A Rolling Crone

What She Left When She Left for College

2012-01-27T16:33:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I was sorting out my books (as part of my New Year’s resolution to de-hoard my life) when I came across a very special book that I had completely forgotten about. It was a fabric-covered journal filled with about 50 hand-written pages composed by daughter Eleni when she was 17 years old—right before she went off to college. The entries on each page were brief, and often broken up into lines like free verse. The first page read:

This book belongs to Joan,

The most influential woman in my life.

So that when I’m in college,

You can look at a page a day.

And it will be as if I’m still here

In my peach jumper.

Naturally I sat down and read it through, laughing and crying as I went. I have a notoriously bad memory, and Eleni has a scarily good one. She’ll say things like, “Remember three years ago when we were walking on Fifth Avenue and you were wearing your navy pants suit and I was wearing….”

So I read through this little volume of memories, most of which had floated out of my skull, and I thought what a beautiful thing it was for a teenager to write something like this as a farewell to her mother before setting off into life.

And now, two decades later, Eleni is a married lady with a five-month-old daughter. I hope when Amalía grows up and goes off to college that she’ll take the time to write a journal like this one to her mother, to say, “I love you” and “Thanks for the memories.”

Eleni wrote that journal 20 years ago, and even then her writing talent, eye for detail and sense of humor were evident on every page. Now she’s about to publish her second book and first novel “Other Waters” on Valentine’s Day. In the journal she gave me, Eleni was recalling golden moments when we travelled, often just the two of us, the ultimate tourists, on annual trips. We had wonderful adventures, many of which would be forgotten if she didn’t write them down. Below are some of my favorites.

Page 1. Remember before I was born how you wanted a girl? And you only drank out of the girl mug, and Grandma transferred your coffee from the horse mug to the girl mug. And didn’t laugh…So you went to the hospital Monday night, because your appointment for a Caesarian was on Tuesday, even though Constantinople fell on a Tuesday.

At 8:15 a.m. on Tuesday, October 8^th they wheeled you in and knocked you out. Ten minutes later you had a baby girl, perfectly unsquished. And you asked Daddy what she looked like and he said, “Me”, meaning him. And that was the beginning of as beautiful friendship.

Page 2. Remember that day in the early eighties when we went to Child’s World and a strange man stopped you and said, “My God – you’ve got the best-looking pair of legs I’ve ever seen on a woman” Remember that? I thought so.

Page 3. Remember our long drives to Old Sturbridge Village when we’d listen to Les Misérables, Fun Rock and Janis Joplin, and stop and get gas and I’d have my bonnet on. Just like Thelma and Louise.

Page 7. Remember the man who pulled me out of the audience to folk dance with him in Greece. All the Japanese folks took pictures and he told me I was beautiful.

Remember the man on Spetses who hoped you’d be his Shirley Valentine?

Page 8. In fourth grade I did a report on Massasoit and you colored in all the feathers on his headdress for me. Thanks.

Page 9. Remember that night in the apartment in Kolonaki when you and Marina talked to me at 3 a.m. because the state of the world upset me so much. I got over it. I always do!

Page 12. The first time I went to Greece alone with Daddy you were sure the plane would crash and it didn’t. So relax. I repeat. We are NOT having a crisis!

Page 16. Remember New Orleans:

The Jazz Funeral

Marie Laveau

Valentine’s Day

Jackson Square

Beignets – Le Café du Monde

The Fortune Teller

Jambalaya

Gumbo

Pecan Pralines

The Moonwalk

Shalom Y’all

Crawfish

The Farmer’s market

The Beauregard – Keyes house

Cajun cooking with Justin Wilson

Page 17. Remember Charleston

You driving a rental car as a stranger in a strange land.

The marketplace

Poogan’s porch—one of the several times in our lives I’ve cried at dinner, although I was happy that night.

Tin Pan Alley

The boy in a military school uniform with his suspenders hanging down, feeding doves on the battery with his girlfriend.

Page 23. Remember my sixteenth birthday party? You made it a highlight of my life. Thanks.

Page 24. You introduced me to

Fitzgerald

Upstairs Downstairs

Gone with the Wind

Chipped Beef

Soufflés

Appreciating photography

Peking Duck

Flea Markets

People magazine

Page 29. Remember my graduation from kindergarten? I cried at the rehearsal. [Because she didn’t want to leave.]

Page 31.Together we’ve climbed to Prophet Elias, braved the Dreaded Palomidi, scaled Monemvassia, waterskied and ridden Space Mountain. We’re unstoppable.

Page 32. Everyone you come in contact with, from the lady at the bank to Al, loves seeing you because you make them feel important and brighten their day. You think you don’t have friends, but you have them all over.

Page 33. How many fifty-one year old women can say they refused Dan Quayle’s invitation to dinner? You can.

Page 35. You gave me my first memory book, fine lingerie and perfume. What an honour.

Page 37. Things I got from you:

Blue eyes

A small mouth (no X-rays)

An appreciation of 5 p.m. Sunday afternoon drives, photographs and doors.

A twinkle in my eye.

Page 39. Remember when I was in 8^th grade, we had a snow day on your birthday and we made a cake and took pictures and God smiled.

Page 41. You are one of the few people who have met the Beatles. Therefore you will always have a place in Mohan’s heart. John and Yoko were in their white stage at the time.

Page 42. Remember our trip to the Dakota with Betsy? The doorman was from Limerick and feared John was forgotten. But the next day in Strawberry Fields, a young blonde mother was telling her son: “There was a man called John Lennon and he was part of a group called the Beatles. He was killed nine years ago today. That’s why all these people are here.” So the legend continues.

Crone of the Week: Hollywood Pioneer Dies at 111

2012-01-16T15:47:00.000-05:00

University Press of Kentucky

It’s been a long time since I’ve picked a Crone of the Week, but now that it’s awards season, the honor had to be revived and the statuette dusted off for silent-era script writer Frederica Sago Maas, who died on Jan 5 at the incredible age of 111. (She was the 44^th oldest verified person in the world.)

San Diego Union Tribune

The New York Times’ obituary for her begins: “She told of Hollywood moguls chasing naked would-be starlets, the women shrieking with laughter. She recounted how Joan Crawford, new to the movies, relied on her to pick clothes. Almost obsessively, she complained about how many of her story ideas and scripts were stolen and credited to others.“

In the 1920’s, in Hollywood, Frederica fumed as her writing and ideas were attributed to others. That’s what happened to women writers in those days. In New York in the 1960’s I often had the same experience. In fact, when I went to Time-Life headquarters to apply for a job with one of their magazines, armed with my Master’s in Journalism and my Phi Beta Kappa key, the (female) interviewer told me—“if you really want to write, don’t apply here, because women can never become writers at Time-Life, only researchers.”

But Frederica Sagor Maas found a good way to get back at those people who stole her writing—she outlived them all and recorded her Hollywood stories in a scathing memoir in 1999 when she was 99 years old! “I can get my payback now,” she told an interviewer. “I’m alive and thriving and, well, you S.O.B.s are all below.”

Frederica Sagor Maas was born on July 6, 1900 in Manhattan to Jewish immigrants from Russia. (Her mother supported the family as a midwife.) She studied journalism at Columbia (as did I), worked as a copy girl for the New York Globe, then became a story editor at Universal Pictures’ New York office. In 1924, she moved to Hollywood and was signed to a three-year contract with MGM, where she wrote screenplays, including a hit film for Clara Bow.

Frederica married a fellow screenwriter, Ernest Maas, in 1927. The couple lost $10,000 in the 1929 stock market crash and then found all their screenplays rejected. They were also investigated by the FBI for subscribing to Communist publications. They struggled to find work as writers’ representatives and then writing for political campaigns. In despair, in 1950, the couple decided to commit suicide and drove to a hilltop where they planned to asphyxiate themselves with carbon dioxide from their car. But they suddenly changed their minds, clutching each other in tears and turning off the ignition before it was too late.

In her autobiography, “The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Early Hollywood”, Frederica tells stories about early Hollywood stars like Clara Bow, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks. She is particularly hard on her old studio bosses, whom she portrayed as “amoral debauchers”

Her husband died of Parkinson’s disease in 1986 at 94 years old. Frederica got a job as a typist in an insurance agency by lying about her age. Then, in 1999, she wrote her autobiography, which is now a standard reference for early Hollywood history. The couple never had children and Frederica died with no immediate survivors.

The New York Times obituary ends: “As for movies, Mrs. Maas stopped going. “I think the product they’re making today,” she said in 1999, “Is even worse than the product we made in the early days.”

Resolution: De-Hoard My Life

2012-01-11T12:29:00.000-05:00

This image is from freedomcolours.net

My name is Joan and I am a hoarder.

Both my parents had what I, a layperson--but an expert on those two--would diagnose as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (although we didn’t call it that in the olden days.) My mother would stack neatly ironed handkerchiefs in a bureau drawer. My father would choose one every day for his breast pocket, and if I simply opened that drawer and looked in, my father would soon say, “Who opened my handkerchief drawer?”

My mother hated it when my father would eat a banana. She’d insist that he take the peel outside to the garbage pail—even if it was midnight during a blizzard. God forbid he should put it in the kitchen trash and “smell up the whole house”! If the garbage man came late to pick up the refuse, my parents would be peering out the curtain, fraught with concern.

I realize that my life-long messiness and hoarding is the flip side of that OCD.

We live in a 300-year-old house in a New England village with a vast basement that looks like a wine cellar with rough stone walls. That cellar used to be filled with trunks and storage boxes from my entire life, and everywhere I went, the guilty knowledge of that cellar was an albatross hanging around my neck. But then one day the basement flooded—an act of God—and we had to rent a dumpster and throw everything out. It was agonizing to open a trunk and see the water-soaked portraits of my parents that I drew when I was a teen-ager, not to mention all my high school souvenirs, letters home from camp, term papers that got an A+--but it all had to go and I felt better—lighter—afterwards. Now the cellar holds only mousetraps, Christmas decorations and a few bottles of stored wine.

It was an A-ha moment, as Oprah would say. And if only that were the end of my story. But no. You see, there’s our attic, filled with household account books going back to the 1970’s and clothes that I couldn’t bear to throw away and all my daughters’ dance recital costumes.

Plus, I have way, way too many books shelved in three different rooms—art and photography books in the studio, hardback books and family photo albums in the library, and paperback books on shelves in my son’s room. (On a trip back he expressed concern that the tall bookcase holding the old New Yorkers and paperbacks was sagging and might fall over and kill him in his sleep.)

In our own bedroom is a low table made of a glass-topped display case that holds some of my daguerreotypes and ambrotypes – part of just one of my collections. (Don’t ask how many “collections” I have!) Coming back from a trip to Mexico some years ago, I put my Mexican photographs and a pristine new photo album on top of the table, thinking I could put the photos in the album one day while watching television. Now, of course, you can’t even see the daguerreotypes in the case underneath all the un-organized travel photos.

I realize that there is a whole spate of reality shows about hoarders on TV these days, no doubt with useful advice for people with my problem, and some helpful therapy thrown in--but I would never watch one. It’s too terrifying to think about those pitiful people huddled among piles of newspapers and trash until they’re crushed to death by their belongings and no one notices until the neighbors complain about an unpleasant odor in the hall. And it's even more terrifying to think that I am one of them! Besides, I'm less interested in the why of hoarding--what makes us do it--than I am in the what now--how do I undo it?

Over the holidays, I announced that my New Year’s resolution was to de-hoard my life. When I stated my resolution at our New Year’s day dinner, my daughter, Marina, was thrilled. “Write it down!” she cried. “Make a list of what you’ll do every day. I just wish I could quit my job and come home and help you do it.”

(Marina is incredibly neat and clean and organized. Once when she moved into a house in Los Angeles with four other people, she said to me over the phone “I’m having the best day. I’ve spent the whole weekend cleaning the bathroom, which has never been cleaned before.” On another weekend, when everyone was out, she spent the day cleaning the kitchen and alphabetizing the spices. I can hear my parents laughing in the Great Beyond.)

I’m sorry that Marina’s not around to help me with my resolution. It’s going a little slower than I thought, one step forward, two steps back. I’ve finished the pile of papers and files next to the computer, but in doing so discovered a whole cache of staples, ink cassettes and people’s business cards that need to be alphabetized into a Rolodex. Next project is my vanity and the nearby wicker stand filled with a lifetime of half-used cosmetics, lipsticks and creams.

(In my defense—when you’re almost 71 years old, you’ve had a lot of opportunity to “collect” such things, and daughter Eleni used to be a magazine beauty editor—which means free cosmetics.)

After the cache of makeup by the vanity I’ll move on to the travel photos on the bedside table. Not to put them into albums, but to stash them into those decorative shoe-box-sized boxes with room for labels like “Veracruz—2008”. And I am going to take a box of books every week and donate them to the local library, which sells them at book sales several times a year.

By spring I may have moved well into the Studio, with all its paintings, prints and art supplies. And by New Year’s Eve next year, if all goes well, I hope to have lost…not those persistent ten pounds around my middle, but two tons of junk.

God grant me the serenity to reorganize the things I need, the courage to toss the things I don't, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Wish me luck!

Amalía and the Jumper Chair

2012-01-04T19:29:00.000-05:00

Amalía went to Nicaragua for Christmas. Everybody in Nicaragua loved and adored her and picked her up and carried her. Nobody put her down for two weeks. Amalía smiled at everybody, even the Santa Claus in the department store.

She went to a beauty salon where her bangs were cut. Her Abuela Carmen held her in the barber’s chair so she wouldn’t wiggle.

Amalía loved her haircut.

After all the excitement and attention in Nicaragua, Amalía came home to Miami Beach. There she found a new jumper chair. It had as many bells and whistles as a three-ring circus, but when her Mommy put her in it, she was not happy. Amalía wasn’t interested in all the toys and rattles.

She sat in her new jumper chair and gave her Mommy a plaintive, pitiful look that said, “Why am I stuck here like a prisoner in solitary confinement? I want somebody to PICK ME UP.”

In the end, Amalía’s Mommy picked her up and put her in her red stroller. Amalía was happy again, because she knew she was going outside for a walk on Lincoln Road. Soon she’d be surrounded by all her fans making a big fuss over her—the waiters in the Italian restaurant, the ladies in the supermarket, the policemen, the boys on their skateboards. Amalía likes being a super star.

Happy New Year...You’ve been Hacked!

2011-12-30T10:37:00.002-05:00

On Wednesday, at 7:00 a.m., a phone call from my niece woke me up. “Are you planning a trip to Scotland?” she asked.

It took me a while to digest this question, but I soon learned that my niece—and evidently a large number of contacts from my Yahoo mail account, had received the following e-mail from “me”, sent at 4:06 in the morning. (I received it too. So did my doctors’ offices and my Pilates instructors.) The subject line read: “It’s Urgent, Please Respond”.

The text read:

It's me, Joan. I really don't mean to inconvenience you right now, I made a trip to Scotland and I misplaced my passport and credit cards. I know this may sound odd, but it all happened very fast. I've been to the embassy, they're willing to help, but I'm short of funds to pay for my passport fees and other miscellaneous expenses. Please can you lend me $900? I'll pay back, as soon as I get home.

Please respond as soon as you get this message, so I can forward you my details to send funds to me. I don't have a phone to speak with you right now.

I await your response

Joan Gage

When I opened my computer, I saw that many friends and e-mail acquaintances –especially those who lived in Europe—had already e-mailed me with subject lines like: “You’ve been hacked”. I got more phone calls and a whole lot of e-mails from U.S-situated acquaintances as the country woke up.

