Talking About the Homestead

A HOMESTEAD WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Map of the Family Homesteads and Surrounding Area ~ 1890s
Sketched out in the 1940s by Wayne Wallace Lindsey (1889 - 1951)

Madrid, Perkins County, Nebraska

Detail of Perkins County ~ Grant = County Seat

In 1887 my great-grandparents (my mother's paternal grandparents), James Sankey Lindsey and Sarah Elisabeth Hartman Lindsey, headed west from Ohio to settle a homestead in Perkins County, Nebraska, taking along their three children: Mabel (b 1880 in Ohio), Jim (b 1883 in Ohio), and Nellie (b 1887, along the way, in Illinois). During their years in Nebraska, three more children were born: Wayne (b 1889), Beatrice (b 1891) and Sam (b 1893). My grandfather Paul (b 1895 in Oklahoma) and his two younger sisters Virginia (b 1897 in Kansas) and Gail (b 1899 in Kansas) were born after the family gave up the homestead claim and returned to Kansas.

Sometime in the 1940s, my grandfather's brother Wayne sketched out the above map, recalling all of the homesteading families who lived near them in Madrid, Nebraska (in the 1890s). The two Hartman - Lindsey homesteads are near the middle: "Grand Pa" (Sarah's father, Charles Gordon Hartman) marked with an "X" and "H sted" marked with an X (James & Sarah's place). Another "X" on the "Road from Madrid" marks the "School where mother taught" (Mother = Sarah Elisabeth Hartman Lindsey). If you look at the right hand column listing all the other families, you can see at the very top of the list is another school -- maybe "Rucker" School. Going south from there, the families seem to be: Williams, Randall, Simon, Janes, Bauer, Kegras, Cutler; to the west are Olesons, two unnamed farms, and Kenaugh; and further west on the "Road from Madrid" is Sam Culver.

It was the adventure of a lifetime, but it was also a tough, harsh time, filled with adversity, frustration, and loss. Saddest of all was the death of 4 1/2 - year - old Nellie in 1891, when she fell from a horse. Yet somehow my Great - Grandmother Sarah persisted, caring for the other children, teaching school, and maintaining connections with relatives back East.

Sarah's account of the devastating drought reads like a testimomial in a history book (for additional narratives, see The Great West, p 424; and "Drought and Depression in 1890s Nebraska").

On July 30, 1893, she wrote to her niece in Ohio:

We have had the worst drought this summer that we have ever had. We have always had what we call our spring rains, until this year we had none until the first of June we had a thunder shower [which knocked James unconscious!], and two light showers since . . . . This is the first spring without some early garden vegetables. Even 3 years ago when we suffered so from drought we had early vegetables, but later ones such as beans, peas and beets, etc. did not grow. But this year we have not had any of any description -- nor a bite of fruit. Our wheat was blown out entirely by the severe spring winds and the drought has burned up the corn. It is general too, and the coming winter will be the worst that the homesteaders of this county have ever known.

I see by the papers that the governor of Kansas has called an extra session of the Legislature to afford relief to the drought stricken farmers in the western half of the state, immediately south of us.

Well, as a result of this succession of crop failures, Jimmie [her husband James] has at length concluded to take your advice and go where he can gain something for his labor but he cannot go until his time on the homestead expires, which will be a year and a half yet.

Thus far our experience in this country: a good year follows a general drought and invariably a great many eastern people who have heard of the rich land. So long as the poor fools will come and will have the land, we hope to dispose of ours so that we will not lose everything by this dearly bought experience. It had to be experience with us too for we thought it was a grand country, and have laughed at folks for moving away. People cannot live on a crop once in 3 years. That is the average -- as we have found it, but we kept on hoping that the rainbelt would be extended and we would have rain more regularly. . . . The effects of the rainfall we do have are carried away by the constant winds. I have not kept account but I don't believe we have had a dozen days this last five months without strong winds all day long -- sometimes ceasing at nightfall but renewing their energies with the sunrise.

People are deceived by the appearance of the country and the occasional good crops. A very wealthy gentleman from Philadelphia has purchased hundreds of acres of land north of Madrid and has been at great expense to have it plowed this summer. Another from the central part of this state has done the same. Had we the amount of moisture required to grow vegetation, never was there a more fertile country; but we are so far from any stream that it is impossible to irrigate it. The winds are very destructive and disagreeable, once the sandy soil is cultivated the wind blows it in great clouds across the country almost blinding the people and filling the houses with dust. This is what we call a sandstorm. It blows the pig pens full of sand like drifts of snow so that the pigs can walk out over the top of the pen.

. . . We don't know where we'll go but we will certainly go -- if we live -- as soon as we can dispose of our claims.

