Sparkling Fall Days

These sparkling fall days called out for a response, and we answered the call, engineering an overnight on the North Shore.

The leaves were brilliant, of course. And the lake exhibited an uncanny depth of color when calm and also once the wind came up. A few days before we left, Hilary spotted a mom-and-pop place called the Islandview Resort in Knife River, just east of the candy shop—the kind of place where the cabins are up on a hill several hundred yards from the lake, on the "wrong" side of the highway, and you might say as you pass by, "Who would want to stay there?"

We booked the Honeymoon Cabin—our 47th honeymoon, I guess—and it was great. The cabins are strategically situated so they all have a view down across an immense lawn and out across the lake.

 They're old; you can almost imagine the tube-and-knob wiring under the paneling. The cabinets seem to be home-made. The chairs are wicker. Knotty pine walls. All the wood surfaces have the glow of antique shellac. The bathtub is four feet long at most.

But it was quaint and cozy, and considerably larger than many of the places we'd stayed in England. It was also much cheaper. And the view from the front deck, nestled in the midst of mature white pines and perky yellow popples, was superb.

But we hadn't gone north simply to sit around. We stopped at Hawk Ridge, which was quiet. We had better luck at McQuade Safe Harbor, where we saw a few Lapland longspurs. They're not especially striking in their non-breeding plumage, but I'd never seen one before.  The evocative name refers to their Arctic breeding range and the unusual length of their back claw.

Other afternoon stops included the Two Harbors library, which has a splendid de-acquisition shop, and the harbor itself, where we spotted some juvenile Harris sparrows and joined the crowd that was watching the James R. Barker ore boat maneuver around the breakwater and into the dock, delivering its famous horn salute—the Barker Bark—several times as it turned the corner.  (You can hear the salute on this link, not quite so sonorous as the original.)

Our dinner consisted of a chicken pasty we'd picked up at the Northern Bakery in Duluth and the remains of the BiBimBap Bowl Hilary had ordered at the Duluth Grill for lunch. After dinner we walked down the hill and across the grass to a large fire that the owners had started for guests in the firepit. Back on the deck we read aloud from the poems of T'ao Ch'ien and Louis Jenkins. Returning later to the firepit, we threw another log on the fire and watched the stars come out.

Simple pleasures continued the next morning. Gooseberry Falls State Park was teaming with visitors, but the Gitchi Gummi Trail was deserted. Out near the end of the loop we met up with an elderly man hiking alone. "Does this trail eventually take me down there to Agate Beach?" He asked. He glanced down at the beach hundreds of feet below us.

"I'm afraid not," I said. "That beach is on the other side of the river. You'll have to continue around this loop, cross the river on the highway bridge, and return to your car. You can drive down to that beach. There's a parking lot right next to it."

"My wife will like that," he said, seemingly unperturbed, and continued on his way.

In some ways the most extraordinary event of the trip was also the most unexpected. I had gone out with binoculars before dawn. The eastern horizon was glowing and it seemed like a perfect opportunity to see the comet tsuchinshan-Atlas unobstructed by buildings and trees. 

If I'd done my research I would have known the comet has swung around and is now visible on the western horizon, just after sunset. But I did see something else—the Green Ray. I had my binoculars trained on the spot where the sun was about to peek above the horizon when I saw a sudden flash of intense green. It lasted only a split-second. Then the edge of the sun appeared, a flaming orange-red.

I wouldn't have known what to call it if I hadn't seen the Eric Rohmer film The Green Ray, which came out in 1986. The plot concerns itself with a bunch of twenty-somethings trying to make the most of their summer vacations, which are mostly full of frustrations, disappointments, and missed opportunities, as I recall. Most of these kids end up watching sunsets on an ocean beach somewhere, probably in Brittany, and there's a lot of talk about seeing the Green Ray. At the time, I had no idea whether the phenomenon was real or merely a plot contrivance.

Now I've seen the Green Ray. Incredible. Hilary wants to see it too, naturally. We can add that rare event to the list of the North Shore's many enticements. 

