folk art for the Kaunas Festival

It’s gonna be a hot time in Kaunas this weekend. Two days of fun commence Saturday and on Friday workers were constructing stages and setting up sound systems from Kaunas Castle to the Botanical Garden and even on the banks of the Nemunas River. By late afternoon when we arrived at the Garden, a dozen food vendors were hawking yummy things here and there around the Greenhouse and groups of every age and description crowded the grounds.

Kaunas Castle, view from St. George's Church

The newlyweds who had earlier quit the Church of Vytautus the Great showed up too.

Town Hall, Kaunas

It’s okay that we will miss the excitement. We’re not festival kind of folks but we are glad the weather has turned fine. The drizzle that impeded picture-taking on our first two days ended and blue skies played with pillowy clouds. It is true, though, that sunshine makes everything look better. The baroque tower of the Town Hall gleams and red brick everywhere glows with warmth.

Duncan Donuts

I did not anticipate feeling so much at home as I drive from Ringaudai into Kaunas and back, stop for kava and a pastry, dodge into the Maxima for beer or flowers. I look forward to Duncan’s breathy and exuberant welcome as we return to Nemunas Tour or come down for breakfast. My Dear One has taken to calling him “Duncan Donuts” and I just go with “Mr. Snuffleupagus.” Duncan clearly feels we are part of the family and does not hesitate to steal a sock from the basket as I prepare to hang my just-washed laundry on the line, a sock that was filthy with rich Lithuanian farm dirt by the time I forced it from his bulldog jaws.

The greatest surprise Kaunas offered, though, was a sense of youth and prosperity. Youngsters are everywhere, walking, working, playing. Streets are lined with restaurants and cafés that cater to chattering students, chic women, and business types playing with cell phones and computers. Streets are busy but not jammed with cars and parking is easy while riders jump on and off trolleys and buses that run from the Center into the suburbs.

graffiti in the Old Town

That the buildings are worn and shabby is evident but not obtrusive. Graffiti is ubiquitous but there may be no modern metropolis outside of Singapore that boasts pristine walls. It is inside the churches that the legacy of almost a half-century of Soviet domination is most inescapable. Churches were closed, locked and left to decay. Soviet disdain and vandalism took their toll. Now, however, restoration efforts are bringing back some of the most sacred spaces and others have been adapted for use by schools, theaters and other organizations.

pulpit and view of south aisle, St. George's Church

That funds are short is also obvious. Museums by and large lack the resources to create a sense of vitality in the displays. The Botanical Garden looks like my garden: full of weeds, bare in patches and overgrown elsewhere. (Danute, a former teacher of horticulture, spoke of the financial problems there. I had not realized that the garden is owned and managed by the University in Vilnius.) There is, however, affection for so many of these institutions and I imagine that a visitor in a few years, or ten or twenty, will encounter many and profound changes.

swan and duckweek

It is another lovely morning. A vegetable omelet, homemade cheese curd and the bread Danute baked yesterday, slivers of Papa’s smoked ham and bowls of peaches and kiwis prepare us for adventures or travails, whatever may come. The green flag with its graphic black-and-white stork, the banner of the Kaunas tourism association, flaps gently. There is the sound of light traffic on the Gelius gatve; before I rose this morning, about six maybe, I heard a distant rooster rousing his hens and probably his neighbors too. It is a gentle atmosphere, unhurried, no sense of the clock ticking although everyone has places to go, tasks to attend to.

And I am a little sad to be leaving.

My ankle is still a bit sore, there is still some swelling, but the twice or thrice daily dabbings with Danute’s elixir of Maria Treben have, I believe, speeded the healing. The house is so quiet now the road noise is almost intrusive. Jurgis and Danute have left for the day, parting with a sprig of purple lilac, the keys to the front door, and firm instructions to return tonight if the next hotel is unsatisfactory, to return any time ever. “Kaunas is the crossroads of Lithuania,” Jurgis says with a smile.

I Heart Kaunas

Kaunas feels like the crossroads of my heart.

Not that it makes any difference.

Lithuanian litas

Yesterday our requests for cash were denied. Feeling a little concerned—those warnings about ATMs stealing financial information get one paranoid—we went inside to consult a teller. She seemed unconcerned.  “Just ask for a smaller amount,” she said. Paranoia, however, took over so we returned to Nemunas Tour where we could log into our bank accounts and make sure there had been no unauthorized actions.

There hadn’t.

Dank, raw weather notwithstanding, we returned to Kaunas this morning to see a few sights in the Old Town and try wheedling money again. This time a Swedbank coughed up 1,000 litas (about $370) but a DNB limited us to 500 litas. We stopped at another Swedbank ATM at the Maxima grocery store in the village and the most it permitted was 200. We’re covered for tonight’s festivities with the cousins (we also have a Maryland Institute College of Art canvas bag, some MICA teeshirts, a couple Johns Hopkins tees and two hand-printed scarves from the Baltimore Museum of Art) but gee willikers!

BoA, we thought, was a little tight-fisted with our allowance but at least it’s consistant throughout the institution. Lithuanian banks, it seems, leave ATM limitations entirely up to the individual branches. And you know what that means, don’t you? Yes, indeedy, big fat transaction profits!  Every swipe of the card comes with a percentage charge and a transaction fee. Any belief that we might just take out a big chunk of cash when we arrived and make it last eight or ten days was purely delusion.

