Let’s Get Meta

MEDFORD

March 25, 2015

This is the first picture I took just for Instagram.

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O'hare E to B

A post shared by Rebecca (@rtbhive) on May 11, 2014 at 7:43pm PDT

It was last May. I was on my way back from a pop culture conference in Calgary. Prior to and throughout that trip, I had been casting around for some kind of writing target. I’ve written before about how, when I first undertook writing for its own sake, I found I had nothing to write about except my big stupid feelings, either my sorrow over the death of my cat Peanut or my shame and rage about failing on the academic job market. And whatever I produced on either of those topics was usually all choked up, either with sentimental garbage about how one special cat taught me how to love or a bunch of melodramatic whining about how stupid I’d been. I needed to open things up, I needed to think about something else. I read books about the writing life. I read Stephen King’s On Writing and Ann Lamott’s Bird by Bird. I felt better. I could look around me and see things to write. I could look up and feel inspired by airport architecture. But I lacked direction. Nothing was adding up.

At the pop culture conference in Calgary, I went to a panel about graffiti. I can’t remember much about any of the projects presented, but I do remember being struck, hard, by the idea that people often use graffiti as a way to inhabit a space, if only for the time it takes to tag a stop sign. It made me think about what can happen when we’re mindful about being where we are (with or without spray paint.)

It’s funny, because I have no interest in graffiti-ing anything, and though I’ll occasionally stop and take notice of a particularly vivid or weird piece of graffiti, more often than not it just joins the mass of visual city noise. But this panel on graffiti helped me to articulate something that I’d only been intuiting since I started casting around for a writing target: as I walk across the Smoot Bridge, or past the S-Curved steps on my way to Davis, or along the Mystic to the library, as I look up and across the many rooftops that jump out in sharp relief against the bright blue sky, I dig into where I am and I find sources for things I might say. Where I live can be a writing target…but how to begin?

Instagram. Really. Graffiti led me to Instagram, a platform I had avoided and scoffed at ever since I learned of its existence. Just eat your food, people! Come on! But, sitting in that Sheraton conference room, taking in the array of graffiti images captured in cities, small towns, and on railway cars, I realized that with Instagram I could capture images of my own. I could accumulate a stylized portfolio of visuals that hit me somehow, and then maybe I could figure out how to write about them. I could even use the captions to take notes for later.

So in May, I started using Instagram.

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#medfordma

A post shared by Rebecca (@rtbhive) on May 14, 2014 at 5:24pm PDT

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#mit #metalanimals

A post shared by Rebecca (@rtbhive) on May 20, 2014 at 2:50pm PDT

https://instagram.com/p/pSMExsC07B/?taken-by=rtbhive

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Blue Duck Bakery #blueduckbakery #greenportny #northforkli #longisland #cookies

A post shared by Rebecca (@rtbhive) on Jul 19, 2014 at 10:26am PDT

I was taking pictures of everything. By November, I was ready to find a picture to write about.

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Walking and running for Iris and Lateegra; Tim won (pays to read and understand maps) #meowmile #charlesriveralleycats #eileengiffordhouse

A post shared by Rebecca (@rtbhive) on Oct 19, 2014 at 6:45pm PDT

The colors and layers of this Meow Mile pic really grabbed me, and it turned out to be a useful way to introduce the characters in my life: Tim, Iris, Lateegra, and the idea of Peanut (whose love taught me how to….yuck, you get it.) My Meow Mile was my first post, written before I really knew what this blog was going to be. What it lacks in coherence I think it makes up for in cuteness…a cheap trick, to be sure.

The point of all this: In a nutshell, winter kills the muse. My Instagram has been running on fumes for months. We’ve got a few pictures of the inside of my house, or a selfie of me in a unicorn horn (because, one must!) but otherwise, just nothing. Nothing I see makes me want to write. And the longer I go without writing, the harder it is to write. In desperation, I went back and read my earlier posts — cringed a bit, copy-edited some — and generally embarked upon a labyrinthine meta adventure, thinking about thinking about writing this blog.

— Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze

The New Grub Street

George Gissing [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

BOSTON

January 9, 2015

Grub Street

Grub Street doesn’t exist any more — as an actual street — and it hasn’t done so for well over a century. But Grub Street has, and still does, exist as a certain kind of ethos. By the time George Gissing wrote New Grub Street  in the early 1890s, “Grub Street” stood for “hack writing” — in other words, writing for pay, or writing “to get one’s bread,” as they used to say. Gissing’s novel dramatizes the cultural split between “high culture” and “mass culture” as it tells the story of two very different writers: an idealistic novelist who writes for art’s sake, with very little success, and a cynical journalist who writes for money and as the market dictates. It’s a good novel — and a great example of British naturalism — though I like The Odd Women better.

But the New Grub Street I’m talking about isn’t Gissing’s, it’s Boston’s. The ethos of this Grub Street is a little bit grubby, but the writers there don’t look at their craft as either high or mass culture. They know that it’s both.

Back in 1997, Grub Street started very small, meeting at the Brookline Booksmith. It was so small that in ’98 it moved to the founder’s living room in Somerville. In 2000 they diffused to locations in Boston, Brookline, and Cambridge, and in 2002 they centralized again in Somerville. This time they rented space in an old toilet paper factory near Union Square. According to the timeline on their website, without a GPS, they were nearly impossible to find. In 2005, they moved to downtown Boston, and in 2012 they landed in their current location, where I found them.

The Steinway building on the Common.

Swampyank at en.wikipedia [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

It’s pretty glorious. The jewel in the crown, perhaps, is the 2013 announcement that Grub Street is leading an initiative to create an official literary district in Boston. It makes sense — their new location once hosted a reading by Charles Dickens, and apparently Edgar Allan Poe was born where the Steinway building currently stands. (And not far, across the street in the common, you can see the new Edgar Allan Poe statue, commemorating the site.)

What you get from Grub Street is an array of different classes, working in all genres and at all levels, from your first personal essay, to how to get your short-stories published, to how to market your books better. And you get a community to talk with, to help you network, and most important of all, to keep you hacking away at your writing.

This past Friday, I took an all-day, Freelance 101 class, because I’d like to figure out whether it’s possible for me to take all the things I’ve learned over lo these many years in academia and share them with a public audience. And maybe get paid. The Freelance class was incredibly informative and exciting. And realistic. There’s a hell of a lot of work that goes into a freelance career, and less certainty than just about any job I can think of, including that of adjunct instructor. (As an adjunct, you’re at least sure there will be a paycheck throughout the semester!)

“Freelance” used to be two words, and it used to mean “mercenary.” Or “sell sword,” in the parlance of George R.R. Martin. One who will hack away, for pay. And indeed, like the cynical journalist in Gissing’s novel, freelance writers hack away for pay. But if pay was all they were after, any freelance you talk to will tell you they’d have gotten into some other field.

The Grub Street philosophy tells us why any of us chooses writing: “Creative writing explores and documents the human condition and creates meaning in the lives of those who practice it. We believe the act of writing can change both ourselves and the world.” And that ain’t gonna be easy.

Whether you’re writing for art or for pay, either way I say you’re a hack writer. You have to be. Writing doesn’t just happen to you because you have fine aesthetic emotions. Writing takes a tremendous amount of work. But work is too pretty a word for the way I often feel when I’m writing. It really is a matter of hacking away at something — sometimes like I’m hacking away at my own brain.

Like, with an axe.

— Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze

My Red Bike

SOMERVILLE, MA

July 2007

I never forgot how to ride a bike, but I went long enough between rides to raise the question. I hadn’t ridden since I was about fifteen years old or so; not since I learned to drive. One day Tim and I decided that I needed a bike and, as with most things, Craigslist was the place to get one. Tim took care of it, while I nervously waited at home, on the sofa, with our cat, Peanut.

Peanut and I both slouched there, gazing into the middle distance, wondering what I’d gotten myself into this time. Bikes hurt my ass. And there are way too many cars here. This bike is probably going to hurt my ass, I’m going to get distracted, and then I’m going to fall off or something and die. Better to stay here and watch Peanut take a bath.

We heard Tim’s heavy footsteps on the stairs and Peanut hopped down from the sofa to greet him.

Tim stuck his head through the half-opened door. “Come take a look!” he said, and bounded back down the stairs.

