it identified as Whipple Bridge. The plaque said it was built by Squire Whipple and I assumed the bridge was named after him. And it was. But not in the sense of Whipple Bridge being a proper name. It’s a product name. It’s not Whipple Bridge. It’s “a” Whipple bridge. Squire Whipple---who was not a squire. Squire was his proper name.---designed and engineered this type of bridge in 1841 specifically to be laid across the canal which was in the process of being enlarged, a project that required the building of hundreds of new bridges. Squire Whipple has a claim to being the first professional bridge builder in the United States. He wrote what would eventually become the book on bridge building. His Cast and Wrought Iron Bowstring Truss Bridges were sturdy, dependable, durable, and relatively cheap and quick to build. Whipple built his first one, paying for its construction out of his own pocket, in Utica, about ninety miles west of here. The plaque says the one in Vischer Ferry was built in 1869 by Whipple himself. Which is not a given. Many Whipple Bridges were not Whipple’s bridges.

Whipple patented his design but that didn’t stop others from copying it.  For decades after he built his first bridge, he had to spend a lot of time in court defending his design against patent infringements. He didn’t win every case. Imitators had only to make a few refinements or vary their designs slightly to make a Whipple Bridge into their bridge in the eyes of the courts. Eventually, Whipple gave up. The last straw might have been when the state of New York officially adopted his bridge design as the standard for bridges over the canal, but then stiffed Whipple on the royalties by declaring that since the bridges were being built for “the public good” and not for private profit, the public didn’t owe him any royalties.

I’ve been cribbing from Wikipedia and Wikipedia doesn’t seem to know how many Whipple Bridges were finally built by him and his imitators. Only two are still in use as bridges for vehicular traffic. This isn’t one of them. But apparently none of them, including the two still open to cars and trucks, are in their original location. Another useful feature of Whipple Bridges was that they were portable. The parts were manufactured in pieces small enough that they could be shipped easily to any point they were needed and assembled on the spot without much fuss or bother. Basically, Whipple sold them in kits. Wikipedia doesn’t say if the kits traveled by boat along the canal but I’d guess that would have been the cheapest and most efficient way, not to mention the most appropriate and poetic. This bridge originally stood out in the hamlet of Sprakers in Montgomery County, forty-four miles west of here. In 1919, after forty years of service there, it was taken apart, packed up, moved, and reassembled on a spot ten miles east on Cayudatta Creek in the village of Fonda. In the 1990s, Montgomery County gave it to the town of Clifton Park, which oversees the preserve, and some engineering students from Union College restored it and rebuilt it here.

And that’s about all I have to tell you about Whipple Bridges.

I can tell you a little more about Fonda, New York. Originally it was called by the Iroquois name Caughnawaga. It was renamed shortly after the Revolutionary War in honor of one of the original Dutch settlers, Douw Fonda. Henry, Jane, Peter, Bridget, and all the acting Fondas are descended from Douw Fonda. In 1780 an army of Loyalist troops and their Mohawk allies led by Joseph Brant raided the village. Douw, an old man at the time, was scalped and killed.

So it goes.

(See what I did there?)

___________________________________________________

Here’s that earlier post, Listen: Lance Mannion has come unstuck in time.

Folksy art

Lake George Village, by way of the Old Mannion Homestead. Sunday. October 11, 2015.

I’ll explain.

Headed on up to Lake George Village for the day. An hour’s trip into the mountains. Beautiful weather, although when the breeze picked up, it got a bit chilly. And it was coming in strong enough from the lake that while we were having lunch on the deck of one of our favorite restaurants we had to weigh down our empty plastic soda cups with the silverware.

Had a nice time but we were disappointed at some changes in the Village. Our other favorite restaurant, a spaghetti house where we usually had dinner when we stayed late enough on past visits is gone. Not closed. Gone. Torn down. The whole block it was on has been torn down and torn up. A generic, off-the-highway ramp motel with some attached stip mall-style storefronts is going up on the site. Ugly. Uglifying. Uglier for being so featureless, out of place, and unnecessary. Up the road a ways, a favorite ice cream stand is closed and looks as though it’s being readied for demolition to provide parking for another set of charmless store and office fronts.

