The Black Folk of Buckingham

I recently read Kathryn Stockett’s extraordinary book, The Help, set in Jackson, Mississippi, in the early days of the civil rights upheavals. The primary protagonists are some black domestics and their white employers. As the story unfolded I kept flashing back to the distant untroubled years of my childhood in Buckingham, Pennsylvania, just 50 easy miles from the Mason-Dixon Line. Any resemblance to Jackson was thin at best. We did not have lynchings and everybody used the same toilets and buses as far as I know. However, there was a black community, although I don’t recall seeing many of them except for a very small number, some of whom played starring roles in my early maintenance and instruction.

Howard Blackstone, for example, who worked across the road for my grandfather on a small, diverse farm. His primary skill was blacksmithing and he made a wide variety of things like horse shoes and hinges and cart wheels and such. But it was a small farm with limited needs for blacksmith products, so Howard did other things as well.

One late fall day in, perhaps, 1938 or so my father, a young man at the time, and Howard were sent to Brown Brothers auction to look for something or other for the farm. It was the sort of auction where just about anything might turn up – shovels and tractors and poultry and tedders and yokes and plows and watering troughs, a wide variety of stuff that some farmer somewhere in the county discovered that they didn’t need anymore. They wandered back and forth along row after row of rusty implements and anxious goats until they got right to the back where the small items were displayed, or dumped, depending on your aesthetic sense, and there they found a great chain, a large, robust chain suitable for pulling stumps and freeing mired tractors. Their bid was successful and so by and by they returned to the distant reaches of the auction yard to collect their prize. My father took one end of it and Howard took the other and they started winding their way back to the parking lot. It was not long before my father noticed that their little parade was attracting attention. Gaping stares, in fact. When he turned around to look he discovered that Howard had wrapped his end of the chain around his neck and was staggering tragically along, arms raised to heaven.

Some years later when I was very small we had a sleigh, and a horse to go with it and enough snow in the winter that Howard could take us kiddies out for a toot around the neighborhood. There were bells attached to some part of the harness and we jangled along just like something out of a Bing Crosby movie. I don't remember where we went but photographic evidence still exists that we went somewhere. Mostly I remember just starting out from the barn leaving brown streaks in the snow until the rust was cleaned off the runners.

It was about this time that Nancy came to us. She lived in the room over the kitchen, a large spacious affair that she referred to as her house, as in “Don't you come into my house before you wash your hands!” She previously worked for the neighbors across the street who always resentfully accused us of poaching her away from them, but I once got a look at the broomcloset she lived in there and can't imagine that it was a difficult negociation.

She was a Jehovah's Witness, a strike against her which I think caused some parental discomfort, but she was made to understand that the children were to be washed and fed, not converted. And so it was that our religious instruction or lack of it was left up to my parents and the Buckingham Friends School. However, she did take us with her when she went around peddling Watchtowers and I have always wondered what her customers thought when this young black woman turned up at their doors with two little white tykes in tow.

I think she was secretly appalled by the bad habits my parents lavishly indulged in like drinking and smoking, but she had the good sense never to say anything about them. The only hint came one morning after the annual traditional cocktail party the parents always held for the neighborhood during which all their respectable friends, doctors and bankers and stockbrokers and such came and drank themselves blind and then wobbled and swerved on home in the great swaying behemoths issued by Detroit in those days. The residue after these extravaganzas was an unimaginable number of bottles. My father was struggling out to the end of the driveway with great clattering sacks of these one day when Nancy appeared on some errand.

My father boyishly observed “If anybody were to look into our trash, they'd think we were a bunch of lushes.”

“They got no business looking in your trash!” replied Nancy indignantly.

At one point she fell afoul of the IRS. It couldn't have been a catastrophe on an absolute scale since she didn't have the assets for it. But it was a catastrophe in her eyes and she was nearly undone when she finally asked my father to help with it. It took a while for him to understand what the problem was partly because of her non-linear and barely comprehensible account of the matter and partly because all IRS personnel involved were referred to as “the man at the post office,” which apparently stood in for any functionary she had been in touch with. The matter, whatever it was, was finally resolved after a few more conversations with the Man at the Post Office, and ever after that I think she considered my father to fall somewhere between saint and genius and slayer of dragons.

