He's Back!

We signed up for the "clunkers for cash" deal a couple of weeks ago, figuring we would never again have a moment in which we could get anything like the $4500 the program offers for our 1996 Pathfinder with 145,000 miles, against a new vehicle.

After kicking a few tires, we decided a Subaru Forrester was for us. Seems a little ho-hum to me, but not only is just about every other car on the road in Vermont a Subaru, but Lacey likes it.

Deal done.

After many backs and forths as the dealer tried to figure out the intricacies of the program - and bitching bitterly about having to do business with the government, who were requiring a certificate that the old car had been crushed before it would forward the dealer the $4500 (even though the dealer was to have subtracted the $4500 from our deal), John and the Subaru dealer told us we qualify and were a go.

Yesterday, after several faxes, and a drive to Brattleboro, 40 minutes away, because the fax of my license wasn't clear enough, they submitted the final forms and assured us we would be in our new car in the next 24 hours.

This morning we woke to headlines that the program had run through all the money appropriated ($1 billion!) in the first days of the program, and the dealers had been told the program was being suspended.

I called John who said they had been told that all the deals that had been processed by today were being honored and would go through. He sounded every bit as confident as Donald Rumsfeld had when he said our troops would be welcomed on the streets of Baghdad with flowers and kisses.

A moment ago I saw an internet headline that said the administration was seeking emergency legislation that would shift another $3 Billion into the program this afternoon.

That old line anyone who has ever shopped for a car will know well, popped into my head: "Blayney, what will it take to get you into this car today?"

3 Billion bucks.

A piece by Naomi Klein in the August 2009 magazine The Progressive - reproduced on the internet by AlterNet, has raised again an issue that has perplexed me for a long time.

I first saw it in sharp relief when, during a meeting of the lay governing board of a parish in which I was pastor, the issue of how we might attract more parishioners (and money) was on the table.

As was true in all four churches in which I worked, this one was dominated by businessmen, most of whom worked in the downtown of a major eastern city, most in financial institutions.

There were a couple of marketing people, and one in advertising, and the conversation became pretty interesting and creative.

After it had gone on for several minutes, I interjected with a question: Why do we want to grow this church larger?

The looks around the table, and the silence that greeted my question eloquently expressed their opinion of my question. It was as if I had questioned a bride's virginity. (Now there's an example from the old world!) Or perhaps suggested that we all join the Communist Party.

And that was pretty much what they believed was implied by my question. And it confirmed what they had long suspected about me: that I am not merely un-American, but even more sinister, a Marxist.

Truth is I have never been sufficiently enamored of any economic system to sign on as a true believer. Because I have lived a more prosperous life than 90% of the world's people, and because I have lived in developing countries, I am grateful for what I have been able to enjoy.

But it has always struck me that most of our good fortune is due to the vast continent we came upon (and took from its original inhabitants, without paying), with its incredible resources and plenty of territory for expansion. The system we call the way we do business - capitalism - suited out circumstance pretty nicely, and provided all but an unlucky few a chance for a pretty good life. And, until recently, it offered a new start for people from the "old world" who were stuck in an old system.

But it never seemed to me that our system (which has been significantly modified over the years to accommodate changing conditions) was either handed down from the gods, nor would it necessarily work forever.

It requires opportunity for endless growth, and since we are a limited being living in a limited sphere, there had to come a time when a new system - that acknowledges limits - would hold sway.

In the case of our church, we were in a small New England town, a suburb, in which English Yankees had settled in the 17th century, most of whom were Anglicans (Episcopalians), who were at the top of the hierarchy. Understandably, a lot of those who moved into the town, who may not have been Episcopalians, were eager to join the church of the ruling group.

Now - 300 years later - things had changed. The Yankee enclave had shrunk, many other groups populated the town, and church membership was no longer a requirement for making it into the hierarchy.

Perhaps our village parish isn't a good microcosm of what has happened in the world. But perhaps it's as good as any. Through the three pastors who succeeded me, the church is shrunk further, and I know they are feeling that if only they could find the right pastor, they would grow.

