TWO CHILDREN....

When I was sifting through old photographs the other day, I was struck by the fact that I’ve got a lot of photos of children: children in sets and clusters of two, three, four and more; children sitting on front steps, at picnic tables; boys in pup tents, wearing scout uniforms; girls in rowboats wearing little white blouses and camp kerchiefs; boys AND girls posed next to their bicycles.

         

Most of those children grew up to be my grandparents or my great aunts and uncles; two of them grew up to become my parents; seven are first cousins…one of those children grew up to be me!

I digress.

This is a photo of my mother and my aunt in the front walkway of my grandparents’ first house on Kirk Street in Boston; Martha (left) and Hope  Howell (my mother is the younger). 

On the back of the photo, in my mother’s handwriting, it says “circa 1924.”

I asked her once about the date.

           “I know it was 1924 or earlier,” she said, “because my parents bought the house on Eliot Street, right near Jamaica Pond, in 1925—this is definitely the Kirk Street house.”

She remembered clearly the trellis for the roses, the wooden steps, the big rhododendron; she remembered being told to hold Hope’s hand in a gesture of sibling companionship.

“I was mad about that,” she told me, grinning. “I wanted to be on my own.”

CHANT....

I found it in a flea market, tucked away in a broken-down cardboard box that was shoved halfway beneath a display table.

What caught my eye was a corner of an old newspaper—and I’ve always been a newsprint fan—so I pulled the box out into the aisle, sat down on the floor and went through every magazine, newspaper, booklet, and folded broadside inside.

          There was a lot of it: a few editions of the Boston Transcript, some 1930s Good Housekeeping magazines; there were some old Shubert Theatre and Boston Symphony Orchestra programs. It all had that particular smell that old paper carries…

I found this on the very bottom, the last piece of ephemera in the stack.

          Miraculously, it was not distressed; there were no folds, no rips, no smears or smudges—kept flat and safe for years at the bottom of this old cardboard box. I recognized Gregorian Chant notation: four clef lines, single note (punctum), two stacked notes (podatus); although I had no idea what any of it meant (my high school Latin long gone, long gone…).

I fell in love with it…bought it on the spot.

          Five dollars.

I had it matted, framed; it now hangs in my study.

I’ve always thought that one of the most powerful moments in human history must have been when two (or more) people realized they could sing together—sing as one rather than independently; they must have found the sense of unification and community that still draws us together today.

Raise your voices high!

MAINE APRIL FOOL....

ELIZABETH RICHARDSON GOULD...

I’ve always loved this painting.

It was in my grandfather’s house; my father remembered it hanging in his bedroom when he was growing up. At some point, my father inherited it from his parents, and I from him.

It’s on the west wall of my guest bedroom; the light yellow walls pick up the soft greens and yellows and browns of the grasses and fall leaves; the mountains rise high in the background—strong gray and blue under a pale sky.

I’m pretty sure it’s someplace in New Hampshire—the mountains look right to me (for those of you who don’t know, the mountains in New Hampshire have a particular shape and heft, a sense of self that’s unmistakable).

Elizabeth Della Richardson was born in (English) Canada in 1887; by 1910, she was a naturalized citizen, married to my great-great uncle Melvin W. Gould, Jr. living in Manchester, NH, first in a rented house, but soon in a house they owned on Maple Street. Elizabeth’s mother, a widow, lived with them.

Melvin was a foreman in a shoe factory—a good job for a man who had only one year of high school education; Elizabeth, a college graduate, was “at home.”

And while “at home,” she painted.

Beautifully.

SHELLS...

Found this photo the other day; it took me by surprise!

          It also took me back fifty years…

Look at all those shells!

It must have been the 1960s – in my hippie days, when Vietnam was raging, the civil rights movement was on the rise, and I was idealistic enough to believe that my generation could put an end to all that horrific injustice and inequality by embracing values of love and peace, of inclusiveness and acceptance.

Just look at it!

A peace sign (for those of you not old enough to remember that symbol).

I had a pair of Peace earrings that I wore occasionally – they were too heavy to wear every day; I gave an old boyfriend a silver Peace medallion – he wore it around his neck on a silver chain; when I was living on the farm, we had a Jersey cow so sweet and gentle that we riveted a leather Peace sign to her collar – when she died, we nailed it (collar and all) to a maple in the eastern tree line where she used to stand in the shade on hot summer days.

As I said, I was idealistic then.

         

But not any more.

          I’m older now, a shade wiser, and I understand that everything I have fought for in the last fifty years is on very shaky ground.

I am struggling to maintain my balance in a country I cannot recognize as my own, a country where the ideals of equality, justice, and working for the common good have been abandoned to sustain the financial and personal gain of the very few.

It’s an empty place, an empty shell.

Resist.

ON STAIRS....

There are bookcases in my living room—an upper level of five shelves that go up to the ceiling stacked over a lower level of countertop with shelves underneath. The bottom section has matching latticed doors that I keep shuttered at all times because it’s always incredibly messy in there.

         

Every so often, I open the doors and clean things up. I sort through photos, jigsaw puzzles, board games, old packs of cards, books that are too big to stack on the upper shelves, old records, etc. I pack things to donate to charity, shove others in trash bags to hit the curb on collection day; I also end up putting things back into the cupboards—things I’m just not ready to part with yet.

I stumbled across my 1966 college yearbook the other day.

I poured a cup of coffee and thumbed through: page after page of young women who looked remarkably alike…page boy hairstyles, knee-high socks, plaid skirts, wool sweaters, Peter Pan collars and the occasional turtleneck.

We weren’t quite “Barbies,” but it was mighty close!

I digress.

         

Anyway, as I was looking through the photos, I noticed that the school photographer had taken all our class group photos on stairways—page after page of sequences of young women posed (alphabetically, by surname; we’re of so little importance that we don’t even have first names) on stairways, one after the other, all lined up like little Stepford Wives, hands on the railing.

We are all the same.

The caption reads: D. Gould, W. Gillingham, E. Grant, L. Goldey, D. Gannet, N. Glesmann, K. Gardner, C. Givens.

And there I am, at twenty years old, standing on the bottom step.

 I am so young that it makes me ache...

THE VOICE....

The Voice.

         

My father adored her.

He joined the Navy in 1940 with dreams of becoming a pilot; he had his flight training in Jacksonville, Florida.

After successfully completing flight school, he flew transport planes for the US Navy during the war, hopping between Miami and Rio every few days.

          Before he married my mother, he lived in a small house in Miami with three other US Navy pilots and a chimpanzee named Violet (she’s a whole different story), a charismatic group of flyboys who spent their evenings in the bars and nightclubs of Miami, slamming down drinks, appreciating the women and listening to jazz and swing bands that toured the area…Basie, Goodman, Dorsey, etc.

         

And then along came Ella Fitzgerald.

         

The first time he heard her sing, my father was transported.

He spent an entire night at a little table in a nightclub, smoking Chesterfields, sipping Manhattans and listening to a voice that left him speechless.

When she took a break between sets, my father (emboldened, I’m sure, by the alcohol), approached her, asked if he could buy her a drink.

She said yes.

He never could remember what she had to drink; he remembered her eyes and her laugh and her voice.

The Voice.