Nancy was a city girl. She lived in Philadelphia when she wasn't with us. She also had a son. That was a long story I didn't hear until half a century had passed. She had relatives in Philadelphia who looked after this child while Nancy was with us, during the week. Then she would return to the city on the weekends. In the summer she would take along armloads of vegetables which my father grew in abundance, including a row of okra grown especially for her since none of the rest of us would touch it. In fact the only cruel thing she did to us during our long association was to make us eat that stuff, and, to her credit, she only did it once.

We also had animals, some sheep, a couple of steers, a couple of horses. These were, for the most part well-behaved creatures. They stayed within the boundaries alloted to them except on those rare occasions when a fencepost fell down or a gate was left open on which occasions they would taste the heady brew of liberty and other peoples flower beds and steps would have to be taken to get them back. In a clear demonstration of the existence of cosmic pranks, these daring escapes most often took place 2 or 3 days after my parents left on a 3 week trip to the back side of the moon, leaving Nancy in charge of our small world with the promise of help from my grandfather, if necessary and available. It was a monument to her courage that she was prepared to face down these large creatures that terrified her with the implacable dignity of a Masai queen, armed only with her faithful broom, her weapon of choice in the face of all perils.

I went to visit her once in South Carolina where she was living in retirement near her brother. Her house was small, cluttered and cleaned to within an inch of its life. There were framed photographs here and there of various events and family members, and I was surprised to discover that during the time she spent with us she was drop dead gorgeous. Why hadn't I noticed this at the time?

It was during that visit that she told me about her failed marriage. She was married at the age of 19 or 20 soon after completing her nursing training. Her husband was in some sort of business that took him and his new bride to Toronto. They got a small house in the sort of place where the back fence is about 10 feet from the kitchen window and she was left in it to wash the dishes and dust the furniture while he went off into the Great World to ply his trade. She hated it. It was cold, grey, and she didn't know anybody. Soon she was pregnant. Then one gloomy day she was standing at the sink looking out the window at the neighbor's trash cans over the back fence and realized that now she was Absolutely Stuck. She would be bound to this dreadful place by her husband and soon her child and then no doubt other children and she would never see her childhood friends again, never feel the intense summer sun of South Carolina on the back of her neck, never experience the joy of her church back in Philadelphia. And so it was that one day she packed up her clothes and returned to Philadelphia where she was taken in by her many friends and relatives. How she came to work out Beyond the 'Burbs I never did learn.

In any case, Nancy and Howard and a small number of others, casually met, represented all black people to me. So when the race riots and civil rights upheavals hit the headlines I was mystified. I could not imagine why anybody would want to exclude these people from the country's mainstream. At the same time, I have come to understand that I actually know nothing about the reality of these people I thought I was so close to – where did they go to school, what were their prospects, how did they come to live the lives they did. Were they happy?

Privacy

We start life wet, noisy, and completely free of any claim or expectation of privacy. No part of our bodies or lives is excluded from invasion by friends and strangers alike, and at first we don't much mind. It's not long, however, before we object to being groped by strangers and are more selective about who gets to see us with our pants down. Before long, perhaps about the time we first learn the potential of speech, we start having secrets. It is not a big step between secrets and privacy, the only difference being one of degree. A secret is just a single thing you don't want to reveal. Privacy is a great tangled complex of secrets that are of great importance to their owner. In fact it could be argued that those things we choose to keep private more accurately reflect our character than those we choose to reveal.

We each of us develop our own private kingdoms in a series of concentric barriers around parts of us that we do not want scrutinized. The outermost barriers are easily crossed by friends and spouses and even trusted acquaintances, allowing access to non-critical areas that we might not want published in the daily paper, but no great harm done if the postman discovers, say, that we vacuum less than we should. The closer to the core we get, the more closely guarded we become, and in many cases the protected areas depend on who we are talking to.

We would have little hesitation discussing our stock portfolios and the appraised value of Grandma’s diamond brooch with the family lawyer, but we might not want to enlarge upon such topics with our daughter’s boyfriend with the nose ring.

We freely describe our rashes and boils and disgusting discharges with the family physician, but might hold back in this area with the telephone repairman.

We may luridly detail the latest developments of our torrid dalliances to our best friend, but wish to maintain a discreet silence with the vicar.

