Category Archives: Personal and family life

“I can’t look at hobbles and I can’t stand fences” from “Don’t Fence Me In”, Cole Porter

Constructing wood fence in the early sixties was my first grown up job.   Having moved on from paper boy, caddy and haying on a diary farm for $1 per hour cash when I was fifteen, my father introduced me to three brothers and their father, Vito.  Each brother practiced a specialty with their own companies, but they conferred daily, so that an employee once hired shifted from installing fence to installing swimming pools and driveways or framing houses, all of which I did when I turned 16.  I settled into the fence business primarily and worked through high school and most of college.  When I turned eighteen, I was awarded my own small crew, a large stake body truck and got paid by the foot.  In a productive week, I could earn two hundred and fifty dollars, a modest fortune in 1965.

We were expected every day to put in twenty sections of six foot cedar picket fence with a gate or thirty sections of post and rail a day.  Each post for a six foot fence was buried roughly thirty inches deep.  If it was sandy and light, a hole could be dug with our hand posthole diggers in under ten minutes.  If we ran into what we called “hard pan” – packed clay that felt like rock – and ran into large stones in our hole, one post could take a half an hour of sweat.  For this tough digging, a posthole digger alone was inadequate, and we would thump away with a heavy iron bar to loosen each grueling scoop.  The bar was hexagonal in section, weighed fifteen pounds, about fifty inches and sharpened to a point on a stone wheel grinder.  No power augurs for us.

Each day we would be assigned to a customer’s home, loading up in the morning the right amount of fence panels, line posts, end posts, corner posts and gates to erect in wood the sketch and specifications agreed to in the contract the owners signed with our salesperson, Eddie.    We built calluses and muscle; and many days were an adventure.  The north shore of Boston, where land was dear and the ground hard, was most challenging.  Once a neighbor came out and spotted the thick string we stretched along the lot line and against which we planned to dig holes and install a fence.  He ran into his house, came out with a hatchet and cut our line in five or six pieces.  I told our customer we’d come back when he sorted out his border dispute.  No extra charge for the lost line.

Occasionally a big job would take more than one day, and we would return to a site. One such project was over four hundred feet of six foot fence around a oversized lot in Revere in which a new in ground swimming pool had been bedded.  Most people with a new pool surrounded it with an unassuming enclosure to meet the building code and prevent uninvited kids from drowning.  This family wrapped their entire yard.  One motive for this barricade became apparent the first afternoon, when the seventeen year old daughter came out to tan in a bikini that failed to cover much of anything.  My distracted crew soldiered on.  They hoped the next day would be sunny.

“A bikini is like a barbed wire fence.  It protects the property without obscuring the view.” Joey Adams

Her parents remained on the property all day, which seemed odd to us.  In 1965 most men who had money enough for pool and fence were at work themselves.  The father was a handsome Italian in his early forties, unpretentious, reserved, but friendly, who brought us cold drinks and snacks.  The second day he charcoal grilled us hamburgers for lunch.  I respected customers who took care of the crew – not only for their kindness – but for their intelligence to extract quality workmanship from the young men who wanted to please them.  When we finished, he tipped us generously in cash.

I told Eddie about the family (including the daughter), and he responded with a cautionary tale.  The father made a lucrative business out of killing people.  This affable soft spoken father would get on a plane from time to time, fly to Las Vegas or Detroit or Kansas City, spend a day or two and come home with a lot of cash.  Some other father in Las Vegas, Detroit or Kansas City wouldn’t come home.  Although locally affiliated, he never worked close to home.  I accused Eddie of making up one of his frequent stories, and he remained silent and unsmiling.  Eddie knew things. A few months later during an outbreak of the murderous gang wars between the Italian mob and Whitey Bulger’s Winter Hill gang, I read in the Boston Globe of a body dumped in my old fence customer’s driveway – not his.

“Don’t ever take a fence down unless you know the reason it was put up.”  Robert Frost

I was reminded of the story this week when reading about the Federal circuit court decision upholding the new Texas law that required doctors doing abortions to maintain admitting privileges in a hospital within thirty miles of their clinics. (Bear with me for the connection.)  Supporters of unfettered abortion claim this law is restrictive to a woman’s “right” to take her child’s life, even though the law specifically states it is to protect women’s health when there are complications, such as excessive bleeding, sepsis or a perforated uterus.  The defender’s rationale is that abortion doctors often come from other states or at least from a far flung part of Texas, so they don’t admit enough patients to qualify for hospital privileges.

