Missing Marvelous Motors

I didn't realize how much I was missing Marvelous Mel Eaton until my dump run down the Quaco Road Wednesday morning. Melvin was only 65, a few years older than I, when he passed away two summers ago. 

There are many scenes in the rural U.S. like the photos at right of the now-abandoned Marvelous Motors, because every business out here is individually owned and operated. While there are a few franchisees (Ace Hardware, Irving Gas), we've got no stop lights and the nearest "big box" store to Deer Isle, Maine is a 2018 Family Dollar Store 20 miles away in Blue Hill.

When we lose the individual in rural America, we lose much more than a single person. We lose essential aspects of our communities that each person represents. Values. Sensibilities. Character.

The Coke machine with its block printed BACK OFF sign and the multiple Beware of the Dog postings have a disheartened look now with the weeds growing tall in front of the garage bays, the lot empty of used vehicles for sale, the mobile home bereft of its occupants. Only a bit of the shiny, Mariner blue fringe that once strung across the lot’s entrance to attract attention is visible here, forgotten on a roadside branch; the handprinted sign is fading. The row of defunct school buses which once held Melvin's massive local tire inventory are empty and the valuable automotive tools have been removed.

Marvelous Motors could be chaotic and disheveled looking even when it was thriving: boys and men and young mothers in and out for repairs, to find an affordable ride to get to work, and mostly for those stacks and stacks of tires stored in the tireless school buses. You had to know where to find him though, hidden off on the side road ending at the town’s transfer station.

In those days Melvin was a key character in the documentary video Tire Tracks by John Steed that I produced while directing the digital media program for Opera House Arts. Still cited today — sometimes negatively by those not understanding that the intentional making of tracks is not related to speeding — Tire Tracks tells a story of how rural men literally burn through tires, brakes, rear ends, “trannies”

and cash to make their marks on this world. While not a cautionary driving tale in the way many hoped or thought it should be, the video documents the peculiar alienation of white American male culture and the ingenious ways those who feel invisible create ways to be seen. 

What I really miss in Mel’s absence and the abandonment of Marvelous Motors is the kind of hurly burly, small rural business life they embodied.

The pandemic brought scores fleeing crowded American cities to remote outposts such as Deer Isle, bringing with them different sets of values and aesthetics.

For the main (and to grossly generalize), they appear to like their yards and villages tidy and neatly organized. They have enough excess wealth to trade in their used for new vehicles every three years or less, or to have dysfunctional appliances hauled away, before they have a chance to rust in the door yard; and the time to protest the construction of a Dollar store in their newly-adopted towns. And where a stern man flush with seasonal cash might find some pleasure in a new set of tires for play, the inequities of the U.S. economy mean the incoming folks have enough excess to feel entitled to post PRIVATE PROPERTY / NO TRESPASSING signs around woods and shoreline once shared by native and local communities.

The word for this invasion of excess wealth and the value and displacements of privacy that tag along with it — i.e., wealth not used for the common good -- is gentrification. Gentrification is the inflation of property values, taxes, rents, coffee prices, movie tickets and general living that occurs when individuals with more than they know what to do with drive up demand for life’s essentials and then feel the need to justify and secure their limited, rightful access to them.

I have a great fondness and longing for places such as Marvelous Motors — locally owned, individually operated, catering to working people who can’t afford a new car or who get their day-to-day pleasure from lighting up their tires — are a bulwark against gentrification. Its absence is another chink in those defenses.

#gentrification

#tiretracks

#ruralamerica

#deerisleme

The Fatal Flaw of Fatalism

 White Americans -- particularly those of us who are or who grew up working class and poor -- are very often fatalists.

For centuries those who would exploit our labor (while torturing, enslaving, and murdering our neighbors of color) have encouraged us to accept what befalls us because there is no other choice -- the world just "happens" and it "happens" to us.

The fish are either there or they are not there: it's not in our control. The climate is either warming or it is cooling: not in our control. The pandemic is going to kill more Americans per capita than in any other country: not in our control.

The "invisible hand" of capitalism or god -- too often conflated in white protestant america -- is at work.

That is what the profiteers want us to believe.

Yet even and perhaps especially for those of us who DO have faith that the world is larger than us -- that we are NOT gods and exist as small beings within a much larger universe -- the knowledge that every breath we take, every action we make impacts some other life is crucial to HOW we live our lives. The choices we make every day. Are they about ourselves alone, or do we consider our impact on everything around us?

This is why our understanding of government action or inaction is so critical to how good of a nation we actually are for EVERYONE.

The Trump Administration shrugged off the pandemic just as it shrugged off climate change. All the words and statements are on record showing that the administration's belief that the "private sector" of business would take care of us was a huge and miserable failure costing us, unnecessarily, hundreds of thousands of lives. Go back and listen to Jared Kushner saying the the procurement of PPE for our health care workers was not the government's problem, while meanwhile our health care workers, and those in their charges, were dying.

While the T Admin helped support the work of private enterprise to create the vaccines -- please remember Pfizer, the first to be released, did not use federal help -- they had NO PLAN to deliver vaccines into arms.

Now, quietly and surely, the Democrats are once again cleaning up the godawful mess left by the private-sector Republicans before them. Most of us of a certain age have witnessed this before -- remember the financial crisis of 2007-2008? -- and it would be nice if we all studied U.S. history a bit more thoroughly and remembered these lessons for the future.

U.S. government was created to BALANCE the rights of individuals for the responsibilities of the whole.

In order for ALL of us to thrive -- including our planet -- the rights of individuals or individual corporations to amass wealth at the expense of the greater good must be regulated and limited.

The world need not be a competition against each other. While we are not in control of everything, our individual actions DO matter. Every day, in every small way. We are responsible for stewarding our beautiful world for each other.

The excruciating and extreme losses the U.S. has suffered in this pandemic were not "inevitable." They did not "just happen." The Trump Administration bears accountability. And climate change is not "just happening." We all bear accountability for the choices we make that further it.

We need a government that understands its important role to work against profiteering and for the common good. Luckily we now have such a government in place. Let's all work to support #votingrightsforall to be sure we keep it.

"In America, the two very different responses to the pandemic have given us a powerful education in government activism. “For the past year, we couldn’t rely on the federal government to act with the urgency and focus and coordination we needed,” Biden said, “And we have seen the tragic cost of that failure….” - h/t Heather Cox Richardson

End of Saturday AM rant -- thanks to those who read, listen, and even respond!

#voteasifyourlifedependsonit

All We Leave Behind

 

Evert Hjalmer Nelson, my dad, at left
with his mother Signe in 1959 as she
was about to set sail for a visit home
from the U.S. to her native Sweden.

A few weeks ago, I was part of a conversation that moved me greatly on multiple levels.

We were prepping for a March 3 public presentation in Portland Ovations' Seeking Resonance Series -- Toward Being Future Beings, a preview of an ongoing commissioned work with Yu'pik creator Emily Johnson.

I was honored to be in the room.

We were talking about home. About our connections to place and people and ancestors. About culture and what we create from these connections.

Jason Brown, a self-professed "hyper creative" of Maine's Penobscot Nation, was among us. Jason began talking about how he was teased in school for being a "half breed" because his father was Swedish and his mother Penobscot.

As importantly, he was talking about how he knew nothing about the Swedish side of his family. They had sailed for America and left it all behind them: the language, the culture, the stories, the families along with the land.

I might be 100% French-Canadian in my genes, but my adopted family was second gen from Bohemia on my mother's side and first gen Swedish on my father's side. Similarly to the Swedish side of Jason's family, our people had left their old lives and seemingly their old selves behind with little trace when they immigrated to the States.

It's a lot to leave behind: those gifts of belonging to place and culture and the people who came before.

And as a result, White America tends to be a very disconnected culture. And in our disconnections, we have done a lot of damage -- especially to the land, but also to each other.

I was lucky growing up. Signe did keep returning for visits to Sweden. She spoke Swedish with the Swedish community in New Britain, CT, and made us Swedish foods for the holidays. Sometimes Swedish cousins would appear in CT on vacation. And when I was 13 she took me to Sweden with her for a month.

