pt at large

The Mount Auburn Cemetery: An Under-the-Radar National Treasure in Watertown, MA

The moment you enter, the elegant monuments and pedestals, interspersed with ordinary gravestones signal that you’re in a cemetery. Cognitive dissonance sets in as you realize the rolling landscape wrapped around an utter sense of serenity signals you’re in one of the most gorgeous parks you’ve ever seen. You’re in the most uncemetery-ish cemetery in the country, the Mount Auburn Cemetery.

Although 93% of the cemetery is in Watertown, it is currently the number one destination in Cambridge, MA (the cemetery’s mailing address) on Trip Advisor.

 

 

 

“Monuments of Mount Auburn Cemetery”
Presented by David Russo
Sponsored by the Historical Society of Watertown, MA
Watertown Free Public Library
Watertown, MA
May 24, 2017

An arboretum, a botanical garden, a template for the American rural cemetery movement…with Mount Auburn Cemetery in Watertown, MA, it’s all of the above.

Given the grace of the many of the memorials, it could double as a museum as well.

The May 24 slideshow presentation by David Russo, Chairperson of the Watertown Historical Commission, was a select tour of nearly three-dozen of the cemetery’s notable monuments. The range of memorial designs– Canopy, Cenotaph, Column, Ledger Stone, Obelisk, Sarcophagus, and Pedestal - is from intimate to bold, modest to commanding.

Founded in 1831, the cemetery, Watertown’s largest contiguous open space, is the most under-the-radar world attraction in Massachusetts, maybe the country. Its perimeters are lined with an ordinary looking assortment of trees, fencing and tall bushes that offer no vistas to the interior.

Inside is a world-class cemetery that happens to be the first rural landscaped cemetery in the nation, a template for other big-time American cemeteries, and, thirty years later, inspiration for Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park to boot. The top three tourist destinations in America in the 1840s were Niagara Falls, Mount Vernon, and The Mount Auburn Cemetery (60,000 visitors in 1848). Despite its Cambridge address, 167.5 of the cemetery's 175 acres are in good 'ol Watertown.

Before the 1830s, burial grounds and graveyards were pretty barren places, skeletons occasionally poking up from the earth, and evoked a dark ‘Grim Reaper’ demeanor. After the design of Mount Auburn Cemetery, inspired by the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, the public park and garden movement, a place to celebrate life while mourning the departed, was off and running.

In 2013, David Russo, was tasked by the Massachusetts Historical Commission to update an old inventory of the cemetery's structures and landscapes done in the 1970s.

The task was ideal for an individual with an appreciation for detail, exactitude, and research. Russo was a perfect fit. He used the  Massachusetts Historical Commission’s Object Inventory Form that requires photographs, maps, a design assessment, a historical narrative, the inscription, a bibliography and/or references to document his findings. The same form requires identifying the type of object, date of construction, designer/sculptor, materials, alterations, condition, and setting. It took Russo three years to complete the inventory and was the basis for his presentation.

He identified a whopping 225 individual resources including monuments, mausoleums, and even a bridge in the cemetery. Russo described the meaning of the symbols inscribed on the monuments selected for the presentation. Commonly understood shorthand in the 1800s, most of them need the commentary by historians like Russo to be understood today. Russo credited Meg Winslow, curator of the  Mount Auburn Cemetery, for her support in his endeavor.

“The founders of Mount Auburn Cemetery wanted to inspire, using the landscape and the monuments to transform the space into a place for quiet contemplation and reflection,” Russo said. His slides displayed a landscape with varied topography and monuments of varying size, aesthetic impact, and purpose. From the get go, the founders wanted to extol the lives of the dead as aspirational models for the living.

Boy oh boy, did they succeed. Abolitionists, philanthropists, sculptors, actors, authors, social reformers, mathematicians, with names were familiar to locals and the nation, found their final resting place there, as do 98,000 lesser known citizens.

We know about Boston, but who knew that little Watertown and its big brother Cambridge were also home base for such a rich host of luminaries. Mary Baker Eddy, Fannie Farmer, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Winslow Homer, Julia Ward Howe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Abraham Maslow…no matter what part of America you live in, you’ll recognize many of these names.