Note: The film is currently available on several streaming platforms under the title "Summer." Easy to find if you add the word "Rohmer." (I wouldn't recommend it.)

The Lustre of the Masters

Researchers in the Netherlands have found a means to quantify a phenomenon that art-lovers have been aware of for centuries: original works of art are more engaging than copies and posters. A recent article in the Guardian reports that by fitting viewers with a helmet equipped with eye-tracking technology and MRI scans to record brain activity, these scientists were able to determine that genuine artworks generated a response ten times stronger than did reproductions.

It seems likely that these scientists fudged the numbers to come up with such a tidy ten-to-one ratio. But little matter. The difference between original and reproduced is real. But everyone knows that. Two important questions remain unasked: Why is the original more stimulating? Des such an effect necessarily mean that the piece is a better work of art?

In 1935 Walter Benjamin wrote an influential essay on this question in which he suggested that the difference lies in the unique physical presence of the original, which he referred to as its authenticity and also, strangely, as its "aura." This argument doesn't take us very far. A better answer might be that an original work of art—and especially an original painting—distinguishes itself by its luster. (An equivalent argument in the realm of music would make reference to the richer timber of instruments used in live performances.)

Luster produces a variety of effects that cannot be reproduced by offset or digital printing. For example, the red cloak in a Modigliani recently acquired by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts bristles with an energy that derives entirely by the sheen it gives off. A more subtle example of the same phenomenon might be the Pissarro landscape they own in which the mid-afternoon heat and the dust in the air can be seen, and felt, in the chalky luster on the building facade.

We spent a few hours at the National Gallery in London recently and I came away with a variety of impressions regarding those classic works we see again and again in books. The marriage scene by Van Eck was deeply engaging. The Holbeins seemed less attractive, less complex that I'd remembered them. A few of the Veroneses almost measured up to the best of the Titians. And it struck me that some of the late portraits by Van Dyke were top-flight. Who knew?

To my eye, the composition of Mantagna's six-panel Triumph of Caesar offered a new and astounding way to fill a large canvas. And there were individual faces in several of the works that conveyed great depth of character.

Over all, I came away from these galleries with a renewed appreciation of the human face. The modern galleries, in contrast, were dominated by color, often depicting landscapes clothed in pleasing but entirely artificial harmonies. But in the modern rooms of the National Gallery, I felt that I was just looking at surfaces. The Cezannes, in particular, struck me as flat, dry, harsh, generic ... uninteresting.

On the other hand, most of the artworks—prints, posters, photographs—that are hanging on the walls of our house are landscapes and domestic scenes, most of them dating from the twentieth century. I've long been a fan of the Fauves, and we have framed posters or book illustrations by Matisse, Miro, Dufy, and Braque hanging here and there, and even a N. C. Wyeth book poster of Kidnapped.

You can be moved by the shadowy penetration of a Rembrandt self-portrait in a museum without feeling the need to have such a face bearing down on you enigmatically day after day. To judge from the artworks we pass by on our movement around the house, you might wonder if we had been inspired by the remark of Henri Matisse:

What I dream of is an art of balance, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter…..a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair that provides relaxation from physical fatigue. 

A Slice of England

Why England? Good question.

It's quasi-European, but they speak English there. It's a non-stop flight, a mere eight hours across the "pond." We hadn't been there in forty-odd years. And there were a few places we'd never been that we wanted to see, especially south of London.

We set up an itinerary that included three nights in London followed by stops in Canterbury, Rye, Eastbourne, and a few villages in Dorset and Wiltshire. What we were going to do, specifically, was entirely open. As the trip began to take shape I might have mentioned Greenwich, Hampstead Heath, and Samuel Johnson's house as places I'd never been that might be interesting. We went to none of those places. Rather, we wandered London, visiting the National Gallery and the British Museum, Hyde Park and Westminster Abbey, and attended an international art song competition at Wigmore Hall—all of which places we'd been to before. So what? 

On our first morning, after dropping our bags at our B&B near Marble Arch, we wandered out into Hyde Park, where a large section of open ground had been roped off. Bobbies and military women and men wearing berets were at attention maybe a hundred yards apart. I asked one of them what was going on.