Note to Village planners:

If your charming village's main selling point is charm then doing things that subtract from the charm is not a good idea.

This kind of thinking should not survive a second thought:

"Lots of people are coming to our charming village! We need to tear down things down they come here for and build more motels so they all have places to stay when they come here to look at what isn’t here to look at anymore!"

Still, there’s charm enough left in the Village and the place was hopping so there was none of the end of season melancholy you often sense in summer tourist towns as business winds down and the crowds have stopped coming and the locals are obviously beginning to hunker down for the long, unprofitable winter of empty streets, empty shops, and empty tills and empty wallets ahead...

What was I saying about melancholy?

Never mind.

Lunch at the Boardwalk was good, as always, and we had a fun time just strolling around afterwards. And we came across something new.

New to us, at any rate.

On a grassy slope leading up into the Village from the docks below the Boardwalk, these guys.

They’re marching toward the lake out of a sculpture garden featuring “Folk Art” by one Forrest Lanfair.

Lanfair, who died a dozen years ago at age 78, wasn’t an artist by training or trade. He was the postmaster for the nearby town of Warrensburg. He started sculpting in his thirties, apparently for his own amusement. He didn’t try to sell his scupltures, he resisted showing them, and his plan for them when he died, according to his brother Clyde, was for them to be bulldozed into a big hole in the ground in a unmarked mass grave. He made them for fun out of wire and a surface bonding compound and stood them out in the fields on some property he owned and, I guess, got a kick out of picturing people coming along and meeting up with characters like the ones in my photos and the ones described in an article from 2006 by Konrad Marshall for the Glens Falls Post Star:

An old farmer, black-bearded and bowlegged, his pot belly bulging through an open blue shirt between red suspenders, stands smoking an oversized corncob pipe. There are holes in his soles, in the knees of his dungarees, in the elbows, and even in the seat of his pants.

The farmer's wife, with her rosy red cheeks, drunkard's nose, rolls of neck fat, hunched shoulders and swollen but sagging bosom, looks like the kind of lady that could wield a rolling pin with ferocity.

[A] caveman family - Dad dragging Mom by the hair, while their little hairy son looks on…

[And an] old swayback horse...her ribs pressing through her chest as she whinnies, bug-eyed, wearing a Hee-Haw hat, like some bizarro old gray mare.

I imagine the thought cracked him up. His brother wasn’t amused.

"I respected his ability to do those things," Clyde said. "But I can't say I personally liked them that much."

Lanfair, who was also a painter and furniture-maker, may not have been interested in selling his work, but people were interested in buying. And after he died, they did. Which is how the ones we saw wound up where they are, and it's not exactly a happy ending. There's a sad side to the story. The Post-Star article gets into that along with more about Lanfair’s life and personality, which you’ll see when you read the whole thing, Honest Art.

Here’s one more set of Lanfair’s statues. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether they add to or subtract from the Village’s charm.

Visiting some friendly and familiar ghosts at Edward Hopper's House

Thursday. March 21, 2013.  Nyack, New York. Front hall of the Edward Hopper House.  On the right hand wall are a series of photographs by Charles Sternaimolo laying out side by side many of Hopper’s paintings with the scenes and places depicted in them as they look today. Click on the photo to see some examples.

