A few days ago the New York Times website had an interactive feature about the “East Bathtub,” a section of the World Trade Center site where construction is way behind schedule. Workers are on the job twenty hours a day trying to catch up. Each day’s delay costs the Port Authority $300,000.
The bathtub is an 80-foot-deep pit, the foundation for two new towers. On the screen, the image of the pit moves slowly, providing a 360° view of this eerie abyss, an ocean floor with backhoes bent over like abandoned sea creatures. Men stand in the pit as though to give scale.
Monuments must go up, it seems. They must aspire, literally breathe out and fill the sky. But there is something moving in the idea of digging down, creating a void – the inverse of the inevitably bombastic buildings to come. A hole cut deep into the strata of the city, lined with the remnants of oyster shells and ships’ hulls, the fossils of flora that grow no more.
Tradition
The turning point was the chocolate chip cookies: the year my mother did not give me a tin of her Tollhouse cookies as a Christmas present.
Tollhouse cookies were one of her four specialties, the others being two casseroles and a stew. Ever since I had moved way from home at nineteen, my mother had put together a tin of homemade cookies for me each year. I counted on them.
And this was before her stroke, so I did not know what to make of it that Christmas when she gave me a few oddments – her usual style of gift-giving, which was fine by me: random stationary supplies, a box of tea, maybe a nice dishtowel -- but no cookies. I considered if I had done something wrong, but certainly I had done nothing wrong in my mid-40s compared to what I might have done in my mid-20s. She just forgot, I thought. Or more likely was afraid of the oven, an old gas range with an uncertain pilot light.
But no mention of the omission either. My mother would have told me if she had not been able to bake cookies, and would have shown me the two big bags of Tollhouse chips she had bought and not been able to use. And the decorative tin.
I returned home to Baltimore and told my husband I was a little let down. He had counted on the cookies as well. But I realized it was a sign of the times, a small letting go of a small Christmas tradition my mother had created for me as an adult. Amazing to think now about how much more letting go there would be in the next few years.
Tollhouse cookies were one of her four specialties, the others being two casseroles and a stew. Ever since I had moved way from home at nineteen, my mother had put together a tin of homemade cookies for me each year. I counted on them.
And this was before her stroke, so I did not know what to make of it that Christmas when she gave me a few oddments – her usual style of gift-giving, which was fine by me: random stationary supplies, a box of tea, maybe a nice dishtowel -- but no cookies. I considered if I had done something wrong, but certainly I had done nothing wrong in my mid-40s compared to what I might have done in my mid-20s. She just forgot, I thought. Or more likely was afraid of the oven, an old gas range with an uncertain pilot light.
But no mention of the omission either. My mother would have told me if she had not been able to bake cookies, and would have shown me the two big bags of Tollhouse chips she had bought and not been able to use. And the decorative tin.
I returned home to Baltimore and told my husband I was a little let down. He had counted on the cookies as well. But I realized it was a sign of the times, a small letting go of a small Christmas tradition my mother had created for me as an adult. Amazing to think now about how much more letting go there would be in the next few years.
Missing Places
How long does history last?
The Huguenots of Hanover County were still giving their children French names well into the twentieth century. I saw some of their graves today, next to an old plantation house up on blocks, dying slowly, with broken windows.
Should we mourn the plantation house? So many went through horrors to keep it warm, its larder stocked, its wood and silver polished.
What do we lose when we lose an old house? A woman stands at a second floor doorway, waiting to step into a missing wing, waiting to find out.
The Huguenots of Hanover County were still giving their children French names well into the twentieth century. I saw some of their graves today, next to an old plantation house up on blocks, dying slowly, with broken windows.
Should we mourn the plantation house? So many went through horrors to keep it warm, its larder stocked, its wood and silver polished.
What do we lose when we lose an old house? A woman stands at a second floor doorway, waiting to step into a missing wing, waiting to find out.