I bid Peanut adieu and followed Tim down the back steps to our entirely blacktopped “back yard.” There it was, leaning jauntily against the chainlink: a bright red Columbia Tourist with a wide leather saddle, cruiser-style upright handlebars, and chrome fenders. This was the vintage bicycle of my dreams, and I never even knew it till this moment. Tim was grinning, vibrating with excitement, almost hopping up and down. High fives and hugs, we hopped on our bikes.

The day Tim brought home my red bike coincided with Somerville Open Studios. Open Studios gave us this big bike idea in the first place. First, get me a bike. Then ride all over town, bask in its Somervilleness, look at art, and generally avoid slouching on the sofa gazing into the middle distance with Peanut.

This all went as planned, and I felt pretty damned good throughout. We were riding and running around, popping into little studios, ogling beads and glass and pretty pictures. I was totally comfortable. I rode straight, joining the flow of traffic, coexisting peacefully with the many, many cars. I sighed with relief as the breeze tousled my hair. This is living! This bike is amazing!

We rode over to Highland Street via Porter to look at a jewelry studio. Porter Street surprised me by suddenly turning into a very steep hill. My red bike went faster and faster. The wind that whipped through my hair no longer made me feel happy and free, but rather like a doomed jet plane coming in too fast.

I pumped the back brakes, recalling a story my mother once told me about slamming on her front brakes, flying over her handlebars, and smashing her face into the gravel. This cautionary tale, told to me when I was perhaps seven years old, kept me from ever using my front brakes throughout all of my bike-riding years. But now, as the back brakes squeaked and squealed, my red bike continued to gain momentum. Oh no. I quickly tapped the front breaks, and the bike jerked a bit, but continued to speed up. If you’re careful, I said to myself, you won’t fly over. Just tap them.

I alternated, back brakes, front brakes, back brakes, front brakes. Squeak, Jerk, Squawk, Jerk. “Oh…God! Oh…God!” I was slowing down, but not enough, and at the bottom of the hill was a lot of city traffic. I pumped and held each brake longer and longer, until I had them both gripped flat — Squeal, Jerk, Squeal…Squeeeal…Screeeeeeech… I was screaming right along with the screeching brakes, tears running down my face. The bike was slowing down, but my body didn’t seem to be. My hands were burning from gripping so hard. I am going to fly over these goddamned adorable cruiser-style upright handlebars. There is the bottom of the hill, there are all the many many cars. This will hurt.

But it didn’t. Both the bicycle and I came to a shrieking halt at the bottom of the hill. Tim pulled up next to me, smiling, laughing. He reached out and patted me on the back. I slowly unclenched my teeth, my shoulders, my entire body.

“I never want to do that again,” I whispered. The only thing I wanted was Peanut and the sofa.

As you might imagine, the shrieking brakes were a real red flag. Once off the road, Tim flipped the bike over and we took a closer look. The lines were totally rusted and the brakes themselves liked to stick in place. Later, we took it to the shop, and we got the news: my red bike is both unrideable and unfixable. We determined that neither Tim nor I were savvy enough to make a smart Craigslist bicycle purchase, and we bought a nice new blue-green Raleigh Venture from Park Sales and Service, near Somerville’s  Union Square (they sell bikes and sharpen ice skates, too.) This new bike came with a nice wide, cushy saddle. I have ridden it ever since.

But we still have that red bike. At the moment, it leans against the back of our house in Medford. We lock Tim’s Jamis and my Raleigh to it, and hide all three under a big green tarp. We figure for now it makes our working bikes harder to steal, should anyone ever sneak behind our house looking to steal some bikes (two years and counting, this has yet to happen.) And we have DIY bicycle dreams. It’s so damned cute, and it cost fifty bucks. We have to be able to use it for something.

Me with a bike that works–though the seat is totally wrecked. Arlington, MA, Minuteman Bike Trail

#EnoughIsEnough at the Common

BOSTON

December 4, 2014

Boston Common

It’s been a rough few weeks. No kidding.

Before Thanksgiving, we learned that Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, would not be indicted. Earlier this week, we learned that a grand jury in Staten Island, NY refused to indict an officer caught on video putting a fatal, illegal choke hold on the unarmed Eric Garner.

