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People and Places and Things

People and Places and Things

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In his book The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss, Edmund de Waal tells the story of 264 small Japanese figurines called netsuke that generations of his family collected, displayed, lost and found. Made of ivory or wood, these tiny carvings of people or animals are delicate but strong. A cooper making his wheel. A rat with a curved tail. A hare with amber eyes. If you carry one around in your pocket, it “migrates and almost disappears amongst your keys and change. You simply forget it is there.”

The netsuke are by no means the most valuable artifacts the Ephrussi family possesses, and when the Nazis storm their Vienna home in April of 1938, a loyal maid with an ample apron manages to smuggle the statues out of the house. Everything else — the paintings, silver, porcelain, jewelry, an entire library of cherished incunabula — “the accumulation of all the diligence of the family, a hundred years of possessions” — was taken.

I’ve read other accounts of the Holocaust. This one moved me more than almost any other. The objects people touch and cherish are the keenest and saddest reminders of their absence.

After the war, the maid, Anna, gives the netsuke back to the family, and de Waal eventually inherits them. He treasures the figurines, but he also finds them an affront. “Why should they have got through this war in a hiding place, when so many hidden people did not? I can’t make people and places and things fit together any more.”

This book is not only about people and places and things; it’s also about love and loss and endurance.

(I cherish our old cuckoo clock, and — even though my family disparages me for it —the worn wallpaper, too.)

Up Close

Up Close

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There were fewer people then, but they huddled together. Eleven souls once lived in this tiny house, which consisted of one room downstairs (a bed, a hearth, a table) and a cramped stairway to the second floor. There, scads of islanders were born — including the mother of an old woman I met the day I visited this place, the oldest house in Chincoteague, Virginia (circa 1795).

Meanwhile, there are only three of us now in a once cramped center-hall colonial that is ever more roomy as the children move out. And we are one of the smallest houses around. Nearby neighborhoods are filled with McMansions, their two-story foyers and three-car garages of a different heft and scale than the houses here.

What sort of people does crowding create? And what sort of people emptiness? I re-charge in solitude and would probably have been driven crazy by the cheek-to-jowl existence of my ancestors. But still, there are times when I feel a deep-boned loneliness that’s not so much personal as evolutionary. Maybe it’s the crowded rooms of the past that I miss, the intensely shared life that never let us forget that we’re in this together.

The Measurement of Awe

The Measurement of Awe

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Finally! An article from the Washington Post that is not about the fiscal cliff but about a real geological marvel.

A story headlined “Huge Gap for Geologists: How Old is Grand Canyon?”  explains that until recently, most scientists believed the canyon to be six million years old. But new techniques (and new scientists, one of whom is 36 years old) say the canyon could be 70 million years old. This would put its formation back to a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

The article (true to fiscal cliff style journalism) discusses how the new canyon theorists and the old canyon theorists are sparring.”It is simply ludicrous,” sniffs one professor of geology. Adds another: “We can’t put a canyon where they want to put it at the time they want to put it.”

All of this hardly matters when you stand on the lip of the south rim and look into what seems like time itself. Is it six million or 70 million years old?  This question may some day be answered. Will I ever see a scenic vista that moves me more? I was 13 when I first saw the canyon —and I haven’t yet.



(Photo: Grand Canyon National Park Service Flickr site.)

Staying Put

Staying Put

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In The Merry Recluse, the late Caroline Knapp writes about finding home. It wasn’t a grand “ah-hah” moment, she says. “I figured Boston would be an interim city, a place to set down my bags until I moved on to some bigger, more exotic locale … I figured I’d be transient, my sense of place fluid, my attachments focused on people and jobs rather than on location. And then, not long ago, I looked up one day and thought: Oh, my God. I have a life here. I’m not moving. I’m home.”

Her point is that many of us don’t choose our place; our place chooses us. It’s not so much a decision as a non-decision. A not-moving rather than a staying put.

What helped Knapp stay put is the Charles River, “one of the longest, best stretches of flat water for rowing anywhere in the U.S.” and where Knapp would scull four or five times a week.

If we stay here (and it’s always “if”), it will be because of the hollow tree along Little Difficult Run, the one Copper always has to stick his nose in on the days he’s lucky enough to get a walk. It will be because of the mossy hill and the view of treetops I can see from there. It will be because of this one ancient knobby tree stump I always look for because more often than not it trips me up. 

It will be the little things that keep us here.

Election Day

Election Day

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I drove to work today, and as I crossed the Potomac the familiar landmarks loomed solid and significant in the wan winter light. Driving past the White House and the Capitol, I thought about the people who aspire to live and work in those places, people I’ll vote for today.

It does feel momentous, this election. Perhaps because we live in a battleground state and our phone rings half a dozen times or more a day. Perhaps because positions seem to be ossified — the fact that we had our first hard freeze last night, is that a metaphor?

Or perhaps because these polarized times make clear a truth we sometimes forget: that every vote really does make a difference.