In the past I had received very similar e-mails when some friends were hacked—but I think it used to say that they were stranded in London and needed $900. (Is there even a U.S. Embassy in Scotland? I wondered. )

So I, and most of my contacts, knew immediately that this was a hacker pretending to be me. And most of my friends (and I) realized that the return address he was writing from was identical to my e-mail address except for one letter missing (His e-mail address read “Joan Gag” instead of “Joan Gage.”)

I immediately did what Yahoo Help advised—changed the password to my account. I also managed to find under “Yahoo Help” a place where I could detail my problem to “Yahoo Customer Care”. I was given an “incident number” and told that Yahoo would get back to me within 24 hours.

But it’s been over 48 hours now and I still haven’t heard from them.

Since I am, as my blog says, a Crone—over seventy last time I looked—the mind and idiosyncrasies of a computer are a foreign language to me. Whenever I have a tech problem I look for a member of a younger generation.

First I called a friend who had been hacked with the same message (but allegedly stranded in London, although I knew she hadn’t left Massachusetts.)

She told me she immediately changed her password, but soon realized this wasn’t enough. Eventually she had to close down her Yahoo account completely, switching to G-Mail.

A college-age relative, who seemed very computer-savvy, told me that I’d have to immediately change every password I had and probably have to lose the Yahoo account as well.

My daughter Marina, who was visiting for the holidays, exclaimed in horror when she saw that my Yahoo account had over 8,000 stored e-mails. “Don’t you ever delete them?” she asked.

Well I do, but these e-mails—going back to 2008—allow me to contact, say, a fellow vintage-photographs collector in Europe whom I long ago communicated with –thanks to the Yahoo Search Mail function-- by simply typing “daguerreotype” into the search box. Yahoo knows the e-mail addresses for all my friends, if I just type in their first name—so of course I’d never written all those e-mail addresses down. While gathering biographies from my Minnesota classmates for the 50-year High School Reunion book in 2009, I relied completely on my Yahoo account’s ability to store e-mail addresses. Now I had to say good-bye to all this information. Would I ever get those addresses back?

My daughter and I tried to find a list of my contacts on my Yahoo account before closing it down, but Yahoo listed only 15 contacts for me. One of my European correspondents suggested that the hacker must have “wiped out” most of my contacts.

I wonder why my hacker went to all this trouble. Does he ever find people naïve enough to think they must immediately send him $900 to save me from my plight in Scotland?

I suspect that the door used to get into my Yahoo account may have been my Facebook account. My computer teacher, artist Andy Fish, closed down his Facebook account long ago, saying that it brought him so much spam. But I don’t want to lose my Facebook account as well as my Yahoo account—it’s the only way I can stay in touch with far-flung friends and my kids’ generation.

Another friend thinks my Linked-in account may be the vulnerable spot.

When I think of how many times I’ve given my Yahoo address as the way for a new acquaintance to reach me, I shudder. I’ll have to get new business cards printed. I’ll have to inform the various airlines, the credit card companies, every organization I belong to—the mind boggles.

And the same day I was hacked, I received that startling e-mail from the New York Times saying that my home-delivery subscription was being cancelled. Like over 8 million other people, I tried to call the Times or reach them through their web site to say, “Don’t cancel my subscription!” But when all lines were tied up and the Times site was unavailable, I began to realize it was all a huge computer glitch. I guess Mercury was retrograde on Wednesday.

Oh well, here’s to a New Year, a new e-mail account and new ways of being tortured by my malevolent Mac Power Book. I think I can hear Steve Jobs, from somewhere in internet heaven, laughing.

Joan Gage -- A Rolling Crone

(P.S. --To my friends and contacts--I haven't closed my Yahoo account yet -- will let you know my G-Mail address when I do. To tech-savvy readers--I really would appreciate your advice on what I should do next.)

Worst-Taste Christmas Decoration Ever?

2011-12-27T17:48:00.000-05:00

The first time I drove by the decorations on the roof of this house in Shrewsbury, MA, I thought--"Nahh! That's not what I thought it is." The next time I drove by, I took a good look and realized it WAS! Santa peeing a lighted stream across the roof into a puddle of lights.

I went back in the daytime to make sure--but without the lights, I'll bet no one noticed anything odd about this Santa standing next to a chimney.

I just read last week that a homeowner in nearby Westborough MA., who got carried away with filling his front yard with lights, was receiving warning letters from an anonymous neighbor who threatened to tear down the display if he didn't winnow it out to make it more "tasteful." But at least the guy in Westborough didn't have Santa peeing on his front lawn!

Meanwhile, daughter Eleni, who's spending Christmas with her husband Emilio in his native Nicaragua, says that touring the Christmas displays in Managua means going from one creche scene to another. She's got photos of the Nacimientos on her latest blog post "Away, In A Manger." Every home has a Nativity scene, I gather, and in public spaces the figures are life-sized. But the Christ Child, which is the centerpiece of the scene, cannot be placed in the manger until Christmas day, when he is born. Before he's placed in the manger, the children touch the Christ Child for a blessing.

Here in Worcester, MA and its suburbs, there are a lot of giant inflatable Santas and Snowmen in front yards, but there is nary a Christ Child or manger scene around. I think I read that it is now illegal to have a representation of the Nativity in a public place.

But I'll bet there are no laws on the books in Massachusetts against having a peeing Santa on your roof.

The Christmas Card Crunch

2011-12-23T16:23:00.000-05:00

My pals at the North Grafton post office received me with hoots of derision when I walked in on Tuesday holding 150 Christmas cards all stamped and ready to go. “Not already—you’re early this year!” They remember well the several past years when I’ve sent out my cards AFTER Christmas, referring to them hopefully as “New Year’s cards”.

The following day I came back with another 60 cards, and declared myself finished. This year I designed the cards, plus a newsletter with text on one side and, on the other, a collage of small photos illustrating the highlights of the year.

The highlight of 2011 for us, of course, was the arrival in August of Amalía, our first grandchild, so we included a lot of shots of her, despite the suggestion of one acquaintance: “Go easy on the baby photos. We’ve all seen enough by now.”

Not a chance! I just cut the critic off my list.

Why do I spend a big chunk of my precious pre-holiday time designing cards and newsletter and photo collage, addressing 200 cards, stamping them and sending them off? Well, for one thing, I love getting cards with news of all those friends I haven’t heard from in a year. Because we lived in Greece for five years and Manhattan for 14, because I grew up in Minnesota, went to college in Wisconsin and Berkeley, we have friends spread around the world. About 35 percent of our cards need overseas stamps.

I love opening holiday cards and reading them, especially if there are photos. One couple always sends a poem, to be sung to music—usually Gilbert and Sullivan. Two couples always feature a painting by one of them. One couple photoshops themselves and their dog into cartoon-ish situations. A gutsy female friend manages to stalk a celebrity every year and get her photo taken along with said celebrity. Last year it was James Gandolfini who played Tony Soprano. The text of the card said: “Hanukah, Xmas, Kwanzaa…Fuggedaboutit! From Bada-Bing and Lotsa Bling.”

(Some of my more tech-savvy friends send animated E-cards—even ones they’ve animated themselves, but it isn’t the same. You can’t store them in a closet in a shoebox to revisit next year.)

Since childhood, daughter Eleni has reveled in the cards we receive, sitting by the tree, studying them all. This is the first year she sent out her own family card (featuring, of course Amalia—it served as a birth announcement as well.)

Eleni wrote a blog post on “The Liminal Stage” about holiday cards, called “The Ghosts of Christmas Cards Past” and included some rules for senders of newsletters. (I know that people like Miss Manners think family newsletters are tacky, but even so, I adore getting them and sending them. It’s the only time of year I actually “correspond” instead of e-mailing.)

Eleni’s rules for Christmas-card writers can mostly be summed up as “Don’t embarrass your children”

Eleni wrote: I’ve read cards bragging about stellar SAT scores (a delight for proud parents, a nightmare for shy kids). But the worst text I’ve ever seen described a seventh-grade boy’s multiple accomplishments and then added, “and yes, he has discovered girls.”

Which leads me to the first rule of holiday card and newsletter writing, which I’d like to offer as a public service: Puberty has no place in your holiday newsletter. If you have a pre-teen, it is already all over your photos. Please, do your sensitive child a favor and ignore any references to a social life and/or physical developments. This will not only save your relationship with your child, it will spare me, the reader, from flashbacks to my own awkward years.

In a similar vein, vacation shots on holiday cards are great. Bikini photos, not so much. I say this as a person who finally had to tell her mother I didn’t want to see my breasts on any more holiday card newsletters...

While we’re on the topic of body image, you should know that if I receive a photo of just your children, not you and your children, I’m going to assume it’s because you don’t want me to see how much weight you’ve put on. (That’s harsh, and not in the spirit of Christian charity and lovingkindness, but I’m telling it like it is.) Your kids are adorable, but you’re the one I went to college with; I want to see your smiling face, too! Of course, this year, our own Christmas card features just the delightful baby Amalía, but that’s because it’s doubling as a birth announcement. And because I don’t want you to see how much weight I’ve put on.

But the biggest faux pas you can make holiday cardwise, as far as I’m concerned, is not sending one at all.

Here are some rules of my own from the viewpoint and wisdom of a senior citizen:

Omit any mention at all of any significant others in your child’s love life—until they’re officially engaged. Lines like “Susie and Oscar Vanderbilt seem to be getting serious” can look awfully embarrassing in a year, after Oscar has come out of the closet and married Rodney Thistlewaite and Susie is back on the dating market.

No matter how fascinating your year has been, even if your last name is Obama, you don’t get more than one page to tell about it. Okay, this year I had to take my Arial 12 point font down to 11 point, but I sternly adhere to the one-page rule.

This is a biggie for senior citizens—whatever grim medical procedure you’ve undergone, do NOT go into detail. No one wants to know. Just sum it up in a cheery matter: “Despite having a knee replacement, Cedric will soon be back on the golf links.”

Of course if Cedric passed away in the past year, you owe it to your friends who may not have read the obituary to tell them. In fact, I suspect the entire newsletter would be Cedric’s obituary, with a line or two from you, the widow, thanking everyone for their support and condolences.

(One more thing—if your pet passed away, please make it clear that it was a PET. Otherwise we get sentences like, “We are still grieving the loss of our beloved Lancelot”—which leads to scrambling through old Christmas cards to try to remember the names of your children. Better you should say, “our beloved Golden Retriever Lancelot” )

I second Eleni’s remarks about photos—we don’t just want to see photos of your adorable grandchildren, we also want to see YOU in photos, so we can judge how well that last facelift is holding up.

That’s all the rules I can think of as I recover from this year’s Christmas card crunch and await what the next few days will bring into the mail box. The only final rule I have is:

Send that holiday card. I want to know about your kids and grandkids and the hip replacement and the 50^th high school reunion. And if you don’t send me a card this year, you're off my list next December.

R.I.P. George Whitman—We’ll Always Have Paris

2011-12-15T18:16:00.000-05:00

Photo by Simon Nofolk for The Telegraph

Today’s New York Times carried the obituary for George Whitman, who died yesterday, Dec. 14, in Paris in his apartment above his bookstore “Shakespeare and Company” at the age of 98. There was even a small photo of him on the Times’ front page saying “Heir to a Paris Legacy—George Whitman, owner and operator of the postwar Shakespeare & Company bookstore and a beacon, mentor and provider to generations of young writers. Page B 17.”

I was immediately transported back to 1969, when, as a single “career girl” in my 20’s, I took two years off, quit my magazine job in New York and traveled, visiting friends from Vienna to Paris to Morocco to Rome and then settled into an editing job in London.

Like every writer of my generation (including Woody Allen) I harbored fantasies of being part of the Paris writers of the twenties, hanging out with the Fitzgeralds and the Hemingways. I knew all about Sylvia Beach and her famous bookstore Shakespeare and Company, and I had heard it was now owned by a New England eccentric who was continuing Sylvia’s legacy and would offer food, board and books to anyone who wandered in off the street.

I was eager to write an article about him, but the first day I walked into the store, he refused to be interviewed. When he finally did grudgingly agree to answer some questions, he mixed fantasy with fact, because he liked enhancing his legend. He told me he was the “illegitimate grandson of Walt Whitman”, but the twinkle in his eye hinted that we both knew how unlikely it was that the poet left any progeny.

Looking today on Google for photos of George and his famous bookstore on the Left Bank’s Rue de la Bucherie, facing Notre Dame, I discovered that dozens, maybe hundred of writers of my generation visited Shakespeare and Company and had experiences similar to mine and are now reminiscing on their blogs about the man who devoted nearly a century to carrying on Sylvia Beach’s store and her encouragement of writers. (It's not the same physical store, but Sylvia late in life gave George the right to use the name.)

My article on George Whitman was eventually published in the April 1970 issue of the late, lamented Holiday Magazine. As I wrote in the lead, “Between the two world wars, a minister’s brown-eyed daughter named Sylvia Beach owned a famous bookstore called Shakespeare and Company on Paris’ Left Bank. She provided encouragement criticism and occasional handouts to struggling American writers …She published Joyce’s revolutionary Ulysses when no one in New York or London was willing to take the risk…Ernest Hemingway, in "A Moveable Feast", wrote about her: ‘She had pretty legs and she was kind, cheerful and interested and loved to make jokes and gossip. No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.’”

In the 1970 piece I chronicled the troubles Whitman had been having with the French Government, which had closed down the second floor of the store because he was using it as a free hostel for young people who wanted to crash there. I quoted the sign in the window on the day I first entered the store: “To Those Who Cherish Freedom, Practice Equality and Seek Justice –WELCOME. We wish our guests to enter with the feeling they have inherited a book-lined apartment on the Seine which is all the more delightful because they share it with others.”

In the article I compared Whitman to “a modern Don Quixote. He is the image of the knight of the woeful countenance—tall and painfully thin, with watery blue eyes in a doleful, hollow-cheeked face, unkempt red hair streaked with gray and a gray Van Dyke beard that juts out at the world like a defiant Brillo pad.” (And that was 42 years ago, people, when I was very young and he was already an old man. Twelve years after I visited him the first time, George Whitman produced his only heir, a lovely blonde woman named Sylvia Beach Whitman, who has taken over the running of the store.)

I found this photo of Whitman, posing with his daughter Sylvia and Bill Clinton on a blog with the unlikely name of Palavrasqueoventoleva

In “The Paris Magazine”, Whitman’s attempt at a “poor man’s Paris Review” he wrote, “Why do people always come in and ask me is this your bookstore? I consider it as much yours as mine ...Go ahead and kick off your shoes and lie in a bed and read…”

Here’s how I described my first meeting with him: I was peering into the window when a bleary-eyed, bearded figure unlocked the door and, squinting at the sun, asked me what time it was. “Noon,” I replied. “Come in and I’ll make us some coffee,” he said.

Soon I was drinking coffee at a table outside the door of the shop, gazing at what must be one of the most lovely views in Paris, while my host opened his mail. I felt I should explain myself, but when I began he snapped, “No interrogations at this time of the morning,” and went back to his mail.

Some customers wandered in and he motioned me aside “I have some good news for you, dear. I’m going to let you run the store while I take a shower.” He handed me the cash box, warned me not to sell any books that didn’t have the price written on them and nailed up a “Black Power-White Power” poster on an outside wall. Then he scrabbled around the messy desk looking for his soap, towel and a candle. “To cut my hair.” He lit the candle, ignited his hair, then beat out the flames with his hands, muttering,” Better than a haircut.” Finally he donned a red-plaid sports jacket, leaped onto his bicycle and rode out the door to the public showers, leaving me with 25,000 second-hand books and the odor of burned hair.

He never asked me my name and I never got a chance to ask his.

During the next seven hours, Whitman returned two times—just long enough to unload piles of books from the baskets of his bicycle. To my protests that I had to go, he’d mumble, “Lots of important errands to do, lots of people to see. Haven’t paid the tax on my bicycle.” And off he’d ride, red coat flapping behind him. Meanwhile I sold about $150 worth of books in five languages and refused to sell what were worth about $100 more because they weren’t marked. The most popular books that day were Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire, L’Anarchisme and anything by Ezra Pound.

