pt at large

The Ice Panda

 

February 26, 2021 

He appeared this morning  . On a small patch of snow. The only remnant of the 2 feet of a snow bank, now evaporated,  that had lined my street for the past 10 days.

Upright. Indomitable. Inscrutable.

A mystery, a miracle, a little soldier of fortune

He was about a foot away from where my snowblower would have shredded his poor furry body. And another foot from where a giant snow plow would have relocated him Lord knows where and how far away.

He scared a neighbor who thought it was a deranged overgrown possibly rabid chipmunk to be avoided at all costs earlier in the morning.

Close inspection revealed he must have been a well-loved object of affection by a child somewhere within plowing distance of the front of my house. Its gray matted down and soaked weight and the fact its tiny feet were frozen to the ground helped him maintain an upright posture, looking alert, perhaps a sentinel guarding against other marauding soaked toy animals with malicious intent.

Three hours later, after a trip to Home Depot to buy supplies, there he are he was, not having moved one inch. By nightfall, his island of snow had totally disappeared and there he stood watching, waiting for something to happen.

And act of kindness was in order, A gesture, a salute, recognition of a minor miracle. I lashed him to the top of the fire hydrant a few feet from where he had been keeping watch to give him a better view of the surroundings. And elevate him to the safe throne he so richly deserved after all his travails.

Sometime in the coming days he may be seen and retrieved by his owner. In the meantime there's a glint of satisfaction in his two tiny black eyes. Against all odds, he has prevailed and has a future.

POSTSCRIPT

His nickname was suggested by a friend who recalled the discovery of Otzi the "Ice Man" found in Italy's south Tyrol mountains in 1991, although not with a copper ax in in hand!

First appearance of the Ice Panda after a warm windy night evaporated the  remainder of a snow bank in front of my house.

Vigilant night...

and day...

The Icc Panda appeared after a major ice melt of the snowbank over a week of unseasonably warm temperatures.

Photos  by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

"Virus’s long reach imposes a heart-wrenching isolation on all of us...

... imposes a heart-wrenching isolation on all of us."

March 28, 2020

The story resonates today in different forms and still animates the way we live our lives on earth these days...

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/03/28/metro/viruss-long-reach-imposes-heart-wrenching-isolation-all-us/

These are the kinds of stories I need to read these days, kaleidoscopic scope and breadth about the young, the old, and the in-between, how we are navigating roiled waters, managing our dreams, aspirations, callings, making peace with them in a disorienting present, uneasily, but resolutely.

Luminous details, small brush strokes, bore right down to the bedrock of who we are and connect us in unexpected ways...all important reminders of our shared humanity usually overshadowed by the surface tension of what used to be daily life.

PT

Opening Day at Fenway Park - Covid19 Vaccinations!

February 1, 2021

https://www.boston.com/news/coronavirus/2021/01/30/coronavirus-vaccine-fenway-park

Phase 2 of the Massachusetts rollout of Covid vaccine began yesterday, February 1 at Fenway Park in Boston.

 

The Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC) hit a Grand Slam..

No Fenway Franks, no hawkers tossing paper bags of peanuts up ten rows in the grandstand with better accuracy than some of the pitchers on the mound,  no guys standing on milk crates in the concourse selling programs, no sound of a full house crowd cheering on the Sox - something waaay better - the first round of vaccinations in Phase 2 in Massachusetts.

The concrete concourse inside the 112-year-old diamond in the rough known as Fenway Park (or 'Paak' depending on where you grew up) had a lineup of volunteers and professionals who worked together with the efficiency of the crew that covers the entire infield in five minutes flat when the rain begins to fall during a ball game.

Today demanded that kind of efficiency - a nor'easter was on the way. In a blast email from CIC, everyone with an appointment after 2 PM was urged to cancel or report in the morning. I was in the lineup at 10 AM, my friend Susaan at 3:30 PM. We rolled out to Fenway at 9 AM. Beat the storm, maybe even beat the crowd. We did beat the storm. Beat the crowd not so much - lots of people had the same idea we did.

Not to worry. The CIC logistics managed the plan like a veteran manager would pencil in his lineup for a big game. This huge set up with hundreds of moving parts from entry at Gate A on Jersey Street to the exit on the same street. It was flawless.

Show your confirmed appointment at Gate A. Enter the concourse. Read the signs inside the door. Stay on the circular 6 foot decals. Get a little loose about compliance and a floor manager points to the decal. You sheepishly stand right on it. When you reach a row of desks separated by plexiglass, show your insurance card,  sign a form confirming normal temperature and no contact with anyone with Covid19 symptoms and you join the line ahead.

The line snakes way up the concourse to a destination unseen as yet. Every 30 to 90 seconds follow the person in front of you to stand on the next 6 foot decal. After half an hour, notice the 15 minute waiting area in which people are sitting after being vaccinated. You're getting close.

Ten minutes later see a row of chairs, tiny desks and a nurse or medical student vaccinating those ahead. One raises her hand. I'm walking from the on-deck circle to the plate.

I am inexplicably nervous for a moment then full of anticipation. Amanda greets me, has a sealed vaccination needle of Pfizer–BioNTech COVID‑19 vaccine ready. Which arm?  Take off shirt. Right arm. A quick alcohol rub to clean then a shot i barely felt. WOW...DONE!

Amanda fills out a COVID-19 Vaccination Card with my DOB, Product Name,  Manufacturer and Lot Number on one side and "Reminder! Return for a second dose! with 2/22/21 she's inscribed on the reverse side.

Another card she gives me - "Important Next Steps" has  an address cic-health.com/Fenway and a QR code on one side and "Please remain in the observation area until 11:07 AM on the other side.

I am directed to a chair by a volunteer who checks the time. A few minutes later another volunteer with a laptop on a rolling cart greets me. "Would you like to schedule your second dose?"

"Yes indeed!" Then and there I officially sign up for my second dose on February 22.

While waiting for the next 15 minutes I peruse the "What to Expect after Getting a Covid-19 Vaccine" brochure.

What seamless planning and execution! Fenway Park is easy access by public or private transportation, the whole shebang happens undercover and indoors so no worries about weather.  Semi-trailer sized space heaters keep the concrete and steel interior warm. It is 32 degrees F outside.

A first dose of vaccination is not a magic bullet. I still need to mask up, wash my hands, keep a small social bubble. I'll do the same after the second dose. I'm doing what's necessary because some day down the road I want to go dancing, head to my favorite eateries, and visit my friends in Lafayette, LA.

Everyone here today has hopes, dreams, and anticipation for a future without Covid. Some have had losses so much deeper than mine, losing friends, parents, businesses. I am healthy enough. My friends and families have not been savaged by Covid 19. I am mindful and grateful for that.

I'm in that crevice between grieving for what's lost and hoping for what can be recovered. Time and again i remind myself of the words of the poet Antonio Machado as he considered the 600-mile pilgrimage walk  El Camino Real -  "There is no road, walking makes the road."

I'm walking.

XXXXXXX

Start at Gate A on Jersey Street

 Line up, sign up

Follow the line...

My turn !

Make an appointment for second shot while in recovery area

 

Photo opp on the way out...

Who knew the most important event this year at Fenway would have nothing to do with baseball!

Photo by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Helpful sites

https://www.nbcboston.com/news/coronavirus/public-to-get-first-glimpse-of-fenway-mass-vaccination-site/2288562/

https://www.boston.com/news/coronavirus/2021/01/30/coronavirus-vaccine-fenway-park

https://www.mass.gov/info-details/covid-19-vaccination-locations

or Google "how long is the california el camino real"

 

 

 

Joan Baez: A New Stage

December 28, 2020

20/12/28 Joan Baez/Stacey Abrams

Joan Baez: A New Stage

When 79 year-old Joan Baez announced her farewell tour  ending her public singing career I assumed she was sailing over the horizon and anchoring at some distant island of quiet retirement. Wrong.
https://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2018/09/joan-baez-fare-thee-well.html

Today my friend Myke Farricker dropped in to deliver a Christmas present.

From the size and shape I could tell it must be a photo, perhaps one of the historic fundraising bike rides we have done for the ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis)s) cause . Wrong again.

The bold and beautiful limited-edition portrait of Stacey Abrams stunned me.

“Check the name of the artist,” Myke says. Another shock.

Joan Baez.

It’s not a far leap to know that Baez as always had a social activist streak.

Now instead of using her one-of-a-kind immediately recognizable voice she is using color and canvas to make her point.

I don’t know whether artistic ability comes from the left brain or the right brain or the heart. All I know is that her drive to put her shoulder and talent to the wheel of social justice is unrelenting. Never happy with the status quo of politics in general, the past four years have been a car-crash affront to her political sensibilities.

She is pushing back.

To her, music has always had a point.In her politically framed songs, she knows that her sentiments can be a driver to raise consciousness...and money.

Painting has become her new voice, she is a force to be reckoned with. This may be the most important stage in her life.

Case in point: 100% of proceeds pledged to Abram's "Fair Fight" PAC

 

 

• DETAILS
• Handmade

 

• Height: 15.5 inches
• Width: 11 inches

Description

 

Limited edition (250) archival pigment prints of the Stacey Abrams portrait painted by Joan Baez titled "Georgia on my Mind." Printed on Moab Entrada natural paper, these prints measure 11" x 15.5" including a one inch deckled border. Each print has been personally hand-signed and numbered by Joan Baez and comes with a certificate of authenticity. Prints are $200 each. Shipped in durable triangular tubes.

 

Another portrait ...sent to me by Susaan Straus...a friend  just tried to  purchase...SOLD OUT!

This photo from  Joan Baez website

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Noel Ramble

December 21, 2020

'Tis the season...and a perfect night for a pre-Christmas ramble in the neighborhood illuminated by holiday displays and the light of a waning Beaver Moon.

 

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Mini Pre-Midnight Ramble: Halloween Treat - Blue Moon and Mars

October 31, 2020

I bought a couple of bags of candy but not one trick or treat kid came to the door tonight.  Not surprising considering the pandemic now have enough chocolate to snack on for a month.

When it was clear that the streets would be empty for the night, I took a brief walk in search of he full moon I had read would be rising up there somewhere.

A minute later, red tinged Mars showed up to join the 'Blue Moon', a pretty neat trick on Halloween.

“Once in a blue moon” explained…

The Oct. 31 full moon also happens to be a "blue moon," a designation for the second full moon to occur in a single calendar month. Blue moons are relatively rare as well, occurring on average just once every 2.5 years or so. Blue moons are relatively rare as well, occurring on average just once every 2.5 years or so. It won't happen again until 2039.

By then I will have consumed all that candy.

Whoa, from my history of  Midnight Rambles, I recognize that reddish planet.

Surprise...Mars in the clear sky!

Photographs by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Concert for Rebecca

September 19, 2020

Al fresco concert for Rebecca...

No matter from whence it comes, music lifts the spirits.The right music at the right time sprinkles ethereal fairy dust that for brief sparkling moments ever so softly and subtly temporarily neutralizes  pain and the shadows of mortality. It can happen in churches, temples, dive bars, back yards and warm kitchens. It happened here today. Erin Harpe, an RW fave, provided the musical groove that called down the spirit.

That spirit came down and sat beside us as soon as it heard Harpe's robust, Piedmont blues dexterous finger picking, a perfect match for the songs in her repertoire. Obvious in the videos below. And her stage (lawn?) patter that introduced songs that often had a distinct ragtime rhythm with a bluesy twist. The style was sourced in African American songs that gained popularity from the mid 1920s to the the 1940s. If you've ever heard a Josh  White song you feel it.

Contemporary artists like Keb Mo, Ry Cooder and David Bromberg carry on the tradition. And this afternoon, Erin Harpe gives us a front row seat and treat with her deeply felt Piedmont picking and stylings. Once you listen to the style, you can hear traces of it in other regional styles that veer into the style with string  bands and ragtime.

https://www.erinharpe.com

Erin Harpe and Jim Countryman, aka the Country Blues Duo. Jim Countryman provides the bassline the way a cement foundation  supports the frame house above it,  not flashy,  certainly essential and occasionally playful.

 

 

 

 

 

The Kazoo is an  unexpected surprise in Erin's musical grab bag...what a hoot!

 

More KAZOO on this jaunty swing gem.

A terrific cover of John Prine's "Angel From Montgomery."

We need angels today. This is more than a lawn concert. It is a wish of a woman to fill her heart and ears with sounds that make her happy, stir neurons that palliate and cast rays of sunshine down roads with vanishing points that we as her invited friends cannot imagine staring into.

A dark undertow runs under the rich melodies, vocalizing. and presentation. Reflexively I am loving the music. And can't shake the reason I am siting here with a woman I have shared so much with. Her days are numbered.

She has invited a handful of us because she knows we are kindred spirits, transfixed with the same kinds of music that lifts, cradles, sends us into corners in our psyches and onto dance floors real and imagined in which we dance with passion, effervescent energy in the immediacy of now.

She wants us here to share this now with her. It is all we have. 

Videos and photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Song Of The Day: "Don't Be Cruel" - Reinvented

Whooeeeee, never thought someone could, or would, take this song by you know who, turn it upside down, let the sound of the coins falling from its trousers produce a song track, utterly its own, groove heavy, emotionally convincing, reeking of the 1950s ... voice, phrasing, backup singers, and tight band that makes every note count. And a bass line running through it like a freight train with a metronome in the firebox. I don't remember dancing to the original but this version begs you push the chairs back in the kitchen. And is that an organ introducing the song? Oh, my. This song has it all going on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-STFyfsdoVA

I Voted!

August 24, 2020

Creative dropbox located between the Watertown Free Public Library and Town Hall, Watertown, MA...return your books or return your ballot!

A sad, and scary, comment on the uncertainty that ballots sent through the USPS may not reach their destination on time. I'm taking no chances. My ballot was mailed to me August 13, 2020. My ballot was tabulated at Town Hall the day after I put it in the drop box. No worries about recently appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, businessman and Republican Party fundraiser,  messing with my vote.

I never thought the day would come when I would question the safety and sanctity of my right to vote.

Photo by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

FLASH...UPDATE!

I tracked my ballot at www.TrackMyBallotMA.com

9/1/2020 State Primary

Ballot Mailed: 8/13/2020

Ballot Received August 25, 2020

Status: Accepted

My ballot was scanned and accepted at Town Hall. The ballot was transported to my voting precinct location, scanned and counted.

I will receive a ballot for the November election soon. I will complete the ballot and return it to the same drop box and track my vote the same way. As in the primary election, my ballot will be transported to my voting precinct location, scanned, and counted.

I am horrified that the president is casting doubt on the election process.