Russo’s slides highlighted the aspects that made Mount Auburn Cemetery a model for some of the most impressive cemeteries in the country and, in essence, transformed the way we honor our dead. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2003.

Anyone who can present an hour-long slide show and keep an audience engaged with a topic necessarily heavy on names and dates deserves praise.

Russo’s success was in large measure due to his ability to keep the pace brisk, the underlying facts tied together with a consistent frame work that highlighted the designers and architects of the monuments, the accomplishments of the men and women for whom they were built, and perfectly timed interjections of humor.

“This was a cultural landscape, the first of its kind,” he said.

It remains an irony that a place in which we bury our dead and shed our tears rises above our grief to become a place in which we find solace, accept the finite nature of life, and count our own blessings.

"Mount Auburn has and always will be a sacred place of remembrance, a place to mourn those we have loved, a place to seek inspiration and solace, and a place to celebrate life." mountauburn.org

Mount Auburn Cemetery Factoids

Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Prince: RIP in an eternal Purple Haze

 

Published in Watertown TAB April 29, 2016

Prince Rogers Nelson (June 7, 1958 – April 21, 2016)
RIP in an eternal Purple Haze

Some listeners lost their virginity listening to Prince. I lost my hearing.

The Internet is jammed with eloquent hosannas praising the artist, dead at 57 years old.
 
His sixth album, “Purple Rain,” is the reason I am hard of hearing today.

In my car, at full volume, I played the nine songs on that 1984 cassette over and over and over. It was a majestic ride from funk to R&B, pop, rock and a dash of heavy metal – I don’t think Prince ever got it any better. I cranked it so loud it occasionally made me dizzy.

A 250-watt amplifier powered the two ADS speakers mounted on the kick panels a few feet away. I wasn’t satisfied listening. I wanted to feel it ricochet through my bones. The whole Alfa Romeo GTV vibrated like a Boeing 737 MAX lumbering down the takeoff runway. I didn’t care that in the afterglow my ears would ring after the downpour of dazzling guitar licks and Prince's shimmering falsetto radiating sexually provocative lyrics. .

Tinnitus is the daily soundtrack for me today. You only lose your virginity once. It takes repetition and reckless abandon to lose your sense of hearing. Prince was my pied piper, his mesmerizing marching songs begged to be played at stadium audio levels. I still get a rush listening to Prince's "Purple Rain" album (earplugs firmly in place). I have a few regrets over the loss of my hearing. I have mighty regrets over the loss of Prince.

Fifty-seven is too young to die. In Prince’s case, out of the blue. Did he have any idea how much his music affected and influenced others? Or how much we admired him?

He can’t hear it now. But the people around you who make up your own constellation of friends, family, lovers, co-workers, they can hear. Say the words to them today that might be too late to say tomorrow.

+++++++++

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SFNW5F8K9Y

Prince, Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne and others perform "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" at the 2004 Hall of Fame Inductions. The video is about six minutes long. Tune in at the 2:40 mark to see how it's going before Prince takes over at the 3:25 mark.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/pictures/super-bowl-halftime-shows-ranked-from-worst-to-best-20140128/4-prince-2007-0718626

Superbowl 2007 Prince sings "Purple Rain" in a rainstorm...and has the Miami stadium singing along with his epic anthem.

+++++++++++

Purple Rain, 1984
Side One
“Let’s Go Crazy”
“Take Me With You”
“The Beautiful Ones”
“Computer Blue”
“Darling Nikki”

Side Two
“When Doves Cry”
“I Would Die For You”
“Baby I’m A Star”
“Purple Rain”

Beverly Cleary Turns 100

April 11, 2016

Beverly Cleary turns 100 today. The Oregon housewife wrote some of the most popular children’s books of the twentieth century. Amazingly, the books still have standing…and popularity today.

For years, books like “Ramona The Pest” and “The Mouse and the Motorcycle” were a feature of my reading/writing program at the John Pierce School in Brookline. Cleary’s books were great read-aloud stories. The author had a canny sense of how to portray children navigating bumps that are part of the process of growing up.

I often chose “Ramona The Pest” as a first class read-aloud. From my point of view, the lively discussions and writing responses were a first step in establishing a bond, a shared experience, that shaped a class identity that fostered empathy, cooperation, teamwork and a positive work ethic .

