Enchantress

When I was in high school, there was a revival of ‘Camelot’ on Broadway, so the local cinema showed it again on the big screen.  I went to see it more than once.  I loved all of it — the acting, the music, the costumes — everything.  I could not stop singing songs from the soundtrack, especially “If Ever I Would Leave You” on the way to the bus stop.  I wanted so desperately to be Guinevere.  I was an average-looking high school girl, and I yearned, more than anything, to be the kind of woman that Guinevere was:  beautiful, queen of one man’s kingdom, and mistress of another.

That year, I was taking Art as an elective. 

A lot of people thought of Art as a gut course at Auburn High School.  Maybe it was, but not if you had Glenn Williams as the teacher.  Glenn (he allowed us to call him by his first name — it was the Seventies) demanded serious work from his students.  I got one of the few Bs I got in high school from him.

I was shocked.  When I asked him for an explanation, he told me that even though I did not have as much artistic skill as many of the other students, he was not just going

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Eye of the Beholder

I was sitting across from my beloved at a brunch party in our home when I noticed him frowning at the sideboard.  The frown was a fleeting thing, but it caught my attention, because it is so unusual for my beloved to grimace.

 I did not ask him about it until much later.

“What were frowning about at brunch?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You were sitting at the head of the table and everyone was laughing and talking and then you looked over at the sideboard and frowned.  I know that you were not glaring at the food, because everything was great, but do you remember?”

“Oh, yes. “

“Well?”

“It was at the decor.”

The décor?  I hadn’t changed the décor since we painted that room after we bought the house. What could he be talking about?

I walked into the dining room to review the décor.

Our house, the Old Beauty, has an unusual setup in that the kitchen and dining room are separated by the downstairs bathroom.  The bathroom — according to the previous owners— was added after the turn of the century, so it was once part of the kitchen. Where we have a sideboard there was once another sideboard, but instead of the mirror that hangs above the sideboard there used to be a pass through — a wonderful idea, especially for entertaining — but then again, so is indoor plumbing.

The dining room is green.  A green that was originally intended to be apple green, but ended up moss.  Both my husband (who feels that most rooms should be painted blue) and my daughter have expressed their dissatisfaction with the color, but until they offer to repaint it, it’s not going to change. 

There’s not a lot in the dining room.  There’s a built-in china cupboard, with drawers, in one corner, and the dining room table and chairs. The only other furniture is a old sideboard, which we are holding onto for Pat’s partner.  I restored it by rubbing nearly an entire jar of Hellman’s mayonnaise into it, which worked miracles.  Over the sideboard hangs an ancient mirror that I bought from Elizabeth Ann’s Victorian Tea Room years ago.

What décor is he talking about?  I wondered.

There are pictures on the wall, but they are all things that Bill likes and they have not changed since we renovated the room, except for the addition of a photograph of a nautilus shell given to me by my friend Bruce.  Bill likes that, too.

So I concentrated on the sideboard.  A pair of candles, in a pair of plain glass holders.  Between them sits a two tier dessert stand of ruffled hammered aluminum — not to my taste, exactly, but it was one of my parents’ wedding presents, and I remember my mother serving small sandwiches, cookies and date nut bars to my aunts and grandmother on it.  Plus, I had made it look rather cool by the addition of some funky jeweled and beaded fruit.  But I could understand Bill not liking the dessert tray.

I went in and said to him, “I’ll put the tray away, but I cannot get rid of it, because it has sentimental value.”

“It’s not the tray I mind, it’s that ridiculous fake fruit.  That’s just ludicrous.  It annoys me every time I look at it.”

I was completely taken aback, though now that I think of it, I shouldn’t be.  I’ve been married to Bill for over twenty years.  Bill likes things to look like what they are.  He objects to painted furniture, because he thinks if it’s made of wood, it should look like wood.  He likes his food to look like food, his women unmade up, and his stories unvarnished.

So I put away the jeweled fruit into a cupboard.

But I am glad that Bill told me about it.  I think it’s awful to live with objects that you don’t find attractive, and I have to say that now that the funky apples and pears are gone, I’m noticing that I find that tray unappealing.  I frown at it.

It’s about to be reunited with the jeweled fruit.   

Circle of Life?

If you visit the Old Beauty today, you may wonder what’s going on at my house.  There’s a vaccuum cleaner standing like a sentinel next to the back steps.  There’s a beach umbrella with its point stuck through one of the wrought iron hoops that holds plant pots in the summer.  There are carpet remnants of various colors rolled into different size tubes on the porch, along with stacks of quilts and blankets.  It looks like a cross between an old time used goods store and a massive cleanout.

It is precisely that.  But it’s not my cleanout.  It’s my parents’ cleanout.

My parents, after resisting acknowledging their age and mortality for many years, have suddenly decided that they are mortal beings.  They made a will.  They signed  medical proxies. They tackled many of the projects that they wanted to take care of in their house, including sorting out all the stuff in it.  And of course, they crave their children’s assistance.

