The Other Half

I recently traveled by car, train, and bus to Florida to provide health care support for some friends.

I thought about my Dad a lot while there, because he loved it so.

He didn't subjectively love it: as in, there were all these favorite places and people he was eager to see each winter.

No, Evert Hjalmer Nelson -- only son of Signe who immigrated from central Sweden to New Britain, CT, when she was 17 to help her sister, who was ill, raise twin girls -- OBJECTIVELY loved Florida because of what it represented to him.

Climbing aboard the mid-size motor home he and my mom first rented, and later purchased; and hitting I-95 south for Florida for several winters in the 1980s - 1990s meant, to my dad, that he had "made it."

He'd achieved one of his lifelong goals: to be a guy who could afford to spend part of his winter in the warmth of the South rather than battling the coastal ice of New England.

Like the motor home itself, the place they landed every winter was very modest: Woodsmoke Campgrounds in Fort Myers, on the Gulf Coast. Because it wasn't really "the South" in which they were interested. It was Florida, very much its own nation-state in White American culture.

Evert Hjalmer and Mae Louise Nelson
circa 1980's

Woodsmoke is directly on the "main drag," the infamous Tamiami Trail ribboning south along the coast from Tampa and then cutting across the Everglades to Miami. I don't remember how they ended up at Woodsmoke, but it became a place both he and my mother loved. Dad could ride his oversized tricycle around the park; Mom paddled around the pool, walked the camp loop and made a few friends. They forewent the omnipresent shuffleboard (I've never known anyone who played, although having shuffleboard seems, in those days, to have increased the camping appeal) and stuck mainly to their slab of concrete and picnic table. The one time I visited them there the whole place was very neat and tidy. No mud, no puddles laced with thin ice.

This winter pursuit was a bit of a busman's holiday. My Dad's other big dream, the one of many that had resulted in this big dream, was to a) quit the machine factory in which he was working on my arrival b) own his own business that was preferably c) a franchise (this was the 1960's, we were in awe and desirous of McDonalds) and, ideally d) a KOA (Kampgrounds of America) campground.

Here is one of the big gifts my Dad gave to me: he was a dreamer who actually pursued and obtained this creative dreams.

Very cool.

And like any first generation, mid-20th century veteran of World War II, a good number of Dad's dreams had to do with attaining what other guys had, and this of course had a lot to do with what was pitched to them and what privilege they had as White men in the post-war era. A house with a (small) yard in the (white) suburbs rather than the rooming house in Connecticut's "Hardware City" in which he had grown up: a completely multicultural place whose tool factories drew workers arriving from Sweden and especially Poland. After World War II, Puerto Rican immigrants were recruited to fill a labor shortage in the tobacco fields of the Connecticut River valley, and by the 1970's the demographic had shifted to that New Britain and Hartford now have some of the largest per capita percentage of Puerto Rican people of any cities in the U.S.

Other aspect of Dad's post-war dreams: being the boss of his own business. Cars, decidedly plural. Boats, same.

My dad was fascinated by and envious of how "the other half," as he called them, lived.

He liked to drive through neighborhoods with bigger houses than ours. He and my mom would go out for dinner by picking up a takeout burger and motoring down to Stonington Point (CT) where they could watch the beautiful sail and motor boats go by. It was kind of like a pre-internet shopping trip for my dad as he decided what boat he wanted to buy in the future: that far away and mostly imaginary day when he might have the means. Or they would grab a pizza and take my brother and I, and sometimes aunts and uncles and cousins, to sit at a picnic table at a rest stop on Interstate 95 so my dad could count the campers going by. In retrospect, I suppose this constituted some form of market research.

When realized, our own campground in Mystic was scraped together in 1970 from a gravel pit. Like much about their adult lives, I have no memory of how my dad connected with his partners -- Woody, who owned the land and the bulldozing equipment to make it into a campground; and George, the thin, sharp-faced lawyer, maybe the one who financed and brokered the deal? -- but there we were, by 1971, having moved 25 miles east down the coast from the mouth of the Connecticut River where my mother, and then we, had been born and raised.

We went as a family twice to Florida during February vacation: because that's how "the other half" lived, by my Dad's definitions, and he wanted, and worked hard for, that "better life" for his family as well. In kind of the same way he wanted us to have the college educations neither he nor my Mom had.

Going to Florida was a big deal. My parents didn't fly (or ever have credit cards), so we had to be gone for at least two weeks, which meant my brother and I had to miss a week of school in addition to vacation week. After some soul-searching and minor arguments between them on the merits of this, they took the plunge anyway.

