Rainy day fun

We had big plans for Sunday, but then the rains began. Even though I carried a huge umbrella, my pants were dripping onto my feet when I got home from church. Our friends called and apologized that they could not come over for lunch as we had planned. They couldn’t imagine coming through the downpour and bringing their dripping children into our house.

Alla re-set the table for the two of us and we feasted on a meal originally intended to feed six. (Yes, we had leftovers.) We talked about going back to the Museum of Fine Arts to see the Chihuly exhibit one more time before it closed, but decided against fighting the rain and the crowds. Instead, Alla curled up with a book and I got out the slide projector.

About two years ago my dad sent me thousands of slides that he had collected until sometime in the 1970’s when his lifestyle began to change. Overwhelmed, I put the boxes into a far corner and waited for an auspicious time to sort through them and decide which to keep. Finally, I decided after lunch to choose a few from these thousands to salvage.

The first box I opened contained the most recent stuff, from 1973-1974. My parents went to Japan a couple of times then, and my dad joined some mountaineering expeditions with the Mazama club in Oregon. I stormed through the slides, loading a roll at a time into my projector and picking out one or two photos from each roll. While I enjoyed some of the scenic photographs, I didn’t spend long with most of them. I developed a rhythm, click-click-clicking through a roll and stopping only for the really great photos.

After getting through half of the slides, I got tired, bored and hungry. I stopped for dinner and planned to put away the projector and save the remaining slides for later. I didn’t particularly enjoy looking through so many pictures of places I’d never seen and people I didn’t know. But after my break I decided to finish the project for the sake of efficiency. This time I found myself digging into the older stuff (where I appeared more often!) I found pictures depicting the Christmas when Santa brought my brother a toy saxophone and left me a toy trumpet. Roger hadn’t gotten up yet, so I rushed into my parents’ bedroom and told them I really wanted the saxophone. They allowed me to switch the instruments before Roger saw anything. I saw the saxophone again on Sunday, and it brought back far more than a memory of two little boys.

I also found pictures of our bikes decorated for Play Day at school. Play Day! I’d forgotten that too. Once a year we set aside all academic considerations and played. The festivities included a bicycle rodeo, for which we always decorated our bikes with colored crepe paper. A policeman would come to spend the morning with us and judge our cycling abilities. He would also run a little demonstration to show us how much time it takes to stop a car from the moment one of the teachers fired a piece of chalk into the pavement from a gun mounted on his bumper. Then he’d measure the distance from the chalk mark to the bumper and tell us all to be careful around cars.

All the slides are gone now. I selected about 800 favorites and sent them off to a slide-scanning service, where they promise to start work on my shipment sometime next month. The thousands of rejects have already left the city, sent wherever Boston buries its trash.

Something has got to change

Today I wrote a grossly over-simplified blog post about Proposition 13, the consequent failures of education, and the dumb things our Federal government has done lately. I worried that a poorly-educated electorate may be leading toward poor decisions in government (leading to more school cutbacks and... it got kind of black.) I decided not to publish it because it offered no constructive solution, but I am very concerned. The only good news I have in mind right now is that at least I felt free to write and potentially publish my concerns about the direction of the American government. In my other life, I never talk about politics at all.

Rather than publish a finger-pointing piece about people with bad ideas, I'd like to take steps to change the environment and encourage us all to talk together and even think together. But this has to happen mutually, and it can only happen with inspired leadership. Which we must, somehow, elect. (There I go again.)

I think we all need to set aside time to talk together. We may not agree, but if we don't make time to work toward a solution on the local level we will never figure out how to make a solution on the national level. I guess I'll start at my local church. Where will you start?

Lowell Folk Festival

We always like the Lowell Folk Festival. It’s not only big and wonderful: it’s free. Volunteers do ask everybody to contribute a few dollars, but folks from the poor neighborhood certainly can and do attend. Alla and I figured out a couple of years ago that we can stay overnight at a hotel in the middle of town and enjoy two full days of music without driving home late on Saturday night, which makes the show much easier to enjoy fully. This year we almost forgot to make our hotel reservations in time, and they could only offer us a room with two double beds. The big room gave us an opportunity to throw a little party, so we invited our friends Larry and Sarah to stay with us. Everything worked out perfectly.

As we walked out from the hotel yesterday, Alla and Larry spotted a booth offering sunglasses for $8.00 a pair or two for $10. Alla and Larry got together and bought identical glasses. I think their choice must be “fashion-forward,” because the style looked like the glasses the ever-so-trendy guys from Turkmenistan wore last spring at the Minsk State Linguistic University.

Equipped with proper eyewear, we got ourselves a nice spot on the lawn right in front of the stage at Boarding House Park. The program started with a Hawaiian guitar player whom we had just met at the hotel and included a very powerful gospel quartet and a group of sisters who play Texas swing music on the fiddle and sing their own sweet harmonies. We left our stage a couple of times for other opportunities at nearby locations, including a boogie-woogie piano player from Mississippi who both moved our feet and won our hearts, but finished the day with a big salsa orchestra back where we started.

