Plaice Cove is the northernmost of the three Hampton beaches, and there was only one other car in the frozen parking lot today. When Mr. Boat (the yellow lab) and I threaded our way down to the beach, we looked north toward North Hampton and saw no human being, no driver belonging to that car. Apart from some sea gulls, there were no other living creatures visible on the beach. Even Mr. McKenzie, the harbor seal who perches on his boulder a hundred yards off shore, was nowhere to be seen.
Low tide is when most of the dogs and their owners come to the beach. There is room to run and more dry surfaces. But today, no other dogs, no dog people.
It is true it was 17 degrees with a 20 knot wind, but it was one of the most stunning days of the year to be on the beach. There are 1440 minutes in each day and only 365 days in a year and while those may sound like big numbers, they are finite numbers and nobody knows how many they have left on this planet. How can you miss an opportunity like this, if you live anywhere near this beach?
The beach is never the same, day to day. Some days, it is covered with seaweed two feet deep; some days there are boulders and flotsam. Today, it was carpeted from surf to seawall with smooth rocks, the size of AA eggs, which crunched pleasantly underfoot.
The wind blew snow vapor off the boulders, white mists rising like ghosts from the big rocks which form the sea wall below the cottages perched above the beach. And the winter light made everything sparkle. Octagenarians who have their cataracts removed and replaced with new lenses say all the colors look bright, once the yellowed lenses, like dim windows, have been replaced. They say everything looks the way it did when they were children: bright and sharp. The winter light has the same effect on the rocks and the snow and the houses at the beach.
We crossed the border into the North Hampton side of the beach. Ordinarily, we do not cross this line, because the citizens of North Hampton, being what they are, post policemen to write tickets to Hampton dog walkers who allow their dogs off leash, legal in Plaice Cove, but not in North Hampton. Today, with nobody around, we decided to chance the citation and go forth boldly. The beach changed to smooth sand, sans pebbles and rocks, spread out down to the water's edge. Along the North Hampton beach are cabanas painted bright blue, red and yellow. In the winter light, they looked almost neon.
Mr. Boat chased his bouncing orange ball into the water without hesitation, and returned it for his treat, back and forth, all the way back to the entrance to the Plaice Cove parking lot.
Walking in that direction, the wind blows stiff in your face, but it is pleasant, makes you feel alive and tingly. The only sounds along the way are the wind, the pounding surf and the occasional clang of the lanyard on a flag pole, banging in the wind. No flags up poles today; no signs of life in any of the cottages looming above the beach.
Not a soul on the beach.
How strange: the denizens of Hampton should have flocked to the beach today. How lucky they are to live so near. There can be no place on Earth any more beautiful today.
Through the windows, against the white of the snow, you could see the trees bending in the wind last night. This morning, the branches of the evergreens were not sagging under the weight of accumulated snow because the wind had swept the snow clear. It's the light, fluffy snow of a cold storm.
Ms. Maud was as cross as an older sister watching her little brother toddling toward the busy street--she, correctly as always, inveighed heavily against trying to shovel this stuff. Already, only hours into the storm, there is no question about shoveling the driveway. Ms. Maud was right: No way. There will be no way to snow blow it, for that matter. My neighbor has a truck with a plow and he can be relied upon to take pity. We'll buy him a dinner at the Library (Portsmouth) at the end of the season, and he'll eat his steak happily and he'll say, as he always does, "Happy doing business with you. Here's to snow next winter." New Hampshire folkways.
I did go out to rake the roof (sorry, Maud, but less likely to be fatal than shoveling). Tugboat was eager to get out into it and he did his dolphin thing through the snow, disappearing beneath the white crests, leaping out again. He had to figure out where and how to poop, which took a while, but he managed. Then he was done and demanded to be taken in.
I walked down the street and enjoyed the sound of the storm. All you can hear is the wind. No other sounds. After the storm, if you walk in the woods behind my house, you will hear very little. That's one of the best things about snow--the silence. It's why I hate snowmobiles. If they were as silent as dogsleds, I'd be all for them, but they roar. The silence of snow is worth a lot. By the time I reached the cul de sac, children's voices. They were trying to sled. Sent me back to childhood.