By the time the sun was going down, I had been joined by two mini-skirted English girls who had run out of money, a starving French boy who wanted to sell his art books, a young American couple who couldn’t find the friends they were supposed to stay with, a fiery Frenchman with a broken leg who wanted to talk to Whitman about publishing his poetry, and Gerard, a soft-spoken American who had been on the road for seven years and was currently sweeping up the store in exchange for food. Whitman himself popped in for a minute to say he was going to make potato salad—we must all stay for dinner—and he was just going to the grocery store. Much later, when he hadn’t returned, we raided the refrigerator, ate bread, sausages, cheese and yogurt on the table outside and watched shadows cover Notre Dame while the good bourgeoisie of the neighborhood looked at us with curiosity. I handed the cash box to Gerard and set out on my Métro trip back to the Right Bank.”

Eventually, of course, I came back and eventually I got the chance to interview George. One thing he said that I quoted in the article: “My favorite customers are seventeen-year-old girls. I can’t think of anything more wonderful than being seventeen and in Paris. If a girl comes in on her seventeenth birthday, she can pick out any book she wants, free.”

That interview took place in 1969 when I was 28 years old, not seventeen. When I turned 60 in 2001, I returned to Paris with my two daughters (both of them over 17 by then) and dropped by Shakespeare and Company to find it being tended by a young British schoolteacher. She assured us that George was in fine health, reigning over his small kingdom as usual. He just wasn’t in at the moment.

Now George is gone, but I suspect his ghost will still be sitting in the shadows of his dusty, overcrowded store which, according to the Times he called, paraphrasing Yeats, “my little Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart.”

George Whitman lived a remarkable life. I’m just sorry I never got a chance to thank him for one of my favorite Paris experiences.

Her Lost Saints

2011-12-10T00:02:00.000-05:00

I have mentioned before daughter Eleni’s blog, which she began this year, called “The Liminal Stage.” Having studied Folklore and Mythology in college, Eleni writes about traditions, rituals, and liminal stages—the “psychological thresholds, times of transition when we stand ‘betwixt and between’ one state and another. The biggies are birth, marriage, death”.

The blog post she wrote yesterday, inspired by the fact that it was St. Anna’s day, just blew me away. She makes it look so easy. Her writing is always funny, conversational, yet full of wisdom. (A proud mother’s plug: her second book, first novel “Other Waters” is being published in February by St. Martin’s Press). By the end of yesterday’s essay, I had a lump in my throat. So I asked Eleni’s permission to reprint the post here, because I think it deserves the widest possible audience.

My emotional reaction to this blog post was not unique. A dear friend who lives in Israel wrote her yesterday: “Each blog post is more – better – awesome – terrific….My grandmother (who died in Auschwitz) was named Anna. One of the few photos I have of her is sitting outside on a stone or something very low and reading. And here we have Anna teaching Mary how to read. My mother’s name had a bit of Mary in it, as did many females in Hungary at the time. See—your blog make my memory electrons move rapidly.

You touch my heart.”

My Lost Saints

Saint Anne teaching the Virgin Mary to read from the church of San Giuseppe alla Lungara in Rome

Today is Saint Anna’s day. You may know her as Jesus’s grandma, as Anna and Joachim were the parents of Mary. Anna is not a flashy saint. She’s no Mary Magdalene (hubba hubba!) or John the Baptist. But for people named Anna, she’s a patron saint. And there may be others who choose her as their patron as well, because they feel a special fondness for her, or were saved from a tragedy on her nameday (it’s sort of like a spiritual Big Brothers/Big Sisters mentoring kind of thing). She’s not my absolute favorite (that’s the Virign Mary), but I do have a soft spot for Anna, partly because of a wooden santos from Puerto Rico I was given by a dear friend, which depicts Anna reading to a child Mary. I love this image of her; a mom like any other, reading to a child, a commonplace event made exceptional because of the people involved and the tenderness of the moment.

Tuesday, December 6th, was St. Nicholas’s day. Now that’s a saint who’s a headliner, having been turned into Santa Claus because of his generosity. A fourth-century bishop in what is now Turkey, he was the original perpetrator of random acts of kindness, known for giving secret gifts to people, including throwing gold coins down the chimney (or through the window) of a poor man who had three dowryless daughters who would otherwise have had to follow the career path often ascribed to Mary Magdalene. (In the chimney version, the youngest daughter has hung her stockings in the fireplace to dry and the cash dropped right in, ka-ching! Thus stocking stuffers were born to the delight of retailers everywhere.)

St. Nicholas is known as the patron saint of single women (there was a particular icon of him at Holy Trinity in New York I often venerated in the days before he sent me my beshert), thieves (not sure why, maybe it has to do with all the sneaking around chimneys), and fishermen (he’s often depicted saving sailors from shipwrecks and is sort of conflated with Poseidon in Greek folklore, maybe because of the beard, but that’s my own little theory). He was also the patron saint of an uncle-figure of mine, Themis, whose life was saved twice on St. Nicholas Day.

The first time, Themis was a 17–year-old policeman in Athens when the Nazis occupied the city and rounded up the entire police force in the station. Nature called and he excused himself. While in the bathroom, wondering what the Germans had in mind for the policemen, and sensing it wasn’t anything good, he noticed an open window. A skinny teenager, he climbed out the window, pulled himself up onto the rooftop and jumped from roof to roof of the neoclassical buildings in the Plaka neighborhood until he reached his own home, where he hid under the bed. The Nazis proceeded to march the policement to a nearby hill, shoot them, and leave their bodies in a ravine.

The second time, he was driving on a winding mountain road on St. Nicholas’ Day when he rode off the edge. The car flipped, but he was able to walk out of the twisted wreckage unscathed, leaving the car’s remains on the mountainside. Whenever I see a mangled auto carcass on the side of a mountain road in Greece (which is surprisingly often) I think of St Nicholas.

I know some would argue that these are tales of luck, and the date is coincidence; why would St. Nicholas choose Themis instead of all of the other policement or mountain drivers? But that’s the nature of patron saint relationship; they’re mystical and faith-based, they’re about feeling and belief not demonstrable knowledge. And above all, they’re personal, a connection between saint and supplicant and no one else.

I once wrote a paper for a nonfiction class that investigated an icon of the Saint Irenein Queens that was said to be crying (a not-unheard-of phenomenon among icons of female saints; some icons of male saints have been observed to emit a sweet myrrh-like scent, but there arren’t any cases of crying St. Nicks or his brethren, at least none of which I, and the priest I iterviewed for the paper, are aware). The priest I spoke with told me that he fears the furor over miracle-working saints or crying icons could detract from a worshipper’s belief in Christ Himself, which is the main event of Christianity. (Perhaps the multiplicity of saints feels too familiar to polytheism for this particular priest’s comfort.)

I see his point, but I sort of like the idea of having a personal relationship with a saint who looks out for you, one to whom you can confide your smaller problems when you don’t want to break out the big guns. Just like I like the idea of a saint who once read to her baby daughter before she grew up and became the Virgin Mary. I’m all for awe and wonder, the splendor of a cathedral. But I like my religion to have room for coziness too, the intimacy of a small chapel.

That’s what I think Elizabeth Barrett Browning was referring to when she wrote that she loved Robert with “a love I seemed to lose/With my lost saints,” a love that mixes simple fondness with profound faith that someone is watching out for you.

Confessions of a Christmas Nut – Part II

2011-12-07T12:47:00.000-05:00

I’ve got my (four) Christmas trees up early this year—because, when daughter Eleni and her husband Emilio and our brand new granddaughter Amalía came for Thanksgiving, we knew that they would not be back for Christmas. (They’re going to Emilio’s family in Nicaragua.) So, under Eleni’s direction, they bought a Christmas Tree the day after Thanksgiving and decorated it the same day so we all could take “Christmas photos.”

Here are some shots of three-month-old Amalia gazing at her first Christmas tree in wonder. We stuck to a mostly silver color scheme this year for the “real” tree, with some spots of red. The other trees—the “antique ornaments” tree, the “shoe tree” and the porch “cookies & candy” tree are pretty much the same as last year, so I thought I’d reprise last year’s blog post and photos below.

(The happy family--E, E & A, and in the 2nd photo, Aunt Marina, better known as Tia Marina, trying to stuff Amalía into her stocking.)

It’s great that the Thanksgiving deadline spurred me to get the trees done early, but about now, I suspect that my Christmas cards are going to turn into New Year’s cards (or Valentines!) if I don’t get them designed, printed, addressed and sent out this coming weekend.

How’s your holiday to-do list coming? Any secrets for streamlining it?

Here's last year's post. Click on the photos to enlarge them.

A Christmas Tree Nut

Right now I should be addressing Christmas cards but I'm in the grip of my seasonal craziness which involves decorating...lots...of...trees.

I also decorate doors and chandeliers and kitchen shelves and the grand piano and of course the mantel piece, but what I do most is trees. Each with a theme. In every room. Well, not EVERY room because my husband has started to crack down on that--especially in his office, despite the lovely all white (sprayed snow and icicles and pine cones) tree I did one year. It shed.

I think this is a genetic thing inherited from my mother. At Christmas time she decorated so much that you couldn't find a flat surface available to set down your cup of eggnog.

So far I've only put up, um, four. And I'm going to show them to you now.

On the day after Thanksgiving came the Real Tree, which goes in the living room. I realize that's much too early and it will soon be very dry, but daughter Eleni and her brand new husband Emilio, with some other elves, insisted on dragging it home and putting on the lights as soon as the turkey was digested and the cranberry sauce was gone. I usually pick a color scheme, and this year went with silver and white, with the only color coming from some crazy peacock ornaments I got from Pier One (which has great ornaments! Have you seen the under-the-sea collection? Squid and fish and lobsters and crayfish and mermaids. Now there's a theme I haven't tried.)

With the peacocks, I also used lots of white butterflies (from the Dollar Store) and white birds and angel wings, so I guess the theme of the wonderful-smelling Real Tree this year would be wings.

In the dining room I always put a wire tree to show off my antique ornaments. And I put a wire from the tree to the window latch so that it (hopefully) can't get knocked over. You can see that we don't have snow yet in Massachusetts, unlike Minnesota, but we will soon.

Some of these ornaments are reproductions, but most are the real thing. My grandmother had a whole tree decorated with blown-glass birds with those spun glass tails and often a metal clip to hold it on the tree. I still have a few of hers. I really love the fragile teapots once sold at every Woolworth's for pennies. They cost a lot more now. The blown-glass ornaments usually say "West Germany" on the metal cap. The glass ornaments that were once screw-in lights were made in Japan between 1930 and 1950 and are a lot less likely to break.

In the library I always put my Shoe Tree, which started when the Metropolitan Museum in New York first started selling ornaments based on shoes in their collections.

This became a kind of mania and now I can't afford to buy the newest ones from the Museum, but I've added lots of cunning real (baby-sized) shoes, and people keep giving me more. My favorites on this tree are the Chinese baby shoes that look like cats and the fur-lined baby moccasins and the tiny Adidas sneakers.

On the porch I've put the Kitchen Tree, or Cookie & Candy Tree. This was inspired by some friends who live in a tiny apartment and decorate their tree only with cookies and candy and pretzels and candy canes. Then, when Christmas is over, they put it all outside for the birds and other New York fauna to enjoy.

As you can see, I've cheated quite a bit--adding ornaments that look like kitchen utensils and non-edible gingerbread men and peppermints. An authentic Kitchen Tree should have chains of real popcorn and cranberries (which we did back when I had children small enough to enjoy stringing them.)

Last year Trader Joe's sold little gingerbread men with holes already punched in their heads so I could string them on the tree, but this year the gingerbread men are frosted but the holes are missing, so I just stabbed them with the wire hooks and it worked fine (and any that broke, I ate, of course. They taste better frosted.)

That's four trees so far and counting--I still haven't started decorating the tree in my studio that holds my stash of ornaments from Mexico and India, but that will come soon, and I haven't shown you my Santa Claus collection and the miniature town in the bay window in the kitchen and the many creches we have from around the world....But let's face it, I have to get back to those Christmas cards.

Roseanne Barr Celebrates Crones and Cronehood

2011-12-03T15:39:00.001-05:00

Illustration by Sean McCabe from Newsweek, Nov. 28, 2011

Back in September 17, 2009, when my blog “A Rolling Crone” was a year old, I wrote a post called “What is a Crone, Anyway?”

The reason I wrote it, as I said, was that several friends of mine – especially some from the Midwestern states where I grew up—objected to the word “crone” in the blog’s title because they found it offensive and insulting to women. So I did some research to find out the origins and true meaning of the word “Crone” and found a wealth of information. As I said then, it’s a topic for a PhD thesis, not a single blog post.

Many women have written eloquently about cronehood, including a woman called “ZBudapest” in an essay called “Crone Genesis”. Read it! She says, “We are one block of herstory, one savvy chain of generations, one strong and active generation that is going to continue to change the world. When we are done, being old will be fashionable, stories and movies about old people will be normal, and we will live a long time.”

It made one proud to be a crone.

Now a sharp-eyed friend of mine, Barbara McCarthy, brought to my attention the essay written by Comedienne and actress Roseanne Barr in the Nov. 28 issue of Newsweek. It originally appeared on the web site “The Daily Beast.” The subject of her essay, titled “Roseanne, the Pirate Queen” is menopause, but at the end, she considers the meaning of “crone.”

I’ve always considering Roseanne to be a wise and witty woman. (And have you noticed how much livelier Newsweek has become since its editor-in-chief’’s chair was taken over by Tina Brown—who is also editor in chief of “The Daily Beast”?)

So, although Roseanne tends to write in a more profane style than I do, I love what she has written and want to quote part of it below. Having discussed the subject of menopause-- “Menopause is the victory lap over the curse of being born a female,”--Roseanne concludes:

Ah, OK, I’m in full Crone mode now.

Depending on who’s defining the word “crone,” it can be a really wonderful gem of language. Crone got saddled with the role of synonym for hag, an old grizzled woman who’s often bitchy at best, malicious at worst: the sinister, old, gossipy type who sometimes had magical or supernatural associations. Luckily, intelligent women, and some men, have begun returning the word to its rightful definition: an experienced, mature woman who’s arrived on the north shore of the raging seas of this largely corrupt planet.

We’ve run the gauntlet and we stand, battered, bruised, and perhaps even worse, some of us, but we’re consciously here and mostly intact.

And, with a little luck, we have some time to affect things. Some sources cite Crone as the third stage of goddess formation: Maiden, Mother, and Crone. Well, I like the goddess part, but I don’t mean to insult or diminish women who aren’t mothers. In fact—after holding the world up to the light and subjecting it to a quick exam I call “Do the math!”—I’m here to say, we could use a lot more women who don’t become mothers of their own offspring, but instead Mother the world in a more expansive way—and help to alleviate some of the misery and need of countless millions of people who are here already.

But, let’s get past the idea of things we have to do, breathe a sigh of relief, and remember that there’s probably more time to do things we want to do. Form or nurture a few good and real friendships, and silently observe the world. You don’t need a young athletic body or piles of money to read some of the world’s great books; or to soak up brilliant music and art; or to grow something beautiful (and edible?) in a little garden spot. May your uterus remain relatively undisturbed during these, your glorious turban years!

Now that you’ve read Roseanne’s take on crones, (and I hope you’ll read mine, as well), please share your thoughts on this important and challenging phase of life. But only if you’ve sailed through the sea of menopause and entered the relatively calmer harbor of crone-hood.

