210. The Potters’ Tale

Tregurnow pottery

It’s marvelous where a train of thought can lead you in a day, and how sometimes things seem to come together all at once.

Just yesterday I was looking at some photographs I had taken of favorite pieces of pottery and china. I particularly treasure the mug, sugar bowl, and milk jug from Tregurnow Pottery, started by Mag and George when they moved down from London to a fishing village in Cornwall. They were part of my parents’ close circle of friends in London before I was born, and they all had their first children within a few months of each other. Mag is the one who pierced Mum’s ears for her, using a red-hot needle, or perhaps a red-hot safety pin. She is also the one who gave me my pet name. Visiting Mum and me when I was just days old, she first called me by the name that was to supplant my given name until I was thirty, and is still the one preferred by my family and oldest friends.

In the summer of 1971, on a trip to England after we had graduated from high school, Andrew and I took a coach down to Cornwall to visit Mag and George and camped on the clifftop near Treen. We went to a performance of Iris Murdoch’s The Italian Girl at the Minack open-air theatre, waded in the fantastically cold ocean water at Porthcurno (where George swam year-round), tasted nut rissoles for the first time (Mag and George were strict vegetarians), and learned about the importance of conserving water from George, who was decades ahead of his time in his commitment to a simple, sustainable life.

Porthcurno Bay (wikimedia commons)

So I looked up Tregurnow Pottery on the Internet, and found the website of the couple who, back in 1999, had bought it from Mag and George after they retired, and started their own studio. Imagine my delight when I found that one of them, John Nash, had written a book about my parents’ friends, telling the story of their struggle to establish the pottery. I wasted no time in ordering The Potters’ Tale, and am looking forward eagerly to receiving and reading it soon. I was even more delighted to receive an e-mail message from his wife Mim and to learn that she is now a close friend of Mag’s. This in turn led to an e-mail exchange with my Uncle Ted, who had heard from Mag just last week and had greetings from her for my mother.

One thing led to another. I found myself looking up the Minack Theater and learning that it was built by hand in the  1930s, stone by heavy stone, by a remarkable woman called Rowena Cade, who died in 1983 at age 90, and would have still been going strong back when Andrew and I visited the theatre. I found a video postcard of the Minack on YouTube and showed to to my father. I even found the archive of all the shows ever produced there since The Tempest in 1932, confirmed exactly when we had seen The Italian Girl, and learned that Iris Murdoch herself had participated in the play’s adaptation from the original novel.

The Minack Theatre (from thenakedcreative.co.uk)

This morning, over tea and a doughnut with Andrew, he brought out an old paperback and presented it to me: “I found this while I was sorting through some papers.” Wouldn’t you know—it was Iris Murdoch’s The Italian Girl!  My father-in-law picked it up for me at the town dump (er, sanitary landfill) a long while ago, but it had slipped out of sight and I had forgotten all about it—until just now. Synchronicity.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

202. Tennessee Stud

For years my love of country music was a bit of a guilty secret in a group of friends who listened mostly to rock-n-roll, punk, blues, and reggae. I remember once in my twenties, while I was playing Hank Williams in our group house in Somerville, my housemate Charlie going up into his room and playing his saxophone at full blast to register his displeasure. I listened to real country, country blues, folk, and bluegrass. Besides Hank Williams (whom I had loved ever since 1970, when I had heard a nameless musician sing Jambalaya at the Nameless Coffee House in Harvard Square), my favorites were Jimmie Rodgers, Johnny Cash, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs; and my favorite, Doc Watson.

In December 1970, when I was sixteen and had been in the States for less than a year, Andrew took me to the Boston Tea Party on Lansdowne Street near the Fenway. The line-up that night was the Incredible String Band (pretty, but for me at least, forgettable), Mimi Fariña, who had a lovely voice and sang Pack Up Your Sorrows (though sadly, without Richard Fariña, who had died four years earlier); and Doc Watson, with his son Merle, whose performance that night instilled in me a lifelong love of his music.

