The Urban Pantheist

One of the claims to fame of my humble little town is one of the oldest (if not THE oldest) colonial era houses in the country. The Fairbanks House contains a section built in 1636 and additions from later years.

( more Fairbanks House )

I wrote myself a note to clean the kitchen table in order to find my health card and the letter from my dad. The health card is the missing piece to making a doctor's appointment, and I was going to use the letter from my dad to post something poignant about a conversation we had.

I more or less cleaned the kitchen table, by which I mean I dug through a year's worth of stacked mail and moved some of it to other rooms and threw a lot of it in the recycling, and did not find my health card but I did find my Dental Insurance card. I figured that there's a chance that I could sign up for an online account with that, and get the ball rolling toward going to the doctor regularly like a grown man (I mean middle aged man). The application to get an online account seemed simple enough but when I got to the bottom to click "next," the blank page reloaded. Start again! After doing that 4 times I gave up.

I couldn't find my dad's letter either. I found a dozen other letters from him from earlier in the year but not that one. Suffice it to say: He documents me being a terse dick. But it's funnier than that sounds.

EDITED TO ADD:
No, wait, I'll tell the story the best I can remember it. My dad wrote it out and it was pretty funny so I'll try to approximate his version.

We were on Sanibel Island driving around, talking about Ding Darling (the cartoonist who managed to get legal protections against development on much of the island) and such when my dad said something like "Anne Morrow was out here at that time too." And then just let it hang there. Now I had no idea who Anne Morrow was, and I didn't really care. I forget what we were up to, but I didn't want to learn new history at that moment, we were trying to do one of our crazy fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants vacation style tasks. Both he and my brother do this, and I probably do too, but if I do please tell me because it's obnoxious: dropping a name or a fact out there, knowing that the person you are talking to probably has no idea what you are talking about. It's a way of dominating the conversation by leaving breadcrumbs that the other person has to pick up in order to complete the thought of the last sentence. Anyway.

I inhaled deeply and said "I don't know who that is."

"Anne Morrow's father was a partner at JP Morgan who became ambassador to Mexico and the Senator from New Jersey. Her mother was president of Smith College, where Anne went before becoming an important author. It was in Mexico that she met Charles Lindbergh, they married and she became a pilot herself. Lindbergh believed that Germany ... politics.... Lindbergh baby Kidnapping...." I confess at this point I dropped the thread of the narrative realizing that we had passed a shortcut.

"Can I stop you there, dad?" He did.

"She was Lindbergh's wife."

"Yes."

"Okay thanks."


My dad's takeaway from this exchange is that he talks too much. I'm not sure that's exactly right; I would say that we each talk a lot, and each have fairly deep interests in very different fields, and would do well to be considerate of one another. Also I diminished the important accomplishments of an important figure in history to simply being the spouse of another important figure in history. We should probably all know Anne Morrow better.

Anyway, thanks Dad! Sorry I was a dick.

My dad writes long letters and sends them to multiple people. For all intents and purposes he's blogging via the US mail. So I'm reposting. In his most recent letter he wrote on St. Patrick's day, the story of learning of our Irish ancestor:

Decades ago [my Irish friend] challenged me to find my Irish Roots and I discovered one that improved my teaching of the Colonial era. Back in the mid-1650's, when Oliver Cromwell had overthrown the monarchy and put the puritans in charge of England, many New Englanders returned home. The loss of these families prompted some Cromwellians to send a kidnap ship along the coastline of Ireland to break in to homes and gather sturdy youths to be involuntarily indentured in the Colonies. My genealogical research in Ipswich stops at Philip Welch who sued at age 18 to be released from his indentured servitude. It was denied because he had been sold to age 21. That is a tragic story and a classic genealogical "dead end" because he'd have known no English when kidnapped and would have lost his Gaelic here. His name would have been altered and he lives a life that is un-illuminated by any spectacular success. Still on most St. Patrick's Days I ponder the inequities of life and marvel at the Irish who soldier on smiling and drinking despite a history of more burdens than most cultures.

I just learned about Juneteenth. I can't say I care much for the name, but if there was ever an event in United States history that deserved a National holiday, the ending of slavery is it. Let's call it Emancipation Day, and give everyone a chance to be happy that slavery is behind us, and be introspective about the fact that our ancestors tolerated it so late into our history.

( obligatory provocative anti-bible comment )

While researching earlier Urban Nature Walks involving the Muddy River, I discovered that Olmsted (the 19th century landscape architect that transformed urban America) was given the task of dealing with Stony Brook, as well as the Muddy. Both are tributaries of the Charles, but while the Muddy is the centerpiece of a major park, the Riverway, that I live next to and visit every day, I realized that I knew nothing about Stony Brook. I knew it was the name of a train stop in Jamaica Plain, but the brook itself didn't even seem to appear on maps. Then we decided to do an Urban Nature Walk at the Stony Brook Reservation, the location of the headwaters of Stony Brook, a Metropolitan Reservation (as opposed to Municipal Park) that straddles the neighborhoods of Roslindale and Hyde Park in Boston. I did some research before our walk, and turned up some interesting history. ( Read more... )

My pictures of the Stony Brook Reservation can be seen here, while cottonmanifesto's pictures are here and here.