Autobiographical
- "Protect your hands! You work with them," poster (silkscreen) by Robert Muchley for the Federal Art Project, WPA, Pennsylvania, 1936. Repository: Library of Congress PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98518513/.
- "Be careful near machinery," poster (woodblock) by Robert Lachenmann for the Federal Art Project, WPA, Pennsylvania, ca. 1936–1940. Repository: Library of Congress PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98518717/.
- "Work with care," poster (woodcut) by Robert Muchley for the Federal Art Project, WPA, Pennsylvania, 1936 or 1937. Repository: Library of Congress PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/92517365/.
- "Failure here may mean death below – safety first," poster (woodcut) by Allan Nase for the Federal Art Project, WPA, Pennsylvania, 1936 or 1937. Repository: Library of Congress PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98518429/.
- "Backyards, Baltimore, Maryland," black and white photograph by Dick Sheldon for the Farm Security Administration, July 1938. Repository: The New York Public Library Digital Collections, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/ba309cea-94b2-4288-e040-e00a18066c61
- My mother enjoying flowers and the arrival of spring at Weston’s Farm in Freyburg, Maine.
- Slabs of granite in the woods next to the upper section of Diana’s Baths.
- A view of the water and granite at Diana’s Baths.
- Sand dunes in Barnstable, MA. Was taking a break after driving to Cape Cod to see my wife, my son, and my son’s family.
Visited extended family in another part of the state today. One of them will be the first in their family to attend college, starting this fall. I am so happy for this kid.
Starting to Get My Local Groove On
Last Tuesday’s ballot for the local election in Conway, NH, seemed extraordinarily long to me. The many budget and development questions (“warrants”) would probably have been decided at town meetings in earlier days. Maybe they still are in smaller NH towns, as they were in Tamworth when I was growing up. Anyway, today I noticed that the research I did for the election and the half hour or more it took me to fill out my ballot have had a positive effect on me. Driving around town with my elderly mother today, I realized that I knew some things about the direction of the town’s development and that I actually cared. It seems I’m growing more connected to this place in these times.
This shifting personal orientation is no small thing because I’ve felt relatively isolated here since coming up from DC for eldercare in late 2021. Hanging out in indoor spaces where I might meet people is limited by my awareness of the health risks that such activities entail for my mother. This circumstance also limits word-of-mouth news about local goings on. It doesn’t help that the days of bulletin boards and multiple local and regional newspapers are long gone. I’m told there’s local information on Facebook, but I wasn’t that desperate.
Last week, I finally subscribed to the online version of the only remaining local paper in order to prepare for the election. I took the plunge after talking with a few people at the protest on April 5th, my first in this town. I think this bit of personal agency and local involvement is doing me good, especially in these times. The paper prints letters, so maybe it’s high time I wrote one of those up here too. The last time I did that was for the International Herald Tribune in the early 1990s while living in Germany.
Reading Dr. Suess with FaceTime
I’m so excited. I just read Dr. Seuss’s One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish to my granddaughter in another state using the MacOS Books and FaceTime apps. Since we’d already read this on a couch together a few times, she sometimes explained a page to her father before I read it to her. Or she got excited and spoke lines before or with me.
At this young age (preschool), it helped that a parent was sitting next to her. That took care of the cuddle element that one usually gets when being read to. It also helped reduce the distraction of background voices in the house.
I did this on my desktop using split view, devoting a small part of the screen to her face. On the other end, they used an iPad to follow along. They saw the book open to two pages along with my face because I was sharing my whole screen in FaceTime.
📽️ The last time I saw “Three Days of the Condor,” dir. Sydney Pollack (Paramount, 1975), was long enough ago that I didn’t get as much out of its mid-seventies paranoia about the CIA as I did this time around. Or maybe it just didn’t gnaw away at me like it’s doing now. I grew up in a small rural town, but the grit in that movie pervaded a lot of popular television culture. I also heard my fair share of conspiracy-theory talk during my teens. Besides, the CIA was in the news.
I’m still not sure what to make of the mentality expressed in this film. It’s interesting, in any case, to speculate about how anti-establishment images and paranoia from the period have mapped onto both ends of our political spectrum.
"Maybe there's another CIA inside the CIA."
