It’s The 4th Of July…

And a signature moment

John Hancock’s signature on the Declaration of Independence is nearly five times larger than those of the other 55 signatories. Legend has it that as he put quill pen to parchment he exclaimed, “I want King George III to be able to read it without his spectacles!” That’s almost certainly apocryphal but it’s a good line.

Hancock’s signing first was appropriate. He was President of the Continental Congress and at the time as prominent as any of the others who affixed their signatures to the document after his. That group included Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and two others known more today for having their names associated with…

1. Gerrymandering— a corruption of representative democracy named after Elbridge Gerry who as governor of Massachusetts signed a bill to create a partisan election district map in 1812 despite the fact that he didn’t approve of it.

2. Samuel Adams— a beer brand named after Samuel Adams, a founding father, who led resistance to British taxation and promoted drinking beer as a patriotic act in the years leading up to the American Revolution. Adams advocated boycotting all British imports and especially urged Americans to buy local brew. Why beer before tea? Adams’ father was a malt producer and he had taken over the business.

It’s not unfair to say that John Hancock’s own mark on history is primarily his signature. Although he was a nine term governor of Massachusetts (terms in the commonwealth were only for one year in the late 1700’s), Hancock has had many things named after him from towns and counties to American naval vessels and an insurance company.

But of course what’s most enduring is that a “John Hancock” today refers to anyone’s signature.

Hancock was one of the richest men in the American colonies by virtue of an inheritance from an uncle who made a fortune in trade and shipping. He was generous with his wealth and used it to finance the American revolutionary cause by funding militias, paying for their supplies and covering their debts.

By backing independence he put himself at both great financial and personal risk but Hancock didn’t get the thing he most coveted. He felt he deserved to be made commander of the Continental Army but that position went to George Washington.

John Hancock was as flamboyant as his signature. He was also vain as well as status conscious. Although not mean nor dishonest, by all accounts he had an enormous ego and a desire always to be the center of attention.

A showman, Hancock reveled in pageantry as well as ostentation from his mansions to his wardrobe. His relationships were strained with Washington and John Adams, who found his perceived self importance insufferable.

To sum things up Hancock had some of the same personal traits as the current president of the United States but with a most significant difference. John Hancock may have been a bit of a Donald Trump but he also happened to be a patriot.

For me and millions of others our country’s 250th birthday will be a day to honor our history, not desecrate it. Trump will hold a rally on America’s birthday and pay homage to himself. He more than likely will say ugly and profane things about others and brag dishonestly about whatever crosses his addled mind. He might also possibly squeeze in a round of golf. That, as they say, is par for the course for him.

Trump has put his likeness on our money and in our passports but his coin of the realm is a currency of lies and his eternal photographic image for posterity will be a mugshot. Trump’s place in our country’s history as the worst person to ever be the president of our country is secure even if he and his appointees have made the rest of us feel less so…

Those who admire Trump are misguided.

Those who enable him are cowardly.

Those who exhibit fealty to him to advance their position or increase their wealth are craven.

Those who support his administration’s policies aimed at oppressing others are cruel.

Those who take advantage of his depravity to feel permitted to project their own prejudice toward others’ race, religion and sexual orientation are hateful.

I hereby rest my case!

And may the words of Franklin and Washington inspire and guide us forward…

——————-

Graham, We Hardly Knew You But That’s B.S.!

Sung to the tune of “Just One of Those Things” written by Cole Porter for the 1935 musical Jubilee.

It was just one of those flings, just one on your list of bad things.

You’re one of the guys who now and then lies, just one of those things.

It was just one of those flights, lifted off from the ground and soared to great heights.

A trip to the sun on Icarus wings, just one of those things.

If we’d thought a bit about the end of it when you inked over that tattoo,

We’d have been aware that the rot was there and too much not to be true.

So goodbye Graham and amen. Here’s hoping this won’t happen again.

Your redemption tale is undone. The past you cannot outrun.

Just one of those things!

The link below takes you to the original recording in 1935…

Just One Of Those Things

As Time Rolls By…

Hunting in my garage for a roll of kitchen garbage bags made me think of my mortality. Strange? Morbid? Not really when you consider how large the roll of bags is that I’m talking about. It has taken years to use this one up.

