Across The Street and Three Centuries

If you cross the street from Abigail Adams, you can look back at the First Parish Church she adorns from the sylvan vantage point of the old burial ground. It has the calm of a spot of extreme age, well tended. There are no hard edges remaining, even on the hardest of original edges displayed there.

These were austere and uncompromising men and women that were buried here. Life was not a bowl of cherries for anybody three hundred years ago, as the mute evidence of the numerous tiny nameless markers at the foot of the parent’s graves testify. No man should bury his children, it is said. I suspect it was said recently.

The various inscriptions about the denizens here are very chaste in their praise. It was enough, apparently, to commemorate their importance to the town and the country, to single them out for mention. There are two bronze plaques from the 1920s which list the names of the local inhabitants that participated in the Revolutionary War, flanked by another listing those first hardy souls that founded the city.

The founder’s plaque has but a few names: Hancock, Adams, Quincy, Hoar. They are the ancestors of the men of those names we learn of in the history books. Hoar was a doctor, and the third president of Harvard University. The boneyard itself was set aside in 1640.

Henry Adams was born in 1583. It is useful to put that in perspective. William Shakespeare baptized his first daughter in 1583. Michelangelo was still painting the back wall of the Sistine Chapel just forty years before that. Andrea Palladio, that most influential of architects, whose Four Books Of Architecture that church was most surely based upon, was still alive in1580. When I first began working in the 1970s, I worked with people whose experience went back to before the Depression. Henry Adams and his neighbors rubbed elbows with the Middle Ages.

The inscription on the lovely gate leading into the burying ground reads: “The Mortal Shall Put On Immortality.”

Certainly that. There’s also a kind of fame, made indistinct by the passage of time, which fertilizes the grass here. We are watching the proceedings from the stands, mostly. These are the men and women who strode into the arena, and slew the beasts.

Whatever rest they’ve gotten, they earned.

Look Who I Bumped Into

I’ve only been to Europe once, but Europe is not obscure to me. In the same way that cultivated persons once used to learn French, and those of a scientific nature German, I was taught about European things while being educated. I knew how to find my way from Brunelleschi’s dome to the foot of David without directions. And yes, I know that’s a copy standing there now outside the Palazzo Vecchio.

Sometimes it seems like Europe has nothing but history. It occurs to me from time to time that most of Europe is just living in the wreckage of an earlier civilization’s works, waiting…

Never mind. I’m an American. We’re not waiting for anything. Now, it might appear to many persons in this big country of ours that nothing’s very old here. There’s no Collosseum in Quincy, where the picture is taken, after all. But just because you live in a suburb where the trees are still staked and no one’s house has been repainted yet, doesn’t mean the whole enchilada is like that. Sometimes the old sneaks up on you; you bump into it right on the street.

That’s Abigail Adams right there. That’s a monument to her outside the First Parish Church of Quincy, Massachusetts. She is that rarest of things — both the wife and the mother of an American President. But America is old enough at least to have produced two such women. That church in the background was established in 1639. Quincy is not new.

It wasn’t Quincy then, of course. It was part of Braintree, which is still right down the street if you’re interested. The city of Quincy was named for Abigail Adams’ grandfather Colonel John Quincy. And so the town is her family home, really, not those prickly men she cared for.

John Adams was not a lovable fellow, though Abigail surely loved him. In the words of Benjamin Franklin, who readers of this page know is my kind of guy, John Adams was: “Honest, intelligent, and sometimes out of his mind.” His son John Quincy Adams was about as uncompromising and hard-nosed as his old man, and gathered a few detractors himself when his presidential campaign included saying unkind things about his opponent Andrew Jackson’s wife.

Jackson’s wife died right after the election, the slur still in her ear, and it hardened Andrew Jackson’s heart; and he was already about as ornery a man as you could find in American history. I think this monument is really there to remind us how dour our lives would be without women in them, and to remind us how to behave towards each other.

They made a movie about John Quincy Adams succesfully arguing the Amistad case in front of the Supreme Court. It was a worthwhile endeavor, but it would take Lincoln to free the slaves ultimately; perhaps John Quincy should be remembered for the two most earthshattering changes he brought to the presidency: he wore long pants, and went to the bathroom indoors.