Arthel “Doc” Watson (1923-2012) would have been in his late 40s when I saw him in 1970, Born and raised in Deep Gap, North Carolina, near the border of Eastern Tennessee, he was like no other American I had ever yet met. I did not know at the time that he had been involved in the American folk music revival and had played at the Newport Folk Festival back in 1963: he seemed to me to be the down-home authentic article, uncontaminated by outside influences—although I was to learn that he was eclectic and experimental, drawing from traditional and modern folk, country, bluegrass, and blues, and even throwing in the occasional rockabilly performance. His virtuoso flat-picking was so fast that it boggled the mind, and his voice was true and clear—I could listen forever and never tire, to Deep River Blues, Shady Grove, Banks of the Ohio (performed here with Bill Monroe), and so many more.

It was on that night in 1970 when I heard him play Tennessee Stud for the first time. I was to learn later that it was his most popular song, a big crowd-pleaser. Although it clearly wasn’t one of Doc Watson’s own favorites, he seemed to be resigned to delivering to the audience what they wanted. Immediately after his first song someone yelled out, “Tennessee Stud,” and although Doc seemed a little annoyed, he eventually obliged, hamming it up just a little (I whupped her brother and I whupped her paw), and, after the last There never was a hoss like the Tennessee Stud, there was such a cacophony of heehaws you would have thought that we were in a barnyard. If there’s anything more irritating than a down-home country boy saying heehaw!, it’s a highly-educated Bostonian saying hee haw! the way he imagines a country boy would; but Doc just maintained his enigmatic expression, nodded quietly to Merle, and went on with the show.

A few years later, probably in the late 1970s, we went to see Doc and Merle Watson again, at the Paradise on Commonwealth Avenue. Again those irritating young men started calling out “Tennessee Stud” from the very outset. As if Doc didn’t have a massive repertoire and a line-up of songs ready to perform. But those who didn’t know anything else by him, knew “Tennessee Stud” from the popular album, Will the Circle Be Unbroken (1972). (Andrew, by the way, had no patience for the song. He found it intensely irritating that these country singers all seemed to love their guns and their horses more than anything or anyone else; much more, he said, than any woman.)

The whistles, interruptions, heehaws, and yells of “Tennessee Stud!” continued. Finally Doc Watson stopped playing and addressed the crowd in stern, admonitory tones.

“Since y’all seem to want it so much, I will play the song, but on one condition: you must keep completely quiet through the whole performance. Not one heehaw, d’you hear?”

Silenced, the callow youths nodded their heads dumbly, like chastened schoolboys. Having received the desired promise, Doc was as good as his word, and he and Merle gave the crowd a rousing rendition.

I was able to see Doc Watson three or four times more, twice in the late 1980s/early 1990s with Nikhil when he was little. The first time was in Memorial Hall in Wilmington, VT, the only venue on the tour that allowed children, and was Nikhil’s very first concert. In the intermission I asked Nikhil which songs he’d like Doc to play, and we took them up to the stage on a piece of paper. Someone must have read it out to Doc or else Nikhil’s favorites were Doc’s own, because he sang every single one of them, including, as I recall, Mama Don’t ‘Low No Musical Played Around Here. The second time was outdoors at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and was supposed to be Doc’s last concert before he retired. (Thankfully, he went on doing those “last concerts” for nearly 20 more years.) The line-up featured Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, not long before Bill Monroe passed away, with Doc Watson singing no more than a handful of songs. I asked Nikhil which songs he would like Doc to sing if he could choose, and he replied, “He’s in the Jailhouse Now and The Last Thing on My Mind.” I’ll be darned if Doc didn’t sing both of them!

The last time I got to see Doc Watson in concert was in November, 2006 at the Calvin Theater in Northampton, Massachusetts. A living legend at 83 years old, he took us on a musical journey back to his roots and brought down the house. No one asked for “Tennessee Stud,” but he sang it for us anyway.

Rest In Peace, Doc Watson.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

201. Screaming Women

(from jollygoodshow.net)

In the evenings, after the storytime ritual was over and our son had gone to sleep, I would be faced with the choice between relaxing on the couch and grading student papers before class the next day. But no sooner had I settled down with a cup of tea and a sigh, than it would begin: the screaming women.