Postmaster DeJoy's meddling with the systems of the country's drop boxes and the internal systems of sorting mail, including mailed ballots efficiently, is an assault on citizens' right to have their ballots received  and tallied on time.

NB: Read and follow instructions, especially where to sign and date. Ask your town hall if you have questions. Melania Trump's vote was disqualified because she did not sign where required. Pay attention!

PLEASE VOTE and VOTE EARLY!

Mid-Day Ramble: "We Can Do It!"

 Oh boy! I smiled when I noticed them on a Midnight Ramble. The smile on my face was as bright as the noonday sun when I read the inscriptions on the stones today. The colors on the stones outdid the flowers nearby. And the messages? See for yourself.

This has to be the mail deliverer's favorite stop of the day. For everyday passersby, it's a shrine.

In times of flux, social change and uncertainty, words matter. They mattered when, in 1883, Emma Lazarus wrote these words inscribed on the base of The Statue of Liberty:

“Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,/I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” words inscribed on the base of The Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.

Today we are masked masses, eager for the day we can breathe free again, who can appreciate a momentary uplift by reading the messages painted on these petra-petunias arranged on the steps.

We're learning to see through our masks and connect through our eyes, our laughter, and our attitude.

YES we can!

Easier some days than others...that's why we need those messages on the other stones!

That's when the fun begins...

The best rock garden ever!

and you can see it all the way down the street.

FLASH...I just learned that these artistic rolling stones were painted and captioned by the homeowner. She recently painted messages honoring women's rights...stay tuned for a photo update.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

https://www.biography.com/writer/emma-lazarus

 

 

 

Midnight Ramble: Firefighter Memorialized

August 15, 2020

Midnight - Mars rising as I head down Oliver Street. I never know what might be revealed on the ground during a Ramble. Overhead, I can count on bright Jupiter, as close to a neon sign you'll ever see, dominating the cosmos, along with Saturn, the Big and Little Dippers, Polaris, and a host of constellations that became more visible after Covid-19 closed the state down and emissions from automobiles cleared away.

Tonight's Ramble has a target - drop off my Water/Sewer quarterly payment, due today,  into a drop-box next to Town Hall.

Pieces of Watertown history are abundant on the way to Town Hall.

Even before Covid-19, death can visit suddenly as it did with this beloved 20-year veteran of the Watertown Fire Department. Cemeteries aren't the only place to memorialize the departed.https://patch.com/massachusetts/watertown/2-alarm-fire-watertown

On Main Street Rt 20, a virtual gravestone...

reminds citizens and firemen alike that the call of civic duty has hazards...

that need to be acknowledged.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

George Washington: Good Trouble in Watertown, MA

August 3, 2020

If you'd been standing around this corner, a main thoroughfare not far from the Boston Post Road, in the spring and summer of 1775, you'd have seen a who's who of American history riding through the streets of Watertown, MA.

When passing through Watertown, George Washington spent the night at Widow Dorothy Coolidge’s tavern. The tavern was located at the present site of the MBTA Bus Terminal landing next to the Charles River.

“We lodged in this place at the House of a Widow Coolidge near the Bridge, and a very indifferent one it is.”

High rating for historic significance but Widow Coolidge's lodgings get a pretty poor rating on Ye Olde Trip Advisor.

What was really on the menu was what the late Congressman John Lewis would say was getting into 'good trouble'...plotting to overthrow the British Government and embrace self-rule.

TO BE CONTINUED WITH FURTHER RESEARCH

MANY THANKS TO NEIGHBOR AND HISTORIAN MARILYNNE K. ROACH FOR INVALUABLE INFORMATION ABOUT ALL OF THIS!

 

 

 

 

Don Lemon: Anchor, Bridge

June 22, 2020

Don Lemon: CNN Anchor, Bridge

Don Lemon is paving the way every night to expand the conversation about racism in America. He is thoughtful, presents his authentic self every night, and differentiates his opinions from the news clearly.

He’s deceptively good at tackling the heretofore third-rail subject of racism, touchy to explore even with a CNN audience. Low key before the George Floyd murder, he registers the event with sense of the now, recognizing that this is the time to open up the talk and that he is going to use his platform to do it.

I can think of no other highly visible black man in the media constellation who has the credibility, sensibility, and a smoldering repugnance at a nearly profane sense of systemic racial injustice regarding black men in particular.

George Floyd's murder in plain daylight, captured on video, lit a fuse in the national psyche. Lemon lets it burn. But in a way that he intends, figuratively speaking, to cause as much imploding as exploding. When white folks begin to notice then come to grips with entitlement and privilege that comes with their skin color and begin to notice it without feeling called out that’s quite a feat.

Lemon is doing that. When he launched a podcast titled "Silence Is Not An Option," he put his words into action.

Excerpt from "Silence Is Not An Option"

I know that this issue, like this country, isn't just black and white — we're all impacted by this, and we all have work to do. Listening to this podcast won't wash away your sins, and you won't get a certificate at the end. You may still say the wrong thing — hell, I am sure at some point I'm gonna say the wrong thing — but silence is not an option. We've got to talk about this and find some concrete steps forward, together.

The stone he’s cast into the pool of race consciousness is making a ripple on shores heretofore unlapped . A news anchor, yes. And a bridge to a national consciousness about race.

 

Regular Sex: Mature and Often

June 23, 2020

What makes your skin feel more supple and makes you appear five to seven years younger? No, not Oil of Olay… SEX !

That high-pitched sound of bed springs creaking in senior living communities across America is because residents just read this comment by Dr. David Weeks on the bulletin board of their recreation center. Weeks says people formerly called elderly can “shave between five and seven years” off their appearance by having regular sex. The more orgasms the better. Let endorphins rage.

Those endorphins are leeetle miracle workers, he says.  They can act as a natural pain-killer, reduce anxiety, boost circulation and release a human growth hormone that makes the skin more elastic. Forget ibuprofen. Break out the Viagra.

"Sexual satisfaction is a major contributor to quality of life, ranking at least as high as spiritual or religious commitment …” he added. That finally answers the question of why people experiencing orgasms so often shout, “Oh, god!”

“….more positive attitudes towards mature sex should be vigorously promoted," he said.  I guess that means I’d been having immature sex until I was eligible for my AARP card. I wonder how mature sex is different. Well, I haven’t used the trapeze lately, maybe that’s a sign I’m having mature sex.

Here’s the interactive part of this post. We should be able to create a top ten list of signs of mature sex. Here’s a starter list.  Feel free to weigh in.

•You can wait till you get to the bedroom before you start.
•You haven’t had sex in a car in a few years.
•You have sex with your socks on.
•You wonder whether you DVRd your favorite TV show while you’re having sex.

OK, readers, your turn to add to the list. You don’t necessarily have to be of AARP age to add your comment…

George Floyd: Watertown Vigil In Solidarity for Justice

June 2, 2020

Today’s Watertown, MA, vigil wasn’t heralded on CNN or Fox News but it happened where it needs it most, to wake up white citizens in  every day places like Watertown, MA, all over the  country. It was sparked by what we saw on the gut wrenching video of George Floyd being murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis last week.

35,954 people, not counting children, live in the 4.2 square miles of the city  eight miles from Boston.

This message showed up on my neighborhood list serv.

The vigil tonight will be held on "The Delta," the green space in the middle of Watertown Square. If many people come, we may spread out to the street corners.

Word spread. So did the crowd.

An inter-generational swath of them showed up at 5:30 PM to 6:30 PM to fill "The Delta," the grassy area in the middle of Watertown Square, the nexus of the city, and spill onto every adjacent sidewalks and street corner. I wouldn’t describe Watertown as a hotbed of activism. Tonight it was a city with a conscience. We held hands with small towns across the land.

The video showing George Floyd's murder was a defibrillator. It shocked us into taking a step to address racial bias and institutional injustice against people of color. What began as a visceral reaction to gross inhumanity has to continue with pressure to change culture across the board.

For me, I confronted my own conscience.I have always voted for justice. This was a moment to stand up for it. We joined hands with everyday people in Paris, London, Amsterdam, Syria, New Zealand and hundreds other places around the globe, revulsed from watching the video of a black man murdered in broad daylight by a white police officer.

The white people here might fear that the police might ticket us for speeding. Black men and women fear that police might ticket them because of their color. White privilege is hard to acknowledge. I haven't thought much about it because I don't have to. I understand it better today.

The Watertown Police Department  just issued this document describing guidelines for "use of force."

And this: "On behalf of the WPD Chief Lawn would like to thank all who attended the peaceful vigil last night. Chief Lawn attended & was impressed by the over 500 people . We are proud of Watertown and our community’s commitment to advocate for social justice. Thank You!!!" @watertowngov

Watertown's citizens read the tweet. A thank you from the Chief is good. I have had no personal experience to the contrary but Watertown's adherence to live up to the "use of force" guidelines will be essential. They will certainly be held to the guidelines they stand for.

The governor of Minnesota said, "We have only one chance to get it right."

The hard work has begun.

This story in the Huffington Post helps me figure out ways to keep it going.

People walked into Watertown Square from every quarter in the city. From 5:30 PM until 6:30 PM, the area swelled with people who needed to stand up for justice...

Three generations...

SAY THEIR NAMES...every sidewalk and median strips was occupied by protesters bearing homemade messages with messages they wanted to express

 
At every traffic light change, drivers of passenger cars, UPS and Postal Service trucks and 18-wheelers leaned in their car horns.


High school kids made very specific signs...

 
.

Everyone wearing masks. Social distancing observed better in some groups than others.

 
Critical: We need to take action with votes and voices.

Protesters raise signs, drivers lean on horns to demonstrate support

 

What will this boy remember about this? How has his mom explained it? The governor of Minnesota said, "We only have one chance to get this right."

Scores of home made signs...

to send a message to the political system and to each other.

At 6:20 PM, the entire square suddenly became quiet. I look around. Everyone is kneeling.

Everyone is kneeling. I had no idea this was in the plan. No one utters a word. Everyone is processing why they are here, what the moment calls for.

We are aware of the momentous disquiet across the land, that we are part of a movement for change. It's up to us to do more than kneel.

 

The hard work begins now. How will parents talk to their kids about this? What kind of conversations will begin between the teenagers present? What steps do I take?

This story in the Huffington Post helped me figure out where to start. This post is a start.

6:35 PM...heading home. It is up to me and everyone in this crowd to put our shoulders to the wheels of justice.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2G8j2TxTXEA

Watertown Square, all ages vigil gathers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TJ0qNXp0s8&list=TLPQMDYwNjIwMjC1VjDgTqGOrg&index=1

Crowd stand in solidarity, most holding home made signs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDHvnayUwkQ

Every corner filling up with over 500 people standing for justice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpNj-iiHKBI

6:21 PM

One minute later, a powerful 8 minutes and 46 seconds of silence, the time frame a Minneapolis policeman kept his knee on the throat of George Floyd, killing him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liQPu_oSSI8

Kneeling at 6:22 PM

 

 

Midnight Ramble Series - May 21, 2020

May 21, 2020

2:00 AM

These midnight rambles have evolved from a substitute for exercise at my health club into a walking form of contemplation, meditation, and sheer wonder at the contrasts all around me, light and shadow, emptiness and density, deep silence spliced with the rustling of the wind through tree branches overhead.

I can feel it. Every night, like coming upon an old friend, it wraps around me in the first moments I pull the front door closed and walk into the zen like territory of sound/no sound. 

The smell of budding trees, lilacs and primrose, the earth coming to life in the spring unmitigated by pollution of any sort, awaits me. I have been sucked into this eddy of silence and fragrance, addicted to and embraced by the sum of all of it.

In the nine weeks since I began rambling in the middle of March, the earthly shutdown has acted like a massive physic for the cosmos. Reminded me of a science experiment my sixth grade teacher demonstrated. She poured dirt into a large beaker of water and stirred it up. You know what happened in the next hour. 

The canopy overhead looks like a blue/purple blanket onto which a mighty force has arranged the cosmos. Like me, it takes a ramble every night. Each of us has  our own neighborhood. Mine varies according to my whim. The constellations plot their well worn paths every night.

"Look for Venus tonight!" a friend texted me. What I saw blew me away.

I downloaded a couple of apps. Rambling at about 2 AM last night (this morning) I see a brilliant star, high overhead. Open the "Sky Guide app", point my iPhone overhead. JUPITER!  I first spotted the planet low in the southern sky around midnight two weeks ago, outwattaging every other body around it. Tonight two hours later, it looks like a beacon in a sea of lesser stars and planets.

https://history.nasa.gov/SP-349/ch1.htm

Ursa Major and Ursa Minor are a celestial halo, giggling and pointing fingers at grain-of-sand-me staring at them through my phone as I slow march past Victory Field along the yellow traffic lane in the middle of Orchard Street.

The Greeks,Romans, Hindus have told Ursa Major, Ursa  Minor creation stories for eons. Runaway slaves used the Little Dipper's handle, aka the North Star, to guide them to freedom. Little did their owners realize "Follow The Drinking Gourd" was a celestial road map from sun down to sunset.

 

 

 

Below...Jupiter rising in the southwestern sky

The smaller 'star' to the left of Jupiter...SATURN! It turns out that May is the best month to get this view of the  duo.

 

The smaller 'star' to the left of Jupiter...Saturn!

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.... 2 AM...rambling

 

 

A Visit to the Dentist, Mitigation Reigns

May 20, 2020

I'm nervous when I shop at my local Stop & Shop. Imagine how I feel when I had to visit my dentist. On March 20, my two upper incisors needed to be capped. Custom ceramic replacements were scheduled for March 5. The pandemic changed that.

My dentist opened for business last week. In full mitigation mode. One patient at a time. I begin to feel relaxed when I see the plexiglass barrier at the receptionist's window. And her mask. And the gloves, mask, hair covering on his assistant who ushers me into the room with all the paraphernalia of the trade.

The doc enters ten minutes later, sits down, we talk. He's relaxed. And reads my mind. "I shower and change scrubs between every patient. I'm taking care of both of us." His assistant, wearing a plexiglass shield over her masked face, stands behind me in a corner.

I'm relaxed. He examines the temporary caps on the incisors.

"Your gums are a little soft. I want the gums to be firm when I install your new ceramic crowns to get the best fit. But take a look. I think the color matches your own enamel,"  showing me my new pearly whites.

Five minutes later, I've purchased an Oral-B Genius Professional Exclusive Rechargeable Toothbrush made by Braun. "I add $10 to my cost," he says, "I offer them so you have the best chance to keep your gums healthy. Reschedule for two weeks. Call us if you have any questions about using the toothbrush."

Back to the receptionist's alcove. Slide my credit card under the plexiglass. She wipes down the pen I'm about to use with a sanitary wipe. Same to my credit card when she returns it. His assistant brings me a clean new fabric bag with the new toothbrush.