Elaborating, they contend that it is necessary for these doctors to live other than where they ply their trade because abortion protesters make it uncomfortable or even dangerous for them.  We’ve know many of these “abortion protestors” who “intimidate” these doctors.  Almost all of them are armed with rosary beads or an occasional sign.

Could it be that they live in other states or locations hundreds of miles away because they prefer to fly in from their home environs, do their work for a day or two and fly home, while at least half their patients won’t ever go home?  The neighbors and their daughters may never know how their parents pay for the pool.

“Euphemism is a human device to conceal the horrors of reality.”  Paul Johnson

Angela and Meg on Lake Webb, Weld, ME circa 1988

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.  Thomas Carlyle

Twenty five years ago we were walking the neighborhood with our two youngest daughters, Angela and Meg, when three year old Meg took note of sewage back up.  “Dad,” she said, “someone is having a yucky cookout!”  I had been pondering the science that concluded that all smells consist of millions of tiny particles spewed from their point of origin; she was trying to make sense of a new experience as all children will do.  At first I was confused, and then all became clear.  Meg’s experience of outdoor smells was mostly of hamburgers, hot dogs and chicken on the grill.  This was an outdoor smell, but made her queasy, therefore….

“Yucky cookout” wasn’t Meg’s mistake; it was someone else’s misfortune.

Without music, life would be a mistake.  Friederich Nietzsche

Our first grandchild, Gianna, is now five, the daughter of Peter and our next to youngest daughter, Angela.  They live a couple of blocks over, and we see them often.  When a car passes with windows down presumably to assault the rest of us with make-believe gangsta toughness, she takes note of the pulsing onslaught at decibel levels which would require OSHA approved ear protection.  Occasionally, she will mimic Peter’s response, “Thank you for sharing,” but she adds her own refinement to this auditory mugging, “Thank you for sharing the broken music.”  Much young wisdom lies in this analogy.

Gianna and Ellie on Lake Webb 2013

Since well before she was born, as her mother had, Gianna listened to magnificent sounds that are sometimes elevating, sometimes spiritually stirring, sometimes peaceful. Mozart, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Chopin, but also an eclectic medley of Norah Jones, Doc Watson, bluegrass from Alison Krauss or old Nitty Gritty Dirt Band albums like “Will the Circle Be Unbroken”, Nat King Cole, Dave Brubeck and many others.  She is in her second year of ballet lessons – her teacher, Jamie, danced as Sugar Plum Fairy for the same “Nutcracker” Christmas productions in which Angela and Meg danced.  Our parish is lively – the whole congregation at Sunday Mass, including the children, sing uplifting songs.  Her whole young life has been immersed in beautiful music.  Gianna’s response to music often is to break into spontaneous dance; her two year old sister, Ellie, imitates her as she sweeps into the living room with kindergarten chassés, petit jetés and demi-pliés. This is so reminiscent to us of her mother and Aunt Meg at that age.

“Broken music” wasn’t Gianna’s mistake; it was someone else’s misfortune.

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.    Victor Hugo

Admittedly, hip-hop and rapping are estranged from me, and I remain ignorant of their nuance (if nuance isn’t a bridge too far for them); they evolved from and were a reaction to the dismal disco of the seventies. Disco also spawned the early sampling of rave techno and house music.  These genres are contrived offshoots, but allegedly reflect an alienated culture: outraged anger or frenetic coupling — joyless, addictive, frequently drugged out, adrenaline fueled thrill and pleasure-seeking without succor or respite or ascent of the spirit.  They seem to me to stink of stale sweat, testosterone, hostility and lust void of love. For your edification, here’s a small sampling:

Smoke any as***le that’s sweating me
Or any motherf**ker that threatens me
I’m a sniper with a hell of a scope
Takin out a cop or two they can’t cope with me
F**k the Police – NWA (Dre)

And I’m gunning for your spouse
Tryin to send the b***h back to her maker
And if you’ve got a daughter over 15
I’m gonna rape her!

X is Coming for you – DMX

So I f**ked your b***h you fat motherf**ker!
Hit ‘em up – 2pac and The Outlaws

Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.  Jacques Barzun

Angela posted a video on her Facebook page this week, which is well worth the four minutes it takes to watch, about the Landfill Harmonic Orchestra.  Brimful of gratitude for the many blessings in my life, I marvel at the elegance brought up like precious stones from the refuse.  The creators of the video tell of an enormous landfill in Cateura, Paraguay, on which thousands of people live and rely upon for sustenance, recycling trash and selling it.  Some of the youth have been organized by volunteer musicians and teachers into an orchestra; they play instruments fashioned from other people’s junk.  Bebi is a nineteen year old who plays a cello, he tells us, made from an oil drum and salvaged wood; the pegs are made out of an old tool used to tenderize beef. He plays a credible version of the J.S. Bach Prelude from Unaccompanied Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major, which you may recognize from the Galapagos Island scene in the Russell Crowe movie, “Master and Commander.” These children play Handel’s Water Music and many other pieces.  From out of the most wretched conditions, they draw beauty.