When I was first introduced to television in England as a child of nine, the government  was very strict about what could be shown on television during the daytime, when children might be awake and watching. Children’s programs were aired in the morning and afternoon, then the news, documentaries, and family programming—soap operas, comedies, music and game shows. It wasn’t until after 9 pm that adult programs were screened, including dramas, thrillers, mysteries, and anything with violent content. Even so, back in the 1960s the British rules governing TV violence were restrictive. Compared to U.S. standards British television was permissive about sexual content but much less so about violence. All that has changed now, of course; as much as I admire Helen Mirren, I had to avert my eyes again and again throughout the long-running crime series, Prime Suspect (1992-2006), and after just one episode I can see that it’s going to be more of the same with the new mini-series, The Bletchley Circle.

In the U.S. during the 1970s and 1980s the television networks were encouraged to self-regulate when it came to  shows with graphically violent content, reserving the time-slot of 8-9 pm Eastern Standard Time for “family viewing.” But after 9 pm, violent programs would crowd the line-up on every channel without fail, and it only got worse in the 1990s. I’m not just talking about Miss Marple whodunits in which one family member after the other is poisoned in a stately home or Westerns with to-the-death shoot-outs in front of the saloon; these were films about sadists, psychopaths, and serial killers who invariably targetted women, predictably barmaids and prostitutes. Not content with one killing, it seemed, there had to be a sickening succession of them, each one more grisly than the last.

So the nightly onset of this programming would be signaled by the screams of members of my own sex. There was no way I could relax when one of those screams rent the air and my heart, and threatened to wake the baby to boot. The “screaming women,” our shorthand for that perverted category of entertainment,  were my signal to gather up my papers and retire to the study. It was positively soothing to grade error-riddled student essays when the alternative was bullet-riddled women’s bodies.

Nowadays, with hundreds of cable and satellite TV channels to choose among, one doesn’t have to wait until 9 pm; guaranteed, one can find a screaming woman on air at any time of day or night. Now that’s progress.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

200. Roots, Rock, Reggae

My first encounter with Reggae music was with Jimmy Cliff’s Wonderful World, Beautiful People in 1969, during lunch-hour at the all-girls Parliament Hill School in London. It was an incongruous setting: in a school community polarized between hippies and skinheads (with the hippie girls wearing long hair and black tights and the skinhead girls wearing very short hair and white tights), it was the skinheads who played the Reggae, while the hippies were playing the newly discovered Led Zeppelin. I was an outsider to both groups since I attended that school for only a few months, though if I had belonged to any group it would have been the hippies. The skinhead philosophy (if you can call it that) was a racist one, so it was odd that they liked Jimmy Cliff. Gangs of skinheads would lie in wait for Asians (“Pakis,” they called them all) and beat them up, kicking them with their Doc Martens, which they called bovver boots. According to their racial stereotypes, Asians were weak and passive, while the Afro-Caribbeans were masculine and liable to  fight back. Hence they left them alone, gave them grudging respect, and listened to their music.

While my sympathies were with the hippies, I thought that Jimmy Cliff’s was unquestionably the better sound; Led Zeppelin left me cold. The previous year, when I had first arrived in England, Desmond Dekker topped the charts with his hit single, Israelites, and I loved that too.

After moving to the United States I lost touch with Reggae music for a couple of years, but when Perry Henzell’s film The Harder They Come (1972) came to the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge (for what was to be a ten-year run) I fell in love with it all over again. I can’t tell you how many times I watched that movie and, of course, played the album many times more, over and over again, as was our wont in those days. Every song on it was a winner, from the hard-hitting title track to the achingly sweet Many Rivers to Cross and Sitting in Limbo.