I'm coming back in two weeks. Hopefully with firm pink gums. And a dose of confidence that I'm being cared for by a very highly motivated team of professionals aggressively managing and mitigating.

The one thing that overrides everything?

Trust.

The Miles Davis Tadd Dameron Quintet in Paris Festival International de Jazz May 1949

May 19, 2020 P.E.

"I haven’t played this in years. In perfect condition. Ecstasy!"...

says my dear friend. I've been swapping stories and adventures with him since he moved across the street from me as we entered our first year at South Junior High School.  We've been on the same wave length since Elvis, Mickey Mantle, Duke Snider, Little Richard,the  Boys Club Friday night dances, the list goes on...

 

Friendship matters. Thick and thin. We're in the thick part. Past, present, future swirl around like the disco ball at the Boys Club dances, casting bright beams, illuminating memories long forgotten but ready to comfort with the power of shared recollection. Where would my psyche be without these connections during isolation? When I listen, cascades of memories from a less complicated time flood in surges, an inchoate tumble of laughter and melancholy roll over well worn milestones. Opportunities taken, opportunities lost are matters of fact. Recalibrating and reimagining are in order. My timeline is limited. Not so my imagination.

 

So here I am with Miles...

 

Listening now, music only, no video but who cares. I can smell the smoke filled room, see the band through the haze as I squeeze into a wrought iron chair at a tiny deuce crammed in with a bunch of people who appreciate what they’re hearing. Bebop must have just been bolting from the gate. Incandescent energy of a live concert…the riffs at the 29 minute mark start with the known then plunge into spontaneous reverie, sort of a stepping stone from tradition to new territory that the French, god bless them, really understood for what it was.

 

Check the credits at the end.

This brought me back, way back.

Later

Swallowed whole into the belly of youtube, I hear Miles Davis - February 1955 at the Hi-Hat Club, Boston, on the corner of Columbus and Mass Ave.

And a treasure trove of Bill Evans

 

Isolating with giants of jazz...

 

Mother’s Day with Irma Thomas, WWOZ, May 10, 2020

May 10, 2020

Mother’s Day with Irma Thomas, WWOZ, 12 PM - 2 PM

Today would have been Irma's 37th (yes, 37th) annual Mother's Day performance at the Audubon Zoo.  New Orleans does not give up its sense of tradition for anything, a pandemic included.

The two-hour program that Thomas usually performs is being broadcast on flagship radio station WWOZ....a virtual feat that uses a fabulously curated collection of her songs over the years. 

Just as WWOZ did with Jazz Festing in Place, the radio station today is one giant PSA sending love to moms and thousands of listeners sheltering in place. I have watched Irma light a place on fire.

Sadly, my internet is down until 1:15 PM… then

...finally Thomas's still poignant “Cold Cold Rain” (Katrina) pours down from the ionosphere and here’s the Mother’s Day Salute by Irma Thomas, The Soul Queen of New Orleans. If New Orleans has an earth mother, it has to be Miss Irma.

 "You Can Have My Husband but Please Don’t Mess With My Man” 2011 continues the set that spans from resilience to rejoicing. “Can’t Break Away From You,” 2011, “Time On My Side,” a proclamation of female resilience charged with comeuppance for an inattentive lover, I am listening to one in-charge woman. #metoo, meet Ms. Irma Thomas.

Listen to that cackle at the end of “I Wish Someone Would Care About Me.” Right about now I am throwing bouquets to the engineers and producers who integrated pace and style of this salute as mightily as the Mississippi River threads its way around the city.

Here comes “I Done Got Over It.” When the Queen says, “This is the audience participation part, we’re gonna have an indoor second line. We celebrate everything in New Orleans with a second line, births, deaths, weddings, funerals, when a pregnancy test comes back negative! Get out your hankies, shake your tail feathers (cackles)” the audience needs no encouragement.

“Iko Iko,” another New Orleans anthem.

I can’t stand it. I’m bounding down the stairs, JBL Flip speaker blaring in hand. Out the front door to dance in the sunlight on my front porch. Someone in the audience shouts, “We love you, Irma!”

“So do I! Happy Mother’s Day Miss Irma!”

Photo top PT, bottom courtesy of WWOZ

Irma Thomas at the Regatta Bar, Cambridge, MA April 9, 2009

Midnight Ramble Series - May 7, 2020 - Photos

May 7, 2020 Midnight Ramble

Walking from residential neighborhoods to the middle of a ghost town to post a letter.

The Flower Moon , the last supermoon of 2020, begins to bloom...

A sign of the times...

Mount Auburn Street 100 yards from Watertown Square heading east...would get arrested if tried this BP (before Pandemic)

Walking the line...

Empty bus on midnight run...

A verified midnight ramble!

Amazing colors at midnight...

Luminous golden glows pour like rivers from mute homes that stare at me as I walk past in the silence.

Photos by  Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Midnight Ramble Series - May 7, 2020

May 7, 2020

In response to Governor Baker's updated public gathering ban, my health club closed on March 16. A gym rat for decades, I needed to feel the burn. Or at least a simmer.  On March 20, I began walking. Which heretofore I have hated. Pound out a steady rhythm on an elliptical machine till I break a sweat. Love it.

Walk around the quarter mile track a quarter mile from my home? No way. Until March 20. The state is in a shelter in place mandate. If you're not an essential worker, stay home. Markets, pharmacies, liquor stores are open. Everything else closed. No cars moving on the streets. The skies hushed with no air traffic.

Around midnight March 20, my will to exercise told my ideas about walking to...well, take a walk. I donned a parka, headed out for parts unknown. That first midnight ramble has become a habit as steady as my commitment to show up at my health club.

Mitigation at that date: wash hands, do not congregate in groups of more than 10. No mention of masks yet.

The idea to walk at midnight wasn't a plan, a strategy to keep away from contact with others. I was wide awake. I  really wanted to stay in shape.  I actually thought that there was a possibility that I could resume dancing before too long (a delusion no doubt, we all have ways of dealing with a crisis) and I was going to be up for it physically.

What happened stunned me. I could not hear a thing. Anywhere. Not a single car. Not a single person on the streets. Nothing moved. Lights glowed from living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms. I stopped in my tracks several times trying to arrange this in my head. Many homes were dark, inhabitants asleep. Clearly there was activity in others but not even muffled sounds from the TVs flickering inside. I was walking through the set of a science fiction movie.

The total silence, sounds of human activity, of any kind, totally inaudible. The deep silence unnerved me.

After six weeks now, I still choose to ramble at midnight. In a way I haven't yet grasped, the silence comforts me.

The part of the ramble I like most - I walk straight down the middle of the street right on the yellow line not a car to impede me. Sort of a heady disregard for normal rule of law in a time so much has changed. Walk in the middle of the road? Every step I take reminds me I'm living in a global moment in history in which the outcome is unknown. For me, too.

Luminous golden glows pour like rivers from mute homes that stare at me as I walk past in the silence. In an hour, I'll be back in my own living room, the warm glow one of many pouring onto my steely silent street.

PHOTO ESSAY NEXT PAGE

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Social Distancing At Close Quarters

A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT!

Social Distancing At Close Quarters

Dr. Wendy Walsh psychologist Saturday, April 25 on CNN at about 2:45 PM In a weekly segment hosted by CNN anchor Frederica Whitfield.

Whitfield asks Walsh to respond to a viewer question. "We are a couple living in a small apartment. How can we maintain distance and avoid conflict in our small space?"

Dr. Wendy Walsh’s Answer

“There are two kinds of distance,” she says,”physical distance and emotional distance.”

“When emotions are running high we should not judge our partners by their coping ability. With this kind of stress, everyone has a certain neuro-chemistry that wires them to respond in a certain way when dealing with stress. So don’t go into this thinking I’m going to leave this person because they cannot endure the stress. Instead focus on forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness.”

“Ask yourself every day what can I do to catch them doing something good and verbalize that. Because you want to water what you want to grow. Otherwise it inspires criticism and when you complement your partner it reminds your brain of why you fell in love with him/her in the first place.”

“Regarding physical distance, you need to talk about this especially in a small apartment. This is your corner, this is my corner, during these hours. Let’s make a game strategy for this team. Always think about it In times of conflict. If this relationship wins, then you both win.”

Walsh's advice about emotional distance can apply to everyone in the house/apartment. Making a team effort could quite possibly keep the team in the winning column by the time the period of isolation is over.

PS April 8, 2020 Corona Disease Guidance from City of Boston

"March the Ninth Twenty Twenty" : A Poem by Mariangela Gualtieri, Italy

March 23, 2020

“March the Ninth Twenty Twenty”

A day in the midst of a pandemic...
A Poem by Mariangela Gualtieri, trans. by Lucy Rand and Clarissa Botsford

From Edizione Black Coffee written in Italian *
https://lithub.com/march-the-ninth-twenty-twenty/

Published on March 23, the poem

The poet's sentiment resonated with me. I spent time in Rome in June 2018 and in Rome, Castelfiorentino, Florence, Siena, and Bologna in 2019. I've walked the streets, been seduced by the architecture, colors, cobbled streets, sounds the expressive Italian language, a linguistic Tarantella echoing in my ears. I swear I've been on the same street as the photo accompanying Mariangela's poem. I worry about the health of the people I met in my hotel, restaurants  and shops I visited.

The poem speaks truth across continents and oceans. It was true for Mariangela Gualtieri the day she wrote it. It is true for me as I read it.

The poet's two words "I think" in the final stanza, are aspirational. It remains to be seen if, in the words of the poet, "Our hand will be more delicate in the doing of life now that we know how sad it is to stand one meter apart."

“March the Ninth Twenty Twenty”

I’m telling you this
we needed to stop.
We knew. We all felt it
that it was too furious,
our frenzy. Being inside of things.
Outside of our selves.
Squeeze every hour – make it yield.

We needed to stop
and we couldn’t.
We needed to do it together.
Slow down the race.
But we couldn’t.
There was no human force
that could hold us back.

And since this
was for all of us a tacit wish
like an unconscious will –
perhaps our species has obeyed
loosened the bonds that protect
our seed. Opened
the innermost cracks
and let it in.
Perhaps this is why there was a leap
in the species – from the bat to us.
Something in us wanted to be opened.
Perhaps, I don’t know.

Now we are at home.

It is extraordinary what is happening.
And there is gold, I believe, in this strange time.
Perhaps there are gifts.
Nuggets of gold for us. If we help one another.
There is a very strong call
of the species now and as a species
we must each see ourselves. A common fate
holds us here. We knew it. But not well enough.
Either all of us, or no one.

The earth is powerful. Truly alive
I feel it thinking a thought
that we do not know.
And with what’s happening now? Let us consider
whether the earth is not what’s moving.
Whether the law that rules
the entire universe, whether what’s happening, I wonder,
isn’t the full expression of that law
that governs us too – just like
every star – every particle of the cosmos.

Whether the dark matter was this
being bound together in an ardor
for life, with the sweep of death that comes
to rebalance every species.
Keep it within its dimensions, in its place,
going in the right direction. It is not us
who made heaven.

An imposing voice, without words
tells us to stay home now, like children
who are in trouble and don’t know why,
and won’t get kisses, won’t be hugged.
Each within a suspension
that takes us back, perhaps to the slowness
of ancient ancestors, of mothers.

Look more at the sky,
daub a dead man ochre. Bake bread
for the first time. Look intently at a face. Sing
a child softly to sleep. For the first time
hold someone else’s hand tight
feel the strength of the agreement. That we are together.
A single organism. The whole species
we carry within us. We are saving it inside us.

To that grasp of a palm
in another person’s palm
to that simple act that we are now forbidden –
we will return with expanded awareness.
We’ll be here, more attentive, I think. Our hand
will be more delicate in the doing of life.
Now that we know how sad it is
to stand one meter apart.

My friends at La Dispenza del Podere in Rome

Bologna - Centro Storico

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

 

 

 

 

What Day Is It?

It's taken me three weeks to get used to feeling unmoored to daily schedule. I have to check my iPhone to figure out what day of the week it is. I can tell if it's day or night, refine that to morning or afternoon by looking outside. I need a schedule or I feel like I'm trying to hold water in my hands. I tune into Governor Andrew "FDR" Cuomo every morning for a dose of facts from a man with command of them, a sense of empathy aimed at New Yorkers, the elderly, the entire medical community, neighboring Governors of New Jersey and Connecticut,  the Federal government when applicable, and clearly separates the facts from his opinion. The whole country tunes in for his daily fireside chat.

I need a sense of structure and routine each day to counter a world out of control just outside my door...so, I ...

• play whatever appeals to me from a pile of CDs I haven't listened to in ages... classical (Claude Debussy's "Images 1894, Series I, II),Glenn Gould's "Back Goldberg Variations" recorded in 1955); Jazz (The Modern Jazz Quartet (Lonely Woman 1987), Bill Evans "Conversations With Myself" 1963); Django Reinhart (Jazz Masters 38); Opera (Roberto Alagna and Angela Gheoghiu "Duets and Arias").

• reconcile months and months of my checkbook

• finish at least one household task on my long to do list

• look out the window

• let a day go by doing not much of anything

• improvise the day's meals with an ever diminishing supply of food in cupboard, fridge and freezer

• learn how to order groceries online (still feels so strange)

• get lost in youtube rabbit holes

• download Zoom to talk with a bunch of friends, make sure i shave and have a decent backdrop for the session

• wash my hands

• worry about running out of toilet paper

• get over feeling like a Martian on the rare times I go to the market and wear my mask

• steer clear of others in the one way aisles in the market

• obsessively worry about how to wipe down every damn thing from the grocery store

• have a staging area just inside the door before taking anything inside

• appreciate silence

• take a walk every night around midnight

MIDNIGHT RAMBLES: Not a sound outside, nothing, no cars, no people, the silence is unsettling and eerie.

 

Photos and videos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

The Pandemic: You Gotta Have Heart

April 5, 2020

As far back as The Plague of 1348, art was created in some form or another to counter grim reality.  Giovanni Boccaccio wrote The Decameron, with ten stories that ranged from witty to bawdy,during the plague in Italy. Any way to keep the plague at bay. Today we're emailing friends, long lost or near and dear. It's diversion, but more important, it's gathering our friends around a figurative communal campfire.

In the Art vs Virus department, my neighbors are putting up a fight. As the song goes, "You Gotta Have Heart."

They're displaying teddy bears and rainbows in their windows. We need to be amused, consoled, but more than anything, feel a sense of community.  Just the search for something to display made me feel good...ended up hanging Mardi Gras beads on my front porch and displaying a goofy puppet of Santa Claus in the front window. I was in my '"we're all in this together" mode.