While we are busy spending money, the Dow-Jones exchange is suffering another plunge. In the immortal words of Alfred E. Neuman, however, “What, me worry?”

A great way to start off the journey to Lithuania we have been planning for a couple of decades.

My Tattooed Boy was punctual, even early, on Monday. Plenty of time to review plant care and load up the suitcases. Before we actually left the driveway, my Dear One returned for the watch he had forgotten. I did not notice I failed to move my socks from clean laundry to luggage until I unpacked, but that was an oversight easily rectified.

The skies had clouded a few hours earlier and intermittent showers made the greens greener and the browns darker. The ride north set the tone for what was to come. A Scion xD is far from ideal as transportation for three tall adults, two large suitcases, two carryon bags and a purse; to accommodate the passenger in the backseat, the driver’s seat was so close to the steering wheel that the column rose with an obscene smirk between my thighs.

Newark? All the way from Aberdeen, Maryland? Well, have you seen the cost of flights? Despite our best efforts to combine a US Air flight to somewhere, so that we could get one free ticket with accrued points, there was no convenient connection to either Vilnius or Kaunas, so we accepted Expedia’s suggestion and focused instead of the travel options between home and Newark. Long-term parking was outrageously expensive; Amtrak offered only a single train that would get us there early enough and it would have gotten us there at least a couple hours too early. Was the Tattooed Boy available to chauffeur? Or at least ride along? Indeed he was. Upon our return, Amtrak offers two trains that should do and both deposit us at the home station. From there it is a five-minute taxi ride to the house.

Our seats on an SAS jet were just awful. Our knees pressed into the seats in front of us and our hips fully occupied the space between armrests. Twinges and aches began almost immediately. A few minutes snoozing a few times over the Atlantic were all either of us managed and the long walk in Copenhagen from arrival gate to connecting departure gate was welcome exercise. The Vilnius airport is a pleasant facility and soon we were driving westward.

My first impression of my Dear One’s homeland is birch trees. Even along the A-1, the not-hugely-attractive main drag between Vilnius and Kaunas, birches flaunt their signature white bark ridged with black. Their sunny spring leaves contrast with the darker, bluer needles of pines and firs and every so often thickets hint at the ancient forests lost to the insatiable axe. Fields covered gently rolling hills and battered concrete structures, relics of the Soviet past, were evident everywhere.

Yet all this has a welcoming charm.

an expression of melancholic wisdom

eyes blue as new chambray

We arrived at our bed-and-breakfast, the Nemunas Tour, earlier than anticipated and found no one there. I checked my cell and discovered—predictably—that it was out of juice. No problem. We asked Serena for her gps guidance to a shopping area thinking we might find a charger that could be used in the car. We found instead a small shop and a café, excuse me, kava, in a charming residential neighborhood just over the Nemunas River. A kind young man used his own phone to call our hosts and we discovered that they were only a little bit behind us on the A-1, having just returned from a brief holiday in Turkey. We ordered two cups of coffee and sat outside in the mild afternoon air. A small dog who seemed to carry the melancholic wisdom of the ages watched us with bemusement. A Lithuanian cherub in striped stocking cap chortled, eyes blue as new chambray, from the arms of his mamytė.

An altogether perfect welcome.

fragrant lilac

Back at Nemunas Tour, Jurgis, or George as we call him, and his wife Danute, bustled about, settling us into our room, carrying bags and bring gifts of fresh strawberries from Turkey and lilacs from the garden. A place where we might have a bite to eat? Why the Timejas, just a few minutes drive away. Would it serve dinner as early as 5:30? It serves food twenty-four hours a day, because the Timejas is a truckstop.

We ordered a beer—he the Ekstras, I the Baltas—and a bowl of šaltibarščiai with a side of boiled potatoes. My Dear One makes a better one, but the sour cream here is something wonderful. We split an order of karbonadas, identified on the menu as “bacon chop” and looking more similar to schnitzel. Instead of a bread coating, it was fried in a batter so eggy it seemed wrapped in a cellophane-thin omelet. Tasty but more than our combined efforts could handle.

This morning, prior to my graceless tumble, we checked in at the Kaunas regional archives and were told pretty much what we expected: if you don’t provide an exact name and an exact parish or village where an ancestor was born, you can find out nothing. Most of the useful records, moreover, are located in the Vilnius archive. Ah well.

Church of the Archangel Michael from the steps of the Mykolas Žilinskas Gallery

On the tourism front, we think that the neo-Byzantine church of St. Michael Archangel is a stunner. I wouldn’t have expected that expressionistic paintings of the Stations of the Cross would have worked for me, but they surely did. The Mykolas Žilinskas Art Gallery boasts dramatic modern architecture and a remarkable collection of paintings, sculptures and decorative arts of its own, and is currently filled to the brim with material from the M.K. Čurlionis Museum as well. (According to the museum’s website, Žilinskas also “enriched many Lithuanian art collections.”) It is possibly the worst installation concept ever: two full floors were hung by decade that the works were acquired, starting in 1920s. There were large didactics exalting the visionary aspects of the collections, but the effect was just repetitive and visually uncomfortable. A more workable approach might have been to arrange the collections approximately chronologically, with some thematic groups, and include a “Sixty Years of Collecting: the Highlights” gallery.

the divine Ugnė

Footsore and peckish, we wandered back down the Laisvės alėja, the eastern end of the pedestrian street that concludes in the old town at the confluence of the Nemunas and Neris Rivers, and settled on a sheltered table at Pizza Jazz as damp turned into rain. The divine Ugnė brought us more Ekstras and salads with beef carpaccio (my Dear One) and prosciutto (me). After an espresso, strong and sweet, we were looked forward to an explore of the Old Town.