It wasn’t until the mid-1970’s that I discovered the Wailers, but when I did, I became a complete and total fan of Reggae, which seemed to combine the best of rhythm & blues, Third World politics, a voice for the working poor and the dispossessed, and messianic liberation theology with Caribbean syncopation, positive vibrations, and a truly global vision. It was slower and less frenetic than rock-n-roll; it had the beat, but it also had soul. We went to see Bob Marley & the Wailers three times, in 1976 at the Music Hall in Boston, 1978 at the Music Inn outdoors in Lenox, Western Massachusetts, and in 1979 at the Harvard Stadium. In 1979 we saw Peter Tosh in Sanders Theatre at Harvard on his first solo tour. It was around that time, too, that we first got to see Toots and the Maytals, and I accompanied my friend Geno backstage to interview Toots after the show.

When Bob Marley died of cancer in 1981, only thirty-six years old, it felt like the end of an era. Peter Tosh was killed a few short years afterwards, in 1987, at age forty-two. The harsh realities of the unequal, war-torn world he sang of in songs like Equal Rights and Rumors of War caught up to him in his own home. We were entering the Reagan era, and we needed all the inspiration, the Redemption Songs, we could get, but we had lost our prophets and bards. Listening to Bob Marley singing Three Little Birds, we sang along:

Baby don’t worry,
’bout a thing

Cos every little thing’s
Gonna be all right

And tried to believe it.

To this day, I far prefer a reggae version of just about any song to the original. If you want proof of the truth of this, listen to Toots and the Maytals sing Country Roads and follow it up with the John Denver original. I guarantee that thereafter the latter will be insipid by comparison.

Listen: Roots, Rock, Reggae: this a reggae music.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents\

195. Marathon

John Blanding/ Globe Staff (boston.com)

My parents moved to Newton, Massachusetts in the late 1970s, onto a street off Commonwealth Avenue just over the brow of the notorious Heartbreak Hill, the one that all Boston Marathon runners dread. The runner who first makes it over that hill is invariably the winner of the race, but just getting that far is an achievement. Actually, the first to crest the hill are the wheelchair entrants. In 1975, Boston was the first major marathon to include a wheelchair division.

mother and daughter set to run the 2013 Boston Marathon (observer.ca)

I remember walking out to Commonwealth Avenue on Marathon Day, stationing ourselves on the side of the road facing west, and cheering our hearts out. The winners sailed by early and, after a bit of a lag, the rest followed, old and young, men and women, many of them huffing and puffing alarmingly. But they persevered. I remember tears coming to my eyes as I cheered on young and middle-aged women, mothers and grandmothers running together. Some labored up and over that hill long, long after most of the pack had passed, but they made it over, and we cheered them until we were hoarse.

There are 29,000 people signed up to participate in the 2013 Boston Marathon,  so many that  it may be hard to remember a time when marathon-running wasn’t a big deal. But in 1970, the year we immigrated to the United States, there were only 1174 entrants, and in 1960, just ten years before that, fewer than two hundred. I remember the excitement when New Englander Bill Rogers won both the Boston and the New York marathons in 1975, and won Boston twice more in the late 1970s; suddenly jogging was all the rage. Apparently, interest in running marathons among the U.S. public had been sparked in the 1972 Olympics by the dramatic TV coverage of  American Frank Shorter winning the men’s marathon after an attempt to steal the race by an imposter was foiled.

Some of the female runners at the 1972 Boston Marathon (Image © Bettmann/CORBIS)

It may also be hard to remember, now that more than 40% of the participants are women, that although the Boston Marathon started way back in in 1897, it was not until 1972 that women were allowed in the race. Now that I think of it, that fact probably accounted in large part for my emotional response to the intrepid women of all ages who crested that hill, determined to finish the 26.2-mile course no matter how long it took. Now that I am middle-aged myself, I am in even greater awe of them.

I have never run a marathon myself, though one Sunday I set out on a stroll and ended up walking 23 miles (see Two at a Time). That was a long, long time ago; more recently, the closest I’ve come to a marathon is this A-to-Z April Blogging Challenge, not 26 miles but 26 entries in 30 days. It’s Day 15, and I’m already flagging, with Heartbreak Hill still up ahead.