Taking a page from Boston's Sidewalk Sam of yore, my neighbor ordered a bucket of chalk and drew radiant rainbow hearts on every section. Aside from a trip to the grocery or drug store, a walk around the neighborhood is one of our only options in the Stay Home reality. That sidewalk was the show for several days. It took two days of rain to erase the chalk. The joy I felt after seeing of those knockout colors and the memory of watching her create the mini masterpiece with her son? It's still there.

Break out the chalk...

   

With a little help from her son...

   

and teaching moments..."I need the yellow chalk now, can you find a piece?"
 

my neighbor lights up the sidewalk...

Use what makes you feel good...for me, Mardi Gras beads I've collected from numerous Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans and Lafayette and a "throw" from (Krewe de Vieux) 2019 Mardi Gras parade on Frenchmen Street in New Orleans; and a goofy puppet of Santa Claus!

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Venus and Trump

During my midnight rambles up the hills in my neighborhood, I walk right up the middle of Palfrey Street.  The Stay at home mandate = no cars = less pollution overhead. Watertown is right under jet flyway routes leaving Logan Airport. Not now.

I have never seen Venus this bright in the evening sky.

Why such a clear sky?

The Editorial Board of the Boston Globe shed light on the subject.  Virus or no virus, we’re all in it together as far as the environment is concerned.

XXXXXXXXXXXXX

Boston Globe Editorial: April 8, 2020

Trump’s team finds new ways to harm our health

Polluters already were enjoying a reduction in enforcement, but the administration keeps on giving. Lawmakers should keep pressure on the Environmental Protection Agency.

Even as the White House bungles its response to the coronavirus pandemic, the Trump administration is endangering public health in other ways — by eliminating or undermining protection of our air and water.

It’s bad enough that this is happening during a pandemic outbreak of a respiratory illness, given that air pollution worsens lung disease in general and appears to be having the same effect with COVID-19. But the effects of various rollbacks in pollution standards could linger long after this crisis subsides.

During his time in office, Trump has ransacked the environment so vigorously that advisory boards appointed by his own administration have criticized the administration’s disregard for scientific evidence in its approach to regulating pollution. Last week, the White House finalized a plan to cut vehicle gas-mileage requirements to a degree that was even more extreme than the deregulation sought by several automakers. And yet Trump and Andrew Wheeler, the former coal lobbyist who heads the Environmental Protection Agency, keep finding new ways to give industry a pass when it comes to contaminating the environment.

On March 26, the EPA announced that it will refrain from requiring companies, including oil refineries, chemical plants, and other industrial facilities, to monitor and report their discharges of hazardous material if those companies can show that the coronavirus got in the way of such work. As a result, companies that were already enjoying a reduction in the enforcement of pollution rules under Trump now have a new excuse for avoiding responsible stewardship of the air and water. The public is left to hope and pray that companies don’t exploit this moment and instead continue to uphold their obligations to avoid poisoning communities.

Companies that release hazardous pollutants may be keeping many employees home to slow the spread of the virus. But if the facilities are still staffed enough to operate as normal with employees on production lines — as many power plants and petrochemical facilities are — they should be able to keep looking for leaks, testing emissions, and reporting discharges, says Eric Schaeffer, who formerly directed civil enforcement at the EPA and now heads the Environmental Integrity Project, a watchdog group.

Schaeffer argues that the EPA didn’t have to deviate so far from the process it usually follows when natural disasters or pipeline breaks force companies out of compliance with environmental rules: The agency writes specific, short-term waivers. But this EPA didn’t put a time limit on its COVID-19 policy. Companies are instead urged to “return to compliance as quickly as possible.”

Perhaps it seems there’s some margin for environmental error now, with overall air pollution way down as stay-at-home advisories keep people out of their cars. But that’s not true for the employees and neighbors of big industrial facilities. “If you’re living next to a smelter, or a metal-finishing operation, or a refinery, it’s business as usual for them. They could be putting out stuff that’s pretty nasty,” Schaeffer says. And those toxins are very likely to go undetected if the companies stop monitoring what they’re putting into the air and water. “The problem with most pollutants is that they don’t have color, they don’t have taste, they don’t have sound,” he says.

To put it another way: If industrial facilities can’t say whether they’re operating safely, maybe they shouldn’t be allowed to operate at all.

RELATED: Editorial: Don't let Trump poison the air

Overturning some of Trump’s most damaging environmental policies, especially ones related to global warming, will require voters to throw him out of office. But it’s still worth trying to persuade the administration to rethink the pollution-monitoring holiday and other unhealthy policies it’s formulating. Six senators, including Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey of Massachusetts, asked the EPA last week to halt “several proposals that would likely have a negative impact on air quality and public health.” These proposals cover, among other things, the allowable amounts of mercury, methane, and coal ash in the environment.

Such requests could make a difference, even now.

Before the coronavirus outbreak, the EPA was in a hurry to sharply reduce the influence of public-health studies on environmental regulations. Wheeler has been claiming, disingenuously, that epidemiological research is insufficiently transparent unless its raw data, including individual medical records, are publicly released. Wheeler and his Republican allies know full well that releasing such data could be unethical or illegal, and their real goal is to discredit the studies.

In March, the EPA opened up a relatively brief 30-day window for public comment on this insidious proposal; nearly 24,000 comments have come in. But in light of the disruption caused by COVID-19, critics asked for more time to respond and the EPA extended the comment period to May. Anyone concerned about the intimate connection between the environment and our health should be sure to weigh in.

In the meantime, Congress should keep the heat on the EPA to continue enforcing the nation’s pollution rules amid the pandemic. Public health depends on it.

Photo by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr. /iPhone 11 Pro

Hilary Sallick Poetry: Asking The Form

 Hilary Sallick’s web site is one of the cleanest, most seamless, easily navigated, and transparently spirited that I have seen in a long time. Then there’s the matter of content, graphic and literary, and how it is demonstrated.  In her new collection, Asking The Form, her concept of using audio clips to read her poems embedded in the site is brilliant. How often do you get a sense of content and the author in the same moment? The result makes an indelible impression that, like the puffy parachutes of a milkweed pod, can float in your memory for a languorously long time.

The photographs of her on the site evoke an image, a notion, of the woman behind the stanzas, from whom the words were created, formed, rewritten, reformed and finally hammered into print. A friend recommended her previous collection, Winter Roses, a collection of poems and  vignettes that capture mystery and wonder. Most are constructed like an artist's still life, a moment in time to be savored. It's unusual for vignettes to be included in a work of poetry but Sallick's vignettes have the same balance of opacity and specificity as her poems.

The three poems from her new collection, Asking The Form, are reproduced on her web site, with the benefit of her reading them aloud. Her poetry is more about flow, mood, and reflective observation than meter, rhyme, and stanzaic structure.

Writers like Sallick elevate events so ordinary in our own lives that we don't register them. After reading Winter Roses, I was more conscious of the mini dramas occurring all around me, in the street, cafés, and subways. For Sallick, they are her palette. The colors she chooses give us a glimmer of the woman forging the words.

The book cover, Paul Cézanne's portrait of Gustave Geffroy, a subject of one of her poems, is a metaphor for her own style. As in Cézanne's portrait, the viewer/reader is left to fill in unfinished or suggested elements with their own experience.

As a teacher, artist, poet, woman, human being with the antennae to absorb her surroundings, she transforms uniquely personal experience into moments that readers can relate to, and feel resonate internally like a tuning fork, with moments we’ve experienced ourselves.

Such is poetry, the compact art form that, in a few stanzas, can illuminate, resonate, uplift, affirm, and manage to be mysterious and comprehensible all in the same layered moment.

 

Andrew Cuomo: Let’s ‘Kick Coronavirus’s Ass’

Andrew Cuomo: Let’s ‘Kick Coronavirus’s Ass’

There's a reason Maureen Dowd had won a Pulitzer Prize: Here she is writing in the New York Times about New York Governor Andrew Cuomo

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/opinion/sunday/cuomo-new-york-coronavirus.html?smid=em-share

My unedited response a minute after reading it.

I laughed, i cried. Since the first time I saw him do a briefing in early March, I tune into TV around noon every day to watch, to listen to him minister to the country with FACTS, a command of numbers and what they mean and portend, pride for his state and its willingness to take on his proposals to collectively manage the unthinkable and flashes of humor that defuse tension.

His personal stories about mother or his “Cara is that true?” questions to his 22 yo daughter sitting at the rear of the room show a mix of paternal pride and his ability to have a big tent mind-set to collect facts from all quarters and put them to work in policies. I guess what that’s the kind of positive bullying that Maureen Dowd talks about.

Her reporting on Cuomo, mixing anecdotes, quotes, reporting about his bullying ways, with references to his father who he sounds and talks so much like, made her comparisons to Trump factual and not polemic. No question that the governor is a driven man but I like the road he’s driving down.

Spanish poet Antonio Machado wrote, “There is no road…walking makes the road.”  That’s Cuomo. He’s walking the walk.

NOTE

You can watch his press briefings on youtube

Louisiana: New Orleans to Lafayette in Crisis

Dispatches In A Time Of A Keep Your Distance Stay Home Pandemic

March 29, 2020

Louisiana, especially New Orleans, is getting crushed by  COVID-19. I was introduced to New Orleans and southwest Louisiana in 2009. The experience changed my life. Check the "Louisiana" archives on this page.

My born-and-bred Baton Rouge guide loved knew just about every good place to eat, dance, and see some history every mile down I-10 from New Orleans to Lafayette. She taught me how to pronounce words a Yankee would never ever get right if he said them like they were spelled (or could pronounce in the first place). I learned how to dance to Cajun and zydeco music, tasted exotic (to me) foods boudin, gumbo, jambalaya, alligator, shrimp grits and gravy,po'boys (dressed!), andouille, crawfish étoufée, muffuletta for starters.

From 2009 till last February, I've met some of the friendliest, most welcoming people on the planet. I've visited Lafayette scores of times since my first visit in 2009. It was named the happiest city in the USA in 2014. Based on my most recent visit with dear friends in February, that hasn't changed much.

Last Saturday, I sat in front of my computer and tuned into a Zoom party organized to give all of us required to stay indoors a lift and put some money in a tip jar for the Lafayette musicians whose performance fans from southwest Louisiana, both coasts and lord knows where else watched.

Like everyone else, I've been watching the COVID-19 numbers in Louisiana getting larger and larger. I am praying all my friends are safe and stay healthy.

A few days ago, I sent this image with the note, "To all my Louisiana friends...sending positive energy and luminous love your way..."

We can't have dinners or dance together but there's comfort in staying connected with Zoom and Skype and text until we get to the other side of this.

 

 

Robin Redbreast Chirps..."Play Ball!"

Robin Redbreast Chirps..."Play Ball!"

Dispatches In A Time Of A Keep Your Distance Stay Home Pandemic

March 28, 2020

Chirrup, chirrup...

The gate to the track was locked. I headed for home.

I stopped in my tracks when I heard that familiar chirp. A flood of memories ensued. Since I was a kid, seeing, and especially hearing, robins had been a sure sign that Spring had arrived.

Time to take my trusty leather Rawlings baseball glove out of the closet, oil it up, put a baseball in the glove's 'pocket' and stuff it under the mattress to form the shape I wanted. No matter that playing in the field across the street a couple of weeks after the snow finally melted meant wear an extra layer of sweater and sacrifice a pair of sneakers for the next couple of weeks, mud season. The field was still squishy, the grass hadn't even begun to green up. The leather baseball we agreed to sacrifice felt like a shotput by the time a game was finished. Nevermind that in early Saturday morning games you could see your breath. We were playing baseball!

As the years passed, the field appeared to get smaller as we got bigger. Hitting a homer was no longer a prodigious feat but watching the ball carry across the street and into the woods was still a major satisfaction

Standing in front of that locked gate, it was comforting to let the childhood memory envelop me. I felt the contours of the glove on my hand, the camaraderie of boys immersed in play, the smell of the soaked grass underfoot…a wonderful time travel moment, consoling and momentarily freeing from the exigencies of life in this moment in time.

Today, the threat of COVID-19 has closed every park in town. The robins thank god are not under order to stay in their nests. A few chirps was all it took to take me back to a simpler time, when all I had to worry about was being on time for dinner and keeping my beloved baseball glove oiled and ready.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/baseballs-glove-man-77865726/

Sign Of The Times

March 24, 2020

State and local lockdown...unprecedented measures, themes of science fiction become reality.

Photo by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Puccini in a Tshirt

Dispatches In A Time Of A Keep Your Distance Stay Home Pandemic

March 24, 2020

One of my favorite tenors, Roberto Alagna, in jeans and T shirt,in rehearsal with with wife Aleksandra Kurzak, sing "Vogliatemi bene" for Puccini's Madam Butterfly..totally blew me away, watching the singers and orchestra, dressed more like Saturday afternoon in the back yard, sing and play some serious stuff.Their was nothing held back in the singing or orchestra and an occasional outburst of playfulness, some mugging by the two stars, that was amazingly refreshing.

I'm playing the chorus...opera in a T shirt and jeans...a mind boggling way to see how art is created.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tpVBbZtak8

and in concert!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvCx9dMn6pE

LitHub: A Literary Lifeline In A Time of Pandemic

Dispatches In A Time Of A Keep Your Distance Stay Home Pandemic :LitHub - A Literary Lifeline In A Time of Pandemic

March 22, 2020

State of mind...

Desperate is not the right word but it's in the ballpark playing left field with pandemic in center and stay at home in right. Reminds me of Abbot and Costello's Who's On First. For me, a sense of humor these days is a necessity to balance anxiety, fear, and walking in the dark. So is music, subject for another day.

Today's life ring for the waters I'm bobbing around in...literature. If reading is one of your things, LitHub is a godsend. Sign up and you  get an email with links to several stories a day. You can cherry pick ones that look appealing or just click into unknown territory.

Another cool thing. Every email starts with an image captioned TODAY and a piece of literary trivia.

I need information and balance. A dose of fear, anxiety, and social responsibility keeps me 6 feet away from anyone else on my daily walks. To be honest, I wouldn't have latched on so appreciatively to this literary link in non pandemic times. I embrace this link and literature today more than I probably should have in my years at St. Michael's college.

If you're of a certain age, required to grasp the cultural references, here's a start that might perk you up.

Go to https://lithub.com/  , scroll down right side column to SUBSCRIBE TO THE LITHUB DAILY, ENTER YOUR EMAIL

I spent two weeks in Rome,Tuscany, Milan in July, before the contagion. When I saw this photo for the poem on the March 23 Lit Hub, I knew where it was from.