And we would have explored, too, but I just didn’t find my feet.

Because I was curious about when the “winners” might have their essays printed, I poked around on the Internet.  Much to my surprise, I discovered that six finalists had been chosen, and in the style of The Voice or American Idol, the public was invited to vote for the winner. The essays were posted on April 20 and voting closed at midnight April 24. Not being a person who spends much time reading anything online, I missed the deadline and lost the chance to vote. I am nothing if not consistent.

Inasmuch as I wrote an essay and spent considerable time polishing it down to fit into the 600-word limit, I’m posting it here. No reason to waste it and besides, I haven’t made a blog post is a while.  So here it is.

Peter Bell for "The Ethicist," New York Times Magazine

The Ethicist explains that “those who forswear meat have made the case that what we eat is a crucial ethical decision. To be just, they say, we must put down our cheeseburgers and join their ranks.” Those of us who enjoy our cheeseburgers apparently let them get away with that sweeping indictment.

The challenge she poses is to explain “why it is ethical to eat meat.” Essayists must opine on  dietary morality by defending omnivorous cuisine. The question, in fact, demands that our suppers be positioned on a moral continuum, so that we might, as fast-food caviler David Zinczenko decrees, “eat this and not that.”

We may not, however, resort to the argument that one human’s meat is another person’s nutmeat.

In philosophy, the Oxford English Dictionary says, ethics pertains “to ethos as opposed to pathos,” which is to say dealing not with the transient or emotional (pathos) but the permanent or ideal (ethos). Both factions might agree that wise dietary choices should be more a matter of moral ratiocination (ethos) than gustatory emotion (pathos). Assuming, however, that one eats for reasons that go beyond simple survival, carnivoracity is magnanimous and altruistic to the same degree that it is selfish, greedy and environmentally rapacious and vegetarianism is no different.

Both diets support agribusiness. Both contribute to the increasing genetic homogeneity of grains, fruits, and vegetables, beef, pork and poultry. Problems associated with mountains of manure are comparable to damage wreaked by tons of chemical fertilizers. Clear-cutting of forests, depletion of soil nutrients and erosion of the soil itself speaks as much to a global demand for grain as for beef. Ideologues on both sides can claim high ground staked out by locavores. Both are guilty of squandering fossil fuels in order to satisfy particular hungers, regardless of place or season.

We humans already occupy dubious moral territory in the natural world to which we ostensibly belong. The ethical devil is everywhere in the details because the ethics lie less in what one eats than how and why one eats.

Consider the following.

Our forbears largely eradicated a variety of animals from the continent, including predators like wolves and big cats who reside just below humans on the food chain. They almost wiped out white-tail deer, too, reducing their total numbers to about 500,000 by 1900. Once deer received protection, however, their population rebounded and now there are something over 20 million of them. Under “optimal conditions,” the number of deer may double every two years.

Beware, one and all, the law of unintended consequences.

My property clearly has optimal conditions. The couple of deer that occasionally strolled through our backyard in 2005 have become a herd of about a dozen.

Leaving deer to multiply unchecked would not—in any way, shape or form—be an ethical act. Deer destroy habitat needed by countless other species; they wipe out ground cover that protects against the silting of streams and lakes. They cause car accidents that kill and maim themselves and people.

Then there’s the problem of exotic animal species and the havoc they cause. Pythons are released into the wild in Florida. Nutria escaped their cages for the Louisiana marshes. Northern snakeheads thrive in Maryland waterways. Feral pigs devastate landscaping and crops in Texas, California, Michigan and New York.

Nutritional choices can and should be moral. Let our dinners improve the world we leave to our children. If you want to make the ethical choice: order up a haunch of venison, maybe fricassee of nutria or python steak. I’ll have a dandelion salad with mine.

Patience, the Dogwood

She withstood the travails of flood, drought and blizzard, and constant cropping by deer, and this spring she blossomed, like some insecure girl crossing that seemingly impassable divide between challenged childhood and blessed womanhood.

Her siblings, in a foster-child kind of way, were more precocious. I knew, however, that delayed efflorescence does not disallow full flower.

Back in, oh, 2004 I think it was, we made a donation to the Arbor Day Foundation and received a bag with ten twigs in it: two redbuds, two hawthorns, two crabapples, two Goldenrain trees, and two dogwoods. We carefully potted them up, watered them every few days and set the pots into a garden bed when it came time to winter over.

Somewhere along the line we lost a dogwood and a Goldenrain tree. The rest grew well, moved into larger pots, and came with us to our new home along with some volunteer hollies, lavender bushes, the bay tree, and a few other cherished plants. The saplings—they had all achieved an age one might think of as tweenhood—did well on the patio as we mulled over where they might best flourish.

The redbuds and hawthorns went in back along the edge of the woods. The crabs found a spot in the side garden and the Goldenrain tree survivor headed up front to the “yellow garden.” We weren’t sure just yet where to put the dogwood.

flowers on the dogwood

All was well until that morning we noticed that the Goldenrain tree had been gnawed to a nub. Okay, we said. We now know, despite assurances in various publications, Goldenrain is not “deer-resistant.”

We potted up the stump and moved it back to the patio to see if it would recover. We set the dogwood temporarily in its place. And all was well.