Monday evening, April 15th, 2013: This day that dawned full of excitement and anticipation has ended in tragedy, grief, and utter bewilderment. Sending love and deepest sympathy to all those who were hurt and traumatized, and to the families and friends of those who lost their lives.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

194. London, My London

(from http://www.kentishtowner.co.uk)

I was born in London, a London of the 1950s just emerging from the ravages of the Second World War and the era of British colonialism, a new London with more educational opportunities and better health care and social services for the poor and working classes, greater cultural diversity as immigrants from South Asia, Africa, and the West Indies came to find work in the “Mother Country,” a London where my Indian father and English mother met and married. Although I have actually lived in the city of my birth for only 5-6 years in total, they include periods in my infancy, in my nursery, elementary, and secondary school years, and while I was a university student. London, birthplace of my mother, will always be dear to me and, as cities go, is perhaps the only one where I could imagine myself feeling completely at home.

London from Parliament Hill (hampsteadheath.org.uk)

the Heath in Autumn (hampsteadheath.org.uk)

But my London is not the home of Big Ben and Buckingham Palace—in fact, after all these years I have yet to visit the Tower of London. “My” London is a city of neighborhoods, and specifically, of the neighborhoods of North London where my mother grew up, where my father lived as a student, where I was born, and where in turn I lived as a student—Kentish Town, Belsize Park, Hampstead, and Camden Town. When I return, I go straight to my family, infinitely more important to me than any monument. When my mother returns, she and her sister Bette head straight out to Castle’s pie and mash shop (not my cup of tea—I’m squeamish about eels) and then for a ramble over Hampstead Heath, ending up at Kenwood House for tea and a bite to eat.

Queen’s Crescent market (kentishtowner.co.uk)

“My” London is plaice, haddock, or cod-‘n-chips in newspaper, the thick, soggy chips salted and liberally doused with malt vinegar; crowded street markets with stalls where half the goods seem to have fallen off the back of  a lorry; corner shops run by British Asians selling fresh coriander and green chillies along with English sweets and tabloids; bakeries full of fresh crusty  loaves and squashy jam doughnuts; the Tube, double-decker busses, and black cabs (my Uncle Bill drove one–see Get Me To the Church on Time); and, of course, pubs, which can still be found on just about every street corner.

The Flask, Hampstead (tigergrowl.files.wordpress.com)

In my London, Cockney accents emerge quite naturally from the mouths of British Asian youth whose grandparents immigrated there from the former Empire—after the sun set on it. (See Gurinder Chadha’s I’m British But…) Visiting a friend in Hackney back in the 1980s, I found the adult education booklet carrying night-class listings in eight languages, including Bengali, Punjabi, Greek, and Turkish.

My London is the London of Brick Lane and Southall, of the Royal Free Hospital and aging public housing estates; of pub food that features samosas as well as Cornish pasties and traditional English Sunday dinners; of the Bank Holiday fairs on Hampstead Heath and the Caribbean Notting Hill Carnival every August Bank Holiday weekend (by the way, given the importance of Notting Hill to Britain’s history of race relations, it infuriated me that they managed to make the movie Notting Hill without a single black character in it).

Notting Hill Carnival (demotix.com)

My mother married for love and had to leave her beloved city for most of the rest of her life; yet it has never left her heart and therefore it can never leave mine. Every seven years, when I watch the latest edition of  Michael Apted’s 7 Up series (Here’s the late Roger Ebert interviewing Apted in 2006), I wonder fleetingly what my life might have been like had my parents decided to stay there. But if they had, I wouldn’t be who I am now.

I leave you with the British Asian band Cornershop’s 1990’s hit, Brimful of Asha, and a rendition of Hubert Gregg’s sentimental 1940’s favorite, Maybe it’s Because I’m a Londoner.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

192. Jam Today

In my mid-twenties I participated with many others in an effort to stop the Seabrook, New Hampshire nuclear power station from being built. We did not succeed in Seabrook, although we did raise awareness about the costs and dangers of nuclear power. The anti-nuclear movement grew and flourished throughout the 1970s, but in 1980, the election of Ronald Reagan, like that of Margaret Thatcher in Britain the year before, began a long period of what we called the clampdown (echoing The Clash’s prescient Working for the Clampdown on London Calling), and put a serious damper on the movement, along with so much else. Early in 1980, though, oblivious of all that was to come, we were making serious preparations for non-violent direct action to occupy the site, in a decentralized system of self-organization based on affinity groups and consensus decision-making. One of the affinity groups, friends of ours, called themselves Jam Today.