My fourth graders, at nine years old, were old enough to be able to look at Ramona Quimby’s questions and actions in the rear view mirror. They were several years older than Ramona in her first few months of kindergarten, could feel quite a bit more grown up and empathize with her behavior. They really got it when Ramona was told on her first day of kindergarten to "sit here for the present" and she does, waiting for her present.

Cleary kept it simple but Ramona’s questions and dilemmas were universal and her character indelibly drawn. Cleary’s cast of characters usually involved Ramona’s older sister Beezus (Beatrice), her parents, especially her mother, and her friend Henry Huggins, but Ramona was the axis around which the stories were told.

Beverly Cleary captured a child’s universe with a charming economy of style and keen observation. Ramona was no angel. She had trouble paying attention sometimes, and once was sent home for gently pulling the hair of the girl sitting in front of her because it looked so much like a spring and out of curiosity she wanted to see if it worked like one.  My fourth graders chuckled when Ramona called herself a “kindergarten drop out”. And they reveled in their blooming maturity when Ramona talked about singing the "Dawnser song" in her first days of kindergarten, her interpretation of "The Star Spangled Banner.

I liked Beverly Cleary’s books because, in a non-preachy format, her books offered a platform to talk about values, character, and issues like sibling rivalry, being picked on, a father losing his job, unfairness in life... described by the author with a forthright but tender touch. Some of the discussions we had about what made Ramona tick resurfaced later in the year as we read other books or dealt with real life situations.

Peel back the personas of many teachers and you’ll find an entertainer… that certainly applied to me from 1974 to 2004. Sitting in the chair next to my cluttered desk, with twenty nine-year-olds sitting on the carpet in front of me, adopting voices for each character, pausing for effect in dramatic moments, using a little body English to embellish, making eye contact with my audience, I wanted the stories to come alive. If it involved theatrics, all the better. And I loved it.

Cleary published her first book, “Henry Huggins,” in 1950. Between 1955 and 1999 Ramona was featured in eight books and published in 20 different languages. The fact that she still has adoring fans, and still has a wry sense of humor, is remarkable. Her response to the question about the secret of living to be 100 sounds like it could have come from the mouth of Ramona Quimby.

“I didn’t do it on purpose.”

Photo of Cleary and fans by VERN FISHER/MONTEREY HERALD VIA AP/ FILE

Robin Williams RIP

Robin Williams (1951-2014) RIP

He made me laugh. The kind of laugh that erased my own travails of the moment, made them go poof for a while, a nearly out-of-body experience to be taken for such a joyful, crazy-assed ride, windows rolled down, hair flying, exhilarating, free association, semi-demented and bent in a good way, the kind of humor that Williams manufactured in nano-seconds in a waterfall of images, with voices, mime-like body and face dynamics so fast and sustained that I could barely keep up, never mind connect, the dots as fast as he was laying them down or spraying them out scattershot from his sawed off shotgun of a mind.

His antic and manic humor still makes me laugh, ache now added to awe, in the days after his death. Laughter is a rich commodity Robin Williams owned with a Midas touch. The irony that it didn’t erase his own travails is the unkindest cut of all.

Crystal Myths

Back in the day, there used to be a goofy song we sang on road trips as college kids, went like this:

Well, I don't care if it rains or freezes,

Long as I have my plastic Jesus,

Riding on the dashboard of my car,
Through all trials and tribulations,
We will travel every nation,
With my plastic Jesus I'll go far.

Times have changed some but replace the plastic Jesus with plastic discs with stories embedded in them and you have Audio Books. These days, if I have more than four hours of road time looming, I head to my library for an audio fix.  I load my car’s CD player with disc 1 of an audio book and I’m ready for anything the road fates throw my way.

My first fix happened innocently enough a few years ago. My neighbor tossed an audio book, titled “Little Green Men,” written by Christopher Buckley into the front seat as I was about to make several round trips to Westport, MA. “It’s a little quirky, give it some time and I think you’ll love it,” he said.

I was a little dubious. My usual company in the car is NPR or a music CD. Before pulling out of my garage, I sift through a pile of CDs piled behind the driver’s seat, pick two or three that match my mood, and head for the open road.