The machine nature of hip-hop and techno music draws alienation from what was once meaningful:  sampling and repeating and hammering away with no instruments made by hand out of real materials – wood, gut and steel string, reeds, brass and craftsmanship.  The derivative nature of hip hop requires not as much musical ability as some sophisticated electronic gear – a DJ and a recurrently angry and misogynist MC.  Where the Landfill Harmonic Orchestra recaptures harmony and beauty from deprivation; the rappers distort into depravity what was once harmonious.

Rita and I played guitar and banjo when our kids were small and sang a lot with them; Rita also plays an accordion, a legacy from her childhood.  Angela and Meg played piano and flute; Gianna this morning told us she wants to play piano or violin.  She has lovely hands with long, strong fingers that will help her to do that.  She has expressed no interest in learning to “scratch” a turntable or to “play” an electronic beat maker or synthesizer.

For Gianna and for me, sadly, there is “broken music” without redemption or real meaning to draw us closer to one another or to lift our souls.  Perhaps this brokenness exposes a broken culture; if so, it is a culture Gianna chooses not to embrace.

My life would be worthless without music….. People realize that we shouldn’t throw away trash carelessly; well we shouldn’t throw away people either.  From two of the players in the Landfill Harmonic Orchestra

If music be the food of love, play on.  William Shakespeare

We are pet-less, now, if you don’t count grandchildren, but in the past a small menagerie of somewhat domesticated fauna has graced our path.  Mostly cats and dogs, but occasional hamsters, rabbits, laying hens and completely useless goldfish have come and gone.  By gone, with the goldfish, I am referring to their final resting place, which usually requires just one flush.  Cats and dogs are more complicated.

“Cats don’t like change without their consent.”  Roger Caras

First there were Sam and Harry, who had to be jettisoned to other family members when we moved.  Another half dozen or more cats have drifted in and out of our lives, the last being my favorite, Mama Cat, who died in the bushes out back (as cats are wont to do) after just over twenty years with us.  She used to sleep on top of Meg’s head when she lived here.  Meg attributes that resting spot to affection; I would tease her that Mama Cat liked to be warm, and the crown of her head was an efficient source of heat.  Since our cats were always outside as well as inside cats, every once in a while, Meg, especially, would wake up with flea bites – the price of feline fondness.

Typical for their species, our cats were languid, detached and generally disinterested in pleasing humans —  as happy on a sunny window sill as curled on someone’s lap.   On their whim (not yours) they would purr, rub up against a leg or jump on the table for attention.  Most of the time, however, they were content to pursue their own interests, actually more than content.  Obsessed is more like it.  Several were superlative hunters and would leave gifts of mouse parts or half birds on our front steps.  Big Billy (he of the big body and small brain) was fixated on killing telephone cords.  He also would wage fierce battle for five minutes at a time with his doppelganger up on his hind legs in the floor to ceiling mirror in front of the girl’s ballet exercise bar. He was indifferent to the ridicule of humans.  Billy’s greatest triumph came when the neighbor’s scruffy mongrel chased him under the yews out front; after a terrible yelp, the mutt emerged with a badly bloodied nose and cured of cat chasing.

“If a dog jumps into your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.”  Alfred North Whitehead

Dogs are a different tale.  Their pleasure was in pleasing and their passion in protective loyalty – except for Frankie, our basset hound, who danced to a different drummer.  A friend found Frankie at around three months old half starved in the foothills outside of Boulder.  Dave and Yvonne had an enormous Weimaraner and a small apartment; a second pooch was not an option, so we were gifted with him.  He was beautiful in a way only funny looking dogs can be.  He had two speeds: absolute rest approaching coma and full throttle.

Back in Massachusetts, I worked awhile as a reporter in the evening covering local boards and politics.  During the day, I would sometimes take Frankie for a run in the nearby forest because beyond all else (except supper meat stolen from our table) he liked to hunt on a scent.  I would wait until he went off after a rabbit or squirrel, then I’d run and hide while he was distracted.  If observed by a rational person, my sanity would have been questioned.  Splashing up streams to lose him, sometimes I would climb a tall, straight tree and jump to another and yet another, so my descent would not land me in the spot from which I ascended.  Eventually Frankie would tire of rabbit and come looking for me. My predilection was to hide in a bush near a clearing where I could observe him.  When he ran out of trail at the base of one tree, he would expand his search in a widening spiral until he again picked up my scent.   As he neared my hiding spot, I would break from the bushes in a dead sprint; Frankie would lift his voice in a full throated howl and run me down.  We’d laugh (or so I imagined he was laughing, too) and wrestle, rolling in the pine needles.