Somewhere recently I read a review of a book about California from 1950 - 1970, when the state not only grew into one of the largest economies in the world, but still embodied the American dream of a chance to go to a new place, start over and live the good life. The reviewer pointed out that no one who lives in California today (as I do half the year) would recognize the happy, optimistic place described in the book.

All the search for the blame for the recent economic global collapse hides the reality that the so-called free market capitalism we have been exporting to the rest of the world, has recently become dependent on smoke and mirror economic tricks that add nothing to productivity. Unless you are in the financial business.

Naomi Klein cleverly marks the appearance of Sara Palin as the signal of the end of the world as we have known it. Plucked from obscurity by a desperate McCain, hoping the buzz would get him back in the race against the rock star Obama who was eclipsing him, Palin offered nothing more than buzz.

(That photo is of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders marching in the annual Strolling of the heifers in Brattleboro. Sanders was elected Mayor of Burlington on the Socialist ticket, then was the only Independent Member of Congress, and is now the same in the Senate.)

Klein writes that if we try to resolve this crisis by restoring the status quo - which can only be done with increasingly arcane and ultimately unproductive economic inventions, we are simply paving the way for the next, much worse, crisis.

I am not with her in signing on for some specific new economic system. But I am with her in recognizing that "drill baby drill" is not going to take us to a prosperous future.

Monday night I began to feel a familiar scratchiness in my throat.

No big deal. We had overnight guests - old friends we hadn't seen in years - and I usually run my mouth pretty non-stop on occasions like that, and end p with a sore throat.

By bedtime my nose was running, my head filling, and my limbs ached as if I had done something more strenuous than sit on the porch and gas with friends.

Yesterday I felt so rotten I took my temperature. It has been so long since the last time I did that, I had to search around for a thermometer.

100º+.

First time I have given serious thought to the possibility that I am now at the age at which something I would once have sloughed off, could do me in. I'm in pretty good shape for my age, play a lot of tennis, go on bike rides several times a week, swim.

But I have an immune system that had been at work for nearly 70 years. And these things aren't designed to go on forever.

Truth is, today, rotten as I still feel, I feel simply sick, bad cold, not terminal.

But everything takes on a slightly different caste at this age.

Makes today look pretty sweet.

Ever since I crashed my truck into an oak tree having fallen asleep at the wheel, I have been taking an alert drug the neurologist suggested when he said my tests showed that I likely have chronic narcolepsy.

It has worked remarkably well. I haven't hit a single tree in three years.

Maybe a half dozen times in those three years, along about 2 PM I have begun to feel nasty. Depressed, anxious, exhausted.

Each time, as I thought back, I realized I had forgotten to take my Provigil (love the name?) that morning.

Since then I have done some research on the internet and discovered a few things about the drug. The first is that it is often used for people who are depressed. The second is that it is sometimes used as a performance enhancer, or sometimes even for a high. It seems it has begun to appear as a street drug.

There is divided opinion about whether it is addictive.

This morning Lacey asked me how I was feeling and before I answered I did a brief inventory and decided, sub-par.

"Maybe better," I said, "once I take my happy pill."

And I had a flashback to the days shortly after my parents moved back to this country from a decade in the Philippines and weren't finding the transition a happy one. My father had a lot of autonomy in his job with Procter & Gamble out there in the western Pacific, and now found that his younger-than-him boss in Cincinnati was a constant and unwelcome presence. My mother, who had a bevy of servants in Manila, was unprepared to run a house and cook, not to mention face a Boston winter.

As I tend to when I get tired, my father got surly and difficult to live with. He finally went to see a psychiatrist who prescribed whatever mood elevator was in fashion in 1960. It seemed to work reasonably well. Recently my sister reminded me that we always checked to see if he had taken his happy pill before asking him for something.

I don't know whether I have become physically addicted to Provigil, but life is unquestionably a lot better for taking it. I guess that might qualify for emotional dependence. Maybe because I am about to celebrate - or mark - my 69th birthday, I don't feel particularly concerned.

But I sure do remember laughing at GE's duPont's slogan (I think it was duPont), "Better Living Through Chemistry."

The more likely truth is that our altering of molecular structures will be one of the key components of how we have hastened our extinction on the planet. We are able to do a lot the consequences of which are unknown.

