Category Archives: Festivals/Major events

Save the Turkeys

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It’s a given that every year, a week or two prior to Thanksgiving, there will be a host of stories related to food safety and the traditional turkey dinner. Inevitably, salmonella will be the villain. These stories are always framed in terms of “proper handling” and cooking your bird for a set amount of time at a certain temperature (to kill what’s most likely to affect humans consuming contaminated holiday-associated foods).

Proper handling of your Thanksgiving turkey. (NY Times Cooking)

Of course, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that industrial meat (and poultry) manufacturing in America is one hot mess. Not even addressing the compassion angle about cruelty to animals, large, factory-farming operations are breeding grounds for disease and contamination. But why face reality when it comes to meat and poultry consumption? Let’s simply wing it when it comes to cooking ole’ Tom Turkey and hope for the best.

Just a year ago, there was an outbreak of the common bacterial disease that affects the intestinal tract. Salmonella bacteria typically live in animal and human intestines and are shed through feces. Humans become infected most frequently through contaminated water or food. The outbreak linked to raw turkey products, which began in California in 2017, has now spread across 35 states and sickened 164 people.

When I was still eating animal products, I believed somehow that chicken and turkey (white meat) was healthier. The reason I believed that was due to the clever marketing done by the poultry industry and their lobbyists. It was supposedly leaner and better for me as a carnivore. That was a lie, but like most Americans, being a duped consumer was part of my red, white, and blue DNA. Continue reading →

Moving Past the Midterm

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I am a progressive, politically. I’m fine with the label, “radical,” also. There’s a tie-in to the late historian, Howard Zinn on the latter point. Zinn was a man who I admired and I’m glad Mark and got to hear him speak at Bates College one year during his Wheaton years, when he was home for Thanksgiving.

Tuesday’s election results are being interpreted in a myriad manner of ways. Much of the parsing of the final tallies of voter’s choices land along a narrow ideological divide. While certainly someone who can be called a “partisan,” Ari Melber’s trenchant analysis on MSNBC nailed it, IMHO. Spin it however you want: it was a historic night!

Tuesday was a historic night for Democrats.

For those deniers of “blue waves” or believers who thought Beto might win in Texas, a state redder than a ripe tomato, Wednesday morning delivered disappointment. If you were hoping for something less—simply restoring some check on the Orange-Menace-in-Chief—then you might be okay with the outcome. Of course, being the narcissist that he is, The Trumpinator made his push for Republicans what some were calling “a referendum.” As he told one reporter, “In a sense, I am on the ticket,” said The Donald following one of his rallies.

Sharice Davids, left, celebrates with mother, Tuesday night. (Jim Lo Scalzo photo)

Continue reading →

Dad Goes For a Drive

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I spent most of Sunday driving across the Allegheny Mountains, passing through rural villages and hollers. At times the sheer natural magnitude left me breathless. Mountains symbolize something bigger than ourselves. When I’m in their shadow, I’m left humbled. It helps me to realize how insignificant I am.

Along backcountry highways, I knew that here, many supported Donald Trump. It was also impossible not to notice numerous gun shops and signs trumpeting patriotism. Being on the road is a reminder that we are living in a collection of states where people hold contrary views, with little to bridge the divide. I’m not sure I see that story ending well.

This sign should read, “Trump Country.”

Passing through the land of guns, God, and glory.

Late in the afternoon, I found PA-641. This is the road where Mark began walking after crossing the river from Harrisburg. He stopped at The Healthy Grocer. Continue reading →

Always a Father

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Death affects people in  various ways. If you are a parent, where does the role you’ve occupied for more than three decades go? Are you still a father (or a mother)?

Last year on Father’s Day, we drove down to Providence and retraced the beginning of Mark’s walk when he left his house on Pleasant Street, setting out on what would be his final walk. A friend of his, James, helped us figure out the steps Mark took as he left his beloved city. A small group of friends and co-workers walked out to a point on the city’s bike walking trail and turned back. We walked nearly 11 miles.