Eventually—a year or so down the road—we swapped the dogwood and the renewed Goldenrain tree. A new stone terrace offered the perfect location for the dogwood and I imagined bright flowers enjoying its dappled shade.

And all was well.

For a while.

Goldenrain Tree

The deer, having eschewed the dogwood while it was up front suddenly developed a taste for it. They also rediscovered Goldenrain, which subsequently developed severe scoliosis. Regular applications of rotten-egg spray to new leaves helped a little, but only a little.

Big Crabapple

Meanwhile, in the plantings behind the house, other problems emerged. Both redbuds initially thrived and then—without warning—one croaked. For weeks it was fine, then it went limp, turned yellow, and before a week was not only merely dead, but really most sincerely dead. The hawthorns, suffering their own deer-depredation issues, picked up a fungus that neither aggressive pruning nor fungicide has kicked. The crabapples quickly got too large for the side garden and were moved to the Lower Forty. One was large enough that most branches soon extended beyond ungulate reach. The other one?  Let’s just say it has attained bonsai dimensions.

Still, we take our triumphs were we get’em.

Big Redbud

A few years and a nip-and-prune later, the redbud has achieved a graceful branched form and offers an explosion in orchid-pink each spring. The posture of the Goldenrain tree has been corrected and in season it is all feathery-green foliage; even a few aureate blooms gleam in the summer sun. The big crabapple is Brobdinagian next to its Lilliputian cousin. The hawthorns? Meh. We should probably cut them down. They are too close to the weeping willow which went from a branch rooting in a vase of water to the glory of the back yard in about four years.

This year, nine years after we potted up that seedling and almost six years after we transplanted a sapling into the ground, Patience has given us flowers. All is well.

dogwood flowers against the sky

hellebore in bloom beneath the redbud

When we signed on the dotted line and acquired the key to our new home in 2005—a new house in a new development—the rock-studded clay and steep slopes of our lot offered a tabula rasa. The woods beyond, a non-tidal wetland protected by the state Department of Natural Resources, would ring with birdsong as soon as the tumult of construction died down. We envisioned a day when trees, shrubs and perennial flowers that we would artfully install, would be the glory of the neighborhood and surround us with beauty year round.

Redbuds in the Lower Forty

Well, the redbud I nurtured from a twig is now a graceful form that is lovely in winter, dense with pink flowers in the spring and covered with heart-shaped leaves that shift from summer green to autumn gold. The rock gardens in the upper terraces are practically overgrown with ajuga, columbine, various succulents, and grape hyacinth. Moss phlox makes giant splashes of pinks, lavender and white in spring and is attractive in its feathery green the rest of the time. We get a fair number of compliments from neighbors, visitors, and the UPS guy, so in general I would say we are well on the way to achieving that vision.

sedum, ajuga and white rock cress

Except in the Lower Forty.

The Lower Forty is an oblong space below the retaining wall that slopes from about 15 feet at its highest point to ground level about halfway through the backyard. This flat ground is mostly riparian buffer between the wall and the wetlands. Despite our plans—and an agreement with the builder—that the area was to be sown with wildflowers by us, the new homeowners, it was covered with cheap lawn mix by them and given a blanket of straw lousy with undesirable seeds. That was followed by several days of rain. In no time at all, the Lower Forty was a morass of weeds.

Conceding that battle if not the whole war to the weeds, I focused my attention on one end and filled it with durable perennials. The deer mowed down the Joe Pye Weed. The foxglove looked lovely for a season then disappeared. The liatris never came up. The bluebells did so-so. The black-eyed Susans turned into deer dinner. There were moments with things looked good—like when I had just planted flowers and mulched around them, but those moments were few.

We decided to try grass again in the section not given over to flowers and chose a fescue that we hoped would grow longish and lush and crowd out everything else. We paid Landscape Guy to bring in a load of dirt—a very cool thing to watch as the soil was blown in through a giant hose—and spray it with a coating of seed. The fescue sprouted quickly and grew well. The Lower Forty looked wonderful and after a month or two we even enjoyed a few games of croquet.

Each year since then it has looked less and less good. Weeds moved in, despite ongoing eradication and the annual seed and feed. Now it simply looks like hell.

Before signing the contract for a new year of mowing and maintenance, I invited Landscape Guy to take a look at it with me. We agreed that it looked pathetic and that it might make more sense to reduce the amount of maintenance scheduled and set our sights on something other than the creation of a meadow.

where fescue once grew

I pointed out the places where moss was established on naked ground. What did he think of encouraging moss, with the goal of a velvet carpet throughout?  Well, Landscape Guy mused, it might work. The environment was damp enough, probably shaded enough. Okay then, we decided, cut back on mowing, no fertilizer or weed treatments, and I would start spreading moss slop around.

A lot of people spend huge amounts of time and money trying to remove moss from their lawns.  I am more interested in removing lawn from my moss. Moss slop is something I learned about from Moss Acres and other websites dedicated to bryophytes.

There are two ways to plant moss.  You can transplant mats of it the way one might sod a yard with turf grass. Keep the moss wet until it is well established and all should be well. The other way to transplant moss—particularly effective if you want moss on rocks or the interstices of stone pathways—is to spread moss slop.

moss in sunshine

Moss slop is easy to make.

