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PHOTO OF THE DAY

Fifties in England

From the series, In The Town Where I was Born

Photo: My primary school [though photo is in the sixties]

After discussing how it was back then, here are a few remarks from old school mates:—

Says One: We also didn't use lots of plastic, carrier bags were brown paper with string handles and we ate breakfast, dinner, tea and supper. White bread was the only one on the table but not sliced in a pack. it was home baked. We had never heard of cholestrol Al-Qaeda, package holidays and not everyone had a car. Telephones were in a box on the corner of the street cost four pence and you pressed button a or b. Sweets and even cigarettes could come in little paper cones and Saturday was cinema matinee day!! We had never heard of computers, calculators, face book or social.media and tv was about 9 inch screen in black and white. We also played records on the gramaphone washed clothes in a boiler used a mangle,went to the local shop and had never heard of fast food, played outside til it got dark Safely, oh and respected our elders and teachers and said please and thank you and may I leave the table, blimey the good old days loads of fun.

Says Another: We never had spaghetti or macaroni. Fruit was something we had at Easter, along with chicken dinner. No turkey then. Well not in our house. We used to have tinned fruit and evaporated milk for pudding, or trifle on Sundays.

No sugared drinks and we had to eat what was given to us, as there was nothing else. Bread and dripping, or toast were our snacks. Not crisps and biscuits. Meant to add, Ice cream was a real treat. There were seven of us, we didn’t have a freezer, and so once in a blue moon we would have one from the ice ream man. Thinking about it, no wonder we were all so slim.

And a third: Full fat milk was good for you butter was a luxury cod liver oil daily fish and chips in news paper, what little food waste was fed to the pigs jam and bread and a bottle of water was a picnic for a day out. Every meal you had two choices eat it or stay at the table until you did. A treat was a stick of rhubarb and a twist of sugar to dip it in. Finally: And I don’t remember a single friend back then who had an allergy to anything at all, unlike today when most people seem to think it is “cool” to be allergic to something, which in most cases seems to be a simple excuse for not even trying it out.

PASSAGES

David Hockney

Text selections by Vermont View

We don't all see the same way at all. Even if I'm sitting looking at you, there is always the memory of you as well. And a memory is now. So someone who's never met you before is seeing a different person. That's bound to be the case. We all see something different. I assume most people don't look very hard at anything.

In art, new ways of seeing mean new ways of feeling; you can't divorce the two, as, we are now aware, you cannot have time without space and space without time.

The urge to draw must be quite deep within us, because children love to do it.

There is nothing wrong with photography, if you don't mind the perspective of a paralysed Cyclops.

What an artist is trying to do for people is bring them closer to something, because of course art is about sharing. You wouldn't be an artist unless you wanted to share an experience, a thought.

It takes a long time to make it simple.

The camera can't see space. It sees surfaces. People see space, which is much more interesting.

Faces are the most interesting things we see; other people fascinate me, and the most interesting aspect of other people - the point where we go inside them - is the face. It tells all.

Modernism in a way, early modernism, for instance, in pictures, was turning against perspective and Europe. And all early modernism is actually from out of Europe, when you think of cubism is African, is looking at Africa, Matisse is looking at the arabesque, Oceania. Europe was the optical projection that had become photography, that had become film, that became television and it conquered the world.

Read more PASSAGES >>>

Recent Passages By: David Hockney, Allen Ginsberg, Abigail Adams, Thomas Hardy, John Ruskin, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Amy Lowell, Bernardo Bertolucci, Buffy Sainte-Marie, John Keats, David Niven - Actor, David Niven - PhD, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Joan Didion, Pablo Casals, Geoffrey Chaucer, Muddy Waters, Aretha Franklin, Dorothy Maclean Read their work here

Beth Kanell, The Long Shadow.

Gale, a Cengage Company, 2018.

Splendidly Researched Novel of Vermont History

It's March 1850 in North Upton, Vermont, where fifteen-year-old Alice Sanborn is the only girl in a prosperous farming family. She and her friend Jerushah, the daughter of the inn-keepers across the road, consider themselves the adopted sisters of twelve-year-old Sarah, a slave recently brought to the village by Miss Farrow, a black abolitionist from St. Johnsbury. Sarah is quietly accepted in North Upton, but her safety is endangered when Alice's brother William and Jerushah's brother Matthew hide a fugitive slave, a project that introduces them to the young traveling abolitionist Solomon MacBride. In the midst of the Sanborn's sugaring-off party, word comes that a bounty hunter is only a few miles away. William and Matthew hurry north with the fugitive -- but the village derelict tells the bounty hunter about Sarah's presence in North Upton. The girls, fearing for Sarah's safety, accompany her first to Miss Farrow's house in St. Johnsbury, and then, as they are still followed, to Coventry to leave Sarah with the Hayes family, free blacks that live close to the border. Their brothers and Solomon do the driving at different times, but as they struggle over roads alternately swept with snow, mired in ruts, and flooded by rushing streams, Jerushah and Sarah develop scarlet fever, forcing the three girls to stay in Coventry for weeks. Tragedy in North Upton sends Solomon to Coventry to drive Jerushah and Alice home – a difficult journey made worse by Jerushah's hostility as it becomes clear that Solomon and Alice have formed a tentative emotional bond. That bond, along with Alice's consciousness that she has the strength and will to work for abolition, changes her future prospects unalterably, even though wrenching loss and grief show her how deeply she cares for her family. As the book closes, she is no longer a girl, but a woman who must choose her own path. <extract, read on>

Read the full review and other reviewed titles in this column.

The Devil in the Valley — Castle Freeman, Jr.

Vermont Exit Ramps II — Neil Shepard and Anthony Reczek

Half Wild: Stories — Robin MacArthur

A Refugee's Journey: A Memoir — Walter Hess

Vermont Non-GMO Cookbook — Tracey Medeiros

Robin MacArthur, Heart Spring Mountain.

Jackson Ellis, Lords of St. Thomas

Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

Beth Kanell, The Long Shadow

NOT QUITE THE THING

Sponsored by Delectable Mountain Cloth

Caption It!

