It was the evening before the annual Sunday family get-together over the Labor Day weekend. The sun had gone down and a slight breeze cooled the broad expanses of the old wrap-around porch that so functionally adorned the centenarian three-story shingle-style merchants’ home.
Earlier the porch had the scene of kind and matronly aunts, sisters, and grandma scurrying about as they prepared with great anticipation.
They had all retired to the kitchen where they continued planning and preparing.
As I sat upon the porch my thoughts drifted about like the clouds. I’ve been told artists dream of castles in the clouds, writers live in them and psychologists are the landlords that charge rent.
At my advanced age, I’m comfortable with the concept that my cloud is my castle and I own it and I’m too tight to pay rent.
Although fall is just around the corner, the katydids and the crickets are still out in force in a cacophonous chorus of southern gothic musings and it is still hot enough to remind even the oblivious that Maryland still has one foot in the old south.
I thought of the title of the 1989 novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, “The Remains of the Day.” The novel is about post-war Britain. The main character considers his past and is forced to come to terms with the gravity of the sacrifices he has made in the name of duty.
The plot, at the moment, is not why my mind wonders to the novel. It is the title, “The Remains of the Day,” which refers to a quiet evening when a person takes time to reflect the day's work.
It could also reflect pondering being older and looking back to take a tally of life work. In the novel, “The Remains of the Day” is also a metaphor for the last vestiges of England’s grand homes – and its waning position as a global power.
Although I was pre-occupied with the theme “porch,” my thoughts did not include the 1991 grunge tune, “Porch,” by Pearl Jam. I’m not sure I ever understood the song: “All the bills go by, and Initiatives are taken up, By the middle, there aint gonna be any middle any more, And the cross Im bearing home, Aint indicative of my place, Left the porch…”
Whatever.
It’s Labor Day weekend, a throwback to an ebullient era in the United States when one’s labor was the meaning of the person.
I am reminded that the porch – and the home – were built around 1910 at the end of what the local historian Chris Weeks called an “enthusiastic” period in Westminster, from about 1865 to 1910. He wrote in his 1978 architectural reference book, The Building of Westminster,” that it was an era when Westminster and “the entire nation was reveling in itself and its accomplishments…
“The city was beginning to attract heavy industry; there was a marked shift in population and economics…
“The citizens and their fathers had created a town in the middle of nowhere by using nothing but their own will and work…”
Mr. Weeks cites an excerpt of an address by Dr. J. W. Herring, at the Semi-centennial Rally in Carroll County on April 11, 1887:
“This ebullient era was neatly and succinctly summed up in an address by Dr. J. W. Herring… some of the Doctor's remarks are pertinent and valuable today:
‘Prominent, as we think, among the sources of the prosperity which followed [the settling of the county], and perhaps underlying them all, was the conservative disposition of the people…
‘Labor is not only honorable, but it is the legitimate and necessary law of our being… They [the early settlers] exhibited in large degree the virtue of self-reliance, without which no success can come, either to an individual or to a nation…
‘The prosperity which has marked our country's history and which we enjoy today is in great part due to the fact that our fathers depended upon themselves. They did not believe in the doctrine of 'delegated powers' as it represents one's own business.
‘And in this there is the suggestion of a valuable lesson… To produce, and not alone to consume, is the teaching which political economy would impress...’”
Whether our great nation still revels with pride in the values illuminated by Dr. Hering is for you to decide and the stuff of another musing for another time.
For now, as I sat on the porch in the dark, I daydreamed about my childhood days – - and the reclusive and enigmatic childhood friend of Truman Capote, Harper Lee.
Ms. Lee was born Nelle Harper Lee on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama.
She is best known for her one and only book, which just happened to be a Pulitzer Prize-winning best-seller, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” published in 1960, when she was 34 years old.
Earlier in the day, as I watched a cable news program, I kept wondering what Ms. Lee’s character, Charles Baker “Dill” Harris, would think of the caustic commentary about the breaking news momentary meaninglessness of today.
If you will recall “Dill,” who was based on Ms. Lee’s childhood neighbor, Truman Capote, was “Jem” and “Scout’s” summer friend, with an enormous imagination.
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Dill - the porch - is my summer friend.
For those who have studied “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Dill represents the perspective of childhood innocence.
Some will argue that “Mockingbird,” like me, is an anachronism. I suggest that much of her commentary about the machinations of our contemporary society is just as relevant today – just different.
Nevertheless, for those of us who wallow in the loss of innocence five decades later, it is still a sin to kill a mockingbird.
In recent years, the summer months have almost been just as busy as the rest of year. Gone are the lazy southern Carroll County summers. However, growing up in Carroll County in the 1950s and 60s, lazy summer days were the opportunity to sit around and read and write all day.
From those long-gone lazy days, I usually associate “Mockingbird” with short stories like Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” “Rain” by William Somerset Maugham and “Portnoy’s Complaint” by Philip Roth – and why I’m still traumatized by the word spatula – except when Rachel Ray says it on her cooking show.
I think of the film “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” by Robert Altman – of whom I was initially introduced to when he directed a number of episodes of “Bonanza.”