I’m not sure when I bought the 400 bags on two separate rolls and now have the other 200 left. I figure we average a bag a week and factoring in the time we’re away from home, I estimate we need fewer than 50 a year. If I calculate the first 200 garbage bags have lasted more than four years, then how likely will I ever need to buy more kitchen garbage bags?

Hey, the Social Security Administration says I will but not for that much longer. I know I’m slowing down and the world is moving faster than I am. I may be in trouble.

Actually, Jo made a point about life expectancy more definitively when we bought a new car in 2023. I call our Prius a car but the salesperson at the dealership where we bought it called it a computer on wheels. Anyway, before we left the lot, he told us that we needed to have a password— a password for the car. Before I could stop laughing my wife had one.

Jo: “LastCar1”

As we drove the Prius home I discovered I needed more than a password for programming our new computer on wheels. Subsequently, I went back to the dealership for a couple tutorials. How do I connect my phone? How can I listen to the radio? How do I turn on the rear window windshield wiper? Turned out if I had looked, I’d have known there wasn’t one.

The salesperson diagnosed me with tech overload and I bet I still wouldn’t pass a Prius proficiency test without a Toyota tutor. The owner’s manual is 600 pages and not at the top of my reading list.

But there’s a bigger issue here than learning where the switch is to heat the steering wheel— that’s a major thing in Maine winter. I want my life to be simpler but of course that’s a good deal more aspirational than realistic. We boomers are living longer at a time when change is accelerating at the speed of a Formula One race car.

When I was a kid I only had to know my parents’ phone number and open the phone book or dial 411 if I wanted to know someone else’s. I used a Webster’s dictionary and a Roget’s Thesaurus and never asked questions of anyone named Siri or Alexa or Claude.

So far I believe I’m doing Ok keeping up. As Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling used to say “Presented for your consideration”, I submit as evidence my Substack. I’ve taught myself what I’ve needed to learn to create and publish it.

Of course there are things I can’t do. Amazingly, I found an electrician who came here yesterday and fixed (I hope permanently) an outlet in the garage with a circuit breaker that wouldn’t unbreak. And we just got our refrigerator ice maker repaired after I couldn’t get it to stop making ice and every time we opened the refrigerator door we had an ice rink on the kitchen floor.

Yes, I know these are so called first world problems and what the hell am I complaining about? But there are frustrations we all encounter— annoying ones —and I’ve noticed fewer and fewer of them now involve other people. That’s an issue for someone raised in a time when personal interaction was the norm and not increasingly the exception.

For instance when I call any company with a question or for help these days, a voice pretending to sound human tries very hard to get me to deal with it for whatever I need and if I had a mantra, I think it would be “Let me speak to a real person.”

Actually, I’ve worked hard at staying agitated on the inside and acting like I’m sedated on the phone. Sure, I can let things get to me but not as often as I used to so I guess I’m coping or is it submitting? As we age the difference can get blurry.

This is a long way round to studies I’ve come across recently that have found that as we get older, we get happier. Hey, I can enthusiastically say that I have. I was 63 when ABC News offered me a buyout and I sprinted out the door. Since then the past 16 years here in Maine have been the best ones of my life.

Oh, sure I can’t do some of those things I loved to when I was younger— play pickup basketball, eat a burger with fries and a milkshake, and stay awake until midnight on New Year’s Eve. But I’m happy and I say sometimes to others “Hey, I’m the luckiest person you’ll meet all day.”

How do I know that? I don’t, but here’s what I do know. At 79, and still believing that I’m thinking clearly and acting logically, I’m grateful that my energy isn’t gone even though it’s clearly depleted. And I’m thankful that my brain isn’t shot although I’m aware that the hard drive is pretty full up.

Hey, where’s that USB device to insert into a slot in my skull that will give me back my RAM (Recently Absconded Memory)? I’m not kidding.

Of course there’s another solution that might just take care of both my failing memory and the predicted upheaval that AI is going to create for almost anyone getting a job in the future. Forget college or high school. Let’s put our elementary school age children to work to help us boomers keep keeping up.