[Letter to be continued next time . . . ]
As the historians will tell you, immigration to Nebraska slowed to a halt in these years and thousands of covered wagons (18,000 of them in 1891 alone) reversed their westward path and returned to friendlier climes. In 1895, three of these wagons belonged to James and Sarah, who was expecting my grandfather at the time.
In his autobiography, my grandfather writes:

I was born in a covered wagon in the fall of 1895 in Choctaw Indiana Territory near Stigler, Oklahoma. My father left Perkins County, Nebraska, two months before I was born, with his family in three wagons outfitted for sleeping, and with 30-some loose horses He was headed for Arkansas and intended to trade horses for land.

They came through Caney, Kansas, and on southeast when they had to halt for my birth.

By this time they were all chilling. Everyone was full of ague [malarial fever] from drinking water out of creeks. They saw graves being dug in every graveyard they passed, so decided to come back north.

The country around Caney had appealed to them so they came back thus way and traded horses for eighty acres of land in the Sand Hills of Cascade Community, immediately west of Caney.

By the time they got settled they had been on the road and in camp one year, I was ten months old when we stopped one - half mile west of Cascade Schoolhouse."

Paul Jones Lindsey (1895 - 1983)

*******************

Here I am with my grandfather in 1981,
around the time that he jotted down the above
story of his childhood and recounted several
hours of oral history that my kind husband Gerry
has painstakingly transcribed from cassette tapes
to digital files for safekeeping.

When I encountered the following poem in Plainsongs -- appropriately, a literary magazine from the Great Plains of Nebraska -- I felt the truth of my ancestors' homesteading experience:

This Is Not the Farm I Talk About
When I Talk About the Farm

I.
Show me a vase of daisies,
and I will turn over dirt, point
to chopped root of thistle
pulled the day before.

All summer
I filled the back of her truck
with purple flowers
then set the field on fire.

II.
If you squint, you won't see
sweat or prickled skin or the way
we curled away at night
from the brown recluse
that paced our headboard,
from a loaded revolver,
from spirits of animals stretched
and pinned to the wall -- for protection
or company, I don't know,
we were very alone.

Sometimes I heard wheelbarrows
bumping over rocks, saw horses
running in the two - by - fours
we'd used to build the barn. Or, if not
horses, someone's face missing
half its nose, a small child
rocking. A splinter of wood
was a gash of cloud,
and it all meant something.

III.
The chicks are learning to pluck
maggots from a steaming pile of straw.
It is winter,and you can warm your feet
to burning on last week's shit
stomped flat between two trees.

Genevieve N. Williams
Contemporary American Poet ~ Nebraska & Iowa

Associate Editor Dwight Marsh explains that "This poem is an anti - pastoral, a tradition with a distinguished history, probably as old as the pastoral itself. The pastoral idealized country life where the only problems were indifferent maidens and calluses on finger tips from strumming lutes. . . . But debunking the myth of idyllic country life is wide spread. . . .

"'This Is Not the Farm . . . ' enumerates some brute realities of rural life: thistles, fires, spiders, sweat, armaments, predators, injury, splinters, the rawness of the life cycle of ingestion and excretion in a range of animals . . . . The poem is a bitter lament for the hard life of farming, in terse forceful images and language."

Plainsongs, Vol XXXV, #3, pp 2 - 3
Spring 2015, 35th Anniversary Issue
In one of those remarkable literary coincidences that I love writing about on this blog, I was recently thumbing through one of my old notebooks of saved poetry from 1984. One of my favorites that year was "The Drama Critic Warns of Cliches" by Evan Zimroth, photocopied from Poetry magazine (April 1984). In all these thirty - four years, I can't recall ever having stopped to read the poem on the facing page until that day last month:

Mute

Once, on the last ice-hauling,
the sled went through the surface
of the frozen pond,
pulling the son under
the thrashing hooves
of horses. Listening for him

after all her tears was perhaps
what drew the mother
into that silence. Long afternoons
she sat with the daughter,
speaking in the sign language
they invented together,
going deaf to the world.

How, exactly, did they touch
their mouths? What was the thought
of the old man on the porch
growing so drunk by nightfall
he could not hear
mosquitoes in his ears?

There is so much no one remembers
about the farm where sound,
even the bawling of the unmilked cows,
came to a stop. Even the man’s name,

which neighbors must have spoken
passing by in twilight, on their way
to forgetting it forever.

Wesley McNair
Contemporary American Poet, New Hampshire & Maine

In a radio interview with McNair, Mary Kuechenmeister observes that "Drawing from his personal experiences, McNair's poetry is emblematic of both family and economic hardships, and New England living." For example, McNair recalls the time during his childhood when his stepfather "began building a garage, which we lived in for many years, actually, while he got the wherewithal to start a house. So this garage was probably one of the most forlorn family homes in existence."

