Golden Ages

Carrie Snodgress, "Diary" Star

My life is changing
in so many ways
I don't know who
to trust anymore
There's a shadow running
thru my days
Like a beggar going
from door to door.
--Neil Young, "A Man Needs A Maid"

We are enjoying a golden age of television.  There are simply so many series available on Netflix and Amazon Prime, dating back to 2000: The Wire, West Wing, Newsroom, Doc Martin, House of Cards, Justified, Mad Men--the list goes on. 

During some eras, you know you are in the midst of something significant, for others it's only in retrospect. 

One era, which may not be quite as lustrous, but which was a boiling cauldron of ideas is, in retrospect, the early 1970's:   A wave of novels by women about the experience of being a woman in a new age swept through. Why this genre appealed to me, I am not sure, even today, but likely because the challenges women faced during this transition period entailed the most conflict, the most complexity and the most drama. The 60's had established the principles of the sexual revolution--the 70's would deal with the consequences in real lives. 

So I read "The Bell Jar"  (actually written much earlier but popularized then) and was captivated by that stunning opening line, "It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York." I never got much into Sylvia Plath's poetry, but her novel blew me away. Her casual intelligence and her vulnerability and honesty and the way she took personally events which did not affect her personally just slayed me.

Then there was "Diary of a Mad Housewife," written by the wife of a physician at my hospital.  I knew the doctor who was the model for the husband in the book, and he was sort of prototypical Upper East Side aristocracy, confident, successful, Brooks Brothers suits, doctor to the rich and famous. I could imagine how insufferable he must be at home, and he was not happy about the book or its success. He was probably better than the book's protagonist, and had more redeeming qualities, but there it was, in print for the world to see. 

Things just got darker from there, with "Looking for Mr. Goodbar," which chronicled the downward spiral of a twenty something woman as she compulsively lived the pick up scene in New York. She  had corrective surgery for scoliosis as a child, and never really believed she was anything but physically crooked and the scoliosis permeated her self image as something flawed and unattractive and she sought expiation through one night stands.

If you were feeling glad to be born male, then "Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen" sealed the deal, as you followed the trials and indignities of trying to execute womanhood as a path through life, with stops for venereal disease, abortion, divorce along the way. 

For women in the 70's, it appeared, if these works were any guide, they had been stricken by that old Chinese curse, the misfortune of living in interesting times.

Finally, there was some relief when Erica Jong came along with "Fear of Flying."  For Ms. Jong there was a spit in your eye solution--just do not capitulate, do not accept the strictures your parents and teachers taught you: Enjoy your own sensuality unapologeticly, don't allow others to make your rules for you. It was a pot boiler, full of exuberant sex, but it carried a serious load--women embraced it and, for me, it seemed well argued. 

I'm not sure those seventies novels of the emerging "new woman" were great literature, but they did shape my perception of women, what they could be, what they ought to be, what they were not yet and why they are interesting. 

Why I Love The Donald: Trump Card

He reminds me so of Mussolini.  Both men loved to puff out their chests and brag about their own virtues. Mr. Mussolini was especially eager to proclaim his attractiveness to women. Mr. Trump also would have you know he is virtually irresistible to human beings of the female persuasion.  (Well, apparently Ms. Maud has managed to look past his good looks to want to push him off a sea wall, but we are talking the average woman, which Ms. Maud certainly is not.)

They both inspire ardent admirers who want strong men to lead the dithering masses.

They both admire their own looks and intellect.

They both exude confidence.

Is that enough?

Anomie and The Stranger

Roger Cohen is not one of my favorite columnists in the New York Times, but today he had a piece about a new novel based on Camus's The Stranger, and that book has always meant something to me. 

Cohen notes the protagonist, Meursault, "does not love, he does not pretend, he does not believe in God, he does not mourn his dead mother, he does not judge, he does not repress desire, he does not regret anything, he does not hide from life's farce or shrink from death's finality." 

I've always admired the capacity to summarize, and Cohen does a nice job there. 

I read L'Etranger freshman year in college, in French class. I was a terrible student of French, but I was required to take a foreign language and qualify as having a reading competence in a foreign language, so there I was. We read Camus because Camus used simple words and constructions and also because the French Department thought he would appeal to freshman and because existentialism and ennui and alienation were all the rage in the mid 1960's.  So I read the Stuart Gilbert translation and then I read it in French and then I read it in English again and I was smitten.

