A Wicked Fun Time in Boston

Last week I took a four-day jaunt Northward from Connecticut to visit my good friend Max in the Boston area (Belmont, to be precise), and renew my age-old love affair with Harvard Square.  The weather was unseasonably warm, the skies were blue, and it was wonderful to stroll through that little warren of streets charged with collegiate energy, retail in sentimental convection, and immutable red-brick facades.  We had lunch at the good old Border Cafe, coffee at a new arrival called Mike’s Pastry, took a walk along the Charles...

Max is always good for unusual entertainment, and he led me to a very “Harvard Square” event: Trash Night at the Brattle Theater.  This institution consists of airing an epochally bad movie and encouraging the audience to yell jokes and comments at the screen, like a live, ad-lib Mystery Science Theater 3000.  The theater was packed with nerds of all ages, the “film” was a mid-1980s abortion called “Space Rage,” filmed on location in some dirt lots using dune buggies with cardboard shells, and the impromptu commentary rang out fast and furious.  The main movie was interrupted with a few artistic “commercials” made by the organizers, little two-minute whimsies assembled from period clips that managed to be more surreal than the movie itself.  It was great fun and I recommend Trash Night to anyone with an appetite for kitch if they find themselves within range.

On another night we went out with two other old friends of mine, Cherie and Susan, to an event more properly “Boston”—a trivia contest at a sports bar (the Cherry Tree).  This was no minor-league trivia contest: it had named teams, printed blanks on which to write answers, “hint” songs played over the stereo, and a complicated five-round scoring system.  Max and the other regulars were delighted to have me along for the “Sports” category, but I would only have been useful for baseball questions and alas the “Sports” ones thrown at us were for football.  Our team finished woefully, but by then I’d had two pints of Sam Adams and was quite satisfied.  The next day the Yankees won their playoff against the Indians, which also satisfied me, though being in Boston I kept quiet about it.

Visiting Boston is always an exercise in nostalgia for me: I’ve lived in the area three separate times, dating back to my days attending boarding school at my beloved Cambridge School of Weston, where Max and I first met.  On one sunny afternoon Max and I decided what the heck, we would dial the nostalgia meter all the way up (or back, as it were), and we drove out to our old school, top-down in the Miata.  Though the Cambridge School was in session, the place was oddly deserted--most of the students, we saw, were gathered at the lower fields for a soccer game--and we were able to walk at will through the little campus of grassy lawns, wooded slopes, and buildings both new and familiar.  The big modern Art & Science center, a recent addition, was admirable but had displaced a belt of woods integral to the geography of memory; my old dorm under the pines, however, had thankfully become only more decrepit since 1980.

     Newboys, my old dorm

Personal journeys.  Visiting an old school is always a re-measuring of life against potential, and rare must be the alumnus who comes out from that stroll ahead.  I will say that it was satisfying to revisit CSW in my yellow Miata on the return loop of a great road trip through Mexico.  That’s the kind of thing that looks good in alumni magazine blurbs.  But like the Yankees, who went on from their playoff victory to lose to Houston and fall short of the pennant, my return loop brings me closer to greater dissatisfactions: my unfinished novel, my unsold land in Connecticut, my shaky prospects for finding work when I return home.  Reality approaches: in many ways my future is up in the air. 

But I still have a month of my road trip left!

A Month in Connecticut

Today marks—hard to believe!—a month that I’ve been living with my brother in Cornwall, Connecticut.  The October trees have flamed and thinned and I’ve raked the lawn into wheelbarrows full of brown leaves to cart into the back field; the crisp scent of autumn fills the air; at night Orion heels over the silhouetted evergreens and the wavy belt of the Milky Way stands crystal clear, splitting the sky over the roof of the house.  My childhood home has been a beautiful place to camp for a while.

Ben has been an excellent host, putting up with me for a month.  He’s been cooking delicious dinners, and in return I’ve tried to be a helpful boarder, buying groceries and doing bits of needed maintenance like cutting down some thorn bushes that had grown up against the house.  We’ve settled into a comfortable, perhaps too comfortable, routine: with both of us on vacation, as it were, the days blur one into another.  In the mornings over coffee, the TV news reminds me that I’m really back in the United States of Absurdia.  In the afternoons I walk the country roads or we trek through the woods together.  Evenings we’ve been advancing through the fun Marvel superhero series on Netflix that I never saw: “Jessica Jones,” “Daredevil”...