"We're going to do a 41-gun salute to commemorate the anniversary of the death of the queen." Interesting. The field was full of geese and crows; there was no artillery in sight.

A half-hour later, while we were eating some sandwiches at a café overlooking the Serpentine, a pack of elaborately uniformed horsemen rode by just outside. Time to head back to that field. We arrived to see them charge down from the north dragging cannons, set them up, and blow them off one at a time. Then do it again. And again.

On the first blast, the crows and geese took off. The smoke billowed out of the cannons and hung in the air in clouds fifteen feet off the ground. I could hear a military band playing on the other side of the field, where a crowd had gathered that seemed slightly larger than the fifteen or twenty passersby we were among.

It took a while to reach forty-one blasts, but we had time. Then they reattached the cannons to the horses and charged by us again, their swords and accoutrements clattering at their sides.

 

A few hours later, on the advice of the couple who ran our B & B, we were sitting at a table on the sidewalk in front of the Duke of Kendal Gastropub. It's situated on the triangular tip of a backstreet intersection in quiet Connaught Village, a neighborhood just north of Hyde Park that I'd never heard of until I looked it up just now. The streets here are lined with tiny shops—cheese, patisserie, fresh flowers—and "ethnic" cafés, including a Persian "tapas" restaurant and two Iraqi places. On our plates, fish and chips and a fresh Greek salad. People were conversing in twos and threes at nearby tables over beer or wine. Bicycles and cars whizzed by. The best of European life on a mild sunny evening.   

We wandered London for two days, then hopped a train to Canterbury, a fairly large town masquerading successfully as a lively village. Lots of restaurants, street musicians, tourists ogling the impressive cathedral, and students attending one of the four local universities. Two blocks off main street things quite down. We enjoyed a peaceful walk along the river, listened to the bells chiming at some length, and attended an evensong at the towering cathedral, which was directly behind our hotel.

Another short train ride took us to Dover, where we'd rented a car. That night we were at an inn near the coast just outside the village of Winchelsea. Taking a walk across the fields at sunset we came upon a man out for a stroll with his son. Formerly the London bureau-chief of Knight-Ridder news service, he wanted to talk about Trump. Why? Why? Why? I finally had to remind him about Brexit, and said, "Liz Truss wasn't too impressive, either."

"Tell me about it," he said. "The first day she was in office, I lost ten percent of my pension."

I asked him whether there was a footpath from Winchelea to Rye, which lies a few mile to the east along the coast.

"There is; you can do it," he replied, "but it's a rotten trail."

The next morning we drove into Winchelsea, one of the few English towns laid out in a grid—it's only a few blocks long—and hunted down the house where Ford Madox Ford lived for several years early in his career. Ford's work is not well known today, but I was deeply impressed in college by his tetralogy of WWI novels that were later published together under the title No More Parades.

Here, in a nutshell, is the way Amazon describes his career.

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) was an English novelist, poet, critic, and editor. He was an international influence in early 20th-century literature. Ford grew up in a cultured, artistic environment as the son of a German music critic and grandson of the Pre-Raphaelite Ford Madox Brown. He wrote his first novel at 18 and went on to publish more than 70 works. He is remembered for Parade's End and his generous encouragement of younger writers.

For many years I was in the habit of hunting down Ford's lesser books in used-book stores, and over time I amassed quite a few, most of which now languish in a box in the basement alongside forgotten works by W. H. Hudson and George Moore. I took a closer look at one of Ford’s early travel books, The Heart of the Country,  before we embarked on our whirlwind trip across the countryside of the southern Home Counties, but it didn’t grab me. I’m reading it again now, having been there, with greater pleasure.

Our next stop was Lamb House in nearby Rye, where Henry James lived for several decades in the early twentierth century. Not large, but “well appointed,” as they say. The walls of the study ar lined with pencil scetches of those of James’s literary friends who also happened to be friends, including Ford, Kipling, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, and others.

I’m not a huge fan of “the Master,” as Ford often referred to James. He seemed to be fond of writing books about things that didn’t happen, at increasingly great length. My approach has been—the shorter the better: Daisy Miller, The Aspern Papers, The Beast in the Jungle.