 

Arianna Huffington's Time to Thrive

Ten minutes well worth your time... it made me late to pick up dinner as I listened to the last few minutes of the radio program.

 

I recognized the sound of the woman's voice, the accent, and couldn't identify who it belonged to. Next day, I found a link to the program on the internet thanks to a helpful woman at WGBH radio.

 

https://mastersofscale.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/mos-episode-transcript_-arianna-huffington.pdf

 

The topic is entrepreneurship. As a retired elementary school teacher, it would seem to have little to do with me...except it turns out to it have everything to do with how I organize my life, manage time, and sensibly carve out a sense of well being on a daily basis.

 

Reid Hoffman’s questions and Arianna Huffington’s responses in the transcript are fascinating. It took a life crisis to inspire Huffington to leave Huffington Post and launch Thrive Global in 2016. A research wonk, she found that 75% of healthcare causes and healthcare problems are stress-related and preventable. 

 

Wellness, enough sleep, corporate culture...would never appear in the same sentence before Thrive came along.

 

"Thrive is about only one thing (this Forbes interview explains Huffington's philosophy of managing performance using micro-steps): How do we build our best lives? How do we achieve everything we want without burnout and stress, bringing together ancient wisdom, the latest science, and new role models? " And all do-able since they're micro steps to build habits to reduce stress, improve well-being and maximize productivity." Her own bout with burn-out inspired the vision.

 

I’ve taken her last comment (below) to heart. It has changed my life (ok, a little hyperbole but not far from the truth). Her earlier comment about “prioritize” is a close second.

HUFFINGTON:​​ And wake up in the morning and have a minute, that's another micro step. Take a minute to remember what you are grateful for, set your intention for the day before you go to your phone. Over 70% of people sleep with their phones. The first thing they do is go to their phone. If you think of it, our phone is everybody else's agenda for us. Our bodies are flooded with the cortisol stress hormone before we have even gotten out of bed. These are small changes, small microscopic changes that can have a huge impact. That's what is so wonderful. That's why I'm so optimistic. These are not huge changes. We are not asking people to leave their jobs or move to a Caribbean island."

I guess the last sentence is optional.

The Statue of Liberty: A Closer Look

December 12, 2019

The torch, the crown, the Greco-Roman stylized robe flowing gracefully from Lady Liberty's broad shoulders to her perfectly formed feet, we all know what she represents.  Her powerful arms bearing the torch seem to illuminate the path to a land of possibilities. For over 100 years, the popular narrative is that the Lady is welcoming the "poor huddled masses." Wrong.

Those immigrants may have been immigrating from countries with monarchies, iron clad social strata, and bleak penniless futures. Surely, their eyes were on the Lady, regal, resolute, representing the end and the beginning of their journey...but what about those chains and broken shackles around her beautifully formed toes.

...a Washington Post May, 2019 story  upended just about every idea I had about the The Statue of Liberty. The purpose of the monument, originally developed in France, was to celebrate the end of slavery in the United States, not, as I have believed for years, to welcome the arrival of immigrants.

What happened? Why? Will the original purpose be restored?

The monument was imagined in 1865 by Édouard de Laboulaye , a Frenchman passionate about the cause of freedom. He was an abolitionist, a friend of Abraham Lincoln, and a scholar of the U.S. Constitution. The French Revolution had torn through his country 65 years before that. The emancipation of slaves in America and freedom as a universal right rang a bell for him. He gave epic speeches about freedom and by 1867 floated the idea of creating a commemorative gift that would celebrate importance of the liberation of slaves in America.

The French artist Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi  had proposed a statue resembling Lady Liberty for the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. His idea was rejected.  Bartholdi recalled that Édouard de Laboulaye had proposed in 1865 that a monument representing freedom and democracy be created for the United States. Thus began a 16-year campaign of fund-raising and politicking by these two enterprising Frenchmen.

By 1884 Bartholdi had completed the statue in France. In 1886 he oversaw the statue's reassembly on Bedloe's Island, an outcropping in New York harbor that he saw on one of his fund raising trips to America and immediately envisioned as its placement (6 years before the nearby Ellis Island became a gateway to America).

Immediately after the statue's dedication, the Black Press pushed back. Racism, discrimination, and segregation persisted.  The two Frenchmen's ideal was heartfelt, perhaps propelled by projected wishes for an end of the monarchy in their own country. For African-Americans, it was a bitter pill to swallow. Still is.

The new Statue of Liberty Museum in New York harbor will surprise, shock is not too strong a word, most visitors. Forget the plaque with the Emma Lazarus poem — “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” — added until 17 years later, in 1903.

The 305-foot statue's original purpose was to celebrate the end of slavery.

In an early model of the statue by the French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi from 1870, Lady Liberty is depicted holding broken chains in her left hand, a clear reference to emancipation. Bartholdi based the statue on the Roman goddess Libertas, who is usually depicted wearing a Phrygian cap, traditionally worn by freed Roman slaves.

In Bartholdi’s final model, the broken chains in the statue’s hand were replaced with a tablet that represented the rule of law. Bartholdi placed the broken shackle and chains beneath Lady Liberty’s feet, making it nearly impossible for visitors to see at most angles.

Above and below: pull-quotes in italics from a May, 2019  New York Times story:

The museum doesn’t shy away from the fact that this symbol of “universal liberty” was far from a reality for people of color and women during the late 19th century and for decades afterward.

That point is highlighted by a quote taken from the African-American-owned Cleveland Gazette, which wrote one month after the statue’s opening, “Shove the Bartholdi statue, torch and all, into the ocean until the ‘liberty’ of this country is such as to make it possible for an inoffensive and industrious colored man in the South to earn a respectable living for himself and family, without being ku-kluxed, perhaps murdered, his daughter and wife outraged, and his property destroyed.” It also quotes a suffragist pointing out the inconsistency of using a female figure as the face.

The Statue of Liberty...The American Myth or The American Dream?

I had to revise the narrative I've believed for years.

How about you? Pass the story along, the timing is perfect.

xxxxxxx

Photo courtesy of Statue of Liberty Museum

https://libertyellisfoundation.org/statueoflibertymuseum/gallery.html

 

Mr. Rogers: A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood

July 24, 2019

Stop what you're doing. Set aside ten minutes to read a story about Fred Rogers that will change your life for a few minutes or maybe forever. The stop and set aside ten minutes is not negotiable. You might start skimming the story. Sorry. Not possible. By the fourth paragraph you'll be hooked by a story that grabs you by the lapels and lets go only after the final word. Stories like this just don't come around that often.

The story about Fred Rogers made me laugh out loud, cry, sob, think of life in ways in which I've forgotten register it. A tour of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood from its birth to its place in heaven...the story  will remind you of all that is important in life.

The innate ability of this man to connect deeply, intuitively, intentionally, with men, women, children, strangers, his TV audience... a rare gift - that's Mr. Rogers. Never overt, the power of prayer, simple, unadorned, unaffected, and a well of empathy deeper than the ocean, motivated him. So did grace, found in every corner of the man's life and neighborhood.

Mr. Rogers' story unearthed the entrance to my own rabbit hole of memories, over time buried with the turf of life, illuminated nooks and touched chords, like the ones Mr. Rogers played on his piano, and practically ordered me, with a need that took me by surprise and fullness of heart, to sing along.

The story by Tom Junod, a journalist who slowly, with an initial bit of skepticism, found his way into Mr. Rogers Neighborhood as he shadowed the man over time in 1998 and updated in 2017 is the most deeply realized story you'll read in a long, long, time.

Tom Hanks as Mr. Rogers in a "A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood", a film based on Tom Junod's story, will be released in late 2019...Hanks, who can convey the natural grace of Fred Rogers with the ease of, well, Mr. Rogers himself, and right around Thanksgiving...how perfect.

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a27134/can-you-say-hero-esq1198/

 

Block Party: THE VIDEOS: A Touch of New Orleans on Pearl Street

Saturday, May 18, 2019

https://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2019/05/block-party-a-touch-of-new-orleans-on-pearl-street.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Videos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

https://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2019/05/block-party-a-touch-of-new-orleans-on-pearl-street.html

 

Block Party: A Touch of New Orleans on Pearl Street

Saturday, May 18, 2019, Watertown, MA

4:30 PM – 8:30 PM

The Hawthorne/Oliver/Palfrey/Pearl Street Neighborhood Block Party was a Saturday afternoon blockbuster in all the right ways.

This was the great grandmother of all block parties. All the right stuff: high-grade potluck food, both sweet and savory, covered the tables set up on Pearl Street (closed to traffic between Fayette and Palfrey). The desserts donated by resident Nobuko Maruyama from her bakery Koko were a big hit.

Little kids were playing games and drawing on the pavement with huge stubby pieces of chalk, while their parents were chilling alongside them. And neighbors cheerfully chatted on this, the most gloriously sunny and warm spring day of the year after a brutally cold, rainy,  blustery stretch of days since Spring officially began on March 20.

I had no idea what was in store for us later in the afternoon when it rolled from a sedate gathering to a rollicking Second Line street dance to the hot-as-boiled-crawfish sounds of The Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Club of Somerville, MA… but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.

On the social side of things…

Libby Shaw, President of “Trees for Watertown,” the thriving, green, non-profit organization founded by my Oliver Street neighbor, the late Adelaide Sproul, delivered an update of the organization's work. Another neighbor, David Meshoulam, Director of Teens for Trees, recognized teens who volunteer for the program. I don’t have to tell you what an investment it is for the kids of Watertown to become stakeholders in the organization.

The organizers asked us to bring non-perishable items for the Watertown Food Pantry…we did.

 At 5:15 PM Neighbor Richard Herman stepped up to the mic, banjo in hand, playing sing-alongs for the kids, joined by Carole Tierney on the accordion.

At 6:00 PM  The Great Hawthorne/Oliver/Palfrey/Pearl Street block party is cruising right along. A bunch of festively dressed men and women walk up the street. Is that a tuba? No, two tubas! And they’re breaking out trombones, saxophones, and a big ‘ol bass drum emblazoned with “Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Club” on its side.

Whoa, Mama! Am I dreaming? A brass band...on Pearl Street?

They bolt out of the gate with a New Orleans rolling thunder brass band classic “Do Whatcha Wanna” and are airborne for the next hour. My neighbors do what any self-respecting New Orleaneans would do...they break out their second line moves.  

If I close my eyes, I could be standing in front St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square where brass bands play with joyful abandon from morn till night. This band is out of the same mold. They got swagger! Directed by the spirited sax player, trombone, saxophones and trumpets blast full-tilt funky brass band solos. Bass and snare drums pound out rhythms that translate immediately to the feet of everyone within earshot. 

Swingin', swayin' and occasionally singin', the band is having fun. I am in a delicious near out-of-body experience,  reveling in the midst of authentic, honest-to-goodness brass band playing and second-line style dancing I usually travel thousands of miles to New Orleans to savor. I AM A FIVE-MINUTE WALK FROM MY HOUSE!!! 

My neighbors - people I see walking their dogs, pushing their kids up the street in carriages, gardening - become transformed and are stylin’ with improvised moves I see in the Tremé or the Marigny or at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. I REPEAT…FIVE MINUTES FROM MY HOUSE!

New Orleans music, brass bands and all, is a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic gumbo that combines music played and sung by slaves in Congo Square in the late 1800s with European military band music, rhythms from Cuba and the Caribbean, and music made by black and white musicians from way before Louis Armstrong till today. There is no music on earth quite like it.

Music, second-line dancing, and food are the H the 2 and the O of New Orleans culture. When you hear a brass band, you know there’s a funeral, a wedding, or a spontaneous ignition of joy coming down the street.

As of today, I'll have to add a Watertown neighborhood block party to that list.

Big props to the Watertown Community Foundation for covering some of the costs and to our block party hosts: Eileen Ryan, Heather Caldwell, Lisa Cole, and David Meshoulam. Their brilliant idea to invite The Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Club Brass Band helped us reconnect after a long winter and listen and dance to the uplifting music of a brass band…social aid and pleasure indeed!

Photos by Paul A.Tamburello, Jr.

Video above by Dan Usher

 

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“Miracles and Other Deceptions”: Sleightly Wonder-ful Show at the Omni Parker House

“Miracles and Other Deceptions"

Omni Parker House, 60 School Street, Boston, MA, 02106
Fridays, 7 PM and 9PM
November 16, 2018

I’m rolling up my sleeves to show I have nothing to hide as I tell you this is one of the best evening’s entertainments in Boston right now.

“Miracles and Other Deceptions,” a 75-minute program of theatrical sleight of hand magic is all of that. Paul Gertner was smitten with the idea of magic when he was a kid. He’s so good at it, he presents all over the world. He’s fooled Penn and Teller. Three times. Fooling me was a lot easier and I loved every minute.

No grand stage illusions by levitating a woman, or having her climb into a small box, driving swords into the closed box, and then opening it up to discover only air inside. This is the best kind of magic. Small scale, a few props, and big surprises with playing cards, coins, and cups and balls.

The set up is perfect. A small room on the Omni Parker House mezzanine level, a large round table covered in black velvet seating 12 people, plus one for Paul Gertner. Risers accommodating a dozen others are set behind the table close enough to see the goings on. I was two seats away from Gertner; my pal Myke who invited me to join him for the show sat right next to him.

"The closer you look, the less you'll see!" Gertner says in the first few minutes. Giving into glee is much easier.

Telling you what happened would spoil the fun. I can tell you that with playing cards, coins and a few cups and balls he will bedazzle you with magic and patter that makes the show feel like a musical that hums along just fine without the music. Back stories, anecdotes about his father, children, Johnny Carson, and wife seamlessly connect with the sleight of hand he performs. It is utterly mesmerizing for the ears as well as the eyes.

“Does anyone have a $20 bill?” he asks. I quickly reach into my pocket. What happened next had something to do with a lemon and was stupefying.

I haven’t had so much fun since my mother, her mother, and all her sisters were playing Peekaboo with me when I was an infant. OK, that’s an assumption. A fact is I haven’t done as much oooo-ing and ahhhh-ing in a long time.

“The sense of wide-eyed wonder you had as a kid still lurks in your psyche,” he tells you upfront. No small part of his show is that he makes that re-appear too.

SIDEBAR
Pricing; VIP “At The Table” $60, 12 people; General Admission: $45 in second and third row and close to the magic, 12 people, seats not assigned. Definitely recommend VIP seating.

Seating: Arrive 30 minutes early, wait in the hallway on the mezzanine level till Gertner’s wife Kathy opens the door 15 minutes before showtime. The 12 seats around the VIP table are first come, first served, as are second and third row. Myke was the first ticket holder for the table who entered the room and got those fabulous seats right next to Paul Gertner.