Southern Morale Soared
I like to read historic road markers, or at least try to read them as I drive by. One that I have read countless times is VA-E2, Intermediate Defenses, at the corner of Chamberlayne and Laburnum, where the red light allows me to savor the text:
Here ran, east and west, the intermediate line of Richmond defenses during the Civil War. Near this spot on 1 March 1864 Union Brig. Gen. H. Judson Kilpatrick halted his raid that was intended to free Union prisoners and lower morale in the Confederate capital. A detachment led by Col. Ulric Dahlgren was defeated to the west of the city. On 2 March Dahlgren was killed; Southern morale soared.
Of course, it is the last, succinct phrase that is so compelling. Another favorite is the heading on the marker at Cedar Lane and Ashcake Road: Stuart Turns North. Both would be excellent titles for short story collections, I think. The roads are filled with markers, most of them about the Civil War, given how much action this part of the world saw in the 1860s.
Growing up in Manhattan, I got the usual bullet-point version of the war from the Northern perspective. Add to this Catholic school Manichaeism and you have a fairly straightforward story of good triumphing over evil. In the eighth grade I did a history report called “The Civil War in Song” and it was quite clever. The report was bound in burlap-covered cardboard and each section opened with a stanza from a different song of the era, ending up, I think, with the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
The South was a very different, kind of scary place to me. I did not really know anyone from below the Mason-Dixon line until grad school. My friend Gerald, from Winston-Salem, was Baptist to boot, and altogether a new breed for me in a city whose immigrants, when not Dominican, seemed to be mostly from Ohio.
But despite my utter ignorance of things Southern, I had always felt a direct connection to the Civil War. My great-grandfather fought in an upstate New York regiment and did time at Andersonville. Later he was part of a prisoner exchange and was transferred to a hospital in North Carolina before being sent home. We know this because we have a wonderful letter he wrote to the U.S. Pension Office in the 1880s asking where the hell his veteran's pension was. The letter is filled with details of his service: where he was inducted, his commanding officers, the names of comrades and battles, and his time as a prisoner and invalid. I do not know if he ever got his pension. I certainly hope so.
In my late thirties I started drifting south, first to Baltimore, then to the DC area, and now Richmond for the past six years. I have tried to educate myself, and road markers are just a small part of this. They cluster in some areas, two or three in a row, lending depth and meaning to the land. Blood was spilled here. Exhaustion, hunger, homesickness. Even victories – “Southern morale soared” – can be heartbreaking.
It is hard to scrape away almost forty years of prejudice and stereotype, but I feel I owe it to Richmond and to the South in general. Plus, battles took place on the ground I live on, the roads I drive over every day. It is a confusing, tragic history, one many people still debate. I am not about to mourn the Lost Cause or ignore the misery that sustained the South’s economy and way of life. Recent scholarship has shown how much the slave trade sustained New York’s economy as well. I just know that I am part of this history, and that I cannot live in a place without trying to understand its people and its past.
Here ran, east and west, the intermediate line of Richmond defenses during the Civil War. Near this spot on 1 March 1864 Union Brig. Gen. H. Judson Kilpatrick halted his raid that was intended to free Union prisoners and lower morale in the Confederate capital. A detachment led by Col. Ulric Dahlgren was defeated to the west of the city. On 2 March Dahlgren was killed; Southern morale soared.
Of course, it is the last, succinct phrase that is so compelling. Another favorite is the heading on the marker at Cedar Lane and Ashcake Road: Stuart Turns North. Both would be excellent titles for short story collections, I think. The roads are filled with markers, most of them about the Civil War, given how much action this part of the world saw in the 1860s.
Growing up in Manhattan, I got the usual bullet-point version of the war from the Northern perspective. Add to this Catholic school Manichaeism and you have a fairly straightforward story of good triumphing over evil. In the eighth grade I did a history report called “The Civil War in Song” and it was quite clever. The report was bound in burlap-covered cardboard and each section opened with a stanza from a different song of the era, ending up, I think, with the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
The South was a very different, kind of scary place to me. I did not really know anyone from below the Mason-Dixon line until grad school. My friend Gerald, from Winston-Salem, was Baptist to boot, and altogether a new breed for me in a city whose immigrants, when not Dominican, seemed to be mostly from Ohio.