In "Mute," McNair memorializes the bleak reality of rural farming, the untimely loss of life, the relentless elements, and the inevitability of nature. If the farm itself grows mute, then we must talk -- and write -- about it for its own sake and for our own. Although from different parts of the country, both Wesley McNair and Genevieve Williams insist on the anti - pastoral rather than the cozy romantic Home on the Range. Their poems bear witness to the lived reality of my great - grandparents, to the persistence and stamina required of them in their search for a homestead and a home.

"Barber ~ Shop ~ W. W. Lindsey"
One of my Great - Uncle Wayne's Barbershops

Some of my second cousins: Dick, Katheryn (top left)
Marilee, Joyce, Jeannie (front row) Fitzwater
Wish I could name the other two, but alas I cannot!
Nor do I know the exact location of the shop but know
that Wayne had shops in Chautauqua, Elgin, Havana, Peru
~ all in Southeast Kansas ~
and that in one of them, he shaved Emmett Dalton!
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Friday, September 28th

Between now and then, read
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my shorter, almost daily blog posts
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Smart Beautiful City

A CITY WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

All photos in this post ~ Astana, Kazakhstan ~ August 2017
Earlier this week, I spent two days at Purdue University's Dawn or Doom Conference, an annual event that takes a close look at both the rewards and risks of emerging technology. The theme for Dawn or Doom '17 was inspired by Professor Michael Bess's insightful, disturbing book about biomedically enhanced humans: Our Grandchildren Redesigned: Life in the Bioengineered Society of the Near Future. Topics ranged from Designing Humans (think Gattaca) to Designing Food (think Monsanto) to Designing Information (think fake news) to Designing the Workforce (think Brave New World) to Designing Cities:

"Whether it was Uruk,* the first ever human city, or Sumerians throwing up ziggurats like they were temporary housing, or the social engineering dreams of the 19th century utopians or the Puritans' visions of a godly “city on a hill,” humans have always seen cities as a way to solve humanity’s hardest problems.

"Of course, reality is a different beast. Cities are notoriously hard places to manage, among other things because of the amount of information required to allow them to run at all, let alone perfectly. But that doesn't mean people don't try to build perfection. And the latest incarnation of these utopian cities are known as “smart cities” their deep and embedded technology." ~ Gerry McCartney

*Uruk, was in Sumer but is regarded as pre-Sumerian.
Ur was up the road about 300 miles.

We then listened to two speakers who explained how these new “smart cities” are going to enable us to build the technological advanced “city on a hill” of the 21st Century: Mike Langellier from Techpoint and Paul Singh from Results Junkies.

Gerry's thought - provoking introduction to "Smart Cities" brought to mind a few connections worth sharing:

1. from Song of Myself, Part 42 ~ Walt Whitman

"A call in the midst of the crowd,
My own voice, orotund sweeping and final. . . .

This is the city and I am one of the citizens,
Whatever interests the rest interests me, politics, wars, markets,
newspapers, schools,
The mayor and councils, banks, tariffs, steamships, factories,
stocks, stores, real estate and personal estate . . .

the fathomless human brain . . . "

[See also Ferry Connections & House With a Past]

2. from the novel Benediction ~ Kent Haruf

"What if we said to our enemies [or at the national level, what if we said to our citizens]: We are the most powerful nation on earth. We can destroy you. We can kill your children. We can make ruins of your cities and villages and when we're finished you won't even know how to look for the places where they used to be. We have the power to take away your water and to scorch your earth, to rob you of the very fundamentals of life. We can change the actual day into actual night. We can do these things to you. And more.

"But what if we say, Listen: Instead of any of these, we are going to give willingly and generously to you. We are going to spend the great American national treasure and the will and the human lives that we would have spent on destruction, and instead we are going to turn them all toward creation. We'll mend your roads and highways, expand your schools, modernize your wells and water supplies, save your ancient artifacts and art and culture, preserve your temples and mosques. In fact, we are going to love you."

3. from the musical Godspell ~ Stephen Schwartz

Beautiful City
sung in the movie adaptation,
featuring Victor Garber, Lynne Thigpen, et. al.