In addition to these specific revelations that we control on a person to person basis we are constantly patrolling our perimeters to protect ourselves from unauthorized invasion by strangers. Common courtesy is our main fence. In a uniform society in which all members understand the signals, saying “Butt out!” with a look, a tone of voice, a bland comment inoffensive to all is a common practice. We back off, change course, no one is offended or invaded. Apart from a few people who want to offend us or don't care if they do, the system works quite well.

Where the problem arises is when we are confronted by somebody who is using another set of rules. Either they do not understand our signals, or they actively seek to breach our defenses for some purpose. We often react strongly to these attempted invasions. First we try formality. Next comes frigid silence. And finally, when all else fails, we fall back on rudeness. In some cases, such as persistent telephone solicitors, rudeness is the only defense possible. In others, such as foreigners using different signals, we would like to be kind, but we feel under attack, and may overreact to perceived aggression.

One of the worst mistakes we make in our relationships with others is believing that people we are close to should have no secrets from us, that we should be open books to our parents and spouses and friends. Or in other words we should not mind a bit upon finding Mom going through our drawers and throwing stuff out or demanding an explanation for THIS! The fact that we have been out on our own for several decades and have the white hair to prove it, have been leading independent lives and are doing fine doesn't neutralize the trespass, or detoxify the resentment. We need some space that is ours alone or we risk losing ourselves.

In addition, our own notion of what areas must be maintained inviolable may differ greatly from that of others. Is religious belief an acceptable area to open to the public? Or money? Or our psychotic relatives? In some cases yes, in others no.

So much of our behavior is governed by our need to maintain our privacy, it is small wonder that so much heat is generated over political movements whose aim is to invade areas cherished by some as intensely private; by others as matters to be dragged into public view in front of a studio audience.

If media reports are to be believed, upcoming generations will entertain no expectations of privacy. They will accept as normal the impertinent questions put by online merchants and special interest websites and will obediently supply their preferences in reading, viewing and listening, clothing, medications, sports teams, and holiday destinations. They will cheerfully welcome, rather than resentfully tolerate, the inescapable intrusion of advertising in all aspects of their lives. They will not mind that Apple Inc., the FBI, or Big Brother listens to their phone calls or traces their movements. Perhaps it is the vanguard of this new demographic that appears on Dr. Phil.

In any case it seems ironic that a people that has always prided itself on its rock-ribbed individualism would so easily abandon this myth in favor of bobble-head compliance with the demands of private industry and shadowy government interests.

Strangers in the Day

I believe this to be true: there is a magic in strangers. These mysterious beings have far more potential than the flesh-and-blood people we actually know. That dark-haired man at the airport picking through the NASCAR monthlies at the news vendor could be the next in line for the Swedish throne. Who knows? Or he could be the money man for Al Quaeda on his way to New York to assemble the funding needed for the definitive conquest of western Europe. Or maybe a high school social studies teacher from St. Louis come east for a quick visit with his mother who has been hounding him since last August to come see her. I know which identity I would prefer and which one is most likely but, most importantly, not which one is true.

People we don't know before we encounter them as part of a known group don't really qualify as strangers because right off the bat we know something about them. We may only know that they are members of the Baptist Curling and Garden Club, or friends with our old classmate, Adelaide, or take courses in renaissance poetry, but this is enough to assure us that this new untested person is probably not an ax murderer or a Columbian drug lord, since such people would not be present in these groups. A true card-carrying stranger is one about whom we know absolutely nothing beyond what our eyes tell us.

Any one of the plodding throng in the airport concourse could be a saint or a genius, a monster or a villain, while people who are actually known to us, with few exceptions, are merely humdrum. They may be comforting or abrasive, considerate or clever or dull as ditch water, they may complain or burp or slurp their soup, they may laugh at the wrong things and tell us we are wonderful, but for all their faults and virtues they lack the immense possibility of strangers.

I was jostling down a wide crowded sidewalk in New York once, scanning the oncoming throng for any signs of psycopaths, cutpurses, or gang rapists, which are known to prevail in such places, when I spotted a woman through the mobs. She had unremarkable clothes and no discernible make-up and was the most beautiful human being I had ever seen. She was tall and graceful and had a soft brown face that could launch a thousand ships. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I wanted to stop her and stare, but she saw me gawking, lowered her eyes and was gone. Now, in reality, she might well have had the voice of Marje Simpson, robbed poor boxes, and beat her children, but she will live forever in my mind as a perfect being, a goddess.