I can tell what my emotional state is by looking at my choices. Is it going to be a reflective hour or two in which I just let my mind loose to ruminate – the soundtrack being the muffled sound of air over-cresting the Mercedes’s hood at 70 mph, or a rowdy romp with honky-tonk, zydeco, rock ‘n roll, or classic Tony or Frank. No matter what the choice, it is restorative. Now, if I’m going to be on the road for a long ride, Audio Books rule.

“Little Green Men” appeared to be an outlandish, a not so subtle science fiction sending up Washington politics. Before long, it turned into a really funny satire that laid into beltway politics, the media, the Space Program, UFO maniacs and the Establishment. By the end of the story, I was hooked on audio books.
http://www.amazon.com/Little-Green-Men-A-Novel/dp/0060955570

These days, I don’t even think about beginning a long road trip before making a short one to the library. Those CDs can take between 8 and 10 hours to complete. It would take about a month of trips to the market, health club, music clubs and diners to finish a story. I need to settle in for a few hours at a clip.

With a book in the CD bay, my outlook on travel has been altered. Traffic jams? No problem. I get to listen to a few more chapters. Siri sends me down the wrong road? Same. When I really get into a story, I get an urge to visit my friends in Pennsylvania.

Downsides? Getting back home with an hour or two left when the story is really popping is exasperating. I make up errands lists and take the long way to the destination. I actually slow down and stop when a traffic light turns yellow (a tactic unknown to Boston drivers).  I sit in my garage an extra few minutes waiting for a chapter to complete. A mysterious code of conduct overrides any thought of bringing the CD inside. The car and the CDs are peanut butter and jam, natural partners in pleasure. Listening on board is a fabulous use of time. There are no distractions, no refrigerator to raid, no emails to send, no laundry to put in the dryer. Just pay outward attention to the road and let my inner mind loose as the scenery whizzes by.

A good reader can make a good story great. His voice (and the books I’ve listened to are 95% read by men) is usually an eerie match for the book’s main character. He can subtly vary his tone/accent/pitch to portray other characters. I begin to get a physical concept of the characters by the way the reader casts them. When I read a series by a particular author, I look forward to hearing that familiar voice again.

Crime mystery/adventure stories are my current faves. I’ve led an alternate life as LA defense attorney Mickey Haller or LAPD detective Hieronymus Bosch in Michael Connelly’s series; as Alex Cross, Washington, D.C. psychiatrist, detective, sometimes FBI special agent in the James Patterson series; and Jack Reacher in Lee Childs series Reacher series. Dick Hill is the perfect gravelly voiced reader for this series. He embodies the essence of Reacher’s center of gravity.

Revealed book by book, all these guys have back-stories - and flaws - fragile family connections, romantic interests past and present, and opinions about life, the way is and the way it ought to be. They are men I’d like to know, hell, they're men I’d like to BE.

A two-hour trip still takes two hours but the time seems to pass faster, in another dimension, fiction-enabled warp speed. But fair warning... once you find an audio book that tickles your fancy, you may not want to head for the open road without one sitting on the dashboard of your car.

http://watertown.wickedlocal.com/article/20140822/NEWS/140828680/12455/OPINION

http://watertown.wickedlocal.com/article/20140822/NEWS/140828680/12455/OPINION/?Start=2

Boston Marathon Bomber: Last Stand In My Home Town?

Friday, April 26, 2012

 

 

Watertown, MA
Friday, April 19, 2013
3:00 PM

2:33 AM.  Who the hell is calling at this hour?

"This is Detective Connors of the Watertown Police Department. There is an active incident in Watertown right now. Chief Deveaux is asking all East Watertown residents to remain in their houses. If you see or hear anything suspicious please call 617-972-6500."

Now it's personal. One of the Boston Marathon bombers is apparently holed up in a house a mile and half from my home in Watertown. Near one of my favorite restaurants. Near the place I get my car washed. Right off Arsenal Street, one of the busiest thoroughfares in Watertown.

Governor Deval Patrick asked people who live in the entire city of Boston, as well as the nearby communities of Watertown, Waltham, Newton, Belmont, Cambridge, to “shelter in place” — stay inside and not open their doors to anyone, except police with proper identification. That’s over a million people.

