Into Full Dispersion Mode

Kish has been in touch with our neighbors up in Stonington, Maine.  Stonington, as you may recall, is a tiny lobster village located at the far tip of Deer Isle, jutting out into the Penobscot Bay.  It is a remote location, to say the least.

In their communications, our neighbors have mentioned something interesting:  many of the seasonal property owners are coming up earlier than ever before to open up their Stonington residences.  Normally, only permanent residents would be in Maine during this time of year, in what the locals jokingly call the “mud season.”  Typically, the summer residents wouldn’t show up at their Deer Isle places until late May or the beginning of June, at the earliest — and yet, this year, here they are already, up from New York City and Boston and Washington, D.C.

Can you blame them?  The big East Coast cities are COVID-19 hot spots, where many of the U.S. cases of coronavirus have been identified and there are concerns about how the medical facilities will handle the caseload.  In contrast, one neighbor told Kish that there are no reported COVID-19 cases in Stonington, on Deer Isle, or indeed anywhere in the surrounding county.  (Of course, nobody up there has been tested, either.)  According to recent news reports, there have been 155 cases of coronavirus in all of Maine, with most of those clustered in Cumberland County, where Portland is located, which is about three hours away from Stonington by car.

I would imagine that the dispersion from NYC and Boston to places like Stonington is being seen throughout Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.  It’s mind-boggling to think of how difficult it must be for Manhattanites living on a densely populated island to achieve meaningful “social distancing” during this time.  If you’ve got to work remotely, and you’re fortunate enough to have the option of going to a faraway location where you aren’t cheek by jowl with other people as soon as you step out your front door, why not take “social distancing” to the max and head out to the remote, less populated areas and wait until the COVID-19 virus burns itself out?

Many of us wonder whether this coronavirus pandemic will result in lasting changes to American culture and society.  I think that one possible result is that more people will become interested in exploring, life outside the big cities, where there’s some elbow room to be had when the next epidemic hits.  They might just find that they like it.  And with the technological advances that allow people to work remotely, why not go into full dispersion mode?

On The Commons

The old ball game didn’t end well for the Indians, but Russell and I have enjoyed our trip to Boston nevertheless. After leaving Fenway Park we walked around Boston and visited the Boston Commons and the Public Garden, both of which were packed with people. Families, tourists, people leaving work, joggers, people reading on the grass on a sunny day with a delightful breeze — all were drawn to the green space.

It made me realize, again, what value there is to cities in having downtown parkland where people can gather. And a few fountains and monuments don’t hurt, either.

Take Me Out To The Ballgame

The Tribe is playing the Red Sox in a day game today, so Russell and I decided to head down to Boston and catch a game at Fenway — the iconic ballpark where all of the greats have played. It’s pretty cool to be here, and if you’re a baseball fan who knows the history of the game, it doesn’t get any better than a game at Fenway or Wrigley Field.

Go Tribe!

Neon Art

I’ve always liked neon signs.  There’s something kitschy about them, of course, but also something classically American — bold, consciously attempting to be memorable and attract passersby, naked in their capitalistic purpose, and often dosed with fantasy or humor.  Plus, neon really looks cool at night.

Downtown Boston has come up with a great way to celebrate — and preserve — some of these neon relics of a.past America.  On one of the small strips of land between the downtown area and the waterfront, called the Greenway, neon signs have been positioned around the perimeter.  The signs draw visitors like moths to light.  Two of my favorites were the Siesta Motel, with its cactus and sombrero theme, and the Flying Yankee Restaurant, with its rocket ship and flaming trail.  The Siesta Motel, which dates from 1950, was located in Saugus, Massachusetts — where its southwestern-themed sign must have stood out like a sore thumb — and the Flying Yankee Restaurant, which dates from 1953, long before rocket ships were commonplace, was located in Auburn, Massachusetts.

Don’t you wish you’d had a chance to see these signs on the great American road during the ’50s, and perhaps stop at the Flying Yankee for a cup of coffee and a piece of pie?

The Long Wharf

I’m in Boston for work, staying down in the old financial district near waterfront. Last night I took a walk out onto the Long Wharf, which juts out into the Charles River. The area has been a focus of redevelopment efforts, and last night it was crowded with people getting on and off harbor boat tours, enjoying an after-work beverage and the music at an outdoor gathering spot on the wharf, and trying to decide which of the many nearby restaurants to select for the night’s dinner.

It’s a great area if you’re a Midwestern landlubber who always enjoys checking out real harbors. There were sailboats on the water, enormous chains and tie-off pilings, and a sense of bustling activity that you always get at a busy harbor. It’s a fun thing to watch and experience, and gives you a good sense of what making the waterfront easily accessible to walkers and joggers can mean for a town.

Logan Airport, 5:07 a.m.

At 5:07 a.m. at Logan Airport in Boston, where red-eye flights have just dropped off their loads of bleary-eyed cross-country travelers, the lines at Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts are long.  As the would-be customers try to clear their heads and vow to never, ever take a red-eye flight again, their very willingness to wait in line testifies that a hot cup of freshly brewed coffee is just what is needed to kick-start the morning and make the bedraggled traveler feel a little bit less like a grit.

On The Old Commons

Established back in the early 1600s, the Commons remains a popular gathering spot for the people of Boston — and its tourists.  Along with the Boston Public Garden, located right next door, the Commons provides a merry-go-round, a frog pond, a towering memorial to the Bostonians who fought in the War Between the States — and some of the shady, grassy spots that city dwellers crave on a hot summer day.

Sunset Over Bunker Hill

The Bunker Hill monument, an obelisk commemorating the battle at the dawn of the Revolutionary War, was gloriously framed by the sunset last night in the view from our event on Boston’s pier 4.

The View From Pier 4

Tonight Kish and I went to an event at Pier 4, across the harbor from downtown Boston.  It’s a great place to hang if you like boats — and really, who doesn’t?

A Less Corrosive Time

I’m in Boston for meetings, and last night I went to an event at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.  I had a chance to walk through the exhibits, which included photographs, letters, television footage, a recreation of the Oval Office as it was in the Kennedy White House, shown above, and a gigantic American flag high above the reception area, shown below.  Of course, the exhibits end with the tragic events of November 22, 1963 and an effort to capture JFK’s legacy.

JFK’s presidency has always been a huge historical “what if” — Steven King wrote an entire novel exploring that premise — and a story of unfulfilled promise.  Viewed from the standpoint of the modern era of PACs, attack ads, internet memes, and rancorous “debates,” though, it seems like a golden era, where politics was less bitter, less nasty, and less divisive.  For all of the heightened feelings about the Bay of Pigs, the Civil Rights movement, the Cuban missile crisis, and the fighting in Southeast Asia, Americans somehow managed to avoid the bleak corrosiveness that now seems so pervasive in our politics.

I’ve never bought into the depiction of the Kennedy presidency as Camelot, but I don’t think you can walk through the exhibits at the JFK Library and Museum and compare what you see to the present day without thinking our system has taken a wrong turn somewhere.

Boston At Twilight

In Boston for meetings, I learned that the JFK Library offers a pretty spectacular view of downtown.

A Colonial Time Capsule

In 1795, Samuel Adams and Paul Revere placed a box under the foundation of the new Massachusetts State House.  On Tuesday, that box was opened — very carefully.

Inside, a conservator from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts found five folded newspapers, two dozen coins including a “Pine Tree Schilling” from 1652, a George Washington medal, a Massachusetts seal, and a silver plate made for the occasion by ace silversmith Paul Revere himself.  Even cooler, the silver plate has visible fingerprints on it . . . presumably those of the man whose famous midnight ride warned colonists that “the British are coming” and helped trigger the American Revolution.

Although news reports describe the box as a time capsule, technically that is not correct because time capsules are designed to be opened at a particular date — usually, a century or two later.  Instead, the box is part of a much more ancient tradition of putting material in the foundation of building.  That practice dates back to ancient Mesopotamia and, over the centuries, has been employed in the construction of colossal medieval cathedrals and, more recently, been adopted by fraternal organizations like the Masons.

Indeed, in 1793 George Washington laid such a ceremonial cornerstone in the foundation of the U.S. Capitol building.  That ceremonial cornerstone has never been found and its contents are unknown — although I’m guessing it has played a role in a Dan Brown-type novel or a Nicholas Cage movie.

The Generic Conference Room Breakfast

If you’ve been to a meeting in one of our major cities that starts at 9 a.m. or before, you’ve seen something that looks an awful lot like this spread.  It’s the generic conference room breakfast.  You grab a plate, bleary-eyed, and shuffle on down the line.

There are certain staples.  There’s coffee, of course, with sugar packets and little plastic creamers and plastic stirrers.  Sometimes the coffee will have a little name plate telling you the type of bean being roasted, but more often it’s just coffee, period, served in a generic metal dispenser where you push down the big button at the top and the coffee gushes out into a generic paper coffee cup.  Who cares about the blend?  We’re here for a meeting, and we just want the caffeine.

If it’s a top of the line spread, there will be bottles of juice, but more often the drink options are coffee, coffee, coffee, water from a pitcher, and cans of soda.  If you don’t want to pump yourself full of coffee, you can enjoy an early morning Sprite instead.

Of course, there are always bagels galore, with some pats of butter, little tins of creamed cheese, and containers of jelly.  The serving platter usually features some baked goods like muffins or scones, too.  And, because we might conceivably want to eat healthier, there’s some sliced melon, and grapes, and a few other fruits tossed in to make the plate look colorful.

And sometimes there’s something, well, odd.   In this edition of the generic conference room breakfast that I encountered yesterday morning in Manhattan, there was a large bowl of hard pretzels.  Pretzels?  A chance to fill the blood vessels with salt at 9 a.m.?  Not exactly the breakfast of champions, but it was New York.

Is all of this food even edible, or is some of it plastic?  Does the stuff that isn’t consumed — which usually is about 95 percent of it — get recycled or donated to the nearest homeless shelter?  How many businesses In New York City, and Washington, D.C., and Boston, are dependent upon baking up those generic bagels, and brewing that generic coffee?

Made It, Worth It

After a mad travel day that featured a canceled flight, rerouting to Boston, a rental car drive through the strip mall area around Logan Airport and then up the east coast to Portland, Maine, and a mad dash to try to catch the Casco Bay Lines ferry to Peaks Island, I finally met up with Russell for the ferry ride and we were greeted by Kish at the Peaks Island dock.

Sometimes travel days can suck; it’s just the world we live in.  But when your ultimate destination is a good one, with family members and a lobster dinner waiting and sunsets like this to awe you at the end of the day’s journey, it’s worth it.

The Tsarnaevs And The Immigration Debate

The Boston bombings came at an inconvenient time for the politicos who are working on an immigration reform bill — but that might be a good thing.

In our catch-phrase, talking-point era, the immigration issue has been reduced to mantras like “securing our borders” and fuzzy video images of people scaling flimsy walls in desert landscapes.  Of course, immigration involves a much more complex, multi-faceted set of concepts and questions.  We are a land of immigrants, built in large part through the hard work and aspirations of those who came to our shores in search of freedom.  We need immigrants to perform certain jobs in our economy, and we want immigrants who will be doctors and entrepreneurs.  We feel a more obligation to offer asylum to those seeking to escape persecution in their native lands.  Millions of people now working in America came here illegally; what are we realistically to do about them?

The Tsarnaev brothers accused of perpetrating the Boston bombings cast a different perspective on the immigration debate.  They didn’t come here smuggled in the hold of a ship or sneaking across the border in the dead of night.  “Securing our borders” through towering walls or armed forces in the southwest wouldn’t have stopped their arrival.  And what happened after they got here?  News reports indicate that various members of the Tsarnaev family received government assistance.  It’s not clear that the Tsarnaev brothers ever held a permanent job.  If they had had to find gainful employment, and didn’t have hours of free time to surf the internet for hateful messages and theories, would they have descended into apparent jihadist beliefs?  Tamerlan Tsarnaev eventually was targeted as a potential radical in comments from a foreign government, investigated by the FBI, and put on a CIA watchlist.  Should something more have been done about him?

The Tsarnaevs shouldn’t define the immigration debate, of course, but neither should we ignore lessons we might learn from them.  As immigration reform is debated in Congress, it’s entirely legitimate to ask whether our experience with the Tsarnaevs should cause us to revisit how we decide to allow people to come to America, what we should do, if anything, to monitor them after they arrive, and whether we should be able to take action if their conduct after their arrival indicates that they aren’t making positive contributions to society.