Then there was the young man at the Calgary airport. He seemed to be part of a group of university students headed for the slopes. The girls giggled and pushed to impress the boys with their light-hearted wit, while the boys romped and pushed and pretended they didn’t notice the girls. Meanwhile, my young man just stood waiting for the plane, neither a part of nor apart from the others. He possessed a massive dignity and self-possession that most politicians can only dream of. I imagine him transfixing crowds with speeches of great conviction and wisdom, stepping up to the podium to accept his Nobel prize, moving confidently through the board rooms of the nation solving intractable problems and settling labor disputes. Actually he probably sells pre-owned cars during the day and relaxes in his undershirt with a brew in the evening, but I'll never know.

Once I was travelling by train through Europe. The trip included a stopover somewhere and my understanding was that I would have to move from the car I was on to another car on the same train when we stopped since the car I was in was going somewhere else. Either that or I would have to change trains entirely. I wasn't exactly sure.

The carriage was one of those quaint arrangements favored by foreigners where you got to sit in a compartment with up to 7 other people with their bundles and boxes threatening to spring from the overhead rack into the startled faces of the other occupants. We were just about to pull out, and we were all casting optimistic glances at one another, thinking that we might get away with fully occupied rather than jam packed when the door slid open and a large businessman stepped in and stared at a too-small small gap among the passengers. Hoping that he would go somewhere else, the people next to this gap stood their ground until he headed right for them, kicking aside baskets and umbrellas on the floor. Then he rearranged the overhead rack to make room for his suitcase and sat.

Now we were moving, everybody had made themselves as comfortable as possible in the suddenly diminished space. After a minute or so the Interloper burrowed unto his jacket and came up with a big black cigar about the size, shape, and aroma of a dog turd, which he lit, with much puffing and cloud formation. In our tiny crowded compartment with all the windows closed. Happily I was sitting right next to one of the windows, and opened it as far as it would go, while some of the others glared daggers at the completely oblivious monster of depravity. The unruffled Interloper announced that he was sensitive to draughts and demanded that it be closed, ignoring the daggers, and so we rattled our way through rolling fields, picturesque woodlands and distant mountains, trying not to inhale.

At last we approached our destination. People started gathering up their coats and packages. I groped out my ticket to see if I could make sense of the instructions and laid plans to find an anglophone somewhere to tell me where the next train, should it not be this one, left from.

As I was gathering up my luggage the Interloper said something in German, of which I understand 3 words on a good day. I made a Gallic sort of “Dunno, sorry” gesture and edged toward the door. Then he snatched my ticket and was out the door and onto the platform. I picked up the pace and set off after him wondering if I should scream for help, hit him with my purse, grab him by the collar and what? It soon became clear that he was headed for a ticket window with a huge line. He stormed up to the front of the line, shoving aside all the people who had been standing there since lunch time and shoved my ticket through the bars barking commands or noisy explanations or something. It is really hard to find a suitable reaction when you have not the least faint clue what is happening so I just stood among the hostile customers clutching my luggage with the alert intelligent expression of a squirrel wrapped up in an anaconda.

Soon the fracas at the ticket window ended and my guy came out with a different ticket. He had discovered that as long as he had my ticket I would follow him anywhere like an imprinted duckling, so off we went at a great rate of knots past ticket windows, food kiosks, many platforms, finally turning down one of them until there was a conductor. Now he said a lot of things in German, he pointed to me, to the ticket, to the train, and then he was gone. The conductor helped me get my luggage onto the train, found me a seat, and in about 10 seconds, this new train had left the station. This final leg of my trip was long enough to reflect upon this bizarre interlude. I realized at last that this appalling loud, aggressive man with his disgusting cigar and complete disregard for his fellow passengers must have got a glimpse of my ticket with its final destination and, being familiar with this route, had known that there was a tight connection and for no reason beyond pure untainted kindness had done what would have taken me the rest of the week to do to get me on the right train headed in the right direction with seconds to spare.