Year #1: camping outside Disney World, not long after it opened and pre- any other associated theme parks. The monorail! Going through the fancy hotel at which we could not afford to stay! Pretty magical.

Year #2: a tiny rented houseboat on the Intracoastal Waterway. Pretty harrowing.

That first trip to Disney was kind of de rigeur -- i.e., "everyone" was going, now that we had access on the east coast to the "wonderful world" which had opened in 1971, the same year as the campground. The second and last trip the four of us took together was more of a family tragi-comedy.

I was 14 that year, as in: a ninth grader who was not happy about being dragged away from my basketball team, music, and friends. It was 1975, the U.S. appeared to be falling apart as our last troops were evacuated in a panic from Saigon following on the President's impeachment and resignation and the Watergate trials, Captain & Tennille's "Love Will Keep Us Together" was the #1 song and I wanted to believe it desperately about one of the first girls for whom I had a self-identified crush. As in: if I went away, she would forget me. Out of sight, out of mind. No cel phones, no email, no texting.

Despite having an angry, unabashedly surly teenager in tow my Dad decided the best option was to put us all aboard a houseboat and float us away from any chance we had on land to escape each other. In retrospect, this choice had nothing at all to do with us and everything with fulfilling another of Dad's Dreams.

And, in perfect metaphorical fashion, he ran the boat aground on a sand bar.

We could have just waited for the tide to come in which, in fact, we ultimately were forced to do.

But that was after hours of Dad, inexplicably in his extra large whitey-tighty underwear, and me in my swim suit jumping in and out of the very warm, very shallow water, heaving our combined weights at the boat while our feet sheared out from under us on the sandy bottom, and screaming at each other in frustration, blame and filial anger.

By the time we motored back and I was able to jump to the dock, I never wanted to see Florida or how "the other half" lived, at least in Dad's imagination, ever again.

New development in Sarasota County, FL

Almost 50 years later, the dreams Dad shared with others of his generation -- the White, U.S., what-was-then-the-middle class dream in which you get a car, you get a car, you get a second home, you get a boat, you get a vacation, you get a vacation, etc., the impact of which was then inflated with each handoff to the next generation -- has overwhelmed Florida and is the engine of desire perpetuating our culture's widening gulf between the "have's" and "have not's."

Like California's, like Texas's, Florida's roads are nearly impassably clogged with vehicles. In Sarasota alone, 20,000 new building permits have been issued and three story elevator shafts, to facilitate living spaces now mandated to be 13 feet above ground to prevail over the king tides of climate change, lurch from the muddy, bulldozed remains of the Florida scrub like so many extraterrestrial gophers.

Most of us raised as members in White American culture have been, for the most part, "trained to obtain" since birth, especially when it comes to property and other material goods already owned or obtained by others. Our colonist ancestors wanted the land/beaver/trees/labor/wealth those resident on this continent had, and every generation since we've strived to obtain that material definition of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." If someone else can have it, why not I?

I've had to wrestle with this monster ever since leaving the campground and attending Bowdoin College: a realization of another of Dad's Dreams, to have college-educated children who could more easily attain and experience how "the other half" lived. But once I landed at this small, elite institution populated by the children of some of the U.S.'s wealthiest and most powerful citizens, the gulf between those "have's" and me and my family proved too dangerously wide to cross. The few times my parents ventured onto campus, Dad was stricken by horrible migraines and had to hide from all social events in my dorm room.

Now, as I witness the gentrification of the small, Downeast Maine island I have called home for almost 25 years -- watching as the urban wealthy buy multiple homes and invest in rental properties to acquire more wealth while gutting our community by reducing workforce housing -- I sometimes feel as if I am standing on a sandbar where multiple seas, each representing "the other half," intersect. The tides, winds, and currents of the wealth, power, and control of others rip, buffet, and swirl around my calves, threatening to pull me -- with my one foot in and my one foot out -- to death? to paradise? Certainly to a place that no longer resembles our authentic, year-round communities.

It takes a lot of energy, muscle, and intention for each of us to stand tall right where we are against the values and dreams of "the other half."

Yet stand we must.

#gentrification

#theotherhalf

#newblogpost

#connecticut

#florida

#daddreams

Oh, Jimmy: The Peanut Farmer Who Became A Beloved Statesman

Oh, Jimmy.

In 1980, you were the first person I ever voted for for President.

But the majority of the country, including my family and my home states, the usually reliable Democratic electorates of Maine and Connecticut -- arguably still in shock from the string of four political assassinations and frustrated by the upheavals of the1960s and 1970s they marked -- mocked you as an inept buffoon.

You broke my young and hopeful heart, winning only six tiny states and losing in a landslide to Ronald Reagan.

Your loss precipitated nearly 40 years of a widening wealth gap and decimation of the middle class in our country, thanks to Reagan's "voodoo," or supply side, economics and tax cuts -- in both of which too many are still fooled into believing.

You were then still young, in your 50s and not the leader you would become, belatedly winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for your "decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” (The Nobel Prize)

We forget the terrible situations you inherited as President in 1977, only remembering you appeared to be unable to correct those most key to voters -- inflation, an ongoing energy crisis that was resurgent in 1979, and the Iran hostage crisis. 

Yet on your second day in office you pardoned all Vietnam War-era draft evaders. You created the Departments of Education and Energy, and introduced energy conservation, new technologies, and price controls. You facilitated a lasting Egypt-Israel peace treaty.

You were a working class kid from a small rural town who became a submariner and inherited nothing, yet then worked successfully to revive your family's peanut farm. You believed in your service to the world and pursued numerous strategies to create healing for many, culminating in your establishment of the Carter Center to promote and expand human rights in 1982 -- for which you have been working ceaselessly since.

As high school students, we made fun of your big, toothy grin and that you were called "Jimmy," had a brother called "Billy," and couldn't seem to restore U.S. power and privilege. All of which, to many, appeared "unpresidential."

Yet now again you set a leadership example for us, opting to stop hospitalized medical care to return to die at your home, with your family. Having lived a good life and choosing to die well, too.

In following your many examples, it is good for us to remember to forgive; to always to return to the potential and beauty within each of us; and to know that we are merely servants to love in this world -- and that that is a commitment which requires decades of hard work.

Oh, Jimmy. Thank You.

"The reason that remarkable stories of forgiveness take our breath away is that we instantly feel the liberation in the lifting of boundaries, the end of separation, of “inside” and “outside.”

Roshi Nancy Mujo Baker, “The Seventh Zen Precept”

#1980 #voodooeconomics #wealthgap #diplomacy #jimmycarter

The Real Genius of Theater is How it Builds Community: Remembering Jean Wilhelm in Eastport

The towering Eastport Arts Center,
formerly a Baptist Church in Maine's
easternmost community.

As theater makers, we deal in physicalities.

The voices and bodies of actors. The buildings and stages in which we gather audiences and create imaginary worlds that heal our hearts and minds, that build new, temporary mini-communities with every performance. We learn to and honor being present in our bodies and places.

Our work often involves buildings -- saving old ones and at times building new to house our stages, roofs under which to bring people together.

So it was with our dear compatriot Jean Wilhelm throughout her career, but especially in the last two decades as she helped to purchase an old Baptist church in Eastport, Maine -- our nation's most eastern outpost -- and create the Eastport Arts Center.

As its website says, "The Eastport Arts Center (EAC) nurtures and promotes six year-round constituent groups engaged in theater, art, music, film education and community outreach."

Music to Jean's ears, and a song to my soul.

Jean, who was in her late '70's already when she relocated to Eastport, didn't do this on her own. She worked closely with another woman, Joyce Weber, who died two years before Jean, as well as many, many community members. Because in theater we don't do anything on our own. Theater is the art of the ensemble, of community. It is about bringing people together to share an experience, "to breathe," as one friend of mine said, "the same air."

This is its most potent power for change.

Jean Wilhelm memorabilia at her memorial
service August 13, 2022  in Eastport, Maine.

From the moment Jean sought us out at Opera House Arts in Stonington we knew she was a kindred soul. She believed deeply in the need for every community member to participate in and experience art of all forms. We asked her, in 2008, to direct a community playreading and she chose three exquisite short plays by Tennessee Williams: "The Lady of Larkspur Lotion," "27 Wagons Full of Cotton," "Portrait of a Madonna." The language in these plays is almost ridiculously beautiful, stunning, and Jean guided the community members young and old -- most unfamiliar with the work of Williams -- to find themselves within these stories from the 1940's.

Jean had fairly auspicious roots but, born in
1927 and graduating from high school in 1943, she became a woman during a time when being independent was not the norm. She had to, and did, literally sail her own course: straight through Smith College where she worked with the iconic Hallie Flanagan and on through advanced degrees in theater at West Virginia University and the University of Minnesota, on to the University of New South Wales in Australia and Goucher College in Maryland and finally on up the Maine coast. It was while getting her PhD in Minnesota that she forcefully introduced herself for hire to the legendary director Sir Tyrone Guthrie; opening up, as she said, "a whole wonderful sequence of events" including directing Guthrie's infamous worldwide touring version of Oedipus Rex in Australia in 1970-71.

The thing that most resonated with us about Jean was not even her artistic work -- we traveled up to see both Brian Friel's "Dancing at Luhnasa" and Williams' "The Glass Menagerie" under her hand in Eastport -- but her dedication to democracy: in civic life as well as in theater. The two came together for Jean as they do for us.

Jean's official President Obama
commemorative photo.

For example, at her memorial service on August 13, 2022, I newly learned she had been in front of the Eastport post office every Saturday -- protesting George W. Bush's falsified war in Iraq. She shamelessly supported Democratic candidates, including Obama. Her small-D democratic values powered her work -- as it did our own.

Jean's nephew Bill deBlasio, former Mayor of NYC.

As her most famous nephew, Bill deBlasio, former mayor of NYC noted at the beginning of his comments Saturday, the beautiful photo of Jean and Joyce talking with each other, taken by a student, was right out of the Nixon era of "un-indicted conspiracists." It turns out the two actually WERE conspiring at that moment, seated on a bench in the unfinished upstairs theater space above where the photography workshop was happening -- plotting the creation of the Arts Center.

In Jean's bright blue eyes, the world was always wonderful and marvelous and the charge was always ONWARD! This is just the expansive, glass overflowing attitude we in theater and really in all our lives need to accomplish our work and improve our communities, or so much of it would never get done. It is a world in which, in Jean's own words, death is “not frettable.” (sic)

ONWARD! dear Jean. And ONWARD! all of you making moments of beauty that gather and heal those around you, whether through theater or faith or civic duty.

#MaineCulture
#CultureChange
#NewBlogPost
#Onward

Goosed

Our biggest challenge along the
Erie Canal Bike Trail??

Hissing, beak wide open, wings spread, the goose came at my right flank. I swerved the bike and accelerated my peddling. It was a narrow miss.

The goose was protecting its brood, mate, young and fellow geese, of whom 15-20 were spread across the Erie Canal Bike Trail. Repeatedly. It's June, and the goslings are of different ages, many verging on adolescence, and the adults are in full molt: they lose their big wing feathers at this time of year, and cannot fly, leaving them extremely vulnerable.

And defensive.

On Day 1 of the ride we'd witnessed a rider knocked to the ground by a flock of geese in Tonawanda.

They appear to be the most dangerous part of our 400-mile journey. Clustered at many various points on the trail, protecting their young, charging us on our bicycles as we attempt to part their feathered flocks and urge them not-unkindly off the path into the canal.

But being goosed -- prompted, urged, herded -- is for many of us a rather necessary thing.

Doing a long ride such as this, dependent upon your own physical strength and mental determination, "gooses" one forward toward new revelations and perceptions. As any herd dog, or goose, might tell you: a bit of a sharp nip on one's haunches, a change of scenery, a physical challenge is often what one most needs to get to the destination(s) one desires.

Riding the trail last month, I was goosed to consider what it really means to be a 60-year-old queer, feminist, childless woman out in the world, a body visibly traversing in real, human time the state of NY.

In my welcoming Maine community, I live a fairly protected life in which such facts of my difference from the normative culture don't often present themselves. But out here, exposed to the hissing of geese and the fury of young white men, I am just an old white dyke in their way.

And since then, there is the Supreme Court with all its illegitimacy and unrepresentative decisions that threaten our individual human rights -- including overturning the "settled law" of Roe vs. Wade.

It's easier to forget in these days, when fluidity of gender and sexuality has been more normalized in many-but-not-all places, what internalized homophobia and misogyny feel like.

As I pushed my body and my mind along the path for those two weeks, I was reminded of the things I carry that for the most part I have successfully evaded. In response to the cat calls and questions and assumptive "sir's" comes the internalized reality that to be a masculine female is indeed not only to be triumphantly queer but to be wrong. To be a woman my age without kids or grandkids: wrong. How much easier it seems were I to take testosterone, grow a beard, lower my voice even further so I could just be one and not the Other: both. A queer butch woman, unapologetically without children, masculine and yet still a woman. Powerful in myself, cycling 400 miles: someone others in their fear of what is different would like to disempower.

My tactic for the past 50 plus years to prove my rightness to myself has been to assert the power of my sexuality. To seduce and to charm the world around me. 

But I am 60. I am tired. I don't want to charm anyone anymore. And it is in that final 10 miles, riding through the 40th mile to the 50th, that I feel very alone and sad: living proof that the choices I've made are naturally wrong. We all have these moments when confirmation bias is achieved and escape velocity not. This is the point of vulnerability at which the power of the loving community is paramount.

#newblogpost

#queer

#whatisnormal

#imokyoureok

#lovingcommunity

Post-Bike Trail Notes: The Many Roads Not Chosen

One of my many paths not chosen was the path of classical music performance.

Riding a bike every day, all day, creates that beautiful space that dancers and other performers know well: the life right here now, in the physical body in time and place.

As the cinder of the Erie Canal Trail from Buffalo to Albany unspooled beneath my wheels the first two weeks in June, I could spin into a kind of trance state of cadence and motion. Being.

Yet at every juncture, choice and often action were required. Wayfaring signage was not always available or clear, maps not detailed enough, priorities of co-riders not the same. And at times, even with due consideration, initial choices to follow a certain route had to be remade. Sometimes a path just didn't "feel right," and a 360-degree turn was required.

Bicycling is, of course, a well-used metaphor for life. And the trip gave me time to reflect on several roads I did not take.

The first of these materialized in the first few days of the ride when we arrived in Rochester -- home to the Eastman Kodak company, inventors of the Brownie camera that popularized and democratized photography at the beginning of the 20th century; and its philanthropic offspring, the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester.

Kodak Hall, the largest performance venue at
he Eastman School of Music in downtown
Rochester, NY.

George Eastman, the inventor who founded Eastman Kodak (Kodak is not a collaborating partner but rather a name Eastman devised for his company), ascribed to the philosophy of "noblesse oblige." He stood alongside Rockefeller and Carnegie as one of the most philanthropic men of his era. He provided Kodak employees the first "stock bonus" in U.S. corporate history, and invested millions in education at MIT and in Rochester. He was the largest contributor to HBCU's in the 1920's, and a pioneer in dental and medical philanthropy.

A scientist, he also recognized the links between the creative and scientific processes, particularly through music. "There are no drawbacks to music: you can't have too much of it," he famously said.

This passion led him to establish one of the nation's most famous music conservatory programs, the Eastman School of Music, where my path nearly intersected with Eastman's vision and philanthropy for music.

I became a trumpet player at age 9 by accident: we were invited to begin in our school band program at that age, and this was the instrument found moldering in my grandmother's attic -- provenance still unknown. But I took to "blowing my own horn" like a fish to water: I love music, and I love the feeling it creates in my brain and body when I create it myself.

The trumpet is an utterly collaborative, ensemble instrument: yes, you can solo, but it is not really the instrument for living room confabs. As a wind player, I pursued first concert band, then orchestral playing, then brass quartets and quintets.

My love for it was so clear that my parents -- who had earlier told me a piano was beyond our financial reach -- broke down and sent me off to NYC with my junior high band instructor to purchase a decent instrument along the hallowed musical hall of 48th Street.

But most importantly, they hooked me up with private lessons and somehow I was charmed enough to wind up with one of the best trumpet instructors in New England: Irvin Bourque, who had previously taught at the Juillard School and who had himself studied with the famed NY Philharmonic trumpeter William Vacchiano and played for the larger-than-life conductor, Arturo Toscanini (bringing a type of "What would Toscanini do?" filter to my life!).

All more esoterica on trumpet legacy than you may need on a Monday morning.

Mr. Bourque, who dragged me willingly with him from town to town as part of the Norwich (CT) Civic Band and several brass quartet/quintet configurations, had me headed toward Eastman, at which one of my best friends, a French Horn player, matriculated the year before I was to go.

Through her, I began to understand what it meant to go to a music conservatory. Hours and hours of practice alone in a cement block practice room! What of softball, what of history, what of writing, what of lesbian bars?!

The world was too wide and enticing. It distracted me from the alluring tones of the Eastman Wind Ensemble and landed me instead -- again, almost by happenstance in the form of a high school U.S. history teacher whose sister worked in Bowdoin's Hawthorne-Longfellow Library

Ultimately, at Bowdoin, I DID spend hours and hours in that cement block practice room with my horn, as well as on stage with the college orchestra and pit bands, as well as on Bowdoin's fields and in its seminar rooms. Yet standing before the hallowed hall in Rochester fired my imagination: what a very different life mine would have been in choosing the Eastman path!

#music

#musiceducation

#EastmanSchool

#trumpet

#newblogpost