Journal of a Sabbatical

June 9, 2001

quaint new england

Today's Reading: A Flora of Essex County by Stuart K. Harris, Tibetan Trek by Ronald Kaulback, Books and Habits by Lafcadio Hearn

Today's Starting Pitcher: Pedro Martinez

Photos top to bottom:

Baskets at West Parish Yard Sale

Goslings in the Shade

Shutter at West Parish Yard Sale

Dust Jacket in Sunny Window

Dust Jacket in Bookcase

Y'know, I've read that some New England towns were deliberately sort of made quaint in the 19th century to appeal to city dwellers who wanted a glimpse of old rural New England fishing and farming towns. I guess the concept of New England as theme park goes back quite a way. No wonder I sometimes feel like it's impossible to photograph New England without falling back on cliché. The whole landscape was designed to be a cliché. So here it is a gorgeous June Saturday in the New England theme park ... time for that quintessential colonial New England activity... the West Parish yard sale!

Time to rendezvous at the West Parish yard sale and walk with Priscilla, Rita, and Claire in the cemetery while Harold hangs out by the food tent flirting with all the women in the brilliant sunshine. And I do mean sunshine. Even the Canada geese who live in the cemetery are seeking shade. It's funny to watch them cross the grass by the pond, waddle across the gravel road, and plunk themselves down amidst the gravel under the trees.

When we get back from an hour long circuit of the cemetery the "dollar a bag" promotion is going on. They usually do this at the end to get rid of the stuff nobody could possibly want, but now they're doing it for a limited time - like a blue light special - to liven things up. The idea is you buy a plastic shopping bag for $1 and as many items under $5 you can stuff in the bag are yours. Doesn't tempt me and I'm getting sunburned so I go over to the food tent to bother Harold. He's, as usual, surrounded by women. He tells them I speak Hungarian and gets me to give Hungarian lessons. After "nem" and "igen" and a few other words I run out of Hungarian and everybody has a good laugh.

Although I have a thousand and one things to do before picking up Nancy at the bus station for another Marblehead expedition, I decide to go for coffee and see if any of my coffee buddies are around. Oddly Starbucks is not filled with strangers in town for the Phillips Academy graduation. At the corner table are Dan and Geri back from France and Queen Isabella whom I haven't seen in months as he has become an early riser. He's teaching Italian now before regular class hours. While I'm sitting there getting the lowdown on Dan and Geri's trip to France and Isabella's trip to the Philippines over the winter Hussein appears back from his trip home to Turkey. Nonstop conversation in a variety of languages ensues (no, none of us have managed to learn Turkish yet). When I tell them about Zsolt's plans for me in Nepal, Queen Isabella advises me "Don't accept any invitations to dinner at the royal palace." Personally I'm more worried about the Maoist insurrection - but like I said before I don't think the coup will start in the national herbarium.

QI tells me he was sound asleep when he heard the BBC news report on the Nepal royal massacre and all he heard was something about was it OK to make the crown prince king if he'd killed everybody in line of succession above him. With no idea what country they were talking about he sat bolt upright in bed thinking that Prince William had killed Prince Charles and the Queen. Not bloody likely.

Marblehead is New England fishing village quaint to the nines with winding hilly streets around the harbor, yachtly types in the seafood restaurants, antique shops, gift shops full of nautical kitsch, and Domino/Dust Jacket in the window at Much Ado. What's a vegetarian to do in a New England fishing village? Fortunately I had already discovered a yuppie gourmet sandwich shop down the street from Much Ado. Truffles, it's called - with lots of truffle pig kitsch decor. So after a much needed lunch of a black olive pate sandwich and tomato/basil/feta salad at Truffles (I forgot to mention that I did the coffee with Isabella and company instead of lunch so was very hungry by the time we got to Marblehead) it was time to browse the quaint used books and pet the quaint used cat.

The humans remembered me from Wednesday. Domino/Dust Jacket remembered me from Olde Port as well as from Wednesday. She was stretched out in the sunny window looking so photogenic I couldn't help myself. Then she led me over to her favorite section, which has a half empty shelf next to a basket full of postcards. This turned out to be right near the "travel memoirs of eccentric Brits in Asia" section. I found a book I did not know existed called Tibetan Trek by Ronald Kaulback. Ever a sucker for Tibetan trek books, I picked it up. This guy had my Zsolt & István lackey job with Frank Kingdon-Ward! The plant hunters had camp followers and non-botanical lackeys? Wow. Gotta have this book. Even if Kaulback didn't have to find parts for obsolete laptops in China...

More browsing yields A Flora of Essex County, which I've been wanting for some time. It's cited in just about everything I read about Plum Island (not that there's that much written about Plum Island). I aso pick up another collection of Lafcadio Hearn essays to go with Books and Habits, which I picked up Thursday night at Rodney's in Central Square when I went to buy this week's two book cubes for the library modularization project.

Nancy browses codependently for me as well as for herself and tries to convince me to buy this turn of the century guidebook to Bosnia-Herzegovina for BiB. It's got a lot of foxing (that red blotchy stuff on the pages of old books) so I'll have to think it over. He did love it when I sent him The Boy Allies in the Balkans and his birthday is coming up in July... One of the bookstore people comments on my eclectic tastes and muses that we must be an unusual family if my collection is Japan, Tibet, and the Merrimack River and my brother is in Bosnia. I tell him he doesn't know the half of it. As Andrea puts it "In a normal family, nobody at the table would have been to [Antarctica, Tibet, Bosnia, Congo...] (pick one)" .

The bookstore humans have a new G4. One of their friends comes in an asks "what's that?" They tell her it's the new G4 with microwave and death ray. I call out from among the books "I'm jealous you guys got the one with the death ray built in!" There's much laughing and joking going on as more of their friends come in. Somebody goes out for wine to celebrate some guy's birthday but he left before the wine arrived. Nancy and I left wishing we had a peer group like that to socialize with. Even my coffee buddies aren't that perky lately.

When we run out of daylight for walking the winding streets of Marblehead we pass the evening reading aloud from Tibetan Trek a chapter called Renegade Vegetarians but are unable to figure out what the title has to do with the content. I burble about how I either can't find or can't afford any of Frank Kingdon-Ward's accounts of his treks, so this will have to satisfy me for awhile. After Tibetan Trek, I resume reading aloud from Books and Habits by Lafcadio Hearn two lectures on insect poems. One of the lectures is on French insect poems and though between us we can decode French pretty well we can't figure out what the duvet is doing in the fireplace... until we read the commentary and discover the poet is comparing the white ash to down. That explains everything.

Nancy wants to walk around another quaint New England seaside town tomorrow.

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