Mephistopheles tells Dr. Faustus the saddest thing is remembering happier times. I don't agree. The sadness derives from the feeling you will never see happier times, your arc is downward, all your best sins are behind you. But hearing those tinkling voices in the snow brought to mind images of friends from snows past.
This is a genuine blizzard. I did not have to call in to work to say I couldn't make it in. They wouldn't allow me on Rte 95 into Massachusetts today, unless I was in an ambulance. No ambiguities today.
My son, in New York, will have trouble getting from his apartment on the Upper West Side, across the Park to Mt. Sinai Hospital. He is supposed to try to get in to catch the hospital shuttle to Elmhurst, the city hospital where Mt. Sinai residents get a view of how the other 90% live, die and get ill. He assured his mother he won't do anything stupid, but we know him.
In fact, his mother behaved no better when she was caught in the blizzard of 1978. We were living in sin in a farmhouse in southern Rhode Island, on a pond, on a potato farm, half a mile from the Amtrak station at Kingston. When that blizzard hit, it paralyzed the state. Not even the trains could make it through.
After two days of reading by the fire, and after many phone calls from the nurses in the ICU at Roger Williams Hospital in Providence, she decided she would do a Dr. Zhivago and try to get 45 miles north to the city. The nurses were running out of tampons, toothpaste, all the vital supplies, and not even the pharmacies could open. The hospital pharmacy was not for the nurses and didn't have that a lot of that stuff anyway. Keeping a garrulous person in a farm house when her nurse friends, fun (and likely a few interns) beckoned, was not going to happen: She pulled on her boots and I walked her to the station through the drifts, and the train eventually groaned in, looking like it had only barely escaped the Bolsheviks, and off she went to the party at the hospital.
Back home at the farm, the snow piled up. I had my books, my typewriter and, occasionally, a working television--reception was iffy--and my record collection. Played a lot of Bob Dylan, Joe Cocker and watched the snow change colors with the rise and setting of the sun. It was solitude. It would not last forever. The power went out briefly, but the house stayed warm. It was a good time, overall.
Now I have a generator if the power goes out. And a gas fireplace, which will someday blow the house up. I have my roof rake, and I'm playing my current favorite Dylan album (Blood on the Tracks) on my i pod as I pull the snow off the roof.
Overall, I cannot say, looking back at the blizzard of '78, that it was any better than this blizzard of 2015.
Every blizzard has its charms.
I am now beginning my seventh year in New Hampshire. My parents hauled me up to this strange and wonderful land when I was nine. My family rented a cabin on Lake Winnipesaukie . It was August and sweltering in Washington, D.C., but it was eighty degrees and dry in New Hampshire and it got so cool at night, you needed a sweatshirt. It was paradise. I never wanted to go home, and certainly never back South. My parents laughed and said, "You'd never last a single winter up here."
The year before, Peyton Place had been published and my parents asked some locals, who had the cabin next to ours, what they thought of it. They said they thought there was a lot of truth to it, to the depiction of small town New Hampshire, with all the repressed secrets of desire and resentment. I had not read the book, but this was my first introduction into the idea of a different culture, with unspoken rules. I concluded adults kept secrets and these people up in New Hampshire lived by these rules, broke these rules, kept secrets, and my parents understood all this.
Stray comments, like, "Oh, taciturn New Englanders," floated by occasionally, as when the man brought us the rowboat, after my father asked where he could rent one. No commitment had been made, nothing said, the man simply showed up with a rowboat. So, I learned, these people were not like people down home.
When I finally got the chance to live my dream, and moved up here, I arrived with all the excitement of an anthropologist come to live among an exotic tribe, to learn their ways. Margaret Mead among the Samoans, Colin Turnbull among the Forest People. Here I was among these Northerners, who were more reserved, revealed less and needed to be studied and explored to be understood.
It has finally snowed, the first real snow of the season, with more to come this week. I am the only person on my street of ten houses who does not own a snow blower. It takes me 45 minutes to clear my driveway with my shovel. This is a cause of great consternation among my neighbors, all of whom are New Englanders, most from New Hampshire, and every last one owns a snow blower and it is a source of great pain and wonder to them to see me shoveling snow by hand.
