Nature's Nurture

My parents were famous gardeners—mostly vegetables for consumption and canning—later freezing. My Mom had grown up on a family truck farm in Southern New Jersey and was an expert.

Before they could afford a gasoline cultivator, my Dad tilled the ground with a one wheel hand plow. In his wake robins dared to forage for earthworms. The texture and aroma of the loam in early spring remain with me from more than half a century ago.

Into the ground went the distinctive seeds of the respective plants: carrots, beets, yellow and green beans, zucchini, lettuce, cabbage, cauliflower, and of course corn. Also into the ground went the tomato and bell pepper seedlings that had be nursed along in a hot house sash arrangement on the sunny side of the chicken coop.

Chickens scratched and clucked, laying their eggs inside in straw lined roosts. Year after year the earliest vegetables were the asparagus spears that poked from a long bed at one end of the great garden. Here there was also a compost pile of grass clippings, clean kitchen garbage, and in high summer season overgrown zucchini. When they began to ripen the zucchini hills were impossible to keep up with. (“Betcha’ never smelled a real compost pile before!”)

I didn’t go to kindergarten, Mr. Fulghum. I learned about Nature from Nature first hand, not via a little seed in the Styrofoam cup. I didn’t need to be taught wonder. It flowed from Nature. I was filled with simple awe that has proved to be abiding by the seed planted into the prepared soil, becoming fruit with new seeds in it; fruit that I ate and grew. It was a simple realization that life goes on in spite of death.

In the distance of time, it seems every day of my childhood and early youth was spent in part outdoors, wandering the woods among the trees, a cross a meandering stream with minnows, crayfish, and salamanders, up and down hillsides studded with great blue granite boulders, and into a cornfield that had once been a Leni Lenape settlement where arrowheads could be found by searching the furrows between the rows. Seasons didn’t slide by as much as they gracefully edged toward, out of and into, then feathered away from each other.

Joe's Interment

The setting: a bleak and decrepit little town in Western Pennsylvania not far from New Castle, circa 1980. The town had been an enclave for East European immigrants who worked the steel mills of the region when the steel industry was booming. It had become a place of closed storefronts and old folks left behind.

Joe, the deceased was a more recent immigrant, part of the jetsam of World War II from the region of contentious ethnic groups that became Yugoslavia. He had an old house and a dumpling shaped girlfriend who’d lived with him, a scandal in this insular community.

His only relative, a niece who lived in California with Unitarian ties, had called me in Youngstown. Niece, the girl friend, and I sat in the living area of Joe’s modest home, in the gray twilight of a bleak winter’s afternoon, drinking his homemade wine from cream cheese glasses. The strong wine warmed the belly and lessened the gloom. The niece told Joe’s story.

As the war progressed, Joe’s village was taken over by an unfriendly group of guerillas who threatened to raze and kill. Joe made an impassioned plea for mercy, declaring “Aren’t we all brothers?” His plaintive appeal saved the village.

After the war, in his new American town, Joe and a few other locals had a dispute with the town’s Catholic Church and were excommunicated. As a result they couldn’t be buried in the church’s consecrated graveyard (not to mention buried by a Unitarian minister!). But they’d made plans. The excommunicants had bought a parcel adjacent to the graveyard and as they died, one after another, the little graveyard filled up. The Church had retaliated, erecting an ugly barbed wire fence where the unconsecrated land began. The message was unmistakable, the symbolism as obvious as a crown of thorns.

As I pronounced the words by the graveside, before a handful of dispassionate people, I looked past the granite tombstones embedded with medallion portraits of the deceased, to the barbed wire fence, and beyond to the so-called consecrated land and stolid church. Clots of snow fell from a leaden sky and wind cut my cheeks.

Were the tears in my eyes from weather. Or were they from an aching grief for the inhumanity of a religion too proud of itself to simply love as its prophet had so clearly commanded?

Dime a Dip

Ellie and I lived in Vermont in 1969/70 when I went to grad school at UVM. Ellie grew up on Lake Champlain on the New York side, literally looking across the narrow waters to the Green Mountains. From the New York vantage it is easy to recognize why Camel Back Mountain (the tallest of the Green Mountains) is so named. Ellie’s family outings often ended up at a famous restaurant in Middlebury, where the poet Robert Frost, then in residence at Middlebury College, might be sighted at Sunday dinner.

I love Vermont. And forty years ago it still had an old-timey feel, here and there in the countryside.

One of my fondest memories of that era involved a late summer/early autumn meandering drive into the hill country. We happened upon a typical little town perched among the mountains, East or West or South Something or Other. The single white clapboard church with weather-vaned steeple had a handpainted sign in front: “Dime a Dip Today.”