(Photo: DClikealocal.com)

Bucophilia

Bucophilia

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It’s still dark at 7 a.m., a cold inky blackness that does not invite exploration.  Leafless trees, downed branches littering the yard, a sky just light enough to promise hope.

It is a season that calls for poetry (as if all seasons didn’t). So I return from the library my arms full of Donald Hall, Jane Kenyon, Maxine Kumin.

This morning, Kumin makes me smile:

Bucophilia, I call it —
nostalgia over a pastoral vista —
where for all I know the farmer
who owns it or rents it just told his
wife he’d kill her if she left him, and
she did and he did and now here come
the auctioneers, the serious bidders
and an ant-train of gawking onlookers.

Bucophilia — it’s a word I’ll take into the day.

Under Water

Under Water

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When constructing my fantasy life I often get hung up on location. The suburbs are out, and a pied-a-terre is a given (after all, I still have to earn a living); the confusion comes with the country retreat. A cabin in the mountains? A cottage on the shore?

After Sandy, the answer is clearer. After Sandy, the mountains are starting to look pretty good. After Sandy, I wonder: What happens when the places I love are under water?

There’s Venice. But of course with Venice it has always been part of that city’s doomed charm.

And there’s Chincoteague. As the wind and rain pounded us Monday I thought of my time there this summer, the stillness of the refuge, the beach that goes on forever. Does it still? 

And now there’s New York City, too. Sea water coursing through subway tunnels, lapping at the steps of the Stock Exchange. Apocalyptic visions.

People perish; place endures. Or at least it used to. I’m not so sure anymore.

(Lower Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge.)

EZ Pass?

EZ Pass?

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Our newspaper today was wrapped in a advertisement for Virginia’s new 495 Express Lanes. The construction of these lanes has tied up traffic for years, and now it’s time to enjoy the benefits. But first we have to figure out how to use them.

So into our already harried suburban lives come new complications. To use the lanes you need an EZ Pass transponder. You can use your old transponder if you don’t plan to use the lanes with three or more people in the car. If you do, then you need a new EZ Pass Flex transponder.

To use the lanes you must be able to read, drive and count at the same time. If your truck has two axles, you’re in. If it has more, you’re out. If your car has three people, you’re free; if it has one or two, it’s, well, you’re not sure how much it is because the price depends upon the time of day and the traffic conditions. Prices are posted on a display board that you must read while driving.

Do I sound pessimistic? You betcha. I’m remembering one of my favorite New Yorker covers. It ran around Thanksgiving, a holiday which is becoming known less for giving thanks and carving turkey than for the sitting in traffic on the way to the feast. The cartoon, titled “To Grandmother’s House We Go,” showed a bunch of cars proceeding through the EZ Pass toll gates. Then it showed another group of cars flying above them. They were using the EZR Pass lanes.

Until those are installed, I think I’ll stick with my crowded old tried-and-true routes.

(This is the cover by Bruce McCall; it ran December 9, 2002.)

Mall Walk

Mall Walk

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Yesterday’s mall walk: Brisk wind, hands stuffed in my sleeves and looking, always looking. The mall belongs to
everyone and holds everyone and when you walk through it on a clear fall day, it’s the people you notice first. They stroll, they stare, they move slowly. Sometimes they stop, right in front
of you. And then you (or at least I) roll my eyes and stride impatiently
around them. But the place is for them and of them and they make it sing, they
make it make sense.
Usually they come in groups. Families with toddlers who careen
down the broad gravel walkway. Tired mothers with purses worn across their
chest to leave their hands free for pushing a stroller or wiping a nose. Groups
of school kids with backpacks and more energy than seems possible. Tourists were everywhere yesterday — forming
lines at the Capitol, taking a break at the carousel, buying
hot dogs and ice cream in front of the Smithsonian Castle. 

And there I was, a reluctant
resident of our nation’s capital, someone who  routinely disparages the
traffic and the lack of place — until I take a walk on the Mall.
Until I see the people. And not just the tourists but people like me, office-dwellers with keys around their necks and tennis shoes on their
feet, all of us out for some air on a sunny afternoon. Runners and footballers and Frisbee throwers and people sitting quietly on a
park bench munching a sandwich and folks
strolling through the Botanical Gardens, learning to recognize the
switch grass from the blue stem. 
I know it’s probably just the endorphins from the walk, but these people, all of these people, the tourists and the residents, all of them seem glad to be alive on
this day and in this place. It’s easy to be one of them.
One State

One State

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As I drive east today I’ll be thinking how if I were making this trek 221 years ago I would not be traveling through three states, but through one. Kentucky was part of Virginia until 1792.

Now these states are separate. But once they were part of the same large region that stretched from the ocean to the “first west.” One were their hills and valleys, one their rivers and streams. The mountain range that divides them was shared.

Yesterday I drove the back roads of the Bluegrass, hopping out of the car often to stick my camera between gate bars, snap photographs and, sometimes, just to sigh.

Once these two places, these two important places, these two poles of my heart — once they were one.