I love riding trains. On my business trips between Washington and New York, the train is always my preferred mode of transportation. So I’m glad to see the pundits like Neal Peirce commenting on the train ride that Obama and Biden are taking to Washington for the Inauguration as a positive metaphor for passenger rail.
Rail enthusiasts, for decades spurned by presidents of both parties, were elated by the news that Barack Obama will travel to Washington for his inauguration by train from Philadelphia.
“The symbolism is magnificent and the message very positive for all of us who for so many years have labored to create a more balanced American transportation system,” said James RePass, president-founder of the National Corridors Initiative that’s pressed since 1989 for upgraded rail passenger service in America.
Rail service is wonderful. Compared to air travel, getting on a train is about a simple as stepping in your car. On a train you can plug in a laptop and work uninterrupted and with sufficient space. From the first second to the last you can wander the aisles, stretch, or spend the entire trip in the cafe car. If you want to be quiet you go to the quiet car. You can look out the window at the right time and you’re likely to see the sunrise or sunset over a river or bay. And different trains have different personalities. The Acela is the business persons’ train. Men and women in suits, lots of corporate conversation, and fast, with only a little bit of difference in time door-to-door when compared with the airline shuttles. The Metroliner, on the other hand, is slower, sleepier, and more democratic. I still remember a ride earlier this year when I watched four older African American women, decked out in their Sunday finest including their big hats, having a delightful ride to Philadelphia. The way they talked and showed affection for one another reminded me of my Grandmother and an earlier era.
Passenger service in this country is in poor shape, however, due to a half-century of disinvestment and outright hostility on the part of policy makers. I still remember a train ride to Chicago in the 1980s that forced us to endure the summer heat for over 24 hours without air conditioning. It was hell. But the return ride, when a local historian joined the train in West Virginia and narrated a fascinating trip through the wild and beautiful New River Valley, was magical and heavenly.
Today’s airline travel is antiseptic at best and de-humanizing at worst. I can think of one, maybe two, great memories on a plane. But my first long train trip included a stunning sunset on Lake Ponchartrain, and I have had dozens of wonderful experiences in the 30 years since then. I hope we are beginning to see a renaissance in train travel in the U.S. It is about time we became more civilized.
Merry Christmas from More to Come… to all our regular readers and to those who find us by accident on that great information highway. We’re with family this year, which is always a bonus since we don’ t have immediate family in the Washington area. The presents are out, the calls from all parts of the country have already started, and we’re working on a great Christmas morning breakfast.
As a Christmas gift, here’s a video of Canadian singer-songwriter Allison Crowe singing one of our favorite seasonal hymns, In the Bleak Midwinter. Enjoy, and best wishes for the holiday season.
In an earlier post I got it half right. Despite a good effort by the Nationals and their owners the Lerners, the big free agent catch Mark Teixeira got away…but to the Evil Empire (a.k.a. New York Yankees) instead of the Boston Red Sox. With that signing, the Yankees now have the four highest paid players IN BASEBALL HISTORY on their team at one time. What recession? Jeez…
But I’m going to take the positive view about this from the Nats perspective. At least they finally decided to play in the big leagues of free agency, and they went after the right player this time as well. I think in my heart of hearts I knew the Nats were on the margins in the Teixeira chase even with their strong offers. But they can’t stop here. A career 48-59 pitcher with a 5.05 ERA for the Orioles can’t be the big news out of the Hot Stove League for our Nationals. Fans deserve more than a Triple-A team playing in a major league ballpark. That’s my Christmas wish (at least as far as baseball is concerned).
Time passes too quickly. Sixteen years ago our twins were born and life in our family changed forever. I have been enriched by their beauty, inquisitiveness, talent, laughter, tears, art, openness, and love. Having just spent yesterday afternoon with the two of them, I was reminded of why the last 16 years have been such a joy. I posted three of my favorite pictures from when they were young.
But the day was also a reminder of why we strive to live in the moment. Long-time friends spent the weekend with us. We shared stories, jokes, and laughter and made new memories. We talked about the upcoming birth of their first grandchild. But as they were leaving, they received news of the death of a dear friend. At about the same time, an email from work told me that a colleague’s sister had taken a turn for the worse and was very ill. We also had a lovely visit with a classmate of Andrew and Claire’s who stopped by with her Mom to surprise the twins with 16th birthday presents. It was a joy to see them, but we learned that their family was suffering from the loss of a job in this economy. Joy, sorrow, birth, death, perseverance, pain: all are a part of life. Working to see the good can be difficult.