I asked both of the tour guides present in the house whether they were full-fledged fans of James’s work, and neither would admit to it. I shared two quips with the knowledgeable guide in the bedroom and got a hearty laugh from both. “Henry Adams’ wife once remarked that in his later novels Henry James chewed more than he bit off.” And “I believe it was Oscar Wilde who remarked that James wrote novels as if it were a painful duty.”

But I have it in mind to give James another go … right after I finish The Heart of the Country.

In an entirely different key, we drove out the Rye Harbor Nature Reserve, a vast and impressive collection of trains through salt marshes and across beaches at the edge of the English Channel. And we saw some new birds there, including the little egret, common redshank, eurasian curlew, eurasian oystercatcher, great crested grebe, little grebe, and great cormorant.

From that point on our route was designed to take us past long-distance footpaths. England has quite a few. We had planned to walk the last few miles of the North Downs Way, following the route pilgrims used to take into Canterbury, but events intervened. We picked up the South Downs Way at Beachy Head and walked it for a few miles, high above the sea. And we joined it again thirty-odd miles inland just west of Steyning, where it proved a lot harder to hike up to it than to follow it once we reached the top of the “down.” We were overtaken by a psychiatrist and his Irish setter during our ascent who advised us as to the best way to the top, and during our subsequent trek I enjoyed chatting with a man who spends his winters in Crete about the recently concluded U.S. Open, where the rising British star Jack Draper had made an impressive run to the semi-finals.

The countryside was grand. We passed yellow fields of wheat and herds of white cattle, with blackberries in the hedgerows and red kites occasionally hovering above. And from time to time we could see the English Channel glistening on the horizon far to the south.

The most luxurious of our lodgings was Gore Farm, an AirB&B a few miles south of Shaftsbury. We were surprised when the caretaker informed us that the little cottage we’d rented, which looked out onto a plowed field surrounded by mature woods, was appended to the home of Sir John Eliot Gardiner, renowned orchestra conductor and founder of the Monteverdi Choir. That evening we sat on the terrace in front of the house with a glass of wine and watched the shadows lengthen across the recently plowed field as the sun set while listening to some Bach cantatas Hilary had called up on her phone. The next morning we walked through the woods and across the road to Fontmell Downs, the obscure but lovely National Trust holding that had attracted us to the area in the first place.

Near the end of our two-week circuit we spent some time wandering the famous landscape garden at Stourhead and exploring the Stone Age archeological sites in the vicinity of Avebury. These generally ill-formed stone megaliths are less concentrated and less impressive than the ones at nearby Stonehenge, but they’re more extensive, cover a much wider area, and are a delight to wander among. The nearby West Kennet Long Barrow, sitting on the top of a hill in a farmer’s field, is also an impressive site. The burial remains it contained have been dated to around 3600 B.C.E. 

A mile or two down the road we parked at the top of Hackpen Hill and walked a few miles on the Ridgeway Trail to Barbury Castle—not a castle at all, but an ancient grass-covered hill ringed by primitive earthen defenses.

 

Introducing Rachel Cusk

It's always a thrill to make the acquaintance of a novelist with a keen vision uncluttered by irrelevant drama and detail. But Rachel Cusk published her first novel in 1993, so I can hardly claim to be introducing her to anybody. I saw her name on the NY Times list of outstanding twenty-first century novelists and checked one of her books at random—Outline—out of the library.

It didn't take long to notice that Cusk's perspective was unusual and her prose vivid yet strangely muted We learn in the opening pages that the nameless narrator is on a flight to Athens to teach a writing course, but the first thirty pages are largely devoted to the rambling reflections of the nameless Greek man sitting next to her, who she refers to throughout the book as "my neighbor."