What it comes down to is that a stranger is a sort of larval form, since it seems true that the transition from unknown to known necessarily involves some sort of transformation. My savior on the train morphed from mystery to brute in a matter of seconds. But then underwent a backflip and there he was applying for sainthood within a very short time. Most people make the transition invisibly. They start out essentially invisible, and slowly assume shape and name and then there they are, unique and startling, and we wonder why we can’t remember our first meeting.

My husband was the flip side of this. I noticed him immediately, tall, dark and handsome. This aura clung to him right up until we were married. This somehow triggered the transformation, which continued through a couple of years of squabbling and whining, and now, years later, all I can remember is the intestinal gas.

Sea Cruise

I love ships. I love the sea. I love the throaty roar of marine diesels. I therefore thought I had died and gone to heaven when I managed to talk my way on board the HMCS Cormorant, a Canadian Navy sub tender bound for Lancaster Sound for various reasons, including sending its little sub down to the seabed off the Labrador coast to look for places where icebergs had hit the bottom and carved trenches in the sediment. I attended meetings to discuss the work. With earnest expression I spoke of dropstones and relict scours. In private I skipped and whistled sea chanteys.

Finally departure was imminent. I had packed and repacked a dozen times. Although I had never been troubled by seasickness, everybody involved in the trip warned me that it was lunacy not to start the trip with a Gravol, just to be sure. So I did. And I soon discovered that the primary effect of Gravol is drowsiness. A deep and insurmountable drowsiness. I first noticed this about the time we dragged our last box down into the hold. I flopped down onto it and was all set set for a little nap when a crewman bustled in and told me I had to move since he had to tie everything down. I shuffled back up the ladder to the deck and spotted a big soft coil of rope in which I made a nest and was just about sound asleep again when another crewman chased me off it, offering the weak excuse that he needed it. A lifeboat caught my eye and I was headed for it when yet another busybody threw a canvas over it and tied it down. I finally found a nook right up in the bow next to the anchor chain and went right to sleep for two hours, completely missing our departure from St John's harbor. But I wasn't seasick.

The HMCS Cormorant, it turned out, started life as an Italian fishing trawler. The Canadian government got a deal on it and made it over into a sub tender, which means that they added a large, heavy enclosure to keep the sub in and finally the large, heavy sub itself, which effectively moved the center of gravity a good deal higher than it once was. The result of all this was a very slow-moving little ship that wallowed like nobody's business in almost no sea at all.

There was to be another ship in our little convoy which was the HMCS Protecteur. This was a much larger, more serious navy ship, with guns and secret handshakes and no women. As we steamed out of port, the HMCS Protecteur was down in Halifax having a last minute repair. Nobody was concerned by our head start since we were such a pitiful scow and they were such a big sleek ship of the line and would catch up with us in a couple of days as soon as she was clear of Halifax.

So we settled happily into our routine of dining in the officers' mess, partying with the chiefs and petty officers, and chatting with the folks on watch.

We had put Newfoundland behind us and were on our way up the Labrador coast when word came that the mighty Protecteur was still stalled in Halifax. Our new instruction was to slow down until further notice.

Meanwhile, a storm had begun to form and seemed to be heading our way. The swells had already caught up with us and we wallowed constantly. Some of the crew started skipping meals and the first pea-green faces started to appear. After a couple of days the storm had developed as a tight little well with howling winds and green water over the bow. After the deafening crash of a thousand pieces of crockery at lunch one day we sustained life with sandwiches on paper plates.

Meanwhile, back in Halifax, the majestic Protecteur had developed another problem which might be fixed tomorrow if they could get the part. I was up on the bridge when the news came and so discovered that the Canadian navy was given to exchanging bible verses in a conversational sort of way. My father had told me that this was common during WWII when he was plying the North Atlantic, and that one of their favorites was Ecclesiastes 9:4 which explains “A living dog is better than a dead lion,” which I thought was entirely suitable for our situation. I think they might have used it if the Protecteur's captain hadn't outranked ours.

At length the storm passed. We took the sub out for a romp at some unscheduled location and started getting hot food again. We received orders not to cross 60ºN. We did another dive and another, and before you knew it, a month had passed. The Protecteur had still not left Halifax, and ice was beginning to form in Lancaster Sound. So we were called back. The trip was cancelled.