Theses have been written about the famous first sentence:  "Aujourd'hui, maman est morte," which, as I read it reads, "Today, mama is dead," or as Gilbert had it: "Mother died today."  But that whole debate strikes me as silly. It is not the first sentence but the first paragraph which captivates:

Camus

"Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday. I can't be sure. The telegram from the Home says, 'Your mother passed away. Funeral tomorrow. Deep sympathy.' Which leaves the matter doubtful. It could have been yesterday."

To this day, I'm not sure why this book so thoroughly moved me. Part of it was that I reserved reading it for a break between calculus and inorganic chemistry homework, so it was a treat for an hour or two, between stuff for which I had no enthusiasm, and by comparison, it was lively and engaging. 

It may have had something to do with my  awareness of my own  mother's impending mortality--she would die five years later of a disease she had then. I wrote her about the book and she wrote back she would read it and discuss it with her faculty friends at the high school where she taught and would get back to me. I'm not sure she ever did.

But mostly it was the unblinking honesty, the refusal to say and do what polite society demands, the insistence we show contrition so others can say, "Aw, he's sorry," or to say the expected things about love. 

Meursault picks up a girl at the beach so soon after his mother's funeral, he is still wearing his black tie, and after he sleeps with her she asks him if he loves her and he says he's not sure what the expression even means, but he describes the beginning of love when he talks about the salty smell her head had left on the pillow in his bed, and the tawny, healthy wonder of her body.  He may not "love" her yet, but he has started that process of what most of us would call love, in his physical and sensual response to her. He just simply does not want to trivialize what he is feeling by packaging it into a pre wrapped sentiment. 

Some have argued the French word, "L'Etranger" is closer to "outsider" than "stranger" and that may be true. Meursault is strange, and he is someone others do not know, and some today might call him autistic, because he cannot say the formulaic thing, cannot exchange the expected standard responses and he is indifferent to the effect of his refusal to say what is expected has on other people.

I have not read the book recently, but as I remember it, as Meursault is drawn inexorably toward his own death, the meaning of losing his life, the sadness in it,  was connected to the feelings he had developed for his girlfriend, Marie.  In her, he actually found someone he looked forward to seeing, someone he enjoyed being with and someone he cared about.  

van Gogh

As he observes his own trial, he is fascinated by the picture the lawyers create of him and he knows that picture is unrelated to who he really is, what he thinks and feels. It is all just convention and phony and he cannot bring himself to be phony, even to save his own life. He'd rather go to the guillotine with the crowds screaming for his blood.

Years later, trying to describe the dehumanizing effect medical training had on me and my fellow interns, I came back to The Stranger because it seemed the closest thing to the experience of desensitization, of anomie, I had seen during internship. Through fiction, Camus, had gotten closer to reality than anything I had known. 

I guess that's why they call it "art."

Elizabeth Warren Reams Out Primerica President: Sweet

Senator Warren

It is so rare for vulture capitalists to surface and be harpooned, but this is what happened when the President of Primerica was called to testify before a Senate Committee and Elizabeth Warren went to work on him.

His company advised 238 Florida firefighters who were nearing retirement and about to begin getting their lifelong, reliable, predictable pension payments to forgo those payments and that security in order to buy plans for which Primerica sales people would reap commissions. These plans which were not guaranteed and much riskier. The Primerica agents dangled the prospect of much richer rewards in front of the fire fighters, who probably should have known better, should have smelled a rat, but did not.

This, of course is what Republicans have advocated for Social Security--privatize it, because, of course, rich advisers who know how to make money will inevitably do better for the average fire fighter than that drab old Social Security administration ever could.

The President of Primerica, a fair haired boy named Peter Schneider,  said that if a person were about to die, he could leave his new, cashed out pension, bought through Primerica, to his family but his monthly paycheck would end with his death.  Warren leaped all over that: So these 238 people were all near death and you are saying they got good advice from Primerica?

Nice Guy Wants Your Pension Plan So He Can Drive a Mercedes

Well, it was legal, the President of Primerica said, in his best Fred Rice mode. We violated no law when we gave that advice.

What A Senator  (Or a President) Should Be

Yes, it was legal, I agree with that, Senator Warren said. And that's what we are talking about today--we should make it illegal.  It should be illegal for fat cat Primerica agents to prey on the ignorance of firefighters and teachers who have earned reliable and safe pensions. We sometimes have to protect people from their own stupidity and greed.  Republicans hate that; Democrats know it's necessary. That's why Democrats voted in Social Security lo these many years ago, because people are fools, when it comes to planning for their own financial security. And we have to make them behave in a way which will insure they do not go broke and become a burden to the rest of us.