Took Young Ken down to Nyack yesterday so he could visit the Edward Hopper House to do some research for a project for his art class. Hopper was born in the house and grew up there and he visited on and off all his life, but it was really his parents’ and then his sister’s home. Interesting and informative visit but a bit disappointing.  Wasn’t expecting to see any of Hopper’s major works there, but I thought they’d have some paintings by him, and they do, but they’re upstairs in rooms that are rented out as studios and none of the artists currently renting them were there to give us permission to look in.  We did get to see the upstairs bathroom, though, which hasn’t been remodeled.  It’s as Hopper would have always known it. The volunteer showing us around says she’s always amazed when she looks at the cast-iron bathtub.  She wonders how he fit.  It doesn’t look long enough.  Hopper, it turns out, was six-four, a fact that impressed Young Ken, who is only six-three and a half. Never thought about Hopper’s height before but now that I know I can see it in his photos. He was a big-boned, rangy-looking guy.

This is the bike of a tall man.

So no paintings by Hopper but almost as good were the ghosts of some of his paintings. He sometimes used parts of the house itself as inspiration and background. Click on the photos to see the paintings they found their way into. Right click to see the photos themselves enlarged.

This is a corner of the front porch.

Here’s the view down the stairway to the front hall.

This fireplace is in what is now the office.

And this place isn’t part of the house, it’s up the street a few blocks.

So that was cool. And although we didn’t get to look at any of Hopper’s paintings, there were some drawings and family photographs about and there were paintings by other artists. Two downstairs rooms are used as a gallery and paintings by three contemporary abstract artists were on display. Ken particularly liked the work of Robert Straight and decided on the spot to switch his paper topic from Hopper to Straight.

"Where do you put a painting like that?"

Forty or so minutes north of here there’s a village called High Falls that is growing into a footnote in the history of 20th Century Art. From 1946 through 1948, Marc Chagall lived and painted here.

The reason it’s only achieving its footnote status now is that for years few people were aware he’d ever been there, even folks in High Falls. His neighbors didn’t know him or know who he was. He had been living in the United States since 1941 but he hadn’t learned to speak English well. He just couldn’t get his tongue around it. He lived quietly, without obvious eccentricity. Whenever he needed to go act the part of artistic genius he would go down to New York City. More often, though, the representatives of the genius would slip up from from the city and take back with them his most recent finished work to display and sell. If you were in the art world but weren’t paying close attention, you might think he was living and working in New York. Chagall himself preferred to stay put and work at being a genius. In his short time in High Falls he worked his genius into 90 or so paintings, drawings, and prints.  Meanwhile, he kept mostly to himself. No local legends developed about him. No anecdotes or stories of encounters with the great artist were collected and handed down.  When he finally left, he left little behind in the way of memories or, apparently, of his work. There’s just this one rumor.

Somebody supposedly once heard somebody say that a neighbor of hers who’d been a neighbor of his said that he’d paid her for something with a painting or maybe given it to her as  gift. Chagall’s neighbor apparently appreciated the gesture but not the painting.

“Where do you put a painting like that?” she said in explanation for why she put it…away.

No one knows what happened to it. Maybe it’s an attic or a garage or a basement or a shed somewhere in town, waiting.

The D & H Canal Museum in High Falls has put together an exhibit devoted to Chagall’s time in town. Young Ken and I went up there last week to take a look. There isn’t much to see, if you’re greedy to see original Chagalls. A few drawings and small prints, studies from his Four Tales From the Arabian Nights, reproductions of several of the masterworks he painted or completed while he was in High Falls---Blue Violinist; Winter Night in Vitebsk, one of my favorites; The Falling Angel; Liberation; a few others. It’s a little museum and I suspect they couldn’t afford the insurance on any original paintings that might have been loaned to them. What we found, then, was a story.

In 1941, with the help of journalist Varian Fry, Chagall and some other Jewish artists were able to leave France just ahead of the Nazis’ occupation of Paris. In New York, gallery owner Pierre Matisse, son of Henri, took charge of him. Chagall and his wife Bella moved into their daughter Ida’s apartment on Riverside Drive.

Chagall and Bella were devoted to each other.

In 1944, Bella died.

They were on vacation in the Adirondacks. An infection took her. Chagall’s heart broke. Back in New York, he turned all his paintings hanging in Ida’s apartment to the wall.