Would you say it is nihilistic for me to look out my study window across the pond to the green hills, and be happy to be here today? Happy pills may well carry some of the reason for that.

The phoebes that nested behind the outside spots over our door laid three eggs.

Two weeks ago they hatched. We have been watching the parents ever since, going non-stop to keep those baby birds nourished. The past few days we have watched with growing uneasiness as the birds grew so large they could even move around the nest. When the parents came with food, they had to hover like a hummingbird because they couldn't even perch on the side of the nest to feed.

I asked a knowledgeable friend if it was more usual for young birds to fly right out of the nest, or to fall to the ground while they figured it out. He said the latter.

We worried about the snake that lives directly below their nest. He might find one of those baby birds a month's worth of dinner.

This morning the three young birds were nearly totally still in the nest, as if a single movement would be catastrophic. (Like the 99 men in a boarding house bed... Roll over, roll over. They all rolled over when anyone said, Roll over, Roll Over... And in the shuffle one got his neck broken)

Along about 10AM Lacey - who had been working in the garden directly beneath the nest - speaking sternly to the snake when he came out to sun himself - called to me: the birds have flown!

And sure enough.

Two weeks.

Think of it. Our newest grandson turns a year next week and we are thrilled that he can crawl.

Ever wonder about the government printing money?

Even in those long ago days when they told us there was an ounce (was it an ounce) of gold for every dollar they printed.

The theory ( I guess) was that if you lost confidence in the value of the paper, you could turn it in for an ounce of gold. I actually don't think an ordinary citizen could do that, but just the idea of it might restore confidence.

Well, we went off the gold standard several decades ago, but we didn't stop printing paper dollars.

So what makes us think they're worth anything?

Habit.

Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, who has become the Democrat Republicans have chosen to focus their ire on, asked after one of the recent multi-billion dollar government bail-outs of a "too big to fail" bank, where does all that money come from?

The dicey answer is: from the august mind of the Federal Reserve.

And who is the Federal Reserve?

A bunch of bankers and economists who meet and talk - just the way I am now - about what's going on in the country and around the world, and whether we need to print (or, presumably, possible less) money.

Not surprisingly, when things were booming, only a few spoil sports raised questions about this.

But when the bottom fell out - and the Fed began printing money at an unprecedented pace - the questions began.

What is to prevent all those dollars that were printed just to get more money into a credit system that had suddenly gone totally dry, but were unrelated to any boom in the production of anything useful, to causing inflation that will lead to any even worse crisis down the road?

The answer - which not everyone finds persuasive - is that the economy was knocked back so far that it required all that extra currency to keep us from a Great Depression. And - goes this version - the resurgence sure to come to fill the void left by the collapse, will absorb that extra money.

We'll see.

Would you think it enough to sum up your life as a time of "wonder?"

I wonder.

Here's the thing: it has become pretty clear to me that every settled opinion reached by our species is not only tentaitve and temporary, but so skimming the surface as to leave the depth of reality untouched.

God?

Certainly not as described so far.

Evolution?

A happy pass at describing having noticed things keep changing.

Atoms?

20th century phlogisten.

Look, yes I am an iconoclast, but this is not about that. This is about finding something more durable to celebrate in our brief moment here than getting it right.

My nomination?

Wonder. Before I turn in tonight, Cosmos - our terrier - and I will take a walk up into the cemetery across the road from our house, where the sparse lights of this rural place don't reach and the sky is dark. And while Cosmos pees (I may join him) I will look at Kayla's grave, where her eight year old body was laid four years ago after a truck smashed into the vehicle her mother was driving, and then up to the Milky Way, and I will wonder.

I will be standing on the as yet unopened gravesite Lacey and I gave to each other several Christmases ago.

Just a few paces from the pink stone that marks Minnie Stetson's grave, who died 20 years ago. When we tell people where we live, they say, "Oh, you live in Minnie Stetson's house."

I wonder if, decades from now someone who lived where I now live, (Oh, you live in Blayney Colmore's house) will stand on my grave? And wonder?

I have no idea whether Cosmos will wonder.

But whether he does or doesn't, he's great company when you're wondering.

Of course the CIA lies.

It is, after all, a spy agency.