We are happy to provide such assistance, but frankly, it can get complicated schedule-wise.  My father, as does most men of his generation, thinks that things should be done the moment he decides that they need to be done.  He gets annoyed when his children, who have lives of their own, have to arrange things like cleaning out the cellar.

So last weekend, my sister Pat and her significant other, Dan, drove down to my parents’ house in Dan’s truck, and my husband Bill and daughter Lucy drove down in our van, from which Bill had taken out all the seats, to  clean out the cellar.

My father functioned as Project Director —  Pat and Bill and Dan decided wisely to just load up whatever he told them needed to go.  They did not debate any of his choices, except when he decided that he wanted to throw away a box of old photographs.  My sister Pat intervened and arranged for my mother and my niece to go through them together, and to let Rachel scrapbook them, if she deems it necessary.

Lucy was there to see her grandparents and entertain her grandmother while the cleaning went on.  I wasn’t there, because the van could only accommodate two passengers when the seats are removed for maximum hauling space.

But now I am dealing with the fallout, some of it good, some of it not so good.

Not so good — a lot of the previously mentioned stuff (the rug pieces and the vaccuum, as well as a couple of other broken appliances) is in such bad shape that all they mean is more trips to the dump for Bill.  So Bill went to Massachusetts to pick stuff up  to bring to New Hampshire only to throw it away. In addition, some of the books that got delivered to our house are so damaged by years of being in a damp cellar that they are unkeepable.  Good — I now have an antique mahogany rocker in my living room.  It needs a good cleaning with Murphy’s Oil Soap and then some serious polishing, but I like having it there.  Then there’s the mysterious pile of photographs.  I think they inadvertently got put in with a collection of 78s that are now living here.

There are more pictures of men than women, and there’s only one photograph with someone I recognize, and she’s one of two people in the picture.  That’s the one of my Grandmother Lemen, with a man I assume to be her first husband, who died young. Her hair is quite dark, much darker than in any other picture I have of her. There’s a man in a priest’s cassock, and another picture of him standing in a formal pose.  There’s a high school graduation picture of someone named Charlie, dated 1938.  There’s a picture of two men with a table between them. There’s a wedding picture — a bride, her maid of honor, four bridesmaids and six men (one, I assume, is the groom)  in a folder from a photography studio in Brockton, Massachusetts.  I am betting that these are some of the Lithuanian cousins that I met as a child.  One of the groomsmen appears to be the man in the priest’s cassock, who looks sad in the wedding party photo.  I wonder who they all are.  They look quite well-to-do.  The bridal attire and the flowers  are quite ornate.

There’s a picture of a man at a desk, obviously posed, but I am wondering if it’s his actual workplace.  There’s a note on the envelope that it was in which says “Mr. Burlingame” on the outside.  I wonder if the picture is Mr. Burlingame, and who he was. Most intriguing of them all is a picture of two young girls, all dressed up, with two elderly people, both wearing round, horn-rimmed eyeglasses, sitting in chairs in a field, or a quite overgrown garden.  The older of the two girls in that photo looks slightly like my grandmother, but I am not sure if it is her. And there’s a picture of a little boy sitting on a pony, wearing a striped knit hat.

Who are these people?

I asked my mother if she knew anything about them, and she said they did not sound familiar to her. I will bring them with me for my parents to look at when I visit them next.  They traveled all the way up here only for me to have to take them back to discover if I want to keep them.

Is this what they mean by the Circle of Life?

Marketing Monday

I am learning to be a marketing maven.  I have to.  I have been told that I am too old and have been out of the workplace too long to get hired again as a technical writer, which was my profession.  I'm also probably too 'round' (as my ten-year-old calls it when she wants to spare my feelings) and I refuse to dye my hair.  I look every one of my 53 years.

I have, as the English say,  "taken advice" and the best option that I have to survive in this economic climate is to make the most of the skills that I have — writing, editing, and schmoozing.  I have been employed my entire life for my writing ability.  It started the moment I entered the workforce.  Started as a person who signed other people up for job interviews at the MIT Placement Office, ended up as the in-house librarian and writer of student resumes.  Graduated to technical writing in MIT's ARCS center as a way to combine a love of writing with a love of nerds.

While I was a full-time technical writer, as well as a weekly newspaper columnist, I always had editing and writing work on the side.  My favorites were the editing gigs for big corporations where I'd get paid to edit a four-page document down to two paragraphs.  This paid me handsomely and was a whole lot of fun.  Ah, the 90's.  What a lovely decade for making money.

Schmoozing?  I am good at that too.  But I tend to use it for other people —

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What I Can't Write About In the Paper

When I write for The Telegraph, there are subjects I can't write about.  When I was first hired, it was as the Singles columnist and after a few columns ran and readers decided they liked my work, I was given the okay to write about whatever I wanted to, as long as it had a Singles focus.  Then I got married and they still let me write what I wanted to. 