I once had a secretary, who never got past fourth grade in her West Virginia hollow, but she was smart and hard working and she learned our computers lickedty split and she cared about our patients and she was invaluable to my medical practice. I set up a pension plan for her.  Her husband, who could never keep a job, and who she supported, discovered she had accumulated $40,000 in her plan and convinced her he needed a new truck and he drained that account and bought himself a truck. What he needed that truck for, I could never understand, since all he did was sit home and watch T.V.  She was a smart lady, but she was stupid about her choice of husbands and about planning for the future.  

There shoulda been a law.

What Happened to Sandra Bland in Texas?

Not the model Texas prisoner 

Sure looks suicidal to me

Does This Lady Look Like She Wants to Hang Herself?

Why would you pull over a driver for failing to signal a lane change?  When was the last time I actually saw another driver in Massachusetts or New Hampshire actually signal a lane change?  Why would you demand the driver get out of her car, if you were going to issue a warning or a ticket?  Why would you subdue her with a knee to the back on the ground?  Was Sandra Bland examined with fingers in her vagina in the Texas jail? Did she make any phone calls from jail over the 3 days she was there? Who, aside from Texas employees actually saw and talked with her? Why was she in jail 3 days after failing to signal a lane change?  How long does it take to die when you have a trash bag ligature pulled across your neck? What was done with vaginal swabs during the Texas autopsy? Was semen found? Was semen tested for DNA?

Just a few questions which occur in the case of an employed young Black woman, with a college degree on the way back to her alma mater to take a job. Just that much is not a complete profile, but it is certainly not the expected profile of a woman who would wind up in jail, much less hanging by the neck unto death in jail.

The Phantom has raised the issue before about what happens in American jails.  We know Justices Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito and Kennedy have said they are more worried about the safety of the jailers than the Sandra Blands of the world.  The justices have given jailers, sheriffs, police in jail houses a carte blanche to have their way with any young woman or man they can bring into the jail in handcuffs. 

When those be wigged 18th century gentlemen wrote the Declaration of Indepence and then the Bill of Rights to the Constitution, they had fresh in mind the sorts of depredations visited upon prisoners in His Majesty's jails. Once you have a person bound by wrists and ankles, you have a power over her or him which no doctor or any authority figure in this country ordinarily possesses. 

Do we trust the people who take the jobs of police, jailer, sheriff or constable so much we are willing to allow our daughters to be hauled off to jail for failing to signal a lane change?  Oh, the officer can always claim he was insulted, assaulted, feared for his life, but where is the dash cam to document that?  

A Theater of Ideas

Donna and Josh

I hardly ever read fiction any more. I watch quite a lot of it, however. One of the things I'm currently into is "West Wing" mostly for the quick exchanges between people, which are as well crafted as those lines from Myrna Loy and William Powell in "The Thin Man." 

Donna and Cliff

Here's one from an episode in Season Three, when Donna, an ardent Democrat, has been set up on a date with a lawyer who works for a Republican committee chairman. She finds him attractive and she cannot understand how a man who seems to be otherwise intelligent, droll, caring can attach himself to the ruthless, uncaring Republican party.




DONNA

Why are you a Republican?

CLIFF
Because I hate poor people. I hate them, Donna. They're all so...poor. And
many of them talk funny, and don't have proper table manners. My father slaved awayat the Fortune 500 company he inherited so I could go to Choate, Brown and Harvardand see that this country isn't overrun by poor people and lesbians.

Donna smiles.

CLIFF
No, I-I'm a Republican because I believe in smaller government. This country
was founded
on the principle of freedom, and freedom stands opposed to constraints,
and the bigger
the government, the more the constraints.

DONNA
Wow.

CLIFF
[a little surprised] You agree with that?

DONNA
No, it's crap, but you're really cute.

CLIFF
Yeah, I know. [chuckles softly]

DONNA
I had a hunch you did.

CLIFF
Oh.

***
DONNA
[smiles] Right... Anyway and not to editorialize but since we're fighting
for the betterment of ordinary people while you're voraciously protecting the
grotesque wealth of the few, I wasn't sure if this was awkward for you.