"Oil fields."
"We have games. That's all. We play games. What if? How many men? What would it take? Is there a cheaper way to destabilize a regime? That's what we're paid to do."
"How do you know they'll print it?"
Protest
My sign is hiding a lot of the crowd. I haven't heard an official number, but preliminary counts suggest at least 500 for my small town.
Too many clocks around here that need resetting after a time change, and I forgot that someone born a few decades before me might be using any one of them. Open question whether we’ll make it to her appointment on time.
Not a bad drive, but still something of a forced march from the White Mountains to the great city that hosts the institutions under attack by Felonious Husk and his young fascists. Am finally lying in bed, but my body still thinks it’s in a moving vehicle.
I’m streaming my mother’s church service to her in the living room. On a Facetime call, my three-year-old granddaughter asked what this service was. I referenced circle time, which she immediately understood. Preschool for the win.
I plainly have a cold. On a video chat, my granddaughter reported that she had a lot of boogers in her nose too.
It was a treat to see my granddaughter and other adults in her life this weekend.
Besides marking a massive mob attack on the Capitol four years ago, this date reminds me of the early signs of the coronavirus pandemic a year before that and of my parents' tumble down the stairs in that same period, my father landing on my mother. That’s also when I finished writing “Blogging Histories of Knowledge in Washington, DC,” meeting with my coauthor in Frankfurt a.M. via FaceTime from a hotel room in North Conway, NH.
I had to relocate to NH for eldercare 20 months after that. That means I’ve lived up here for 40 months now, though I still haven’t got used to all the changes. Except for becoming a grandfather—that part has come easy to me. My grandchild is a joy.
My mother has been watching her church service online so she can hear it. That means I hear parts too. And I can see what’s happening on the desktop I’m streaming to the TV with. Different vibe today. Pastor began by inviting people to settle, to be present, to allow themselves to have their feelings. I also saw more people in attendance than is often the case. The service emphasized themes such as inclusion, compassion, and justice, the last term describing something very different from the hypocritical, moralizing, vengeful God that I despised and rejected in my youth. If I had a religious bone left in my body, this place could be one point of connection with the local community.
One of the 8-inch M110 self-propelled howitzer crews I served on in the mid 1980s was majority Puerto Rican. If I recall correctly, two of us were white, two Black, and six Puerto Rican. I feel richer for having had such experiences than the orange role-playing garbage man will ever be.
Seeing pictures of the crowds of Harris–Walz supporters at the Washington Monument in DC tonight is heartening. They make me feel at home. That’s where I stood for Obama’s inauguration in 2009 – and for Independence Day celebrations despite the post-9/11 security theater.
My brother and a friend of his took a short trip from L.A. to the White Mountains. They did his usual beating about the lake and woods where we grew up. I did a little chauffeuring, and our mom got to visit with them.
My 86-year-old mother went with us to Madison Boulder today. The 0.6-mile round trip gave her and her rollator quite the workout. “Us” today means my granddaughter, her parents, and both sets of her grandparents.
Workplace Safety Posters, ca. 1936–40
I am enjoying Depression-era workplace safety posters from the Works Progress Administration (WPA). They evoke a time when the power of government was effectively leveraged for good. If you live in the United States, there is a good chance you’ve encountered WPA building and infrastructure projects. One WPA program was the Federal Arts Project, which put artists to work. To get a feel for the diversity of programs this art supported, see the Library of Congress’s online collection.
Unfortunately, the WPA also built and helped staff internment camps for Americans of Japanese descent after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. This part of the story underlines the negative potential of government power when racism shapes policy.
Besides the four posters that follow this text, I include a photograph of an alley behind a row of houses with tiny back yards in Baltimore. If you look closely at this image from the Farm Security Administration, you can see a WPA poster attached to an open door in the bottom left-hand corner. It is captioned “Stop accidents before they stop you.” The building itself appears to be part of a factory of some kind because only a door and a single big wall with windows is visible, visually distinct from the opposite side of the alley, where all the little houses are.
These posters remind me of the ongoing importance of government for writing, publicizing, and enforcing workplace safety regulations. They connect past concerns about workplace conditions to countless reports of workplace injuries and sickness in our own time. They also link to family stories past and present, whether handed down or forgotten, whether taught or ignored in schools, workplaces, and union gatherings.