You can leave a comment below or e-mail me at: joanpgage@yahoo.com

Musing on Apple Pie

2011-11-22T12:14:00.000-05:00

I am not a good cook. My mother Martha was not a good cook either. (If it was Thursday, you could be sure we were eating Tuna Casserole with crushed potato chips on top.) My first job, back in 1964, was as a writer in Ladies’ Home Journal’s food department. “I can’t believe you’re telling seven million women how to cook!” my mother would often exclaim. (Of course I wasn’t writing recipes—the ladies in the test kitchen were doing that. It was my job to write the text that went with the recipes, with a heavy reliance on words like “crunchy” , “delectable”, “golden brown”, “rib-sticking”, “taste tempting”, etc.)

But my mother and (later) I always knocked ourselves out at Thanksgiving—it was part of our Scandinavian/American heritage. When I was a child, we would often drive the forty miles to Aunt Olive and Uncle Clarence’s house in Princeton, Minnesota, at Thanksgiving, where our grandmother and aunts would be laboring over a vat of boiling oil, making those three-dimensional cookies called “Rosettes”. (You need a decorative iron mold on a long metal rod, coat it with thin dough, then plunge it into the boiling oil.) I remember we’d all eat until we were sick—cleansing the palate with sherbets between courses so we could eat more—and then the men would loosen their belts and fall asleep while watching football on television and the women would retreat to the kitchen to clean up and gossip.

Ever since I got married forty-one years ago, I’ve made a big production out of Thanksgiving – even in the years when we were living with our three children in Greece, where the traditional ingredients were never available. (Daughter Eleni, in her travel memoir “North of Ithaka” describes a particularly hilarious Thanksgiving when I cooked turkey in the very primitive conditions of my husband’s mountaintop childhood village while Dina, the acknowledged cooking queen of Lia, endeavored to out-cook me, ending up with a charred Turkey that everyone preferred to my golden-brown one.)

So for 41 years I’ve been doing Thanksgiving—streamlining the procedure drastically every year because I’m lazy, and my Greek relatives still don’t realize that my special cornbread stuffing comes out of a package (slightly doctored up.) They spend days making their Greek stuffing, which includes chestnuts, hamburger and a lot of other things. Of course everyone prefers the Greek stuffing, but I still make my cornbread stuffing, because it’s “tradition.”

But because I like to bake, I generally make four pies or three pies and a cake. This year I made three of the pies on Monday night—a “reduced calorie” pecan pie with maple syrup instead of corn syrup, and a “chocolate-kahlua” pie which somehow became a Thanksgiving tradition many years ago when I tried out the recipe. Now I could leave out the turkey and no one would complain, but they sure would miss the Chocolate Kahlua pie. The pumpkin pie I’m making today.

But to get to Apple Pie. Some people (like author Joyce Maynard, who often writes about her famous apple pies) are born with a pie-making gene that’s usually inherited from their mother. There was no apple-pie gene in my family. So every Thanksgiving I try a different apple pie recipe, in the hopes of finding the prize winning Apple Pie that will bring tears (of joy, not sorrow) to my family’s eyes.

I haven’t hit on the perfect recipe yet, but this year, on Monday night, I baked a pie based on a recipe I tore out of the New York Post. The article seems to be about what wives of NY Jets football players cook at Thanksgiving. Now, I know even less about football than I do about cooking, but I noticed the apple pie recipe with the title “Apple Pie Made Woody Marry Her!” Woody is Woody Johnson, owner of the Jets, it seems, and the recipe looked very simple, so I figured why not? If it landed this lady a “mogul husband” I’d giving it a try—even though I landed my mogul husband forty some years ago by learning to make Greek Coffee.

Among other things, the recipe calls for “Five large peeled apples, chopped.” When I went to my supermarket on Monday before my pie-making marathon, I reflected that I love Thanksgiving because (1.) It’s non-denominational—everyone can enjoy it except maybe the Native Americans—and (2.) Only at this time of year do you see the market jammed with crazed shoppers trying to find some exotic recipe ingredient (dried cherries, fresh ginger, craisins ) that they never buy at any other time of the year.

I finally found the last package of chocolate wafers--needed for the crust of the Kahlua pie, but it was way at the back of the top shelf so I convinced a leggy blonde shopper pushing a baby nearby to climb up on the bottom shelf and reach it for me.

(Food shopping at Thanksgiving can be hazardous to one’s health, as I reflected yesterday when, visiting the newly opened Wegman’s in Northboro to get some of their adorably frosted Turkey cookies to use as place cards, I passed by a woman who was being wheeled on a gurney out the door to a waiting ambulance, escorted by about a dozen EMTs and trailed by Wegman’s employees looking worried. As I stood aside to let the gurney pass, I heard the injured woman say “I didn’t even see her coming and then there she was, right in front of me!”)

During my pie-shopping market visit on Monday, I went to the produce department and asked an employee who was stacking fruit, a young man about 18 years old, “What’s the best kind of apple for making pie?”

“Uh, I don’t know,” he stammered, then asked another 18-year old near-by who also shrugged. Then he yelled at an older man, who was spraying brightly colored peppers, “Hey Tom! What’s the best kind of apple….”

Tom didn’t even blink. “You need a combination,” he said. “Pink Lady for the flavor, Comstock for the crunch and also Granny Smith.” He chose for me one Pink Lady, two bright red Comstocks, and two green Granny Smith’s.

That’s the kind of information and friendly interaction with one’s neighbors that is inspired by Thanksgiving. People helping people. As opposed to Christmas shopping, when it’s the law of the jungle to get the last Tickle-Me-Elmo. That’s another reason I love Thanksgiving.

So I cooked the pie that made Woody Johnson marry his wife Suzanne. It’s keeping cold on the porch. On Thursday we’ll find out if I’ve finally hit on The Ultimate Apple Pie—good enough to become a Thanksgiving Tradition, like Chocolate Kahlua. I’ll let you know.

Does The New York Times Scorn Women?

2011-11-18T13:29:00.000-05:00

If you read the New York Times announcement of my daughter Eleni’s wedding last year, you might think the mother of the bride was dead, hidden away in the attic, non-existent or had never held a job in her life. The New York Times (free-lance!) writer, Devan Sipher, who wrote the announcement cited the professions of the mother and father of the groom and the father of the bride, but refused to mention the fifty years I had spent writing for national newspapers and magazines, even though 21 of the articles I’d written had appeared in The New York Times.

(You may remember Devan Sipher as the writer of the notorious “Vows” column in the Times celebrating a couple who dumped their spouses for each other after they met at their kids’ pre-kindergarten classrooms.) .

While the snub was painful, I put it aside until yesterday, when I read a new post on my daughter’s blog “The Liminal Stage” called “Nice Work if You Kin Get It.” Eleni studied folk lore and mythology in college and will publish her second book “Other Waters” in February. She usually writes in her blog about “psychological thresholds, times of transition…The biggies are birth, marriage, death.” The subject of yesterday’s post was “kin work” which she explains as “the term anthropologists use to describe the ‘conception, maintenance, and ritual celebration of cross boundary kin ties’” –in other words, hosting Thanksgiving dinner, remembering birthdays, sending Christmas cards…you get the idea.

Eleni went on to say that it’s usually women who do kin work and their work is usually unpaid and therefore undervalued. She continues:

“I also think it’s a question of identity. If someone goes into an office every day, society knows how to define him or her–by his or her title or job description. The fact that a person goes somewhere and does something that someone else pays them to do renders them, inherently, worthwhile. Those of us who work at home, juggling work that pays us along with kin work, are considered dilettantes.

“This was brought into high relief for me during my wedding, by the writer who wrote up our New York Times’ wedding announcement …

“The reporter asked where my mother, a writer, had been published in the past year. I said Vogue and Budget Travel.

‘If that’s it, that’s exactly what the Times is trying to avoid–-part-time work,’ said the man, a freelancer himself.

“This angered me for any number of reasons: First, who gets to decide how many publications per year make one a full-time freelancer versus a part-timer? What if your sole publication is a groundbreaking article or book? (I mean, if my mother had been Harper Lee, would he have said, ‘And what has she published in the last 51 years since To Kill A Mockingbird?’)

“And second, what’s wrong with part-time work anyway? In an economy such as ours, and a world in which technology enables us to work from home, more and more people in any number of fields are going freelance. Does the fact that they don’t go into an office every day mean that they don’t really work?

“But what angered me most was the misogyny of it all. My mom had gone into an office before she started raising kids. As did I. And the fact that she re-shaped her career to make room for kin work, as well as paid work, had rendered her so unimportant in the eyes of a paper she had contributed to well over a dozen times, that she was omitted from the graph describing the jobs of the parents of the bride and groom in the wedding announcement of one of the children she’d made time to raised. So yes, as Mary Elizabeth Williams pointed out in Salon today, the New York Times does have female trouble.”

Eleni’s right. I did go into an office for many years—working first for Ladies Home Journal, then in London, editing a small magazine called “Homemaker’s Digest”, then, after returning to New York and marrying a reporter for the New York Times, I worked for a syndicated features service that published my articles around the world. By the time the second of our three children was born, I only went into the office a few days a week, working at home on other days.

When our third child was born in 1977, our family was moved by the New York Times to Athens, Greece, where I raised the children while my husband spent most of his time in Turkey and Iran covering revolutions and war as the Times’ foreign correspondent for the Middle East. (He usually made it home for Christmas.) During the five years in Greece, I wrote a number of articles for the Times about entertainers, politicians, artists, travel and archeology.

Among the journalistic gigs I’m proudest of is the series of essays I wrote for the Times “Hers” column in 1979. People born since 1970 cannot imagine what a journalistic milestone it was for the Old Gray Lady to launch a weekly essay written by women about women’s issues.

During the 1980s I wrote a monthly column called “Kids in the Country” for Country Living, and have continued to publish free-lance articles everywhere I can, including several in Vogue, as well as writing a number of movie scripts with my husband (which have been optioned but so far not made it to the screen.) So, from my point of view, it feels like I never stopped working

Daughter Eleni ends her blog post with a thought about her baby daughter Amalía: “This attitude towards women–and work–this idea that any work done at home is irrelevant, is something I struggle with now that I am doing more kin work than ever. How can I raise my daughter not to think that her father’s work is more valuable than mine because papi gets dressed and drives off to the office, and mama stays home and writes in between loads of laundry…Maybe by the time Amalía does kin work of her own, we’ll have figured out a way to reward it, beyond just giving it a name.”

I share that wish, and I hope that when Amalía gets married some 30 years from now, her mother will be included in the New York Times announcement, acknowledged as a real person who had a real career.

A Night in the Mission –San Francisco

2011-11-14T20:03:00.000-05:00

Visiting San Francisco gave me a chance to hang out and see daughter Marina’s cool apartment in the Mission neighborhood (Bay window in the bedroom, solar powered mood lights in the bathroom, diner-style corner booth in the kitchen.)

Yesterday we meandered down 24^th street and then turned right on Valencia and over to Mission, reveling in the unique atmosphere of this neighborhood. There are painted ladies and wonderful Victorian architecture everywhere. And nearly every wall bears a mural –which is why we took a walking tour of the Mission Trail Murals on Saturday, an incredible experience I intend to write about next. Everywhere you look, including on this playground, are images referring to the hopes, aspirations and beliefs of the many ethnic groups who have made Mission their home.

The stores sell everything from Day of the Dead candy skulls and skeletons of every kind (including Michael Jackson), to tarot readings, very cool vintage clothing, antiques of every nature, lucha libre masks, and the world’s best donuts (at Dynamo).

Today we had breakfast at St. Francis Fountain (SF’s oldest ice cream parlor) that features such items a “Nebulous Potato Thing” and “Chef’s Mess.” (We split the latter. It was delicious.) They also sell vintage gum—the kind that came with trading cards of your favorite TV program.

But last night, after shopping our way down to Mission, antiquing at “Gypsy Honeymoon”, buying 1950’s style stools at “Stuff” on Valencia, watching people have their tintype portraits taken at Photobooth and admiring the art exhibited everywhere, we forged on through the cloud of marijuana fumes to have a drink at the roof-type “Sky loft” at MedJool on Mission Street atop the Elements Hotel (which offers dormitory-type hotel rooms.) From the roof we could see the sunset and the now boarded-up movie theaters that once offered porn films in glamorous surroundings.

Soon it was dark and Marina made plans for us to meet with her friend Kristen and Kristen’s year-old daughter at the nearby “Radio Habana Social Club.” We walked into a place the size of a large walk-in closet. Its walls and ceilings were hung with bizarre “art” including mangled figures . I decided the wall art was tributes to authors and rebels, many of whom died tragically, especially with the help of alcohol.

In the back of the small room, a trio of Cuban musicians were playing at an ear-splitting level, while to one side drinks and sangria were being served at the bar.

“This is no place to bring a year old baby” I shouted into Marina’s ear over the din.

But by the time Kristen and baby arrived, I was completely under the spell of the music, the warmth and enjoyment of everybody in the room, which heated up to the point where the tall, dark man to my left busted out with some incredible break dancing moves—not easy in such a limited space.

Finally we tore ourselves away from Radio Habana and walked over to the “Foreign Cinema” restaurant—unassuming from the outside, but very large and up-scale on the inside. We sat in a giant covered courtyard where classic foreign films are project on the giant screen. Last night it was “The Shadow of a Vampire” about the filming of one of my favorite old-time films, Nosferatu.

We ate Opa fish, kalamari, pork belly and a vegetarian plate for Kristen followed by pumpkin cheesecake and roasted pear profiteroles.

By the time we got back to the bedroom with the bay window view, I felt transported back to my youth, when I graduated from Berkley in 1963 and headed for New York and the rest of my classmates hung around to nurture the Free Speech movement and wait around for the Summer of Love. Wonder where we’ll go tonight?

The Baby with 1,000 Faces

2011-11-11T14:03:00.000-05:00

Here it is November 11 and I haven't written a blog post since Halloween! My computer & blog teacher and famous artist Andy Fish will be scolding me again, as he firmly believe in Blogging Every Day as he does on Fish Wrap.

In the last two weeks I have experienced the "Historic Storm" in the Northeast, which downed a lot of trees and knocked out our power for four days (when the interior temperature went down to 20 degrees.)

Then I flew down to Miami to spend about five days with daughter Eleni and granddaughter Amalia (and son-in-law Emilio). I've been planning to write a blog about South Beach and the Sleepless Night festivities we enjoyed and the art on the Wynwood Walls, but just can't get my act together. Stay tuned.

And then I flew yesterday to San Francisco with husband Nick to attend a Hellenic Charity Gala, staying in the Fairmont and exploring San Francisco with daughter Marina who is setting up her apartment here (with a kitchen that incorporates a diner theme.)

So I'll tell you about all that soon (I hope) but meanwhile will show you some more photos of Amalía, the baby with a thousand expressions, as she approaches her three month birthday and delights us by interacting with and discovering the world.

She sits in her Boppy Pillow watching with awe as her butterfly mobile spins.

She hangs out with her parents at all the happening spots in South Beach. But sometimes can't stay awake.

She practices making sounds as a preview to talking.

And she readies her wardrobe for Thanksgiving, when she will travel to New York and Grafton, MA to meet all of her extended family and her parents' friends.

I promise a more serious blog post soon--with no grand-baby photos!

True Ghost Stories III -My Final Word (I Hope)

2011-10-31T13:16:00.000-04:00

What are ghosts exactly and how do you know if you’ve got one?

As I mentioned last week—I have a collection of 101 letters from people describing ghosts they have encountered in their homes. These letters came to me 25 years ago when I was working for Country Living Magazine and we asked for reports on hauntings. But because the subject proved so controversial with readers of the magazine—especially Christian fundamentalists—the editors told me to write a brief and up-beat article and not go into any frightening detail.