We saw folks entering the side door and were soon following them into the familiar surrounds of a modest social hall with a curtained stage at one end. Several long tables, covered in white paper table cloths were set for supper. By the stage, another long table held large and inviting casserole dishes: baked beans, mashed potatoes, egg salad, escalloped potatos, macaroni and cheese, string bean casserole (proverbial church beans), carrot salad, ham salad, cole slaw—all the familiar unpretentious and hearty dishes of potluck dinners. Behind the food were women in bib aprons and print dresses with ice cream scoops in hand—the old fashioned ones with the thumb bail that lifts the ice cream from the metal hemisphere.

By now if you didn’t know already, dime a dip is quite literal. You choose a dish and present your plate. Your server takes her scoop to the dish, secures a scoop, inverts the scoop over your plate and releases a mound of food.

The price 40 years ago was literally 10 cents a dip; a final woman at the end of the table tallied the dips, received the money, and made change from an old metal cashbox.)

There was something fascinating, even charming about a paper plate festooned with little round mounds of food: mashed potatoes in the center, coleslaw to the side, string bean casserole next to the coleslaw, egg salad and so on.

To close the culinary circle, a slice of cake or pie was also a dime, while apple or cherry cobbler was also served by the scoop.

We vividly remember that supper--setting, sensations, and circumstances, including one year old daughter Katie, plum baby food smeared all over her face and on the paper table cover that she ripped to shreds from the perch of an old high chair the women had procured from a closet and wiped clean with a wet cloth.

Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University

I studied theology at McGill University in Montreal. Here’s how I got there.

We were living in Ottawa (1970-71) when I decided I wanted to be a UU minister. The first requirement was a theological degree. I considered either the University of Toronto or McGill. So, one weekday, Ellie, Katie (who was two), and I took the train to Montreal. I showed up at McGill’s Faculty of Religious Studies unannounced. The professor who headed the program I was interested in graciously gave me his time and walked me through the venerable Faculty building at the edge of the campus. At the end of the interview he said, rather casually, “And, oh, if you enroll, you can become a member of my College of the United Church of Canada and we will pick up your tuition.” (The United Church, the Presbyterians, and the Anglicans who’d once owned the Building, had given the property to the University and in exchange had so many “free” enrollments in perpetuity.) Talk about the kindness of strangers! It was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Religious Studies at McGill, was rich with, of course, world-class Christian scholars. It also had relationship with a Hindu Institute as well as an Islamic Institute whose founding director was an important scholar of comparative religions: Wilfred Cantwell Smith. He was unassuming in appearance (very professorial in a tweedy way) but a radical scholar, and something of a post-modernist before that descriptive was devised, who emphasized how Western biases skewed scholarship. (Incidentally, his most influential successor in comparative religion studies is Karen Armstrong, whom I featured last Sunday.)

It was in his Introductory courses on Islam, attended by a host of Muslims from around the world, that I slipped the surly bonds of my own cultural background and became freely, gladly eclectic and relatively cosmopolitan. I began to acquire and assimilate bits and pieces of what I now call “natural religion:” a religion of realities, tested by reason and experience, open to all the disciplines, not merely theology. In fact, I found theology relatively poor. (Dr. Smith once said, "Interdisciplinary studies are a ladder to get out of a hole into which the true scholar never falls.)

Summer of '69

In June of ‘69 I graduated from the University of Delaware and in September I began graduate studies in history at the University of Vermont. After my graduation Ellie and I moved to income eligible housing in Burlington. Our possessions had fit, with plenty room left over, in one of those small U-Haul trailers. Our first end tables were cardboard boxes draped with tablecloths. We were economically challenged.

Nearly broke when we arrived, we wondered how the three of us,--Katie was an infant,--might financially survive until September, when I would have a stipend as a Teaching Assistant and Ellie would teach in a Burlington elementary school.

Shortly after arriving, from a state employment office, I secured a job cutting grass in a cemetery. At lunch on my first day, I parked my decrepit gas lawn mower beneath a tree and never returned. The pay was terrible and the job awful. I thought surely there had to be better summer employment; at least nothing could be worse.

As a result I had one of the better interludes of my life. I became a ticket agent for Vermont Transit on the town square in Burlington. Vermont Transit was an interstate bus company and state law required all buses originating in Vermont to be carried by Vermont Transit. (For example, passengers on the Montreal Greyhound bus had to depart and continue on to Boston or New York on a Vermont Transit bus.) Burlington was V.T.’s home office. The terminal, on the corner of Park and Main, was a small, time-worn operation. For that matter Burlington hadn’t been gentrified yet; the terminal suited the town. Farmers in bib overalls walked the streets, along with long haired, disheveled back-to-the-land hippie parents and their wan, wide-eyed children.