Police brutality has been on my radar as a scary but all-too common reality out there affecting other people who don’t look like me ever since I was about 12 years old. Put another way, it’s been something I’ve sort of ignored for almost my entire life. I have this sad, self-protective habit: I register such awful news, roll my eyes to heavens to silently decry such ignorance, and then let it all pass on by. But since the Ferguson announcement, I’ve read some things that, slowly but very surely, knocked some sense into me. And with the announcement of no indictment in the Eric Garner case, I can no longer pretend that my quirky little life is insulated from his, or Michael Brown’s, or anyone else’s.

Rather than write about this myself, I thought it better to share the essays and articles that kicked me in the ass. These folks write about what’s been happening far better than I ever could. They are the ones that pulled me out of my warm little nest in Medford and out onto the freezing cold Boston Common to march in protest — for the first time in my life — against these staggeringly common failures of justice.

A friend of mine posted Jenée Desmond-Harris’s column for the Root, “How to Deal with Friends’ Racist Reactions to Ferguson.” Before reading this I had thought it wasn’t my place to make any kind of fuss, because I have absolutely no idea what it feels like to be black in America. I’m often struck with this kind of privilege-awareness-induced aphasia. Between this piece and Mallory Ortberg’s piece for the Toast,  “Eric Garner’s Killer Won’t Be Indicted,” I was quickly convinced to get over myself.

In “Michael Brown Wasn’t a Superhuman Demon,” Slate’s Jamelle Bouie illustrates how Darren Wilson’s testimony draws heavily upon stereotypes that have been used to justify the dehumanization of African Americans for well over a century. Bouie draws clear connections between Wilson’s self-justifications and the deep-seated, cultural fear of black people, which has become integral to the rhetoric surrounding police brutality cases. (After the Eric Garner decision, Bouie published “Shoot First,” his take-down of police departments’ pervasive use of rapid deadly force.)

Finally, please read “The Intellectual Condescension of White Liberals” by Rev. Dr. Victoria Weinstein (published on her blog, PeaceBang.) She is rough on the white liberal. If you are one yourself, try not to take it personally, and instead try to understand: there really isn’t a good reason for what’s been happening. The justice system does not work the same for everyone. This makes me very angry. It is good to be very angry about this. Let’s get angry and do something.

The following are my blurry pictures from #EnoughIsEnough, the action organized by We Are the Ones. This was part of a larger event that marched on Christmas Tree Lightings in cities all over the country (including the really fancy one at Rockefeller Center.) In Boston, everyone met at the Boylston T stop, across from the big Loews movie theater. Over 4,000 protesters then marched up Boylston Street (stopping traffic), across the common (surrounding the Christmas Tree Lighting), and over to the State House. Though I had to go home early, the march went on pretty much all night. Check out FergusonAction.com to sign up for notifications about things you can do in your town.

Big Crowd, little tree

The State House

A Word from Hubway

Hubway saw Tim’s Hubway Adventure through Twitter and shed some light on a few mysteries…Thanks, Hubway! (Also note what I think is Boston Twitter spam from Dara brennan…as soon as I tagged the tweet with Boston, I won some kind of lottery…)

Tim’s Hubway Adventure

MEDFORD, SOMERVILLE, CAMBRIDGE, BOSTON

and back again

Hubway bike sharing

Tim’s bicycle has a broken axle. He bought it when he was 23, when he was living in New Brunswick, New Jersey back in the spring of 2000. The bicycle before that was purchased the previous summer, in Delaware. It traveled with him–first to Richmond, Virginia, where he stayed for one month in late summer ’99, then to New Brunswick, where he stayed a bit longer, for basically the whole ’99-2000 school year. Somewhere in there, Tim left that bicycle under a tree in the side yard of the blue split-level colonial where he lived with five other twenty-somethings. The bike got stolen. He replaced it with a black Jamis, which he has ridden ever since — until the day he crossed the railroad tracks near Kendall Square in Cambridge and busted the axle.

Though Tim is a freelance editor today, he used to be a math teacher, and before that he worked raising money for environmental causes. After graduating from college, Tim took a job as canvas director for the Fund for Public Interest Research. He would travel from town to town setting up canvas offices and deploying teams of college students to knock on doors, raising money for things like Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife and Human Rights Campaign. He worked for the Massachusetts bottle bill his first summer (a new version of which just failed…again). He had a big win the year his bike was stolen: he helped protect about 90 million acres of national forests from the logging industry.