Mark, in addition to being an award-winning poet, activist, and a one-in-a-million son, also collected geography, while passing through places in Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania. He reached Zanesville in Ohio. He got on a bus. He’d concocted a plan designed to subvert the coming of winter and what that meant to his bare feet. It was the only way he could come up with for continuing to walk. It seemed like a brilliant idea. Hell, it was a brilliant idea!. How could he know that the Greyhound was taking him south was actually transporting him closer to something dark and tragic waiting for him in Florida’s Panhandle? Continue reading →

The Sociological Thread

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Mary was going through some old boxes that had cards, letters, and other assorted paperwork. She has resumed efforts at downsizing that began prior to our move back in 2016.

Some of the boxes contained letters from her mom, sent during college. When we were both off at school back in the day, letters (not text or social media) were how parents communicated with their children who were off at school if they cared about remaining in-touch.

Yesterday was yet another sad holiday. I felt inadequate, knowing her sense of loss as a mother whose son was killed: she also lost her mom last fall, so the day was particularly tough for her. I’ll experience something similar on Father’s Day. Life is never the same for parents who’ve lost an adult child, and not everyone is celebratory on days like these.

An item Mary dug out related to me was an old book report. I’m not sure what I wrote it for (most likely a freshman English class at UMO). It was on Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain.

Reporting out on “Huckleberry Finn” (circa 1980 or 1981)

Reading through my writing from the past was interesting. It doesn’t quite match up to my writing today, but there were signature items in this 300-word review that made me smile.

In the report, I managed to report-out on the “sociological thread” running through Twain’s signature work. Apparently, my interest in that method of analyzing writing was present back in 1980 or 1981.

I wrote this:

His (Twain’s) creation of Huck Finn, the uncouth, ignorant character at the heart of the book, captured the hearts of countless readers. This is something in its own right. Twain goes a step further, though, and delves into the sociological makeup of Americans at this time period.

I’d  rewrite this paragraph today so that it reads a bit “smoother,” but I obviously had cultivated an eye for the “sociological,” because it was there, back in my late teens.

A Month of Poems

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April is National Poetry Month. Thirty days for celebrating words, wordsmiths, and the poets who subvert the status quo.

Do you think Donald Trump reads poetry? Maybe he should put the Twitter down and pick up some Walt Whitman. Whitman wrote,

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

Mark was a poet, an award-winning one. While he was out walking across America for something bigger than himself, he was writing poems, like this one: Continue reading →

Easter: Just Another Sad Holiday

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Today is Easter Sunday. Some of you got up and went to a sunrise service. I used to like these. Being outside, in nature, helped connect theology to Earth. Of course, many Christians don’t care about Earth because they’re fixated on heaven.

I’m not a practicing Christian these days, whatever that means. When I was 21, I was naïve. I didn’t know any better. Thirty-five years ago, I simply accepted the false notion that “Christians aren’t perfect,” to excuse the abhorrent behavior I found inside “the fold.”

When you embrace something new, there is always a honeymoon period. Having been raised Catholic, I was attracted to the enthusiasm for scripture I found in many other believers during my initial Protestant foray. I loved the freedom that came from reading the Bible for myself, not having it spoon-fed to me by a priest.

For the Catholics I knew, Jesus wasn’t seen as a revolutionary or renewing figure in their brand of religion. That’s not to say that Catholics don’t believe in Jesus, just that salvation is a different process than “simply believe and be saved,” as I came to understand Christianity back in 1980.

My born-againism “lit a fire” in me, enough so that I left school at UMaine and walked away from my second love (Mary was my first), baseball. But, it doesn’t take long for this initial zeal to cool, or get squashed. Or, in my case, moved to another location. In this instance, it was Crown Point, Indiana, and Hyles-Anderson College.

My experiences at Hyles-Anderson have been documented here and here, as well in one of my essays in the previous book I put out, The Perfect Number: Essays & Stories Vol. 1. Things in the Hoosier State didn’t turn out as expected. Continue reading →

Another Day, One Year Removed

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According to this website, Martin Luther King Day is a federal holiday held on the third Monday of January. It celebrates the life and achievements of Martin Luther King Jr., an influential American civil rights leader. He is most well-known for his campaigns to end racial segregation on public transport and for racial equality in the United States.

On MLK Day a year ago, Mark was watching a parade in Chipley, Florida. He had six more days of walking ahead of him before he’d be hit and killed walking westward, along U.S. 90.

I started watching Mark’s videos back in October. This was just prior the beautiful event that Brown (Mark’s library co-workers and members of the school’s literary arts department) held on a perfect fall day that also happened to be Josiah Carberry Day.