I have violated some local more, some folkway. (I also mow my lawn without a ride on mower, but that's another story.) I have to get up early to shovel my driveway, but I'm usually awake at 5 AM, and only one other neighbor gets up that early, so I can usually get the driveway done without upsetting the whole block. A retired man, two doors down, comes up with his snow blower at 7 AM and does my whole driveway again, just to drive home the point that you do not clear your driveway properly without a snow blower and no man is a man who does not own a snow blower. The guy who plows the street usually blocks me in around 6:45, so the snow blower is actually useful.
These Granite Staters do not understand the joy I cannot contain whenever it snows. In Maryland, snow was an occasional gift from God: You got the day off from school and spent all day with your friends sledding and drinking hot chocolate and running in and out of neighbors' houses. My mother, who taught high school, was the happiest woman in the neighborhood on snow days and she spent all morning on the phone with her school teacher friends, exulting about the free day off. These were the same teachers I occasionally encountered in our living room, drinking martinis, laughing raucously and making the typical New York City bar sound like the tea room at a convent. On snow days, I could hear them on the other end of the line yowling with delight.
But these Granite Staters do not look skyward with the same hope and anticipation. Snow is just snow. You deal with snow. You may embrace it, but you do not endow it with special significance, like, it's a gift from a loving God who wants you to be happy occasionally.
In many ways, these villagers seem like the people I grew up with, but they seemed puzzled when I described the importance of prestige in my own home land--brand named clothes, colleges, vacation homes in Vail, country clubs, titles of various jobs in the government--none of that seemed to mean much to them, and ultimately, I decided none of that should mean much.
One woman I worked with refused to listen to NPR because it had so many stories about Africa and Europe, places she had never been and would never go, so why should she care? She had never flown on an airplane. But most of the natives here have traveled just as extensively as the folks back home and clearly got just as much out of it. They just did not try to parlay the experience into something to brag about.
In fact, natives here do very little bragging. Where I grew up, parents bragged so relentlessly about their children, about their athletic victories, SAT scores, college acceptances, you sometimes wondered if they were talking about children or prize horses.
Not in New Hampshire. There is little chest thumping. One mother apologized about mentioning her daughter had her picture in the paper, playing volleyball. In Washington, D.C.,that mother would have emailed it to all her friends and to any college her kid was applying to. And it wasn't like the mother was claiming the kid was the best volleyball player on the planet and would get into Harvard because of it. She apologized for mentioning it. I went home and looked it up, and it was very clear why the editor had chosen that particular photo--the kid is gorgeous. Of course, the mother would never say that. Not up here.
Maybe if I had kids at Winnacunet, I'd be telling a different story. Maybe, parents are just as insufferable up here. I just haven't seen it.
Mostly, in fact, it's more like England here than France. Sometimes you want to hear somebody sing, "Fie on Goodness, Fie!" So many here cleave to the proper and the safe, but they make it work. It may not be thrilling, but it's very comfortable. And nobody burns crosses on anyone else's lawn.
I can just hear Ms. Maud's eyes rolling (if you could hear eyes rolling)--she will object I am not talking about a place, so much as a time of life. If I just got out to Ri-Ra's or The Press Room in Portsmouth, or the Bistro or 401 in Hampton, more often, I'd experience plenty of fun and intrigue. This is undoubtedly true--my wife gets out to these places every week, and she confirms, the Seacoast is FUN.
And there are wonderful, exciting people up here, critical, funny people. I've met one woman who actually loves David Sedaris and Bob Dylan. How much more can you ask? It may simply be the concentration is not as dense. Or it may be I've simply spent too much time at work.
I'm headed out now, down to the hardware store, where they do not have a pot belly stove, but they do have some old codgers who hang out there, talking about the weather.
There are a lot of reasons the Phantom expected to be disappointed by the movie "Selma," but for some reason he found himself in one of those reclining chairs at the Epping O'Neill theater, enlightened, moved, enthralled, swept away.
That the movie makers treated President Lyndon Johnson unfairly has been widely proclaimed, but this actually turned out to be, at least for the Phantom, a non issue.
Of course, one reason it did not bother the Phantom is that he hated LBJ. LBJ tried to kill him, and all his friends, and his brother, by sending them all to Vietnam.
What males of that vintage remember about LBJ is Vietnam. Nothing focuses the mind like getting shot at, or the prospect of getting shot at.