A Happy Thanksgiving message that magically turns into a personal timeline/mini biography from Paul

“Miracles and Other Deceptions" program covers.

 
Myke, Paul Gertner, PT

The residual memories of the joy of seeing magic being performed a few feet from my chair at the table in synch with an evening of personal anecdotes that scaffold the illusions has kept me beaming days and days after witnessing it.

https://gertner.com/developing-new-magic-trick/

https://gertner.com/upside-down-thinking/

Thanksgiving: Alternate Takes About What You Learned In School (UPDATED NOV. 21, 2018)

November 18, 2018

UPDATE FROM JESSIE LITTLE DOE BAIRD, A LEADER OF THE MASHPEE WAMPANOAG TRIBAL NATION,  ON NOVEMBER 21, 2018 (The true story of the first Thanksgiving and what it meant)...deep context for information and links that follow.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2018/11/21/the-true-story-first-thanksgiving-and-what-meant/fZFrN9YZQhVLZF6fLel5PJ/story.html

The New York Times weighed in. So did Readers Digest, not everyone's cup of tea, but as far as I know, it has no driving political motivation to fake us out. To this day, there are contradictory references of how English and Native Americans gathered on that first occasion. A mix of myths and facts surrounds the holiday. To steer clear of complicated history, best to look at it with a small lens focused on friends and family and the ties that bind us together. Politics is the third rail, don't even think about it unless you are completely certain you're with kindred spirits.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/us/thanksgiving-myths-fact-check.html

• A few factoids asserted in this story...

• Squanto - complicated: He was captured by the English in 1614 and later sold into slavery in Spain. He spent several years in England, where he learned English. He returned to New England 1619, only to find his entire Patuxet tribe dead from smallpox. He met the Pilgrims in March 1621. Extraordinary story.

• Native Americans (approximately 90) did participate in a three day feast of food, games and prayer; there is no written record of how they were invited.

• First feast day of Thanksgiving in 1621? Nope, a day of Thanksgiving had been celebrated for centuries by Europeans and Native Americans after successful harvests.

• No turkey, no pie (no butter, no wheat flour) at first feast... sorry.

• 1863 Abe Lincoln declares a day of thanksgiving for Union victories.

• First boatloads called themselves were Separatists looking to establish a theocracy, which they did.

• The company that sponsored them was a business looking for profits, first settlers shipped them animal skins, fur, lumber.

https://www.rd.com/culture/thanksgiving-facts-that-actually-arent-true/

• A few factoids asserted in this story...

• First arrivals called themselves “Saints”; the term “Pilgrims” not applied generally until around 1880.

• When took place? Likely late September/ mid October after harvest brought in.

• Turkey? Nope; the big dish was venison, something new to the newcomers. “Back in England, deer were on estates and people would be arrested for poaching if they killed these deer … The colonists mentioned venison over and over again in their letters back home.”

• No buckles, tall hats, black clothing; 19th-century artists painted them that way and we've been stuck with that image ever since.

•1863 President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation declaring “a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise,” the culmination of a 36-year campaign started by so-called “mother” or “godmother” of Thanksgiving, Sarah Josepha Buell Hale—a magazine editor and writer.

• 1939 Franklin D.Roosevelt declared Thanksgiving to be a federal holiday. The exact date? Into the weeds with this timeline here.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs a bill officially establishing the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day.

The tradition of celebrating the holiday on Thursday dates back to the early history of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies, when post-harvest holidays were celebrated on the weekday regularly set aside as “Lecture Day,” a midweek church meeting where topical sermons were presented. A famous Thanksgiving observance occurred in the autumn of 1621, when Plymouth governor William Bradford invited local Indians to join the Pilgrims in a three-day festival held in gratitude for the bounty of the season.

Thanksgiving became an annual custom throughout New England in the 17th century, and in 1777 the Continental Congress declared the first national American Thanksgiving following the Patriot victory at Saratoga. In 1789, President George Washington became the first president to proclaim a Thanksgiving holiday, when, at the request of Congress, he proclaimed November 26, a Tuesday, as a day of national thanksgiving for the U.S. Constitution. However, it was not until 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving to fall on the last Thursday of November, that the modern holiday was celebrated nationally.

With a few deviations, Lincoln’s precedent was followed annually by every subsequent president–until 1939. In 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt departed from tradition by declaring November 23, the next to last Thursday that year, as Thanksgiving Day. Considerable controversy surrounded this deviation, and some Americans refused to honor Roosevelt’s declaration.
For the next two years, Roosevelt repeated the unpopular proclamation, but on November 26, 1941, he admitted his mistake and signed a bill into law officially making the fourth Thursday in November the national holiday of Thanksgiving Day.

https://www.pilgrimhall.org/pdf/TG_What_Happened_in_1621.pdf

• Primary source contradicting information on one source above, identifies who was present, what happened on first day (actually three days) of what we celebrate now as Thanksgiving.

Edward Winslow's Journal, September 6, 1621 to March 22, 1621

• The most detailed documentation of the settlers early days, worthy of a docu-drama.

• Thanksgiving is considered a National Day of Mourning for Native Americans since the event marks the negative influence of white settlers on their culture and livelihood.

UPDATE FROM WAMPANOAG NATION NOVEMBER 21, 2018

https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2018/11/21/the-true-story-first-thanksgiving-and-what-meant/fZFrN9YZQhVLZF6fLel5PJ/story.html

https://plymouth400inc.org/OurStory
Squanto: brought to England as slave; returns to Plymouth and aids survival; this site dedicated to the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower landing in Plymouth; time will tell if they get the story of the Wampanoags right.

https://www.si.edu/spotlight/thanksgiving
All things Thanksgiving

The whole story about the Separatists, Saints, Pilgrims, Wampanoags, is intriguing and complex. Google Squanto, Separatists in the Netherlands, William Bradford and his two volume "Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647" for starters. His appalling account of a massacre of 300 Pequot when the English burned their village gives credence to why Native Americans label our day of Thanksgiving as a Day of Mourning.

Happy Thanksgiving...

 

To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults

To Survive On This Shore

Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and
 Gender Nonconforming Older Adults

A Project by Jess T. Dugan and Vanessa Fabbre

A presentation and book signing at the Harvard Bookstore, 1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138
November 13, 2018

Part 1 Impressions

Where to start?
I’m in an audience of gay, straight, transsexual, transgender, transfluid, bisexual, gender non-conforming adults - quite possibly the most non-judgemental group of people I’ve ever gathered with. After a few minutes. I stop trying to use personal pronouns to describe my fellow attendees, millennials to septuagenarians. Downshifting to put my stereotypical mind into neutral gear, I stop worrying about it.

 

Welcome to the world of “On This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults,” A Project by Jess T. Dugan and Vanessa Fabbre, who are presenting tonight.

For the next hour, I’m taken on a passage to that shore, about as foreign to me as Madagascar.

Sitting in the Harvard Bookstore before the presentation I think about the title, “On This Shore,” the perfect metaphor for this project. To reach a shore, you have to make a voyage, often without a reliable map, over rough seas, and an uncertain timetable. Landing on shore isn’t the end of your voyage, it’s the beginning. What lies beyond the shore? Allies? Adversaries? A place you can call home?

Dugan and Fabbre have made their own voyages. This is the night to present their project, the story of men and women in their fifties to seventies, forerunners, who, often at great risk and sacrifice, transited to the other shore.

Part 2 The Project

One mission, two vocabularies, one using a lens, the other using a pen, Dugan and Fabbre created “On This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults.” The photos won’t work without the subjects. The words would have no context without the photographs. Look for yourself.
https://www.tosurviveonthisshore.com/interviews/
https://www.tosurviveonthisshore.com/portraits/

Dugan and Fabbre, accomplished photographer and writer, respectively, tell the story as well as they danced together at a country line dance when they met at a gay cowboy country bar in 2012.

Over time and a developing relationship, they found they had overlapping interests in the LGBT community, the subject of aging, and the expertise to tell that story.

You’re probably saying, what the heck are the prospects for a project that tells the stories of subjects in their 50s all the way to their 90s…they’re old and trans-something and we’re in a youth oriented heterosexual culture. It took a generation for gay culture to become normalized through TV, films, and celebrity personalities. If transgender society follows the same path, this project will be one of the tipping points.

Part 3 The Harvard Bookstore event

As brilliant and perceptive as they may be, photographers and writers are not always reliably the best presenters for their own material. Jess T. Dugan and Vanessa Fabbre are an exception to the rule. Over the next 45 minutes they carefully assemble the pieces of their story and the story of this book with clarity, warmth, and empathy. The bookstore is filled to capacity, 90 people crammed together on folding chairs, standing around the perimeter, and sitting on the counters.

This pair was way ahead of a cultural curve that now talks out loud about transgender matters. Referendum question 3 on the Massachusetts ballot this year was about transgender rights. This week, President Trump has been lobbying to refuse transgender men and women the right to serve in the military.

This isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. For a long time, the way out of the mainstream subject generated fear and loathing in heterosexual society. But, for their subjects in the shadows of misunderstood sexuality, tonight is an affirmation.

The creators tell us upfront that the project is a conscious and intentional vehicle to pay tribute to the generations who paved the way for transgender identities and to give younger trans people a sense of their past and their future. This can be scary stuff for people in the midst of it. I think of this book as a gift to them.

The project took shape between 2012 and 2017. One of the first subjects was Grace Sterling Stowell, whom Jess, describing herself tonight as a “baby queer” teenager scouring the bookshelves for stories about sex change surgeries, had met while she was working at this very bookstore. Grace is the executive director of the Boston Alliance of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Youth.

“We started the project with people we knew, others found out by word-of-mouth. We called LGBT centers to ask who are your trans elders,” says Vanessa.

“I think 2015 was a trans tipping point. We did not want to do Hollywood or celebrity stories. We wanted to do relatable stories of real and complicated people,” says Jess.  Dugan’s photos are character studies in black, white and infinite shades of gray. Fabbre’s text mirrors the subtleties of the photos.

Others got wind of the project after The New York Times wrote about it. “Many of our subjects wanted to have their stories recorded. They had a conscious wish to give something to the next generation, “ says Jess, who holds a BFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, a Master of Liberal Arts in Museum Studies from Harvard University, and an MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago.

“Their motivation was clearly intentional,” says Vanessa. Most had ‘come ashore’ during an era when it had no precedent in everyday culture and was, frankly, dangerous. They were survivors. With the rise of the transgender population becoming a mainstream topic (Caitlin Jenner), having the opportunity to tell their stories to understanding artists, without fear, must have felt liberating.

“We would meet in the home of a subject, or an LGBT center, or a park, that allowed people to be where they wanted to be situated and that felt like home for them,” says Jess.

They knew from the start they wanted a diverse range in age between 50 and 90 years old. Diversity was key. Trust me, it’s as wide as the Mississippi River…age, race, ethnicity, social status, gender identification and categories - and uses terms like binary, non-binary  that I had to look up to understand their meaning.

By the time they finished, they had profiles and photographs of 65 people for the book although they interviewed and photographed 86 people. The subjects they profiled, from small towns to metropolises across America, had made a transition between 1970 and 2016. The book was published in Germany in May 2018 and in America in August 2018. It has sold out. A second printing is being considered.

“We consciously wanted to balance struggle and joy to tell a complex story and not sugarcoat it. We asked a question to one subject who’d experienced poverty and discrimination and he spoke for one and a half hours straight, then said, ‘We’re done,” says Jess.

Vanessa, PhD, LCSW, an Assistant Professor at the Brown School of Social Work and Affiliate Faculty in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, uses that story in her classes. Her research explores the conditions under which LGBT people age well.

“By agreement we used subjects first real name. This was a big emotional deal for us and for our subject. After parents of a subject read the story, they apologized for all the years of using the wrong pronoun for their child,” says Vanessa suppressing tears.

Comment from the audience: “As an older person, I feel we have lost a sense of community and I sense a divide between the younger and older generation. As young people, we were aping heterosexual models. I see this book as a cry for community.”

Jess responds. “The subject of community came up from our interview subjects. We want people to use the book to manage the gap. Organizations like SAGE bring younger and older people together at inter-generational meals to build community and break down misunderstandings that still divide younger and older trans people.”

SAGE Advocacy and Services for LGBT Elders reports that the U.S. census has never measured how many LGBT people live in America and estimates that there are currently around 3 million LGBT adults over age 50. That number is expected to grow to around 7 million by 2030.

They will have the elders in this book to thank for paving the way.

“There is no road. Walking makes the road,” says the poet Antonio Machado. The subjects of this book have made their own roads where there were none. Jess T. Dugan and Vanessa Fabbre show us the maps.

Photo by Paul A. Tamburello,Jr.

 

4T Alumnus' Parents in Watertown

October 19, 2018

"Let's visit the Watertown Senior Center. I helped my sister arrange the tables for their annual party and want to  see how it worked out," says my neighbor Gerard.

His sister Rae is one of the managers. The party and dance is held in what was the gym of the Phillips School, the school he attended as a kid, now repurposed as part of the Senior Center.That brought some memories back for him.

The party is winding down. A fellow playing the keyboard, keeping it lively, hits a number and a dozen women begin a line dance. I can't resist. Halfway through the dance. a tug on my sleeve.

"Mr. Tamburello? You were my son's fourth grade teacher!"

I'm about to have a blast from the past moment myself. A few minutes of catching up ensues. Greg is 42, lives in Arlington with his young family, is a mechanical engineer. Su Wong and her husband still live in the Brookline neighborhood near the John Pierce School where I taught 4th grade for 34 years. Su loves to dance. They are regulars.

A retired ESL teacher in Boston, this is one of the fun parts of her retirement.

"We come here for line dancing every Tuesday!" she says.

Greg would have graduated from 4T in 1986! I love this.

2018 Post Spin Spin

October 3, 2018

The 24th Positive Spin for ALS, now named Ride To Defeat ALS, was held in Wayland, MA, on September 23, 2018. https://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2018/09/ride-to-defeat-als-24-years-until-a-cure.html

Every year since 2001, Myke Farricker and I have made a ceremonial ride after our official fund raising rides have been completed. For the past ten years, we've driven to Truro, hopped on our bikes and made an eight mile jaunt to First Landing Park next to the breakwater at the end of Route 6A in Provincetown, MA, where we stand and honor the men and women whose lives have been changed by a diagnosis of ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease. This is personal. Myke's brother Pete, and my dear friend Janet Speers were lost to ALS.

We are usually joined by Susan Lyman of Provincetown, whose husband, Doug Trumbo, was a popular member of the Provincetown EMS team and died of the disease in 1996. Susan read about my Positive Spin in the Provincetown Banner. She a and her kids Sam and Hannah met me at the Pilgrim Landing Park when I completed my "Spin" in 1998.