He did not paint for almost a year. 

In 1945 his daughter hired Virginia Haggard as a combination secretary and housekeeper. Virginia had just freed herself from a “sex-starved” marriage to a “depressed and destitute artist.”

One thing led to another.

Chagall was 57. Virginia was 30. They stayed together for seven years and had a son, David.

After two years of living together in High Falls, and with the war over and Chagall missing Paris, they left the United States.

Virginia left him for a photographer in April of 1952. The young docent at the D & H museum thinks it was the same photographer who took many of the photographs of Virginia and Chagall together that are featured in the exhibit.

Chagall’s daughter Ida decided it would not be good for her father to be alone. She introduced him to Valentina Brodsky who became his secretary.

Valentina, known as Vava, was twenty-five years younger than Chagall.

One thing led to another again.

Chagall and Vava married in July and were together until he died in 1985.

Here is the odd part of the story.

According to the docent, a young sculptor working on his MFA, Vava was able somehow to “disappear” Virginia from the story of Chagall’s life. He was not sure how, but it seems to be that since she was Chagall’s public representative, she made it clear that she would not help anyone working on exhibitions of her husband’s work, his biographies, or articles about him unless they agreed to pretend that Virginia didn’t exist.

However it was managed, in erasing Virginia from the story, Vava erased High Falls along with her.

If you’re in the area, the exhibit runs through Sunday, October 30.  Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Mural

By the riverfront. Newburgh, New York. This morning around 11. Sunday, April 25, 2010.

How do you feel about paintings that look back at you?

Details from a five panel mural downtown.

First panel.  Washington’s Headquarters.

Artist Garin Baker completed in the mural in 2007.  He used residents of the city for his models.  That’s the mayor in the group with the Revolutionary War soldier and the kids.

Second panel.  Broadway.

Third Panel. Downing Park.  I’m guessing the trees are residents too. I wonder if the couple in the left hand corner were a couple, if they became a couple, if they’re still a couple.

Unfortunately, the surfaces weren’t prepared in the best way available.  Moisture gets in behind the paint.  By the spring of 2008, the paint had begun to peel, particularly on one of the panels.

Fourth Panel.  Dutch Reformed Church Gala.

Restoration work was supposed to have begun then.  But by last summer, it hadn’t been done and the artist was talking about scrubbing away the fourth and fifth panels and leaving them blank for another artist or artists to fill with new work.

As you can see.  That hasn’t happened.

Fifth panel. It’s The Crawford House.  I had to look it up.  The name’s peeled away.

Boom

Couple weeks ago we were up at Lake George and took a tour of Fort William Henry, site of some terrific scenes in James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans and of a real life massacre during the French and Indian War.

The guides at Fort William Henry wear uniforms from the 18th Century but fortunately the fort is not a "living history" museum. The guides may be dressed like British soldiers in 1757, but they don't pretend to be soldiers from 1757. It's not like that annoying place, Plimouth Plantation, where the folks working there go about as if they just got off the Mayflower and the tourists are a bunch of dimwitted time travellers who deliberately get everything wrong about life at the edge of the Massachusetts wilderness in the 1620s. They speak in horrible academically approved approximations of 17th Century accents---which is to say they all sound like they're trying to imitate Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean but don't get the Keith Richards joke. They won't engage with you unless you play along, and when you ask them a question, any question, they become exasperated with your ignorance about their way of life----"First Thanksgiving? I never heard of any festivity called a Thanksgiving? Perhaps you are referring to the Harvest Festival we celebrated with our Indian neighbors?"---and go all Puritan on you, scolding instead of teaching. Which reminds you that it's today's Liberals who are the true descendants of the Puritans not the right wing Christians. Right wing Christian puritans only want you to feel bad about having sex. Liberal puritans seem to want you to feel bad about everything else.

"Tell me that after all this time you still don't know that second hand smoke is dangerous."

