When I moved into this version of Bedlam Farm, I made myself a promise.
I would buy and plant a tree every year that I am here so that Maria and the people who follow me to live on this farm will have shade and a ring of green around the old farmhouse.
I didn’t grasp the imminent onrush of global warming, it’s made me feel even stronger about trees, the people who come after me will need them more than ever. If you drive around the farms year, you will usually see giant maple and oak trees towering in a beautiful ring around the old farmhouses.
The first farmers were very conscious of their moral obligations to improve the land, nurture the soil and plant trees for their successors. It is a matter of honor for me to do that, and Maria has fully embraced the idea.
I am older than she is, and hope she will get to see the trees we have planted grow and widen. We planted three maple trees on the front lawn when we moved in, and they are thriving, shielding us for privacy, to soften the road of the trucks in summer and providing shade.
The future residents will appreciate them, as we appreciate the thoughtfulness of those who came before us.
Beyond the maples, we have planted eight trees along the South side of the house, front and in the side, mostly big and beautiful white birches. Today, we went to the Mettowee Nursery and we got two new trees, brown Paper Burch’s on sale for $160 each.
These were the last two small trees at the nursery, we got there just in time. Maria is out digging the holes right now, I can’t really do that kind of work any longer, especially when I pull a muscle in back, as I recently did.
So I swallow my manly pride and take pleasure in doing the watering. i put down the mulch and shovel the soil back off of the grass. And I water.
So two new trees to Bedlam Farm, I have kept my promise for another year. I will do so until I can’t do it anymore. I love thinking of people sitting in the shade, of having this beautiful old farmhouse enveloped in a circle of green, just like the old farmers wanted.
And I love keeping my promise, to the farmhouse, to Mother Earth. Planting a tree is always a sacred thing.
For me, you don’t have to die heroically or face bullets to be a hero. Some of the bravest heroes I know are the people who take risks and make leaps of faith to do what they love and do it well.
I’ve seen Nancy with her hot dog stand in Manchester, Vt. for years now, but it was only in the past several years that Maria and I ever stopped at her stand – she calls it “Nan-Z’s” and got to know here and love her quite exceptional turkey hot dogs.
I had heard a lot about her: her hot dogs are especially good, she has great mustards, her stand is spotless, she is lovely and remembers many of the people who have faithfully come to eat at her stand in all kinds of weather.
Nancy is coy about where she gets the hot dogs or just how she cooks them. She does say fresh rolls are important. She is a fresh face and admirable soul in a world increasingly occupied by unhappy and angry people who rarely get to do what they love. There are few callings in our time, only jobs that last as long as a company’s profits rise.
It is no longer in fashion to love your work, the goal is to keep from getting thrown into the street for as long as possible and work hard to build up hopelessly small IRA and pension funds that will not last very long once you need them.
I am lucky, writing is my calling and i have clung to it for dear. life. I have no pension plan or IRA, this is a trade I knowingly made for love and fulfillment.
A literary writer friend has obvious distaste for my blog, he wrinkles his nose asked me once what Mark Twain or Herman Melville or Emily Dickinson might think of it. I said Mark Twain would love having a blog and I didn’t really care what Herman Melville or Emily Dickinson might think of bedlamfarm.com.
I get to do what I love, every day.
So does Nancy. For decades, she has been selling hot dogs in that parking lot near the popular outlet stores and hotels and inns of Manchester, once a quiet Vermont town, now a very busy commercial and skiing and tourist hub.
She gets to work for herself, live her life, ski all winter.
Nancy has been there through the good times and bad times, she cares deeply about the quality of her hot dogs – she has beef hot dogs also – and even got a picnic table installed on the edge of the parking lots.
She is, in fact, incredibly nice and raises hot dog making to the highest possible culinary standards. I’d rather eat there than most of the restaurants i know. Sometimes, we just make the 35 minute drive to Manchester to have lunch in Nancy’s parking lot. If you come early, you can eat at the picnic table.