Remember to live.
More to come…
DJB
P.S. – A true post script. After writing this, I attended the Forum at the National Cathedral this morning, where actor Martin Rayner (currently starring as Ebeneezer Scrooge in Ford Theatre’s production of A Christmas Carol) and John Glavin (a playwright and professor of English at Georgetown University) were speaking on the topic of Exploring Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. To the question of what Dickens’ play had to tell us in 2008, Glavin offered that what Scrooge discovered was that we had to live in the past, present, AND future. And he is, of course, right. Living in the present moment doesn’t mean that the past doesn’t have resonance and that the future doesn’t matter. Too often today we act as if we are all that matters. But living correctly in the present recognizes that we have a three-dimensional life.
Strings, strings, and more strings were the order of the evening as the Institute of Musical Tradition closed out its 2008 Fall Season with a Scandinavian Christmas concert tonight in Rockville.
Before a full house of Swedes and Norwegians (or so it seemed), Andrea Hoag, Loretta Kelley, and Charlie Pilzer were joined by Bruce Sager for a night of polskas, waltzes, walking tunes, and other music from the north. The evening opened with triple fiddles backed by Pilzer’s steady bass, and throughout the night the four musicians played wonderful music as soloists, duets, trios, and a quartet.
The dance polskas (not to be confused with polkas) were great fun, but I especially enjoyed the walking tunes such as Solskenslaten (The Sunshine Tune) and The Bell Tune, where the bells on the reins of the bride’s horse were tuned with the fiddle to ring in harmony as the fiddler led a traditional wedding procession.
Loretta Kelly (left in the photo above) played two different hardingfeles (or Hardanger fiddles) with their sympathetic vibrating strings, while an energetic Bruce Sager joined in on the Swedish nyckelharpa (or keyed fiddle). All in all it was a different take on holiday music (No O Christmas Tree here), and it made for an enjoyable evening of music.
It is 30 degrees outside, we’re approaching winter solstice, so naturally a young man’s thoughts turn to…baseball!
Yesterday at work I used the term Hot Stove League in a memo to some colleagues, referring to rumors about projects that were heating up. A friend who loves baseball said she wasn’t familiar with the term, so as is usual I sent her the link from Wikipedia. According to that source of all knowledge:
The Hot Stove League is a baseball-related term, referring to the off-season. Therefore, it is not actually a “league”, but the term instead calls up images of baseball fans, anxious for the start of the new season, gathering around a hot stove during the cold winter months discussing their favorite baseball teams. The term has also come to refer to the wave of off-season player transactions (trades, re-signings, free agency, etc.) that occur between seasons, especially during the winter meetings. Since most free agent signings and trades occur during the off-season, this time of significant player transactions (including rumors and speculation about possible trades), is often referred to as the “Hot Stove League” or sometimes more simply “Hot Stove”. Essentially, teams continue competing, except it is the team owners and general managers who are doing the playing, with the score being in terms of human resource losses and gains.
So why am I writing about the Hot Stove League? It could be from the depression of the Yankees announcing their bank-breaking deals this week to C.C. Sabathia and A.J. Burnett (what is it with all the initials?) while the home-standing Washington Nationals were making marginal signings at best. The Nats – to their credit – did make a serious play for home-town player Mark Teixeira who would be a big fish if they could land him. However, I suspect all they’ve done is forced the Boston Red Sox to pay more money in the end. I saw Teixeira play this summer when he was with the Braves, and he’s the real deal. I just wish the Nationals would spend a little more of the Lerner’s money to land several good players and make the team competitive. But until that happens, I’ll just focus on passing along baseball trivia to friends and maybe pop Bull Durham– my vote for best baseball movie ever – into the DVD player.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation is working with the Foundation for Historical Louisiana and other partners to try and stop the demolition of significant portions of the historic Mid-City neighborhood in New Orleans. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and Louisiana State University recently announced the selection of the Mid-City neighborhood for the site of their new hospitals. As the National Trust website PreservationNation.org states:
The new hospitals would needlessly destroy the historic neighborhood around Charity Hospital where residents have been rebuilding and restoring their community since Hurricane Katrina. We believe this decision was a serious error and urge LSU and the VA to explore the alternative sites that would restore needed health care facilities faster and at less cost, while preserving much more of the historic Mid-City neighborhood.