Should we prosecute Dick Cheney for having obviously (as we have all known for years) broken the law?

If we want to. But not because we have just discovered some astonishing piece of news that offends our sense of democratic fairness and decency.

The requirements for living in a country that dominates the world - and, measured by our budgets, spends most of her resources maintaining that dominance - should be clear to us. We, after all, are the citizens who benefit from being so rich and powerful. We are those who fear some other country (China) seriously challenging our dominance. We stood by while our president pretended to be invading Iraq to rid the world of a dangerous dictator with weapons that could threaten the entire globe. We knew full well we were protecting our access to the oil in that region we need to keep ramping up our life, way more oil than we can drill on our own land.

Perhaps one reason this is all raising such a stir right now is some combination of Democrats feeling the oats, and our unease that the economic collapse may not only be for a long time (maybe permanent), but the life we of the middle class and above have thought our inalienable right is starting to look fragile.

I think Obama knows this, but I doubt he knows any better than anyone else, how to manage it so the whole country doesn't turn on him.

Maybe a scapegoat?

The Phoebes that have built a nest atop the spotlights above our door have hatched three chicks and are now working round the clock to give them the massive nourishment they need to grow strong and fast enough to fly before they crowd each other out of their tiny nest.

Lacey noticed that the mother and father - both of whom are on 24 hour duty - employ quite different strategies.

The male arrives with a mouthful of worm or something and pops it directly into the mouth of whichever chick happens to get its beak in his face first. Then he flies off to get more.

The female divides up her spoils equally among the three, waiting patiently for each of them to arrange itself under her, then perches on the edge of the nest watching, seemingly to make sure each of them manages to ingest what she has brought. Then she spends a little more time, pecking at each of them, perhaps cleaning them, keeping them mite free, before flying off on her next hunting trip.

The photo above is blurred but maybe you can see.

Males and females have quite different ways.

I am taking the liberty (I hope not breaking any copyright issues) of copying Judith Warner's blog from the NY Times website, because it raises what I think is a major issue for the future of human kind:

Dangerous Resentment
A couple of weeks ago, Bridget Kevane, a professor of Latin American and Latino literature at Montana State University, drove her three kids and two of their friends — two 12-year-old girls, and three younger kids, age 8, 7 and 3 — to a mall near their home in Bozeman. She put the 12-year-olds in charge, and told them not to leave the younger kids alone. She ordered that the 3-year-old remain in her stroller. She told them to call her on their cell phone if they needed her.

And then she drove home for some rest.

About an hour later, she was summoned back to the mall by the police, who charged her with endangering the welfare of her children.

“Be quiet,” she was told, as she scrambled to explain herself, and a policeman threatened, as Kevane describes it in the current issue of Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers, “that if I ‘went crazy’ on him, he would handcuff me right in front of the children and take me away to jail for the night.”

The children were fine — “smiling, eating candy” — or were, at least, until the police decided to make an example of their mom.

The city attorney who took on Kevane’s case decided to do the same thing. She refused to hear of slapping Kevane on the wrist or accepting a guilty plea for anything less than “violating a duty of care,” a child endangerment charge punishable by jail time.

Now, we can debate until we’re blue in the face whether or not Kevane should have left those three young children alone with the 12-year-olds. The pre-teens in question, it seems pretty clear, didn’t have the maturity to be entrusted with the care of younger kids; despite what Kevane calls their solid “experience” babysitting, they ditched their charges in the purse section by the cosmetics counter in Macy’s while they went off to try on some shirts, setting off the whole sorry adventure with law enforcement.

That still doesn’t mean that Kevane’s error in judgment adds up to anything like child endangerment.

The issue I want to take up today, however, is not that of tricky choices, or over- or under-involved parenting, questions that have already been discussed with much gusto elsewhere. What really sent my head spinning after reading Kevane’s story was the degree to which it drove home the fact that our country’s resentment, and even hatred, of well-educated, apparently affluent women, is spiraling out of control.

The prosecutor pursued her child endangerment case ultra-zealously because she “said she believed professors are incapable of seeing the real world around them because their ‘heads are always in a book,’” Kevane writes. “I just think that even individuals with major educations can commit this offense, and they should not be treated differently because they have more money or education,” the prosecutor wrote to Kevane’s lawyer.