In terms of my purposes for being here, I have good news, bad news, and expensive news, as follows: 

• Helping Ben find a job: victory!  With my assistance he landed a part-time waiter gig at a local retreat center, though it doesn’t start for another three weeks.  I’m still looking to find him something else with which to supplement it, as that alone won’t meet his bills.
• Selling land: fail!  I have some land here for sale, and was hoping to unload it this year, but unfortunately Cornwall has fallen into an epochal buyers’ market, with dozens of properties listed.  Not sure why.  But after meeting with my real estate agent I see no likelihood of selling my piece for what it’s worth anytime soon.
• A cheap road-trip month: Whoops.  One goal of spending a month here was to ease my travel budget, but wouldn’t you know it: my Miata’s clutch finally failed for good and needed to be replaced!  An $1100 bill.  Still, better to have it happen here than when I cross the country in winter...

The main thing my brother and I share in common is a love of music, and Ben, who plays a mean blues guitar, has introduced me to the Northwest Connecticut music scene.  Each Thursday he plays at a friendly open-mic night in the town of Norfolk, often with his friend Jason, and I’ve gone along as a percussionist.  Of course, I don’t have any drums here, but in true percussionist fashion I made do with a metal popcorn tin (it had a great sound, though up on stage the lid did tend to pop off mid-song).  There’s a good music community here with a lot of skilled performers; the open-mic evenings tend to end with a fun general jam session, and overall it’s made me miss my drumming roots.

Ben and I onstage at the Infinity Music Hall in Norfolk, CT

When our turn was done I took photos of the other performers, where I really missed my defunct Canon T6i: my iPad camera just doesn’t do too well in low light.  Still, it was worth capturing the bevy of eclectic New England characters strutting their respective stuff.

    Ben and his friend Jason

Still Life in Cornwall

It’s hard to believe, but I’ve been in Cornwall, Connecticut for ten days now.  The creaking old house, the quiet fields, the late-summer beauty, the town full of memories, have woven a spell about me.  The days with my brother have been spent running common errands, visiting old friends (the few who remain here), taking walks, making meals, reading and watching TV, or sitting out on the grass behind the back porch looking up at the stars.  In my childhood the Cornwall house was the setting for summer vacations from school, and by arriving here to stay a month I seem to have triggered a great recrudescence of relaxation, unconscionably abetted by the wave of balmy weather mingling the last lush verdancy with the first twinkling snowfalls of yellow leaves and sudden crimson spirals of vines, as I drove my Miata slowly half-lost down almost-familiar roads through thin woods, past open fields anchored by old barns, along already autumnal lakes.

But as I should have known, coming straight from a writers’ retreat, you can’t go back again.  It’s been a decade or so since my brother Ben took over the house after my parents died, and any change of generations in a house makes it an entirely new dwelling.  In this case Ben’s musician lifestyle has been overlaid on my parents’ literate-weekender one, so that the study is now filled unwalkably with guitars, the dining-room table hidden under disassembled amps, etc.c., and I needed to forge with two hands through a tangle of TV, Apple receiver and sound bar wires to get to the bookshelf where I pulled out my parents’ dusty, sunfaded hardcover of John Cheever short stories.

And I’m also here with a purpose.  Ben is going through a broke, hard-luck period, and in between Cheever stories and Netflix TV (he’s turned me on to the excellent “Jessica Jones” series), I’ve been trying to help him find a job and stabilize his life, pretending for the moment that I’m qualified for such a task.  We’ll see how that goes.

Despite the flavor of elder-brother intervention, we’ve been having fun together.  In addition to walks and living-room jam sessions (and “Jessica Jones”), last weekend we went down to East Haven to visit our cousin Larry Kurt and his wife Sherrie.  Larry’s the kind of great cousin who, given the sunny day, scooped us directly from the Miata into his speedboat, and within an hour of our arrival we were pounding our fiberglass bow over the blue chop on Long Island Sound.  We spent a fabulous morning on the water, drinking beer and exploring the ritzy coinage of the Thimble Islands, where every little round isle sported a million-dollar mansion. 

My cousin's speedboat, the Avalon

It was great to catch up with a side of the family I hadn’t seen in a while, and it made me wish I had a boat of my own on Puget Sound.  But the path to get there is clear enough.  (1) Find my brother a job, (2) find myself a job, (3) revise my novel and get it to that agent, (4) have it sell real well. 