MM Kizi

Series 27 images

SHORTS

Discontented Russians, Environment in, Climate change deniers

Vermont Views

STATISTIC: Record 20% of Russians Say They Would Like to Leave Russia — A new high of 20% of Russians say they would leave Russia if they could -- and Russian President Vladimir Putin might be partly to blame. — Gallup

STATISTIC: Preference for Environment Over Economy Largest Since 2000 — With the U.S. unemployment rate around 4%, Americans' preference for prioritizing environmental protection over economic growth is at a two-decade high. — Gallup

STATISTIC: Americans living in the East (67%) or the West (67%) are more likely than those living in the Midwest (60%) or the South (53%) to believe climate change is now occurring. — Gallup

Read More shorts

Real Vermont Stories

Real or Not Real? Famous Words of the Vermont Supreme Court

by Beth Kanell

The most famous quotation from a Vermont Supreme Court judge dates back to 1804, when [illus.] Theophilus Harrington (1762-1813), a man with plenty of experience but no formal legal training, examined a suit where an attorney for the “owner” of a fugitive slave presented a bill of sale for the fugitive, in an effort to get the “property” back.

The court that day met in Middlebury and it was Harrington’s first year. Even the court was new: Vermont’s constitution  established courts in each county in 1777, and the next year, the legislature created a Superior Court. According to the official Vermont Judiciary history (https://www.vermontjudiciary.org/supreme-court), the chief judge and four other judges were chosen each year by a hodgepodge of officials: the governor, the governor’s council, the House of Representatives. Meeting four times a year in four different locations, to spread justice around the state, these judges made decisions—but in turn, the decisions could be appealed, to the very same bodies that appointed the men in the first place.

A few years later, in 1782, the legislature restructured both the county courts and the upper court, which became the Supreme Court. The legislature got to elect its five judges, and these met as a court in each county once per year. Within seven years, legal training had prevailed and all the Supreme Court justices were lawyers, though clerking could take an aspirant to attorney status, without schooling.

Still, formality emerged slowly. It took until 1797 for the decisions to be put into writing and recorded. By 1823 those decisions even got published.

But not so in 1804. Numerous accounts of Harrington’s noted declaration cite each other, but there’s no existing court record of exactly what was said to decide that suit. What we do know is that when Harrington, as a first-year judge on the court, explained his reasoning to the attorney seeking the fugitive, chief judge Jonathan Robinson and assistant judge Royall Tyler concurred.

What was Harrington’s point? He insisted the bill of sale presented by the attorney didn’t go back far enough in time. Neither did the second one provided, showing purchase of the fugitive man’s mother. The frustrated attorney asked what documentation would suffice, and it’s reported that Harrington declared, “Nothing short of a bill of sale signed by God Almighty Himself.”

In the years that followed, Vermonters praised Harrington’s reported words as honestly representing the intent of the 14th state’s constitution. And after the Civil War, in 1886, the legislature promoted a monument to Harrington, at his burial site in Clarendon’s Chippenhook Cemetery.

All good background for writing historical fiction set in Vermont. But there are four major flaws in how “real” this story is. First, there’s no record of Harrington’s actual words, because court reporting hadn’t developed in 1804. Second, there are no accessible newspaper accounts to confirm this, either—Vermont’s early newspapers in current digitized form only date back to 1836. Third, we know more clearly today that the state constitution’s wording around enslavement—“no person born in this country, or brought from over sea, ought to be holden by law, to serve any person as a servant, slave or apprentice, after arriving to the age of twenty-one years, unless bound by the person's own consent, after arriving to such age, or bound by law for the payment of debts, damages, fines, costs, or the like”—allowed de facto enslavement especially of children, a shameful aspect of our history. (See Harvey Amani’s 2014 book, “The Problem of Slavery in Early Vermont, 1777–1810.”) And fourth, alas, opinion around slavery and abolition was far from unified in 1804, “even in Vermont.”

More on that final point, in another “Real Vermont Story.” It matters—to our integrity, and to the books I’m writing in the Winds of Freedom series.

<Extract>

Read More of this article >>>

Our Man In

Belgium

by Doug Hoyt

I travel light. To stay two steps ahead  (not like a head of kale — kale does not form a head) of the Vermont Kale Gang Escapee Deputees, you can't afford to haul tent or leave scent.

Everything changed, though, in Belgium. For one thing, the food. At the train station they have meat on a stick for 3€ . In Belgium, it is a wooden stick. Changing trains in Hanover, though, the meat had come with the original stick, still stuck in the hock (4.80€).

What they also have in Belgium is beer. It is said, there are as many different styles of beer in Belgium, as there are brands of beer. I could not establish that definitively in Bruges in just one evening. But not for lack of trying.

Moving on, quickly, to Ghent, the allure became overwhelming, and many useful items and warmer clothing were jettisoned (may the deputy's dogs be ever confused), in favor of suds, which had won favor after cruisin' the brews in Bruges, such that many a cent was then spent in Ghent.

<Extract>

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Finnish Fandango

WATCHING THE MAESTRO

Anneli Karniala

Having just checked my calendar, I see that the concert was already 5+ weeks ago. I could have sworn it was only 2 or 3! 

I had planned on attending a free open rehearsal of our Cape Symphony with Jung-Ho Pak, Artistic Director & Conductor. I had attended it last year and loved it, so wanted to go again this year. I've been to many of the Cape Symphony's concert evenings in past years, but last year was my first open rehearsal evening. It was a treat!

The late afternoon of that rehearsal evening, I was still doing documentation on my work-iPad for the patients I had seen that day.. Fifty-two years as a nurse, and the paperwork hasn't gotten any less -- on the contrary! Well, I was behind and didn't like that. I almost always finish by evening so I don't have to continue the next day. However, I was getting more and more frazzled, and my eyes were getting bleary from the damn screen. 

I really wanted to go to the concert rehearsal, but a nagging work ethic was lecturing in my brain: "No, no, you shouldn't go. Just take a break, then finish working. You'll feel better in the morning if you keep at it now. You can do something enjoyable tomorrow." 