I looked out from one of the two wickets at the ticket counter onto a gray-tiled waiting room with pitted chrome and burgundy, cracked vinyl benches that seated twenty or so travelers and local-loungers. It was an era long-before computers. I determined routes and fares from a phone book size tariff/schedule volume with tiny type and ran two carbon tickets through a manual ticket printer with changeable metal address plates. Floor to ceiling plate glass windows looked out to the square onto an ornate Victorian fountain that local kids had painted an astonishing electric blue. A favorite task was to announce at night, after the dispatcher had left, on an ancient chrome table microphone the departing buses and their routes: “Now loading on the Main Street platform …

From behind the ticket counter, I had a literal and figurative window on the slice of the world that was Burlington, Vermont 1969. I found that summer, while rich in Vermont lure and pregnant with anticipation for graduate school, at the very least unsettling. The imagined innocence of the Age of Aquarius was slouching toward a more sinister stage. The hippie back-to-landers and denizens of rural communes who roamed Burlington streets, to my eyes, appeared more woe begotten than romantic. Recreational drugs had taken on darker manifestations than cannabis, apparent even among backwater Vermont youth who hung around the electric blue fountain in the square. Of course, the Vietnam War overshadowed every other event that summer. But there was a succession of significant events.

Ellie and I huddled around our little black and white TV. and watched Neil Armstrong step onto the moon. I followed widely publicized instructions for f-stop and speed settings to capture my own images of the moon landing from the TV. screen on black and white film with a second-hand Argus 35 mm camera.

In the Burlington Free Press, between writing tickets for the infrequently scheduled buses, I read about the sordid Ted Kennedy/Mary Jo Kopechne Chappaquiddkick tragedy and his lame justifications for his actions following the accident; I also read about the horrific Tate-LaBianca murders in Hollywood, that would later fall on the so-called Manson Family, but at first seemed to presage more random acts of violence.

And of course in mid August I fielded last minute requests by Vermont youth for schedules and tickets to Woodstock, NY. After consulting the thick book of tariffs and schedules I concluded, as did the farmer in the familiar Vermont joke, “You can’t get there from here,” which was true because of complications of multiple bus changes for last minute Charlies.

I’m nostalgic for the tumbling days that clustered as the Summer of 1969—I lived through them as I was transitioning with my little starter family. But then and even now I think of that interlude as unsettling, disquieting, disturbing…

Wanderings

The Dune region that curves around the bottom of Lake Michigan is a source of fascination and wonderment.

Geographically, it's magical--make that spiritual in my scheme of natural religion.

I've learned it's the axis mundi of North American, where major ecosystems converge. It's no wonder that it was a labratory for modern ecological studies in the early twentieth century.

Its history and its lore, along with surviving remnants of days gone by, inspired a romance for one of the most unique regions I've ever experienced.

Ellie and I often travel through, yes through, Gary to Michigan City on US 12 & 20. For some 2o years a favorite byway stop was Andershocks in the country outside of Portage--a rambling, ramshackle farmers market, nursery, and flea market. It was as authentic as it gets--an unpretentious remnant of what once was. In the autumn there were great wooden bins of gnarly apples, piles of pumpkins, and tables of ornamental gourds and Indian corn from Indiana farms. Several years ago Andershocks closed. (Nothing lasts forever.)

In its final days, among the forlorn rows of neglected plants were little pots of "wandering jew." I bought one for a quarter and have managed to keep it alive since then from successive cuttings.

Yesterday afternoon, the sun sluicing in my kitchen widow illuminated the plant's purple leaves. I remembered Andershocks with the sweet pain of nostalgia for day trips to Michigan City and back.

Those day trips around Lake Michigan are metaphors for untold day trips we'd taken as diversion and recreation in Vermont and Upstate New York, Quebec, Ohio and neighboring Pennsylavania and West Virginia, Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin.

Hey Baby...

It was the spring of 1961. I was thirteen, feeling self-important. The world vibrated, the taut string of my being resonated in sympathy.

Dad took me on a Saturday shopping trip to Chester PA to visit men's clothing stores. The downtown was still viable. Shops lined the main streets—Market Street and Edgmont Avenue. It seemed busy—urban, a little dangerous.

We parked in a lot adjacent to the meandering Chester Creek and walked a wobbly pedestrian bridge to the downtown businesses. The few times I’d walked the bridge before, I’d been afraid of tumbling into the river.

We were walking on the shaded side of Market Street. Sun shone on the other side, bouncing off store windows. The light was thin, but bright, The air was chilled but warm where the sun shone. Down the sunny side of the street a throaty convertible, the top down, drove slowly, deliberately. A driver with slick, long black hair had one arm on the seat, the other on the steering wheel. He claimed a progressing slice of the world. The car radio blared a song of the day:

"Hey, hey hey baby!/I want to know if you'll be my girl/Hey, hey hey baby!/I want to know if you'll be my girl."

He words echoed, in my mind, if not off the buildings.

Crossing the foot bridge back to the car, I’d forgotten old fears.

God, I felt alive, that spring day when I was thirteen.