But there is something else, the Phantom became thoroughly addicted to listening to the Lyndon Johnson tapes and having heard those long conversations between Johnson and Richard Russell, his old buddy from Georgia, and having heard the conversations Johnson had with every Southern Democrat (and the Southerners were ALL Democrats in those days) trying to get the Civil Rights Act and then the Voting Rights Act passed, it is clear the movie does not distort the truth. Johnson knew he could not move too quickly; he just did not have the votes. He could not get too far ahead of public opinion.
The movie suggests LBJ placed higher priorities on the war on poverty and on Vietnam, but the tapes reveal another truth--Johnson, the consummate politician, dealt in the world of the political reality, while King dealt in the world of moral imperative, whether it was politically palatable or not. Johnson had his schedule, Martin Luther King had his. For King, there was only the awful urgency of now.
And, in the end, they do show Johnson's famous speech in which he cut the final ties to the Democratic South and said, Hell with this--we've got to move forward for the Negroes now, and when he did, he did decisively and effectively and with great and genuine feeling.
But the real reason to see this film is not Johnson or his relationship to King, it is to see just what King and his colleagues faced, the brutality, the enormity of the hate.
It is not an easy movie to watch; there are scenes of graphic brutality, but it is one of those experiences you need to have. The Phantom sat there thinking, "I knew about that march across the bridge, but I never really knew what that was like.
One surprise is the white characters. There are white Alabamans, one woman in particular, who are shown watching the images of the carnage on the bridge and being revolted, and transformed, and they turn out to march across the bridge with King the next time. These are the American equivalents to those Dutch people Maud described, who hid Ann Frank and her family in Amsterdam. Those are the people in life who really astonish the Phantom. Evil is so common. Cowardice is common. But people who are comfortable, who are not threatened, but who place themselves in harm's way to help others, those people are wondrous.
And that is what this movie is really about: Nobility, the possibility of nobility.
There is an interesting depth to nobility displayed here: There is a scene where Coretta King has received a tape recording of, purportedly, her husband having sex with another woman. She knows it's a fake recording, because, as she says, she knows what her husband sounds like when he is having sex. But it is clear she also knows she is not her husband's only lover; she simply demands that she is the one he actually loves. And, as much as The Phantom disparages the idea of marital "love," in this context, the word actually has meaning because, for this couple, their struggle as a couple and as individuals and as leaders of a movement is all about the meaning of love. In the face of so much hatred, love becomes something tangible, something you can almost see and smell and taste.
David Brooks, writing about "meaning" today says "meaning has become the stand-in in concept for everything the soul yearns for and seeks." He says, "In this way meaning is an uplifting state of consciousness. It's what you feel when you're serving things beyond self."
For me, meaning gained a very concrete status my second year of medical residency.
The meeting was mandatory, I was told, no excuses. I had been up thirty hours, but that was no excuse. Two other residents had been up just as long, but six of us had to rally for a meeting in the Department of Medicine office conference room.
It was a very impressive room, with a long glistening conference table. Eight by ten photos of chief medical residents past lined the walls, along with bookcases filled with medical journals and text books. We took our chairs and not a one was happy to be there. We were required to be there for the one hour of "psychiatry training" required of internists, so we could sit for our board exams.
Waiting for the shrink to arrive, I looked around and the three of us who had been on call looked no better than I did: a day's growth of beard, dark circles under eyes, and white uniforms spattered with blood, urine, vomit, all the stuff you acquired on call.
I fiddled with the rubber tourniquet looped through my belt and Jay, whom I had known since medical school, spun his reflex hammer on the polished table, eyelids drooping. David, flipped a sealed angiocath container up and down in his palm, as if he were throwing a knife. We were, each in our own way, in a really foul mood.
Six hours earlier, I had been talking to a favorite patient, when his eyes went opaque in that peculiar, pathognomonic glaze unique to the eyes of the dead. We managed to get him back, briefly, with defibrillation and the code had gone smoothly, but then he flat lined and there was no getting him back. As many times as I saw patients die, there was still something about their eyes when they died that chilled me. FUBAR that night, no doubt.
I had to call his wife in and take her to a conference room, and deliver the news, which has always been my absolute least favorite task as a doctor.