Kevane reflects, “I now realize that her pressure — her near obsession with having me plead guilty — had less to do with what I had done and more to do with her perception of me as an outsider who thought she was above the law, who had money to pay her way out of a mistake, who thought she was smarter than the Bozeman attorney because of her ‘major education.’ This perception took hold even though I had never spoken one word to her directly. Nor did I ever speak in court; only my lawyer did. I was visible but silent, and thus unable to shake the image that the prosecutor had created of me: a rich, reckless, highly educated outsider mother who probably left her children all the time in order to read her books.”

This simmering resentment is common and pervasive in our culture right now. The idea that women with a “major education” think they’re better than everyone else, have a great sense of entitlement, feel they deserve special treatment, and are too out of touch with the lives of “normal” women to have a legitimate point of view, is a 21st-century version of the long-held belief that education makes women uppity and leads them to forget their rightful place. It’s precisely the kind of thinking that has fueled Sarah Palin’s unlikely — and continued — ability to pass herself off as the consummately “real” American woman. (And it is what has made it possible for her supporters to discredit other women’s criticism of her as elitist cat fighting.)

The idea that these women really should “be quiet” comes through loud and clear every time. Men, you may or may not have noticed, are virtually never accused of “whining” when they talk or speak out about their lives. When well-educated, affluent men write about other well-educated, affluent men — and isn’t that what most political reporting and commentary is? — they are never said to be limited by the “narrowness” of their scope and experience. Well-educated fathers are not perceived as less real, authentic or decent than less-educated fathers. Even professor-dads, as far as I can tell, don’t have to labor to prove that they’re human.

The idea that women with “major educations” are somehow suspect, the desire to smack them down and tell them “to be quiet” is hardly new. At the end of the 19th century, as increasing numbers of women began for the first time to pursue higher education, a campaign began, waged by prominent doctors, among others, against these new unnatural monsters, whose vital energies were being diverted from their wombs to their brains. In the last quarter of the 20th century, feminists were routinely delegitimized as brainy elitists ignorant of and unconcerned with the plight of ordinary women.

It made no difference how much work groups like the National Organization for Women did on behalf of battered or economically powerless women. It made no difference how much advocacy was done for legislation promoting pay equity (a particularly acute problem for women at the lower end of the economic spectrum) or for affordable child care. The media — then as now — was interested only in more educated, more affluent women, and so it was these women who came to define the women’s movement in the popular imagination. And it was these women, too, who came to be identified with social change, and who came to be despised when that change proved frightening and difficult.

This is why Palin — in her down-home aw-shucks posturing — is the 21st-century face of the backlash against women’s progress. This is why Kevane could be threatened and humiliated in front of her kids, menaced with jail time and ultimately railroaded into cutting a deal with the prosecution, once she realized she’d never be popular enough with local jurors to have a shot at making a successful not-guilty plea in court. (Paradox of paradoxes, as part of her deferred prosecution agreement, she was sentenced to even more education: in the form of a parenting class.)

The hatred of women — in all its archaic, phantasmagoric forms — is still alive and well in our society, and when directed at well-educated women, it’s socially acceptable, too. Think of this for a second the next time you’re inexplicably moved to put an “elite” woman in her place.

Now, it's me back again.

I'm sorry Judith Warner had to choose this case to make her point, because I find the woman's having left her kids alone at the Mall while she went home for some quiet time to work, a major dereliction of her duty. The blog doesn't give us information about a father, nor about whether that mother is likely ever to do such a thing again, but unless the court could have been satisfied that such a situation would never again arise, I think they had a duty to do whatever needed to get adequate supervision for those kids.

That being said, I think Warner's premise - about the fear and hatred of smart, powerful women, is real.

And I believe it is as useful a way into matters like environment, foreign policy and domestic politics as one could choose.

Once one begins to look at the western world through the lenses of domination and control, it isn't much of a stretch to see the policies that extend male domination as undergirding our long history.

I'll have lots more to say about this in future blog entries. Suffice it to say here that I am convicted of the role of male domination as a key to understanding both how we arrived at the culture we have today, and as explaining the violence we have mounted to keep from change.