The video below is just one of several prepared by the Foundation for Historical Louisiana where the affected residents talk about the decision to demolish their neighborhood. Click on the link above to see more videos and learn what you can do to try and reverse this decision.
Mother was born on December 9, 1930. Today would have been her 78th birthday, had cancer not claimed her on New Year’s Day 1998. For the past ten years there’s seldom a day that passes without something happening that reminds me of her. She was a remarkable woman with a large circle of friends and an even larger capacity for love and service.
After I graduated from college and left home, Mother and I maintained a weekly correspondence for many years. She was a “newsy” letter writer, with information about the family mixed in with items from town, updates on old friends, tidbits about both our careers, and extensive sports news. (Mother was my loyal co-spectator for games on television.)
Several years after she died, I published a collection of her letters from 1980 – 1997 entitled Rich in Love. Over the course of those 17 years she wrote about love, death, babies, pets, advice, and family. Her letters included a four-page typewritten description of our wedding she prepared for family members who couldn’t attend. She wrote one of the most wonderful tributes I’ve ever read to the men in her life for one Father’s Day. She suffered (in the 1980s) and exulted (in the 1990s) with her Atlanta Braves. Rich in Love was my way of ensuring that my children, who were five when she died, would have some way of really knowing and understanding their Grandmother.
Mother had a sense of humor. She could write that my brother called from California and “As soon as he said ‘hello’ there was an earthquake.” Like me she struggled with spelling in these pre-computer days and would complain that, “Even with clean keys the typewriter can’t spell.” When bragging on her first grandchild, she noted that, “Tom and I received our first grandparents card from a grandchild. Ashli really prints her name well to be only two months old.” After returning from a baby shower, she wrote me that, “I’ll give you a bachelor shower and you can give me a menopause one!!! My things are wearing out and you’ve never had enough.” When writing of her own mother she said, “Mother and I have been working on the Weatherly and Roberts families (genealogy). I should have started it several years ago. She has the same person married to three different men in a ten minute interval.”
As the primary care-giver for her mother-in-law for a number of years, Mother worked long hours mixing work with personal responsibilities. She looked up one midnight to see the dog, her granddaughter, and her mother-in-law and wrote, “Tinker is asleep under the piano, Ashli is asleep in the baby bed and Grandmother is asleep in her bed. What I’m doing awake I don’t know.”
Mother was a librarian who worked during the week for the city/county system (for many years as the Children’s Librarian in our town) and then on weekends she served as the volunteer director for our rather extensive church library. She devoured books and passed along her fascination with reading to me and my brothers and sisters. Mother also had a beautiful soprano voice and shared her love of music with all her children. In her letters she writes about every genre imaginable — from attending a Lena Horne concert with my father (one of his all-time favorite singers), to singing opera and classical oratorios, to how much her father and father-in-law would have enjoyed the bluegrass I was playing with my brothers. She loved it all.
Early in 1996, only two months after she retired, Mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. After chemo and surgery the cancer went into remission but shortly thereafter a new problem developed when she began to have symptoms of inflammatory arthritis. Even after 17 doctors at Vanderbilt examined her they could not confirm a diagnosis. They finally said it was “like scleroderma” which was very painful. And then in October of 1997 the cancer returned. After talking with us, Mom decided not to undergo additional chemotherapy. She went into Hospice care in November, lived to see her 67th birthday, and then died peacefully on New Year’s Day 1998.
About a month before she died, the library staff from church brought her a video of Amahl and the Night Visitorsas a gift. Mom and I sang the leads in a production of this opera in 1966, and it has great meaning in our family. They also left her with a note which captures how so many people saw my mother.
“Dear Helen:
Your years of service to our library and our church will long be remembered. The many hours that you spent in creating, administering, and directing a first-class library program have set a standard of excellence for all church libraries. Your expertise in your field have been in demand not only in our church, but also in our association, state, and convention. We are so proud of you and all your accomplishments. Just think of the countless lives you have touched through your ministry.