Think about it. How much does my generation know about phishing, cyber bullying or deep fakes? Can we distinguish a chatbot from a crackpot? I’m sure I don’t know as much as I think I do. Someone has compared Congressional hearings where a Mark Zuckerberg or a Sam Altman is questioned by an octogenarian akin to a grandparent asking a grandchild for help on their computer.

Change has accelerated into a hyper gear. What was new not so long ago can become old overnight. I went to a concert a few days ago and bought a compact disc—CD —with music of the string quartet that performed. A friend with me asked, “Do you have a way to play that?”

The time from invention to obsolescence has become a hell of a lot faster than the half life of radioactive isotopes and that includes job skill sets as well as products. In the 1950s there were some— Craftsman hand tools, Tupperware, Zippo lighters —that their manufacturers believed would last forever and were “guaranteed for life.”

I don’t know if any of them or anything else still has that kind of warranty today but a few years ago I changed an incandescent light bulb in the most inaccessible socket in our house with an LED. The new bulb was supposed to last for 15 years. As I screwed it in I thought, “This bulb will outlive me!” It burned out a year later.

Things may not be guaranteed for life anymore but there are projections, predictions and “Use-By” dates that now warn me that nothing lasts forever.

I risk sounding like a recovering journalist who has become a philosopher of the obvious but I think an important part in achieving happiness is accepting that life will outrun you and at some point you will begin to feel that you are being lapped.

Sure, I want to have even more than 200 kitchen garbage bags left before I leave the track and I just realized I have another item in our house that I want to outlive. It’s also in the kitchen and after using one for at least several years I just opened another.

Yes, it’s a bottle of Tabasco sauce so let’s call my race with it one to the bottom. Who will get there first? Well, a Bloody Mary a night and I’m sure I’ll win!

Oh, and since acquiring the Prius, we bought a second new car and maybe you can guess it’s password…

You can’t? It’s LastCar2.

I’m hanging in! That’s what my father said in his late 80s when someone asked him how he was. Hmm… if there is to be a LastCar3, will I even have to drive it myself?

Celebrating Cultural Milestones!

We already have more holidays than we can keep track of starting with the 11 official ones set by Congress that close federal offices, banks, the postal service and give federal employees the day off.

But there are plenty of other Presidential proclamations, Congressional designations and observances. From Mother’s and Father’s Days— which are great for florists and golf gimmick manufacturers —there are hundreds more that cover every day of the year. I have never heard of the vast majority of them and you haven’t either.

Take for example National Static Electricity Day in January which I was shocked to learn exists. And then there’s the Festival for the Souls of Dead Whales in December which sounds like a sad affair but I just learned something that has enlightened me about whales’ souls. One whale species are in fact the oldest souls. Bowhead whales are the longest-living mammals on Earth, with some estimated to live over 200 years so I’m Ok with their getting a shout out.

Most of these commemorations are obscure, ridiculous or promotional— many are all three —but I propose we create others that I think would be meaningful and even sublime. I’ve picked out one for each month that I’ll reveal in the next 12. They historically occurred on a particular day and in a specific year and I consider them important landmarks in the cultural history of America. Nearly all of them are also a good story.

So let’s start today and here is my recommendation for the new July National Cultural Landmark Holiday. As luck would have it— this July 23rd —is actually the centennial anniversary of its occurrence!

National Buster Keaton Crashes A Train Day !

Celebrating a train falling into a river may not seem like something to warrant a holiday but if it is regarded as an extraordinary and perhaps unparalleled feat of moviemaking plus a moment that happened in the early years of cinema no less, then why not?

On this day exactly 100 years ago, Buster Keaton filmed the most expensive shot of the silent film era. The scene was in what’s considered Buster Keaton’s movie masterpiece The General and here’s the setup for its role in the film…

Buster Keaton’s character in The General is a Civil War train engineer who has stolen a a locomotive of the same name. An enemy train— the Texas —is bearing down on him and after his engine crosses a bridge, Keaton— playing a character named Johnnie Gray —sets the structure on fire. As the pursuing locomotive then attempts to cross the burning bridge it collapses and the Texas takes a fiery tumble into a river.