I am male, wealthy, educated in elite schools, having spent my work career as Rector (from the Latin Rex, Regis - king) of an Episcopal churches. (More US presidents have been Episcopalians than of any other denomination).

So, why would I climb onto this hobby horse?

Because from as early as I can remember, I have suffered discomfort at being expected to be a part of the group that dominates and rules. For many years I assumed it was because I lack the talent and self-confidence that role requires. Then I questioned my sexual identity. My natural mating inclination became the potential source of a major life meltdown as restless, attractive women were drawn to things about me that were different from their Type A husbands.

Sometime in the past 20 years, reading Walter Wink and reflecting on our nation's seeming addiction to preserving her place in the world through economic and military domination, I began to connect my personal history with meta-history.

There are many pictures of the world that do not assume that every relationship must be between one who dominates and one who submits.

It may be that the breakdown of the financial system our nation has sponsored - and assumed the rest of the world would emulate - may mark the start of a new paradigm in relationships, micro and macro.

Looking at the role and treatment of women in the west - especially since women have begun to take their place among the pace-setters, is a pretty good place to begin.

My step-son is working on a book that looks hard at a piece of human existence that seems to me has no end to it.

He has been living in Aceh on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia for the past couple of years. His wife worked with Mercy Corps helping people devastated by the horrendous tsunami to begin rebuilding their lives.

Our son is a free lance writer. He began talking with a group of international scientists who are studying the place where they believe they can predict the next tsunami - likely bigger than the last - and likely within the next 30 years. They have been talking with people who live in the path, trying to begin thinking about preparing, maybe even moving.

He also has been talking with the local people.

His book is about the unwillingness - or inability - of people to redraw their lives in light of an impending disaster.

It would be easy for westerners to scorn Islamic fundamentalists for refusing to listen to the warnings, claiming the scientists are usurping the role of Allah, who is the author of these matters.

But I have lived the past 22 years atop the Rose Canyon fault in California, known to be active and long overdue for a major shift that could bring the entire town down the hill on which it is precariously perched, and our apartment is at sea level where the likely tsunami will hit.

All the evidence shows that we humans simply are hard wired for immediate issues, not long term. We consider disasters unusual and infrequent events, unlikely to happen in our lifetime or to us.

We're deluded, but perhaps that's a good thing.

Yesterday I was privy to an exchange between a man and a woman about her big, aggressive, scary dog.

She got the dog from a pound a couple of years ago. It frightens her friends. Her previous dog, a pit bull, once bit and punctured the tires of a friend's car when she drove up the long dirt road to their house. She had to buy two new tires for her friend.

"Why do you have this dog?" the man asked, with a big attitude in his voice. "You took the dog on a one day trial, and I remember it was a disaster. Why didn't you just take the dog back and look for a gentler, more manageable dog?"

"Look at this dog," she said. "Can you imagine anyone else going to the pound and deciding to bring him home with them? Not a chance. He'd languish in that enclosure, pacing frantically until they gave up on him and put him down."

Get it?

She has to totally rearrange her life for that dog. So do her cats, that now live closed in her green house so the dog won't eat them. And her friends who call ahead and ask her to put the dog in the house before they come.

She does this because no one else will. It is a strike for life. She brought this dog to her big spread, with woods, lake, wildlife, where the feral beast must have a happier existence than anyone would have ever predicted.

I never would, never could, make such a gesture for life.

Those two dogs in the photo are our little Norfolk terrier and our daughter and son-in-law's lab/hound mix. They have a one year old son. They rescued their dog from some place in Tennessee. Our daughter says it's sometimes like having two babies, as she tries to call her dog off the scent when she's walking her little boy through the woods near her house. When he comes to visit it's a little like having a tornado come through the house. I behave badly, and she and her husband take care to guard my fragile sensibilities. Our 10 pound terrier begins each visit as a worse host than I am, snapping at their dog whenever he goes near anything our dog regards as his. Which is everything and everyone in the house. Then they settle down and even play.

Our daughter and her husband love their dog. And he is lovable. Like their little boy. I admire their taking the dog from whatever life didn't work out, paying considerable money, and giving him more love than most of us get.