CLIFF
Listen, Robin Hood...

DONNA
You don't think it's a good tax?

CLIFF
It was, in 1916, when this country's wealth was concentrated and we wanted
to prevent
the emergence of an aristocratic class, however...

DONNA
Says Choate, Brown, and Harvard.

CLIFF
The wealth is now spread among farmers, small business owners, farmers,
merchants, and  did I mention farmers?

This captures so much of what you hear Washington people saying. They allude to a number or some assertion of fact, like wealth was more concentrated in 1916 than it is today in America. In order to refute that you'd have to have some numbers of your own, which undoubtedly would be equally bogus, to say, no, actually wealth is more concentrated now than it was in 1916 or at any time in our history. 

When I lived in Washington and got into arguments like this, I'd quote back some very large numbers to support my argument.  I  was rarely challenged on these numbers but when I was, I'd admit I had just  made them up, but they were as valid and meaningful as the numbers my adversary had just quoted.

Such are the folkways of the academically endorsed as they thrust and parry inside the Beltway.

The importance of academic pedigree was a peculiar feature of Washington folkways. When C.J. is assigned to sit next to a Nobel prize winner at a state dinner she prepares for the event,  avidly learning the schools he went to, trying to think of what she can say to an eminent chemist. Here in New Hampshire, I cannot imagine a woman doing that. I can't think of a New Hampshire woman who seemed eager to impress me one way or the other.  People here approach you as what you are now rather than looking at your merit badges. In Washington, the uniformed services wear their decorations plastered all over their uniforms. For the non uniformed players, the merit badges are less visible but worn with the same fierce pride and sense of importance.  It's only when you live in New Hampshire  and breathe the clean air up here for a while you can appreciate the neurosis which festers along the Potomac.

One of my favorite people in Washington was a woman from Rhode Island whose husband was a major donor to the Democratic party and she was seated next to Al Gore at some dinner and she said he hardly met her eyes once, but spent the evening scanning the room, looking for more important people, little knowing he was sitting next to one of the most important people in the room. She was down-to-earth New England, taking the measure of the man, and finding him wanting. She wasn't about to mention all the connections which made her important to him; she just observed him.  

Watching "West Wing" brings me back to Washington, every night. But it's particularly wonderful to watch it from New Hampshire where people show less ego, where they strut less, and where the place you've arrived seems more important than the path you've taken to get there.

Memories of Bastille Day

Whatever virtues the French may have, they were ruined in advance for me by those horrific women who were my French teachers in school. I did have one charming French teacher in high school, but he was Algerian, so his kindness and virtues did nothing to buff my image of what the French are like.

Today, July 14 is Bastille Day, which I know not because of anything I was taught in those excruciating hours they called "French class" but because the French consulate was located directly across Reservoir Road from Georgetown University Hospital and every Bastille Day they threw a huge party and I even got to go to one once.  French tricolors festooned the gates and the staff made merry and it was pretty joyous, even to drive by.

Washington has always had a soft spot for the French: L'Enfant, a Frenchman designed the city and, truth be told, Washington (the man) could not have won the American Revolution without Lafayette and the French navy which arrived in the nick of time at Yorktown. Really, without the French, we might still be speaking like Brits.

So, today, I was thinking about those French having a good time in Washington, and come to think of it, likely in Paris as well.

Which brings me to Paris. Because Paris has lots of French people, I had no desire whatsoever to visit, but I got dragged into a Viking tour last November, which started in Paris.  The shocker was how nice, how funny, how charming the French were. I may not have met a representative sampling, but the people I met did not mind my massacring their language, and they were helpful when I got lost. 

In fact, one very kind French lady directed me back to my boat when I got lost on a run along the Seine.

Watching mothers, and fathers, walking their children to school on the Right Bank was lovely. At a glance, I'd say the French have produced some very fine parents.

And I am still trying to ascertain what that hot chocolate brew was. 

I loved the sidewalk cafes in New York City, when I was twenty something, and Maxwell Plum's and the cafe scene was big in New York. This was when Friday's was not a franchise but a really fun bar on First Avenue not far uptown from the 59th Street Bridge and if you showed up with a woman who was good looking, they gave you a window seat in the winter and a good sidewalk seat in the warm weather. If you showed up alone, they shuffled you to the back of the bar, but there were always lots of interesting people even there. 

But, it turns out, New York did not invent the sidewalk cafe. Hemingway was sitting around such establishments in 1927, in Paris.