While on the breakwater this year, we met Moffat, the world traveling bunny rabbit, with his globe trotting owner Christy Howard and her husband Jim, who were on a tour of New England from their home in Colorado. The chance meeting was amazing for several reasons. One of Jim's mentors succumbed to ALS. What are the chances our paths would cross at the moment Myke and I rode to First Landing Park in Provincetown?

We're proud of our work to raise money for the ALS Association MA Chapter and to support men and women and their families who are coping with the disease. What...you've never heard of the Zarb Corporation? Myke will tell you about it!

 
I mean, how can you not start a conversation with two people carrying a well-loved stuffed rabbit?

Christy and Jim Howard celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary with a two week jam-packed tour of New England. Of course, Moffat was along for the ride. Moffat is the perfect intermediary for teaching history to her primary grade students. She's pretty good at it.

Christy was named 2017 State History Teacher of the year in Colorado by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. She was nominated for National History Teacher of 2019, pretty rarefied territory.

 

Christy takes photos of Moffat, brings them back to her classroom and viola, uses photos of the peripatetic rabbit as teaching tools. Even Susan, Myke, and I got a photo opp on the jetty.

 

After we met on the jetty, we walked through First Landing Park.

She'll undoubtedly use the photo of Moffat on the plaque to talk about the Pilgrim's first landing and teach history,  geography and maybe squeeze in some math.

One of the reasons they chose Provincetown? They're Teddy Roosevelt fans. President Roosevelt laid the cornerstone of the 252 foot granite Pilgrim Monument in 1907.  And of course Moffat had to include that you-can-see-it-from-10-miles-at -sea tallest granite monument int the United States in his travels. (Photo by Christy Howard)

To complete the TR connection, they dined at the historic Red Inn where President Roosevelt and his wife dined on their visit.

Moffat is now part of the lore of our ride!

Sam participated in the ride in Wayland in his senior high school year in 2006. In 2007, his freshman and sophomore years in college, he  joined me and Myke for three Post Spins Spins from the Outer Reach Motel in Truro to the First Landing Park. The whole family raised funds through 2009.

Sam hasn't ridden with us since moving to Baltimore but...thanks to Moffat, he's thinking about rejoining us next year!

"So this year is the 21st year of my family knowing you and sharing in your mission to ride to defeat ALS! What a ride and joy it has been!" says Susan.

Who knows, our ride and why we do it might even show up in Moffat's adventures some day.

 

Ride To Defeat ALS: 24 Years Until a Cure

Sunday September 23, 2018

24th Annual Fund Raiser for ALS...from Positive Spin for ALS to Ride To Defeat ALS

The Longfellow Tennis and Health Club, 524 Boston Post Road, Wayland, MA 01778

11 AM

Ashley Corbin, Special Events Manager Extraordinaire for the ALS Association MA Chapter, does the count down for the 25 mile Pete's Ride. Pete Farricker was a member of the 1982 World Champion Rude Boys Frisbee Team. Pete's joyous sense of team, community, competition and fierce but overwhelmingly fair demeanor was the embodiment of Ultimate Frisbee's Spirit of the Game. https://www.usaultimate.org/about/ultimate/spirit_of_the_game.aspx  and https://www.usaultimate.org/spiritawards/#farricker

His teammates rallied around him when he was diagnosed with ALS in 1999. Pete died from the disease. His spirit did not. Their dedication lives on every year through the Spirit Rides held around the country http://www.spiritride.org/index.cfm  The Spirit Ride is now also in memory of another Ultimate Frisbee legend, Kathy Pufhal. The Spirit Rides raise serious money for the ALS Association MA Chapter and for Cancer Research.

The most successful ride yet, staged from The Longfellow Tennis and Health Club in Wayland ...raised over $230,000 with 270 riders on the 25, 50, and 75 mile routes in and around the Wayland, MA area. A radio operator spent the entire day monitoring communications between water stops and SAG wagons along each route. Every rider was accounted for!

 

Six men and women coping with ALS were present (more than at any previous ride), two of them with huge retinues of riders and supporters...

Welchie's Team (John Welch in green cap) was a rolling green wave of support on the road and on the ground. "Some of my riders didn't know how to adjust the valve so they could pump up their tires!" John said cheerfully. Good for showing them how, John!

 Riders, teams and patients relax...

and wait to cheer team members as they finish the ride...

Hot and cold food, fruit, ice cream, snacks for all, donated by local businesses. Even a cold beer at the end of a long ride!

Executive Director of MA Chapter ALS Association Lyn Aronson and Channel 5 TV personality Cindy Fitzgibbin get ready for final announcements.

 
Apple employee Steve gave stirring and uplifting remarks as hundreds gathered after riders had finished. "Apple not only matches donations made by employees, but right now they are doing a double match – for example, Steve made a $1000 donation to his team, and Apple sent a matching gift of $2000. In addition, they donate money per hour for any employee who volunteers at an event, and with the amount of employees that were there volunteering and riding, they are getting $1500 donated to the ride!" said Ashley Corbin, the Special Events Manager.

 

Steve Mooney, alumnus of the 1982 World Champion Rude Boys Ultimate Frisbee Team, MA Chapter ALS Association Executive Director Lyn Aronson with Myke Farricker, co-owner of the Longfellow Tennis & Health Club. Members of the Rude Boys team show up every year to support the event, sort of a mini reunion, and donate thousands of dollars to the ride.

PT, Myke and photo bomber Ashley Corbin

This was one of the most seamlessly coordinated rides I've ever witnessed. Individual riders, teams of riders, and people who showed up to support the ride were met by volunteers who welcomed and checked in riders, answered questions, handed out T-shirts, served food and beverages. There was an air of certainty surrounding the event. As Patriots coach Bill Belichick would say, "Everyone did their job."

I organized my solo Plymouth Rock to Provincetown "Positive Spin for ALS" from 1995 - 2004 for ONE rider, myself. I spent months preparing for it every year. I cannot imagine the time and skill it takes to pull off something like the Ride To Defeat ALS. It took me ten years to raise $300,000. Today's riders raised almost that much in eight hours!

Organizing for over 200 riders is the tip of the iceberg. Planning meetings, recruiting reliable volunteers, assigning them to jobs, printing road signs, buying supplies for water stops, printing route maps or making Apps for riders to use on the road, asking vendors to supply food and drink, hiring a DJ, enlisting a TV personality to put the ride on the media map...I could go on. Event coordinator Ashley Corbin was the coolest cucumber at Longfellow all day long. Unflappable.  As a former member the Board of Directors of the MA Chapter ALS Association, I fully realize the value, in terms of fund raising, positive infectious spirit, and creative thinking, Ashley brings to bear. She's a gem of an asset to the MA Chapter ALS Association. 

Events like this are bittersweet. ALS has no cure. That's why we are here...with resolve in the face of daunting odds, to control what we can, fight grief with with action, and keep moving forward. Having the event work so sure-footedly is a blessing.

  

Speaking of photo bombers, there's Mr. Jonathan, the fabulous DJ who skillfully read the crowd and provided songs to fit every mood of the day, behind us. And the Elite Wheels Team T shirts, sponsored by the Zarb Corporation...to be explained in a later  post.

Photos mostly by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

VIDEOS http://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2018/09/ride-to-defeat-als-24-years-until-a-cure-the-videos.html

 

Joan Baez: Fare Thee Well

Joan Baez "Fare Thee Well Tour"
Boch Center - Wang Theatre
September 15, 2018

I was in an alternate universe the moment she walked onto the stage. 

Let’s start out with how is it possible that a voice that began electrifying people nearly 60 years ago is still a thing of beauty, fully capable of moving an audience to tears and laughter washed with diamonds and rust. She may be a relic but she sure can still rock the house.

Thirty seconds. That’s all it took for me to fall in love with the contralto of her new old voice, with its gravelly edge softening the angelic soprano of yore. She’s not shy about being 77 years old. Hell that’s the point, that’s why she’s here. With dark humor and personal anecdotes, with the songs she chooses and ease of talking to us as if we were at the kitchen table, she’s pointing a light down the tunnel of mortality. Hers. Ours. Mine.

To have that gift of a once in a lifetime voice is wonder enough. And the sound is enough to pitch you into another time zone.  The woman is in the rare company of singers who defined a generation of activists.

The vibrato and tone of that voice is recognizable within seconds. She freely talks about sliding her voice down a range to a still supple contralto with that familiar trademark vibrato that makes me shudder with delight when I hear it. 

Just as I’ve come to terms with Joan’s new normal, she reaches up to the stars and down into a small sweet spot still residing in her vocal chords to nail those soprano notes that put her in her own universe. I would have been able to hear 3500 jaws drop if not for the reflexive collective roar that came from our own throats.

Collusion is a huge buzz word these days and there’s Joanie up there colluding with age to downshift, without losing speed, to share that voice with us in the home stretch of her journey, burning every last drop of fuel left in the tank. A drop in octave doesn’t mean a drop in octane.

I love her for the way she makes me feel. A huge a la carte carousel serving joy, pain, indignation, sorrow, laughter, social justice, camaraderie with people on the margins, evoked with a voice of compassion, forgiveness all the way to in-your-face righteousness. For ninety minutes I am a tuning fork, resonating deeply with thoughts and feelings that flow like currents in the subsurface of the aquifer of my psyche. 

Who melds wistful and hopeful better than this woman? Tonight in easy patter from the stage, she recounts loves, losses, causes, and her sense of social justice and the way she has bridged them all from the past to the present – universal and personal, poignant and powerful, with a palpable generosity of spirit.

Leaning forward, elbows on her knees and hands cupping her face, the woman next to me is in a world of her own with Joan. Her husband in the next seat is mouthing the words to every song.

Joan doesn’t call this a Fare-Thee-Well Tour for nothing. It feels like she’s picked songs to be sung at her own wake.  And don’t think for one skinny minute that we aren’t thinking the same thing since so many of our heroes are dying. And don’t think for one skinny minute that we don’t know that we are closer to our own end lines, just as she is. My head is spinning. Halfway through the 90 minute set, I can feel the deep hum of that tuning fork vibrating in my seat in the mezzanine.

Love lost and found, hits and misses in life, sadness for what hasn’t worked out, Baez has concocted an alchemy of gratitude and acceptance for the vicissitudes of the life she’s lived.

This could easily descend into a morbid valedictory to life’s dissonant chords. That’s not what the troubadour has in mind. This is not a revival. Her songs haven’t disappeared down the drain of popular culture. From socially conscious to just plain beautiful ballads, the songs meant something when she first sang them. They have the power to elevate our spirits today.

She looks fabulous. Close cropped grey-streaked silver hair, tailored black jacket, form fitting jeans, comfortable black flats, she doesn’t look like any grandmother I’ve ever seen.   

I’m channeling two concerts, one from the stage, another playing out in my psyche and heart. 

A strange stew of triumph and elegy begin roiling around inside my guts and this woman is making them feel like the perfect elixir paving the way for me to consider my own fare-thee-well from this good earth. Honest to goodness this has the rich atmosphere of a wake when warm reminiscences are shared by friends of a lifetime with way more laughter than tears. I actually begin thinking about a playlist for my own wake.

Her voice has always been her gift and still is. In accommodation to age, she’s tuning it down to a lower range but it’s still THAT voice, one that gives me the chills as if I can feel her breath and her body temperature all the way back to my seat in the mezzanine

So here she is, the daring young woman on the flying trapeze, once invincible, now vulnerable.

Which is not to say irrelevant. “Goodbye Rosalita” that she will sing later is still utterly topical and touches on her lifelong themes of social justice, dignity of the marginalized (immigrants today, she will tell you flat out) delivered with the power of a sledgehammer wrapped in velvet. 

Fare Thee Well, Joan…but not just yet.

Saint Martin's Day: Lafayette, LA Style

November 11, 2017
Lafayette, LA
The Feast of Saint Martin

My generous host, Bernard Ussher, a Dublin lad now ensconced with his wife in Lafayette, Louisiana, is Irish to the core. Storyteller, merrymaker, prankster, bon vivant, chef sans portfolio, the gregarious fellow is always on the lookout to host some craic (a term for news, gossip, fun, entertainment, and enjoyable conversation, particularly prominent in Ireland.)

The November 11 Feast of Saint Martin (if I hadn’t googled it I would have sworn he was making it up) was all he needed to call together a crew of pals for a Men’s Feast. The fact that none of us had ever heard of the good saint? Never mind. He’d tell us while we sat down to devour a table creaking, craicing?, with enough food to feed a band of starving crusaders.

The morning of the feast every surface in the kitchen is piled with fixings that depleted at least one market’s vegetable section. Yours truly is relegated to slice, peel, or dice heaps of red and yellow peppers, green and yellow zucchini, sweet potatoes, Yukon gold potatoes, asparagus, onions, tomatoes, mushrooms, and corn.

The chef is busy trussing up a chicken to be fried upside down in a propane fired gizmo that people around here use for that purpose and to anyone north of the Mason Dixon line looks like a fryialater invention gone awry. Fry chickens? Upside down? Really?

Oh, and slabs of steaks and large links of Andouille sausage, all bound for the gas grill. Alongside one whole pineapple and a handful of peaches.

Without apparent forethought, the man empties cupboards and assembles a prodigious array of spices, seasonings and marinades. With the inspiration of Julia Child after her third glass of Chateauneuf de Pap, he begins to dust, dab and drench. Not a measuring device in sight.

“How much do you add?” says I.

The chef chortles and glug-glug-glugs or shake-shake-shakes bottles, jars, and containers, seemingly upon a whim, fearlessly, with a master plan known only to himself.

”About this much ought to do,” says he.

Combinations unknown to the faint of heart are thrown together. Through the eyes of this Yankee, the spirited scene feels somewhere between a Monte Python's Flying Circus skit and the madcap glee of a Johnny Carson skit of Carnac the Magnificent - high culinary theater in the kitchen!

Men arrive, ready to do justice to the memory of the good saint. Aromas of fried chicken, steaks, simmering vegetables marinated and seasoned liberally, tease our now fully engaged appetites. Spirits are quaffed. Stories are told.

Every platter and bowl in the kitchen is liberated and piled onto tables on the patio. Men on a mission, we heap our plates with aromatic, exotically spiced food. Julia would have been impressed. Our plates empty, we dig into the grilled peaches and pineapple. Temporary torpor sets in. Then more stories and huzzahs for the host.

Saint Martin, a patron saint of France, got around. His day is celebrated around the world. One researcher claims he was the uncle of Saint Patrick. More gist for stories. Today he was, in absentia, the beatific host of Bernard Ussher’s Saint Martin’s Day Men's Feast, a day to be remembered and put on the calendar for 2019.