After another small storm we arrived in the Straits of Belle Isle, and steamed south between Newfoundland and Labrador. We saw a little iceberg. There was a chill in the air. The crew oscillated between ill-tempered crabbiness at being stuck out at sea for so long, and giggling euphoria at being so close to port.

We entered the long fjord leading to the Corner Brook harbor early one morning. It was sunny – a beautiful day. I went out on deck to admire the unfamiliar lumps on the horizon. Then I smelled the pines. Until that moment I had not understood how much I had missed the smells of land. As we steamed slowly down the fjord we passed hay-scented islands. And finally the homey smell of a fish plant.

I loved that cruise. Even the storm. I would do it again in a flash. But one of the most euphoric moments of those six weeks was standing on the dock at Corner Brook with the gulls squawking overhead and the querulous growl of rusty pick-ups in the distance, still swaying gently with the rhythm of the ship.

The Joy of Lists

Some of the most satisfying moments in life come upon completing something. Anything. The contents of my attic bear mute testimony of my repeated and rarely successful attempts to achieve this happy state. There are a dozen or so half knitted sweaters, boxes of dismantled small appliances, various projects involving textiles, and many many garments with missing buttons or split seams. There are photograph albums, partially filled, and heaps of unsorted photographs waiting to be sifted into them. There are half-done paintings, and apple crates filled with tax records in no particular order either by year, type, or importance. My desk looks like an entropy wave broke on it; there are addresses on postit notes, the backs of order forms, envelopes, and quite a few in my address book, which I can sometimes find.

One day I will resolve some of these things, and I will feel uplifted. But not today.

Instead I will make a list. There is a technique to this. First you need to understand that every list should have a purpose. A grocery list, for example, should display items that you can easily obtain on your next trip to the shops. Such a list should never contain significant items such as “refrigerator” or “sports car.” Major items each need a list of their own noting important features such as “manual transmission” or “upholstery that will not show dog hair.” Also you should never include service needs like “repave driveway” or “repair furnace” since in all likelihood these tasks will involve days of telephone communication, negociation, and scheduling, and other items on such a list stand in peril of being overlooked.

It is OK to make a list of tasks such as “Muck out the attic” which you know you will never do. The purpose of this sort of list is to demonstrate how hard-pressed you are so that you have a ready excuse for not doing something else. For example, your aunt unexpectedly phones wanting you to canvas your neighborhood for contributions to her church jumble sale. You can quickly glance at your impossible list and explain that Calvin will be coming soon (never mind it is next June) and you need to clear out the attic and repaint the woodwork before then so that he can set up his electric train.

This sort of defensive list should not be confused with the purely recreational list which is typically undertaken for its own sake. Birdwatchers, for example, have been known to keep a list of every bird they have ever set eyes on. This list serves no useful purpose, is not suitable for publication, has not the slightest value to posterity, but is of intense and abiding interest to the birdwatcher. I have not heard of people who are drawn to fish or mushrooms or dogs or orchids keeping such lists but perhaps they do.

One year I kept a list of every piece of mail I received from the most exalted personal manuscripts to the lowliest grocery flyer. There were 1940 items, the overwhelming majority being junk that had to be handed straight off to the recycle. This year I am keeping a list of phone calls, an increasing number of which appear to be mendicants of one sort or another. I couldn't say for sure because I don't answer these calls any more than I read the rubbish that comes in the mail. Again, nothing useful is likely to emerge from this, but it amuses me.

But I digress.

The most important list is the list of things that you know you can realistically achieve in a day. This list should be tailored to your mental state. If you are feeling happy and optimistic, then go ahead and include something from the attic, or some overstuffed closet. Make it a short list with items like “Clean garage,” but make sure to include something you can actually finish, like “Empty the trash.”

On the other hand, if you are feeling gloomy and depressed, what you need is a really long list of achievable things like “Hang up pajamas” and “Put away blender.” You need at least a dozen such things; the more the merrier. Take the list with you as you sigh and shuffle through the day, and cross off each thing as you do it. You should feel perkier by lunchtime. If you find yourself doing something that is not on the list, finish it up and then put it on the list and cross it out. By the end of the day you should have a long list of things that you actually did, that are complete. Now you can sink down in front of the evening news in a warm glow of satisfaction, and start on the attic tomorrow.