Nancy is out there all day in the heat and cold from April to Christmas. This year the temperature was below zero and her mustard froze, it was the first Christmas in 30 years that she wasn’t selling her hot dogs. In the winter, she mostly skis, there are mountain ski resorts all around Manchester.
I love living in the country for many reasons, one is that it is still possible for individuals like Nancy to live their lives and be fulfilled and not tremble all day in fear of being fired or laid off. In the country, it can still be done. I am doing it, and so is Maria.
I count Nancy as being among the blessed.
People have the right to choose their own lives, but in my mind, to work only for money is to be a slave.
The critics are calling BlacKKKlansman Spike Lee’s greatest movie. I haven’t seen all of his films so I can’t say if that is true, but I can say it is by far the best of his movies that I have seen, and one of the funniest, most wrenching and also, surprisingly, one of the most entertaining of his films.
It is a powerful and painfully real movie. In a sense, it sets out to tell the story of race in America through the surprising and sometimes hilarious misadventures of the first African-American member of the Colorado Springs Police Department, who successfully manages to infiltrate a local Ku Klux Klan chapter with the help of a white and Jewish fellow officer.
Lee remembers to be funny even as he takes aim at America’s festering sore, race.
The movie could have been written by a thriller novelist, Undercover Detective Stalworth not only penetrates the Klan, he also, astonishingly, manages to become telephone buddies with David Duke, the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and a supporter of President Trump, whose words he often quotes approvingly, and to devastating effect in the film.
If you love movies, you will realize quickly that Lee’s film is almost a direct counterpoint to the infamous W. D. Griffith’s Birth Of A Nation, an American epic that portrayed blacks as crude and ignorant assaulters of white women and cast the KKK in so heroic a light that it triggered a revival of the Klan, which had gone dormant after the Civil War.
By contemporary standards, the movie would be considered brazenly racist, but President Wilson had it shown at the White House, and praised it as an important piece of American history. He was right, but maybe not for the right reasons.
If I had seen the movie three years ago, before November of 2016, I would have considered it alarmist and knee jerk. Today, I consider it restrained, especially for Lee. Like many of us, Lee portrays quotes and scenes that were unthinkable just a few years ago, it seems like another age.
Most of BlackKKKlansman is really a mainstream Hollywood cop movie, interspersed with sometimes chilling reminders that racism in high places is all too real and all too obvious.
The contemporary truth of the movie, and its real point, hits home from time to time like a small series of bombs exploding in the midst of a good and suspenseful yarn, a kind of tense and thrilling French Connection with heavy racial overtones.
In movie terms, it is really an amazing achievement, well worth seeing for a lot of reasons.
In the midst of all the intrigue and tension, there is even a car chase or two and love interest with a radical African-American revolutionary (Patrice Dumas, played by Laura Harrier). She wants to lead a revolution, he has wanted all of his life to be a police officer.
Officer Ron Stallworth (Denzel Washington’s son John David Washington), who got inside the Klan using a fellow officer, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), did a compelling and heartfelt job portraying the idealistic but quiet Stallworth, who first job was filing reports in the police department basement.
Over the course of his investigation, Stallworth begins to wake up and comes to conscious, but never goes as far as the revolutionaries and radicals he has started to befriend.
But it was interesting for me to see how careful Lee was not to alienate or exclude whites from the movies. Several of the police officers were honest and supportive of his hero, and the Denzel character was almost apolitical, he never uttered a radical or incendiary thought, even in the face of great provocation.
Like Griffiths, Lee uses all kinds of cinematic fantasy tricks to go back in time, flashbacks, old films, music, dancing, news clips, to keep a good story moving.
Scene by scene, he reminds us more and more convincingly that racism is not only deeply entrenched in our country, and now seems to reside quite openly in the highest levels of our government, especially the White House.
It was easy to watch, it was painful to watch.
It is truly horrific to watch Lee put these pieces to together, one at a time, as our worst fears and suspicions suddenly become so clear and incontrovertible. If you are awake and paying attention, you sort of know what is happening, but to see it presented so skillfully and in such a thoughtful way is still both shocking and sickening.