But despite my utter ignorance of things Southern, I had always felt a direct connection to the Civil War. My great-grandfather fought in an upstate New York regiment and did time at Andersonville. Later he was part of a prisoner exchange and was transferred to a hospital in North Carolina before being sent home. We know this because we have a wonderful letter he wrote to the U.S. Pension Office in the 1880s asking where the hell his veteran's pension was. The letter is filled with details of his service: where he was inducted, his commanding officers, the names of comrades and battles, and his time as a prisoner and invalid. I do not know if he ever got his pension. I certainly hope so.
In my late thirties I started drifting south, first to Baltimore, then to the DC area, and now Richmond for the past six years. I have tried to educate myself, and road markers are just a small part of this. They cluster in some areas, two or three in a row, lending depth and meaning to the land. Blood was spilled here. Exhaustion, hunger, homesickness. Even victories – “Southern morale soared” – can be heartbreaking.
It is hard to scrape away almost forty years of prejudice and stereotype, but I feel I owe it to Richmond and to the South in general. Plus, battles took place on the ground I live on, the roads I drive over every day. It is a confusing, tragic history, one many people still debate. I am not about to mourn the Lost Cause or ignore the misery that sustained the South’s economy and way of life. Recent scholarship has shown how much the slave trade sustained New York’s economy as well. I just know that I am part of this history, and that I cannot live in a place without trying to understand its people and its past.
Frank
I buy my furniture at Diversity because their stuff comes with good ghosts, the kind of people with whom I feel some affinity.
Take the chair I bought a few weeks ago. An old office chair from the fifties, probably, not a boss’s chair but maybe something you’d have in the waiting area or perhaps around a conference table, one with enormous, multi-notched ashtrays. But it is handsome enough, with its fake burgundy leather and brass tacks. It’s not all that comfortable, but it was not meant to be, so I think it does its job.
And it came with Frank, an amiable guy with the usual worries – wife, kids, mortgage and so on. But he’s pretty upbeat – key to a salesman’s success – and he has a lot to be thankful for. The heart attack was just a blip on the screen and now he’s here with me, although sometimes he does wander off for a smoke.
Frank doesn’t notice the computer or the microwave. In fact, he couldn’t care less. He squirms sometimes; the meeting should have been over half an hour ago, but hey, it’s not like he has somewhere more important to be. It’s fine here.
Take the chair I bought a few weeks ago. An old office chair from the fifties, probably, not a boss’s chair but maybe something you’d have in the waiting area or perhaps around a conference table, one with enormous, multi-notched ashtrays. But it is handsome enough, with its fake burgundy leather and brass tacks. It’s not all that comfortable, but it was not meant to be, so I think it does its job.
And it came with Frank, an amiable guy with the usual worries – wife, kids, mortgage and so on. But he’s pretty upbeat – key to a salesman’s success – and he has a lot to be thankful for. The heart attack was just a blip on the screen and now he’s here with me, although sometimes he does wander off for a smoke.
Frank doesn’t notice the computer or the microwave. In fact, he couldn’t care less. He squirms sometimes; the meeting should have been over half an hour ago, but hey, it’s not like he has somewhere more important to be. It’s fine here.
Clippings
I lent an old book to a friend the other day and mentioned when I handed it to her that there was a newspaper clipping folded up in the back, an obituary for someone described in the book. I know it is not good to keep such things in books – they stain and erode the pages, put pressure on the binding, and eventually result in yellow newsprint confetti. But the obituary added another dimension to the story: vertical time – this person’s long life – at a right angle to the horizontal time – the here and now, circa 1922 – of the book’s subject.
The newspaper clipping used to be an important way of saving and sharing information, and I have not gotten out of the habit in the age of the internet. True, these days I do the “esheehan has sent you an article” routine much of the time, although I dislike the third party intervention and the barrel of ads and cookies such “clippings” deliver to my friends’ computers. And the emailed or linked article does allow the recipient to print clean copies or forward to others, or, more likely, store the email until a respectful period of time has passed and she can delete it, unread. I am okay with that. An emailed article is always a potential intrusion, possibly even critique.
