I owe you all letters but instead you get this
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| This is a photo of a photo that I took in a hurry, so sorry about the quality. It is somewhere in Central Otago, 1977-ish? Bill, Peter, Sandra, Me, Nick. The reason I am showing you this particular one is because you need to know there was a time my father wore red pants and a red shirt at the same time while on holiday. |
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| Michael and Ella, 2003-ish. I mean, come on, what cuties. |
TL;DR: Trains are cool. There should be more trains, in real life and in stories. Trains have been historically problematic.
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| Santa Barbara, CA |
Yesterday the largest steam engine in the country rolled through Binghamton on an America's 250th Cross Country tour, and everyone in town went crazy. I mean, they acted like they'd been fanatical trainspotters since childhood. Michael and I drove to Ithaca at peak-Big Boy time, and as we were driving out of town, Michael pointed at all the cars pulled over on a side road waiting for Big Boy to pass and said, Wow. Owego took forever to get through because every person in a fifty mile radius appeared to have taken their child out of school to watch the passing. Lots of men with fancy camera gear. I texted my friend who lives in Owego with an lol comment and she replied that she'd taken a sick day to watch, and sent me a cool video of the engine wooshing through Campville. I was like, I co-taught with you for ten years and I never heard you mention a train once, oh, except for that time you took a train to Florida and the other time you took a train to South Dakota, so I guess you do kind of like trains, ok, you get a pass, but why aren't all these other people out in force demanding we get high speed commuter rail through Broome County?
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| Michael and Ella on the Sugar Cane Train, Maui, HI |
If we had a train here, I would take it all the time. I love riding trains, as I tell you every time I go to New York via Beacon and Metro North down the Hudson River. You get to see the back-sides of towns, the parts no-one is supposed to see. You get to fall asleep somewhere hours out of Sydney and wake up to mobs of kangaroos hopping across barren landscapes and still not be even close to your destination (yes, that is something I did).
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| Me scouting for a forward facing window seat, Grand Central Station, New York, NY |
I spent most of January slogging my way through Dickens' Dombey and Son, and boy, are there trains in that book. Dickens lived through the transformation of the English city, town, and countryside wrought by trains, and they're a big part of the Dombey family story, it must have been insane to see the world change like that, not always for the better. I am teaching a two semester grad seminar on United States history starting this Fall, and you bet we're going to talk about trains. How the federal government funded and facilitated the spread of railroads across North America, allowing a few corrupt men to amass vast personal fortunes, alienating Native Americans from land, leading to crises in debt for farmers. Etcetera.
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| Michael admiring his childhood train set, made by a shop class in St Maries, ID. |
The book I am trying to write currently starts and ends at Binghamton's Lackawanna Railroad Station, which is not something I consciously planned, but makes perfect sense because trains are symbols of arriving and leaving and strangers and progress running you down.
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| One of my favorite trains from literature is in Richard Adams, Watership Down, one of the top five books of my life. Captain Holly describes their escape from Efrafa. "What I'm going to say now is the cold truth. Lord Frith sent one of his great Messengers to save us..." |
Sorry if this doesn't hang together. I'm finishing it in a hurry because.
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| Me and Allie. I made her take the selfie because I always assume younger people are better at that than me. I will resist making an old-person comment about fashion coming around again in regard to the hair style of the person behind me. I mean, it's not like I'm doing anything interesting with my own hair. |
This blog is subtitled "I owe you all letters but instead you get this," a little explanation I came up with years and years ago when letters were still things people wrote. I didn't realize until Sandra died this year that most often I imagined my posts as letters to her. She would write back regularly commenting on things I'd said. Now she's gone and I miss her replies and I'm not sure who I'm writing for anymore.
When this little dogwood flowered this spring I was very happy. I planted it as a tiny bare stick a couple of years ago and wrote about how one day it might turn into something more. Sandra wrote back with a story about planting trees in her garden, and the tree person who told her that you really had to take care with new trees. After she said that, I was extra conscientious about watering the dogwood through its first summer, and look, this year it felt secure enough that it flowered! Yes, I know dogwoods don't actually have flowers. They have bracts. But I can't say my tree bracted, that sounds wrong.