It’s the climax of the movie and Keaton’s Johnnie Gray becomes an instant Civil War hero who also wins the heart of the woman who drove him to join the army in the first place to prove his love for her.

Kind of standard mush, no? But today it would also be— at least hopefully — unpalatable mush. Keaton is fighting for the Confederacy and has stolen the General, a Union train. The train that is chasing him that he destroys— the Texas —is also one of the Union’s.

When The General was released in early 1927 the film failed at the box office but not for the reasons you might think. Keaton’s casting the hero as a Confederate didn’t turn many heads. At that time both sides of the Civil War were often portrayed as honorable and a film favoring the losing side was apparently an unobjectionable story line.

Reviews of The General criticized it for other reasons, and particularly for too few laughs. The New York Times critic didn’t think it was funny or thrilling and Variety simply called The General a flop. It wasn’t until a Life magazine article written by James Agee in 1949 entitled Comedy’s Greatest Era praised Buster Keaton’s movies that he began to be compared to Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd and The General became recognized as one of the silent era’s great achievements.

But let’s get back to the shot that eventually was seen around the world. The location for the scene was near Cottage Grove, Oregon on the Row River. The logistics of its undertaking were nothing less than monumental.

Keaton’s crew constructed a trestle bridge more than 200 feet long and over 50 feet high at a spot on the river full of rocks and steep banks. Dozens of craftsmen built the bridge in two weeks and civil engineers constructed a dam to raise the river’s depth a dozen feet for the crash.

Such an endeavor certainly didn’t go unnoticed and on the day of the scene’s filming the town of Cottage Grove declared a local holiday and an estimated 4,000 onlookers were present on the river banks to witness the action.

Keaton certainly knew he had only one chance— one take —to achieve what he desired. He wasn’t going to be able to buy another locomotive or build another bridge and he was determined to eliminate any risks. Some of the structure’s wooden supports were partially sawed through and weakened and rigged with dynamite charges that were set off as the Texas crossed.

Keaton also had six hand-cranked 35mm cameras rolling simultaneously. However, in the finished version of The General only a single camera’s shot was the one used to show the actual collapse. Those who witnessed the scene reported that the sound of splintering lumber, clanging metal and hissing steam was deafening but of course this was the silent film era and none of it was recorded.

How much did this one shot cost? The figure arrived at was $42,000 in 1926 which is about $800,000 a hundred years later.

And what became of the wreckage left behind? For a couple of generations picnickers came to view the rusting remains of the bridge and the locomotive resting at the bottom of the Row River. During WWII all of it was removed and salvaged for iron.

There was a TV show called You Asked For It in the 1950s and its premise was just that. Viewers sent in postcards with their requests to see things on television and it could be pretty much anything. One asked for the show to visit the site of the climactic scene from The General. I actually remember watching that episode as a kid long before I saw the movie or knew anything about Buster Keaton.

Today, I assumed Cottage Grove, Oregon more than likely would be remembering Buster Keaton and celebrating the town’s being the location of this milestone event in the history of cinema. I thought there might be precedent for my nominating July 23rd to be a new national holiday. So, I called the office of the town manager. Although the mural on a wall downtown is a reminder of what took place 100 years ago, the person I spoke with knew of nothing special planned for today a century later.

At least the movie itself has not been forgotten. The General was one of the first 25 films voted to be included on the United States National Film Registry and ranks 18th on the American Film Institute’s list of America’s greatest films.

One last thought… Keaton could have faked the shot. Miniature models and trick photography had already been employed from the earliest days of filmmaking. But he didn’t and if ever the cliche “They really don’t make them like that anymore” applies, I believe it does here. So Happy Buster Keaton Crashes a Train Day!

Click on the link below to watch the scene and the shot as it appears in the film…

July 23, 1926

—————-

A “Conversation” With Claude

Ok, you might think what follows is odd, maybe lazy or even self- serving. The title of this post has the word conversation in quotes because I asked Claude, the AI assistant created by Anthropic, some questions and I’ve merely published the answers…

Me: “Is there a difference between writer’s block and feeling your subject is too big to write about or just feeling you have exhausted all your ideas and stories to write about?”