As for my friend with the scary dog. I think she's a hero(ine).

Happy Birthday America!

now try BestCommercial.asf

OK, it's dangerously chauvinistic, but it does me in.

A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world,
but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing.
- Mary Oliver (b. 1935)


********

Greta, my stepmother who died last week, and Bish, my father, who died 18 years ago, were, to use that Limey expression, chalk and cheese.

They were each 60 years old when they married, both well beyond the age at which anyone finds anyone else fascinating enough to make the futile effort younger couples do, to change.

Greta owned a cabin on a point of land on an island on Penobscot Bay many miles off the Maine coast. It had been in her family since the earliest days of the 20th century. Although she was as sophisticated and urban a woman as I have known, she loved the quiet, rustic old place and the clunker car she kept there. The shingled cabin grew moss and lichen, and suffered the wounds of a century of Maine winter.

Bish loved it equally. But he was a no nonsense businessman and he decided the neglected place needed tighter management. Greta liked it the way it was, but she wasn’t into control, so when he began drawing up plans to improve the place, she stay on the sidelines, bemused.

Having spent summers on the island her whole life, she could smell what was ahead.

Before they returned to Baltimore for winter one year, Bish drew up an elaborate set of instructions for work to be done over the winter, a schedule to be followed, and had a meeting with the one guy on the island who did this sort of work. The other 70 or so people who spent winter there, braved treacherous water trapping lobster.

Buster (I gave him that name) listened to Bish’s directives impassively, and took the work schedule Bish handed him, which Bish took to be an implied contract.

There was no contact between the island’s winter and summer residents until Memorial Day, when a few hearty Baltimoreans braved the lingering Maine winter to check on their places. Bish asked one of them to see how Buster was coming with the work on Greta’s place.

They returned a week later to tell him nothing had been done. Greta seemed to enjoy his noisy exasperation, likely anticipating the next chapter.

When Bish and Greta moved to the island the first week in July, the cabin was just as it had been when they left on Labor Day, perhaps a little the worse for an unusually snowy winter.

Bish sought out Buster, finally found him hanging out in the quasi-grocery store, trading stories with the lobstermen. Bish – usually polite to a fault – lost it. Interrupting, not bothering with a greeting, lit into Buster.

I gave you a list before Labor Day of the work you were supposed to do, and a schedule. I am appalled that you haven’t even started.

He went on like that for perhaps a couple of minutes, while Buster and the others regarded him silently, expressionless, as they might an old dog. When Bish finally paused for a breath, Buster spoke for the first time:

Guess you haven’t heard.

Heard? Heard what?

I don’t work for you any more.

Bish was even more exasperated that Greta enjoyed the story. She waited – not long – for Bish to repent, crawling back to Buster – the lone islander who did that work.

Whenever you think you can get to us, Buster, we’d be most grateful.

The work was done over the following winter.

Greta smoked, loved gourmet food, good wine, museums, symphony, all mere pretensions in Bish’s life before her. My affection for her was kindled when I discovered she was addicted to chocolate. Not any old chocolates. There was a chocolatier near her in Baltimore who not only made chocolates like no other, but began concocting special candies just for Greta. Of course they were as precious as Tiffany jewels.

Despite Bish’s scolding and shaming, Greta continued her near daily stops for whatever they had cooked up for her, bringing home a box – and a bill – that would raise Bish’s blood pressure forty points.

They fought. Well, Bish fought, while Greta looked bemused at his efforts to reform her.

A few years after they married I was visiting, Bish was in his big leather chair watching football on TV. He reached over onto the table next to him, picking up a small white cardboard box. He opened it and reached across to me. Have one of these chocolates. They’re like nothing you’ve ever tasted. They make them especially for us.

I suppose it would be specious to try to make anything of Bish – disciplined, abstemious, tight-ass – dying at 78, while free-spirited, high-living, unrepentant Greta lived another 18 years, dying finally at 96.

A few days before he died, I asked Bish how it had been being married to Greta – how the chalk had liked the cheese? By then he was weak, mostly uncommunicative, the cancer sapping his remaining energy. He smiled:

Most exciting chapter of my life.

Must have been the chocolate.