Come sing me sweet rejoicing
Come sing me love
We're not afraid of voicing
All the things
We're dreaming of
Oh, high and low,
And everywhere we go

We can build
A beautiful city
Yes we can
Oh yes we can
We can build
A beautiful city
Call it out
And call it the city of man [and woman]

We don't need alabaster
We don't need chrome
We've got our special plaster
Take my hand
I'll take you home
We see nations rise
In each other's eyes

We can build
A beautiful city
Yes we can
Oh yes we can
We can build
A beautiful city
Call it out
And call it the city of man [and woman]

Come sing me sweet rejoicing
Come sing me love
We're not afraid of voicing
All the things
We're dreaming of
Oh, high and low,
And everywhere we go

We can build
A beautiful city
Yes we can
Oh yes we can
We can build
A beautiful city
Call it out
And call it the city of man [and woman]**

**A simple suggestion, as Schwartz is
not exactly known for inclusive gender.

In closing, I'm charmed by these contrasting thoughts about the men and women who populate the cities. Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892) offers an expansive view, complete with quaintly agrarian metaphor:

"In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less,
And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them."

from Song of Myself, Part 20)
For others, the human density not only of a large smart city but even of a beautiful college town can be overwhelming. A hundred years before Whitman, English poet Thomas Gray (1716 - 1771) wrote:

"Cambridge is a delight of a place now, there is nobody in it.
I do believe you would like it, if you knew what it was without inhabitants.
It is they, I assure you, that get it an ill name and spoil all."

from the Works of Thomas Gray
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Saturday, October 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT ~ Build Back Better
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
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More Dawn or Doom Links

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KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
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A Date With Data

A SETTLEMENT WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

St. Augustine, Florida ~ Artist's Rendition at the Doubletree
Just before Valentine's Day, I had the good fortune to attend one of Thornton May's Value Studio 45 workshops in St. Augustine. The focus of the conference, with an opening presentation by Gerry McCartney, was "What's the Big Deal About Big Data?" Typically when I travel with Gerry, I wander around visiting nearby historical houses and art museums, but this time I had my own lanyard and identification badge -- "Literary Blogger" -- and attended every session.

As a warm - up exercise, Thornton asked each table to write a few sentences containing the word data. Our group went first, and as each sentence was read aloud, an impromptu data poem began to take shape, beginning and ending with a reference to everyone's favorite near - human android:

Data is my favorite character on Star Trek.

Data is the new bacon.

What can I make the data do for me and my company?

We need more than data divas;
we need curators across the enterprise / curriculum.

If you're not using data, you're not going to last.

My data will call your data.

Digital
Artifact
To
Accelerate

Data About Data

Data Search = A Meeting With Google

Data is the lifeblood of everything.

Data can be real, perceived, or fake.

Crime has a lot of data.

Failure to trust data leads to error - prone human override.

Decisions require correct data points.

Avoid incorrect assumptions about data.

Do not ignore data that contradict preconceived notions.

Will Big Data go away like TQM?

Data can tell you where your assets are located.

Valuable Data Point: crunch it up and eat it;
internalize, digest, embody.

If you want your data to matter,
your data people have to matter too.

Data is more than just a way of validating
existing plans and assumptions.

Data has a a story to tell.
Are you willing to listen?
Are you able to act?

Table one stole our Data Sentence!

Henricus de Alemannia Lecturing his Students
from Laurentius de Voltolina, 1350s
Gerry entertained the crowd with slides of a classroom from the past and an office from the future. You'll notice that the classroom of today is little changed from what we see here 665 years ago: a lecture delivered from a front podium to rows of students, some alert but others whispering, chatting, sleeping, gawking aimlessly, daydreaming!

The mid - century office from a long - ago future catches the fashion but misses the fundamentals. The streamlined, aerodynamic look of 1947 may seem silly and non - functional to us; yet, how could those fanciful designers of 70 years ago have foreseen our cell phones and laptops?

Gerry's discussion of how 21st century technology has infused the workplace and the classroom environment was followed by presentations on a lively range of topics, from "DNA Cybersecurity to The Five Languages of Love; from "Data in Food Service" (the business of selling an experience and creating a memory) to "Data & Golf" (predictive data applied in the immediate moment); from a brief history of the ATM banking in Las Vegas to the constant concern of "Data Protection" -- reminding me of the time a few years ago when we got a call inquiring if we were cool with paying $5000 for some dresses in Paris! My first question -- are they my size? Alas, we declined the purchase! Now, how did someone in Paris get our credit card number? You'd be surprised!

Coincidentally, I had just been reading about DNA -- not the technological kind but the biological kind -- in the book that I had brought along for airplane reading: The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead by contemporary American novelist and essayist David Shields. In a meandering combination of autobiography, biography, statistics, and favorite quotations, Shields describes the biological, practical, and existential nature of the human genome as a massive data storage and retrieval system:

The body is, for all intents and purposes, the host, and the reproductive system is the parasite that brings the body to its death.