  Paris can seduce you. Even Woody Allen, who famously could not bring himself to leave New York, apparently now loves Paris. Of course, that may be because you can bring your twenty year old wife when you are seventy there and nobody bats an eye.

Happy Bastille Day, France.  We still owe you for winning the American Revolution for us.

The Care Givers

When my wife's mother was widowed, she had three sons but I had no doubt where she would choose to relocate. She moved to be near her daughter.  The sons had wives, children, careers and although her daughter had children and a very demanding career, mother chose to be close to her daughter because she knew her daughter would have time, would make time to take care of her, which her sons, who were "busy with work" could not or would not do.

Today, I found myself urging a patient, a woman, to set aside an hour every day for exercise, and she gave me the tolerant look you might give a child who simply could not understand. "I don't have time," she said. 

"Oh, come on, " I persisted. "You're not tied to a work schedule, you don't commute. Surely you can find time. You have to want to find time."

"Oh, right. I'm not working, so I can just go to the mall and eat Bon Bons all day," she said. 
Then she laid out her day.  In the morning, she had to get her kids off to day camp. Then she had to go over to her mother's house, to be sure the mother checked her blood sugar, and took her insulin. The mother lives alone and does not drive. Then she took her mother grocery shopping.  
After that, she drove over to her sister's house to walk the sister's dog. The sister works and the dog is alone all day.
Then she stopped off at the campaign headquarters of the candidate for President for whom she had agreed to work, stuffing envelops. 
Her brother, a software engineer, works from home, but had broken his ankle and needed groceries. She drove over to his place, having stopped at the pharmacy to pick up his medications and then drove him to his orthopedist's appointment and back home.
Then the kids needed to be picked up from camp. 
Then home to cook dinner for the family.

She had forgotten to get her husband's dry cleaning. He was not pleased and could not figure out how she could have neglected this essential task. 

She had given up her career to raise her kids. 

"That might have been a mistake," she said. "I'm always the one everyone assumes has time. After all, I'm not working."

My day, by comparison, is simple. I get up, go for a run, go to work, where for 8 hours I'm expected to do only one job. Then I drive home and that's it.   I have time to exercise because my day is divided neatly and predictably. 

Compared to her, I've got it easy.

The Peters Projection World Map

Here's the latest bulletin from the Phantom's latest enthusiasm, "West Wing": 
Periodically, the White House senior staff is commanded to listen to ordinary citizens who do not usually have access to the higher echelons of government, in an effort to nod toward the populism which is supposed to characterize the Democratic party. 

C.J., the press secretary has to listen to a presentation by map makers who assert the standard classroom maps we all know from grade school are subtly deceptive and make American kids think we are more important than we really are.  When you see the projection of what the real land masses are to scale, you realize how big Africa is and how small the United States and Europe. (Of course, if you own a globe, you already know this.) C.J., who has entered this session with all the enthusiasm of a patient approaching a root canal, is transfixed and you can see her mind opening.

But the best part is when they show the same map, called the "Peters Projection," "upside down" i.e., with the southern hemisphere on top.  C.J.'s mind is not so open she can accept this. "It's just not right!" she stammers. And we are with her.

Not Peters Promection, but Upside Down

Presumably, Pope Francis, who hails from South America, would not have the same perceptual problem with South America being on top.

It's one of those things which good fiction can do--it makes you see things differently. Throughout the rest of the episode are the speeches about how America is an idea, about what real patriotism and real treason mean, and scenes about the meaning of family and notions of loyalty which veer toward sloppy sentimentality, but work because this is an Aaron Sorkin show and it's essentially sweet and affecting.

However you feel about the fraught relationship the President has with his middle daughter, or about Sam's conflict over the discovery his father is a human being with clay feet, you can still marvel at the geography lesson, which is slyly juxtaposed with off hand comments about protesters outside the National Geographic society office and everyone asking: Who could find anything to protest about people who make maps and a magazine about geography?

Well, now you can see.

New England Transcendentalism and Ecstasy

Something we were withholding made us weak

Until we found out that it was ourselves

We were withholding from our land of living,

And forthwith found salvation in surrender.

--Robert Frost, "The Gift Outright"

Yesterday was so exquisite on the New Hampshire seacoast it brought to mind a conversation I had with a patient recently about the nature of joy and the joy of nature, and all that is part of nature, like neurotransmitters. 