I never asked any of the members of Jam Today what lay behind their choice of name, but it seemed clear enough. They refused to go along with a society that demanded endless deferral of desires and their fulfillment to some indefinite future.

illustration by John Tenniel (from thevictorianweb.org)

The phrase “jam today” comes from the exchange between Alice and the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1871), in which the queen offers Alice a job with the promise of “twopence a week, and jam every other day.’ Pressed further, she reveals “the rule. . . jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam today.”

‘It MUST come sometimes to ‘jam today,”‘ Alice objected.

‘No, it can’t,’ said the Queen. ‘It’s jam every OTHER day: today isn’t any OTHER day, you know.’

Having been raised to believe in delayed gratification, part of me secretly found the idea of Jam Today a little self-indulgent. But my friends showed me otherwise: they combined concentrated hard work for a better future with an irrepressible joie-de-vivre. They lived in the moment and clearly loved every moment. And time was to prove them right: throughout those long Reagan years, as unemployment skyrocketed, unions were smashed, public services defunded, and environmental protections gutted, the rich only got much, much richer, while continuing to dangle before the rest of us the lying promise of Jam Tomorrow, a tomorrow that would never turn into today.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

186. Drive-ins

Wellfleet Drive-In (retroroadmap.com)

Drive-in movie theaters are quintessentially American. It’s sad how many of them have gone out of business, their battered screens staked out in overgrown fields or deserted parking lots with waist-high weeds cracking through the concrete, and memories of 1950s automobiles with the parents up front munching down butter-drenched popcorn and the teenagers stealing kisses in the back seats.

My first experience of one of these American institutions was in the early 1970s during one of our very first summers in the United States at the Wellfleet Drive-In on Cape Cod, which has been in operation since 1957. We ventured out one evening in our still-new Plymouth Valiant and inched our way down the unfamiliar rows in the gathering dusk, lining ourselves up with one of those strange parking-meter-like sound stations. I still remember the movie playing that night—Mary Poppins, for which I couldn’t properly suspend my disbelief because of Dick Van Dyke’s disastrous attempt at a Cockney accent, so bad that it was embarrassing. (I loved Dick Van Dyke, especially with Mary Tyler Moore in The Dick Van Dyke Show, but really, he was ridiculous in this role, despite his always-brilliant dancing on those long, gangly legs of his.) As a recent immigrant, I don’t think I was able to fully appreciate the ambiance; it was all too new and strange.

(from drive-ins.com)

In the mid-1980s, when we were young parents living in the wilds of Winchendon, one of our favorite outings on hot Saturday nights was to Gardner to the (sadly, now-defunct) Mohawk Drive-In, especially the “dusk-to-dawn” extravaganzas bookending the summer on Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends. Not that we were capable of staying up all night, especially as young parents. The first movie was the family show, full of toddlers whose parents took them to brush all the candy out of their teeth and change into their PJ’s during the intermission. Sometimes the little ones fell blessedly asleep, and the adults could stay on with them through the second movie. But most of the family crowd left  after the second show, and the night was taken over by the teenagers. Only the most intrepid of us oldsters would stick around for the third show. To the accompaniment of horror and zombie movies the teens would drink, carouse, and run amok, lighting fires in garbage cans and generally behaving badly until the police arrived to clear the place out.  I remember staying only once for a third movie, the nightmare-inducing Children of the Corn (1984)—well maybe a second time, for Pink Floyd’s The Wall—but Maureen and I tended to be preoccupied with the babies, and paid only intermittent attention to the strange scenes on the flickering screen. Sometimes we would leave early and the guys, diehard and indiscriminate movie fans that they were, would stay on until the bitter end or until the police arrived, whichever came first. Eventually they shut down that drive-in for good. and now it has been replaced by a housing development.