An Appreciation of Shoeboxes

In an average year I figure I probably get about a hundred boxes that originally contained something I bought.

One spring I got a bathtub. It was a very large bathtub and came in an even larger box. It was a fine, sturdy box that I couldn’t bring myself to recycle, so I spent an afternoon reorganizing the garage, installed it upright against the wall, and filled it with rakes. The following spring I mulched the garden with it.

After that I got a new tele, whose box was in the livingroom for months because the cats liked it for a while. They also briefly like the boxes that sweaters come in, and garden gadgets, and cooking doodads. But beyond cat entertainment, they are no earthly use at all because they open on the short end and are the wrong size for anything except what came in them. Some dreary day I will round them all up and get rid of them.

I also have a vast accumulation of tiny boxes that once contained small articles of jewelry. I don’t know where they came from. I think I have more jewelry boxes than I do jewelry. It’s a mystery. Sometimes other things come in really nice, stout or attractive boxes that I keep because I figure one day I will need just such a box. Stanley Tools has a whole series of such boxes. They slowly fill with felt pens and lost buttons, pennies and paper clips.

I have a great fondness for fountain pens. I get them from mail order catalogs and various websites based in distant places and they arrive in packaging designed to resist nuclear attack. The innermost container is typically a stout, hinged box of wood, plastic, or really nice cardboard with a fountain-pen-shaped indent in which rests the actual goods, couched in voluptuous satin as if it were the finger bone of God himself. The sad truth about these attractive, well-made boxes, apart from the fact that they are too nice to throw out and therefore accumulate beyond all reason, is that they are absolutely useless beyond their original purpose of containing a fountain pen.

The most extreme example of this was a fountain pen that arrived in a cardboard box the size of an overnight bag. Inside this was a snug flannel bag in which was nestled a leatherette box that looked like an attaché case. This contained a flocked plastic liner with a form-fitting insert in which was embedded an attractive wooden box with a hinged lid. Inside this tasteful reliquary lay, in a green velvet nest, accompanied by a brass medallion, a fountain pen. I bought this more than ten years ago. The reason I can discuss it in such minute detail is that I still have every bit of it except the outermost cardboard box which long since went to mulch the garden.

In stark contrast to this flamboyant excess are all the cheesy little boxes made in China with the packing material leaking out past the staples since they can be disposed of without a moment’s pang along with the cereal boxes, milk boxes, envelope boxes, tea boxes, and plant food boxes. I almost prefer these because of their blessedly short half-life.

And then there are liquor boxes. It's true I seldom actually acquire these with their original contents, but I do seek them out when I am in the process of relocating. They are fine sturdy affairs, essential for the moving and storage of books and other small things. A good liquor box is a perfect vessel for, say, a set of dishes, artfully packed with intervening dishtowels. Some are also sufficiently seamless so that a bathroom drawer or junk drawer can be tipped right in without fear of leaving behind a trail of bobby pins or machine screws like Hansel and Gretel after a trip to Walmart. Their fatal flaw, though, is that there are no two liquor boxes that are exactly the same height or width, so that stacking is problematical. This fault eases their trip to the recycle, but some still remain, freighted with small goods that never did get unpacked from two moves ago. They are sometimes interesting as time capsules but for the most part represent a cubic foot of space that would be better applied to some current purpose.

I sometimes long for a boxless world. But then I buy a pair of shoes and suddenly realize that were it not for shoe boxes, all would be lost, both literally and figuratively. I cherish shoe boxes. I repair shoe boxes. Without shoe boxes, how would I ever find my Christmas tree ornaments, rubber stamps, camera parts, leftover seed packets, ribbons and snaps, 5-year-old tax returns, pressed leaves, computer cables and printer cartridges, glue and touch-up paint, photographs and souvenirs, sandpaper and paint brushes. They are the perfect size for almost all objects in common use. They stack well and fit nicely on standard shelves. It is clear that some thought has gone into their design. Some come with a finger hole in the end so they can be easily winkled out of a tight formation. Many have a convenient hinged lid.

And soon I will have to find a suitable pair of sensible shoes to wear to my 45^th college reunion. My plan is to make the salesman show me every model they have in the place and then pick the ones in the best box.