I think it’s great to happen upon Abigail right there in the street, when you’re hurtling past on the way to some hurried quotidian appointment. She personifies the importance of being well regarded as well as being respected — or feared — plus the need to cultivate as well as harvest your notoriety. And old things encountered in a new and bustling setting are terrific for framing a perspective on the trajectory of things; birth, education, toil, joy, death, legacy.

John Hancock was born across the street, two blocks down. I didn’t run into him.

A Midsummer’s Day’s Dream

What sort of a day is it out, Jeeves?

Extremely clement sir; with the promise of more fine weather to come.

Whither?

It’s in the bones somewhere. I cannot picture my forbears in any but urban circumstances; still…

I can picture some greatgrandfather in Cork, hand hammered hobnails gently scraping the cobbles, reading the paper with a pot of tea on the table in front of him. I can dream up the vision of his continental counterpart, kid boots on the pietra dure underfoot, sipping espresso and packing his pipe. They are not farmers. They are not fishermen. But…

There are few of my relatives anywhere I can name that live anywhere flat and dry. The blue thing or the green thing is always at the end of the street. I don’t know why, exactly.

I am not a born sailor. The ocean seems like a foe, more or less. It’s full of things that wish to sting me or eat me or annoy me. I rarely swim in it. And yet…

I can’t swim properly. I learned with all my compatriots, as a child, at the town pool. Old dour Mrs. Metcalf’s booming voice still rings in my ears: “Roll over and KICK!” I learned like I learned differential equations. It was required. In some tight spot it might be useful. I couldn’t picture the topic coming up all that much.

There is a restaurant across the street from the scene pictured above. It is very old, though it has changed hands many times in just the last fifteen years. They screened in the front porch, and you can idle an hour or two with a Black and Tan and a companion there. The crisp breeze off the afternoon water mixes with the variegated scents of the windowboxes and the benignant aromas of the kitchen roll forward to mix with them. The ocean only whispers at 150 yards.

If by some miracle you could bring my great great grandparents — or their great grandparents –back from their blessed oblivion, and plunk them down within ten miles of the spot pictured above, and told them in their own foreign tongues that their descendant was around here somewhere, I guarantee you they would show up at that table and say:

I knew I’d find you here.

It’s Like Bottling Water And Selling It!

We loves YouTube, if you hadn’t figured it out yet. But we have a nagging suspicion that YouTube, and many of its brethren, are not going to look like they do for very long. Because YouTube is that rarest of commodities — something that arose spontaneously while no one was paying attention much. Those people not not paying attention quash such innovations, if they can. Do you think the yeoman farmers and the landed gentry in England would have allowed the Industrial Revolution to happen if they’d have seen it coming? I imagine there were lots of suits at IBM chuckling over the dorky college dropout kid selling them software for their computers twenty five years ago.

Fame and fortune of the popular entertainment kind are exactly like a teeter-totter. There is a tipping point, and there really are only two sides of the fulcrum. On the low side, where all the wannabe and never-was and trying-desperately-to-get-back-in-the-limelight has-beens live, you try anything to attract attention to yourself. Anyone that pays attention to you is great. Set your hair on fire and and play the accordion and juggle and have cellphone camera sex and post it on every possible venue you can find.

A few make it to the high side of the teeter-totter, and oh how things change. The same person who would wax your car if you’d let them borrow your movie camera wants ten dollars for an autograph now. Copyrights magically appear important, and enforceable. Look at me! becomes: Look at my lawyer!

I can’t imagine that the following mash-up of Beatles song, photoshoppped pictures, and animations is legal if anybody wishes to push the matter. The Beatles haven’t said “look at me for free” for forty years now. But I can tell you, the following little images yoked to that delightful song has captivated my three year old for many a pleasant moment:

I Feel Fine.

Sooner or later, it’s the artists that have to ask themselves: how much is enough? And would I have the nerve to try to pry a penny from a toddler’s hand, if I was on the bottom of that see-saw?