I collected a bucket of mosses, several different kinds, from our woods. Mosses are particularly abundant this spring and even to my uneducated eye there are at least five or six varieties. I ran chunks of moss and dirt through the blender with enough water to produce a thick mud and then I mixed the mud with low-fat buttermilk.

mosses around the roots of a young beech tree

Buttermilk, apparently, is a perfect fertilizer for mosses, presumably because of its acidic nature and nutritional load. Some people recommend beer—preferably flat beer. Dry skim milk is another suggestion. There is no scientific proof for any of this, just enthusiastic anecdotes.

moss slop on the pathway to nowhere

At any rate I took my slurry of buttermilk, moss and mud and poured it on a bare ground in areas where mosses seem to be moving in. Apparently it is important to keep the slurry damp so it will get a watering can of water at least once a day. In a couple of weeks, I hope, I will see signs that new moss growth is underway. Stay tuned.

Now all this makes me wonder if growing moss wouldn’t be a perfect science project.

Assignment: Determine the best medium for encouraging the growth of moss.

Materials List

• Five or more wide, shallow clay plant pots, baking dishes or trays of identical or similar size
• Potting soil to fill each pot to a level of 1-3 inches (bagged potting soil is clean and will provide the most reliable growing medium.)
• About a quart of each of the following: low-fat buttermilk, lager-type beer and stout-type beer (beer should be opened and allowed to go flat before using)
• Water
• Enough of a single type of live moss so that about one (1) cup can go into each pot. (Don’t complicate things by discovering that different mosses like different fertilizers or grow at different rates.)
• Measuring cup
• Blender
• Watering can, preferably one with a sprinkler element

Pot 1

Shred about 1 cup moss as finely as possible. Mix it with potting soil. Pat it into the container. This pot is your control pot.

Pot 2

Place 1 cup of moss in the blender with 1 quart of water. Blend until moss appears to be well chopped. Pour slurry over soil.

Pots 3, 4 and 5

Repeat instructions for Pot 2, using buttermilk, and the two kinds of beer.

Now:

1. Place all the pots in a cool place away from too much direct sunlight.

2. Water all five pots twice a day, putting the same amount of water on each. The soil should stay moist so start with one cup of water and adjust as needed.

3. Keep a log of all actions, such as watering. Note changes in the pots and watch for moss growth. If the pots are kept outside, then daily temperatures (highs and lows) and precipitation should be noted in the log.

4. Find out which pot does best and let me know. Send pictures. I love pictures.

There are infinite possibilities for variation. Add dried skim milk or commercial plant food to the list of fertilizers. Test different brands of beer. Try to grow moss on pebbles or rocks.

For teachers who are big on interdisciplinary activities: conduct research on bryophytes; draw and photograph your mosses; learn about Japanese gardens; create Bonsai that include mosses; calculate amounts of soil needed to fill a certain number of pots of specific size. I’m sure there’s a lot more that could be added to this unit, but you’re the teacher, you figure it out.

It should make a great display at a Science Fair.

And whatever you discover might help me create that green velvet carpet of moss.

Parson Malthus

The information that floated back concerned the 19^th century Englishman Thomas Malthus and his Iron Law of Economics. In my dream state, I had imagined myself saying something like, “Well, Regis, I learned in high school history that Parson Malthus said poverty was linked to child-bearing and that improved family finances were inevitably set back by the arrival of the next child.”

To my utter astonishment, one of the questions actually posed was about the social behavior promoted by Malthus. The correct answer and my final choice was “birth control.”

While I rarely think any more about my fifteen minutes in Regis’ hot seat, I do sometimes think about Malthus and his philosophy.

Recently I have had more reason to think about Malthus and his ideas, although I concede the irony that the correct answer in a television trivia game is offers a critique particularly relevant today.

We need to revisit such ideas as we try to climb out of an economic hole dug deep over decades. We need to consider such ideas as we parse the political “discourse” that marks this election year. We need to examine the claims of GOP candidates and analyze their facts from every possible vantage point. Before we condemn the performance of the current administration as it struggled to halt the financial freight train already accelerating downhill at the time of the last election, we need to determine whether that freight train has been slowed and whether it now travels on a more secure track toward prosperity for all and not just for the “one percent.”

Recently, ABC journalist Robin Roberts interviewed Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent about his claim that we are in the “Century of the Woman.” Kent reckons that true equality for women in America on every level would contribute to increased productivity and a significant rise in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Malthus "Essay on the Principle of Population," 1817

At the conclusion of the interview I seemed to hear a deafening chorus of “DUH.” The voices were not all female, or even Democratic. They were, however, all coming from the same position of rationality, modernity, and pragmatism.

This perception of the economic potential of women, however, apparently is not shared by the GOP-dominated Congress. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (a committee chaired by a man and comprised of eight male Representatives) convened a panel to discuss the inclusion of contraception in health-insurance plans. Their first panel was entirely male; the only two women invited to participate mouthed the policies of their fundamentalist Christian institutions.

Quite sensibly, the Democratic women walked out on this travesty of a hearing. Later testimony by Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke—and Ms. Fluke’s personal integrity—were famously inspiration for Rush Limbaugh’s abusive rhetoric.

Let us, however, return to the good Parson Malthus. In 1798, Malthus published the first edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society.” It was a pessimistic tract, one that caused Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) to describe economics as “the dismal science.” In the words of Robert L. Heilbroner (and I quote from the paperback copy of The World Philosophers I bought for that high-school history class in 1967), Malthus averred that, “there was a tendency in nature for population to outstrip all possible means of subsistence… Rather than headed for Utopia, the human lot was forever condemned to a losing struggle between ravenous and multiplying mouths and the eternally insufficient stock of Nature’s cupboard, however diligently that cupboard might be searched.”