What could this shrink tell me, or any of us, which would be of any use at all? He didn't have to do what I had just done. He never had to tell a wife her husband had died, or a son his mother had died, or worst of all, a mother, her child had died. We had about as much use for this shrink as skunk has for perfume.
The shrink walked in and sat down and looked around the table as we stared at its polished surface or met his eyes, each as we felt inclined to do. I actually felt a little sorry for him, but he was what was standing between me and my bed and four hours sleep before rounds.
He wore a nice Harris tweed jacket and his tie was flawlessly knotted, a silk rep striped tie, and he looked well rested and spotless, unlike his captives.
"What would it mean to you," he asked, "To know you were going to die today, by the end of the day?"
Even in my resentful, sleep deprived state, that got my attention. But the real surprise was what followed.
David and Jay, who were both married with kids, guys I thought I knew better than their own wives knew them, guys I stayed up with all night, guys who had watched people die with me, guys who confided in me secrets they would never have their wives know--how they lusted after the charge nurse who wore her skirts so short you could see her panties when she bent over a bed--these guys, my comrades in arms, both said, without hesitation: "It would mean I'd never get to see my kids grow up."
That came as a complete surprise to me. Of course, when I thought about it, it made sense. Being a father was something neither of them ever talked about. It was a part of their lives I never saw. I knew, in some abstract sense, they were married and had kids they never saw back at Payson House, in some apartment, with wives who only came out at parties, but there it was. The most important thing in the world to these two guys was not their world I shared, but that world I never saw.
I, of course, being unmarried, lived for a good sleep, the next day off, and whatever pleasure might be available at the Recovery Room or other pubs around the hospital.
It turned out "meaning" was bigger than I had guessed. Meaning for me meant I could live my life entirely for myself, for some discrete periods of time. My own family had been depleted by death and distance. I spoke to my father by phone every couple of weeks and to my brother and his wife a little more often, but mostly, I was on my own. I never saw childhood friends or neighbors--I was living in a city far away from my hometown. I had friends, but it was like Army buddies: At some level, you knew you'd never see them again. You'd go on to "the real world," i.e. the world outside the hospital, where people dying was not a daily event.
The meaning of life was, for me, whatever was happening that day.
But not my two married friends. Meaning for them was invested in children I hardly knew existed.
After that, I made it a point to go over to their apartments and play with their kids every now and then, to see what that sort of meaning meant.
Of course, I was there, glued to the screen, with dog on lap.
Maybe it was too much to expect things would start with a whir and launch me, but somehow, a little tedium seemed to creep in.
It all seemed a bit worn at the edges, underdeveloped, the edge dulled.
Even in moments which in past shows were templates for sparks, the dinner parties, things seemed ham handed. The school teacher, who voices the important objections to Lord Grantham's thinking, is unable to present it in any sort of subversive or withering way, simply states the truth without attention to the inappropriateness of her chosen forum.
Tom winds up gallantly trying to defend her, but as Aunt Violet observes, it was simply the wrong setting, even for the right opinion.
I could not help but think Matthew would have managed to get the same point across more adroitly.
I'm totally with Maud on this one: Downton is one of those friends whom you love and cannot leave, but who drives you crazy. You endure, despite its faults.
Mary discusses the new openness about matters sexual with her confidant, the wonderful Anna, which sets up her scene with Lord Gillingham, who appears in her bedroom and does not immediately keel over dead, but rather straightfordwardly suggests they try out sex, just to be sure they are compatible in that department--addressing the very thing Mary had voiced concern about to Anna. He would be very much in line with today's Campus Sexual Handbook, asking permission for each step of the process, as if following an instruction manual.
I don't know why, but I expected something a little more elegant from the British aristocracy. I couldn't help but recall how Alfred Hitchcock had handled this, with Grace Kelly, standing outside her bedroom door with Cary Grant, drawing him to her and kissing him and Grant, a little startled, looks at her for meaning, and she says, "Preview of Coming Attractions."
Mary, the ice princess, at least has become more interesting as she has set about rescuing her father and his estate from himself. She has seized leadership of the family because she needs to save the family from her father's 19th century incompetence. But she is not her mother, and one grows weary of ice princesses.