We’ll see how that goes.

Me with Larry, Sherrie, and Ben

Update: The Writers' Retreat

Well, my road trip has carried me through a novel-writing retreat in Virginia, to a nursing home in Maryland where I sat with my elderly father-in-law, up the grey municipal highways through the urban snarls of the Northeast, and into the wooded hills of Connecticut, where the trees overhanging the narrow country roads were beginning to be tinged with the ochres of Autumn.  I’m now at the old family house in the town of Cornwall, where I’ll be spending the next month or so visiting with my brother.  It’s been an immense prodigal return from Zipolite to familiar scenes, with my yellow Miata at rest on the green grass of the driveway, and my laptop on the kitchen table where years ago my mother used to write. 

Yes, this in lieu of Tierra del Fuego.  As reasons for the switch I can separate out a financial, a familial, and a mercantile (I have some land for sale up here; need to check up on that), overlaid with a general refuge of indecision pending my Seattle apartment inhabited through November and newly purposed with creative ideas coming out of the writers’ retreat that would make a month’s pause welcome anywhere.  None of these excuse, in a travel sense, this alternate end of the road, and so the blog is likely to become more sporadic, hiding its head, as it were, as I immerse myself in personal affairs.  This may be the last post for a while.

But first, about that writers’ retreat.

I’d never been to a writers’ gathering of any kind before, so it was all new to me.  This one, the “Algonkian Writer Retreat and Novel Workshop,” advertised itself as a hardnosed clinic for battering your flawed manuscript into shape to meet the requirements of the market, sort of the Jack LaLanne approach to novel workshops, as opposed to those sentimental retreats based mostly on romantic settings.  Of course, it then offered a romantic setting: a line of rustic cabins along the banks of the Potomac in a wooded stretch of Algonkian Regional Park in Sterling, VA.  The mist rose over the river in the mornings, acorns fell onto the wooden porches by night, and every day I had to sweep leaves off my Miata to put the top down.  We each had a private room in the sturdy cabins, and met in the central cabin’s livingroom with wooden armchairs and firm sofas pulled into a circle.

The first surprise was that in the group of 13 writers I was the only male.  Apparently this ratio is standard in writer retreats; I’m not sure what that says about the industry, or me.  Many of the women—whose book ideas I got to know very well—were superb storytellers; all were creative, friendly people; it was a fun group with lots of laughter, and in general a pleasure for someone like me, who’s been writing in isolation, to be surrounded by fellow writers.  I can see why people go to these things.  The second surprise was that Jack LaLanne was nowhere to be found: organizer Michael Neff was softspoken, tactful, and encouraging, and while he did speak as the messenger of draconic entry requirements to the industry he did so in a thoroughly gentle and helpful way, perhaps schooled by the ratio of the frailer and no less litigious sex.

That said, he and his fellow faculty were unstinting in their market-based judgments.  In many cases the verdict on a story idea was unoriginality, and several writers were prompted to revise their books wholesale.  (Some tried to comply actually there, at the workshop, to my amazed admiration.)  In the process a picture emerged of a rabid, primary-color publishing world based on 30-second queries and immediate grab appeal, a carnival-barker atmosphere in which a given story set in Detroit might get through if the writer only “Set it in Bangladesh!”  As a newcomer to the game I could only measure the imposing battlefield with a sidelong look and keep my ears and spirit completely open.

The week went like this.  We spent the first few days polishing our “pitch,” the 200-word story summary with which to hook an agent, after which we had a chance to read them to an actual agent who visited.  From there we had each day a visiting expert who spoke to an aspect of the craft: story structure, characterization, dialogue, etc.  Some were better than others (it took one sweating fellow half an hour to set up his video component, finally saved by the children’s book writer) but all had something interesting for me to learn.  On the last day the workshop concluded with one-on-one sessions to discuss your book in detail.  Breakfasts and lunches were in the cabin; dinners were out in local restaurants, including, ironically, several outings to Mexican.

Organizer Michael Neff with Kim, Karen, and Denise, three of the attendees.

For me, I got some excellent feedback on my novel—including some plot holes pointed out that I must solve (at a Starbucks stop in Maryland I figured out how)—and more importantly a panoply of general advice that makes me impatient to go over every scene anew with a paintbucket of lessons learned in hand.  The visiting agent said I had a good pitch and story idea and she’d like to see my book.