Claude: “Yes, I think these are genuinely different experiences, even though they can feel similar from the inside—that same stuck, blank-page dread.

Writer’s block is usually about the sentence, not the subject. You know what you want to say, maybe you even have the idea fully formed, but something jams between the thought and the page. It’s often tangled up with self-judgment—every sentence you draft feels wrong, so you freeze rather than write something imperfect. It tends to be episodic and can hit you on a subject you’ve written about easily before.

A subject feeling too big is a different problem: it’s not that the words won’t come, it’s that you don’t yet have a shape for the material. This happens with genuinely large or layered topics—the kind where there are six possible essays inside one idea and you haven’t figured out which one you’re writing, or what to leave out.

That’s not paralysis, it’s actually a structural problem. The fix isn’t “just start writing,” it’s narrowing: picking one thread, one scene, one question, and trusting that the smaller thing will imply the larger one. A lot of good essays about big subjects work exactly that way—they enter through a narrow door.

Feeling exhausted of ideas is different again, and honestly it’s often not really about ideas at all—it’s about attention. When you feel like you’ve said everything, it usually means you’ve been mining the same seam for a while and it’s temporarily worked out, not that the seam is empty. This one tends to respond to input, not effort: reading something unrelated, talking to someone, walking around a museum, anything that isn’t trying to produce material. Sitting down to force new ideas when you’re in this state usually just confirms the feeling of emptiness.

If I had to guess which one tends to show up in your case—given how many long, research-driven threads you keep going at once (the mandatory retirement piece, the media history cluster, Keaton, and so on)—I’d bet “subject too big” is the one that visits you most. Does one of these feel like it’s what you’re actually up against right now, or is it more of a general craft question?

Me: “I have written about things I’ve experienced or have opinions about for 6 years. The well seems dry right now.”

Claude: “Six years of writing from direct experience and opinion is a long run—long enough that you’ve probably used up the material that came easily, the stories you’d already turned over in your mind before you ever put them on the page. That’s not the same as being out of things to say. It’s more like: the free money’s spent, and now it’s actual work.

A few things that tend to actually refill the well, as opposed to just staring at it harder:

Write about someone else for a while. Six years of “I” pieces is a lot of self-mining. A profile, an interview, a piece built around someone else’s story—it uses different muscles and often loosens something. You’ve got Brian Rooney, people from the bureau, characters from the golf world, people at the Strand. Someone else’s story can be the side door back into your own voice.

Revisit old ground with a new instrument. The same memory or opinion you’ve already written about isn’t necessarily used up—you may have only mined it once, with one lens. A story about your ABC years told straight is different from the same story told as “what this taught me about obsolescence,” which is different again told as pure comedy. The well can feel dry when really you’ve just been drawing from the same depth.

Write about the block itself, briefly, and see if it moves. Sometimes an essay about not having anything to say turns into the essay. It’s a known trick and it can feel cheap, but it works because the act of writing honestly about the stuckness often surfaces the actual thing underneath it.

Consider that dry isn’t the same as empty. A well can be dry because it needs rain, not because it’s used up. Six years of writing from your own life is six years of output with very little input. If most of your reading, watching, and conversation lately has been in service of writing—research for pieces—rather than just wandering around in things for their own sake, that alone can produce this exact feeling.

Is the dryness more “I sit down and nothing comes,” or more “I have vague ideas but none of them feel like enough to build a piece around”?

Ok, this is me now talking to you— the reader —and not Claude. I didn’t answer Claude’s question but what do you think? Did Claude and I have a conversation?

And what does Claude “think”? So I asked…

Me: When I ask Claude a question and it answers me with what I consider advice and opinion can I call it having a conversation with Claude or is it something else?

Claude: It’s a reasonable question, and honestly there’s no single “correct” answer — but here’s how I’d think about it.

“Conversation” isn’t wrong. Something is happening that has the shape of conversation: you ask, I respond, context carries forward, the exchange can branch and deepen. If you’re describing the mechanics — turn-taking, back-and-forth, exchange of ideas — “conversation” is accurate enough and nobody’s being misled.