Am I a pure Malthusian?  No, certainly not.

Do I think that a nation whose laws and social mores are designed entirely by men of a limited and fundamentalist religious outlook can compete economically and politically on the global stage? No way.

Do I think that the United States of America can move ahead by obsessing over ways to ordain adult behavior in bedrooms and proscribe women’s reproductive decisions? Absolutely not.

The effort of half of the population to exert absolute control over the other half of the population cannot contribute to a more economically powerful country. The claim of a dwindling majority of one race or religion to privileges and truths they deny members of other races and religions is not going to serve us now or our children and grandchildren in the future.

We need to hear voices and respect ideas that express all points of view. We most of all need that discourse to be a search for common ground rather than a battle for ultimate supremacy.

It is an election year. We can regard our votes as an opportunity to pull together as a nation or as a chance to disenfranchise as many people as we can in the hope that “we” prevail and “they” lose. Let’s just think about the implications, though, of what happens when we turn significant numbers of Americans into losers instead of opening success to all of us.

March came in like a lamb and the soft air lures us out to wander through patches of sunshine by creek and through woods and fields. Sometimes we find beautiful rocks or other fascinating objects for our increasingly crowded mantelpiece. That almost-vernal afternoon we headed to Mullins Park on the east edge of the city to check out the turtle pond, sort of a slime-ridden puddle where they like to bask in the afternoon light.

an addition to our collection

It is a place well known to my Dear One. As a lad he worked for Mr. Mullins, driving a salvage truck to and from Baltimore and keeping the junkyard’s books; then there were those nocturnal raccoon hunts. The park, all 239-plus acres of it, was a farm for decades and later a landfill. Now it is a swampy open area surrounded by woods and ravines bordered by creeks and marshes.

remains of a deer

During our pursuit of the sub-order Cryptodira, we detoured down a slope to the edge of Swan Creek, whose winding course forms one boundary of the park. Swan Creek also divides erstwhile wilderness from human habitation; a large trailer park occupies the opposite hillside. Near the bottom of the path, at the edge of the water, lie the remains of a deer. The skeleton is largely complete; the absence of antlers suggests that the creature was a doe or that the deer was killed out of season. Furry hide still clung in patches, along the forelegs and on the ribcage.

Had it fallen victim to some disease? Had it been killed by a blast from across the creek? Had it been hunted and wounded elsewhere and made it this far only to succumb to its injuries?

heap of bones

A little downstream deep water made further progress impossible without hip waders, so we retraced our steps and continued down the track that leads to the turtle pond. Just off the track we came across another pile of bones, deer mandibles and what is probably a raccoon skull. The pile with its neat heap of leg bones was clearly the work of human hands.

There was a movement perhaps twenty yards down the trail. We both looked, we both glimpsed a creature so dark it looked black, its plume of a tail quite visible. A bear? We have black bears but they don’t have tails. It was not a dog and was far too large to be a cat. A unique and mysterious creature, Mullins Park’s own version of Big Foot, a Yeti, or the Loch Ness Monster?

the peaceful life of a raccoon

We continued on our way. My Dear One saw the only two turtles in evidence. I saw the ripples they left behind them as they dived for cover. Then I saw something else. A raccoon meandered down the opposite shore, clambering across fallen trees, pausing to investigate a burrow hole. Unlike the turtles, he seemed unperturbed by our approach, and we watched him for two or three minutes until he disappeared into the undergrowth.

A day or two later we a different direction, to a tract of land that separates a residential neighborhood from the adjacent shopping center. It lies in the northwest corner where the city boundaries cross Interstate-95 to encircle Ripken Stadium. A few years ago someone had gone in and clearcut the trees, mostly black gums and a few scrubby cedars, leaving it an open brushy field. Its apparent flatness turned out to be an illusion: from the other side, the area resembles a bowl with the road at its rim. As we followed the deep ruts left by some tractor or industrial-weight vehicle, the ground went from damp to swampy to a morass of vernal pools. From the trees to the right came a guttural call from some bird we don’t think we have ever encountered. Soon the faint peeping of frogs in lust crescendoed into riotous chorus—and decrescendoed to pianissimo and then silence as we reached the edge of their puddle.

a patch of wilderness by the shopping center

It is a forsaken area, thirty-four acres of apparently ignored property transferred from the Stancills to the city in 2001 for the princely sum of $0.00. The constant roar of highway traffic is unpleasant but not intolerable. Creeks and run-off cut through the woods—tributaries of Carsins Run, perhaps, waterways that look as though they might connect with Swan Creek—and splash against boulders.

We followed a series of squat, conical concrete obtrusions, caps for the sewer line that runs from the Stadium back to the pumping station and from thence to the sewage plant. Trash littered the woods on either side and crude shelters suggested that the woods were regularly home to the homeless. A deer skeleton lay off to one side. We looked at it and walked on.