But I come from a long line of newspaper clippers and I still like to send and get the real thing, sometimes cut into ziggurats of odd column lengths and origami-ed into an envelope. In the old days, if an article was too outrageously formatted, I would spend considerable time at the office copier trying to getting the whole thing down to one or two pages, the first a 94% reduction, the second maybe 86%. Of course, access to a copier used to be a major justification for working, aside from paying the rent and eating. I would use the copies for teaching, or burden friends and colleagues with them if I thought they were of interest. One of my supervisors actually noted in a letter of reference for me how she would miss the little bundles of articles I would leave in her office mailbox. Perhaps.
There are different kinds of clippings: the cut direct, the paste-up job, the Xerox special. And different sources: the handover, which includes mailed articles, the anonymous insert (especially rewarding while browsing in a used book store), the legacies found in family papers. My Irish-born grandmother cut from her upstate New York newspaper a photo of Irish independence being celebrated in 1949 in front of Dublin’s General Post Office, scene of bloody fighting during the 1916 Easter Uprising. My grandmother left Ireland as a teenager in the first years of the twentieth century and never returned. But clearly the founding of the Republic meant something to her. I hardly knew her, but I know this.
And then there is the closely related category of whole newspapers saved for their significance. I have been carrying a box of these with me for decades, building on my mother’s collection. JFK’s assassination, then MLK’s and RFK’s. (A sharp high school memory: seeing the New York Daily News’ front page, with the blurred image of Bobby’s head on the floor of the Ambassador Hotel, scuffed and torn on the platform of the 14th street subway station.) Nixon resigns. Ford to City: Drop Dead. The Statue of Liberty Centennial. Clinton’s first election, and then the Starr Report. And 9/11, 9/11, 9/11. How long will I save each year’s anniversary issue of the New York Times? I think of the Civil War veterans meeting a half century later at Gettysburg and imagine those who remember 9/11 someday being like them, a frail, dwindling brotherhood.
The whole newspaper, of course, creates the mise en scène -- movie ads and white sales at Gimbel’s, the racing results and op-eds by dead wise men. Many years ago my friend Steve ripped up generations of linoleum in his New York tenement kitchen and found a Pearl Harbor-era newspaper used as lining for the 1941 stratum. He gathered it up and went to the local coffee shop and read it at the counter over his eggs and bagel. No one commented, but then most of the habitués had been at that counter since the second FDR administration. I have a 1967 copy of the Village Voice that takes me back to the days of be-ins and head shops on Eighth Street. I am Curious (Yellow).
But the random clipping is a very intimate form of communication, especially when the message is unintentional. I have my father’s handwriting on things he saved. He died more than thirty years ago but his notations, his obsessions really, show how his mind worked and where his interests overlapped with mine. They extend the reach into the past: an article from the 1960s about events that happened in the 1930s stuck in a book about the 1890s, and all connected.
People worry if newspapers will exist in years to come. If they disappear, clippings will go with them. These days we have the “most popular” list of emailed and searched articles on newspaper websites, a form of literary ranking unknown fifteen years ago but vulnerable to the whims of hard drives and servers. I’d rather cut the article out, save it, or send it along: I saw this and thought of you.
The newspaper clipping used to be an important way of saving and sharing information, and I have not gotten out of the habit in the age of the internet. True, these days I do the “esheehan has sent you an article” routine much of the time, although I dislike the third party intervention and the barrel of ads and cookies such “clippings” deliver to my friends’ computers. And the emailed or linked article does allow the recipient to print clean copies or forward to others, or, more likely, store the email until a respectful period of time has passed and she can delete it, unread. I am okay with that. An emailed article is always a potential intrusion, possibly even critique.
But I come from a long line of newspaper clippers and I still like to send and get the real thing, sometimes cut into ziggurats of odd column lengths and origami-ed into an envelope. In the old days, if an article was too outrageously formatted, I would spend considerable time at the office copier trying to getting the whole thing down to one or two pages, the first a 94% reduction, the second maybe 86%. Of course, access to a copier used to be a major justification for working, aside from paying the rent and eating. I would use the copies for teaching, or burden friends and colleagues with them if I thought they were of interest. One of my supervisors actually noted in a letter of reference for me how she would miss the little bundles of articles I would leave in her office mailbox. Perhaps.