But I’ve saved the letters all these years because I thought they were an invaluable source of information about: What is a ghost? And except for one letter, they all seemed to come from responsible and sane people, who included a police officer, a librarian, a minister, a psychiatrist and a host of other evidently reliable correspondents.

Last year-- on Halloween day-- my local paper (Worcester’s Telegram & Gazette) reported on a nearby haunted house, where the owners invited a team of “paranormal investigators” to study their home while the family was away. They set up cameras connected to DVD recorders and digital audio recordings to capture “electronic voice phenomena”. Aside from some mysterious voices and the unexplained turning off of the recorder, and film showing two paper lanterns that revolved in opposite directions, these ghost hunters found nothing much, but I was interested that they later said, there are two types of hauntings — “intelligent hauntings” in which purposeful actions are observed—like rearranging the china cabinet—and “residual hauntings,” which pick up and relay random events, such as a radio broadcast from the 1930’s.

I had already worked out for myself, from reading my 101 letters, that “hauntings”, “ghosts” or “paranormal activity” (as in the blockbuster film) can represent many different kinds of phenomena.

Instant Replay Traumas--I believe that one kind of “haunting” is the re-enactment of some traumatic event that happened in that place long ago. It’s periodically re-projected—like an instant replay in a football game. One example of this was the reader from Fogelsville, PA who reported that every now and then in the middle of the night, they hear a horse trotting up, the locked kitchen door flies open and woman screams “Oh no!” (This reader has seen five separate ghosts in her house including a Civil War soldier “hanging” in their barn.”) I believe that these ghosts all qualify as “residual hauntings” and that they represent no danger to the living. The woman from Pennsylvania ended her letter: “Holidays are the most active seasons. Whether the ghosts like it or not, we’re staying.”

Lost earthbound spirits-- On TV programs like Medium, the ghosts encountered are usually people who don’t realize that they’re dead and they have to be coached to go on to the next world, or move toward the light or whatever is the next stage. Among the ghosts described in my letters, most of these lost souls were children and a few were elderly people who remained in the room where they had spent their last years of life. These old people, who don’t know they should move on, tend to get very angry at newcomers who have invaded their space. They get most irritated when renovations, restoration or re-decorating happens. One woman in Virginia used to encounter the voice and tricks of an elderly lady who once lived in the attic—where the reader would hang her laundry on rainy days. The “ghost” could often be heard rocking in her rocking chair . She opened doors and took a door off its hinges and leaned it against the wall , One day, in exasperation, she cried “Oh, just get out of here!” In many cases, according to the letters, angry lost spirits were helped to move on by a helpful priest, minister, exorcist or psychic.

More pitiful were the ten child ghosts who truly seemed lost and confused and often interacted with the living children of a household. (I learned that animals and small children are almost always more likely to see and interact with ghosts than adults. Often the small children don’t realize the spirits are ghosts and ask “Why won’t the little girl come back and play with me?” and “Why is that little boy playing with my trains?”) One reader from Wilbraham MA, called on ghost hunters Ed and Lorraine Warren who contacted a “9-year-old earthbound boy who apparently died in the farmhouse in 1898, named Alfie. He told them he was concerned over his dog Dodo, and when he died his father was away from home in the army. Every year on July 16—the day he died—there would be a flurry of ghostly activity.” Visitors have reported seeing the little boy looking out the window of a front bedroom and waving good-bye.

From the letters I’ve read, I believe these earthbound child ghosts are unlikely to cause any harm to the inhabitants of a house, although they sometimes smash china and play havoc with electrical appliances—they have also been known to cover sleeping children with blankets and to close windows in a sudden rainstorm. Lucy Ensworth of Louisburg, Kansas who died in 1863 at the age of 12, has done both the pranks and the helpful gestures, stealing things and putting them back, and causing a visiting granddaughter to say, “It’s hard to sleep with that lady walking around—she’s sort of a big girl.”

In two cases ghosts have seemed to known and react to a sickness in the family: A reader in Sandston, VA wrote they have a woman ghost “seen only twice, both times in the fall when someone in the family had been hospitalized.” A man in New Berlin, Wisconsin wrote “As a pastor I’m not supposed to believe in ghosts, but I do.” He described the experiences of friends who live in a country barn house with a poltergeist. Ferns would spin and chairs would rearrange and a cousin who scoffed at reports of a ghost had a fork fly off the table and prick his cheek. “When Jennie’s mother fell down the stairs, her arm was held so that she didn’t plunge headlong, but slid down. On her arm were bruise marks of four fingers and a thumb.” They had a three-year-old daughter who had an allergic reaction to the anesthesia during an emergency appendix operation. The night Jenny died, her bedroom pictures on the wall—mattress, etc—were hurled all over her room. After that, there were no more messages from the ghost.

Animal ghosts—I believe that spirits often return to the place where they lived before moving on—this makes more sense than ghosts in a graveyard hanging around their remains. Many readers described animal ghosts, especially cats, walking on the bed—sometimes their own deceased pets or an unknown pet. I know when my own dog died at the age of 11 years (I was away at college), my mother, who had never liked the dog that well anyway, kept seeing it out of the corner of her eye in the kitchen. A reader in Willoughy, Ohio, described her terrier named Bonnie who would run up the stairs, her nails clicking. One night, several weeks after Bonnie was put to sleep, she was awakened by the familiar sound. “Bonnie just dropped in to let me know that, wherever she was, she hadn’t forgotten about me and our many cozy nights together.”

Evil and dangerous ghosts—Most of the writers said that they view their ghost as a kindly, rather than malevolent presence. Eleven of the 101 correspondents specifically said they consider the spirit a friend. But eight people said they felt their ghost was an evil presence, and a few described the kind of dangerous evil spirit of the type made famous in The Amityville Horror (a true story) —the kind of ghost that would make you immediately put the house on the market at any price.

In each case the spirit was specifically attacking a child in the family. A couple in Surprise, New York described a ghost named Sarah who started out being helpful—caught the woman when she fell down stairs, covered the babies with blankets, put old hand-stitched baby clothes in an empty trunk. But “She hates our oldest son Eric. She threw his bed around the room one night with my husband and myself on it. We have now moved him to a bedroom downstairs. One night she choked him as he was walking in the hallway. He had red handprints around his neck…whenever she comes, our room gets ice cold and a terrible wind comes up. There is a tin-lined closet in the hall where she lives. One night we locked her in with a chair propped up against the door and taped the entire door shut with masking tape. About three a.m. a crash woke us up. The chair was flung downstairs, and the tape wadded up in a ball.”

Instead of moving out the next day, “We were at our wits end and so finally we put a bottle of holy water in our bedroom. She has been back twice since then in the last two years, but both times comes and goes very quickly. We love the house and have now finished restoring it.”

Two more writers described some sort of “monster ghost” that would terrify and torment a child in the family, sometimes trying to bite him—and both used crucifixes and holy water to protect the child and keep the ghost out of the room (in one case it was still looking in through the window.)

I’m very tempted—now that these letters are 25 years old—to write back to the addresses of a few of the most interesting haunted houses to see if the ghosts still are active there. But that might be asking for trouble.

To sum it up—I think most of the paranormal activity described in the letters was NOT dangerous to the homeowners, nor was it directed at them. And in most cases I don’t think there was an actual ghost interacting with the living, but in some cases (of “intelligent response”) there was, sometimes from children or old people still haunting the place they lived. And these spirits (which are sometimes poltergeists) are particularly agitated by re-decorating, construction, moving furniture or illness in the family.

I was amazed at how many readers mentioned: odors and aromas (pipe tobacco, a horrible stench, perfume) and a pocket of freezing air when the ghost was near. And electrical appliances acting up! Clearly, whatever ghosts are, they embody some sort of electrical energy. Fourteen readers reported spirits that played havoc with electric lights and appliances, monkeying with water faucets and setting off doorbells, phones, stoves, radios, TVs—even after they were disconnected.

Here’s a reader from Brevard, North Carolina: “Constantly bizarre happenings: we would find all the lights ablaze, an empty dishwasher swishing away, doors opened or closed. The old turkey platter hanging on the wall was smashed in the center of the room, although the nail and wire hanger were intact. Shower water goes on and off, a vaporous form comes through the bathroom door. Smoke detectors go off constantly. As I write this the lights in the office have gone off and on twice.”

(And that was before computers—wonder if ghosts can type?)

So that’s my last word on what I learned in the Country Living letters--, although I’d love to hear anyone else’s theories on “What is a ghost?” I live in a house that dates back to (at least the oldest section) 1722. Daniel Rand, the first white child baptized in Shrewsbury, MA (in 1722) lived to be 80 years old and is buried nearby. We have his tombstone on our porch.

I’m happy to say that I personally have not encountered any paranormal happenings in this house—although others have—and I’d like to keep it that way. Hopefully the spirits of all the families who have lived here for the past three centuries (and I know all their names and stories) can continue to coexist peacefully, without any paranormal activity or things that go bump in the night.

True Ghost Stories II and One Ghost Photo

2011-10-29T11:59:00.001-04:00

(This is Part II of the three-part "True Ghost Stories" saga I posted on Halloween last year--brought back by popular demand.)

When I was writing a regular column for Country Living Magazine in the 1980’s, I asked, in November of 1983, “Tell us about the ghosts in your country house…Write us a letter describing any experiences with live-in ghosts, poltergeists and things that go bump in the night.”

I received 101 letters from all over the country and, to my delight, only one sounded like it was from a nut (she had also been kidnapped by aliens), but the rest all seemed very reasonable, from people who included a psychiatrist, a police officer and a librarian (with a haunted library.} I thought these letters were beyond price—a treasure trove that would help me learn a great deal about ghosts and haunting and what they really are.

But along with these letters came complaints to the editors saying that our question was opening us up to the work of Satan, that we were in grave danger, that ghosts were just Satan’s demons preying on vulnerable people who had lost loved ones, and that these readers wanted their subscription to the magazine canceled at once.

This naturally rattled the editors, and they asked me to keep the eventual article short and up-beat and as inoffensive as possible to the religious right who thought even a discussion of ghosts was inherently evil.

I made notes on each ghost story. While I couldn’t detail in the magazine the scarier stories I received, at least the summary I did of the letters allowed me to learn what people experience when they encounter a “ghost”. I was struck by how many described feeling a sudden patch of cold air, and many described an odor—perfume or pipe tobacco or flowers. The presence of ghosts in fourteen cases played havoc with electrical appliances –lights, toasters and washing machines that would go on and off even when they were unplugged from the wall. Then there were the flying objects.

After reading all these letters, I came to the conclusion that what people perceive as ghosts are probably several different kinds of phenomena which they grouped under that one word. But I’ll tell you in my next post about that. Right now I’m going to give you the highlights of the letters.

The article that I ultimately wrote in Country Living began:

Imagine what you’d do if this happened to you:

You see the image of a Civil War soldier hanging from the rafters in your barn.

You climb the stairs only to find the way blocked by a wall and to feel someone pushing you down.

Periodically at midnight you hear a horse gallop up to your kitchen door, the locked door flies open, and a woman’s voice screams, “Oh, no!”

The antique blanket chest in your living room erupts with such knocking that you have to grab the television set on top to keep it from falling off.

You go to bed leaving a crossword puzzle unfinished and awake to find it has been completed in the characteristic left-handed script of assassinated president James Garfield, who once lived in your home."

I did not go into detail about the few letters that described truly evil spirits that seemed determined to harm someone in the family—those I’ll tell about on Monday—but for the most part, people felt comfortable with the supernatural beings in their house and 24 people believed they know the real former identity of “their” ghost. Some who didn’t gave their live-in ghosts names.

Among the more than one hundred spirits mentioned, there were ten child ghosts, three Native American ghosts and four animal ghosts (two cats and two dogs) as well as haunted objects: a wicker wheelchair, a family portrait, an antique blanket chest, and a baby carriage.

Forty-one people out of 101 claimed they had actually seen their ghost —anything from vaporous shapes that would pass through a door to what seemed to be a flesh-and-blood person until it suddenly vanished. One reader saw her ghost in a mirror, two described ghosts complete except for having no face, and one reported only the top half of a man repeatedly seen crossing the dining room of her mother-in-law’s restaurant in Indiana.

In 22 cases, pets and small children reacted to the ghost first (like Ronald Reagan’s dog Rex in the Lincoln Bedroom), and children were much more likely to actually see the spirits while their parents saw nothing.

Four readers described being repeatedly pushed down a flight of stairs and two others started to fall down stairs, then were suddenly caught by an unseen hand that left a red handprint on their body. A woman who rented a house in East Kentucky wrote “My first trip downstairs after moving in was on my backside…tearing the muscles in my shoulder. Every time I was on the stairway, I had to hang onto the wall or I’d slip or stumble.’ After three weeks, she and her husband had their pastor come and command the evil spirits to leave, and they did.

Five readers described ghosts who showed concern for their children, covering up babies with blankets, putting toys in the crib, sitting by a bedside and rubbing a feverish brow. Lucy Ensworth, a 12-year-old girl who died in 1863 in Kansas, haunts her Victorian home (she’s buried in the small cemetery on the property).

Lucy has been known to tuck in the baby and to close all the attic windows—propped open with sawed off broomsticks—during a sudden downpour, but she also has emptied a glass of water on a napping adult, smashed dishes all over the kitchen floor, pulled the pegs out of a gun rack before the eyes of its owner, kept the four-year-old granddaughter awake by walking around and rapping on the walls, “just the sort of things a bored, restless pre-teen would do,” according to the woman who wrote the letter.

Ten people said their ghosts make small objects disappear and then reappear in the strangest places—like a flyswatter stuffed into a radio. People described watching flying teapots, mugs, candle snuffers and crystal vases that leaped off a table, rocking chairs that rock by themselves, a wicker wheelchair and a baby carriage that move their position every day. One told about a fork that rose from the table and pricked the cheek of a visitor who scoffed at hearing the house was haunted.

Ten readers told about being repeatedly startled out of sleep by a deafening crash; sometimes to find a scene of chaos, but more often to find nothing broken. (One woman and her daughter would leap out of bed at hearing the din and meet in the hall every night, while her husband slept quietly, never hearing a thing.)

A California woman woke up and found her bed shaking from side to side, while she could see that the prisms on the chandelier weren’t moving. Three people described having their bed shaken, and not by an earthquake.

I have lots more ghost stories from the letters which I’ll tell you about on Monday—including the scary ones that resemble the “Amityville Horror”, but I’ll stop now.

The photo above was sent in by a woman from New Jersey who wrote:
“While vacationing in sunny California this summer (1983) my husband and I came across an interesting small town in Northern California called Los Alamos. [She actually wrote "Los Alimos" but I couldn't find a town of that name.] …We came across this Victorian house...I snapped a photo. We certainly were surprised when we got our pictures developed. The image of a girl dressed in clothing not of this era was clearly visible…. I would really like to find out more about the history of the house.”

To her it looks like a girl in old-fashioned clothes—to me it looks more like the Grim Reaper. What do you think? And have you had any encounters with the other world?

2011-10-27T23:12:00.000-04:00

True Ghost Stories 1: Reagan's White House Ghost

(I’m planning a three-part Halloween series of investigative blogging this weekend on the question of Ghosts—Are they real? Are they dangerous? And what are they exactly? My answers are based on the fascinating stories from 101 letters I received many years ago from readers of Country Living Magazine who answered the question “Is your house haunted? Tell us about it.” Most of the contents of these letters have never been published, because the magazine toned down the piece after discovering how controversial the subject was, so you’ll hear it here first.. But I wanted to start off my Halloween ghost extravaganza with my favorite haunted house story because it was told to me by the President in the White House.)

Ever since the White House was first occupied in 1800, there have been rumors of hauntings, but I got this story direct from the President’s mouth. No, not President Obama. I first heard about the White House ghosts directly from the lips of Ronald Reagan.