As the biologist E. O. Wilson says, "In a Darwinian sense, the organism does not live for itself. It's primary function is not even to reproduce other organisms; it reproduces genes and it serves as their temporary carrier. . . . the organism is only DNA's way of making more DNA.

. . . According to Luc Bussiere . . . "For humans, this might seem counterpoductive because we don't want to die young. We want live long lives. But for animals [yes, including humans!] the goal isn't living longer; it's to reproduce." The survival instinct and the reproductive instinct are opposed.

. . . You can't choose not to have children and thereby gain extra years of life by redirecting your resources for reproduction into efforts at self - maintenance. Your genes make you disposable but have not left you the flexibility to choose to live a longer life by not propagating them.

A mortal animal is a germ cell's way of making more germ cells, thereby optimizing the likelihood that they fuse with germ cells of the opposite sex. The continuation of the germ line is the driving force of natural selection; longevity of individual animals is of secondary importance. Animals are selected through evolution for having physiological reserves greater than the minimum necessary to reach sexual maturation and rear progeny to independence, but once this goal has been accomplished, they have sufficient excess reserve capacity to coast for a period of time, the remainder of which is called your life span. . . . There's really only one immutable biological law, it has only two imperatives, and it gets stated in dozens of ways: spawn and die. (124 - 128)

. . . as Michel Houellebecq writes . . . "chromosomal separation . . . is in itself a source of structural instability. In other words, all species dependent on sexual reproduction are by definition mortal." (206)

As soon as your reproductive role has been accomplished, you're disposable . . . nature has little interest in what happens next . . . physiological resources go into reproduction, not into prolonging life thereafter . . . The individual doesn't matter . . . We're vectors on the grids of cellular life . . . Aging followed by death is the price we pay for the immortality of our genes. You find this information soul - killing; I find it thrilling, liberating. Life, in my view, is simple, tragic, and eerily beautiful. (211 - 213)
~ David Shields ~

Maybe that's the Big Deal About Big Data!

"Data has a a story to tell.
Are you willing to listen?
Are you able to act?"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In conclusion, many thanks to Gerry
for bringing me along and to
~ Thurgood, Thurman, Thurston, Thornton ~
for inviting us to Studio 45!
[Can you tell that I've moved on from David Shields
to Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita?
More on that next time!

Posting late due to distraction of the high seas . . .

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Tuesday, February 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

The Shadowiness of the Still House

A LONE HOUSE BY THE ROAD
WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Childhood Paintings by Gerry McCartney ~ late 1960s

The Listeners

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
’Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:—
‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,’ he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Walter de la Mare

The Sea Gypsy*

I am fevered with the sunset,
I am fretful with the bay,
For the wander-thirst is on me
And my soul is in Cathay.

There's a schooner in the offing,
With her topsails shot with fire,
And my heart has gone aboard her
For the Islands of Desire.

I must forth again to-morrow!
With the sunset I must be
Hull down on the trail of rapture
In the wonder of the sea.

Richard Hovey

*Sam recited "The Sea Gypsy" at St. Peter's
Poetry Declamation ~ 4th grade ~ September 2002

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Thursday, July 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

A Story About a Tree

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Twenty - second Incarnation of the Kmart Tree
Still Going Strong After 20 Years!

2014 ~ Treetop Detail
Bertie Bassett ~ The Liquorice Allsorts Man

A Couple of Connections:

First, thanks to my friend Nikki for sharing with me this fabulous book from her family's collection:

Flair Annual 1953
And more thanks to Nikki for her kind comments after reading my previous post "Be As Brave As Sharon Olds." I appreciated her observation that "the connections are always good, but what's better is when you tell a story! Tell more stories!"

2. Second, speaking of stories, I read Christmas on Jane Street right after Thanksgiving and was summarizing it over the phone for my son Sam. When I suggested that we could pay a visit to the corner of 8th Avenue and Jane Street to see this famous New York City Christmas Tree Stand, Sam, ever the skeptic, and master of the literary allusion, replied: "Mom, sounds like you've been reading a story about a tree." Haha, Sam!

So, at the risk of being a Buzz Killington, I'm going to take Nikki's advice and tell you a story -- a story about a tree.

The first Christmas that we lived in Philadelphia (1993), it didn't occur to me that we wouldn't do what we had done the year before back in Indiana: go to the nearest grocery store on the day after Thanksgiving and buy a tree right out front, chosen from a large selection of live cut evergreens leaning against the plate glass windows. Surprisingly, it was not to be. We drove out to Pathmark bright and early, but where were the trees? "What trees?" the grocery clerk replied. "We don't sell Christmas trees."

Where then? We tried a nearby produce market; no luck. We returned home to ask some neighbors on the street. Of course, many were out of town for Thanksgiving weekend, yet we gleaned what information we could: one family would be driving to Vermont, or something like that, later in the month to chop down their own tree (over - achievers). Another family claimed they never put up a Christmas tree (Bah, humbug!). I was growing despondent. My sister Peg and her family were driving up from Maryland to visit us in Philadelphia for the first time, and my planned Black Friday activity was tree - decorating. But still no tree.

My husband Gerry had an idea. He remembered seeing a small tree nursery across the street from Kmart, a few miles away, outside the city limits. When Peg and her husband Ron arrived, Gerry and Ron would drive down and see what they could find. They did so; and, what to their wondering eyes should appear but a huge truckload of Christmas trees, stacked and netted, "bound into tight versions of themselves for easy travel," (Romp, 10). Success at last you might think; that was not so hard after all! There was, however, a catch. The nursery personnel did not know the going rate for trees that year. The truck had to be unloaded and each tree receive its price tag before sales to customers could officially begin.

"Are you sure?" Gerry asked. "Just name a price, any price, and we will pay that for the tree." This labor of love had become a full - fledged quest, and he did not want to return home empty - handed. But, no, said the clerk, that would be against the rules. Could they return in a few hours? Okay, it was only a fifteen - minute drive, five miles or so. They would make another trip, later in the day.

The hours passed quickly enough, and off went the woodchoppers on foray number two -- only to find that the manager had not come in that afternoon, the trees had not been tagged, and all purchases must be put on hold until the following day. The trees, plainly visible on the bed of the truck, were not to be had at any price. But these men of action were not to be deterred. Daylight had faded, and the neon lights of Kmart beckoned from across the Baltimore Pike.

Maybe it wasn't like a scene from Norman Rockwell or When Harry Met Sally,



but no tree could have been more anticipated or appreciated than the seven - foot storage box that Gerry and Ron carried through our front door that evening, some assembly required. But never mind, we were proud to place it our front entry and it went up quickly. The following year, we put it on the sleeping porch adjoining Sam (in photo, age 15 months) and Ben's bedrooms because that's where we spent many hours and they could enjoy it most:

1993 ~~~ 1994

When I decided a few years later (1998) that I needed a second tree, my dear husband was ready once again to undertake the mission. This time, no need to try the produce stands or tree nurseries, for I had become a true believer in the decorative attributes of an artificial tree, primarily because they provide so much more strength and versatility when it comes to hanging heavy ornaments and reshaping branches to suit a particular arrangement of baubles. Instead of driving randomly around the Delaware Valley, Gerry did the ground - work by phone and located a Sears at a Mall north of town that claimed to have 9 foot trees in stock. Many of the stores seemed to be topping out at 7 feet, but I already had one of those and was keen to extend the reach of my tree collection. Malls were not typically our scene, but Gerry was game, so away he went in our one - horse open sleigh (i.e., 1995 Oldsmobile Station Wagon) for a jolly expedition of tree procurement.

Was the tree at Sears as promised? Yes, but there was only one and it was already assembled, standing in undecorated glory on the showroom floor; and the packing boxes no longer existed. But if Gerry was willing to go out to the loading dock and scrounge around in the recycling for some large boxes and personally remove and repack each branch, then he was welcome to purchase the tree. Naturally, Clark Griswold style, Gerry was equal to the task. We need a tree? He'll get us a tree! "Fixed the newel post!"

Our usual parking spot was on the side street, but for easier access through the front door with several large boxes, Gerry parked right at the corner. As luck would have it, in the few moments in between multiple trips from car to house, we received a parking ticket! Happy Holidays from the City of Philadelphia! Could the officer not see that this vehicle is stuffed with Christmas decorations that are being removed as quickly as possible? Had he no patience or mercy or humor or Christmas Spirit? No, Virginia, he had not. Bah, humbug!

Not to worry! No one could rain on our parade that day. We put the new nine - footer in the second floor turret window (below left) and the seven - footer in the third floor turret window (below right), covered them both with ornaments -- including this handmade series from our multi - talented neighbors Doris & Denis --

and were very happy with the results:
[Look closely on the right to see Ben (L) and Sam (R)
peeking out from behind the tree!]

I know all about the sentimental premium attached to a live tree, and even better if that live tree has been picked out personally from a tree farm, local or distant, and chopped down with an ax. For me, though, nothing can beat the affection that went into acquiring our two artificial trees. Those memories are with me every year as we drag the boxes out and erect our enduring symbols of light and life and hope and fun.

But wait . . . there's more! At the beginning of Ben's third year of college (2010), he and his friends had a successful day of curbside trash - picking: a bookshelf, a chair, a couple of suitcases, and -- "For you, Mom!" -- a Christmas tree. Ben pulled it into the sunroom, and we put it together right away to make sure that all the pieces were intact. It didn't seem to be a recent student discard but rather a vintage 1987 Fake Douglas Fir, complete with its own original brochure -- like ours, over twenty years old, but still in fine shape, discarded, perhaps, by a family who was reverting to the wild or replacing with a twenty - first century pre - lit model. Once we had it up, it seemed a shame to take it back down, what with the holiday season only three months away, so we decorated it for fall with harvest miniatures and Halloween cookie cutters. At Thanksgiving we changed it over to Christmas and finally put it away sometime shortly after the Valentine Dance:

February 2011

Continued thanks to Ben, Gerry, and Ron for bringing these trees into my life and giving me a story to tell -- a story about trees! O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, whether you be regally real or proudly pretend, your green shall ever teach me!

The Big Tree ~~ in 2014 ~~ The Sunroom Tree

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Monday, December 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT ~ Fake Trees & Gift Books
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST ~ "Would you like anything to read?"
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

The Galaxy Will Manage

A GALAXY WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

The September (Sunday night, 9 - 27 / 28 - 2015) Supermoon
aka Perigee Moon -- when the day of the Full Moon coincides with
the day when the Moon is nearest to Earth in its orbit.
Last month's Harvest Moon was the nearest, largest, brightest
Supermoon of the entire year
The various lunar events -- supermoons, eclipses, waxing, waning -- like so many things, are not ours to initiate or control. They belong to themselves, to the galaxy, to the universe. We can bear witness, record, describe. We can seek wisdom and gain understanding, not forgetting our role in the scheme of things (as aptly described in the Nature is Speaking videos by "Conservation International").

In his book Sabbath, community advocate Wayne Muller invites us to consider our world and our work in a larger perspective:

"Sabbath requires surrender . . . The old, wise Sabbath says: Stop now. . . . We stop because there are forces larger than we that take care of the universe, and while our efforts are important, necessary, and useful, they are not (nor are we) indispensable. The galaxy will somehow manage without us for this hour, this day, and so we are invited -- nay, commanded -- to relax, and enjoy our relative unimportance, our humble place at the table in a very large world. . . . [emphasis added]

We feel how large the universe is, and how small our labors. Our work is simply one offering among countless others that have come before and will come again, when all we have planted has been grown, harvested, eaten, and forgotten.

When we stop, we see that the world continues without us . . .

The world seduces us with an artificial urgency . . .

But Sabbath says, Be still. Stop. There is no rush to get to the end, because we are never finished. . . .

You are not going anywhere. Millions have done this before you, and millions will do it after you are gone."

Muller also quotes from the Holocaust Diary of Esther Hillesum:

"Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and reflect it towards others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world."

See "Let It Be," 82 - 85 & "The Book of Hours," 88 - 90
in Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives
by Wayne Muller (b 1953)
Contemporary American author, speaker, and therapist
A humorous rendition of a very similar sentiment appears in the musical My Fair Lady, when Eliza Doolittle reminds Henry Higgins of his insignificance to the workings of the universe:

"Without You"
. . . No, my reverberating friend
You are not a beginning and the end

There'll be spring every year without you
England still will be here without you
There'll be fruit on the tree
And a shore by the sea
There'll be crumpets and tea without you

Art and music will thrive without you
Somehow Keats will survive without you
And there still will be rain on that plain down in Spain
Even that will remain without you, I can do without you

You, dear friend, who talk so well
You can go to Hartford, Hereford and Hampshire

They can still rule the land without you
Windsor Castle will stand without you
And without much ado we can
All muddle through without you

Without your pulling it the tide comes in
Without your twirling it, the Earth can spin
Without your pushing them, the clouds roll by
If they can do without you, ducky so can I. . .

Lerner & Loewe

And yet again the point is made in the movie Birdman, which features an impassioned speech from a troubled, insightful daughter (portrayed by Emma Stone) to her confused, striving father (Michael Keaton) about the value (or not) of his life's endeavor:

"Means something to who? You had a career before the third comic book movie, before people began to forget who was inside the bird costume. You’re doing a play based on a book that was written 60 years ago, for a thousand rich old white people whose only real concern is gonna be where they go to have their cake and coffee when it’s over. And let’s face it, Dad, it’s not for the sake of art. It’s because you want to feel relevant again. Well, there’s a whole world out there where people fight to be relevant every day. And you act like it doesn’t even exist! Things are happening in a place that you willfully ignore, a place that has already forgotten you. I mean, who are you? You hate bloggers. You make fun of Twitter. You don’t even have a Facebook page. You’re the one who doesn’t exist. You’re doing this because you’re scared to death, like the rest of us, that you don’t matter. And you know what? You’re right. You don’t. It’s not important. You’re not important. Get used to it."