But my rebellious streak and my gut took hold and I said out loud, "The heck with THIS! I want to go and I'm going. It's exactly what I need this evening, and if I don't go, I WON'T feel better in the morning, I'll just be kicking myself!"

I had 15 minutes before Jung-Ho Pak would be giving a little talk to the audience members about the music, before the actual rehearsal would begin. So I slapped a slice of cheese onto a piece of hardtack, grabbed a bottle of water, put the dog in his crate, and drove off while chomping on my bite to eat. I hadn't even changed my clothes. After all, this was a rehearsal evening. I knew from last year, that the musicians would be in casual clothes, and Jung-Ho Pak would probably again be in his jeans and a casual top.  

And what a remarkable 3 hours it was. I'm so glad I made the right decision to go. Sometimes it's best to listen to your gut!

Extract Read more Anneli Karniala

The Hills of Nova Scotia

Elizabeth Hill

“No matter where I roam, 

Nova Scotia will always be my home.”

~Anonymous

Every summer it happened, and every summer I tried again, though my efforts were always for naught. We were approaching the Nova Scotia border at Amherst after two long days of our parents driving the six of us north from New Jersey in our way-too-small pale, green forward-backward 1950‘s Studebacker. It was there that all three of my brothers scrambled to stretch an arm as far as possible out an open window in competition with each other to be the first to arrive in “Novie!”

Of course, being the youngest and stuck in the middle back seat, I was always out of reach of the front windows though I still felt compelled to join in the game!

We’d get out of the car to walk around a bit at the Welcome Center, there greeted by a Piper in full tartan regalia, playing bagpipes. That sound transported me to a far away time and place, making my heart race as if it recognized Home.  

The excitement at the border charged us up for the final two hours ahead on the Sunrise Trail to Westville, where Grandma and Grandpa Ross lived. 

As we turned into the unpaved road in front of their farmhouse, the air became full of lusciousness from Grandma’s kitchen. Every day, she made fresh bread and warm, moist, fluffy biscuits that—even before they were slathered with fresh butter and black strap molasses—would make us all drool. 

On the porch, Grandpa would be waiting for us on his rocking chair, or his hammock that was tied up between two trees across the dirt road in front of the house.

On the property there was a big red barn, a henhouse, and a shabby old garage that housed an ancient Model T Ford, whose crank had long ago robbed Grandpa of the top half of one of his thumbs. I can still remember how that garage smelled of old dry leather, mouse droppings, and dust. 

Extract Read More Elizabeth Hill >>>

Blurb Writers At The Edge

Not everyday a Vermont Views columnist has a book published. Here is Daybook 1 by Toni Ortner with reviews by Arlene Distler, Tim Mayo and Phil Innes

This would be Steinbeck if he hadn’t fooled around in other people’s kitchens. This is a full-score Cohen with two more notes, not reaching anywhere, but ever taking in. The words come humming out of the dark to shatter crystalline on the floor as sharp edged duo-tone fridge magnets familiar and mysterious as if designed by Paul Klee — not made in China or the Old Country, made in the Wild East of New York is more like it. There are hiding demons in the text waiting to pierce you, and there are non-resident angels flirting with sin.

—Phil Innes, Vermont Views Magazine

Read more of this and other letters to Vermont Views >>>

WATER’S EDGE

Walmart Universe

Nicola Metcalf

We discovered many campgrounds catered exclusively to RVs.  I scrambled on my iphone trying to locate possibilities. My partner and I were tired, hungry and testy, arguing over how to make a decision. He accused me of being too particular.  I bumped up against his resistance to making plans ahead of time.  We knew Walmart parking lots were an easy solution, and this seemed like the right time to try one.  But first we needed dinner.

Even though I had planned and packed plenty of home-cooked food that only required reheating, we had eaten out at restaurants for our first few meals.  This was because our cook-top blew the fuses on the first try, casting a blanket of disappointment and doubt over David’s handiwork.  He had been stressed gauging which size fuses were needed and where to find them, a process that took place over a day or so.  At this point, I wanted to be eating the perishable food waiting to spoil in the coolers.  David heard my concern and led the way, pulling us off a road leading to a construction site near a motel.  There I peed behind a dumpster and we fixed our dinner roadside.  We ate baked beans with sauteed hot dog slices heated on our newly working cooktop, thanks to new 60 amp fuses.  We played at being vagabonds. 

As it became dark, we headed to the nearby Walmart Supercenter.  We had been there earlier in the afternoon looking for a small and simple non-electric coffee maker since we’d left ours at home.  The place was quiet and cavernous with very few shoppers, and once again I marveled at American Capitalism.  Not surprisingly, Walmart had nothing small and simple in the category of coffee makers, only bulky Keurigs and complicated 12 cup machines.  There was a French Press, but it was too large to allow it valuable storage space in the van. 

Since we had forgotten to pack our hats as well, I asked where hats were located from an employee standing at one of the registers.  A tall woman in her 60s with an ambiguous shade of blonde hair, she held a spray bottle and cleaning cloth and was half-heartedly wiping down the register and its barcode reading wand.  The teller next to her was engaged helping customers make their purchases.  The woman gave me instructions in a southern accent I had trouble understanding.  She waved in the direction I was to go in, but was clearly was not about leave her station.  I couldn’t find them.  Another employee, one with a smile, graciously walked me where I wanted to go.

It was dark when we returned to Walmart for the night.  Shutting off the ignition, I looked out across the large and largely empty parking lot, sparsely dotted with trees.  Sure enough, just as we had heard about, six or seven other small vans, and one gigantic RV, were quietly posed for the night. Most rigs were parked beside one of several trees scattered across the lot, as if the tree marked a campsite, offering a gesture of camouflage and natural beauty.  People had parked evenly spaced from one another, and there was no sign of life behind tightly drawn, light-blocking curtains. I looked over at the van closest to us and spotted a woman slipping into the front cab from the rear, then quickly withdraw. We had quietly joined an underground community.  There we shared a common sense of purpose to gather somewhere free and relatively safe, outside the demands of a market economy.