The track ended in a sort of cul-de-sac from which we could see cars speeding by on I-95. Someone had constructed a tree stand on the perimeter. A sturdy wood ladder reached to a platform ten or twelve feet above the ground; an overturned white plastic bucket provided a seat. Here we found perhaps four discrete piles of deer remains. We looked at each other and eyed the trajectory between the tree stand and the highway: someone was firing a gun in the general direction of the traffic.

tree stand a stone's throw from I-95

We do not weep for these dead deer. There are far too many deer and far too little habitat, even when you count our property with its flowers and shrubs as habitat. The number of whitetail deer had declined to about 500,000 in the early 1900s and now is estimated at about 15 million. We toss out dried corn and bruised apples for our local herd and look forward to that moment that the does allow their fawns to leave the camouflaged safety of the woods and frolic in the open.

As I have been known to say, I will not shoot Bambi myself, but I know that hunting is essential if the population is to be kept at all under control, if woods are to be saved from their depredations, if their contributions to deforestation is to be kept from damaging the watersheds and destroying habitat for all the critters out there.

Venison is, moreover, a perfectly tasty protein, and animals culled by private and government sharpshooters could stock countless pantries.

Bambi's skull

We were delighted when that piece of the old Mullins property became a park, a natural reserve. We hope that the land once owned by a Stancill could be transformed into a playground-cum-conservation area, with walking and biking trails, a playground, a few picnic tables and perhaps a basketball court, making it a facility the city sorely needs.

The remains of the deer, if nothing else, remind us that terrestrial space is not infinite and that for our own good, our own safety and a future boasting anything resembling a decent quality of life, we have to learn to share

On the other side of the Johns Hopkins monument from the allegory of knowledge--imagined as male--is an allegory of healing--imagined as female.

We—my Dear One and I—attended the 121^st Turnbull Lecture at Johns Hopkins University on the evening of February 28. The speaker, John Irwin, a senior faculty member in the Writing Seminars, has just published a book on the poetry of Hart Crane and his topic was “Building the Virgin: The Triple Female Archetype in Hart Crane’s The Bridge.”

the Brooklyn Bridge, the constant image of Hart Crane's epic poem

The talk was a tour de force, sixty minutes of intricate and tightly knit argument that presented this poem as the early modernist epic of American culture. Irwin argued that allusions to works by poets from Americans Emma Lazarus, Walt Whitman and Edgar Allen Poe to the Englishman Matthew Arnold and Ovid in ancient Rome illuminated Crane’s nationalism as well as his engagement with tradition in creating something modern. That Crane had read these writers and internalized their imagery was indisputable; it was less clear to me that Crane deliberately invoked all of them.

By the end of that hour, my little grey cells were puffing with effort. I have not listened so carefully to material so unfamiliar and difficult in many a year, and the exertion packed a real endorphin wallop.

I am not sure I bought into Professor Irwin’s argument in the end. I have not read The Bridge—in fact my only encounter with Crane’s poetry took place in a high-school English class my senior year. There was a part of me that was enmeshed in thoughts about patriarchy and the oppression of women and the problematic persistence of the “virgin ideal,” something that has been considerably more useful and valuable to fathers and husbands than to the virgins themselves. Isn’t this an intellectualization of the trope “Women should be cooks in the kitchen, ladies in the drawing room and whores in the bedroom”?

Titan's "Venus of Urbino"

I did, however, make a note about some ideas to bring up the next time I teach Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538) in my Renaissance to 1855 class.

For all his alcoholism, depression and homosexual turmoil, Hart Crane was a modernist intent on creating a modern art that advanced and expanded the boundaries of great art. Yes, Crane understood the Renaissance representation of Jesus, in showing the way to the Promised Land of heaven supplanting Moses who brought his people to the geographical Promised Land. Like Picasso or Matisse or Kandinsky, Crane did not seek to destroy the Old Masters but instead to join their pantheon as a Modern Master. In so many ways, however, the Modernist Enterprise—a very admirable and thrilling enterprise—was also a masculine and frequently misogynistic enterprise. I don’t know that this matters; I just wonder if Crane’s heroic ambitions should not be framed, in part, by the testosterone-laden circle in which he competed.

I mentioned my musings to my Dear One and allowed as how I probably would not share them with Professor Irwin or his colleagues; my Dear One allowed as how that was probably a good idea.

Professor Irwin’s talk did get me to thinking, however, about the way that we read, and the books and poems that are embedded in our psyches, which constitute the masonry that upholds both our imaginative and our analytical faculties.

And who are the writers, what are the works at the foundation of my thought processes? What works provide the catch phrases, the gestalt of my ideation?

"First he ate some lettuces and some French beans; and then he ate some radishes..."

Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, certainly, who, “feeling rather sick went to look for some parsley.”  It was not the “’satiable curtiosity” of Kipling’s Elephant’s Child that gave Peter digestive upset but rather his boundless appetite for Mr. McGregor’s lettuces, French beans and radishes. The Elephant’s Child almost became the dinner of the crocodile who lived on the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River all set-about with fever trees, and whose dining habits fascinated him so. Peter Rabbit nearly became, as his feckless father had before him, the filling for one of Mrs. McGregor’s pastries.

The Elephant's Child, thoroughly spanked for his "'satiable curtiosity" still wanted to know what the Crocodile has for dinner.

The source of my penchant for culinary metaphors?

It was not that there was a shortage of books at the summer cottage on Squam Lake, but it is nonetheless true that I read The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss more times than makes any sense, and enough times that even at a tender age I found the Disney bowdlerization appalling. Similarly, the copy of Jane Eyre was well thumbed and it was not until the most recent BBC adaptation that I could believe that the writer and director had read Charlotte Brontë’s classic as often or, might I say, as perceptively as I had.

"The Swiss Family Robinson" by Johann David Wyss was originally published in 1812.