"I can't believe you drive an SUV!"

"You actually enjoy The Gilmore Girls?"

"I don't follow sports, to tell you the truth, I have better things to do with my time."

"I'm sorry, but my children aren't allowed to have any sugar."

"We don't use the word 'Indian.' They refer to themselves as the Wampanoag."

The guides at Fort William Henry will sometimes talk as if they were at the fort back in the days of Hawkeye and Chingachgook, but without adopting any specific persona. For instance, while showing how soldiers had to cast their own bullets, our guide said, off handedly, his eye on his mold and the molten metal he was pouring into it, "All the lead for musket balls had to be shipped over from England. That's because the only two working lead mines in North America at the time were up in Canada, and for some reason the French didn't want to sell us bullets. Go figure. We'd give 'em right back to them."

They only get into character with each other, and then only to actually demonstrate something, like how to load and fire a musket or how to skewer an enemy with a bayonet, or, as you'll see below, what not to do with a cannon. They take the teaching part of their jobs seriously, but their acts are comedy routines, and apparently you can't get hired there unless you've got a talent for telling a good story and excellent comic timing. Like this guy. (Thumbnails ahead. Click on 'em to enlarge.)

"If you saw the movie The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson, you saw Mel go through this process of making his own bullets several times. So, now, besides being roguishly handsome, Mel and I have something else in common."

Besides not embarrassing the tourists, this easy going approach to their jobs makes it possible for them to talk about the Fort as it exists around you and help you understand it as a museum. If you ask one of the snooty phony Pilgrims at Plimouth how they built one of the houses there, he'll launch into a long explanation of 17th century carpentry techniques. If you ask a guide at the fort where a cannon came from, he won't bother you with any pretense that he knows about 18th Century ironmongery first hand. He'll tell you, "We scooped it up at auction from a pirate museum in North Carolina the went bankrupt and it's not really the kind of cannons they would have had here." Plus they can talk about the history of the place beyond the date they're pretending to be living in. Ask one of those Pilgrims when the village moved down to the harbor and he'll feign surprise that you'd even think Plymouth might exist as a real fishing village and tourist trap in the 21st century. "Move? Why we've just finished putting the roof on our meeting house!"

If the guides at the Fort had to stay in character they couldn't talk about the most important event that happened there, because they'd be talking about the day most of them died.

And if they had to stay in character they couldn't tell stories about working there, like this one.

Part of the tour is a demonstration of the cannon. There are a few working field pieces up on the battlements, aimed out at the lake...

...and they like to fire one off for your edification and enjoyment.

It makes a bit of a noise.

The floor of the parapet shakes under your feet and car alarms are set off in the parking lot below.

And that's just one cannon loaded with a couple ounces of gunpowder. Back in the day, they used several pounds! And they had thirteen cannons at the fort. Artillerymen got concussions from the noise. They went deaf. They also died a lot from their own cannons blowing up on them.

One evening, some years ago, one of the guides, a college kid at the time, got curious about what that must have been like. So, after the gates had closed and all the tourists had left for the day, he snuck up onto the parapet and loaded one of the cannons with a whole pound of gunpowder.

The shot flipped the cannon over, blew out six windows at a bar up the street and a whole string of streetlights, and was heard by the woman who was manager of the fort at the time and who was eating dinner in Bolton Landing---10 miles up the Lake!

The guide went on, "First thing she thought was, Please God, don't let that be coming from my fort! So she jumped in her car, raced back down here, fired the moron, and I imagine spent most of the night on the phone talking to the good folks at Aflac."

There's a kicker.

That night our 8 year old told this story to his grandparents. And they'd heard it already. Recently. From the moron himself.

Turns out my parents had just met the guy a few nights before, at a party. His experiment occurred 10 years ago. He's in graduate school now, working towards his Ph.d. in American history, and teaching history at a local college.

He's writing his dissertation on British Military techniques during the American Revolution.