Cora, however, is the one bright light. Maybe the Phantom is simply growing so senescent, he gravitates toward women who are not completely awash in tides of estrogen. (On the other hand, the randy aristocrat seeking out her servant was the most exciting female in this episode. She, at least, knows what she wants and is not afraid to take it.) Cora, one imagines, might behave the same way, under the right circumstances because she knows what she believes and why. Cora, all things considered, is the most attractive woman in the show. But her main trait is a tempered steel kindness, and her sense of justice places her above everyone but Tom.
If Mary could look past class, Tom would be her best choice. But what Mary really needs, at this point in her life is not a solid citizen, not a smart marriage. She needs someone to arouse her from her deep freeze. She is Lady Chatterly, dying by degrees. Even as Mary gets less arch, she is not in touch with her own desires. It's not entirely clear she has desires. She needs some of what that lady in bed with the servant is drinking. She reminds us of that comment from another character who lives only in our minds: Francis Underwood. "Everything is, ultimately, about sex. Except for sex. Sex is about power." That is likely true for Underwood, and likely for Mary, but not for the lady in bed with the servant. For her, sex is about life.
For Cora, love is not about power. Cora, one knows, is the emotional and ethical center of Downton, and its real hero.
Maybe Tom should run off with Cora. Now, there's a show I would watch.
One of the people I feel most lucky to know recently announced, with an expression of undisguised shock, "I'm fifty now." Her birthday had been the day before and we were out to dinner and it was clearly a milestone she was still processing. I almost said, "Oh, to be fifty again," but I did not think it would help. To me, she looked very young, and her perfume wafted in my direction and I could not imagine what difference it made to her to be fifty, but I suppose every one has to make his or her own peace with timelines.
Actually, when I turned fifty, I really felt no different than I had at 18, apart from being slower afoot and less flexible, more back pain. I was still running then, but my days running 10 miles a day were numbered. And, it is likely, in terms of numbered years, you are past the mid point, fewer ahead than behind on the time line.
But, still, there are moments.
This morning I opened my email to discover the first indoor baseball practice, in preparation for the 2015 baseball season has been scheduled and is less than two weeks away. I had considered hanging up my cleats after last season, having slumped at the plate and lost more than a step or two in the outfield. If you are a short stop or second baseman, losing speed is something you can compensate for, but as an outfielder, it's all about covering ground and reaching the ball. In the last inning of our last game, the championship game, they pulled me and put me on the bench so a younger, faster player could be out there, just in case. As it turned out, the ball was hit to my replacement and he made the catch, and we won, but for me, that was a turning point. Until then, over the years, I was the guy they put in when the game was on the line, when the championship was down to the last batter, but now, well, if I'd been the manager, I guess I would have made the same decision.
It had not been my worst season, but it was definitely the first step of a decline. You look at pro players who simply cannot perform at the level they once did and you wonder why they continue, why they embarrass themselves, why they cannot see what everyone else can see. They are in denial, clearly. Now it was my turn. At least, I am not in denial; then again, I'm not exactly pulling the trigger, either.
But, as my sons said, "Why quit? What else would you do all summer? You can still hit."
So, I'll at least start the season. And, I have to admit, I can't wait to get back into the batting cages.
And then, Tugboat demanded his beach walk, so at half tide we hit Plaice Cove, as usual.
The beach is never the same day to day. Today it was rock strewn and moody. Reaching the waterline, I started to launch Tug's ball down the beach, but then I stopped mid throw--300 yards off shore, on a rock, I saw a harbor seal raise his head.
There he lolled, flipping his tail around, dappled underbelly brown and gray back.
Some of the regular dog people stopped to look at him and a man with a foot long telephoto lens on his camera came up and let me peer through it so I could look the seal in the eye. And a very handsome fellow he was.
So there you have it. Winter is welling up from the New Hampshire January, but there are still some good things happening in winter. There will be snow, and I'll be able to cross country ski down the abandoned railroad line less than a mile from my front door. Winters of discontent were actually more common when I lived in the South. Winters in New Hampshire allow you to get out and do things. It's cold but at least it's not constantly raining. Snow is more fun.
Decline will have to wait a moment. For now, until that big myocardial infarction or stroke or malignancy comes calling, we are lucky to live on the Seacoast.