It was March 18, 1986, and my husband Nick and I had been invited to a state dinner in honor of Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. The State Dining room was filled with gold candlesticks, gold vermeil flatware and vermeil bowls filled with red and white tulips. I had the great privilege of being seated at the President’s table along with Chicago Bears’ running back Walter Payton; the Canadian Prime Minister’s wife Mila Mulroney; the president of the Mobil Corporation; Donna Marella Agnelli, wife of the chairman of Fiat; Burl Osborne, the editor of the Dallas Morning News, and Pat Buckley, wife of William Buckley.

The President, a brilliant storyteller, entertained the table throughout the meal and the story I remember best was about his encounters with the White House ghostly spirits. Here is how I wrote it later in an article about the dinner for the Ladies’ Home Journal: “According to the President, Rex, the King Charles Cavalier spaniel who had recently replaced Lucky as First Dog, had twice barked frantically in the Lincoln Bedroom and then backed out and refused to set foot over the threshold. And another evening, while the Reagans were watching TV in their room, Rex stood up on his hind legs, pointed his nose at the ceiling and began barking at something invisible overhead. To their amazement, the dog walked around the room, barking at the ceiling.

“I started thinking about it,” the President continued, “And I began to wonder if the dog was responding to an electric signal too high-pitched for human ears, perhaps beamed toward the White House by a foreign embassy. I asked my staff to look into it.”

The President laughed and said, “I might as well tell you the rest. A member of our family [he meant his daughter Maureen] and her husband always stay in the Lincoln Bedroom when they visit the White House. Some time ago the husband woke up and saw a transparent figure standing at the bedroom window looking out. Then it turned and disappeared. His wife teased him mercilessly about it for a month. Then, when they were here recently, she woke up one morning and saw the same figure standing at the window looking out. She could see the trees right through it. Again it turned and disappeared.”

After that White House dinner, I did some research and discovered that half a dozen presidents and as many first ladies have reported ghostly happenings in the White House. It’s not just the ghost of Lincoln that they see, although he tops the hit parade. He caused Winston Churchill, who was coming out of the bathroom naked but for a cigar when he encountered Lincoln, to refuse to sleep there again. And Abe so startled Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands that she fell into a dead faint when she heard a knock on the door and opened it to find Lincoln standing there.

I also learned that the Lincoln bedroom was not a bedroom when Lincoln was President—it was his Cabinet Room where he signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

It’s well known that Abraham Lincoln and his wife held séances in the White House, attempting to contact the spirit of their son Willie, who died there and who has been seen walking the halls.

The ghost of Dolley Madison, wife of James Madison, appeared often in the Rose Garden, which she planted. There is even reportedly a Demon Cat in the White House basement that is rarely seen. When it does appear, it is foretelling a national disaster. While the Demon Cat may at fist look like a harmless kitten, it grows in size and evil the closer one gets. A White House guard saw it a week before the stock market crash of 1929 and it was also reportedly seen before Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.

Abigail Adams’ ghost has been seen hanging laundry in the East Room—she appeared frequently during the Taft administration and as late as 2002 and is often accompanied by the smell of laundry soap.

Lincoln himself told his wife he dreamt of his own assassination three days before it actually happened. Calvin Coolidge’s wife reported seeing Lincoln’s ghost standing at a window of the Oval Office, hands clasped behind his back gazing out the window (just as Reagan’s daughter saw a figure in a similar pose.) Franklin Roosevelt’s valet ran screaming from the White House after seeing Lincoln’s ghost . Eleanor Roosevelt, Ladybird Johnson and Gerald Ford’s daughter Susan all sensed Lincoln’s presence near the fireplace in the Lincoln Bedroom.

I’d love to find out if the Obamas have encountered any ghostly knockings, or if their dog Beau has suffered the same alarming anxiety attacks as Reagan’s dog Rex. This weekend, as the portals between this world and the other world swing open, I suspect the White House will be hosting a ghostly gala of the illustrious dead.

(Note: Two years ago I wrote three blog posts on true ghost stories--culled from my own findings as a journalist. Those posts continue to draw more readers than any other subject, so I thought I'd turn them into a Halloween tradition and run them again this year. I'm going over these old ghost stories to see if any would work for a new "paranormal reality" show. So if you have any personal paranormal experiences to report, let me know about them at: joanpgage@yahoo.com )

Ten Things you didn’t Know About the Smiley Face

2011-10-25T22:48:00.000-04:00

1. Smiley was created in Dec. 1963, in Worcester, MA by Harvey Ball, a commercial artist and decorated WWII veteran for an insurance company that wanted a button to improve company morale and customer service.

2. Harvey never made more than the $45 he was paid for the original design. Others made millions selling Smiley merchandise, but U.S. courts have repeatedly ruled that Smiley could not be copyrighted—he was in the public domain.

3. By the late 1970’s (and again in the U.K. in 1988) Smiley became the symbol of the drug culture, especially LSD and (later) ecstasy.

4. A blood-stained Smiley became the symbol (and cover image) of “Watchmen” which was first a landmark comic book series, then the first graphic novel, and in March 2009, a blockbuster film

5. Smiley became a movie star (or important symbol) not just in “Watchmen” but also in “Forrest Gump”, “My Own Private Idaho”, and a film called “Smiley Face” (2007) about a woman who accidently eats cupcakes laced with cannabis.

6. In “Watchmen” some characters fly to Mars, landing in a crater that looks like a Smiley Face. There really is such a crater on Mars. It’s called the Galle crater.

7. John Bon Jovi, in 2005, released a very successful album called “Have a Nice Day.” In the video to the title song, is Bon Jovi’s version of Smiley which is red, square and has threatening eyebrows and is taking over the world.

8. The Smiley Face Murder Theory is a theory advanced by two New York detectives. They think that a large number of young men found dead in bodies of water from the 1990’s to 2008 were victims of a serial killer or killers. They think this because the detectives discovered Smiley Face graffiti on walls near locations where they think the killer dumped the bodies.

9. Last Sunday an article in the New York Times Styles section said that the Smiley Face emoticon in e-mail is becoming universal, spreading from teenagers and their texts to serious business correspondence..

10. In December of 2013 the Worcester Historical Museum will celebrate Smiley’s 50^th birthday with lots of festivities. They also hope to publish a book on the history of Smiley. Maybe written by me.

Reporting the death of Whatshisname

2011-10-22T16:47:00.000-04:00

As a (retired) journalist, I spent much of Thursday watching internet news with fascination as reports of the violent death of Moamar Gaddafi leaked out. I watched the national news at six thirty and kept checking on line, and by the time I went to bed I still didn’t know exactly who killed him. Still don't.

This kind of story is a nightmare for a working journalist who has to report from the middle of a violent, hysterical and dangerous crowd and has no way of checking the facts he is told. Everyone has his own version of what happened. And imagine how much more complicated things are today, when every terrorist, tourist, rebel, protester and cop has his or her own cell phone recording what’s happening. (This is both a good thing and a bad thing for the general populace, because we get the news immediately as it’s happening, thanks to Steve Jobs and the internet, but we may very well get a slanted or staged version of the event.)

Another difficult aspect of this story—for journalists and especially editors—is what to do about the gruesome images of Gaddafi both before and after he was dead. All the TV reports warned viewers that they were about to view graphic images.

I was eager to see yesterday (Friday) how the story would be handled by the three papers I read every day: the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, the New York Times and the New York Post.

Not surprisingly, the Worcester T&G headlined, in the biggest typeface they could find, “Libya’s new era”. Under that in smaller type was “Joyous celebration, giddy disbelief over death of Gadhafi”. The main photo was of euphoric fighters, all smiles. There was no bloody corpse in sight. And that made sense, because the T&G readers in Worcester, MA are quick to write angry letters every time the paper shows something like a fatal auto crash or any image that would be too hard to take over breakfast.

The New York Times also handled the news with restraint, but a little grimmer tone: “QADDAFI, SEIZED BY FOES, MEETS A VIOLENT END”—was the main headline stretched across the entire width of the front page. The subhead was: “Fighters Mob the Fallen Dictator After His Failed Effort to Flee”. The main photo on the front page showed euphoric fighters waving their guns and shouting in victory. Much smaller and lower on the page was a blurry image with the caption “This still image from a video apparently shows a bloodied Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi after his capture by government fighters.

I knew the NYTimes would be restrained in coverage—she is after all the “Great Gray Lady” with “all the news that’s fit to print.” When I attended Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism in 1963-64, to get my master’s degree, we eighty students, sitting behind our massive manual typewriters in the news room, were taught New York Times style. There were many rules. A man, for instance, was always referred to as “Mr.” until he was convicted of a crime. Women were “Mrs.” or “Miss” (“Ms.” wasn’t yet born.) The word “rape” never appeared—it was “sexually assaulted.” Everything in the Times had to be restrained, calm, factual and backed up by at least two independent sources.

The New York Post, as I expected, on Friday ran full page the goriest bloody corpse photo it could find, along with an inset of a young man brandishing a gold pistol that he claimed belonged to the dead “mad dog of the Middle East” as Reagan called him. The boy was wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap which inspired the New York Post ‘s headlines to trumpet in giant letters 1.5 inches high: “ KHADAFY KILLED BY YANKEE FAN”.

If there was a prize awarded for the best headline of the day, I’m sure the Post’s chauvinist take on the story would win hands down. Oh, and the Post’s subhead read: “Gunman had more hits than A-Rod.” The Post’s story may not have been accurate, but you have to admit it made you smile, unlike all the other front-page reports.

After comparing the approach of my three regular papers, and then scanning other front pages from around the world (collected on Yahoo under the title “Has the media gone too far?…” I suddenly realized that EVERY PAPER WAS SPELLING THE MAN’S NAME A DIFFERENT WAY! You’d think, since the New York Times owns the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, that those two papers would both spell it “Qaddafi”—Times’ style-- but no, the T&G calls him Gadhafi. If you go to Google, as I did, you’ll find there are more than 100 ways to spell this colorful madman’s name and there are a lot of newspaper editors on line defending their own version of the spelling.

The problem is--you’re starting with a name in a different alphabet (Arabic) and trying to spell it phonetically with our Latin alphabet. There’s a similar problem with spelling our last name--Gage-- to a Greek in a language that has a different alphabet and no hard “G”. (It’s “Gamma, kappa, alpha, iota, tau, zita.” Which comes out GKAITZ. This is why a Greek TV reporter interviewing daughter Eleni in Greek reported that she was the daughter of Bill Gates.)

Anyway, I’m glad I didn’t have to cover a slippery story like the death of the Colonel, especially in an era when every man in the crowd is reporting it too. And I say "kudos!" to the young journalists who did it at the risk of their lives. (Now if they’d just learn the correct usages of “lie” and “lay” and “its” & “it’s).

A Grandmother Kvelling

2011-10-20T15:09:00.000-04:00

I belonged for many years to a woman’s group in Worcester that met once a month to discuss a pre-selected topic. There were a few topics that were verboten, however: politics, pets and grandchildren.

I can see why. Nothing empties a room faster than an approaching Grandma clutching a brag book of grandchildren photos. The clever antics of another person’s grandchild are just about as interesting a conversational topic as the details of one’s recent operation.

That said, permit me to rhapsodize a bit about my granddaughter Amalía. No, she did not get into an Ivy League school, nor did she play Moonlight Sonata in a piano recital. She did not learn to ride a bike or even become toilet-trained. She can’t even sit up. Her latest achievement is managing (sometimes) to get her thumb into her mouth.

Amalia is eight weeks old today. (But officially two months old on Oct. 26, when she’ll go to the pediatrician for a check-up.)

Even though she can’t even sit up by herself, it’s a wonder and a delight to me to watch her discovering the world around her (including her hands and her reflection in a mirror.) I think I was too tired to savor this stage of development in my own children.

She sits (or lies) there, wearing one of her pre-Halloween outfits and with great seriousness watches the fascinating and puzzling world around her, looking to me as if she has some memory of where she was before and is now trying to learn the secrets of this new place.

This thought led me to look up some of William Wordsworth’s lines in “Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood”:

         Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
          The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
              Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
                And cometh from afar:  
                  Not in entire forgetfulness,      
             And not in utter nakedness,
             But trailing clouds of glory do we come
              From God, who is our home:
        Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

That's how Amalía seems to me as she studies her new world--she came to us trailing clouds of glory.

She also reminds me of “New Soul” by the Israeli singer Yael Naim, a song that Amalia’s parents, Eleni and Emilio, included in her birth mix— to be played during labor and delivery:

I'm a new soul

I came to this strange world

Hoping I could learn a bit 'bout how to give and take

On Sunday October 9, daughter Eleni and her husband Emilio took Amalia to the Greek Orthodox church in Miami, Saint Sophia, for the ritual that marks her 40^th day of life and introduces her to the church. The priest says a blessing both for the mother and for the baby.

As Eleni pointed out in “Fabulous at Forty (Days)” –posted on her blog, “The Liminal Stage”, many societies believe that the 40 days after birth are a special time when mother and baby should stay together indoors until the child is taken out on the 40^th day. She mentions Judaism, Chinese culture, and Yogis among others. As Eleni writes on her blog,

“Like all rituals, there’s the liturgical explanation for the 40-day churching (we bring our babies to be presented at the Church the way Mary brought Jesus to the Temple), and then there’s all the folklore that rises up around it. …As with so many folk customs, this one crosses boundaries and spans multiple cultures.”

Amalia wore a beautiful dress for her first visit to church, and the brief ritual and blessing seemed a perfect way to mark her passage from the first 40 days of infancy to an individual ready to take her place in the church and the world.

Eleni summed it up in her blog post:

My favorite part of the entire experience was when the priest said, “Bless also this child which has been born of her; increase her, sanctify her, give her understanding and a prudent and virtuous mind.” I felt a thrill at that moment thinking of the little baby in front of me as a person with a developing mind, one which, God willing, will be prudent and virtuous and joyous and expansive, and all the things that mothers in all cultures wish for their baby.

A Holocaust Memorial that Pulls You Into the Story

2011-10-09T16:29:00.000-04:00

Last month in Miami Beach I was riding in a taxi when I saw out of the window a remarkable sight—a forty-two-foot-tall sculpture of a hand reaching skyward out of a reflecting pond. And scrambling up the wrist were what seemed to be life-sized human figures.

One of the things I collect is images of hands—everything from a door knocker to anti-evil eye talismans to a wooden “Hand of God” with a saint perched atop each finger and a gash in the palm. I have patterns for the henna designs painted on the hands of an Indian bride, for example, before her wedding, in the mehndi ritual. So I knew I had to learn more about the gigantic hand I had come across while riding on Meridian Avenue near Dade Boulevard in South Beach.

I learned that it is a memorial, dedicated to the six million Jewish victims of the holocaust. After four years of construction, it was dedicated by Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel on February 4, 1990.

Entrance is free. As I walked through the sculpture garden, like everyone else who has seen it, I was deeply moved by a history that I had heard many times before, but never in such a personal way. As I followed the trail through the sunlit sculpture park, I was walking from the beginning to the end of the holocaust years and retracing the journey of so many victims—beginning with fear and foreboding and ending in despair and death.

Because I found myself walking through a tunnel that becomes narrower, and then emerging into a scene of desperate agony, surrounded by life-sized naked figures in bronze, the experience seemed terrifyingly real, despite the towering palm trees and the water lilies in the serene reflecting pool-- an ironic contrast to the hysterical grief and fear portrayed within.

The huge bronze hand (which has an Auschwitz camp number carved on the wrist) and the one hundred figures were designed by Kenneth Treister and cast in Mexico City by Fundicion Artistica.

While walking through the exhibition, I felt as though I was interacting with the statues—sharing their fear and agony. And after the visit, I felt changed, certainly in my understanding of the holocaust. I think that is the definition of successful art—you interact with it and it leaves you changed.