The two intersect in my unshakeable belief that education is as useful as the student decides to make it and that every talent eventually comes in handy.

Jane goes from learning to duck when books are lobbed at her to parlaying the punishing instruction at Lowood School into a job as a governess where, a couple of fires and a few personal detours later, she marries Mr. Rochester and lives, presumably, happily ever after. The ability to paint striking watercolors touched by Symbolist weirdness is a plus as well.

The sturdy Robinson family rescues a trunk of books from the sinking ship they have just abandoned. This reference library, in conjunction with father’s knowledge and a gene pool blessed with a surfeit of creative ingenuity, provides all that is needed for the establishment of a progressive and environmentally respectful social Utopia. A particularly memorable episode involves the catching of sturgeon. The father produces several barrels of excellent “caviar” and also extracts isinglass from the leftover bladders from which he makes transparent panels for the windows in their tree house.

Jane and the family Robinson indeed are alchemists who seem to find in leaden existence golden opportunity. They are the folk who turn lemons into lemonade, the cardsharps who know it is less about the cards one is dealt and more about the way they are played.

Is this where I became a Pollyanna determined to find the silver lining and celebrate the half-full condition of my glass?

Or was my character molded by the model of Black Beauty? Anna Sewell’s equine hero hews to the moral values and and sense of noblesse oblige instilled in him by old Duchess back in that pasture before his fourth birthday.

I wish I could say that I consciously turn to these sources as I teach and write and make the decisions that bring about the turns in my road.

But I cannot.

A part of me wonders, moreover, how specific Hart Crane was in his allusions, how conscious he was of the well from which he dipped his words and world view.

I also wonder what Hart Crane read when he was a boy.

A massive organization project is underway in our home. The first task involved the ephemera of my Dear One’s childhood, his schooling, and his writing. This project set in motion a game of musical drawers as our separate lives were relocated to designated areas. Among the folders and boxes belonging to me were heaps of loose photographs, images which I have started to sort by decade and experiences.

Do the pictures revive the memories or create them?  I am not sure.

The first home I must have known would have been the little brick house on Harmony Drive in Vienna, Virginia. We lived there until I was about four, until my brother J. was perhaps a year old.

There was a screened-in room at the back of that house. On the table where I sat there was a toaster and as the coils turned red, waves of heat created the illusion of ripples in the screen. There was a sandbox in the yard beyond, and I often tasted the sand, convinced it would one day taste good.  It never did.

playing in the sand

I remember a time lying in bed in the living room. The room was dark and I have no sense of color, no recollection of the bright pattern evident on the curtains in discolored old Kodacolor prints. My sister P. was there. Was this when we had German measles? When our parents were sailing the Aegean on the yacht Thendara courtesy of my mother’s parents?

Maggie, the toy Manchester terrier

I cannot tell whether I remember our Irish setter, Shamrock, who met an untimely end due to a propensity to chase trucks. I should remember the toy Manchester terrier, Maggie, who was his successor, but memories of her date to 1959 and on.

Around 1956 we moved from Virginia to Cambridge, Massachusetts, via the maternal homestead at 161 Main Street in Hingham, Massachusetts but this stay is blurred with one the following year prior to our relocation to Cleveland, Ohio. Our new home, an apartment on Everett Street, a few steps from the northeast corner of the intersection with Massachusetts Avenue, is still there and looks much the same, at least on Google Maps.

The images in my mind feel like memories: the inglenook at the entry and the fireplace there; the dining room table placed to the left of the door to the kitchen. I remember that we draped a cotton-flannel sheet over a floor lamp to form a tent and that the fabric scorched and nearly burned. I remember—or think I do—a window seat and a patch of warm sun in my parents’ bedroom, a newspaper lying on the floor, and my efforts to read the headlines. Then there was the green gingham dress and bonnet my mother sewed for my sister for a Maypole dance. The dress had black velvet ribbons over the shoulders and above the sleeves.

straddling the cannon in the Cambridge Common

In Cambridge we went once, perhaps more often, to the Harvard Museum of Natural History to see the famed glass flowers of Leopold Blaschka (1822-1895) and his son, Rudolph (1857-1939). I remember being about on eye-level in spaces that seemed to be all marble floors and dark woodwork, and being warned not to touch the cases lest vibrations damage those delicate works of art.

The memories become clearer, more numerous, more detailed and crystalline by the fall of 1957, but those are not memories that call to me right now.

Among the old photographs is one that shows P. and me on benches either side of a picnic table in the screened room at the back of the Vienna house. We are in nightgowns and cereal bowls are laid before us. I do not, however, see a toaster, nothing that could produce the heated breeze that distorts the screen in my memory.

toast for breakfast

We did have a toaster, though. I see it on the formica-topped, chrome-edged kitchen table in a photograph a mouse has nibbled.

reading the funny papers

Was I reading those headlines in Cambridge? Perhaps. In this picture taken in Vienna I certainly seem intent in my examination of the funny papers.

time for a nap

I remember this bed and bedroom in the house on Miles Road in Hingham that belonged to Granny and Gramps. In fact, the bed later belonged to me. I think it is naptime; I look more than half asleep. Maybe that is why I do not remember my mother turning down the bed and untying my sneakers with such care. She looks so girlish in the picture that I wasn’t even sure it was she but the haircut is the same one she wears in a picture taken in the kitchen in Vienna and so is her blouse.

I wish I could remember for sure.