<extract> Read more Nicola Metcalf >>>

WRITE WALK

Random Birthdays

Susan Cruickshank

She was grinning big and wide, as a high soprano pulsating breathy giggle escaped her lips. Her husband was smiling big too. He stood beside her as she produced a lime green plastic bag and offered it to me, saying, “Happy Random Birthday. It’s a Random Birthday!” 

I’ve never been good at keeping track of dates, particularly birthdays. If you asked me what someone was wearing 30 years ago, I’m your girl, but remembering the day when a friend made their grand entrance onto the Earth’s stage, well that has always been a struggle.

The irony is that MY birthday is VERY important to ME. The grander the celebration, the more well-wishers, the better, and so it’s not surprising that I have a number of friends with a similar, “Treat me like a Queen for a day, or a week, … forever” persuasion.

I had offended a few of my soul-sisters with my birthday forgetfulness, sometimes failing to remember their big days entirely, not even remembering in time to send something belated. Random Birthdays were born out of this shortcoming and proved to be a smashing success.

The beauty of a Random Birthday was that they never knew when it was coming and as long as it happened within the year of the person’s actual birthday I was satisfied that it was ‘close enough’. Their actual birthday may have been in October but this year their Random Birthday could happen in June.

<Extract> Read More Susan Cruickshank >>>

MEANDERINGS

Another foggy morning

Charles Monette

Wantastiquet is deep blanketed gray as we leave for Black Mountain.  Driving up Rte. 30, we look across the West River, and see Black Mountain shrouded in a dense cloudy mist.  Its base, lower 3/5ths stands softly solid green, a damp deepening green that spoke of summery Green Mountains to come.

The parking area along the fence at the trailhead was empty.  My hiking friend aptly remarked, “we’ll probably be the only ones on the mountain.”  Spraying on some ‘buzz away’ just in case, we head up.

While walking uphill, my mountain savvy partner states, “The air is moist, good for the skin, like getting a facial”.  There are no bugs, but we dare not say so, lest our words shake them awake.   So, the thought silently crosses our minds from time to time as we meander up the mountain.

We both embrace the languid peace absorbing the air.  Noticing newly fallen trees across the trail, we glance at their uprooted collapse.  Wind? Decay?  Wind most likely.

The trail is barely wet.  The footing is good and lends to an easy pace. Hurry below soon left far behind.  Unusual bark patterns abound: white birch cleanly stripped ‘round, dangling, hanging on, silver birch with scar marks seemingly slashed with a hatchet at 5 inch intervals.  Savagely marked, they now appeared healed… grown over.  Other trees’ bark distinctly dark-wetted; yet trunk circumferences were mostly dry.

Little white flowers appeared on shrub branches.  Conspicuous in their sparsity, we questioned their identity. “Too early for mountain laurel?”  Moving on, my friend asks if I’ve “seen any lady slippers up here?”  “None that I’ve noticed”, my uncertain reply.

Moments later, she spots one, a ‘pink’ lady slipper resplendent, alone.

<extract> Read more of this and other articles by Charles Monette >>>

WRITE ON !

George and Agnes

by Howard Prussack

George and Agnes Spaulding, who farmed just two miles south of our farm on Route 14, were intertwined in the fabric of our farm community for as far back as I can remember. Whether it was 4H, a Grange supper, the Tunbridge Fair, the Soil Conservation District, Farm Bureau or any other farm related event, they would be there.

I put up feed for George and Agnes for about 10 years, chopping haylage and corn at either end of the growing season. It was usually a two day affair by the time we moved machinery in, did the work and packed up and left, and it was a consistent window into their lives and the routine they shared for many years. There was a time that I was putting up feed for nine dairy farms each year, scattered around two counties. Everyone wanted to be first to get their work done to get the optimum forage quality, and it was a delicate balancing act to satisfy everyone and not lose any business. Some farmers offered to prepay in return for earlier service, others emphasized the large amount of business they gave me and that should put them at the front of the list. Within just a few short years, Agnes had established their farm at the front of the pack, simply by calling and stating the date she wanted it done by and not leaving me any choice! If there was an early cold snap in September and the corn in the valley had gotten a hard frost, I could almost set my watch to the phone ringing at 6:30 that morning, Agnes on the line. “It’s Agnes, we’ve had a frost and need you here tomorrow to put in the corn.” If it hadn’t frosted by mid-September, I could predict that before the end of the Fair that she would say “We’ll see you this week to put in the corn.”

While there, I would be back and forth in the yard hauling in dozens of truckloads of feed all day long and it seemed that each time I looked up, Agnes was doing something different. Making a few rounds with the lawnmower, in the house making food for an event, working in the garden, jumping on the tractor to mow a few more acres of hay needed to finish the crop, in the car heading to one of the grandkid’s games, or to Village Pizza, and always barefoot. She and George had a distinct division of the summer work; she did the mowing, baling and other chores while he tedded, raked and did the milking. One summer evening George was raking in front of us and it went well past the start of chore time. He finished up and didn’t stick around the field too long, stating that “Agnes is milkin’, and she don’t like milkin’, so I better go.” as he headed back to the barn on the tractor at noticeably higher RPM’s than usual.

Photo Credit: Sam Lincoln, Randolph Center

<Extract>

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OPEN MIND

The Immigration Act of 1924, or Johnson–Reed Act, including the Asian Exclusion Act and National Origins Act

Offie Wortham

Part three of four of a major essay by Dr. Offie Wortham

         This was a United States federal law that prevented immigration from Asia, set quotas on the number of immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere, and provided funding and an enforcement mechanism to carry out the longstanding ban on other immigrants.

An 1882 law had already put an end to Chinese immigration, but as Japanese (and, to a lesser degree, Korean and Filipino) laborers began arriving and putting down roots in western states, an exclusionary movement formed in reaction to the "Yellow Peril". Valentine S. McClatchy, founder of The McClatchy Company and a leader of the anti-Japanese movement, argued, "They come here specifically and professedly for the purpose of colonizing and establishing here permanently the proud Yamato race," citing their supposed inability to assimilate to American culture and the economic threat they posed to white businessmen and farmers. Despite some hesitation from President Calvin Coolidge and strong opposition from the Japanese government, with whom the U.S. government had previously maintained a cordial economic and political relationship, the act was signed into law on May 24, 1924.