This is a very wealthy man, and by all measures, a man who should feel he has everything life has to offer, and yet he sought more.

He had hyperthyroidism, which made him feel caffeinated, electric, unable to calm down.  "Sort of a milder version of Ecstasy," he noted, and it took me a moment to realize he was talking about the drug, not the mental state. He liked and used that drug a lot.

"You've got a lovely wife, three kids, more money than you know what to do with, a great life," I said. "Why do you need Ecstasy?"
"You're right," he said. "I've got it all, but at age 57,  that doesn't mean I should just ride along in life on cruise control."

That, for some reason, flashed me back to a moment age 17, at a wrestling match.  I was sitting on a folding chair at the edge of a wrestling mat with Billy Fricks. We had both just won our individual matches, each in a dramatic and, in my case, somewhat improbable way and were panting, trying to recover, as we watched the next match. We had no business winning these matches against county champions and the gym was going wild, a throbbing animal's heart, loud and pulsating and Billy, grinning, drenched, leaned over and shouted in my ear, "If we live to be 100, neither of us will ever have a better time than right now."  
I stared at him. 
His grin crinkled into a sly smile, "Well, except for what I'm going to have tonight with B.B. (his girlfriend)."
"Oh, so now if it's between this and her, it's her."
"It's not a choice of one of the other," Billy said. "They're both part of the same thing."
I looked across the mat, to the bleachers, where B.B. was staring, with smoldering eyes, at Billy. She was clearly going to get Billy a little higher yet, later on. 
"You may be the wisest man I know," I told Billy.

The New England transcendentalists, Emerson, Thoreau, that crowd, claimed that what we are taught about happiness and godliness and goodness by organized religion was all blather. Every person has an "intuition," an essential understanding of right and wrong and it is only when we allow society or a church authority influence us that we get corrupted, that we get it wrong. 

(Of course, they also thought materialism and technology were bad things. At the turn of the 19th century, they were already warning that technology would be running us and not the other way around.)

My patient lived in this tradition--he would not be shamed or talked into a more conventional pursuit of happiness.  Like Billy, who was having premarital sex at a time when that was scandalous, he wrote his own rules and was happy with the results. 

I'm not sure I'd still call either Billy or this patient the wisest men I know, but yesterday, when the glory of nature ignited such joy among the serotonin, dopamine and other neurotransmitter receptors in my brain, I could sort of understand the body electric thing.

Survivor's Song

Neighbor's Vegetable and Flower Plot

It snowed every day from January through early March this winter past, or at least that's the way I remember it. I do know for sure I was able to rake my roof of snow by standing on the snow banks in front of it, no ladder needed.
My neighbors said, "We've earned summer, this year."
Today, we got the first installment. Blue, cloudless sky, low humidity, seventy degrees, nice breeze, the sort of day which, in my mind at least, feels like this only in New England.
It's the contrast that makes it feel so intense. 
Winter was worth it. 

I have two illegal trees in my backyard, which have filled out this spring, as if in answer to the winter trial.  They are Norwegian red maples and when I moved to Hampton,  New Hampshire, I noticed these trees all around town, in front yards, in front of churches, on school grounds, deep maroon leaves, luxuriant foliage, shade trees. But the people at the local nurseries told me they could not sell these trees which are illegal to sell in the Granite State. Apparently, horticulturists from the University of New Hampshire testified at the State House in Concord these trees are an "invasive" species. The owner of the nursery shook his head, "They are just about sterile. How could they be 'invasive?' I think they just don't like purple trees at UNH."

I told my neighbor this story and a few weeks later got a phone call from him. He had spotted three Norwegian maples at a local big box hardware store. Apparently, the trucks which deliver trees to this chain store, which has stores all over the nation,  come from far afield and whoever loaded this truck did not know the laws in New Hampshire and the kids who work the garden department in this store had no idea what they were selling.  Did I want to ride with him in his truck and go pick them up? Fifteen minutes later we had the trees in the back of his truck and were flying down Route 1 with our eyes on the rear view mirror looking for the tree police. We knew what druggies must feel like when they score a really sweet hit.  

I planted them in the back yard to be less visible to the New Hampshire tree swat teams.  My neighbor put his in his back yard, too. No sense tempting fate.
They are flourishing this summer.  God is in His Heaven and red maples have taken root, against all the efforts of the state to prevent it. Life has prevailed. Green life. Well, more like red life. 

Live tree or die.