Charlottesville: The End of the Trip (For Now)

First let me say that while I’ve been enjoying gorgeous days in the late-summer sunshine in Charlottesville, I’ve been watching the news like everyone else, and my thoughts go out to the several parts of the world reeling from natural disasters: Houston, Hurricane Irma in Florida and the Carribean, the earthquake in southern Mexico.  I feel like my little Miata has been playing dodgeball on the globe with a season of catastrophe.

But I’m about to stop dodging for a while.  Tomorrow begins my week-long novel-writing retreat in Sterling, Viriginia; after that I’ll be driving up to Connecticut to settle in at the old family place with my brother for a month or so.  As I pause here in Charlottesville it’s been slowly dawning on me that my trip as such is over—at least the bloggable portion of it.

So the blog may be coming to a halt, at least for a while.  Among the handful of friends and family who consitute its readership I suspect a certain curiosity about the writers’ retreat, at least equal to my own, so I may append some notes on that experience, but even there what was meant to be a travel blog will have half-crossed the line into something else.  On the other hand I’m clearly still “travelling,” and won’t be home to Seattle for another two and half months, and among that handful I’m aware of a default reference to this blog to keep track of where I am and whether I’m still alive.  So the long and short of it is, that I have no idea what to do with this blog.  I believe you can continue to watch this space—but at your own risk.

---

In the meantime I’ve been here in Charlottesville, my last pure travel destination, for all four of the days I allotted to it.  What have I been up to?  Well, er, the truth is—ahem—I’ve been mostly sleeping.

The Airbnb I booked revealed itself to be a complete little basement apartment in an elderly family’s house half-hidden behind a runaway sunflower garden on a quiet hillside street outside town.  I greeted it as the ideal space to work on fixing up the ending of my novel, but after a few attempts I discovered it to be even more ideal as a place to stare at the walls.  I’ve been on essentially a month-long sprint from Zipolite to get here, through predatory cops, express-mail rendezvous and stomach troubles, and for the next leg I’ll need to use gears that Pepin doesn’t possess.  I needed a break.  The apartment has a kitchen, and the first night I stocked up on groceries, and I’ve just been—reacclimating.

In the process, however, I’ve fallen in love with Charlottesville.  The downtown center consists of a wide brick-walk pedestrian mall full of inviting restaurants, coffeehouses, bookstores (I counted at least three), toy stores and other eclectic shops; it’s been a splendid place to stroll and to sit with coffee—and, at The Pie Chest coffeehouse, fabulous pie.

Around the mall the city is happily lost in a dream of 18th Century Federalist architecture whose white pillars and stately red-brick facades don’t disturb the smooth black roads and modern infrastructure that swish 21st Century cars around it easily.  The second center of the town’s small ellipse consists of the University of Virginia, through which I drove on the way in and whose Jeffersonian buildings framed in the downward flutter of Fall’s first brown leaves vie for prettiness with the surrounding green mountains.

As to its late association with Nazism, my impression is that Charlottesville is mounting an appalled and concerted campiagn to reverse-associate itself with tolerance and love.  Little blue posters of “C-Ville” with a heart are in every shop window, and the signage from the municipal scale to the toystore chalkboard all sound the same theme.

Of course, ordinary people always choose love.  It doesn’t withstand a world whose leaders don’t.

Speaking of leaders, since I was in Jefferson-land I did revisit Monticello, some seventeen years after my first pilgrimage there.  In this case my experience was somewhat dampened.  In my absence the ticket price had gone up to $28.00 (from what I don’t remember), presumably to support the handsome new museum and multi-shuttle-bus system that have sprouted up on the grounds.  Monticello has now become a guided “experience,” where the crowds are grouped together at 15-minute intervals and ushered quickly through the house, and where even outdoors at one’s liberty a panoply of educational signage underscores every view. 

Many of the views indeed include new construction, like the demonstration slave cabin and the underground passages.  I overheard that Monticello gets half a million visitors a year, which of course requires a functioning through-put of people but at the same time reveals the big money underlying the supposedly non-profit industry of historical “reconstruction.”  Monticello is now run by something called “The Mountaintop Project,” whose signage took pains to point out that the process of “reconstructing” the site has been ongoing for a hundred years; methinks they protest too much.  Methinks also that the house was somewhat different; though I don’t necessarily trust my old memories through the veil of misty worship, I don’t remember Jefferson having so many religious paintings on the walls.

Still, the old house is as handsome as it always was.