Where it gets slippery is if “conversation” implies the things it implies between two people: a mind on the other end forming a considered view, remembering you tomorrow the way a friend would, having a stake in the exchange. That’s where the word can smuggle in more than is actually there.

When I give you what sounds like advice or opinion, I’m generating a response — a synthesis of patterns, arguments, and information — not consulting a settled inner viewpoint I hold and am reporting to you. It can be genuinely useful, well-reasoned, even something you weigh seriously. But it’s not opinion in the sense of “this is what I, a person with a stake in the world, believe.”

So I’d say: call it a conversation if the word is doing descriptive work for you — describing the exchange. Be a little more careful if you’re leaning on the word to justify treating the output as you would a trusted colleague’s hard-won opinion. The output can still be worth taking seriously on its merits — is the reasoning sound, is the information right — just not because “Claude thinks so” the way you’d credit a person’s judgment.

Some people split the difference and call it something like “talking with Claude” or “working through something with Claude” — conversational in form, without claiming more than that underneath it. That might be the more honest label, depending on what you’re using the word to do.

Well, what have I learned here? I guess my takeaways are:

1. Claude likes to “talk”.

2. It uses the pronoun “I” as if it is a real person.

3. I know I’ve been writing for the most part about myself or as Claude calls it “self mining” which is an analogy I would not have thought of.

4. Whether it’s a mine or a well I will continue to dig into my past and draw inspiration from it but look beyond my own life experience to find other people and things to write about.

Ok Claude, The Pawned Accordion will learn to play new tunes!

Life In A Small Town

Despite the uninspired title, I hope I’ll be inspired to make this subject an occasional post

On Dragnet Sgt. Joe Friday never actually said the exact words “Just the facts, ma’am.” but here are a few of them about where I lived once and where I live now…

Los Angeles County, California: Population 9,700,000, Size 4,100 square miles

Knox County, Maine: Population 41,117, Size 1,144 square miles

State of California: 36,000,000 registered motor vehicles

State of Maine: 1,400,000 registered motor vehicles

So what other differences are noticeable between the City of Angels and the Jewel of the Maine Coast? There are lobster traps full of them of course. Some good and some less so. Really good pizza and bagels are about two hours away from us here in Camden. We need to drive to Portland. And Chinese food? I’m lucky that I have a couple friends who actually enjoy the kind we grew up with elsewhere which others may remember as beyond bad but we didn’t care then and don’t care now. I know there’s comfort food but is there also such a thing as nostalgia food?

Of course quality of food isn’t quality of life and in my opinion really good pizza, bagels or Chinese food is hard to find most anywhere. I believe where I live what makes life align with the state of Maine’s unofficial motto The Way Life Should Be is our size. Maine is 42nd in total population of all of the states in America. It’s just behind New Hampshire and just ahead of Montana.

Sure we may need to go to Portland or Boston for serious medical issues and a greater variety of shopping choices but two-thirds of Mainers live in communities of fewer than 10,000 people and 16 years ago when Jo and I moved to Maine and to the town of Camden— population 5,242 —that was brought home to me immediately .

When we arrived in 2010 at the house we had bought the year before, our street sign was missing. We are the only house on our street— a long driveway actually —and the woman who had built the house and sold it to us named it after her daughter. We have no proof but suspect she took the sign along with the house keys. Upon discovering both were missing, I called a locksmith and then the town office and was switched to the person I needed to inform about getting the sign replaced.

Me: “I just moved into the house on Kims Way and our street sign is missing.”

Town official: “Yes, I noticed that a while ago and ordered another one.”

A short time later when we joined the local Y, the person who read my registration form said, “I’ve been in your house.” And shortly after that at the post office the postal employee saw the return address on the package I was mailing and said, “I’ve been in your house.” An odd coincidence? Camden has a couple annual house tours for gardens and kitchens. Ours had been on the latter. Incidents like these made it clear we were not in LA anymore.

Los Angeles County has many communities— 88 are incorporated cities —with their own names from Agoura Hills to Whittier. That doesn’t even include neighborhoods like Sherman Oaks where I lived or Hollywood which certainly has an identity beyond its nine zip codes. For the most part Angelenos can’t tell you the difference between the cities of Manhattan Beach and Hawaiian Gardens except that one actually has a beach.