Northfield Drive-In (by Amy Brady, innbrattleboro.com)

Although most of the old drive-in movie theaters have been closed, fortunately there is still one left in the area, The Northfield Drive-In, dating all the way back to 1948. Throughout middle and high school, Nikhil’s summer was never complete without at least a couple of outings to Northfield, where we would meet a gang of the old friends with whom we used to go to the old Mohawk Drive-In. We would take deck chairs, blankets, picnics, and snacks a-plenty, set them up right in front, and then settle in for the long haul. I haven’t managed to get myself out to it for years, but perhaps next Memorial Day weekend it will be time to partake once again of this great American experience.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

181. The Silver Hairpin

In 1977 my father travelled to India for his first return visit since emigrating to the United States, after a gap of eight years. (He has only returned  twice more in the 36 years that have elapsed since, once in 1984 and the last time, in 1996.) Nowadays, with so much more back-and-forthing between India and the States, particularly among our children’s generation—not to mention the constant phone-calling, email, Facebook, and videochat contact—it is hard to imagine the fevered anticipation with which we awaited his return.

My parents’ generation didn’t use the phone easily, especially not for long-distance calls. Incoming calls were dreaded, as they usually brought bad news, and there was the additional anxiety brought on by the knowledge of how much one’s loved ones were spending to make the call. Outgoing calls were equally rare because of the cost, and because placing a “trunk call” from India in those days was quite a hoohah, going out to an STD booth, waiting to place the call, waiting again for it to go through and then, as often as not, having to conduct the conversation shouting through the static. It is only very recently that my dad has stopped shouting into the phone at full volume, loud enough for them to hear him in India.

But I digress. The point is, we had not heard from Dad ever since he had left for India, so when the time finally came to meet him at Logan Airport, our excitement knew no bounds. How we waited until we got back to the house I don’t know, but we still have the photographs to show how he opened the full-to-bursting suitcases and laid everything out on my parents’ big queen-sized bed, everything from cotton and silk clothing to stainless-steel thalis and tumblers to silver jewelry to messages conveyed from this or that cousin to a Marathi cookbook to my grandmother’s famous laddus, carefully wrapped to stay fresh for as long as possible. Then came hours of questions and stories and trying things on and more photos of one or another of us modeling the new outfits to send back to the aunts and uncles who had gifted them to us.

Of all those gifts brought back by my father so many years ago, the one I have used the most, practically on a daily basis, is a simple silver hairpin. It was originally one of a pair, and its partner is long gone, but for years, among the plastic Magic Grip hairpins I used to buy at the West Concord 5 & 10 (brilliant in their own right, to be sure), this one gleamed regally out of  the top of my bun.  It still does.

I have always preferred the elegance, the moonlit-evanescence of silver to the buttery opulence of gold. Last time I went to India I asked everywhere I went for another silver hairpin, but in vain. As the middle classes were growing richer even gold, traditionally the most highly prized material for women’s jewelry, was abandoned in favor of diamonds, for which I have even less appreciation, since they look like cut glass to me and put me in mind of men slaving and dying in the mines.

Finally Mandatya, my father’s youngest sister, took me into a little jewelry store in Vile Parle and spoke on my behalf to the proprietor, who rummaged under the counter for a while, eventually re-emerging, not with hairpins, but with an old box of assorted silver jewelry. Its tangled chains, black with tarnish, had obviously been lying neglected for many years. He called a young assistant to clean the one I selected and soon presented it to me shining like new and at a marvellously low price.

Although I love the silver necklace, I just keep it in a box and admire it from time to time. But the old silver hairpin is in everyday use. Just looking at it calls up India faster than a satellite phone.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

180. The Magic of Found Objects

Over the years, hundreds of small found objects—lucky stones, a plastic Highlander, a Swiss army knife—have washed up at my feet. Some of them have held a special symbolic value for me and I have endowed them with a talismanic power; until they have slipped from my hands and fallen somewhere, waiting latent and unseen for the next passer-by, who in turn will slip them into his or her pocket for a spell.