Now it's personal. I set my home alarm. For the first time in my life I do not feel secure in my own home. An act of terror rocked the finish line of the Boston Marathon on Monday, April 15, Patriots' Day. Improbably, the younger of the two bombers identified by the FBI may be making his last stand in an area I drive by everyday. At this moment, he could be on foot in the shadows, like a cornered rat, looking for another refuge. In the semi consciousness of sleep, I register every noise. If I cannot automatically classify it, I wheel out of bed and peek through the shade. I am on edge.

Late last night, the two bombers highjacked an SUV at a 7-Eleven, shot and killed an MIT police officer as he sat in his car,  and led police on a bloody shootout as the SUV raced down a local streets. Hundreds of rounds were fired. One of the bombers, the older brother, was killed in the chase. His younger brother is in hiding in Watertown, my hometown for over 40 years. I recognize every landmark in the background as CNN engages in nonstop coverage. My hometown is a giant televised crime scene. This is surreal.

Hundreds if not thousands of state, local, and federal law enforcement agents of every stripe are forming a thick collar around that neighborhood a mile away. The street outside my door, normally buzzing with UPS trucks, neighbors driving or walking to and fro, and teenagers heading for Victory Field, is empty. Businesses, schools, the public transportation system of buses and subways – closed.  A “Shelter in place” advisory to all. Unprecedented.

Now it's personal. Since about 2:45 PM on Monday, I realized the Boston Marathon would never be the same. As of 2:33 AM, my tiny, under the radar, unassuming, adopted hometown is in the shadow of that horrible act.

Terror used to be abstract. It happened somewhere else. New York City on September 11, Oklahoma City in 1995, and now Boston. The scene of Patriot’s Day carnage will not disappear. We will still fill Fenway Park and the TD Garden and Gillette Stadium and cheer for our hometown teams. Yes, and run in the marathon.

After Monday, it will be more than a city crazy about its sports teams and traditions. It will be an act of defiance.

Susan Huppe: Dancer With A New Orleans Cause

When Sue Huppe learned to speak French, it didn’t occur to her that it was the first step on a winding road that would lead her to help organize a fundraiser to rebuild New Orleans.

A Watertown resident for the past 9 years, she’s been dancing since not long after her first wobbly steps out of her playpen in Delaware. Her day job as a Certified Holistic Nutritionist and Herbalist pays the rent but dancing feeds her soul. One of her first thoughts after listening to a few bars of music is, “What kind of dance can I do to this?”

Twenty years ago, Ms. Huppe drove down to the Cajun and Bluegrass Festival (now called the Rhythm and Roots Festival) in Charlestown, RI. To her delight, much of the music was buoyant, infectiously happy, and sung in the Acadian brand of French spoken in southwestern Louisiana. She was hooked.

In time, she traveled to New Orleans and Lafayette, Louisiana, the heart of Cajun country, to absorb the culture, learn Cajun and Zydeco dance styles, and listen to music that just about everyone in southwest Louisiana knows how to dance to. When she returned, she was eager to keep on dancing. Believing that Cajun Two Step would find an audience in the snowy North, Huppe decided to make it happen by teaching it to others.

The world of dance began to unfold for her. While teaching her specialties of Cajun and Zydeco, she branched out to learn and teach ballroom, latin, and east and west coast swing at Adult Ed classes in Newton, Cambridge, and Boston and at Springstep in Medford. She taught several of these styles at Dancing Feats for 14 years.

“Each kind of dance has its own flavor and allows you to express yourself in different ways. The most important things are to have a feel for the music and feel the connection between you and your partner,” she said.

When Baton Rouge native and Needham resident Rebecca Wilson decided to create a fundraiser to help the post-Katrina rebuilding programs in New Orleans, she knew who to ask for support.

“I took my first zydeco lesson from Sue four years ago. We connected right away because of our shared appreciation of all things Louisiana,” Wilson said.

Wilson knew that Ms. Huppe was acquainted with the organizers of large events since Huppe had taught at the Williamstown Jazz Festival, Swingin’ New England, and Strawberry Park’s Blast From the Bayou. Ms. Huppe is now one of the core group planning an event to raise $10,000.