“McCabe” introduced me to Leonard Cohen – and later his song “Famous Blue Raincoat.” Remember: “It’s four in the morning, the end of December. I’m writing you now just to see if you’re better…”
I think of Carole King’s “It’s too late,” and Carly Simon’s “That’s The Way I Always Heard It Should Be” – “My father sits at night with no lights on. His cigarette glows in the dark…”
It was over forty years ago in the summer of 1967 that I first heard the song, “Ode to Billy Joe,” by Bobbie Gentry on WCAO on the AM dial of the car radio.
Remember, that was when we first learned from “Mama” that the nice young preacher, Brother Taylor “said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge. And she and Billy Joe was throwing somethin' off the Tallahatchie Bridge.”
It was also in this time period that I became firmly hooked on the existential - “Southern Gothic” genre of storytelling.
Examples of authors of the Southern gothic genre of writing include William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, and Harper Lee.
Tennessee Williams once described the genre as stories that reflect “an intuition of an underlying dreadfulness in modern experience.”
The stories these writers tell are fascinating as often they involve aspects of unexplained historical events, enigmatic dialogue, and inexplicable characters.
But it is the other prominent theme of the Southern gothic story that comes to mind these days in the cavalier manner in which folks today will often engage in character assassination in the pursuit of a particular agenda.
It is the particularly disturbing dynamic that much like contemporary commentary, the southern gothic tale peels away the layers of indifference that contemporary society shows towards our fellow human beings – or in the case of “Ode to Billy Joe,” the loss of life.
In the song the family of the narrator nonchalantly mentions the gentleman’s death: “Billy Joe never had a lick of sense/ pass the biscuits, please.”
Of course the narrator of the story cares: “Mama said to me, Child, what's happened to your appetite? I've been cookin’ all morning and you haven't touched a single bite.”
Other than that, they may as well been having a dinner conversation about the weather.
One wonders what it would be like to have the likes of a Margaret Mitchell breeze her way across the porch and strike up a conversation.
According to a website devoted to the now-historic site where she lived on Peachtree Street in Atlanta Georgia, when she wrote the book, “Gone With the Wind,” Mitchell was born in Atlanta on November 8, 1900. Just like me, as a child, she was fascinated by Civil War stories.
The website biography explains that Mitchell was an “imaginative girl (who) wrote, produced, and directed plays, casting her friends, and inviting the neighborhood to the porch performances.”
It seems that Mitchell was a bit of a “free spirit,” who “scandalized Atlanta society by performing a provocative dance at a debutante ball. Two years later the headstrong flapper married Berrien “Red” Upshaw… a bootlegger…
“Financial pressures led her to begin writing for the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine where she earned $25 per week. Their stormy marriage ended in divorce in 1924. Within a year she married John Marsh… an editor at the paper.”
Perhaps it may have been fun to imagine her visit during her “free spirit” days. If I were allow myself a brief farbissiner aside; it would be so refreshing to see Westminster being scandalized in some manner that does not involve narcissistically utilizing the cracked mirror by which much of the town now views its navel, in the name of progress.
Tomorrow – Sunday - will remind me of the scene on the balcony, or porch, if you will, of the Maison Fournaise along the Seine River in Chatou, France as painted in the 1881 classic painting, “
Le déjeuner des canotiers,” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
Of course, Caroline, Grammy and I once had a had a fête galante attending the “Luncheon of the Boating Party” with friends of Pierre Auguste Renoir on a balcony of the Maison Fournaise along the Seine River in Chatou, France in 1881.
We went with Aline Charigot, a young seamstress, whom Mr. Renoir married in 1890. She is in the foreground of the above image playing with a small dog.
Behind Kevin in the yellow hat is Alphonse Fournaise Jr., who was responsible for the boat rentals. The woman leaning on the rail, wearing the yellow hat is Alphonsine Fournaise, the daughter of the proprietor.
She is talking with a gentleman, whom we cannot see, who is the former mayor of Saigon, Baron Raoul Barbier. Later he hit on Caroline. Not to worry, Caroline has had enough of mayors, she likes artists and writers.
Seated in the chair with the yellow hat in the right-foreground, is fellow artist and close friend Gustave Caillebotte who is talking with Angèle, an actress, in the blue dress, and Maggiolo, an Italian journalist.
I did talk with him some later. He also likes semi-colons. From right to left across the back is Jeanne Samary, an actress. She is wearing the blue dress and is behind Maggilo.
Hitting on Ms. Samary is the artist Paul Lhote and Eugène Pierre Lestringez, who is some sort of bureaucrat. All the way in the back, wearing the top hat is the editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Charles Ephrussi.
Editors are pretty cool and he was fun to talk with later. Here, he is talking with Jules Laforgue, wearing a brown coat and cap. He is a poet, critic, and Mr. Ephrussi’s personal secretary.
The dialogue tomorrow will be a collaboration of Tom Stoppard and Robert Altman and will, in part involve aspects of unexplained historical events, enigmatic dialogue, and inexplicable characters. The only thing missing will be the frilly – and manly – hats.
Maybe next year we could ask folks to wear hats… They go well with an ebullient porch. ( I also want to invite Anthony Bourdain – he won’t need an invite or a reservation.)
For everyone who has benefited from a Catholic school education, Mother Seton is the spiritual founder of Catholic school education in the United States,
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