We ate really well this year. Church and other groups from all around town set up booths and sold fresh hot and cold food. We discovered two groups (one Jewish and one Lebanese) selling falafel, and we undertook an in-depth study of the two. I can’t pick a winner because I liked them both for different reasons. If the Lebanese gave their recipe to the Jews, I think that would have been ideal. The Lebanese falafel had more flavor, but the Jewish falafel came with much better salad.

Today we moved around a bit more so that we could hear some groups we’d missed on Saturday. Still, we tried not to spend all our time walking from one stage to another, and we ended up hearing and seeing some really great groups simply because they came up next at whatever stage we happened to be watching. I wouldn’t have expected to enjoy the Cambodian dance troupe, but they turned out to be a wonderful surprise. All-in-all, we had a fantastic weekend.

Chihuly (Gasp!)

Everybody’s been talking about the Chihuly show at the Museum of Fine Arts. We nearly missed it because we’ve been away, but we got there yesterday. We brought Ibrahim Kanun, a classmate of mine from my very first group at the Minsk State Linguistic University. We really enjoyed seeing him, and we’re grateful that he also wanted to see this exhibit.

I’ve seen Chihuly glass before, but this show surpassed any that I remember. The MFA show included both volume and density, which really brought out some central ideas in Chihuly’s art. Many of his big pieces are amalgamations of a lot of smaller parts, frequently featuring a single color. These pieces often held less appeal for me than other more colorful glass art, but somehow I gained a new understanding at the MFA show. I guess he’s been trying to make a point all along and this time he finally managed to make it forcefully enough that I got his message.

Sorry I was so slow about understanding it. Now I want to go back and see it again, and try to put everything into its new context. We have one more week before it’s gone.

From 2011-07 Boston

Writing

For a while now I’ve talked about the book I started writing in 2003 as if it were some sort of a work in progress. Honestly, however, I didn’t touch it for about eight years. Meanwhile, kind friends and even strangers have encouraged me to get it done, so I’ve arranged my life in a way that I am sure to write a few hours every day. I don’t do very well about writing at home because I’m too often distracted. To counteract this I re-joined the Boston Athenaeum, the second-largest private library in the world and the largest in the United States. Fortunately for me, it’s about a ten minute walk from home and I really enjoy working there. As a result, I’m making daily headway on my book. In addition, I really enjoy being inside the beautiful building with its views over historic Boston.

We're not supposed to take pictures inside, but I took a couple of clandestine shots with my phone:

Looking left from my table

Looking right from my table

Native costume

Occasionally I participate in events at the university in Minsk where people ask me to arrive in “native costume.” This is a little tough for me. I could take them literally and dress as a real Native American (still Known as Indians in Belarus) but such a costume could cost piles of money and I’d feel a little odd in any event appropriating a tribe. I spent some time, then, noodling over what might seem believable in Belarus as “native” garb for an American.

My first choice was to arrive as a Red Sox fan, but I don't yet own a single piece of the required gear. At a minimum, I'd need to get a proper hat (which I should own anyway) and a replica jersey. But I'm not sure what I'd wear from the waist down unless I add a pair of honest-to-goodness baseball pants and a pair of red stockings. It seems like a whole lot of stuff to buy just to strut around at some event pretending to be a typical American with a sense of humor.

I never really considered coming as a Wall Street mogul, though I do own fancy suspenders and the other required gear. Feeling like I’m done with that stuff, I toyed briefly with grunge culture and thought about dressing as an urban skateboarder. But my skateboard is out of date and I can’t do any tricks on it anyway. It would be a lot more fun to arrive in a zoot suit, but once again I’d be starting from zero and I’d have to buy a whole lot of stuff. I promise: If I ever hit the big time I’ll buy myself a zoot suit and parade around in it for everybody’s amusement. (See advertising photo at right.)

That left me with my beginning cliché. I can dress like a cowboy without much effort. When I started Canyon Technology Group I began wearing a lot of Western apparel, and I can bring an acceptable outfit without even buying anything new. But my Western belts are all far too serious, perhaps even yuppified. I decided I’d look for a more attention-getting belt buckle, and I didn’t even have to look very hard. Today as I walked down Charles Street I noticed that Helen’s Leather had some excellent buckles in their window. I didn’t expect to find anything like this in Massachusetts, let alone in downtown Boston. I chose for myself a buckle that melds the Indian Motorcycle logo with other American symbols. I’m all set now with the buckle alone. I don’t even need to bring my cowboy boots and other stuff, but I will anyway.

My belt buckle

Enjoying Boston

Last weekend was our first and Nika’s last in Boston, so we went for a picnic at Columbus Park on the harbor. Conditions were perfect: We found a cool spot in the shade of a big tree facing the harbor on a sunny and warm day. Kids played in the fountain and a guitarist played mellow pop tunes for donations all afternoon long. The water taxis came and went, while we just stayed. We ate, blew soap bubbles, and relaxed.

Nika is gone now, so we celebrated Alla’s birthday with our friend Atef, who may have been born on the same date in spite of what it says on his birth certificate. (The registry was closed on the day of his birth, so his birth certificate cites the day of registration and not necessarily the day of birth.) Atef has a wonderful garden patio, where he grilled steaks and served them beautifully and deliciously.