Tim is tall and thin with light, wavy brown hair, big blue eyes, and a smile that digs deep into both cheeks. Though he looked younger than most of the college students on his team, for as long as he was in town he was an effective manager, running things with an air of good humored sincerity.

His work involved a lot of hustle and bustle, but he also spent a lot of time alone. When the kids were canvasing, Tim would canvas too, walking miles all alone, knocking on doors, sometimes getting donations, sometimes not. On these jobs, there was plenty of time to think — he would, for example, theorize the correlation between the outward appearance of a house, the likelihood of donation, and if they gave, how much. He once told me about how on his rare nights off in West Hartford, he’d stop at a nearby used bookstore, buy a paperback and read the whole thing in a night. This reminded me of the time he fell asleep under a tree near Spy Pond (Arlington, MA) while reading Kafka’s short stories. A solitary but contented man.

On our second date, in the spring of 2005, I saw him crumple his water bottle up into a little ball and stick it in his pocket to recycle at home. I thought that was so weird, I fell in love a little. I soon learned, Tim does not just throw things away. His bike is a prime example. A couple of years ago, when we brought our bikes in for their annual April checkup, Tim and the bike guy shared a little moment, laughing at how long the old Jamis had been hanging on. A few years before that, Tim noticed with chagrin that someone had stolen his bike seat and replaced it with a lesser model. This seat tips up and down and is generally a pain in the ass. I have suggested that he go buy himself a proper seat at least once a year for the last eight years. “Eh…it’s fine,” he says. “Now it’s rusted in place!”

But, this past August, the axle broke. The Jamis is currently unrideable. Fortunately, Hubway exists, and it is right in line with Tim’s sensibilities. It’s a bike-sharing program with bike stations all over the greater Boston area. There are annual and monthly memberships, or you can get a 24 or 72 hour pass — you swipe your credit card at the Hubway kiosk and you can ride as many times as you want within the time-frame you select. You just can’t go over 30 minutes a ride.

The day before I wrote Smoot Bridge, I got the urge to ride my bike over there. I used to ride across the bridge every day, but it had been years and I wanted to recapture the feeling. For a tense moment, we thought I would have to do this alone…the Jamis’s axle is broken, after all. But then we remembered Hubway. Tim decided to do the 24 hour pass. If he could switch bikes in under 30 minutes, he could get away with paying only $6. Challenge accepted.

We walked from our house to the Tufts Hubway station and grabbed the first bike. Being the first one, this transaction took the longest. We rode from Tufts, down to Mass Ave, and through Harvard Square. We heard the noontime bells ringing, and Tim realized he only had 7 minutes to return his first bicycle. I was totally oblivious to this. He charged up Mount Auburn and Mass Ave, on the lookout for any sign of Hubway. He found a station at the Central Square Post Office, with only a couple minutes to spare.

He had a little trouble with this one, because the original 30 minutes wasn’t up yet. For a second, he thought he’d misread the website and he’d be stuck bikeless in Central Square. Once the 30th minute arrived, he tried again and was immediately given his next bike. He figures either the time was an issue, or the kiosk needs a couple of minutes to recognize that the bike is back. (here’s a word from Hubway about what happened.)

We kept riding down Mass Ave, across the Smoot Bridge, where I stopped to take some pictures for the blog. Tim didn’t say anything, but he knew the pictures were going to make it difficult to get to another Hubway station in time. He thought he could make it once we got going across the bridge, but, as he rode out to the patch of Esplanade across from the Lagoon, he realized that I had disappeared.

In fact, I had stopped as soon as I got down to the Esplanade from the bridge. The sailboats were looking perfect and I wanted a picture. I tried to call after him, but he was way out of earshot. Once we met back up, everything was swell until, on the foot bridge at Mass General, Tim realized he had 2 minutes to find a Hubway station. I was in mid-sentence when he realized this. “Time’s almost up! Gotta go! Gotta go!”

Tim’s Hubway Adventure was truly excellent. He may try it again some time, but he wishes we had a station closer to our house. We both feel lucky to live somewhere with a service like this, but we both love our own bikes. I asked him what he wanted to to do about his, fully expecting that at long last he would agree to replace it with a new bike. I don’t know what I was thinking. The Jamis isn’t going anywhere.

–Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze

Hubway Adventure Route!

Tim on a bike path in Wales, holding bikes that look exactly like ours…yet which are not.

Smoot Bridge

CAMBRIDGE AND BOSTON

It stretches across the Charles River, between the MIT section of Memorial Drive and Beacon Street in Back Bay. A steel haunched girder bridge, its design is less ostentatious than the Zakim and less stately than the Longfellow. Still, it is sleek and purposeful as it crosses the longest distance of any Charles River bridge. It is 659.82 meters, or 2,164.8 feet, or 364.4 smoots long. Plus or minus one ear.

Smoot tells his story in The Journal of the Institute for Hacks, Tomfoolery & Pranks at MIT

The non-standard unit of measure known as “the smoot” is equal to five feet and seven inches, or about 1.70 meters. This was the length — or, I should say, height — of one Oliver Smoot in October, 1958. This Smoot was a pledge that year for the MIT chapter of Lambda Chi Alpha. Having become frustrated with the seemingly endless trek across the bridge, his pledgemaster declared that the bridge should be measured and demarcated in pledge-lengths. Oliver Smoot was chosen both for his diminutive stature and for the sound of his name: “the name sounded ‘scientific,’ like ‘meter’ or ‘watt,'” reports MIT Newsoffice Editor, Susan Curran in her salute to Smoot.

And lo, Oliver Smoot was laid down “end over end,” and the long walk from Boston to MIT was measured. Ever since, for over fifty years, the pledges of MIT’s Lambda Chi Alpha chapter repaint. Over the years, the smoots became such a fixture in the culture of Boston and Cambridge that when the superstructure of the bridge was renovated in the 1980s, the Cambridge Police department asked the fraternity to come and repaint the markers. You see, smoots had become useful in reporting the precise location of accidents. During renovations, officials even agreed to “score the sidewalk at 5-foot-7 Smoot intervals instead of the usual six-foot ones.” I have to look for that, next time I walk across.

the total distance, recently repainted; also, note the scoring of the concrete.

Plus or minus an ear. If you look at the total-distance marker now, it only says “+ 1 EAR,” but according to Robert Tavener, in his Smoot’s Ear: The Measure of Humanity (Yale University Press, 2007), the original measure of “plus or minus” signifies the MIT frat’s choice to build-in error, to express the uncertainty of measurement, and to recognize the fallibility “ever-present in human affairs” (xvi). This care for precision through recognition of uncertainty embodies something so important about science — the findings of each new study don’t increase certainty, but rather they open up new questions, new avenues in the pursuit of truth.

I’m no scientist, but I’ve dedicated the better part of my life to asking questions and looking for the many forms truth. Multiplicity, uncertainty and the slipperiness of meaning are some of my favorite things to think about. But a head full of things like that can soon feel far too full. Over the last 10 years, I’ve found respite from thinking and feeling too much on the long, straight stretch of bridge across the Charles.

For five years, when I lived near the Somerville-Cambridge line, I’d ride my blue-green Raleigh to work. I’d ride down the bike lane on Hampshire Street, along the Vassar Street path (past Frank Gehry’s Stata Center), down Mass Ave, across the Smoot Bridge, into the rush of Back Bay traffic, and over to Northeastern University to teach writing and work on my Ph.D. In graduate school, a lot feels uncertain, a lot of the time. On top of that, I was settling into a new marriage and trying to forgive my parents for being fallible human beings. When describing the dark brown muck of my worldview to my therapist one day, I realized that the only relief I felt from an otherwise constant state of anxious depression came to me as I rode my bike across the Smoot Bridge. I have since expanded my Smoot Bridge feeling; the dark brown muck has receded.

Over the river, the world opens up; the blue of the sky, the smell of the water, the sun, the sailboats, the quiet. Riding or walking, I often shift into automaticity, fading into and out of awareness of my movements. Nice and long, on the bridge you can forget yourself, then remember again, and maybe, once across, see things a little differently than you did on the other side.

–Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze

featured photo: friend and colleague Lana Cook’s “Sunset of Yarn.” A good walk to work.

PS: In 2011, “smoot” was added to the fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary.

Also, check out this Panorama from the bridge in winter, at Wikimedia Commons.

Blue Skies and Bolton Springs in October

BOLTON, MA

and elsewhere

Mid-October, 2014

Since I moved to Massachusetts ten years ago, many of the people who cross my path bemoan the encroaching darkness of October. The sky is overcast more frequently in the day, and the sun goes down in the six o’clock hour. This decrease in vitamin D absorption has an immediate, negative effect on a number of people I know. I’m not immune to it; come November, I’m right there with them. But I never get that way in October.

I am from a place in Ohio so cloudy that during World War II the US military created a munitions hub there because the density of cloud coverage made it harder to bomb. If I’m honest, I heard the cloud-coverage story from my sixth-grade home-room teacher, and it might not be 100% true. The point is, I’m from a cloudy place. Back in 2002, on the 45 minute drive to my masters program at Kent State from my apartment in Newton Falls, Ohio (which is a stone’s throw from the WWII munitions hub), I remember pondering the beauty of the autumn, periwinkle sky. Solid, steely gray, but with a touch of purple. Beautiful! When you live under this much cloud coverage, you take your beauty where you find it.

Out on the town with my partner, Tim, on a gorgeous, cloudless Boston day, I am often heard to grumble, “Too sunny.” This entertains him to no end. It has taken me all of the ten years that I’ve lived here to learn to appreciate all the bright blue sunny days. (I reveled in the sunshine during My Meow Mile, for example.) The bright, blue days are fewer in October, but they do exist. (And in November, too. I’m missing out on some serious sunshine as we speak.) If we see blue in my part of Ohio, its brightness is always set off by the equally bright whiteness of the cumulus cloud cover. Though my hometown is always going to be cloudier, in October both places have their share of sunny and cloudy days.

In Ohio, I associate October with hayrides, harvest festivals, and bonfires. I used to go to the White House Fruit Farm Festival every year with my Grandma and Papa; there were at least three different kinds of horse-drawn wagons or buggies you could ride, plus games and a weenie roast over a huge bonfire. Overcast or sunny, we could count on the horses, hay, manure, orchards, apple cider, blueberry doughnuts, huge ice cream cones, and blackened hot dogs you cooked yourself at the end of a long stick. You can’t build a fire like that in Massachusetts, and I looked everywhere for a hayride my first autumn here and came up empty. For a long time here, October meant nothing more to me than another month I hadn’t finished my Ph.D. I’d roll my eyes at the facebook posts of apple picking and pumpkin patches, then return to my life inside microsoft word.

But this October, before an evening with Tim’s family to celebrate our oldest nephew’s birthday, we had ourselves an autumn time in his hometown. Bolton Spring Farms has orchards for your apple picking, a farm stand, and a gift shop filled with good New England country stuff.

It was really overcast that day; as we drank our hot apple cider and ate our cider doughnuts at the picnic tables outside, it even started to rain. It was great.

Cute Connection: collecting teddy bears in different outfits is a family tradition.

My father does not drink, but he collects maple syrup. He goes maple-syrup-tasting; they give you little shots of different syrups to compare. I do not know if tiny waffles or pancakes accompany these shots…are they just doing syrup shooters?

spooky squash.

The Library

MEDFORD, MA

The Medford Public Library, mid-March 2014

High Street, near Medford Square

The 94 bus route to Medford Square is more circuitous than I had originally thought.

“If I want to go straight to the library from Davis, what’s the best way to go?”

“Well, the 94 goes right by there.”

Indeed, but had I gotten off at my house and walked, I would have been there and home already. I’d only ever gone to the library on a whim, never on a mission. Stephen King’s On Writing had come in and they were holding it for me. I had to get to the library. As soon as possible.

Not a direct route.

Now, Stephen King’s On Writing was certainly old news to most by this point in time. It was March 2014. On Writing was published in 2000, not long after King was struck from behind by a light blue Dodge mini van on one of his many walks along Route 5 up near Bangor, Maine. By the time I got around to caring (and I mean, seriously caring…a lot) about On Writing, King had considered and decided against retirement, and published something like sixteen more novels.