At the beginning of the journey is this statue of a mother and two children beneath a quotation from Ann Frank: “…that in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

Then you walk along a black granite wall that summarizes in words and photographs the history of the holocaust from 1939 to 1945. At the end of the wall is engraved a poem and a hymn from the ghetto.

Next you enter a tunnel, starting with a dome that has a stained glass Star of David overhead with the word “Jude”. As the memorial’s historian Helen Feigen writes, it’s “the patch of ignominy”.

You’re now in the square tunnel, carved with names of the death camps, that becomes smaller as you continue. You hear the sound of children’s voices singing songs from the concentration camps. All you can see at the end of the tunnel is a small, seated child, wailing and reaching out for help. As you walk toward the light, the voices of the children get louder and louder. Then you emerge from the tunnel to find yourself staring up at the immense hand, crawling with people in agony. You walk among free-standing figures who are all reaching for help.

According to Helen Feigen, the historian, “A giant outstretched arm, tattooed with a number from Auschwitz, rises from the earth, the last reach of a dying person. Each visitor has his own interpretation ... some see despair ... some hope ... some the last grasp for life . . . and for some it asks a question to God... ‘Why?’”

At this point, you walk around the giant hand, examining the family groups, young people trying to comfort their elders, children trying to soothe their younger siblings, mothers trying to hand their babies to safety. But no one is safe and there is no way out. And the visitor is a part of the scene.

Then you notice the black granite walls engraved with names of the victims.

Finally, when you’ve had enough of this scene of despair, you continue on to the final piece of sculpture, which is the same mother and two children seen at the beginning, but now they’re lying dead underneath another quotation from Ann Frank: "ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us only to meet the horrible truths and be shattered:"

Then you are free to contemplate the peace and beauty of the reflecting pool and the sunny sky, and eventually to return to the tropical scenery of Miami Beach. But you can’t shake the feelings that you had standing below that giant hand, imagining the stories of all those victims who were still trying to help each other in the hour of their death.

Maybe this is why I’ve always been fascinated by representations of hands—because they can be so indicative of the creativity and strength of the human being, and yet so vulnerable—think of the hands of a baby. And in almost every culture, the image of the human hand seems to be a symbol, an invocation, a magical talisman, or the seal on a pledge. Or a cry for help.

A Great Pumpkin Carved by Woodchucks

2011-09-27T17:52:00.000-04:00

Every year when I realize it’s really Fall, I head over to Houlden Farms on Old Westboro Road in North Grafton to get an assortment of pumpkins, gourds, squashes and mums to decorate our front yard.

They always have a variety of colors and shapes that would make Martha Stewart swoon.

One year I scored a pair of “Swan” squashes that were joined at the stem, so they looked like two birds kissing. Houlden Farms had white pumpkins before they became fashionable with great names like “Cinderella” and “Gray Ghost.”

But this year, as I came around the farm stand, headed for the greenhouse in back, this is what I saw in a place of honor:

It was a frowning Jack’o’Lantern carved, as Ruth Houlden told me, by a “very artistic” woodchuck. She said the talented groundhog nibbled on the pumpkin when it was green and it healed over and grew into a good-sized orange pumpkin with a ready-made face.

This struck me as a bit of a miracle, sort of on a par with the proverbial infinite number of monkeys tapping away on typewriters until one of them writes the complete works of Shakespeare.

After admiring the work of the groundhog (and another pumpkin which he had decorated with “maple leaves”) I headed into the greenhouse to pick out my prizes for this year’s display.

Ruth told me the names of each one—there was a “Fairytale Pumpkin” (the green one) and the flat peach-colored “Cheese Squash”, which she said is the tastiest squash of all. “Just cook it like a baked potato”. I also got one Swan Squash this year and a purple Kale.

My orange pumpkin weighed nearly 35 pounds. Ruth’s grandson Nicholas helped me carry the heavy load to the car, towing it on a dolly.

By Halloween I’m going to carve the biggest pumpkin in a design incorporating our family name—I got the idea in a pattern that came with my new pumpkin-carving kit. Then we’ll toast the pumpkin seeds and eat them, and maybe I’ll bake the Cheese Squash to see how it tastes.

South Beach—We’re Not in Kansas any More

2011-09-13T13:02:00.000-04:00

I’ve now been living in South Beach, Miami, for over a monthand I think it’s time to go home. The other day I was walking on Lincoln Road behind a six-foot-tallcurvaceous female wearing only a tiny black string bikini and very tall spikeheels, and I took a good second look to decide whether she was a man or awoman.

This is not such a strange reaction on my part, since nearbyOcean Drive swarms with gay bars and drag brunches in its elegant Art Decohotels. Absolutely no extremeor peculiar dress gets a second look on Lincoln Road, while back home inWorcester, MA, the bikini-wearing vision in front of me might get arrested, ifshe was walking on Main Street.

Lincoln Road, the heart of South Beach, was re-designedaround 1960, by Miami Beach architect Morris Lapidus. His design for Lincoln Road, withexotic gardens, bubbling fountains, raised “grassy knolls” for kids to play onand an amphitheater, reflected the Miami ModernArchitecture, or "MiMo", style. The road wasclosed to traffic and became one of the nation's first pedestrianmalls—stretching for eight blocks from Alton Road to Washington Avenue.

I’ve been since Aug. 12, renting an apartment in the sameArt-deco building where daughter Eleni, her husband Emilio and my firstgrandchild, two-week-old Amalía, live. (For an account of Eleni’s trials, tribulations and triumphs masteringthe art of breast feeding, check out her blog post, “Say Yes to the Breast.”)

Every morning I set out to the nearestStarbucks, half a block away, past the optimistically waiting pigeons, to get mycoffee and newspaper and then I walk up and down Lincoln Road, marveling at therare and amazing species ofpeople, animals, flowers and birds. This is surely the most exotic, bizarre and just plain weird street I’veever seen, and this is coming from someone who lived on Manhattan’s 14^thstreet in the 1960’s and is familiar with Venice Beach in LA and Haight Ashburyback in the day. Skate-board champs, shirtless and covered withtattoos, somehow avoid running down Hasidic Jews and bikinied beauties.

Every day you see the regulars—panhandlers andpeople who earn money as living statues (this one is Ghost Elvis)

or weaving palm fronds into baskets,

juggling or letting people admire his pet ferret (or whatever this is.)

There are a plethora of design stores and artgalleries. I loved this piece ofart work—a dog excreting a long length of pink fabric—juxtaposed with thenearby Dog-pot.

If you are a seasoned Lincoln Road pedestrian,your accessory of choice is a small dog or a baby in a stroller, and yourvehicle is a Segway, or a skateboard, a rented bicycle or a motorized wheel chair.

I think no street anywhere has the caliber ofrestaurants, food stores and cafes as those found on Lincoln Road. I’m tryingto taste every one of the tartes at Paul’s, which is so French that both staffand clientele seem to speak French most of the time.

I’ve already discovered my favorite flavor ofice cream at Kilwins. (It’s Kilwin’sTracks—they throw in bits of all their hand-made candies.)

The Ice Box, which serves indescribablebrunches, makes, according to Oprah, “the best cake in the United States”. Good thing there’s no scale in thisrented apartment.

All the restaurants lining Lincoln Road havetables indoors and outside, and most people sit outside, despite the swelteringheat. Cooling fans and mistingmachines make it bearable.

Overhead are towering palm trees chock full ofparrots and parakeets which squawk non-stop and sometimes come down to be hand-fedmorsels

Orchids grow parasitically on many trees but the most famous tree on LincolnRoad is this “Orchid Tree” dripping with blooms that look like orchids but bloom only at night. Its proper name is Bauhinia Varigata.

Lincoln Road turns into an outdoor market everySunday, selling every exotic type of fruit or flower or spice or Latin foodthat you can think of.

An atmosphere of sin hangs heavy over the street, especially at night. There are party busses with smoked glass windows and advertisements for “No-Tell Hotels”.

Every time I walk by the “Vice Lounge” I wonder what goes on inside. This is what the outside looks like.

When you have exhausted all the pleasures andvices of Lincoln Road, you can continue to the end, where the Ritz Hotel offersthe best Happy Hour food and drink around. (Every single restaurant and bar has a happy hour every day,sometimes starting at noon.) Oryou can hitch a parachute right on the beach.

No wonder every time I walk down Lincoln Road Ifeel like Alice falling through the rabbit hole or Dorothy landing in Oz. But like those two ladies, I’llhave to return home in the end. Sadly I’m leaving South Beach and my new granddaughter in four days. Dorothy said, “There’s no place likehome”, but I’m here to tell you, home is no place like Lincoln Road.

Grandparenting 101

2011-09-04T20:44:00.000-04:00

“When you become a grandparent, everything changes,” a woman who works in the bank said to me. All my friends with grandchildren seem to be at a loss for words to describe how wonderful it is. “You can’t possibly understand until it happens.” “I can’t explain it—you’ll see.” “There are no words.”

Well, now I’ve been a grandparent for ten days. Amalía was born at 4:42 p.m. on August 26—and after nagging for all those years about how much I wanted to have grandchildren, I’m truly at a loss for words when I try to write about it. I think I’m still too new at this grandparenting thing.

Amalía does things her own way. She was a week late, bursting into the world wailing with incredible voice and strength. She was not the Leo we’d expected (because of her Aug. 19 due date) but a Virgo. She has a birthmark on her belly like a Nike swoosh--the symbol of the goddess of victory. As you can see, she’s bright-eyed and precocious and has lots of adorable expressions.

She weighed seven pounds (length 19.75 inches) and is gaining daily thanks to Eleni’s patient round-the-clock breastfeeding. (No bottles allowed—even pumped milk—for four weeks.) She’s beautiful and happy and does nothing but eat and sleep and poop, but we would happily stand over her all day, just staring at her as she sleeps and her face goes through a repertoire of emotions, from despair to grins, yawns, hiccups, sneezes, pursed lips, the occasional squeak. It’s lots more entertaining than TV.

Everyone said to me – “It’s even better than having kids. It’s more fun. You can play with them and then go home. Leave the hard stuff to their parents.” But the minute I saw Amalía wailing lustily, flailing arms and legs--this tiny, tiny person who is completely filling our days and nights-- I remembered the terror of having a new baby. It’s painful to be so in love with such a tiny, fragile-looking, vulnerable little person. After 30-plus years, it came rushing back-- when my own tiny babies had earaches and colic and would scream for hours and you couldn’t figure out what was wrong.

Nowadays parents are so much better educated, with things like “lactation advisors” to help them over the first obstacles in breastfeeding. They know the tricks of the “Happiest Baby On the Block” book to calm colicky newborns. (Wish I had known about swaddling, shushing, etc. thirty years ago!) When some scary symptom comes up, they check the index of “What to Expect in the First Year” and are re-assured.

Eleni and Emilio have had classes in hypno-birthing and infant CPR and breast feeding, and diapering (with cloth, not disposables.) But still, with all the classes and preparation, modern parents also know a lot more things to worry about than we did. I don’t know any new mother who doesn’t have moments of complete panic in those first three months.

Last night Eleni and Emilio went out to a movie for the first time, leaving the baby with us, along with lots of advice. It was raining hard as they headed to the theater. Evidently the previews of coming attractions were all thrillers, involving child murderers and haunted houses.

Soon I got a text from Eleni: “My phone is on vibrate; call if you have any problems. If there's an emergency and you need to call 911, use our landline so your call can be traced.“

I had to smile because I knew just what she was going through. Being a new grandparent can be just as scary as being a new parent. It always reminds me of a quotation that I think started with Frances Bacon and was paraphrased by John F. Kennedy: “Having children is giving hostages to fate.”

Mezcal & My Favorite Mexican Photos

2011-08-23T13:27:00.000-04:00

Back in 2008, when Michael Covino and the Niche Hospitality Group opened Mezcal Restaurant on Shrewsbury Street in Worcester, Mike commissioned me to print, mat and frame nearly 40 photos of the Mezcal-making process—photos I took on a trip to Oaxaca.

In the town of Mitla I photographed many family-owned Mezcal “fabricas”. Mezcal is made from the heart of the Agave cactus–called a piña because of its resemblance to a pineapple. I got great photos, all related to the Mezcal-making process, but I convinced Mike to let me frame as well some non-Mezcal portraits of people I had encountered in Mexico. He hung six of my portraits of women in the ladies’ room and six hombres in the men’s. These “bathroom” portraits proved to be so popular that people kept stealing them, which I took as a compliment.

Mezcal Restaurant in Worcester turned out to be a huge success. It was voted best Mexican Restaurant in the city. Every time I drove by, I saw people waiting to get in.

Last spring Mike asked me to print out a new set of photos for a new Mezcal Restaurant that the Niche group was opening in Leominster, MA. It’s just now officially open, and my favorite portraits of Mexican men and women are again in the restrooms. I hope they don’t get stolen! But if they do, I’ll just re-print them and take it as a compliment. Here’s the story behind the dozen photos:

1. Guelaguetza Girls. These lovely young women were practicing for the ceremony called Guelaguetza that takes place in Oaxaca during late July. Originally meant to worship the corn god, it was celebrated by the indigenous people long before the Spanish came. The trajes (costumes) these women are wearing and their lace headpieces are so stunning! No wonder Frieda Kahlo adopted the fashion for herself.

2. Fiesta tot. This adorable child was photographed some years ago at a Candelaria Festival on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The Zapotec Indians of the Isthmus have their own language and traditions, and it’s a strong matriarchal society—the women rule.

3. At the Candelaria Festival, most of the dancers were women dancing with each other. (The men mainly watched from the sidelines) But this young couple was the focus of all eyes, because they were so beautiful and so clearly in love. I hope by now they’re married and bringing their own fiesta tots to the Candelaria festival.

4. The Tortilla Lady. She’s cooking (with helpers) in her courtyard in preparation for the Candelaria feast. She is one of the many local cooks I was introduced to by Susana Trilling in the course of one of Susana’s culinary tours. Those tours are always full of adventure and take you far, far off the beaten track, because Susana knows the culinary secrets of Mexico better than anyone. Info about her tours is at www.SeasonsOfMyHeart.com.

5. Candelaria Parade. These beauties were tossing favors, just as people do in New Orleans during Mardi Gras. Candelaria happens on Feb. 2 (same as Groundhog Day). Because it’s 40 days after Christmas, it marks the day when the Virgin Mary took Jesus to be presented at the temple. In Mexico, every family buys a new outfit for the Christ Child doll on the family’s home altar and takes him to church to be blessed.

6. You’ve seen this urchin on my blog before--cheerfully carrying her little brother on her back. When I was walking around San Cristobal, Chiapas, Mexico in 2009, also on one of Susana’s culinary tours (this one was “Chiapas & Chocolate & Tabasco”), I encountered this girl and lots of her friends, all selling cheap jewelry. The first day I ran into her, she was unencumbered by her sibling, but she was always smiling. Of course I bought some of her bracelets.

7. This blind musician was also someone I encountered on the streets of San Cristobal. It’s a wrenching portrait. For some reason, almost all the photos I’ve taken of old men in Mexico bring tears to my eyes. I think because they make me think of my father, who died about 25 years ago.

8. This old man, holding his bottle of beer and staring thoughtfully into space, was at a Day of the Dead celebration, which is usually a rollicking event in this village outside of Oaxaca, with bands playing and people dancing. But I suspect he’s pensive because he’s remembering friends who have passed away.

9. This man who entered the church in Tlacalula, immediately knelt down and continued to pray for a long time. I suspect he’d come a long way on this pilgrimage.