This all sounds like a lot and it was definitely something. But my dad never once went to Sweden. None of the rest of my family ever did. He did not speak the language, and as my grandmother aged we saw less and less of the Swedish cousins. I never connected with them as adults and their names and addresses are lost to me. My connections to the people who came before me are not strong, and I've noticed that is baked into White American culture. Our people were leaving behind where they came from, and when they arrived here, in order to benefit from the privileges of joining "White America," they conscientiously erased their differences.

Looking back, I see the moment when I was a teenager and became aware of this. In the 1970's, Puerto Rican immigration to New Britain boomed and new arrivals quadrupled the existing population. My father -- who no longer lived in the industrial city in central CT in which he was born -- began complaining about them. He was predominantly angry that they insisted on speaking Spanish, and often cited Signe's experience -- of arriving in the U.S. and attending night school to learn English.

Like many white western European immigrants, Signe valued assimilation. The new Puerto Rican population valued sustaining their native cultures: they brought their home with them to the mainland U.S.

We all leave things behind. Yet the history of native genocide, enslavement of Africans, and domination resulting from white immigration is a tragic result of our displacement from our own native cultures, places, and peoples. We're disconnected. We've forgotten our "we" to fiercely hold onto our "I's." In so doing, much of value has been lost to us forever -- including the humility that arises when one gives credit to those who came before.

Meatloaf and the Common Good

 

This is the Pyrex bowl in which my mother always made meatloaf.

And yes, being overseen by the Shawnee Pottery mid-20th century vintage pig bank and cookie jar in which she never kept cookies. Or coins.

I still make meatloaf in this sturdy old bowl, the same way she did: for every pound of ground meat (hamburger only in Mom's house) add 1 egg, ketchup and Worcester Sauce and salt and pepper to taste, packaged Italian bread crumbs, and enough milk to bind it all together. Set the loaf on 3 strips of bacon and put 3 more on top.

For some reason, making meatloaf for a family had me thinking about the cultural values that must be top of all our minds since the election, then January 6, then January 20.

The other overseer of both my mother's and my Gram's kitchens were magazine photos of JFK taped to the walls.

It was important to them to have a Catholic President -- not because he was a member of the same institution as they, but rather because they shared his values.

They believed in asking "not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country."

I suppose it sounds terribly old-fashioned and simplistic to call up this old warhorse, but I'm grateful that our new President Joe Biden and VP Kamala Harris are asking the same thing.

They're focused on how to help working folks rather than put more dollars into the hands of Big Business and the 1%. They're focused on ending the pandemic: on track to get more than 1 million doses of vaccine not just manufactured but into people's arms by March. They're focused on rebuilding our nation's sorry infrastructure -- think Texas in an ice storm -- because our roads and power and internet and communications are what regular people like you and me rely on to survive and to thrive.

And maybe because we too often don't share a common belief in the goodness of this universe, in which we are so small, and thus in the power of our communities -- I just don't get Republicans. Their very transparent selfishness and lust for power and control boggle my mind. I don't want to believe in it. I don't understand those who support it. I don't want you to believe in it, either.

In the faith in which my mother raised me, there was no room for living a life based on anger and resentment. We didn't have much, but what we did have -- family, a roof over our heads, meatloaf -- was a gift and a blessing not to be ignored.

My mother had multiple, painful, ineffective eye surgeries before she was 10 years old. She had a full hysterectomy at 17, in 1941. She couldn't have children. She married a man who was legally deaf.

Together, they adopted first me and then my brother. They built a home on land given them by my Gram and on my father's machinist salary. By the time I was 11 years old, we were ALL working 12 hour days on a gravel pit-turned-campground my dad had envisioned and was managing, and on which we were living.

My parents were deeply grateful. They had had plenty of experiences that could have led them to live lives of anger and resentment -- and they chose not to.

This is just one of the many wonderful articles of faith which they passed along to me. I am grateful, too.

#pyrex

#meatloaf

#commongood

#jfk

#growingupinCT

Maine Legislative Breakfast 2021: The Impact of Our Cultural Sector

Below are comments I delivered to a Maine legislative breakfast hosted by the Maine
Association of Nonprofits on Friday, January 22, 2021. By posting them here I am able to include links to underlying statistics, research, and resources for your reference. Questions? Need additional info? Please don't hesitate to be in touch with me at lindanelso@gmail.com.

Good morning. Thanks again to you all for being here --  we're all grateful for your interest in and attention to the vital work nonprofits play in Maine, as well as to the impacts the pandemic has had on our work and priorities.

I'm Linda Nelson, Deputy Director of Portland Ovations and founding Executive Director of Opera House Arts in Stonington, with you today from Bath, the homeland of the Sagadahoc of the Wabanaki Confederacy.

As I hope you are all aware, the performing arts in Maine, as around the country, were among the first to shut down and will be among the very last to regain normalcy. Stages are shuttered; hundreds of thousands of events cancelled; millions in event and related revenues are lost.

This extreme shut down is due to one very crucial fact: bringing people together is the heart of the charitable mission of nonprofit performing arts organizations.

Literally bringing people together. To share experiences. Across differences.

We are traversing an historic time when our need to create such opportunities is greater than ever. Learning and understanding each others' stories, perspectives, and cultures through music, dance, and performance -- sitting in the dark beside a stranger with whom you later talk, laugh, and cry; watching live people perform ourselves and others on stages across our great state -- is one of our most powerful, and underrated, tools for uniting us. And for healing.

That's the heart of what we need to acknowledge today: arts and culture are the unsung heroes of the strengths of our Maine communities.

Nationally, the arts generate more revenues than construction or transportation. Fact. Surprising, hey? The latest data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis show that arts and culture make up more than 4.5% of the nation's GDP, with over 5 million wage and salary workers.

Here in Maine, the last study of five years ago documented over $150 million in revenues generated by this sector, with over $12 million in state and local government revenue.

Here in Maine, for every dollar spent on a cultural event ticket a local purchaser additionally spends more than $30 in that community. A visitor, who has been attracted to that town by that performance, spends an additional $60 plus dollars.

Maine's nonprofit arts and cultural sector employs thousands of people around the state.

While these numbers generate significant impact, there is also opportunity for growth as indicated by the national figures.

But economic impact is not the only, or perhaps even the best way, to understand the impact of arts and culture in Maine communities.

That, perhaps, was best felt during Wednesday's inauguration.

When Lady Gaga performed a national anthem like no other, gesturing to the flag that still flies above what was a besieged U.S. Capitol.

When J. Lo brought her own amazing heritage to This Land Is Your Land and America the Beautiful.

And most strikingly: when 22 year old U.S. Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman recited an original poem that returned the light to many hearts.

Amanda reminded me and hopefully everyone here today of Maine's own recent Poetry Out Loud champions, Joao Victor of Lewiston and Allan Monga of Portland.

THE ARTS had people weeping and remembering why we love this country. THE ARTS enflame a passion for UNITY in our HEARTS -- where it matters most.

But this pandemic has stolen many such experiences from us and will continue to do so.

My organization, Portland Ovations, is working almost entirely virtually and despite the optimism of Dr. Fauci, in his recent keynote address to the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, does not see a return to "normal" ticket sales until our 2022-23 season. Like our peers in the cultural sector, we've used our creative ingenuity to pivot -- and our pivot includes investing our budget, greatly supported by recovery dollars, directly in Maine artists, in the form of five commissions of new performances.

State and federal recovery dollars make up ESSENTIAL parts of our budgets: keeping arts workers employed and nonprofits from permanently shuttering. Even the most innovative amongst us -- and I look toward my peers and friends at Portland Stage, Penobscot Theater, Opera House Arts, Celebration Barn and beyond -- are, like the 90-year old Portland Ovations, operating at less than 20% or our usual revenue capacities.

We are all swimming hard to get back to shore -- making up new strokes, including a pilot project called the Cultural Alliance of Maine that unites Maine's cultural organizations for a stronger voice and more visible seat at the table. We can't continue to retain and attract workers and visitors alike to Maine; we can’t continue to support the Maine artists and events that are an important component of what makes Maine a special and unique place; we can’t continue to bring people together across our differences and divides without YOUR continued inclusion of the cultural sector in all that you do for Maine people.

Maine people and communities need the arts to thrive. And the arts need you.

Thank you.

#nonprofitmaine

#MANP

#cultureME

#MaineArts