I started reading King in 1992, when I was 13 — Carrie, of course — then powered through Christine, It, The Shining, The Dark Half, ‘Salem’s Lot, Pet Sematary, Firestarter, and finally stopped with Needful Things somewhere around 1999. I rekindled things for a minute with The Stand in 2003; I enjoyed it, but King and I had basically gone our separate ways in the late 90s. I can’t remember why, exactly. In 2002, a classmate brought in an excerpt from the “Toolbox” section of On Writing to share with our freshman comp. teaching practicum at Kent State University. This may have prompted me to take a look at The Stand, but on the whole I was focused on books by people named Faulkner, Woolf, Eliot, and I stayed that way until somewhere around March 2014. Except it was around then that I realized I had this Ph.D. in literature and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d just read a book. And it was killing me.

Back in the wintertime, I started taking some creative writing classes as a means to shake off the tortured scholarly prose and get back to where I once belonged. To my dismay, the only things I had to write about were my daily waves of post-Ph.D. bitterness and how I felt about my recently deceased cat. These feelings were intense, and my aphasia on any other topic only made things worse. I felt like an exposed nerve. My writing teacher liked to quip, “There are only so many human emotions,” to help us build confidence in our writing. I created my own version of this: “There are only so many human emotions. And I am having all of them. Right now.” It wasn’t until I finally took a walk one Saturday morning over to the Library that I started to settle down.

The writing teacher asked us to make resolutions about the progress we’d make in the next 30 days. Other people planned their memoir projects. I vowed to start reading again. Just reading. At home, I surveyed my walls of books. Here are the Victorian and modernist novels I’ve started but never finished. Here are the graphic novels I’ve never even opened. Here are shelves upon shelves of literary criticism and theory I’ve been trying to shove whole into my head. I have so many books. I couldn’t read any of them. That Saturday, I walked down Winthrop Street, darted across the roundabout at High Street, and made my way to the Summer Reading section of the Medford Public Library.

the Library in early November

It’s a mid-century municipal building. It reminds me very much of the public library next to my old middle school in Austintown, Ohio, where as a little kid I would check out bags full of books, and as a big kid I would sheepishly explore the “Young Adult” spinner rack. (Back in the early 1990s, “Young Adult” didn’t mean wizards and sparkling vampires; it meant over-the-pants makeout sessions and teen angst!) The Medford Public Library is not fancy. It is not the flagship branch of the Minuteman Library Network. But they have shelves upon shelves of fiction and nonfiction. You can sit down and read the paper at old, expansive tables. You can peruse a dozen spinner racks of ancient paperbacks. And if they don’t have something (and let’s face it, while they have a lot, they don’t have it all) you can order it from the Minuteman Network. It’s a twenty-minute walk from my house, and I love it.

On that first visit in February, I felt I had forgotten how to use a public library (though now I realize that the point is that you can use it however you want.) I walked all around the place before I settled on Summer Reading. I wanted to read something completely different from what I had been reading. Nothing too fancy, but still something solid and good. Good librarians spent time and thought compiling this collection for the local school kids, and I threw myself upon their goodness and expertise. I picked up and put down several different books before deciding on Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding. I went home and gobbled those up in a matter of days. Then, I read seven books in a month. I’m still going strong.

Sometime in late February or early March, I sat down at one of the old PCs the library has for looking up books in the catalog. I wanted to know what they had on writing. In particular, I wanted On Writing. I can’t tell you why, but the book had acquired an aura…I felt it held important secrets or something. I don’t know, I just really wanted to read it. No dice, though. Not today. Medford doesn’t carry it. Denied instant gratification, I put my order in. A few days later, I got the email while I was at work. My mission: reach the Library before closing time! To the 94 bus!

Well, we know how that went, but I did get there before closing time. Book in hand and safely across High Street, I began reading immediately. I read King’s three forewords (yes, there are three forewords) as I took the footbridge over the Mystic from Shipyard Way to Route 16. As I walked down South Street toward Winthrop, I read King’s earliest memory of being stung in the ear by a wasp while he was playing “strong man” in his Aunt and Uncle’s garage. So many of his novels start with similar moments of childhood vulnerability. This one isn’t a scary story, but his voice is the same to me, so familiar. The voice of my old friend who regularly scared me so bad that I had to hide his books under my bed for days at a time.

And, it seems, we are back.

–Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze

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