Subsequent chapters are devoted to a variety of similar encounters with friends, colleagues, students, and passersby, during which they say a lot, and Faye (the name doesn't appear until near the end of the book) says little. As we read on, curious and perplexed, it becomes increasingly evident that these conversations have not been shaped to produce the kind of complex plot we might expect to see at the theater.  There is no plot. Or if there is, it's a plot that hasn't come to a point of clarity and resolution in the author's head. Cusk is giving us a portrait of a woman carefully observing other people, interacting with them, listening, asking unusual but revealing questions, perhaps giving a word of advice. The judgments she makes about these people can be subtle; they're sometimes brutal, more often elusive.

The narrator, divorced, with two young sons who call her at odd times,  seems to be adrift in a fathomless world, clinging to details in an attempt to sort things out.

At one or two points in Outline the narrator offers a more detailed description of her attitude, as in this minor soliloquy delivered from the deck of a pleasure boat on the Aegean Sea.

I said that, on the contrary, I had come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible. One could make almost anything happen, if one tried hard enough, but the trying - it seemed to me - was almost always a sign that one was crossing the currents, was forcing events in a direction they did not naturally want to go, and though you might argue that nothing could ever be accomplished without going against nature to some extent, the artificiality of that vision and its consequences had become—to put it bluntly— anathema to me. There was a great difference, I said, between the things I wanted and the things that I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all.

Many of the characters that surface in the course of the narrative seem to find themselves in varying states of dislocation. For example, in one chapter the narrator meets Paniotis, an old friend, at a bar in a shabby neighborhood in Athens. A long and minutely described scene ensues of ordering wine and food, meeting other guests, listening to their stories.

I asked Paniotis how long ago it was that he had travelled north with his daughter, and he said that it was very shortly after he and his wife had divorced. In fact it was the first time he had taken his children anywhere on his own. He remembered that in the car, driving out of Athens and into the hills, he had kept glancing at them on the back seat in the rear­view mirror, feeling as wrongful as if he were kid­napping them. He expected them, at any minute, to discover his crime and demand their immediate re­turn to Athens and their mother, but they did not: in fact, they made no comment on the situation at all, not during all the long hours of a journey in which Paniotis felt himself to be getting further and further away from everything trusted and known, everything familiar, and most of all from the whole security of the home he had made with his wife, which of course no longer even existed.

It's worth pointing out that although much of the book is devoted to other people telling their stories, little of the material takes the form of dialogue. Far more often, as in the paragraph above, the narrator begins with "he said that" or "she told me that" and fills in all the details herself.

At one point it occurred to me that the novel, though entirely different in tone, bore some resemblance to the works of the Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg. This seemed like an odd comparison to me, and I was more than a little surprised to find in Coventry, a book of her essays, that Cusk has written an essay about Ginzburg. The first few lines, I think. offer an accurate description of Ginzburg's approach to life and writing, and of Cusk's as well:

The voice of the Italian novelist and essayist Natalia Ginzburg comes to us with absolute clarity amid the veils of time and language. Writings from more than half a century ago read as if they have just been—in some mysterious sense are still being—composed. No context is required to read her: in fact, to read her is to realize how burdened literature frequently is by its own social and material milieux. Yet her work is not abstract or overtly philosophical: it is deeply practical and personal. You come away from it feeling that you know the author profoundly, without having very much idea of who she is.

I read no further in that essay. Nor did I make an effort to explore the many critical pieces that have been written about Cusk in the course of her prolific career. Instead, I read Transit, the sequel to Outline, which includes portraits of the Albanian workmen who are remodelling the narrator's flat; a long description of Arabian Saluki hounds delivered by one of Faye's writing students; a dinner party at her brother's posh home in a village near Salisbury, where all the women are elegantly dressed and the children run wild; and much else.  

The third volume of the trilogy, Kudos, I'll keep in reserve for a rainy day. 

August, Cool and Beautiful

The weather gods have been too kind to us. Following a warm winter, who would have suspected we'd get a cool and beautiful summer? The ample rain has brought new life to our gardens, and even the lawn looks pretty good—at least the morning after I mow it.

The National Night Out in early August was a big hit once again on our block. It's the only time we actually converse with some of our neighbors, who are a diverse and generally cheerful bunch of mostly young and middle-aged couples. 