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| Look at my strip of shady wilderness along the back wall, under the neighbor's pine tree. The chipmunks love it back there, among the dogwood, some bleeding hearts, a columbine about to flower, ferns, some giant hostas I dug up from a sunny spot where they weren't as happy, wild strawberries (tiny white flowers), and a lot of things that are weedy and that I sometimes pull up but they come back and it's not a battle I care enough about. There used to be mint thriving back here but a combo of pushy weedy plants and shade has diminished the creeping power of mint, which is hard to do. I'm going to replant it elsewhere. |
Bonus photo! On Friday we went to Ithaca to see I Love Boosters (mostly quite good, some iffy patches, but you have to admire a movie that actually tries to do something interesting), and after we went for the first ice cream of the season at Purity (ok, for Michael the pilgrimage is for a malted vanilla shake. I get ice cream).
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| The server offered a junior size shake, which is a very smart idea. |
Oh look, it's Sunday night and I haven't posted. Contemplating posting less, actually. I don't always have stuff to say that I haven't said before. Although, I guess I'm always up for sharing another silly cat photo.
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| Ida watching while I do yoga. |
That's it, a cat in a box. She's yawning, but it is always funny when you catch a yawning cat, because they look like they're screaming mad.
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| "Love Your Baby" |
I have never smoked a cigar in my life and since I'm writing about cigar makers, that seems like it could be a problem. So when I learned that the Broome County Historian, Roger Luther, was giving a talk at the Lost Dog Cafe on the history of cigars in Binghamton, and that there would be a cigar lounge in the tent out back afterwards, well, I had to go, right?
The Lost Dog Cafe is a Binghamton institution housed in the Hull Grummond building, which was built in 1886 as a cigar factory and employed 600 people in its heyday. Michael and I used to be such regulars there that one Christmas our server gave us the gift certificate they'd been given by management to give to a customer (I'm sorry about that sentence). But we don't go out to dinner much any more, so it has been a while.
Roger Luther told me when I chatted to him afterwards that his primary research passion is the New York State Inebriate Asylum, a massive gothic pile overlooking the river on the east edge of town, but he put together an exhibition of cigar workers for Women's History month earlier this year, and last night's talk emerged out of that. He said only a few things that I didn't already know, but it was all fascinating, and I enjoyed how much the audience was into it and I was intrigued by their questions about things that I've taken for granted ever since I first started researching women's work during my college thesis on the Dunedin Tailoresses Union. For example someone asked why were women doing the low pay work. And I'm thinking, uh, because of the long history of devaluing women's labor, both economically and socially, that leads to women being deliberately excluded from skilled crafts?
Anyway. I asked my writing group if any of them wanted to go, since they've read some of my chapters, and Ethan and Rhonda and Rhonda's husband Jonathan all came along and we bought one cigar and smoked half of it together and I asked the cigar dudes how to properly smoke it and because they are cigar dudes they were so happy to explain stuff to a lady, and like a lot of people who are into a thing, they were thrilled that someone else was about to start on a journey of exploration. Except I'm not going on a journey, I'm getting off the train after one stop. One quarter of one half of a cigar with a mild Connecticut wrapper was enough for me. My mouth still tastes ashy and burnt even though I've brushed my teeth several times and the cats keep sniffing my hair like I smell wrong. But the whole thing was a blast and I thoroughly enjoyed myself.
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| Me trying to look like I know what I'm doing. Jonathan took the photo. He is a professional photographer and his original framing tells a better story, but I cropped it to take out the faces of people in the background. Perhaps I will pay Jonathan so I can use this as my eventual author photo. |
Here's a link to one of Roger Luther's pieces on the State Hospital. He's still researching the place, and has given updated talks as recently as last year, but these photos from his 2014 post are particularly fascinating. http://nyslandmarks.com/treasures/14feb.htm
And here is a post Roger Luther wrote in 2012 about the Hull Grummond building. http://nyslandmarks.com/treasures/12jul.htm