Sometimes I wrote about my job, which was fine with The Telegraph, but not always fine with my employer, Digital Equipment Corporation.  Most of the time there was no issue with me writing for the paper, until I wrote a column about trying to organize a release party and I referred to our product manager by name.  I used his first name only.  He did not have a problem with my column, but his boss did.  She tried to have me disciplined, but as my manager pointed out to her, I had every right to write about what I wanted to.  And wasn't she being just a tad petty? Really? Especially because I never mentioned the company I worked for.

Another time there was a controversy at DEC concerning  one of my columns was when I went on a business trip and stayed in a hotel where I felt unsafe.  So did the other women on the trip.  I treated the subject humorously, but I was telling the truth:  I did drag a bureau in front of the door before I went to bed.  I was uncomfortable with the cheesy  door locks, and the easy access to the rooms.  And when I wrote about my feelings in  my column, that column  somehow got elevated up the management chain. My boss informed me that higher ups at DEC were not pleased. 

This did not bother me.  Much.  I did not want to lose my job (and I really did not think they would discipline me over this) but I also felt that it was not the worse thing in the world for highly-paid executives to know that their cost-cutting measures were adversely affecting the safety of their employees. I don't know if it had anything to do with my column, but the budget for lodging was increased for my next trip.

I remember the first time The Telegraph asked me not to write about something. 

It was during the time that I was living in Merrimack and Merrimack was having a public and nasty problem with their school committee.  A recently elected member and some of her cohorts had pushed through a policy concerning homosexuality: it was not to be discussed, at all, by employees of the Merrimack school system.  Even if a child was asking a question of a guidance counselor.

I was horrified as a Merrimack homeowner.  I was horrified as a columnist, too, but was instructed not to write about it, or other 'flashpoint' issues in the community.

This bothered me, but only a little.  The Telegraph pays me to write a column: it can certainly tell me what are fitting subjects for that column.  But this is my blog, and I can write about subjects in the city that disturb me.

Here's one:  why is the owner of Indian Head Plaza in downtown Nashua such a bad neighbor?

Tonight is my daughter's once-a-year performance at the Court Street Theatre.  It's the end of the second session of Peacock Players.  All four of the camp sections will put on their plays.  The theatre will be used from 6:00 pm until, say, 10:00.  And, if things go the way they have in the past couple of years, Indian Head Plaza will have its security guards out, ready to tow away the cars of the unlucky souls who make the mistake of parking in their lot.

This drives me crazy.  It's not as if the plaza is doing big business (as a matter of fact, a lot of the building seems to be available for lease), or that Peacock Players is preventing them from doing their work.  It's not even that Peacock Players parks there all the time and the plaza management has to set an example. 

And it's not just Peacock Players.  The parking issue occurs at any performance at the Court Street Theatre.  Peacock Players, Actorsingers, whomever.  There's always a warning given before the show, and there's always someone running out at the last minute to move their vehicle.

It has given me an incredibly negative attitude towards Indian Head Plaza and its management.

I understand that they may not want their lot used by other people, but this is ridiculous. Last year I heard about someone's elderly grandparents coming to see their granchildren's performance, only to come out and find that their car had been towed.  To Amherst.  What a lovely parting gift. 

Why does the owner not charge the theatre a reasonable rent for the use of the lot?  Or just let them use it, in a spirit of neighborliness?

Indian Head Plaza was sold in June, so the optimist in me was looking forward to the Court Street Theatre having new, nicer neighbors, but we received word this week from Peacock Players not to park in any other than city facilities again.  Their memo states "The owners of the parking lots near the theatre are very aggressive in keeping their lots free of unauthorized parking  — they will not hesitate to tow cars."

In the July 2011 edition of the New England Real Estate Journal it was announced that Indian Head Plaza had been acquired by RJ Findlay & Co. on June 1st.  They paid $4.3 million dollars for the proprety, and according to the New England Real Estate Journal:

"R.J. Finlay & Co. will now work to lease the remaining commercial space. It will also look to play an active role in the downtown business community, not only bringing new life to the building, but working closely with local officials and neighbors to help revitalize that part of the city."

Gee. I don't know about you, but I do not understand how denying parking space to a local non-profit (a local non-profit that actually brings business into downtown) helps revitalize the city. I could just be dumb, of course.  Here's another quote from the New England Real Estate Journal:

"'Indian Head Plaza represents one of the most important real estate opportunities to come along in quite some time - a setting with truly regional implications for commerce in New Hampshire and Massachusetts,' said Robert Finlay, CEO. 'We are excited to be part of a project we know will create additional draw for an already remarkable downtown and provide substantial, measurable benefit to residents and business owners for many years to come.'"

I agree with Mr. Finlay.  Nashua does have a remarkable downtown.  His company may be excited to be part of it.  But  I guess that the 'substantial, measurable benefit to business owners' that he's referring to is for whoever's got the towing contract for the parking lot.  That's who is benefitting.  Not the residents going downtown to watch their children sing and dance and act at a performance held by one of the not-for-profit groups that brings people to this city.