The first of a succession of lucky stones was my most beloved, fished for me out of a shallow cove in the Aegean Sea by a mysterious mer-woman (see Greece in the 60s: Expatriates & Other Animals), and borne by me to India, where I carried it to exams for years afterwards; until it was lost and in due course, another took its place. Thirty years later, on another coastline, I came upon the plastic Highlander washed up on the shores of the Arabian Sea near my father’s ancestral home and bore it back to the United States with me, where it occupies pride of place on a tray of seashells and stones in our bathroom.

The Old North Bridge, Concord, Massachusetts (planetware.com)

Andrew and I found the Swiss army knife on a hillside adjoining the Old North Bridge over the Concord River back in 1975, on the historic 200^th anniversary of the American Revolution (see Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Concord Hymn). The People’s Bicentennial Commission, which sought to commemorate and revive the spirit of revolution that had been killed by the wealthy landowning and monied classes, held a concert and campout the night before President Gerald Ford was to arrive by helicopter on April 19^th, the date of the battle that sparked the revolutionary war. (Ironically, their logo used the image on the historic Gadsden flag with the coiled rattlesnake, bearing the warning, “Don’t Tread on Me,” re-appropriated a generation later by the extreme right-wing Tea Party, which seeks to revive a very differently-remembered idea of freedom.)

protestors at the Old North Bridge, held back by police (contrariansview.org)

I can’t remember much of the day except the large crowd, the celebratory spirit, and the 40,000 protestors surging over the Old North Bridge as the President landed. Afterwards, when the tidal wave of people had receded, we stayed behind to help with the clean-up of Buttrick Field, where Andrew picked up a knife from among the debris. It was a fisherman’s knife, with the image of a fish inlaid into the handle and an implement for filleting among its multitude of fold-out tools. We had no way of identifying its rightful owners, so we kept it to commemorate that day, and used it on many a camping trip. We may still have it hidden away at the bottom of a drawer somewhere, but I haven’t seen it for awhile now. Perhaps we accidentally left it behind on the banks of another river, and it has passed into the hands of new owners who treasure it as once we did.

White Pond, Concord (50swims.blogspot.com)

The last object was actually re-found: long given up for lost, it was miraculously restored to me. We were living in Concord, in my in-laws’ cottage perched on the steeply sloping shore of White Pond, a deep and ancient body of water mentioned by Henry David Thoreau in Walden, and reputedly connected to Walden Pond by an underground spring. The pond’s water level fluctuated over the years, so that sometimes the water lapped up under our boardwalk and at other times receded so that there was quite a wide strip of sandy beach. One year, after a swim in the pond, I discovered that I had lost my favorite necklace, a long steely-metallic chain hung with cascades of tiny sequin-like discs that I used to wear looped twice or three times around my neck. After looking everywhere for it, I concluded sadly that I must have dropped it in the water, where it would have sunk irretrievably into the primeval mud that lined the bottom, sixty feet deep in places. Years went by and although I looked for a replacement, I never found another necklace like that one. Then, late one summer, when the water was at a lower ebb than others, I was sitting idly on the boardwalk, dangling my legs over the edge, when I saw something glinting in the sunlight through a crack in one of its loose old planks. Prying up the board, I reached carefully in, thinking perhaps to pick out a jagged piece of broken glass. Imagine my surprise and delight when I found my beloved necklace, a little tarnished, but still amazingly intact after so many years! It had not been lost after all, but had been lying in the shallows under the boardwalk all along, where I must have walked over it a thousand times.

Perhaps I do know why these found objects mean so much to me. Each of them holds within it the luminous spirit of its time and place, and of the people with whom I associate it. My family, having moved so frequently and so far across three continents, has had to leave almost everything and everyone behind every time. Carried in on invisible currents to rest at my feet, these little things, the flotsam and jetsam of my life, are all the more precious to me because I know that they are likely to be swept away as unexpectedly as they came. But while I have them, I hold them close to my heart.

Caz from a Little Learning For Two (alittlelearningfortwo.blogspot.com)

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents