Armchair Travel
Monday, February 08, 2010
New Visitors to the Back Porch
The goldfinches love our new thistle seed feeders. They're not as colorful in winter.
The goldfinches love our new thistle seed feeders. They're not as colorful in winter.
And everybody loves sunflower seeds. My flash kept bouncing off the glass, so I had to open the porch door to take this guy's picture. He didn't care; just went right on eating.
¶ 3:56 PM 0 comments
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Sunshine, My Mom, and the Goodness of Life
We've had a little sunshine here lately, and it has been greatly appreciated. Everybody's lots more cheery.
I lost my mom last fall, so I noticed the direct connection between moms and sunshine. My instinctive reaction, when I see the sunshine, is this internal tape recording of my mom saying, "It's a beautiful day. Go outside and enjoy it."
All evening I've had an image before me, a photo from GoNOMAD of an orphan in Malawi with nothing but a tattered pair of pants, standing by the roadside, smiling a big broad smile.
I think too of the kids in Kent St. John's photos from Papua New Guinea, standing in the sunshine smiling.
There's a message here: GoNOMAD writers are funny-looking so they make children smile. Also, life is good, especially when you're standing in the sunshine, even though it's actually nuclear radiation from a fusion reaction 93 million miles away.
These images remind me of a transcendent experience I had as a substitute teacher in a fourth-grade classroom in the Hawlemont School (serving Hawley and Charlemont) many years ago.
Fourth graders are perhaps the most wonderful people in the world. They can round off to the nearest thousandth, but they don't know how to tell a decent lie.
I looked out at this one particular classroom and I was somehow able to see what would happen if every one of these children realized their full potential -- Mozarts and Martin Luther Kings and Jane Goodalls and Frank Zappas.
It's a staggering thing to see, but somehow, at that moment, I saw it, and it changed forever my ideas about humanity.
I experienced a power that's so far above and beyond everything I've ever known that I couldn't tell you the first thing about it, except that it's very, very good.
That's the only thing that can possibly save this sorry world, the promise of our children.
¶ 9:49 PM 1 comments
I lost my mom last fall, so I noticed the direct connection between moms and sunshine. My instinctive reaction, when I see the sunshine, is this internal tape recording of my mom saying, "It's a beautiful day. Go outside and enjoy it."
All evening I've had an image before me, a photo from GoNOMAD of an orphan in Malawi with nothing but a tattered pair of pants, standing by the roadside, smiling a big broad smile.
I think too of the kids in Kent St. John's photos from Papua New Guinea, standing in the sunshine smiling.
There's a message here: GoNOMAD writers are funny-looking so they make children smile. Also, life is good, especially when you're standing in the sunshine, even though it's actually nuclear radiation from a fusion reaction 93 million miles away.
These images remind me of a transcendent experience I had as a substitute teacher in a fourth-grade classroom in the Hawlemont School (serving Hawley and Charlemont) many years ago.
Fourth graders are perhaps the most wonderful people in the world. They can round off to the nearest thousandth, but they don't know how to tell a decent lie.
I looked out at this one particular classroom and I was somehow able to see what would happen if every one of these children realized their full potential -- Mozarts and Martin Luther Kings and Jane Goodalls and Frank Zappas.
It's a staggering thing to see, but somehow, at that moment, I saw it, and it changed forever my ideas about humanity.
I experienced a power that's so far above and beyond everything I've ever known that I couldn't tell you the first thing about it, except that it's very, very good.
That's the only thing that can possibly save this sorry world, the promise of our children.
Monday, February 01, 2010
The Bitter Tea of General Yen
I'm having enormous fun with The Bitter Tea of General Yen. Not the movie with Barbara Stanwyck; the book by Grace Zaring Stone.
It's set in the treaty ports of China, in 1911, I think.
Here we have troops from all over the European empires guarding the International Settlement -- Senegalese, Annamites, Sikhs and Durhams with machine guns
In the harbor you have gunships from England, France, Holland, Italy, Japan and America.
You have your collapsing Qing Dynasty and then your Nationalists, some of them communists, others not, and Russians, White and Red, supporting one side or the other
Then there are your religious missionaries and your medical missionaries and there's even a mention of Yale in China -- Boola, Boola!
Lots of room for international intrigue.
The story begins with the arrival in China of Megan Davis, who is from a small college town in New England (Amherst or Hanover?) who has come to marry her medical missionary fiance, but gets swept up in the capture of Nanking by Nationalist forces
She ventures out of the International Settlement to help a courageous doctor rescue some orphans, but they are set upon by a mob that doesn't like foreigners and the doctor gets knocked unconscious and she's getting beaten up, and then she gets rescued by the eponymous General Yen, who happens by in his private train and turns out to be a very amusing fellow.
Megan being a prospective missionary's wife, there are a lot of interesting discussions about Western attitudes toward the Chinese and vice versa. At one point she's giving the General a hard time because the mob set upon her and the doctor when they had a safe-conduct with his (General Yen's) signature.
"I see now your safe-conduct was worthless. But I did not know at the time. You see, I have lived all my life in a country where if a situation comparable to this were possible, such a pass would be effective. The whole temper and training of the people would make it so
[Pretty hypothetical and conjectural, if you ask me]
"Do you speak seriously?" General Yen replies. "Where is this country you are talking about that has no mob spirit, no race hatred, but only a perfect respect for law and authority? I had supposed that you were an American."
Score one for the eponymous general.
"Megan realized too late that she had been carried away," Stone continues, "and simultaneously that she must not be carried away again."
¶ 7:32 PM 0 comments
It's set in the treaty ports of China, in 1911, I think.
Here we have troops from all over the European empires guarding the International Settlement -- Senegalese, Annamites, Sikhs and Durhams with machine guns
In the harbor you have gunships from England, France, Holland, Italy, Japan and America.
You have your collapsing Qing Dynasty and then your Nationalists, some of them communists, others not, and Russians, White and Red, supporting one side or the other
Then there are your religious missionaries and your medical missionaries and there's even a mention of Yale in China -- Boola, Boola!
Lots of room for international intrigue.
The story begins with the arrival in China of Megan Davis, who is from a small college town in New England (Amherst or Hanover?) who has come to marry her medical missionary fiance, but gets swept up in the capture of Nanking by Nationalist forces
She ventures out of the International Settlement to help a courageous doctor rescue some orphans, but they are set upon by a mob that doesn't like foreigners and the doctor gets knocked unconscious and she's getting beaten up, and then she gets rescued by the eponymous General Yen, who happens by in his private train and turns out to be a very amusing fellow.
Megan being a prospective missionary's wife, there are a lot of interesting discussions about Western attitudes toward the Chinese and vice versa. At one point she's giving the General a hard time because the mob set upon her and the doctor when they had a safe-conduct with his (General Yen's) signature.
"I see now your safe-conduct was worthless. But I did not know at the time. You see, I have lived all my life in a country where if a situation comparable to this were possible, such a pass would be effective. The whole temper and training of the people would make it so
[Pretty hypothetical and conjectural, if you ask me]
"Do you speak seriously?" General Yen replies. "Where is this country you are talking about that has no mob spirit, no race hatred, but only a perfect respect for law and authority? I had supposed that you were an American."
Score one for the eponymous general.
"Megan realized too late that she had been carried away," Stone continues, "and simultaneously that she must not be carried away again."
Friday, January 22, 2010
The Goodrich Foundation
I heard a very moving presentation last night at Stoneleigh-Burnham School in Greenfield: Sally and Donald Goodrich, founders of the Peter M. Goodrich Memorial Foundation, shown here with scholarship students from Afghanistan.
Sally and Donald lost their son Peter on September 11, 2001. He was on flight 175, the second plane to strike the World Trade Center. Among many other things, Peter was a student of world religion who had a copy of the Qu'ran filled with page markers. To honor his memory, they established the foundation to help the people of Afghanistan.
The foundation raised more than $400,000 to build a school for girls in Logar Province and has also provided funds for a well and a reservoir in Kunar Province, and for scholarships for Afghan students to study abroad.
They also provided help to earthquake victims in Nangahar, and they support an orphanage in Wardak, providing a flock of sheep, arable land, a school and a health clinic to support these young victims of the conflict.
The Foundation's website has a wealth of information about these projects.
"In both Afghanistan and the United States," they write, "our hope is to contribute to a new generation of citizens and leaders capable of devising solutions to complex problems."
Both Sally and Donald described how these efforts, and the bonds they have formed with the Afghan people, have helped them to overcome their grief at the loss of their son.
The talk was part of the Miriam Emerson Peters Speaker Series in Global Awareness. ¶ 10:17 AM 1 comments
I heard a very moving presentation last night at Stoneleigh-Burnham School in Greenfield: Sally and Donald Goodrich, founders of the Peter M. Goodrich Memorial Foundation, shown here with scholarship students from Afghanistan.
Sally and Donald lost their son Peter on September 11, 2001. He was on flight 175, the second plane to strike the World Trade Center. Among many other things, Peter was a student of world religion who had a copy of the Qu'ran filled with page markers. To honor his memory, they established the foundation to help the people of Afghanistan.
The foundation raised more than $400,000 to build a school for girls in Logar Province and has also provided funds for a well and a reservoir in Kunar Province, and for scholarships for Afghan students to study abroad.
They also provided help to earthquake victims in Nangahar, and they support an orphanage in Wardak, providing a flock of sheep, arable land, a school and a health clinic to support these young victims of the conflict.
The Foundation's website has a wealth of information about these projects.
"In both Afghanistan and the United States," they write, "our hope is to contribute to a new generation of citizens and leaders capable of devising solutions to complex problems."
Both Sally and Donald described how these efforts, and the bonds they have formed with the Afghan people, have helped them to overcome their grief at the loss of their son.
The talk was part of the Miriam Emerson Peters Speaker Series in Global Awareness. ¶ 10:17 AM 1 comments
The Dearly Departed
My cousin Chris and my mom at cousin Esther's wedding. Photo by Esther Fricke.
¶ 9:05 AM 2 comments
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
RIP C.T.
¶ 8:40 PM 2 comments
My cousin Christopher Todd Hartshorne passed away yesterday, suddenly and unexpectedly, much too soon. The news hasn't really sunk in.
It was like that with my mom last Fall. The grief didn't really register until I looked at her watch and her glasses by her bedside and realized she would never need them again.
C.T. Tucker, known to us in his youth as Cousin Crispy, has been an inspiration to me since we were baptized together in 1952.
My grandmother Essie had a favorite story about the occasion in which Chris objected to his handling by the minister and let him have it in the only way he knew how.
Chris' father Kim was a brilliant musician who gave up his musical career for reasons that seem silly today and became a banker.
It was part of the mantra that Kim's brother, my father, the lawyer who wanted to work at the racetrack, recited to me on one or two occasions: 'You can't do what you want to do.'
The lesson was not lost on Chris, and he did what he wanted to do his entire life. He made his living as a musician for years and years, and I do not recall his ever being in a band where anyone else was the leader.
Kicked out of school for refusing to cut his hair, busted speeding in a stolen car with a pound of pot, climbing over the wall of a juvenile detention facility in his pajamas, Chris was always brave and determined -- much more so than I -- and he lived life on his own terms.
People like that become a beacon for everyone around them and C.T. in his day inspired thousands of people with the idea that you can do what you want, and to hell with anybody who stands in your way.
I do not deny that this manner of living is fraught with peril; the examples are all around us; but Chris was fortunate to find a wonderful woman who, by his own account, rescued him and helped steer him in the right direction.
The sad thing is Chris had really just hit his stride and he was a hugely successful animal wrangler for movies and television, and he had equipped his farm with state-of-the-art solar panels and a great outdoor woodstove that could take six-foot logs.
I talked to him just two months ago about his wonderful Dr. Seuss menagerie of llamas, donkeys, pigs, sheep, horses, and whatnot. Lately he'd been having success breeding miniature beagles.
He said he'd been having back problems, but a week or two later they said he had lymphona all over, and they tried a lot of stuff and then yesterday he passed away.
If you didn't know Tucker, or even if you did, check out this video by my friend John Kunhardt, in which Chris plays Joe Kennedy. The part was written by my brother Paul Hartshorne in his musical Love Field.
It was like that with my mom last Fall. The grief didn't really register until I looked at her watch and her glasses by her bedside and realized she would never need them again.
C.T. Tucker, known to us in his youth as Cousin Crispy, has been an inspiration to me since we were baptized together in 1952.
My grandmother Essie had a favorite story about the occasion in which Chris objected to his handling by the minister and let him have it in the only way he knew how.
Chris' father Kim was a brilliant musician who gave up his musical career for reasons that seem silly today and became a banker.
It was part of the mantra that Kim's brother, my father, the lawyer who wanted to work at the racetrack, recited to me on one or two occasions: 'You can't do what you want to do.'
The lesson was not lost on Chris, and he did what he wanted to do his entire life. He made his living as a musician for years and years, and I do not recall his ever being in a band where anyone else was the leader.
Kicked out of school for refusing to cut his hair, busted speeding in a stolen car with a pound of pot, climbing over the wall of a juvenile detention facility in his pajamas, Chris was always brave and determined -- much more so than I -- and he lived life on his own terms.
People like that become a beacon for everyone around them and C.T. in his day inspired thousands of people with the idea that you can do what you want, and to hell with anybody who stands in your way.
I do not deny that this manner of living is fraught with peril; the examples are all around us; but Chris was fortunate to find a wonderful woman who, by his own account, rescued him and helped steer him in the right direction.
The sad thing is Chris had really just hit his stride and he was a hugely successful animal wrangler for movies and television, and he had equipped his farm with state-of-the-art solar panels and a great outdoor woodstove that could take six-foot logs.
I talked to him just two months ago about his wonderful Dr. Seuss menagerie of llamas, donkeys, pigs, sheep, horses, and whatnot. Lately he'd been having success breeding miniature beagles.