Gerry often tells the parable of sticking your hand into a bucket of water and taking it out again, in order to gauge how much you might be missed when moving on from one workplace to another. I googled for background information only to discover pages of entries, all pointing to this poem:

The Indispensable Man
by Saxon N. White Kessinger

Sometime when you're feeling important;
Sometime when your ego's in bloom
Sometime when you take it for granted
You're the best qualified in the room,

Sometime when you feel that your going
Would leave an unfillable hole,
Just follow these simple instructions
And see how they humble your soul;

Take a bucket and fill it with water,
Put your hand in it up to the wrist,
Pull it out and the hole that's remaining
Is a measure of how you will be missed.

You can splash all you wish when you enter,
You may stir up the water galore,
But stop and you'll find that in no time
It looks quite the same as before.

The moral of this quaint example
Is do just the best that you can,
Be proud of yourself but remember,
There's no indispensable [woman or] man.

Well, now we know!

Indispensable? Perhaps not: "If you lie down, no one will die." Still, it would be nice to make a small dent of some kind, if nothing else, to leave this world a slightly better place than we found it, a modest goal.

~ September 27 / 28, 2015 ~
~ Night of the Total Eclipse ~ Super Blood Moon ~

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Wednesday, October 28th

Between now and then, read Daniel's In Memoriam on
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Ancestors

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Paternal Grandparents

~ Recent Family History ~
a poem
by Ernest Sandeen (1908 - 1997)
Looking out at us from their photographs,
mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles,
now dead for forty - five years or more,
don't recognize us, can't even imagine us.
And we are helpless to penetrate the safety
of their innocence . . .
from Collected Poems (237)

Maternal Grandparents

" . . . we start [that which] we will not live to see,
just as our ancestors could not live to see us.
And yet they, who passed away long ago, still exist in us,
as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood,
and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time."
by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)
from Letters to a Young Poet (62)
I've never forgotten a dream that I had one night when I was in my early twenties. My mother's parents seemed to be right beside my bed, sitting in rocking chairs, sipping tea (or was it Sanka?) from china cups. In reality, my grandfather was still alive at the time, though my grandmother had died fifteen years earlier. It was not a dreamy or dreamlike dream; it was more of a visitation, consisting of a single scenario and one line of dialogue: my grandmother saying to me, "You are very American aren't you?" What could that mean? They were just as American as I, born in America, as were their parents, who had immigrated several generations before. We were not new to the Country, so my American - ness should come as no surprise to them.

Upon waking, I interpreted the dream as their way of granting me permission to forge ahead into a future which, as Rilke says, they would not live to see, reassuring me that my way of being in the world was going to be different than theirs had been . . . and that this was okay with them. Over the years, I have not remembered many dreams, but this one remains as vivid to me as the night my grandparents came to acknowledge that beyond a certain point, they could no longer imagine me, yet I would always have their blessing and their unconditional love.

"We have all rejected our beginnings
and become something our parents could not have foreseen."
by Robertson Davies (1913 - 1995)
from Fifth Business (248)

I love seeing my my maternal grandmother
in these outfits, obviously some of her favorites,
that she chose for having her photograph taken.
Such stylish footwear and that extravagant hat!


Her older brother, known for his photography, had promised her a photo session, and she was hoping to model something elegant, but he had a radical idea: if she wanted another picture taken, she could pose in his baseball uniform. Not her idea of finery, but she reluctantly agreed -- the first and last time in her life to don a pair of trousers. Perhaps he convinced her by insisting that "A hundred years from now, this photo will be a family treasure, cherished by your grand-daughter!" If so, how right he would have been!

On the back, my grandmother has written:
"Rovilla in ball suit"

In another treasured photo,
here is my paternal grandmother, also defying convention.
On the back, my Aunt Sue has written:
"Our Momma in slacks.
This is the only time I ever saw her in slacks."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Bristow Ancestors
Click to see slideshow & hear music by Gerry McCartney
~ Also On YouTube ~

Gerry's Paternal Great - Grandparents and Great - Aunts

We tried to recreate their unusual pose . . .

and thought it would be even more fun
to replace the newspaper . . .

with a 21st Century equivalent.

Something our parents could not have foreseen!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Sunday, July 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Peace Concluded 1856
by John Everett Millais

I love the uncanny similarity between the above photograph
of Gerry's great - grandparents and this painting,
depicting a wounded British officer reading the Times
newspaper report of the end of the Crimean War.