“The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.”  Samuel Butler

Our second favorite dog was a German Shepherd/Siberian Husky mix, a gift from a couple we knew on Cape Cod, when we lived on Mashnee Island.  Nikki resembled a wolf and was always an outdoor dog, even in the harshest of Maine winters.  She would pace and pant in our house until we put her outside on her long run.  I built for her an insulated lean-to shelter against the lee side of our woodshed, but she preferred to sleep in the snow.  She too had strong hunting instincts and loved to run in the woods. I frequently would go for a two mile run with her loping easily alongside.  In the winter she would tear across the large field adjacent to our house kicking up a ten foot high wake of loose powdered snow.  We were working to expand the woodshed one fall afternoon, when Nikki spotted a large wood rat.  She trapped it under a loose 12” rough board that was lying haphazardly over a small hole.  Bounding back and forth from side to side of the board as the rat attempted one escape after another, she was a picture of silent, deadly focus.  Finally in seeming desperation, the rat fled towards the woods and got five feet before Nikki broke its spine with one clamp of her jaws and a quick backward snap.  Talking her out of her supper was a challenge.

Once after she broke off her run, which was 70’ long and constructed of heavy wire and a chain leash, I called for her at least an hour before she returned with bloody muzzle.  I was afraid she had been hit by a car at first, but found her uninjured.  A few minutes later, my neighbor down on the Vienna Road (pronounced “Vy-anna Rud”), “Juny” Hall (short for Junior) knocked on my door to let me know that he was one sheep short, and I owed him some money.  As gentle as she was with our children, prey was entirely of another order.

“We’ve begun to long for the pitter-patter of little feet – so we bought a dog.  Well, it’s cheaper, and you get more feet.”  Rita Rudner

I sometimes think of the current societal oddness about animals.  P.D. James, the British author of the well known Adam Dalgliesh poet/detective mysteries, wrote in 1992 a dystopia novel about a future culture dying with terminal infertility.  Couples without the ability to have children resorted to dressing up and pushing cats and small dogs around in prams.   As I meet the many young couples in our neighborhood taking their twice daily constitutionals, baggies in hand, I listen to them fawn over their pet’s eccentricities as most once spoke about their children.  When they tell me about spending thousands of dollars on cancer surgeries for twelve year old dogs, my obviously unenlightened sensibilities drive my thoughts unbidden to images of homeless families eating at local church food kitchens for which the money spent on terminally ill pets would be of great benefit.  It seems to this observer that something is out of balance.  I am fond of animals and would never be unkind towards them, but they are not people.

A fellow at work told me the story of his Aunt Barbara in Louisiana and spending summers on her farm.  She had several domestic cats and fed quite a large clowder (or glaring) of feral cats along with her farm animals.  Barbara also had three collies that she would let out at night.  A few times a month one of the feral cats would fail to survive an encounter with a collie.  When asked by her nephew why she allowed, even sanctioned, this harvesting, she explained in a matter of fact way that is reminiscent of the common sense practicality of good Maine rural folks.  It seems she kept the cats around to control the population of rats in her barns; the collies were allowed to roam to control the population of feral cats.  To me this is  symmetry and good logic, displaying a proper relationship of human and animal symbiosis.  Not politically correct in today’s wealthy specialty veterinarian culture with health insurance for pets, but to me, this necessary balance reflects more humanity than kittens and puppies dressed up in doll’s clothes riding in baby carriages.

Mildred Fay Jefferson died at age 84 just over two years ago in Cambridge where she lived, not far from Harvard Medical School.  She was the first African American woman to graduate from that prestigious university, having entered it at twenty years of age. She had previously earned a master’s degree from Tufts University following her bachelor’s degree from Texas College at the age of 16.  She went to Tufts while waiting to be old enough to be accepted at Harvard Medical thirty years before “affirmative action” was even a concept.  Mildred was the first woman of any race accepted as a surgical resident at Boston City Hospital, the first woman physician at the former Boston University Medical Center, where she taught, and the first woman member of the Boston Surgical Society. Her intelligence was incandescent, but we will best remember her as a friend.