He said he'd been having back problems, but a week or two later they said he had lymphona all over, and they tried a lot of stuff and then yesterday he passed away.
If you didn't know Tucker, or even if you did, check out this video by my friend John Kunhardt, in which Chris plays Joe Kennedy. The part was written by my brother Paul Hartshorne in his musical Love Field.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
So What Did Spartacus Say?
¶ 6:58 PM 1 comments
I've been wrapped up in The Gladiators by Arthur Koestler about the slave rebellion led by Spartacus. I just googled Koestler and it turns out he's a disillusioned communist
And like Ignazio Silone (Bread and Wine) and George Orwell (Animal Farm), he wrote an anti-communist novel called Darkness at Noon, which I'm going to have to go out and read.
Koestler had a truly amazing life, flying as a journalist over the North Pole aboard the Graf Zeppelin, being captured in the Spanish Civil War and exchanged for the wife of Franco's favorite fighter pilot.
In Jerusalem in 1944 he tried to persuade Menachem Begin (who then had a 500-pound price on his head for the bombing of the King David Hotel) to abandon terrorism and accept a two-state solution. Give the guy points for trying.
The Gladiators was actually written before Darkness at Noon, and it clearly shows his disillusionment with Communism.
Spartacus' (or is it Spartacus's?) big problem, you see, was his own soldiers and followers. They were so into burning and raping and pillaging that it made it hard for cities to open up to them, and they didn't have siege engines like the Romans.
But if they could only have given up the burning and raping and pillaging, every city in Italy would have welcomed them because everybody, especially veteran/farmers, were getting utterly screwed by a corrupt and venal system of large-scale plantation farming using slave labor.
Veterans would come home to see their childrens sold as slaves. Unchecked plutocracy.
Spartacus almost effects an alliance with the Cilician pirates and the Roman exiles in Spain under Sertorius, but that gets bolloxed up by a Roman naval victory, and after knocking off six or eight Roman armies, he finally gets stranded in Bruttium on the toe of the boot of Italy and his pirate buddies let him down and won't take his army off to Thrace, where he's from and whither he would like to retire.
Spartacus comes to the graveyard in Rhegium and sees a tombstone that reads "Titus Lollius lies here by the road so that the passing wanderer may say: Greetings, Lollius!"
"Greetings, Lollius!" says Spartacus, and, Kostler writes, "he smiled the good-natured smile of the old days."
And like Ignazio Silone (Bread and Wine) and George Orwell (Animal Farm), he wrote an anti-communist novel called Darkness at Noon, which I'm going to have to go out and read.
Koestler had a truly amazing life, flying as a journalist over the North Pole aboard the Graf Zeppelin, being captured in the Spanish Civil War and exchanged for the wife of Franco's favorite fighter pilot.
In Jerusalem in 1944 he tried to persuade Menachem Begin (who then had a 500-pound price on his head for the bombing of the King David Hotel) to abandon terrorism and accept a two-state solution. Give the guy points for trying.
The Gladiators was actually written before Darkness at Noon, and it clearly shows his disillusionment with Communism.
Spartacus' (or is it Spartacus's?) big problem, you see, was his own soldiers and followers. They were so into burning and raping and pillaging that it made it hard for cities to open up to them, and they didn't have siege engines like the Romans.
But if they could only have given up the burning and raping and pillaging, every city in Italy would have welcomed them because everybody, especially veteran/farmers, were getting utterly screwed by a corrupt and venal system of large-scale plantation farming using slave labor.
Veterans would come home to see their childrens sold as slaves. Unchecked plutocracy.
Spartacus almost effects an alliance with the Cilician pirates and the Roman exiles in Spain under Sertorius, but that gets bolloxed up by a Roman naval victory, and after knocking off six or eight Roman armies, he finally gets stranded in Bruttium on the toe of the boot of Italy and his pirate buddies let him down and won't take his army off to Thrace, where he's from and whither he would like to retire.
Spartacus comes to the graveyard in Rhegium and sees a tombstone that reads "Titus Lollius lies here by the road so that the passing wanderer may say: Greetings, Lollius!"
"Greetings, Lollius!" says Spartacus, and, Kostler writes, "he smiled the good-natured smile of the old days."
Monday, January 11, 2010
Celebrity Guests
We've had a great response to the black oil seeds we've been putting on the porch rail, with lots of celebrity guests. I think that's a red-bellied woodpecker on top, and our flashy friend the cardinal.
¶ 4:19 PM 2 comments
I'm trying to get a good shot of my favorite celebrity, the lady cardinal, because she's even more beautiful than the male, though not as flashy.
Once I saw the male cardinal feed the lady cardinal. It looks like they're kissing. All that color on our porch has attracted another celebrity visitor, too, a horned owl. He was too far away to photograph.