Each day I watched and wrote through the fall, as I was navigating Medicare’s Annual Enrollment Period as an insurance rep, trying to supplement my income, selling Medicare Advantage insurance. I made several trips down the coast and back, working on a story about Bucksport and the closing of its mill. I began tutoring in September at Hyde School, a private boarding school nearby where Cher’s son attended, as well as Michael McDonald’s (of The Doobie Brothers) son. Continue reading →

A Year of Books (about grief)

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An annual habit of mine since I’ve been blogging has been to compile an end-of-year reading recap. Each year I’ve done it differently: some years I got really involved with my reading recap blog post. Other times, like last year (2016), I simply “dialed it in” because I wasn’t really feeling much enthusiasm for that writing “assignment.” My reading recap in 2014 still stands as “the bomb” in terms of detail, depth, and length.

Keeping a reading list is another lesson I learned from Mark Baumer. He thought it was important to keep track of the books he read and he encouraged his parents to do the same. Like him, I had a website, so I incorporated my annual reading compendium into my blog/website. Like son—like father. Mary kept her list in a journal/notebook, as well as noting it on the Goodreads site.

When Mark was killed in January, I couldn’t read for most of the next month following his death. Grief affects you in a host of ways, and I experienced a sort of cognitive dulling that made following a narrative difficult, if not impossible. This concerned me, especially if it meant that something essential in my life like reading would get snatched away from me, just like Mark had.

I was grasping (and gasping) for understanding without much success in the days and weeks following Mark’s death. This was when I picked up a book written by a friend and someone I had worked with (as had Mark) in helping her publish that book. Linda Andrews wrote a beautifully-honest book about coping with the death of her husband, Jim. Her own experiences with many people’s inability to cope with what you are going through was oddly comforting. Coming back to Please Bring Soup To Comfort Me While I Grieve offered me a much richer appreciation for what she accomplished in writing that book. It also offered me the ability to make my way back to an important practice of reading.

Grief and an existential sadness have become daily companions during 2017, the year I’d soon like to forget (Mark was killed on January 21), or perhaps be offered some kind of do-over. I spent the final 11 months looking for other books that might offer solace and support. My experience became one where books offering insight and understanding of my new landscape of grief and loss and a world turned upside-down weren’t as readily available as I would have thought they would be. Maybe a better way of articulating that is to say that the kinds of books that spoke to me, personally, weren’t something I could just look up online or pick off the bookshelf at the local library. Finding them necessitated work and investigation. I’m still not sure why. Maybe it’s that the books that dot the self-help section dealing with grief and loss simply aren’t addressing the kinds of things I’m living through. Also, as much as we try to apply a one-size-fits-all approach to “healing” the grieving, everyone grieves differently. I’m not looking to simply compartmentalize my feelings, or to make others more comfortable in my presence, which is often how it seems like we’re expected to process death in America. At times, feeling like I had to measure up to this unrealistic expectation made me angry. Continue reading →

No More Turkey

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America thrives on the superficial. Nothing screams “superficial” like the holidays. Never a fan of this particular season and its excess, my tolerance this year is at its lowest ebb.

Last fall at this time, Mark was out walking and was more than a month into his final trek. As Thanksgiving approached, we were sad that Mark wouldn’t be with us. We were also stressed knowing that in less than a week, we would be moving 26 years of stuff to a new house, having just closed on our house in Durham.

It’s only Tuesday, yet I’ve already heard three separate media outlets doing a version of “how to cook a turkey.” Are there no cooks left? Just this morning, NPR had Bon Appétit’s Adam Rapoport in to talk about getting through the next few days “fueled by anxiety,” as you choreograph the perfect family gathering around the bird. My suggestion for the person from Rhode Island hosting 27 people at her house—dump the anxiety and order out for pizza or Chinese.

One big, happy family.

If you’re not  invested in maintaining the facade, then in my way of thinking, the holidays are likely a time of dissonance and even angst. The most noble attempts at down-sizing and disconnecting from “the Christmas machine,” or something like daring to eat differently only deepens this sense of alienation from friends and family. Mark’s death has done nothing to dull the usual holiday malaise creeping in pre-Turkey Day. In fact, his being killed has only heightened it. Continue reading →