 “The great contacts she’s made as a dance teacher helped us put this event together,” Wilson said. “She knew which venues would suit our purposes. Some of the organizers she knew offered tickets to their events for our raffle and linked our web site to theirs.”

The “Help ReBuild New Orleans” fund raiser will be held at Springstep in Medford on Sunday, October 5, from 5 - 9 pm. Proceeds will be donated to Common Ground Relief, a small volunteer based non-profit organization whose office is in the heart of the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans.

The non-profit group partnered with a licensed general contractor and is rebuilding homes destroyed in Katrina’s wake, and offers legal assistance to homeowners who do their own work to cut through red tape involved in applying for building permits and inspections.

Common Ground Relief has also begun a job training program, placing locals with professional carpenters, electricians, and plumbers who are volunteering their time. One of the members of Wilson’s planning group volunteered his plumbing and carpentry skills to the organization several times in the past two years.

The fundraiser will feature the same vibrant music that first attracted Ms Huppe. Two local bands, Slippery Sneakers and The Chili Brothers, will perform a mix of New Orleans style funk, blues, Cajun, and zydeco. The bands and vendors offered discount rates since they realize every penny will go toward building houses in the Lower 9th Ward. Tickets are $25.00 in advance and may be purchased through the Help ReBuild New Orleans web site www.rebuildneworleans.net.

“What is fun about teaching dance? Everything!” Sue Huppe said. “Remembering what it is like to be a beginner and seeing the joy it brings to people, in fact, seeing how it can change people's lives!”

The "Help ReBuild New Orleans" fundraiser is a testament to that.

The Mood Swings Orchestra, an all-woman big band

The Mood Swings Orchestra, an all-woman big band
Performance at First Parish of Watertown, 35 Church Street, Watertown, MA
Sunday, October 30, 2006, 3 P.M.
Printed November 18, 2005

These women have brass and they know how to use it. The Mood Swings Orchestra, an all-woman big band hailing from Boston, played to an appreciative audience that filled the pews of the First Parish Church in Watertown on Sunday. The seventeen piece group is a classic big band, with the brass line of trumpets and trombones standing in the back row and the golden tenor, alto, and baritone saxophones seated in the front. Piano, bass and percussion make themselves at home on the side, supplying the rhythm that’s the backbone of a good band.

Photo:Ryles Jazz Club, February, 2005 (from moodswings web site)

The band’s repertoire reaches back to the thirties and forties. Their two full sets had the silver haired listeners who comprised most of the afternoon’s audience bobbing their heads and mouthing the words to familiar standards. After band leader Kathleen Hepburn’s second invitation to come on up and dance in front of the bandstand, several pairs of dancers answered the call. It may have been the writer’s imagination but the dancers seemed to shed a few decades as their muscle memories took over and they smoothly navigated swing dance passes and tuck turns. The hearty applause at the end of these tunes could as easily have been a salute to their by-gone youth as well as appreciation for the music.

The acoustics in this little church are heavenly for musicians. When the band amped up, its richly textured sound filled the room with sonorous harmonies that were the signatures of the Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey bands. The solo turns were a bit uneven, often a little brittle or underpowered, with an occasional errant note heading into the choir loft. But what unites the members of this not-for-profit group founded in 2003 is a love of music. No formal auditions are required. While the level of skill varies, they’re clearly having fun, the veterans paving the way for the newcomers.

Several renditions stood out in each set. Neal Hefti’s down tempo arrangement of “Little Darlin’” was very sweet, a lilting invitation to polish fox trot skills and appreciate the unique way a big band merges the smooth-as-butter reed and brass sounds. “Night Train” featured the front and back lines playfully swinging back and forth, arching their instruments during glissandos, camping it up in the best big band style. Hogie Carmichael’s “Stardust” featured a classic introduction and the audience unabashedly singing along after bandleader Hepburn’s invitation.

Second set treats included another Neal Hefti arrangement, “Why Not” and Ella Fitzgerald’s “Shiny Stockings”. The audience, no longer needing invitations, continued to dance in the small area in front of the bandstand. “Splanky”, named for Count Basie’s patented four note ending to many of his arrangements, was elevated by a rousing solo from a fleet fingered trumpeter who blew with power and command.