More and more, it seems that white nationalism – invoked skillfully and credibly in the movie through the spoken words of David Duke and other white nationalists – is not a sideshow of the circus that is the White House, but perhaps the point of it and of the November election.
I didn’t believe it or want to believe it – or couldn’t believe it – for the longest time, but I am coming to believe it now.
There is a raging debate about racism in America, one of those interminable left-right things, the movie may clear up the confusion in many minds.
In a way, the film left me heartsick.
I saw film scenes interwoven into the movie that made me credulous to accept the fact that this is America, where hatred of black people is woven into the very fabric and history of the country, something we have never seemed to want to acknowledge or come to terms with.
The only truly violent part of the film comes when Harry Belafonte (playing activist Jerome Turner) makes a riveting appearance to narrate the true story of a horrific lynching of a mentally retarded black teenager accused of lusting after a white woman. He tells the story to young African-American students, it is a wonder that there wasn’t a revolution.
I wouldn’t rule it out.
It seems that is our national horror story, race, is an awful ghost that keeps rising again and again while most people deny it, just like they deny what is happening to the earth. America has always seen what it wants to see and needs to see.
And why should race go away when it is being directly and indirectly invoked every day by people who claim to be our leaders?
At the end of the movie, Lee shows us harrowing images from Charlottesville, Va., and the Presidents stunningly moral-blind response to it. This is, of course, the point of the film, which starts out looking like a potential franchise, and ends up kicking us in the butt with truth.
In our polarized time, some people might wish to dismiss this movie – and the people who love it – as just another rant from the left side of things. I am not an ideologue in any way, I think this is a great movie and an important one.
The best way I can describe it as funny, righteously furious and very, very powerful.
Maria and I felt it so strongly that we couldn’t speak for nearly an hour as we drove home to the farm together.
We probably have not been so silent for that long after a movie in our decade of movie-going together. It took Spike Lee to do it.
The best scenes in our county fair, the Washington County Fair, one of the last great agricultural fairs in the country, is watching the families sitting with their animals, their cows and sheep and horses and goats. This big mule got my attention, his family took up camp next to him at the fair, they slept in a trailer just outside the tent.
Once again, I’m proud of my daughter Emm and the way she puts her life together and takes on complex tasks. Robin, my granddaughter, will be two tomorrow, and Sandy, their new dog, has been with the family just about a week.
Emma took a risk in getting this dog, she has an active and demanding toddler, a busy husband, a small apartment in downtown Brooklyn, where nothing about having a dog is simple or easy.
Emma rarely needs help from me these days, but we did strategize back and forth for several days until Emma got Sandy housebroken, calmed down and at ease. Sandy is probably part cur, she comes from Eastern Kentucky where the curs – an actual breed – live.
Emma found her online, she adopted her from a rescue group that brings dogs up from the South.
She bays at pigeons and gets excited outside, where she can smell a lot of things. Inside, she is a sweet and calm. She loves to sit on Robin’s bed she loves to curl up with Emma day and night while she works.
Sandy is a good choice for this family. Although the curs can get over-hyped outside – they are hunting dogs – they are great family dogs inside, they love children and they love attention. Emma loves it when Sandy curls up next to her on the couch.
Emma has worked hard to housebreak the dog, get Robin and Sandy used to each, and has begun training her not to jump on people outside. I think it’s the outside part that will be a challenge for Emma, Sandy already bays at pigeons.
But overall, a great match, love and growing ease all around. I’m proud of Emma, she has always loved dogs, and this was a good risk to take. It turned out beautifully, because she did the work and is continuing to do the work.
This photo makes me want to get down there. Emma wants me to Facetime Robin on her birthday, i’m balking at that, I really dislike Facetime, you can’t talk with somebody who doesn’t talk. All you can do is make stupid sounds and feel ridiculous.
Emma says Robin wants to see me, so I’ll try it again.
I’m very happy for Emma, and for Robin, Emma got the dog she wants and she did it in the right way.