 

 Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

2018 Dominican World Series: Drama and Obsession

February 25, 2018


Quisqueya Stadium Juan Marichal
Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

Baseball in the Dominican Republic isn’t a national sport. It’s a national obsession. Combine sport, soap opera, zealous conviction, tribal membership, and you begin to understand how embedded the game is in the national psyche.

January marks the end of the regular baseball season and the beginning of the playoffs to determine which of island’s 6 teams will represent the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean World Series. The rivalries are intense. The fault lines in allegiances are known to fracture family gatherings.

Teams from Santo Domingo (Tigres del Licey/Tigers) and Santiago (the Águilas/Eagles), the second largest city in the Dominican Republic are duking it out in a best of seven series. The winning team will head to Mexico to joust with winning teams from Venezuela, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. This is a heavyweight bout. Pride, loyalty, family honor, bragging rights, ride on the results.

Our host, Alex Martinez, used every connection he has to get great tickets to the fourth game in the best of seven series. The Santiago Eagles (Áigules) are up two games to one.

Walking up the ramp into the stadium feels like entering an alternate universe. Yes, I see lush green grass, the clay colored base paths and the pitchers mound and coaches boxes and dugouts and players in different uniforms so it’s a baseball game but, if I close my eyes, I would swear I was at a World Cup soccer match. The energy, cheering, and singing are awesome and unrelenting.

A run scores! Fans from the Tigers or the Eagles are on their feet. The stands become an open-air discotheque as 15,000 partisans stand up and joyously dance, hip-shaking Latin moves that look more at home on a sweat-filled dance club than a baseball park. I am smack in the middle of a sublime cultural experience.

Vendors selling hats, pennants and flags lined the streets on the way to the ballpark. Our host buys us hats and pennants, blue for the hometown team Tigers and, since his wife is from Santiago, yellow for the Santiago Eagles. We have become partisans. The stadium is jammed with them, a sea of blue with dots of yellow, like buoys floating on the Caribbean Sea’s surface, in perpetual motion.

Fervent energy in every row from top to bottom, joy on faces one moment then disappointment and heartbreak on the next. The game is a virtual roller caster ride with emotions rising and plummeting, people living and dying with each pitch and each hit.

Spectators rooting for opposing teams sometime sit side-by-side. The banter is non-stop after a hit, a walk, an error, a disputed call by the home plate umpire.The fans sitting in front of us are perfect examples. When a good play is made they leap up, wave their pennants and shoot "We're gonna win!" looks at their friends.

A sporting event creates instant kinships between strangers. Rooting for the same team, we are comrades in arms. Frank has brought his own sign that he unfurls at every moment of glory for the hometown team Licey Tigers.

“Please show me your sign,”says I.

“Boston, “I reply after he asks me where I’m from.

“Pedro Martinez!” Frank shouts after extending his hand to greet me.

“Just elected to the Hall of Fame,” says I.

“And Vladimir Guerrero, too!” says he.

 

Don’t think for a minute that everyone in the stadium does not know the names of every Dominican player in the big leagues.

A team makes a good play? Sections of the park look like scenes from Sir Walter Scott novel. Yellow or blue pennants are boisterously hoisted as if readying for battle.

You remember the word fanatic? Well, the word fan is in there somewhere and inside this ballpark we are in a world of fans and fanatics. The announcer introduces each player to come to bat in the same sonorous tones in which you would hear a prizefighter introduced a boxing match. Drama. Relentless. Drama. I love this!

This is the fourth game of the championship series. The Eagles from Santiago have won two games. The Tigers have won one in a seven game series.

The series rotates back-and-forth between the cities of Santiago and Santo Domingo. It is hard to estimate how much alcohol will be consumed, how many yellow and blue flags and baseball caps and other paraphernalia will be sold, how many friendly conversations and arguments will take place, how many newspaper stories will be written, and how many hearts will be broken.

Fathers and mothers bring their kids. Games like this germinate bonding experiences that could last a lifetime.

 
The Eagles hold onto a lead for the first part of the game and to the delirium of their fans, the Tigers tie the game in the ninth-inning. Extra innings. Fans are at the edge of their seats with every pitch, every play, every out. I can practically hear their hearts beating. At the end of the 10th inning the Tigers break through and score the winning run

Bedlam in the stands. Players from the Tigers swarm onto the field, a conga line of victors.

We say goodbye to Frank and our fellow baseball fans and head for the car. The Dugout and First Base (of course), two open-air bars on opposite corners are rockin’ with fans who watched on TV. The scene feels more like New Year’s Eve.

To define this as a baseball game would do no justice to what we just experienced: a cultural event of seismic proportions. History, heritage and honor on a baseball diamond.

PS

Edwin Encanation, Bartolo Colon, Dellin Betances, Melky Cabrera, Yoenis Cespedes, Cleveland manager Terry Francona are former Santiago Eagles players. There are dozens more who play in the American and National Leagues.

The Quisqueya Stadium Juan Marichal was re-named in 2014 after the Dominican pitcher, one of the first Dominican players to play in the big leagues in the US and the first elected to the Hall of Fame in 1983.

Oh, also cheerleaders who vault onto the field between innings. And karaoke at the seventh inning when a fan is invited to take the mic and, to the delight of thousands, belt out a popular song. I had to see this to believe it.

Photos and videos by Paul A.Tamburello,Jr.

 

Freddy G's Dress Rehearsal for his 80th

June 2, 2018

Dear Gail and Fred,
This started out as a short thank you note for inviting me to such a warmly celebrated birthday party, a so called decade birthday for a man who celebrates them as if they’re try outs for the real ones. Like a performance of Fandango or The Natural Wonders, the short note started to lift off on its own.

When Fred exclaimed “It’s a lie!” when urged to say a few words after being serenaded, twice, in the birthday song, under a deep cobalt blue sky behind their house in Somerville. We all knew that the 80th part was a lie, one that a guy like Fred can get away with. After all, he was 70 years old for about five years a while back.

What is the gospel truth is that the glue that holds this crowd of celebrants together is music, not any kind of music, but the kind of music that draws as disparate a group of people as you’ll find at any party I’ve ever been to.

Geez, look around. Millennials to old time hippies and boomers. I’m damn certain the party is full of democrats, republicans, atheists, heretics, religious practitioners, every sexual preference, business driven to layabout characters, and all of that is checked at the door. Who comes through the door tonight is a parade of lifetime friends of Fred’s and Gail’s and patrons of their bands from saloons in Cambridge and Somerville to celebrate, the house becoming a benign gospel tent with birthday balloons hanging at the entrance.

Music from Fred-led Fandango and from Gail-led Natural Wonders is life affirming, get up and holler, dance in the aisle, groove in your seat music but that’s only the surface. Underneath, we attend their “church" for an aural salve that feeds our hungry souls, hungry for salvation and relief from an ever escalating parade of toxic media, senseless violence and politics gone awry. I walk into Toad or Sally O'Brien’s dragging the news of the day like lead shackles around my ankles. I leave in a state of euphoria that if it were alcohol would have me arrested for DUI.

“Music calls down the spirit,” Fred says. Oh, brother, does it ever.
“Everything we play is upbeat. There’s not a sad song in our catalogue, “ Gail says.
Can I have an Amen on that?

“So many people have told us over the years that listening to our music makes them feel like they’ve gone to church,” says Gail. Well, if the experience results in feeling uplifted, absolved, bonded together in a universal cloud of non-judgemental acceptance and the earth moving under our feet, what the heck else can you call it?

Forget the pulpit. Naturally wondrous sermons sing out from a bandstand that uplift and offer us the chance to go forth and be better selves, neighbors, partners…to start down the road again.

And every week Prez Susan Sullivan reminds us in an email blast the when and the where of Fandango and The Natural Wonders, when we can get right back on that road.

The location of Fred’s supposed 80th birthday party is not just a lovely home. How about a temple, a shrine to Fred and Gail's beliefs, travels, and lifetime together. When’s the last time you went to a house where they transformed a one-car garage into a “Spirit Room” filled with artifacts inspired by a trip to Cambodia where Gail and Fred found a temple acknowledging and giving equal value to Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, and every religion in between. You know darn well why that rang a bell for them.

Just inside the entrance to "The Spirit Room,” right at eye level so you can’t miss it, is a photo Gail took at the temple.
“The truth is one. The paths are many.” Are you getting the idea here?

"Whatever you believe in, you can feel at home inside there,” Gail says. Does that not sound like what it feels like to be Toad or Sally O’Briens during their shows?

Perfect. Fred’s birthday party brings us right back to the source of the river, a metaphor for what’s so special about the music Gail and Fred intentionally create for us. It indeed calls down the spirit and the better natures in all of us.

And don’t think for a minute that these two are in it only as musical evangelists for our benefit.
Look at them on stage. If you can’t see that they’re deep into the spirit themselves, you ain’t paying attention.

Happy Birthday, Fred! I look forward to your next few 80th birthday parties!

Good News Again

What you see is what you get...

Good News Network Stories. Usually uplifting and reaffirming the goodness of human (and occasionally animal) nature, sometimes a little treacly but in a moderate dose. Then there are stories like this that blew my mind a minute ago. I have my own fantasies about rocking out on stage. Trumpet, accordion, harmonica, drums, guitar...I've done them all in my dreams.

"The Kiss Guy" holds up a sign saying “Let Me Play Monkeywrench” at a Foo Fighters concert and rips his dream from cloud land to the stage of one of the most bad-ass band around. On a whim, they invite him on stage. The guy startles the band with unabashed out-of-his-mind energy and you-gotta-see-it-to believe-it talent that matches the caliber of the world class arena exploding Foo Fighters.

Bookmark the site for a dose. If there's anything 'fake' about it, it sure fooled me.

https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/foo-fighters-see-kiss-guy-with-a-sign-in-audience-and-pulls-him-on-stage-and-he-nails-it/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_medium=weekly_mailout&utm_source=27-04-2018

My Mr. Durkee: Handyman With A Heart

April 11, 2018

My Pittsfield accountant sent me the Berkshire Eagle “This Story In History” article (below) this morning. He forwarded it, with a big yellow highlight on my late father’s name, knowing I’d be interested. As happy as I was to see that my dad was on local boards as he made his name as an attorney in my hometown, I was even happier to see the Eagle’s headline, “Bike repairman James M. Durkee keeps right on rollin’ along”.

The April 11, 1947 story ignited a fully formed memory of a long ago time and a kind man who found joy helping every rag-tag kid who found his little shop.

I used to ride my bike up to Mr. Durkee's shop, dark and cluttered with tools and parts, beside his house when anything went wrong with my trusty two wheeler, no fenders, no basket, a bare bones indestructible second hand model that suffered plenty of mechanical failures from my robust dare-devil stunt riding. 

To a little kid, Mr. Durkee used to look formidable, the gray stubble of a day or two beard growth, his large hands caked with grease, and a stub of a cigar, lit or not, ever-present in his mouth. Actually, that’s the first thing I remembered, the aroma of that cigar that permeated his whole shop. If I were blind, I could probably have found his house by sniffing my way down to 47 Third Street. 

I don’t remember ever being charged for a repair, although it may have cost me a nickel. I don’t remember he ever asked my name and do remember the aura of kindness I felt in his presence. The man was happy doing what he did. 

As quoted in the story, "Well," observed the veteran mechanic, "it’s the kids who keep me young. All these years now in the bicycle business, I’ve dealt mostly with the kids. To some people, they can be a bother. But I like ‘em. They’re always in and out of the place to have this or that done and I like to take care of them."

A member of the Zoning Board of Appeals (on which my father was Secretary) recalled that Mr. Durkee had appeared before the board in the past to renew his five-year permit.

“Yes, I certainly have," Mr. Durkee answered. "I’ve been coming in for the past 15 years and I hope I’ll be in here five years from now. I’ll be 75 by that time."

He never made it to age 75.

My mother, who knew how much I liked the man and how often I’d visit his shop, sometimes for no reason except to say hello, told me he had died when I was about 13 years old. I had never been to a wake or funeral my life. I remember feeling really sad but was too scared to ask to go. That’s one of the first “do over”s I recall having in my life. I’ll bet I wasn’t the only kid who showed up for his wake in spirit. 

Mr. Durkee and my dad served the residents of Pittsfield in ways that suited their talents and ambitions. They both made a mark for themselves in their city and they both made a difference in the lives of those people who needed them. And they both kept right on rollin’ along until they passed away.

FROM THE APRIL 11, 1947, EAGLE Bike repairman James M. Durkee keeps right on rollin’ along  FROM THE APRIL 11, 1947, EAGLE Bike repairman James M. Durkee keeps right on rollin’ along  James M. Durkee of 47 Third St., who probably is known by more Pittsfield youngsters ranging in age from 6 to 60 than any other man in the city, was before the Zoning Board of Appeals last night for a fourth variation in zoning. Mr. Durkee’s bicycle shop in the rear of his home is in a residential zone and he therefore must come before the board to get a special permit to operate. The zoning board can give only five-year variations. This is Mr. Durkee’s fourth application for a five-year permit. There was no one, of course, last night to object to his petition. As a matter of fact, in all the 15 years or more that Mr. Durkee has operated his shop at home, no one in the Third Street section has objected. Mr. Durkee never has done anything but bicycle sales and repair work. He has been at it for 53 of his 70 years. "It seems to me," said Board Chairman Adolph J.Kohlhofer, when the board came to the Durkee petition, "that I have seen you here before." (Mr. Kohlhofer has been on the board almost ever since the zoning law went into effect 20 years ago.) "Yes, I certainly have," Mr. Durkee answered. "I’ve been coming in for the past 15 years and I hope I’ll be in here five years from now. I’ll be 75 by that time." "I hope we’re here to see you," Secretary Paul A. Tamburello said. "Well, we can’t say that we don’t know anything about Mr. Durkee’s reputation," said Board Member Sydney Benedict. "I can remember he used to sharpen my skates when I was a kid." "Well," observed the veteran mechanic, "it’s the kids who keep me young. All these years now in the bicycle business, I’ve dealt mostly with the kids. To some people, they can be a bother. But I like ‘em. They’re always in and out of the place to have this or that done and I like to take care of them." Mr. Durkee’s experience, of course, goes back to the 54-inch wheel. He’s seen the business go up and down through the years. He was one of the few men, probably, who actually benefited from wartime gasoline rationing. "People," he said, "got their old relics out of the attic and brought them down to the shop for repairs. We had a tough time because of shortage of parts but we got most of them rolling." Gasoline rationing did a good job in reviving wheeling, he says. They resorted to bikes because of necessity and then found that it did them a lot of good physically. — Selected by Jeannie Maschino THIS STORY IN HISTORY