Each set might have benefited from re-sequencing to avoid too many similar tempos in a row. The Andrews Sisters “Pennsylvania Polka” gave the program a needed change of tempo near the close of the second set. Their encore number, “Bandstand Boogie”, featured a blistering solo from the leather lunged trumpeter in the back row and sent the happy crowd home with a little extra swing in their steps.

For more information about this band’s next stops, click on their web site, www.themoodswings.org

A country illuminated, one street at at time

A COUNTRY ILLUMINATED, ONE STREET AT A TIME
Guest commentary by Paul Tamburello
September 20, 2001

Halfway down my street, I started to cry. The primitive emotion uncoiled right from my gut, rose through my throat and out my mouth. Tears, runny nose, contorted face, all within seconds. A well of emotion that had been forming since Tuesday morning had been tapped and rushed to the surface like a geyser. I was relieved that it was dark, but knew that if any of my neighbors had witnessed these Friday night tears they’d have understood at once.

Let me start at the beginning, which was Tuesday September 11, 2001, a day America was changed forever. No need to go into the details, you know them all.

Friday, after days of assessing whether my fourth graders had been traumatized by the extraordinary pictures of death and destruction, and after holding an elementary classroom version of a Day of Remembrance and Mourning, I just wanted to sit down in familiar comfort of home, and let the metaphorical dust of the past days settle without my watching it or listening to it. I needed to unplug. There had been nowhere to be free of the images of destruction or the conversations, so surreal in content.

The school day had been book ended with our morning meeting and a minute of silence at the end of the day. I welcomed the hours in the middle as a pilgrim welcomes an oasis. I poured myself into having my fourth graders learn the names of the chambers of the heart, find prime numbers in their multiplication charts. practice cursive writing, and see how to write a declarative paragraph. Even indoor recess due to rainy weather was a respite.

Elsewhere else reality had been bent out of shape and I had been bent with it.

There was no where to avoid the topic. The endless loop of videotaped carnage I had been seeing since Tuesday had slowly crossed the border in my brain from nightmare to reality, a nightmare come to life. After school, at a physical therapy appointment, I was asked how the kids were taking the scenes of death. At my health club, a fellow member recounted the previous evening’s memorial service for his friend who was on Flight 11. At my local gas station, the Libyan attendant, with whom I’ve had friendly chats for two years, railed about the ruthlessness of the terrorists. In the back of my mind I prayed that this kind man from North Africa wouldn’t be targeted by hateful citizens seeking retribution for the barbarity in New York.

By the time I walked up to my porch, I was in desperate need of refuge. Stuck in my front door was a small note reading
Dear (Oliver Street) Neighbors,
Tonight at 7 PM, please join our neighbors on Oliver Street by lighting a candle on your porch or outside your door. to grieve for those who lost their lives and for all of us whose lives have been forever changed by the sad events of September 11.
Others all over America will also be lighting candles. We are all a community of Oliver Street, of America, and of the world, even with people in the Arab nations.

I walked into my kitchen, too drained to participate. Then I recalled that just that morning I’d told my students how citizens derive strength in times of duress by using symbols, the country’s flag for instance, to provide comfort and resolve in times of sorrow and grief. Wearily, I got up, found a candle, lit it, and put my own little symbol in the front window.

An hour later, rejuvenated by curiosity, I decided to walk down my street to see whether anyone else had complied with the note.

Halfway down the hill I realized that my little street had indeed connected with other communities in America, in some kind of nocturnal communion. Every house but one had candles in sight. Large candles, small votives, solitary candles, massed candles.

The emotional dam I’d built to contain uncertainty, loss, and grief, burst. I cried for me, for the country, for the families of the dead and missing, and for our assumptions about life in America which were blown up with the World Trade Center. But my tears were redemptive as well. I could see that my little neighborhood was surviving on its own, in its own little way, and was part of other little streets across this great and flawed country surviving and regenerating in the same way.

I never thought I’d see anything as powerful as the fireball I saw on Tuesday. Somehow, in time, the small glow of those candles on my neighbor's porches is going to outshine that horrible sight.

Paul Tamburello is a teacher and writer who’s taught fourth grade in Brookline since 1970.