Headlines, January 11, 2011

I am bemused. For two days the news media have spoken of nothing but the noisy murder of all those people in Arizona on Saturday.  We can all agree it was a Bad Thing.  My heart goes out to poor Gabrielle Gifford whose life is not likely to return to normal soon or ever.  A shame Christina Green, the little 9/11 child, was snuffed.  She should have had a 12th birthday.  And the only good thing about Judge Roll’s death is that it may lead to the execution of the skin-head who killed them all.
However, to pretend it is surprising that this sort of senseless mayhem is unusual in the country that brought you Columbine and the Beltway Snipers is disingenuous at best. And the sad truth is that this sort of thing goes on all the time.  In Chicago and New York and Los Angeles.  If we hear anything about these violent deaths it will be a 2-inch summary on an inside page.  After all these are brown people and they do this sort of thing all the time, but now we’re talking about white people in Tucson.
Apparently two days after the main event there were flags being flown at half mast all across the country, and President Obama said the nation is Grieving and Shocked. Why?  
Apparently 54 Gazans were killed or injured during the month of December last year.  No grief and shock for them?  But of course they were just foreigners, so it is understandable that Fox News would have limited interest in it.
However, each and every blessed day, 100 people across the country, this country, die in car crashes, 3 of them in Arizona.  The victims of this sort of violence were also expecting to continue their humdrum lives, much like Dorwin Stoddard who was killed protecting his wife. Do we just step over their mangled corpses without a moment’s grief and shock because their deaths are so routine?  Well, perhaps.  We cannot be expected to pay much mind to some news report that says, in effect, “100 more people crushed or maimed by their cars, same as yesterday.”  Not even a more exciting report like “Only 98 crushed or maimed, two less than yesterday. At this rate there will be no further traffic deaths in only 49 days!”
The luckless Gabe Zimmerman was tragically terminated at the age of 30, at the very beginning of what might have been a successful and distinguished career, leaving behind a brother and a grieving fiancée.  59 other people between the ages of 30 and 34 also died that day.  We know nothing about them, or about the other 60 who died Sunday while the news reports interviewed people who were in nearby shops or friends of the victims or local law enforcement folk who had lots of opinions.
There were something like 500 Americans killed in Afghanistan last year.  This number does not include those who were blinded or maimed or returned to their families back in the heartland to be warehoused like a side of beef for the rest of their lives.  This number also does not include the housewives and goatherds and school children who were sent off to their 72 virgins by the mighty American War Machine as suspected “insurgents.”
This is an ongoing process and it would do us no harm to know more about it, beyond the occasional local news coverage of the return of a flag-draped coffin, the tear-drenched family at the airport, the stern, yet concerned, colonel saluting in a manly fashion while more flags snap in the background and the voiceover solemnly enumerates the many virtues of the fallen hero who is invariably fun-loving, inspirational, generous and sorely missed by all who knew him.  Slimy, brutal weasels never return in flag-draped coffins. Perhaps that is what set off the Arizona thug – no heroic homecomings for him.  Ever.
Meanwhile, while we are saturated by detailed reports of everybody remotely associated with the Tucson murders, the dead, the injured, the bystanders, the shooter, the shooter’s parents, the shooter’s lawyer, the first responders, the people in the next street  who heard the shots, the dog walker who had been there just an hour before, people who would have been there only their car wouldn’t start, while all these people are being documented and served up on the national news, there are other things happening.
For example, there must be something worth reporting coming out of all the ice and snow down in the bible belt.  And there’s the Annual Detroit Auto Show in full swing which the newshounds should be able to wring a paragraph or two out of.  
And we need to remind ourselves that there is life beyond us as well.  I haven’t heard much about the estimable Mr Assange recently, news from the Ivory Coast is thin and repetitive, the fuss in Sudan might actually affect us since we are bound to want to invade one side or another. There are huge floods in Australia, cholera in Haiti, stealth jets on the mat in China, Iran arresting vultures for spying, and yet what we hear about in vast and unnecessary detail is the late Dorothy Morris (her friends called her Dot), a retired secretary, and Phyllis Schneck who was a quilter and gave lemon curd to her friends.
I do not deny that these unfortunate people have been wronged.  I do not even begrudge them a spot on the evening news. What I do object to is the overwhelming attention paid to this lamentable event at the cost of other, larger concerns in our increasingly contentious world.