The act set a total immigration quota of 165,000 for countries outside the Western Hemisphere (an 80% reduction from the pre-World War I average), and barred immigrants from Asia, including Japan and the Philippines (then under U.S. control). The act reduced the annual quota of any nationality from 3% to 2% of the number of foreign-born persons of such nationality residing in the United States in 1890 (though more recent censuses existed). The reduced quotas were set to last through 1927. No quotas on immigration from the Western Hemisphere were put in place.

According to the U.S. Department of State Office of the Historian, the purpose of the act was "to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity.

The provisions of the act were so restrictive that in 1924 more Italians, Czechs, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Poles, Portuguese, Romanians, Spaniards, Chinese, and Japanese left the United States than arrived as immigrants

The law was not modified to aid the flight of Jewish refugees in the 1930s or 1940s despite the rise of Nazi Germany. The quotas were adjusted to allow more Jewish refugees after World War II, allies in China and the Philippines. The immigration quotas were eased in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 and replaced in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

Similar to the start of European immigration, the Chinese started immigrating to the United States after a population explosion and a food shortage in China. Other push factors were the Opium War and the Taiping rebellion. While in the United States the Chinese endured constantly changing U.S. immigration priorities. When immigrants could be used for cheap labor they were instantly recruited and embraced but the second an economic shift took place in the United States, immigrants were given the cold shoulder.

<extract>    Read More Offie Wortham >>>

MONKEY’S CLOAK

A robot picked my strawberry today

Charles Monette

Photo: Stock

A robot picked my strawberry today

grasping light brown hands slid into irrelevance

the robot’s squeeze was uniformly gentle

clean and fast and antiseptic

a light brown heart was bruised today

maybe there’s work among asparagus

drinking water with the almonds

gathering ‘neath a sun-brimmed hat another day

embracing the land of free possibility

its cost too dear to know

a robot picked my hope today

grasping hands slid without relevance

<extract> Read more Monkey’s Cloak

THE FIRST GLASS

Speech to the congregation

Vincent Panella

Palm Sunday, 2019, Centre Congregational Church, Brattleboro.

This is my short speech to the congregation as a Loaves and Fishes volunteer.

Good morning, and thank you. My name is Vincent Panella, and I’m a retired teacher and a writer. I’ve been living in Vermont since 1976. I volunteer at Loaves and Fishes for the Friday meal – as you know we also serve a meal on Tuesdays.

So, if I were to tell you what it’s like to work there, I’d like to characterize it in a few words – so let’s say, satisfying, inspiring, and tiring. Satisfying because I’m lucky enough to be able to give up one day a week to a good cause. Inspiring because this is a tangible way of adding some good to a world lacking in compassion. Tiring because one never stops moving until the last fork is put away.

Growing up in an Italian family in which food was a part of physical and mental sustenance, it was natural when I looked around for a place to volunteer that I would gravitate to the kitchen.

So with all that said, let me try to describe my day on a job from eight in the morning to one or one-thirty in the afternoon, a job in which it’s impossible for me to describe every thing I do – but I will try.

When I arrive at the kitchen at eight or so, Ruth and Phil and John and Josie are already cooking the soup and meat courses and preparing desserts and planning for the day’s meal and for next Tuesday‘s meal as well. I have evolved into the salad bar and prep man. The first thing to do after talking with Ruth and the others about what to prepare, is to check the walk-in cooler and whatever food has been donated from the supermarkets and local businesses like Amy’s and the coop. We also set up a coffee bar for early arrivals, which are usually people who just like to hang out or come in from the cold, but who also help with whatever jobs they’re willing to do or offer to do.

<extract>  Read More >>>

ARCHETYPAL HIPPIE SPEAKS

Division Tactics

Jeri Rose

If you think being a Jew is different from being any other human group,whether you were born a Jew or not, you are a racist. The same goes for thinking that women are significantly differently from men. It is sexism to think the sexes are significantly different from one another in the essence of being human. Sure we can analyze and codify differences among people. We can note differences in bone structure between those from Europe and those from Africa. These differences arise from isolated genetic breeding. However, there is only a basic experience of reality that is human and our literature and art express our sameness, even though our societies have differences, as humans, we display a commonality of experience that marks us as one human race.

It does not matter if you think some group is better or worse. It is racism to think that we are different in some essential way from one another. Racism is not necessarily a bad thing as a conveyor of hate; it is simply wrong. There is one human race expressed as male and female. There are people who hypothesize that keeping people divided in their concept of how we think about each other, serves the purposes of those who rule us. I think that might be true; however, looking at human interactions, we see that the separation point of view may arise from within ourselves whether or not it is abetted by those who have control of media and the encouragement of our societal considerations.

Babies are born with temperament for fearing what is new or curiosity to explore what is new. They exhibit these traits before they are socialized to express them. Thus I posit that both ways of responding to the world are natural to us and based in aspects that promote survival. Being wary keeps one alive but so does curiosity. The conservative and the liberal are both valid viewpoints and can add to human civilization.

<extract> Read more Jeri Rose >>>

SCREENplay

Wildlife

Lawrence Klepp

Wildlife, the directorial debut of the actor Paul Dano, came and went quietly early this year, but it’s now available on streaming platforms, and it’s worth pursuing if you have a chance. In a year of outstanding female performers—Glenn Close, Olivia Colman, Viola Davis, Rachel Weisz, among others—the riveting work by Carey Mulligan in this film was largely overlooked. Based on a Richard Ford novel, the movie is set in a small town in Montana in 1960. The town, like many small Western towns, has a bleak, windswept, middle-of-nowhere ambience, but there’s a soaring mountain backdrop that is impressive in itself and lends the film a pathos of distance, a sense that life, or happiness, may be just over the horizon.

Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal play Jeanette and Jerry Brinson, a working-class couple in their mid-30s with a 14-year-old son, Joe (Ed Oxenbould). The family is barely making it financially but seems united and happy. But then Jerry gets fired from his job at a country club, having joined several members, at their invitation, for an off-hours game of golf and a drink afterward, thus violating club protocols. Jeanette, always smiling, always encouraging, is at first optimistic. She’s sure Jerry will quickly find another job. And, if necessary, she could work part-time, and they might move to a cheaper house, one even smaller and more nondescript than the one they’re renting.

<extract> Read More SCREENplay

Environment there and here

Special Environmental report by Phil Innes — Column George Harvey

In Iceland:

¶ Katrin Jakobsdottir, the 41-year-old chairwoman of the Left-Green Movement, has been elected Prime Minister of Iceland. One of the most well-liked politicians in Iceland, Katrín, a former education minister and avowed environmentalist, has pledged to set Iceland on the path to carbon neutrality by 2040. As Iceland’s fourth prime minister in only two years, Katrín will take office at a time when national politics have been tainted by public distrust and scandal. A democratic socialist, Katrín is viewed as a bridge-building leader that may lead the country towards positive, incremental change. “She is the party leader who can best unite voters from the left and right,” said Eva H. Onnudottir, a political scientist at the University of Iceland, according to the New York Times. “Because this coalition includes parties from the left to the right, their work will be more about managing the system instead of making ‘revolutionary’ changes.”

In an era when climate change is making it necessary for countries around the world to implement sustainable energy solutions, Iceland presents a unique situation. ... The story of Iceland's transition from fossil fuels may serve as an inspiration to other countries seeking to increase their share of renewable energy.

About 85% of all houses in Iceland are heated with geothermal energy. ... Renewable energy provided almost 100% of electricity production, with about 73% coming from hydropower and 27% from geothermal power.

In the USA:

¶ President Trump's first EPA Administrator, Scott Pruitt, resigned effective July 6, 2018, amid a series of scandals. Deputy Administrator Andrew Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, started serving as acting administrator on July 9, 2018. Wheeler was confirmed as EPA Administrator on February 28, 2019.

The mission of EPA is to protect human health and the environment. EPA's purpose is to ensure that: ... the United States plays a leadership role in working with other nations to protect the global environment.

The EPA has 14,172 employees, and has a budget of $8,200,000,000.

<extract> Read More World & US Energy News

OLD LADY BLOG

Trapped part II

Toni Ortner

I don’t know how long I stood in the middle of the corridor watching the doors opening one by one.  The doors did not open sequentially. They opened at random every few minutes. Each time a door opened a person emerged either in a wheelchair or on crutches or using a walker.  Some of the wheelchairs were designed so the person sitting in it could move along the corridor without help. They all were moving in the same direction that led away from the entrance. If I wanted to get out of the mall, I had better walk against the traffic and move from where I stood at Door l03 down to Door l. I told myself to keep calm and not to panic.

There was a pretty young woman with long dark hair tied up in a bun with a blue ribbon that was being pushed along. I thought she must have multiple sclerosis; she was humming a tune and drumming her fingers on the arms of the wheelchair. I was right in front of her so she must see me. I waved hello, but she looked at me and through me. Not a single resident seemed to be aware of anyone else. Each inhabited his or her own world. They were acclimated to physical decline. 

I walked and walked and was up to Door 56 when a buzzer sounded, and then an alarm went off. The people who were walking scurried quickly back into their rooms. Door slammed, and within a few minutes I was alone again. <extract>

Read More Toni Ortner >>>

URBAN NATURALIST

A Loud and Colorful Advance Party Marks the End of Hogle Sanctuary's Winter Silence

Lloyd Graf

<extracts> Finally there are signs that the figurative bird repellent is beginning to wear off. Vultures appeared in Sanctuary and town skies in the 2'd week of March, and quickly became a welcome, if delayed roosting presence on both north and south ends. Robins migrating from southern climes recently joined the sparse but rugged group of over-wintering companions on the scene. For me, though, Hogle's silence ended definitively (and literally) on the morning of March 17, St Patrick's Sunday. I parked by the Sanctuary's Eaton Avenue entrance under partly sunny 9:30 AM skies and started down the trail toward the boardwalk and viewing area. As it developed I had to give up my descent at the top of the riser zone and survey the boardwalk, the massive old cement pump station, and some of the waters from on high. The most traveled part of the Eaton trail has recently been, and remained on that day a treacherous packed-down strip of ice. The remnant of once- navigable snow alongside the trail has also been largely iced over. The Eaton approach still remained tricky as recently as March 21 though the risk factor may by now have given way to the mere nuisance factor of mud season gunk.

Suddenly I was treated to an unmistakable and unexpected spring anthem: a series of loud, shrill, overtone-laden “kon-ka-reeeeee's “, the signature calls of Red-winged blackbirds, filtered down from the Eaton Ave neighborhood I was now returning to. As I emerged from the woods, I was greeted by visual confirmation. Some 12-15 blackbirds were artfully distributed on the barren branches of an Oak or Maple tree in a yard on the east side of Eaton Ave's north-south stretch. Back-lit by the eastern sun, the birds all appeared similarly dark, but occasional flashes of red epaulet combined with continuing vocalizations served to establish that I was viewing a small flock of Red-winged blackbirds.

This was exciting to me, in that Red-wings are among the most visually striking, and entertainingly aggressive of all spring harbinger species. The fact that they are also voraciously insectivorous is both encouraging (their efforts will be appreciated very soon, when mosquitoes and flies make their appearances) and perplexing, in that their favored prey insects were not yet obviously there for them as they huddled in the 31F chill. One assumes that the Red-wings must have known what they were up to, though they have not been sighted since that Sunday, neither by me nor by residents whom I buttonholed. Let's hope they're holed up in some life-sustaining local haven or have found well-stocked bird feeders.