Hilary and I have somehow slipped into the category of old-timers; I don't know how that happened. But the eldest attendee, Elfrida, has lived on our block since 1962! I sampled  several strange, cheesy casseroles and enjoyed some piping-hot mini-wieners wrapped in bacon that were sitting at the bottom of a crock-pot.

Pleasant as it is here at home, Hilary and I have also been out and about to various state parks. On one excursion we brought our massive Grumman canoe along, elaborately strapped to the top of our tiny Carolla. After setting up camp at Savannah Portage SP we went for an evening paddle  at nearby Loon Lake, left the canoe by the landing, and returned early the next morning for another placid circuit. There was no one around. The lake was calm, and at one point  we had the pleasure of watching a family of loons drift by. You can watch them here: 

A few minutes later we came upon a pair of kingfishers who led us the rest of the way around the lake, keeping fifty yards ahead, swooping and diving from one branch to another, chattering away.  It's not the Boundary Waters, but it's a lot easier to get to.

After breaking camp we continued north, resisted the urge to revisit our beloved Meadowlands, but toured the Mesabi Range on Highway 169 from Hibbing to Tower and beyond. We ate lunch at the Sportsman's café in Hibbing, where our charming Jamaican waitress told us how she happened to settle down in northern Minnesota. We also spent some time cruising downtown Virginia, where my mom grew up.

The canoe once again proved to be useful at Vermilion State Park, where we'd rented an upscale camper cabin for the night. There isn't really much to do at that park. Trails are few, and it's impossible to see the lake unless you drive down to the landing or the smallish picnic area. But we enjoyed hanging out on the cabin deck, looking off into the trees. And once we hit the water we appreciated the park's lack of shore front development.

The camper cabins are fairly private, but the next morning we ran into our next-door neighbor, who was heading for the nearby parking lot. She and her husband had signed on to take the mail run around Lake Vermilion, by boat. (Something to consider for our next visit.)

The woman's name was Tamara Uselmann. She's a professor at North Dakota State, though the couple live in Pelican Rapids.

"You've heard of Pelican Rapids?" She seemed surprised.

"Sure. With a river flowing right through town and a nice coffee shop. It's right down the road from Maplewood State Park."

 She told us both her parents spoke Finnish at home. I told her a little about the nearby town of Embarrass, the Finnish "capital" of this part of the state. "And you probably know about New York Mills," I added.

"Yes, we know about New York Mills," she said. "We were raised there."

On our way out we stopped in at the Soudan Mine, which also serves as the park headquarters. I was hoping to get a refund for the firewood we hadn't used. While we were there, we got into conversation with one of the tour guides. He'd worked in the taconite mines for years, but had previously pursued a fairly successful career as an opera singer. Who would have guessed?

_______________________________

A few days later we headed north again to catch the Perseid meteor shower at Crow Wing State Park, this time with bikes instead of the canoe. We left in mid-afternoon, and paid a visit to Crane Meadows NWR along the way.

It was a clear night. We set up our camp chairs out in the road at midnight and looked up through a break in the trees that—just our luck—exposed a sliver of sky between Cassiopeia and  Perseus. Hilary saw the best one, a fireball that lasted several seconds. I missed that one, but saw seven shooting stars in all, for the most part bright, but short. At one point I saw two almost simultaneously in the same place, which gave me he impression that the meteor had broken apart at that moment, far above the Earth.

While we sitting out in the dark, we heard a deep, loud groan coming from the distant woods. It was a sound I'd never heard before, like the mooing of a cow, but somehow entirely different. A moose? Hardly likely in that part of the state. A bear? They don't sound like that.

The next morning we set off early on what might be the most beautiful stretch of the Paul Bunyan Trail. It runs through the woods from the park north along the Mississippi to Baxter. It seems to be mostly downhill in both directions, and there are some wonderful stretches lined with blackberries along the way.

Back at the park, we broke camp, and on our way out we stopped in to pay for the firewood we'd burned. I asked the ranger about the mysterious sound we'd heard. He paused a moment for effect, and then said, "Bullfrog."