To us you are Mother Teresa, Joan of Arc, and Wonder Woman. You’re like Coca-Cola (The Real Thing), GE (You Bring Good Things of Life), and Dr. Pepper (The Friendly Pepper Upper). You are the very heart of our staff.
On a personal level your life has been exemplified by the very ideals of the Christian faith….The comfort and assurance you have given us as we have faced grief and tragedy in our own lives have given us courage to bear our burdens. In difficult times you were always there with food, a smile, a hug, and kind words. You have always given of yourself so freely.
I remember stopping by the Anthony’s after Ed died. There you were mopping the floor. This reminded me of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. No job has ever been beneath you. You do what needs to be done.
I have been a member of this church for fifty-eight years. I was enrolled in the Cradle Roll when I was born, but I never felt I was a complete member until you were elected our first female deacon. Thanks for bravely stepping forward and blazing that trail.
We remember many happy times. What woman except Helen Brown who had spent months in chemotherapy would invite forty people to her home for Christmas dinner? What a great time we had….
We wish we could honor you with a dinner or banquet, but we cannot. So please accept our love and admiration for all that you are. Love, Patsy and Your Library Media Staff.”
So many who knew her loved my Mother. We all still miss her. But a good friend sent me a note that I often recall when thinking of Mom.
“They are not dead who live in lives they leave behind. In those whom they have blessed they live again.”
I wish I could say Happy Birthday to you Mom, but this will have to do.
I just learned that Greg Maddux – perhaps the smartest pitcher ever in Major League Baseball – has decided to retire at age 42. As a long-time Atlanta Braves fan, I followed his career closely. Those four Cy Young awards in a row? Amazing. Those 355 career wins (more than any living player)? Just as mind numbing in this age of the specialist. Finishing number 10 on the all-time strikeout list? Now that’s a stat that really does shock me, because I never think of Maddux as a strikeout pitcher. But I do think of him as just the smartest guy on the field at all times.
ESPN’s web site has a great column on Maddux written by Gene Wojciechowski. He includes a wonderful story about Maddux’s smarts:
In 1996, just before Maddux and the Atlanta Braves faced the New York Yankees in the World Series, pitching coach Leo Mazzone met with his starters and relievers and read them the detailed scouting reports. Maddux raised his hand after Mazzone read the report on Yankees slugger Bernie Williams.
“That report is not correct,” Maddux said. “I’ve been watching film of Williams for two weeks, and that report is not correct.”
“Did everybody hear that?” Mazzone said.
The Braves pitchers nodded.
“Well, then the hell with this report,” Mazzone said. “We go with what Mad Dog says.”
Williams hit .167 in the Series.
Thanks for the memories, Mad Dog, and for the great pitching. In this day of histrionics and grandstanders – even in baseball – we’ll miss that competitive yet cerebral approach you brought to the game. And yes, I agree with the fellow who commented on the ESPN column: any sportswriter who doesn’t put Maddux on the first ballot for the Hall of Fame should have their voting privileges revoked.
Playing music with friends over Thanksgiving has pushed me to reorder my schedule to find even more time to play. And – no surprise here – I’ve loved it. I’m reacquainting myself with some of the playing of Norman Blake (check out the Nashville Blues video below of Norman and the Rising Fawn String Ensemble) and other musicians I admire.
In the delightful book Practicing, author and musician Glenn Kurtz says,
For me, sitting down to play has very little to do with discipline. “It isn’t just education and discipline that makes one so devoted to work…it is simple joy. It is one’s natural sense of well-being, to which nothing else can compare.” Love of music brings me to the practice room.
I am finding that joy in playing again and it is a wonderful feeling.
So I’m off to play a bit now, and then tomorrow evening I’ll be at the Celtic Christmas concert of the Institute of Musical Traditions for some great acoustic guitar by Al Petteway and Robin Bullock. If you’re in the Washington, DC area stop by and support live music.
Time passes too quickly. Sixteen years ago our twins were born and life in our family changed forever. I have been enriched by their beauty, inquisitiveness, talent, laughter, tears, art, openness, and love. Having just spent yesterday afternoon with the two of them, I was reminded of why the last 16 years have been such a joy. I posted three of my favorite pictures from when they were young.