Red-wings are great favorites of mine, in part because of their vivid looks (that is the males' epaulet-flashing sinister good looks; the females are tastefully brown-mottled with a subtle russety suggestion on the tips of back feathers) , remarkable vocalizations and consumption of nuisancy insects, and in part owing to the manic, shrill high-energy ferocity with which they defend their territories and nests against any and all intruders. An anecdote from Chicago days 3 decades ago serves to illustrate. Strolling through Lincoln Park, a prosperous, neighborhood often referred to as a “yuppie town”, and specifically through the Lincoln Park Zoo on a glorious warm spring morning, I came upon a knot of people, many resplendent in Sunday morning finery, gathered around a Tapir's outdoor stomping ground. It was quickly evident what had attracted these folk's attention: the Tapir, a large, sturdy, and as it developed, studly male, was experiencing the glandular surges of spring in a distinctively masculine way. One after another, would-be passers-by of various genders and ages joined the clutch of gawkers captivated by the beast's equine-scale endowment. So awe-struck were they, that they were unaware, at least initially, of the entry of another testosterone-fueled character onto the stage: a furious male Red-wing. Enraged by the proximity of the human gaggle to his and his mate's nest in a nearby tree, he first circled the group screeching avian expletives. Then as his ire escalated, he started dive-bombing people's heads, especially ladies' up-do hairstyles and Easter season hats. By the time the crowd dispersed, some members having left to avoid avian strafing runs, others as the tapir's rampancy gradually waned, the Red-wing had knocked a hat off one woman's head and disarranged a couple more.

Extract Read More Lloyd Graf

ARCHETYPAL HIPPIE SPEAKS

Division Tactics

Jeri Rose

If you think being a Jew is different from being any other human group,whether you were born a Jew or not, you are a racist. The same goes for thinking that women are significantly differently from men. It is sexism to think the sexes are significantly different from one another in the essence of being human. Sure we can analyze and codify differences among people. We can note differences in bone structure between those from Europe and those from Africa. These differences arise from isolated genetic breeding. However, there is only a basic experience of reality that is human and our literature and art express our sameness, even though our societies have differences, as humans, we display a commonality of experience that marks us as one human race.

It does not matter if you think some group is better or worse. It is racism to think that we are different in some essential way from one another. Racism is not necessarily a bad thing as a conveyor of hate; it is simply wrong. There is one human race expressed as male and female. There are people who hypothesize that keeping people divided in their concept of how we think about each other, serves the purposes of those who rule us. I think that might be true; however, looking at human interactions, we see that the separation point of view may arise from within ourselves whether or not it is abetted by those who have control of media and the encouragement of our societal considerations.

Babies are born with temperament for fearing what is new or curiosity to explore what is new. They exhibit these traits before they are socialized to express them. Thus I posit that both ways of responding to the world are natural to us and based in aspects that promote survival. Being wary keeps one alive but so does curiosity. The conservative and the liberal are both valid viewpoints and can add to human civilization.

<extract> Read more Jeri Rose >>>

IN BETWEEN

What In your Life is Calling You?

Julia Ferrari

For the past few months I’ve been stuck in a place where forward motion seems impossible and starting new things feels incomprehensibly blocked. So I’ve slowed way down and allowed myself to solve or be present with only one or two problems while just moving through this time, paying attention to what ails me, to how I speak to myself, listening to my inner critic — seeing myself and my life in a new light.

In life it is so easy to get caught up in our uneasiness, wanting to escape it as soon as possible. But sometimes it takes a slow and steady bearing of what is happening, of dealing with things as they are unfolding, to change them for the better. I remember when, soon after my husband died, I would lie awake night after night, thinking of all the things that were left undone and unaccomplished that day. This led to more sleepless nights until I saw it was not helping and decided I had to change it. As I lay down in bed I started to consciously list all the things I had accomplished that day, even if it was only one small thing. Then I would state the things I was grateful for and sure enough, I started to fall asleep again. This small effort slowed me down and showed me that when anxiety inducing situations happen, that increasing our anxiety about our progress is counter-intuitive. Every moment we feel anxious is a moment to look deeper, to see ourselves where we are. 

Pena Chodron in her book “Taking the Leap,” says “… our whole facade, the little song and dance we all do, is based on trying to avoid the groundlessness that permeates our lives. By learning to stay, we become very familiar with this place, and gradually, gradually, it loses its threat… We’re no longer invested in instantly trying to move away from insecurity. We think that facing our demons is reliving some traumatic event or discovering for sure that we’re worthless. But, in fact, it is just abiding with the uneasy, disquieting sensation of nowhere-to-run and finding that— guess what?—we don’t die; we don’t collapse. In fact, we feel profound relief and freedom.”

Many of us are self critical, berating ourselves for our mistakes. We can speak so sharply to ourselves, using searing language to disapprove of anything that irritates or displeases us about ourselves. We would not talk that way to another living soul, but in private we can be our own worst enemies, full of verbal abuse and scathing criticism.

Extract Read more Julia Ferrari

From The Archive

Evolution of democracy from economy to ecology

Editorial Essay

...Not too long ago these [energy] subjects were spoken of as ‘alternatives’, but in the chaotic energy scene of today they are currently only an alternative to chaos itself. One may scoff at specific proposed solutions, but the main problems can no longer be denied.

Elsewhere, Brattleboro as an influential hub to an extensive bio-region, a region without a name, is taking steps to implement a topic suggested by Wendell Berry in an essay he had published at Orion Press, Winter 2001. He titled the central essay The Idea of a Local Economy. This too, said Berry, is not an ‘alternative’ to anything but disempowerment. ‘Without prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the land no voice.’

Indeed, I remember William Irwin Thompson, founder of the Lindisfarne Foundation, New York City, saying much the same in 1982 — that the evolution of democracy will occur when we begin to shift from economy to ecology, thereby an intelligence of bio-regions provides the basis for action within the region, and Berry’s Local Economy is also the base of an enhanced local polity.

Certainly just being ‘aware’ of the difficulties in the world is altogether too passive and we might also consider a term coined by Buckminster Fuller in terms of the right way to harness our technology and economy; Imagineering.

<extract> From The Archive

VERMONT DIARY

Five Chill Words

Phil Innes

About 39 years ago I found myself seated in a group of people from all over the world at an orientation to The Findhorn Foundation, in Morayshire, Northern Scotland. People were introducing themselves and where they came from, and then it came the turn of the woman sat beside me dressed all in black who had been knitting through the introductions.

