Race to Heaven

Somewhere between Williamsport, PA and Liberty, PA,
where worship and daily prayer seemed inadequate,
the town decided it was time,
time to built a rocketship.
Blastoff.

Pecans Recollect

I spent most of the daylight hours of Saturday at the United States National Arboretum. The Lonely Planet says that this place is the least visited of all the national institutes in Washington, D. C., I’d argue that this is largely due to the distance from downtown D. C. and the difficulty of finding it. I spent almost an hour looking for the R-street entrance.

I had my bike in tow and ditched my car at the first chance. The park is nice. There are plenty of trees. (Ha.) I enjoyed the bonsai museum, the koi ponds, the boxwoods, etc., but the best attraction was the Grove of the State Trees, a rather sparse grouping of the official state trees of the fifty states. I didn’t visit all of the states; instead, I headed straight for Texas’, the pecan tree, with a plan.

It was a simple plan; I knew that if this tree were anything like the trees in Texas, its pecans would be ripe for the picking. I was a little too late. But there were some pecans still on the tree and a few scattered about the ground. I started picking them up, shedding the outer soft shell, which should have dried up naturally by now, but hadn’t because of the temperate zone, and getting to the hard inner shell that houses the fatty pecan flesh. I felt like a kid again. (Or as Low would say, it was just like christmas.)

In my youth, during autumn, pecans were a staple. We did not have a pecan tree in our yard until I was nearly 14, but the neighbors had a huge tree and some of its limbs stretched towards the edge of our property. I’d sit along the chain-link fence gathering the pecans that had fallen into our yard. After that harvest was complete, I’d watch for the neighbors to vanish and then reach through the chain-links for pecans in their yard.

At my friend’s grandparents’ house down the street, their backyard butted up against a small pecan farm. There were a dozen or so mature pecan trees evenly spaced on the farm. A few of those branches reached the side street and sidewalks. We’d collect pecans there too. At the end of the day, our fingers were stained from removing the fleshy outer shells, a mark that stayed with us for many days after.

I remember that a lot of my friends could crack a pecan with their bare hand; no aid whatsoever, I could never do this. I think it was because of my fleshy palms. My technique involved aligning two pecans perpendicularly and then squeezing with two hands. The shell cracks and then I can peel it apart. I tried that with a few of these, the flesh was much whiter than the pecans of my youth, the layered structure of the flesh was also apparent, something I must have missed completely in my youth. The taste was subdued, but definitely pecan.

Incidentally, turns out I broke several of the park rules. I can claim ignorance as I did not read the pamplet until I was back in Rochester. What rules did I break? I rode my bike through several of the paths, my hoard of pecans is illegal, and I had a picnic where I was not supposed to. I hope the nation accepts my apology.

Vantage (Washington, D. C.)

Vantage (Washington, D. C.)

Thanksgiving in Gettysburg

Gettysburg is the type of location I usually avoid, not because I dislike history, on the contrary, I firmly believe one cannot go forward without looking back. I avoid these types of places because of the tourists. A crowd of tourists pushes me to the edge of a panic attack. I draw a clear distinction between a crowd of tourists and a crowd on a major city street. Say you are in NYC, there are lots of tourists there, to be sure, but there are also a lot of locals going about their daily lives. Of all the attributes of a city, its people are the one that I learn the most from. The locals in Gettysburg are so entwined with the major source of jobs - namely, the tourism industry - that I cannot distinguish them from the masses and so it all becomes a huge tourist-dominated mess and I run away screaming. In essence, there is no town of Gettysburg, circa 2006, it is, and always will be, stuck in the period of that pivotal battle, as it has every right to, since that event was momentous. But today is different; today the people of Gettysburg have the day off from the daily wave of wide-eyed tourists. Today the people of Gettysburg are doing what every other red-blooded American is doing: watching American football, eating lots of turkey and stuffing, and eating warm apple pie. Today is Thanksgiving in Gettysburg. I have Gettysburg all to myself.

I am walking around the town square of Gettysburg. The small streets that radiate out from the town square are lined with tourist traps. I venture down a few, out of curiosity. I find each shop has a niche but they all take the form of a small museum where the exhibits are for sale. I am window browsing, reading this bit and that bit about the historical finds for sale. The breadth of relics dug up in the nearby battlefields is astounding. One place sells metal detectors, encouraging the visitor to search for their own artifacts. I can’t think of a better way to spend a family vacation, searching for treasure on the bloodiest battlefield of the civil war. I think that is a bit too macabre, even for me. A large window display full of hats takes the edge off. That and Abe.

Now I am walking about Cemetery Hill; it is cloudy, with intermittent sprinkles and silent except for distant gunfire. This is the location of the second day of the battle of Gettysburg. The Union forces had a defensive line at Cemetery Hill and Ridge and withstood the Confederate attacks from three fronts. The area has lots of monuments to various Union soldiers and majors, but the most visual reminders are the large rusted canons. They sit overlooking the valley the Confederate soldiers would have come from; it gives you an in situ view of the strategy used by the Union forces in occupying these high vantage points. The distant gunfire lends reality to my visual cues.

400 Blows

See it, that is to say, rent it, netflix it, or buy it. But once you do that, see it.

This fascinating film portrays a young boy, Antoine, aged 12, in Paris and his struggle with his parents’ questionable parenting skills, the school master’s harshness, and pressure from his peers. The kids are wonderful actors. Of course, since the film is in french, that statement should be taken with caution. Nevertheless, the two best friends, Antoine and René, and their friendship are well casted. They form this symbiotic relationship that is well portrayed in the film, I had an immediate affinity for their friendship.

This 1959 film, part of the French New Wave, is a commentary on social pressures put on youth to excel in school. Pressures that debilitate the otherwise limitless spirit of youth. A commentary as relevant now in the U. S. as it was then in France, albeit cast in a different light. I remember slight pressure on doing good in school, but it was never as dreadful as, do it or you will fail in life, which is the tone the film portrays. Instead, it was more of a laissez-faire approach with some helpful suggestions. It is fun to speculate on the source of the trends seen in today’s American young adults (16-21 years) in terms of the pressure applied during their adolescence. The pressure was definitely not education, as it was in France - which, by the way, may have been on to something, as far as I can tell after reading Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon, wherein he boasts the benefit of having his son start school in Paris while he was there on assignment.

I think the pressure was on acceptance of all others, which mangled itself into a horrible endemic, the backfire of touting everyone as unique and special. Now everyone, in thriving for acceptance, is a carbon copy, identity-less, majority or an outcast. Some might say it has always been this way, and I’d agree but I do not agree that it has been as severe as it is now. The pressure drove a wedge in the youth, pushing the socially inept to one end and the popular majority on the other end with few people in the middle. The outcome of which is prevalent in the young adults of today (16-21 yrs), who’s variations from one to the next, is slight, if it exist at all. At least in my time, yes, this a when I was your age statement, a trend in clothes was noted, but then it was always made your own, one way or the other. Not by me, of course, for I occupied the middle, with inclinations towards the socially inept.

Maybe I am only describing the narrowing of trends due to the wide reaching claws of the internet, rather than a social phenomenon of cause and effect? Or maybe I am only noticing the heavily populated fringes and forgetting that glorious attribute of being in the middle: anonymity.