My grandmother’s father was killed in an avoidable industrial accident in 1917 when she was six years old. The lathe he operated in a Cleveland factory had no safety guard, and then his luck ran out. He left behind six children and their mother, the oldest of them able to work. The sudden loss of this man represented a trauma that no one talked about in my childhood, and I only learned the barebones details from my mother this past year.
I often wonder if and how such trauma is passed down in other families, and why its causes are silenced or not. My mind goes there because I imagine that millions of Americans—from across the political spectrum—come from families with such experiences, even if these were not handed down from the past. And I wonder what, if anything, knowledge about these many pasts might do to change their attitudes today.
This thought ties in with the employers and politicians who fight government regulations and workers' collective bargaining. They strive to steal workers' freedom and dignity, all in the name of their own freedom. Part of this effort benefits from or fosters processes of families and communities forgetting or diminishing the significance of the workplace struggles and traumas in their own pasts.
Fortunately, good governance and organized labor seem to be making a comeback.
The drive down to DC last weekend threw out my back, so I haven’t been able to do anything down here. At least the great nephew I brought with me got a lot out of the trip. Tomorrow, three of us head to Cape Cod to see a younger generation of Stonemans, one not yet 3, and other extended family.
☺️ It is amazing to watch a tiny human, my granddaughter, develop language for herself.
Driving north on Rt. 16, I can still be surprised by the appearance of the White Mountains from a few hilltops between Wakefield and Ossipee. For a moment, today, I was even treated to Mt. Chocorua and Mt. Washington as the dominant figures in a stunning pattern of silhouettes that rose into the late afternoon sky. Chocorua was front and center, and Washington rose up behind it in a pairing that is impossible to imagine in Chocorua’s shadow, where I grew up, let alone in Mt. Washington Valley. where I am now.
Another Trip to Scarborough
It's a beautiful day over here in Down East Maine, where my mother is undergoing a two-part procedure while I wait outside. The picture here is of the waiting area wing of the surgery center on Maine Med's Scarborough campus.
(Photo by author)
Sign of Life
My last post was of snow and now August is almost over? Yikes!
After commuting thousands of miles between DC and New Hampshire since my father’s passing, I’ve spent the summer in New Hampshire. The marathon driving sessions wear on me, so I’ve been avoiding them.
The driving was because I haven’t found a good way to have my mother live alone for more than a few weeks at a time. I haven’t worked out a strategy for getting her help while preserving as much of her independence as possible. So I’ve been the help.
Maybe that’s a good thing, even if it often feels like I’m treading water. During my father’s final months, everything had to be about him. Now I’m able to take the time to work out my mother’s specific needs, even as she works out the business of living as a widow after more than sixty-five years of marriage.
Besides, a health issue has come up that we have to deal with.
(All photos by author)
The Old House and Barn
My brother took the above photo on his trip to New Hampshire last month. It’s the old barn at the house we grew up in, viewed from a dirt road. Below is a picture he took of that house. It was badly in need of paint nine years ago, when my parents sold it, but it looks like it’s in good shape now. The biggest maple tree out front had to be cut down, but the smallest one isn’t looking so small anymore.
To Everything There Is a Season
It feels strange to be back home in DC after nine months away in rural New Hampshire. And I’m driving back up next week for my father’s memorial service—driving because flying sounds like a terrible option these days.
My father was able to live at home for most of these past months. Facilitating that was a two-person job, mine and my octogenarian mother’s. During his last month, he went from hospital to rehab, which I thought might become long-term care, but his old body had other plans.
Fortunately I already knew his wishes, so all three of us were on the same page when it came time. He was at the hospital when we switched him over to hospice care, a small hospital in the White Mountains, and the staff was brilliant.
My son made it up the last week, as did my sisters and one brother-in-law. Even my brother, who I hadn’t seen in thirty years, flew in. On one of the last days the old man could speak, a nurse told him he was lucky. “I know,” he replied.
So it goes.
Early last fall, during a drive down to a different hospital to pick up my father, my wife called me. Our first grandchild was coming. And then another call: she was there.