“Anna from Auschwitz”, she said.

Following that, I adjusted by own introduction away from Cornwall, it’s world class beaches, air, palm trees and dolphins in the river, since that may have seemed a too-conscious levity, and mumbled something else.

I was reminded of this incident by two more recent ones; a review by Laura Stevenson of a title by Walter Hess — A Refugee's Journey: A Memoir; and with simultaneous news reports of increased Holocaust Denial in Europe and in the USA.

Though Anna’s chilly announcement before resuming her knitting is not the thing I remember as much as what happened a few days later. Again meeting at ‘The Park’ in a well-lit room with flowers and upon a mid-session break for tea I felt a claw like hand on my arm — a couple of young Dutch people were chatting with a young German one, discussing what sort of herb teas there were available? As innocent an anecdote as could be imagined, but Anna gasped to me, “(Phil) I cannot hear this language”, and I could see there was an immanent syncope, so I picked her up and carried her outside — then we walked around awhile until lunch, not mentioning the episode at all, not then not ever.

I will not remark on that more except to say, being a Celt, that one does not accept things as randomly happening, and there is always something pert, something important or significant to understand about encounters even of the noir-romance. Not about making something of this into a noble cause on behalf of others, promoting it as a subject for general conversation, or even undertaking a sort of psychic voyage into another’s dark. I wrestled with this for a month or so and eventually let it go, feeling that the response ‘better to light a candle than curse the darkness’ seemed a little too intellectual.

Then I chanced upon two children in the community playing with bricks and one telling the other how to stack them properly, but not succeeding until the knowledgable child demonstrated how to do it.

Read More VERMONT DIARY >>>

AN A-MUSING LIFE

One Moment, Please

Nanci Bern

I am in a car on a New England highway. It is a sunny winter day. This ride could not be more different than the one I took last month. I recall that day because it is 4 days before New Year's Eve and we still have had no snow to speak of. This does not make my inner snow bunny smile.

It was 1:00 pm. The drive from Vermont took the requisite 3.5 hours. The sky grew grey and menacing the closer I got to New York City and the anticipation of having a much missed hometown exploit. Snow was in the forecast. I hadn't been in a winter snow in my beloved concrete jungle in years. Not that I do not appreciate where I live now; but I am split like a log being halved for a winter wood stove.

My friend came to the lobby and introduced me to the doorman. He entered me in the computer so other building folks would know that I passed muster to be allowed to traipse in and out for the week. When I saw myself being popped into the thing a.k.a., the real doorman, I wondered if it was related to H.A.L.

So up we went to settle me in, then just as quickly we spun around to walk the streets of Broadway and West End. Oh, the grit and wait, the harsh swirl of wind (?) that was wrapping itself around my ankles made me stop. I took a whiff of the air with my now New England snout and knew we were going to be in for it. 'This can't be good', I thought. I tried to ferry my friend along all of our stops to avoid the ensuing deluge, but she wouldn't heed my warning.

Yup, we got caught in it. We got so caught in it that I stopped seeing a way out. The snow came down fast, wet and heavy. Frenzy ensued. <extract>

Read more Nanci Bern

Blurb Writers At The Edge

Not everyday a Vermont Views columnist has a book published. Here is Daybook 1 by Toni Ortner with reviews by Arlene Distler, Tim Mayo and Phil Innes

This would be Steinbeck if he hadn’t fooled around in other people’s kitchens. This is a full-score Cohen with two more notes, not reaching anywhere, but ever taking in. The words come humming out of the dark to shatter crystalline on the floor as sharp edged duo-tone fridge magnets familiar and mysterious as if designed by Paul Klee — not made in China or the Old Country, made in the Wild East of New York is more like it. There are hiding demons in the text waiting to pierce you, and there are non-resident angels flirting with sin.

—Phil Innes, Vermont Views Magazine

Read more of this and other letters to Vermont Views >>>

GALLERY ONE

A photographic essay on Devon and Cornwall

Anne Lenten, Ed.

A series of photographs about ‘another place’ collected by the remarkable photographer Anne Lenten — Notes by Phil Innes

#6 Mining conditions haven’t changed much in 100 years

See more photos in this article Gallery One >>>

GUEST ARTCLE

LETTERS FROM CUBA #15

Some sentences from Cuba

Mac Gander

It is dawn in La Habana and I am listening to Bob Marley’s “Rebel Music” as my wife Shanta sleeps in the next room and I mark the end of our third week here. One week to go. Travel is exhausting. There is no moment in which one does not wish to be awake.

I am thinking of the opening trope in Denis Johnson’s “Fiskadoro,” where he invokes Marley as one of the three great gods still left in the Florida Keys after a nuclear holocaust, a book that ends with a war-ship returning to those shores after a 90-year quarantine, from Cuba, a grey ship that is taller than the sky.

GUEST ARTICLE

LETTERS FROM CUBA #12

What lies beneath: Our stories our ghosts

Shanta Lee Gander

Who came first?  Europa or Europe?  With some research, I could get an answer, but the story of a girl who keeps dreaming about two continents fighting over her and who meets her fate and immortality with a God turned beautiful bull is an old one

SPECIAL FEATURE

A Dance with Hermes

Ken Masters

‘Into this hallowed room (I remember a gratifying visiting Professor of Logic, who, whilst debunking “Eastern Philosophy”, and cutting short his fourteen pages of definitions of “consciousness”, waved his arms in the air, inviting in the energy to energise the very expression of his de-bunking – which intangibility I can not possibly recognise, classify, or exonerate) came one Lindsay Clarke, propagating one irritatingly intangible “(A Dance With) Hermes”, full of vital “presence”, whom I hoped I had seen off aeons ago.

Its not over ‘til

Vermont Views

hey, at least its not going to get below freezing

— that is down here in the valley in Brattleboro, though not on the hills and not up North. Looks like Brattleboro is snow-free through Wednesday!

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Julia Ferrari What In your Life is Calling You? in between

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From The Archive Evolution of democracy from economy to ecology

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