Before turning south, however, we drove the eight miles up to Brainerd. We wanted to see what kind of development had been taking shape at the mostly abandoned Great Northern Railyard. Turns out there's a beauty salon, a gift-shop, an event center, and a outdoor-grill franchise, among other things. What interested us was the restaurant with a shady patio called Notch 8 (a railroad term for "full speed ahead"), run by the former chef from nearby Prairie Bay. The lunch special was BLT, carrot-ginger soup, and spinach peach salad with a sophisticated vinaigrette.  I would go back. 

Such excursions are vastly enriching, but there also a lot to be said for staying home. On a given day I might sit on the deck for quite a while, taking note of the slightest changes in the vegetation or watching the young robins eat the white berries off the gray dogwood shrubs, one after another, thus exposing the clusters of beautiful pink stems.

Ah! The black-eyed-susans we planted in May are finally blooming—one little blossom in the midst of a sea of tired Siberian bugloss.

 

    

Garden Tours

I had the opportunity recently on successive Wednesday mornings to visit five backyard gardens in the neighborhood as part of a U of MN OLLI seniors' program. I use the word "neighborhood" loosely here. One of the gardens was in West Bloomington, another in Bryn Mawr; one was a few blocks from the Parkway Theater in South Minneapolis, and two of the five were in suburbs not far from my house: Crystal and New Hope. All five were owned and tended by Master Gardeners, a designation reserved for those who have completed a program of instruction run by the University's Extension Service.

I haven't taken a "class" in many years. For the most part, I'd rather just read a book, proceeding at my own pace, following leads and digressions and taking a break or "dropping out" when I lose interest or another subject attracts my attention. I have a row of books sitting near at hand that I intend to get back to soon: The Beethoven Quartets; The Unity of the Odyssey; Susan Sontag: as Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh..

But seeing a garden is a lot different than reading about gardens, and I enjoyed both the variety of styles and the unstructured character of the presentations. The hosts described their efforts and offered bits of advice as they led us—a group of maybe thirty women and men—across swards of grass and along flagstone paths through varieties of hosta, for example, that would almost rival those at the U of MN's landscape arboretum.

Some of the students knew each other. One woman told me she meets every week with five or six friends, some of whom were also there, to go walking. "Where do you walk?" I asked. "We pick a different route every week," she said.

One of the gardeners had dedicated most of her yard to edibles. Her peach tree was laden with 210 peaches, she told us. And there they were! She also told us how to prepare beds to grow blueberries, described the advantages of creeping thyme as a substitute for grass, and advised us when to eat the leaves on our linden trees. (Early.) 

As we made our way around the house she paused to eat a pod off a radish plant that had gone to seed weeks ago.

"Not bad," she said.

Once the group had continued on into the back yard, I tried one myself. (Terrible!)

The highlight of the garden in West Bloomington was an impressive waterfall cascading down to a stream, under a bridge, and into a swamp lined with colorful pink Joe-Pye Weed (I think). The plantings themselves were gorgeous, but I lost interest when the woman began to describe how the waterfall actually worked--I'll never build one--and I ducked out the back.

From the master gardener in Bryn Mahr I learned why we shouldn't have planted Amur maples along our fence-line (he had planted a few himself), and what we should sprinkle on our lawn in spring as a pre-emergent inhibitor: corn gluten meal. I was happy to learn that he treated his compost pile to benign neglect, the same way I do, though he emphasized that it's important to keep it wet. And he also offered this sage advice: Never divide a hosta. I don't know why he said that, and I never got around to asking.

Before long I found myself offering authoritative-sounding advice to bystanders who wanted to know if wild ginger spread (not that much) and what color the blossoms on a redbud are (not red but pinkish purple).

On our final week we met at a house in Crystal that was build in the early 1960s. The owner described his back yard as a woodland garden, but it looked very prim and open to me. The pebbled paths occupied more space than the plants, and the patio/entertainment center, located well away from the house, was like something out of House Beautiful. All very nice ... but not the way I would do it.

If you want to see a woodland garden in all its ragged glory, come to our house. 