There are different kinds of clippings: the cut direct, the paste-up job, the Xerox special. And different sources: the handover, which includes mailed articles, the anonymous insert (especially rewarding while browsing in a used book store), the legacies found in family papers. My Irish-born grandmother cut from her upstate New York newspaper a photo of Irish independence being celebrated in 1949 in front of Dublin’s General Post Office, scene of bloody fighting during the 1916 Easter Uprising. My grandmother left Ireland as a teenager in the first years of the twentieth century and never returned. But clearly the founding of the Republic meant something to her. I hardly knew her, but I know this.
And then there is the closely related category of whole newspapers saved for their significance. I have been carrying a box of these with me for decades, building on my mother’s collection. JFK’s assassination, then MLK’s and RFK’s. (A sharp high school memory: seeing the New York Daily News’ front page, with the blurred image of Bobby’s head on the floor of the Ambassador Hotel, scuffed and torn on the platform of the 14th street subway station.) Nixon resigns. Ford to City: Drop Dead. The Statue of Liberty Centennial. Clinton’s first election, and then the Starr Report. And 9/11, 9/11, 9/11. How long will I save each year’s anniversary issue of the New York Times? I think of the Civil War veterans meeting a half century later at Gettysburg and imagine those who remember 9/11 someday being like them, a frail, dwindling brotherhood.
The whole newspaper, of course, creates the mise en scène -- movie ads and white sales at Gimbel’s, the racing results and op-eds by dead wise men. Many years ago my friend Steve ripped up generations of linoleum in his New York tenement kitchen and found a Pearl Harbor-era newspaper used as lining for the 1941 stratum. He gathered it up and went to the local coffee shop and read it at the counter over his eggs and bagel. No one commented, but then most of the habitués had been at that counter since the second FDR administration. I have a 1967 copy of the Village Voice that takes me back to the days of be-ins and head shops on Eighth Street. I am Curious (Yellow).
But the random clipping is a very intimate form of communication, especially when the message is unintentional. I have my father’s handwriting on things he saved. He died more than thirty years ago but his notations, his obsessions really, show how his mind worked and where his interests overlapped with mine. They extend the reach into the past: an article from the 1960s about events that happened in the 1930s stuck in a book about the 1890s, and all connected.
People worry if newspapers will exist in years to come. If they disappear, clippings will go with them. These days we have the “most popular” list of emailed and searched articles on newspaper websites, a form of literary ranking unknown fifteen years ago but vulnerable to the whims of hard drives and servers. I’d rather cut the article out, save it, or send it along: I saw this and thought of you.
Disposable
I do not have a camera at the moment – I will buy one – but I need to take pictures right now as the old buildings, woods and waterways in my area disappear. If I wait until I can afford a decent camera, there may be nothing left to photograph but strip malls and townhouse developments.
When I was driving home late last Monday the old tin barn on my corner was still there. By two o’clock the next day it was gone. The trees and brush around it had been leveled, cut into pieces and piled in heaps for a truck to cart away.
So I went and got a disposable camera to take pictures of disposable history. First I took pictures of the black family cemetery on the hill overlooking the Chickahominy, just off Route 1. Then the ravine going down to the river. Then the stripped hilltop where the barn used to be. Old Telegraph Road. The creek behind where I live. These may all be gone soon.
When I was driving home late last Monday the old tin barn on my corner was still there. By two o’clock the next day it was gone. The trees and brush around it had been leveled, cut into pieces and piled in heaps for a truck to cart away.
So I went and got a disposable camera to take pictures of disposable history. First I took pictures of the black family cemetery on the hill overlooking the Chickahominy, just off Route 1. Then the ravine going down to the river. Then the stripped hilltop where the barn used to be. Old Telegraph Road. The creek behind where I live. These may all be gone soon.
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