10. The Red Devil. He’s one of many devils that delighted in harassing us at Carnival time in the village of San Martine Telcajete. I was there while taking a class in collage, shadow box & photography with photographer Mari Seder. Every year the class visits the Carnival celebrations in this small town, which include a hilarious mock wedding featuring trans-dressers and much mischief. (See more about Mari’s classes at www.artworkshopsinoaxaca.com. )

11. This photograph was taken at the ancient ruins of El Tajin on another one of Susana’s culinary tours—“Veracruz & Vanilla”. At the Spring Equinox, the indigenous people come to the ruined pyramids of El Tajin, everyone dressed in white, to absorb the power of the sun god and to have a cuerandero (healer) perform a cleansing ceremony. At night there were native dancers and children handing out clay images of the gods and the next day everyone came back to see the Vanilla Queen, the Voladores (flying dancers) with their dangerous rituals, and of course, to be cleansed.

12. The young man above is happy because he’s off to the Candelaria parade which is followed by the fiesta. As I recall, the price of admission was a case of beer. The Mexicans of the state of Oaxaca, like the customers at the old and new Mezcal Restaurants, know how to have a good time.

Is Greece Safe for Tourists?

2011-08-18T19:04:00.000-04:00

I spent most of July in different parts of Greece. While there, I kept hearing from friends: “Are you scared? Is Greece safe?”

After I got back, on Aug. 7, the New York Times Sunday Magazine published a photo essay, “The Mean Streets of Athens”, which, with photos of heroin addicts, riot police and a burning mosque, made Athens look worse than Manhattan in the seventies.

The NYT photo essay had only one paragraph of text which read in part: “Recent images from Athens have mostly shown violent protests in response to the austerity program Greece has adopted to solve its debt crisis. Less public is the city’s skyrocketing violent crime rate. According to police statistics, robberies almost doubled from 2008 to 2010, homicides are steadily increasing and illegal immigrants continue to arrive.”

In Athens, we usually stay at the Grande Bretagne on Constitution (Syntagma) Square, but this year, when we first arrived, we borrowed a friend’s apartment near the Hilton, away from the center, because we had read about the riots in the Square in front of the Parliament building, during which the police used tear gas on the crowds and considerable damage was done to the luxury hotels around it.

The angry dissidents pitched tents and occupied that square, where we always used to sit in the cafés and watch the sun set over the Acropolis while boys on skateboards sailed down the marble steps and evening commuters emerged from the underground subway station(which is as grand as the entrance to a museum, lined with the antiquities uncovered during its construction, displayed behind glass).

This July, I walked through Constitution Square, snapping photos of the occupying dissidents, who seemed peaceful and busy in the daytime tending to housekeeping chores in their groups’ campsites. The cafes were deserted now and port-a-potties lined the sides where they used to be. The McDonalds at the bottom of the square, which had been set on fire during the riots, appeared as good as new. The Grande Bretagne was repairing some damage to its marble steps. (The GB has iron riot gates, which can drop down to barricade the entrance.) The King George Hotel, however, seemed to be both damaged and closed.

A few days later, we moved into a suite in the Grande Bretagne, overlooking the square. A taxi strike had begun a few days earlier, and we had to drag our suitcases on and off the subway to get there.

Around 1 p.m. I saw that a demonstration was beginning in front of Parliament, with a fleet of striking taxis at the head. Many people were streaming out of the subway and the tents in the square toward the Parliament building where the Evzones, in their pleated skirts, stand guard in front of the Tomb of the Unknown soldier twenty-four hours a day. (The two Evzones are relieved by another pair every hour on the hour. The big, formal changing of the guard, carried out by the entire regiment of Evzones, happens every Sunday at 11 a.m.)

I wanted to open the door to our balcony to take photos, but learned that it was locked—no doubt to prevent injury to onlookers. As soon as the demonstration began, a line of riot police positioned themselves between the demonstrators and the Evzones. There was shouting and singing and much honking of horns, but the demonstration petered out without violence and everyone eventually went back to their afternoon activities.

At the end of July, when I left for the airport, the taxi strike was still on, but the ride to the airport was fairly easy on the air-conditioned subway, and it only cost 8 Euros (compared to 35 Euros—the set price to and from the airport in a taxi.)

After I left, the taxi strike continued, some roadways were blocked, and the squatters remained in Constitutions Square until August 6. According to the Greek newspaper Kathimerini, “Employees of the City of Athens, in cooperation with the police, early Saturday cleared dozens of tents from Syntagma Square - the remnants of two months of protests by self-proclaimed indignant protesters.

The process was completed without any major resistance by the campers, though eight people - four Greeks, two French nationals, a German and a Romanian - were briefly detained.”

Which brings us back to the original question: Is it safe for tourists in Greece?

The answer is yes. The minute you travel outside of Athens, as we did, visiting Crete, Corfu, Ioannina in Northern Greece and the fabulous new ecological resort of Costa Navarino near Messinia, the Greek hospitality was as warm as it ever was. (The Greek word for hospitality – “philoxenia”—literally means “love of strangers”, and Greeks throughout history have felt it their duty to welcome strangers, even if it means serving them food meant for their own family.)

Visiting Athens is another matter. It’s not dangerous—I have never felt threatened by demonstrators, nor have I encountered anti-American feeling in Greece in the last two decades. (Back in the seventies and eighties was another matter.)

The main problem with Athens right now is that it’s inconvenient -- due to the strikes and demonstrations in the wake of the country’s economic problems. The Greek newspaper Kathimerini, in an editorial, pointed out, during the taxi strike, that tourism is one of the only ways that Greece can hope to improve its economic future, and scaring tourists away is basically cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Throughout Greece this summer I saw very few Americans, except for some Greek- Americans. In the expensive ecological resort complex of Costa Navarino, and in most luxury resorts, the guests were primarily Russians as well as wealthy Greeks.

Greece has always been the dream destination for tourists, thanks to its beaches, islands, museums, music, food, and the warmth of its people. All this is still true today, although its economic agonies and the influx of desperate immigrants has changed Athens for the worse. In the city, walls are now covered with graffiti. Formerly chic shopping areas are filled with empty stores for rent. But once you get outside of the city, the islands, the hospitality, the food and the beaches and sunsets are as amazing as ever.

Hopefully by next summer many of Greece’s economic woes will be on the mend, but in the meantime, it’s wise (and increasingly economical) to fly into Athens airport (which is outside the city) and hop on a plane to one of the islands (or rent an car and drive to destinations like Meteora or Metsovo in the north—all now much easier to reach thanks to the new cross-country Egnatia Highway in the north.)

Outside of Athens, Greece still is as alluring and hospitable to the traveler as it was when it enchanted tourists like Lord Byron and, in the last century, visitors like Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell, who wrote, “You should see the landscape of Greece. It would break your heart.”

Hottest Street Art Anywhere: Miami’s Wynwood Art District

2011-08-14T20:45:00.000-04:00

Last night (Saturday, Aug. 13), having just arrived in Miami in anticipation of the birth of our number-one grandchild, we were treated by very pregnant daughter Eleni and her husband Emilio to an Aegean-style dinner at a restaurant called Mandolin in a patio that kept me thinking I was back in Greece.

As clouds obscured the full moon and heat lightning dramatically flickered overhead, they then drove us to what is clearly one of the busiest, craziest and most exciting areas of street art I’ve ever seen. (And you know I like street art!)

Daughter Marina in front of a graphic mural.

The Wynwood district of Miami was originally the fashion district, filled with windowless factories. Then it became a slum and, in January of 2009, to coincide with the famous Art Basel show, it was transformed into the Wynwood Walls District. At least a dozen of the hottest international artists decorated the large walls with their murals.

Here’s how their web site describes it: “Wynwood Walls, Miami’s epicenter for cutting edge museum-quality contemporary murals, builds on the street art tradition already established in Miami’s Wynwood District. The result of a collaboration between Tony Goldman of Goldman properties and Jeffrey Deitch of Deitch Projects, the open-air art park launched during Art Basel 2009.

Probably the most famous name represented here is Shepard Fairey, the controversial artist who created the famous “Hope” campaign poster for Barack Obama. He has incorporated in this mural (below) a portrait of Aung San Suu, whose image he has used in a poster promoting human rights in Burma.

Here’s what Tangerine Living blog magazine has to say about the artists:

The bright light of the neighborhood is the Wynwood Kitchen & Bar that offers a memorable dining experience and delish brasserie cuisine, which also houses the Wynwood Walls with major works from influential street artists from the US, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Their diverse talents are represented with originals by Shepard Fairey, Kenny Scharf, David Benjamin Sherry, Christian Awe, Ryan McGinness, DB Burkeman, Coco 144 & Phase 2, Stelios Faitakis, Invader, Barry McGee, and Ron English to name just a few. It’s one of the coolest and most visually striking resto and art park in the country.

We were very lucky—we just happened to drive into the Wynwood District on the night of the Second Saturday Art Walk. On the second Saturday of every month, the district comes alive with crowds, live music, open doors to more than 70 art galleries, countless food wagons, valet parking and the hippest-looking crowd of art lovers spilling into the streets and enjoying it all.

We couldn’t stay to see it all. After all, Eleni is nine months pregnant and can’t really party like a rock star, but we took a quick look around and I wanted to share some of the photos I took last night with you.

Joan and "Big Eleni". Emilio's mom, Carmen was there too.

The Body of the Year is the Crone of the Week

2011-08-07T16:11:00.000-04:00

It’s been a long time (over a year) since I nominated a Crone of the Week, but when a 66-year-old woman is named “Body of the Year” over supermodels like Elle MacPherson, not to mention Jennifer Lopez and Pippa Middleton, then “A Rolling Crone” has to take notice.

The poll of 2,000 men and women was conducted by the L.A. Fitness club chain. Helen Mirren won with 17.5 per cent of the vote. MacPherson, 48, came in second with 10 per cent.

It’s hard not to hate Helen Mirren for looking so good in a bathing suit. The instinctive reaction is, “Well, she probably has a personal trainer who comes in every day”. But the actress who has played three queens, and can look like an elderly frump as well as a hot pin-up girl, says she stays fit by exercising every day by herself with her WII.

“You can hula, jog, yoga, step – all in one session,” she told the Daily Mail of London. “You need never get bored, as every day you can tailor a new workout. It challenges you and you do it at home, so nobody need see you in those old yoga pants and torn T-shirt.”

(For fellow crones who are as technically ignorant as I am, a WII or more properly wii is a home video game console released by Nintendo in 2006.)

Helen Mirren is a brilliant role model for all of us over-sixties. She’s intelligent, dignified (usually) and a hugely successful career woman (Golden Globe, Oscar for “The Queen”, a house full of other prizes). And she has abs to die for.

I don’t imagine that any amount of exercise could get me abs like that, but Helen Mirren has inspired me to turn my single weekly Pilates session into two and –as soon as I get back from Miami, where I’m going on Friday in anticipation of welcoming my first grandchild into the world—I vow to sign up yet again with Weight Watchers to try to shed that extra ten pounds, which has somehow turned into an extra fifteen pounds. (Thinking of the heat in Miami I pulled out some shorts from years ago, tried to put them on and promptly tossed them into the pile for Goodwill.)

Another thing I love about Helen Mirren is that she lets her wrinkles show.

Wedding Bread as Folk Art?

2011-07-23T05:20:00.000-04:00

We’re presently at Costa Navarino in Messina, Greece, a super-luxurious resort complex which is devoted to ecological reform as well as supporting and promoting the culture and agriculture of the region.

As part of introducing the resort guests to native traditions, they gathered four local women yesterday to demonstrate making the traditional “embroidered breads” which are usually prepared to celebrate a wedding. The breads are set before the bride and groom at the wedding table, and the bride distributes pieces to the guests (like wedding cake in western weddings.)

These four ladies do their bread-making at Costa Navarino every Friday. I was there yesterday, sitting at one of the caned wooden chairs outside the perfect replica of a traditional cafenion, while around us couples sipped coffee frappés and played tavli (backgammon).

You know I love folk art in any form, and photograph it wherever I travel. I quickly realized that the decorated breads made by these local ladies were indeed folk art.

First they sifted.

Then they kneaded.

Taking an occasional break to sip thick Greek coffee from demitasse cups.

The leading artist was Kyria Maria, who had prepared a pencil sketch of her design before she came. (She told me they make different designs every Friday.)

She had a true folk artist’s compulsive need for detail. Her assistant stood by rolling tiny balls and thin snakes of dough at her behest. When the first bread, made by two other women, was complete, Kyria Maria was still creating flowers, butterflies, a sun and birds out of dough to cover every inch of her round loaf. (The first and primary part of her design represented bunches of grapes on a vine surrounding the Acropolis.)

I was surprised at how many Greek guests came up and asked the women what they were making. They had never heard of “embroidered breads” for a wedding.

Here are the almost-finished creations, which would be baked to a golden brown and served at the resort’s restaurants for breakfast the next day.

I knew about the “embroidered” wedding breads because last year, when daughter Eleni was married to Emilio in Corfu, Greece, her cousins and her aunt Nikki had prepared the “embroidered wedding bread” traditional to their part of Greece, but according to their custom, the bride would throw the bread over her shoulders to the single ladies in the group, like the bride’s bouquet in western culture, before it could be distributed to the crowd.

Eleni’s friend Catherine caught it and, just as for the single ladies who wrote their names on the soles of Eleni’s shoes, hoping that she would dance them away, the magic of the wedding bread will undoubtedly spread all the way from Corfu to Worcester, MA and conjure up a happily-ever-after future.

A Fish Story from Greece

2011-07-21T05:17:00.000-04:00

On Saturday, July 9, in Ioannina, the capitol of Epiros in northern Greece, we had lunch at Spuntino, an Italian restaurant set on the edge of Lake Pamvotis, a deep glacial lake surrounded by mountains.

The lake contains an island where Ali Pasha was executed in 1822 by assassins from Constantinople because the Sultan believed the Ottoman Albanian ruler had gained too much power over his realm.

Ali Pasha wowed visiting poet Lord Byron with his luxurious lifestyle, amid his mosques, palaces, Janissary corps of soldiers, his harem of 300 women and the seraglio of young men.

Inhabitants of Ioannina believe that the mists rising over the lake in the morning are the ghosts of the many women Ali Pasha had his henchmen drown in the lake, tied in bags weighted with stones, because they had displeased him in some way.

Visitors ride to the island in small boats to see the sights and eat at the fish restaurants, featuring tanks full of live eels, frogs, trout and other fresh-water seafood. (Once in the seventies, when I visited Ali Pasha’s summer home on the island, where he was killed, I saw that Jackie Kennedy Onassis had signed the guest book at the top of the page.)

But we like to eat on the mainland lakeside, called the Molo, usually ordering the shrimp risotto at Spuntino.

As we watched the boats sail past and the loon-like birds diving for fish, our meal was interrupted by a Greek fisherman climbing over chairs and tables while he played what was clearly a very large fish on his hook.

He followed it around, through the restaurant, patiently exhausting it –letting it out and then pulling it back--without breaking his line. I couldn’t help thinking of Hemingway’s “Old Man and the Sea”.

We carried on eating and watching the lakeside drama until the fisherman managed to exhaust the fish and drag it close to the lakeside, where a friend produced a large net.

By the time the fish was landed, a crowd had gathered.

The triumphant fisherman was applauded by the crowd as his dying prey flopped on the shore, trying uselessly to get back into the vast lake of ghosts and legends.

And then Nick and I went back to our dessert of watermelon and honeydew.

(If anyone can tell me what kind of fish this is, I’d love to know. I did ask the fisherman and bystanders, but got a variety of answers all of which meant nothing to me.)

P.S. An eerie coincidence. As I was typing this at noon on Thursday June 21, the Greek TV news is announcing that a small firefighting plane has fallen into the lake of Ioannina—but I don’t know yet if the legendary Lake Pamvotis has claimed another victim.)