But isn't that one of the pleasures of gardening? You work with your soil, and your patterns of light, your budget, your level of enthusiasm, and your sense of taste. It was obvious to me that the gardeners featured in the tour were spending a lot of time on their gardens, whether in the spirit of recreation or religious devotion. I didn't see a familiar annual anywhere. No impatiens, no browallia, no ageratum.

I can well imagine that many of the students finished the round of visits inspired by a few new ideas, but also gratified to recognize or reaffirm that the garden waiting for them back at the house wasn't all that bad, either. 

And by the way, did I tell you about our new volunteer cherry orchard? Or the hummingbird summer-sweet we brought home from Gerten's the other day?       

High School Reunion

A fifty-year reunion is, by many accounts, a wonderful way to revive old friendships and jog the memory. And I could tell, the minute we arrived at the Hopkins Art Center, two hours late, that this kind of warm social interaction was in full swing. The lobby was packed, and the din of conversation was already considerable. It was clear that for many attendees, the anxieties and insecurities of youth were a thing of the past. The fact that beer and wine were included in the price of admission might also have contributed to the bonhomie of the occasion.

Many of the faces in the crowd looked to me like older, thicker, and more mature versions of the teenagers I went to high school with. I loved them all, but I didn't recognize any of them, undoubtedly because I didn't go to high school in Hopkins.

We threaded our way to the front desk to get our name tags, and the man behind the counter asked: "Lindberg or Eisenhower?"

 "Neither," I replied. "We're here to listen to the band."

Hopkins was a hotbed of rock-n-roll back in the mid-seventies. (Maybe every high school was?) At the time, Hilary's brother David was in a band called Seth that also included Steve Almaas (who went on to fame as part of the Suicide Commandos) and Jeff Waryan (later the lead guitar for Figures and other local bands). Dave played the keyboards and sometimes sang.

Recently someone got the idea of reviving the group to play at the fiftieth reunion. They got a hold of drummer Jay Peck, who had also played with Figures, rehearsed mostly remotely, and in the course of a few weeks worked up a play-list of covers that included the Yardbirds' "For Your Love," the Stones' "Under My Thumb," the Beatles "Oh, Darlin'," and a few golden oldies by Fleetwood Mac, the Allman Brothers, and other bands that were after my time.

In performance the reconstituted Seth was clean and crisp. Front-man Steve Almaas was in his element with both the bouncy bass and the lively patter, reminding the audience, for example, of the first gig the band played at a junior high dance half a century ago. Commandos guitarist Chris Osgood stepped in for one number. People danced. More often they merely chatted with friends or videoed the performance.

Hilary and I joined a group of family friends and relatives at a large table near the back, though the vibe was so infectious I spent most of the set out in the crowd, digging the music. Hey! The Yardbirds were one of my favorite bands in junior high. I can whistle the guitar solo from "Shapes of Things" even today.

Though jazz later occupied most of my attention, I also took a brief dive into New Wave rock-n-roll in the early eighties, during which time I was introduced to the Suicide Commandos, the Suburbs, the Flamin O's and other local groups. Somewhre in the basement I have a great four-minute super-8 film of the Suburbs performing live at twilight down in Loring Park. (It's probably worth a fortune.)

After the set I went up to Steve Almaas and said, "You sounded great. But I wish you'd done a favorite from Suicide Commando days: 'I Just Moved into a Haunted House.'"

"That's goin' WAY back," he replied with a laugh.

The tone, character, and even the volume of the music was perfectly suited to the evening, and the crowd of not-so-young listeners all appeared to be having a wonderful time. I'm sure David was proud to look up from the keyboard to see his two sons, both of them now fathers themselves, out in the crowd, and also his brothers Paul and Jeff, who were monitoring and adjusting the mix throughout the set. 

One final touch was the "Seth" coasters that the band had printed up, which were now scattered on tables all around the room.

_____________________

The romance of high school never dies, and it was a pleasure to be standing among women and men who had outgrown it without entirely losing it. The music brings all of that to life. 

As Hilary and I were leaving, I snapped a photo of our friends in the crowd, who by chance happened to be lined up like something out of Velazquez's "Las Meninas."