Dr. Jefferson was the only child of a Methodist minister and a school teacher, born in 1926, and raised in Carthage, a small town in East Texas.  As a young girl, she would ride on house calls in the horse drawn buggy of the town doctor.  Her family and the doctor encouraged her ambition to become a doctor.  Her family called her “Millie”.  No one else did that I ever knew, including us.  In 1973 after the Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision struck down all laws restricting abortion on demand at any stage of pregnancy, Mildred considered her original Hippocratic Oath taken when she graduated from Harvard and refocused her considerable gifts.  (Link to original Hippocratic Oath, no longer taken by new doctors after a 2,000 year history: Original Hippocratic Oath.)  She founded Massachusetts Citizens for Life, and then co founded National Right to Life, becoming first its Vice Chairperson, then Chairperson and then President, overseeing all its activities.  In 1980, she formed the first National Right to Life Political Action Committee.  If you found yourself in a debate or a battle with Mildred Jefferson, you’d better bring a lunch.

 Testifying before Congressional committees led to crisscrossing the country inspiring millions with her extraordinary public speaking ability and multiple appearances on national television, including a session on PBS’s Advocates, remarkable for its long term impact.  She made her case, none of it “religious”, but logically and relentlessly, Mildred outlined the moral, medical and sociological case against women taking the lives of their pre-born infants.   Watching her articulate her deeply held convictions with grace, power and knowledge was the governor of a large state, who had signed into law a bill allowing abortions in that state.  So convinced and convicted was he by her compelling arguments, he wrote her a letter.  In it, he told her that he had never really considered the full implications of abortion, nor its effects on women and the culture. He deeply regretted his unreflective support for a “woman’s right to choose”, and vowed to do everything within his purview to fight for the unborn, a commitment he kept until the end of his life.  As President of the United States, Ronald Reagan could bring considerable influence to bear.

As we mark the fortieth anniversary of Roe v Wade on Tuesday with its sad accumulation of fifty five million aborted babies, and we celebrate the life of Martin Luther King tomorrow, Dr. Jefferson represented the confluence of the civil rights of former slaves and women as well as those of the unborn.  She was knowledgeable about and a warrior in all these struggles, her certitude was that they were of a piece.  She would talk about the racist eugenics advocated by the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, and how to this day their abortion clinics are located most deliberately in poor and minority neighborhoods.  Mildred deplored the undeniable facts that black citizens comprise about 12% of the U.S. population, yet suffer 35% of the abortions.  She saw this as a kind of genocide, wherein affluent white liberals saw their moral directive was to “help” minorities by lending them a hand to murder their young.

When my wife, Rita, became the Executive Director of Rhode Island Right to Life early in the new millennium, she understood the medical and moral dimensions of the battle, but was naïve on the political battleground.  Mildred Jefferson took her under her wing.  As a force to be reckoned with in both national pro life activity and Republican Party politics, her mentoring skills were like everything else she did – formidable.  She was in her early seventies then, looked fifty, and had a magnificent gift to make you feel like you were the most important person in the universe – the total focus of her attention in any conversation.  Over lunches and dinners, we soon learned she could discuss knowledgeably any topic that came up, from the Civil Rights movement of the fifties and sixties to whatever became of the owner of the former Steve’s Ice Cream emporiums in Cambridge and Providence, whom she knew well.  Her smile, her laugh, her warmth, her truly startling memory and intelligence were a delight and comfort.  Never was there a hint of affectation in her conversation – only a sincere desire to help, to support, to encourage and to befriend.  The Rhode Island Right to Life annual oratory contest and scholarship award for high school students is named in Mildred’s honor; the national contest, to which the Rhode Island winner is sent, was a special passion of hers.   She supported Rita in many ways throughout her years at RIRTL and sat with us at Rita’s retirement dinner.

When Dr. Jefferson spoke at our annual rally in the Statehouse Rotunda, she was mesmerizing with natural speaking ability and gifted intellect; she would let loose the occasional glimpse into the cadences of her Southern preacher father.  The entire audience of religious and political luminaries along with school buses full of young people and the hundreds of ordinary pro lifers with their families were rapt with attention and respect for her history.  This tiny, unassuming woman who could keep us enthralled around a mealtime conversation, transformed into a speaker of great power.  She could even lead us in a rousing few verses of “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, sung with the accomplishment of her childhood Methodist choir days.

She was beautiful in so many ways; we hope to see her again.  We will miss her at the rally on Tuesday, but even more, we will miss her at dinner.  We miss her smile.

Ecclesiastes 3:11, He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart.

Link to NRTL tribute to Dr. Jefferson

Link to a commemorative article about her life.