The four counties considered to be parts of Midcoast Maine are composed of many small communities but because there are a lot fewer of us who live in them, we know their towns and are sometimes even reminded if we should forget. Take Hope! Population 1,698. As the signs below demonstrate, it’s hard to lose Hope…

Because towns here have fewer inhabitants they cling to their identities and distinguish themselves with annual events that take place in them. There’s the Rockland Lobster Festival that was held this past weekend. There was the 4th of July Parade in Thomaston last month and Camden’s Bay Chamber Screen Door Music Festival that is about to get underway.

The Rockport Donut Festival, the Damariscotta Pumpkinfest & Regatta, the Maine Wild Blueberry Festival in Union, the Common Ground Country Fair in Unity and the Belfast Ice Festival & Ice Carving Championship are all events that their communities have attached their names to and take pride in.

Although I’m always surprised when I go to a movie or a concert how many people I don’t know, very often I run into people I do. I’m not a sociologist or a psychologist and never played either of them on TV but I am a retired journalist and think I know a little about a lot of stuff. That might make me good at cocktail party conversation but certainly not an authority on much of anything beyond my experience producing television news stories; a job that required I notice even little things.

So here’s an observation I’ve made that I think may have sociological weight and demonstrates the difference between a small town like Camden and a giant metropolis like Los Angeles.

Take a look at the the two cartoons below…

Did you notice what’s different? If not, here’s a hint. Where are the grocery carts and where are the women’s hands in each of the cartoons?

Got it?

When I get back to Los Angeles I’m always aware of the ways in which life speeds up around me. No, it’s not on the freeways. It’s in places like supermarkets where I might see it. If people in LA who know each other meet by chance while getting groceries and start a conversation, their hands often never lose a tight grip on their shopping carts even if they’ve been talking for a while.

In small towns in Maine if people who know each other decide to talk in the supermarket, not only do their hands come off their carts but they step away from them and fill the aisle. Of course they make way for others to get by. I’ve seen similar behavior here outside in the parking lot. If people commit to talk to each other, they step away from their cars to do it. And of course in a small town and likely most anywhere else, if there’s someone you see who you don’t want to engage with… well, you duck somewhere out of the way.

Do we have more time to engage with people we know here in Maine? Are we less in a hurry? Is it because we have more space? Do we know more of our neighbors? And are people who live in small towns maybe happier than those in big cities?

The answer to that last question has been the subject of a fair amount of research and the best known of these studies is one that was undertaken for nearly a decade in Canada and asked people to evaluate their well-being. During that time the survey gathered 400,000 responses in over 1,200 communities. Type of employment, level of income and education didn’t explain the community differences in people’s perception of their happiness but the size of their communities did. Those who lived in urban areas were shown to be significantly less happy than those who didn’t.

A long time ago I read the book Walden Two about a fictional idyllic community. Walden Two was small. I know our own community isn’t perfect but it is small. Maybe the book’s author who was a behaviorist might agree that I am onto something here where I live now. Here’s his advice…

“If you’re old, don’t try to change yourself, change your environment.” — B.F. Skinner

The Disassembling of America Continues

This is a revised/updated version of a post from two years ago…

When we moved into our house here in Maine I put together the last piece of IKEA furniture I ever intend to. It’s the desk I’m sitting at right now and it’s fine except for a drawer just below one of my hands I’m using to type with.

I’ve assembled a fair amount of IKEA stuff in my life and I do admire the user friendly directions for putting their furniture together. They consist of only pictures instead of the maddeningly dark alleys of words I’ve been lured down too often by other instruction guides.

This desk I tackled was a project— a sort of IKEA final exam —with fourteen pages of pictures and I thought I was acing it until…

I had completed the assembly and was about to start filling up the desk’s two drawers. The one on the left side pulled out easily but the one on the right got stuck less than halfway. Way less than half way…

I figured that I had put a screw in the wrong place and found where it was located but it was beyond my reach to unscrew. I started to remove screws in other places to clear the way but this didn’t help. Somehow, some way, the screw I had screwed up must have been screwed in much earlier in the assemblage.

I kept disassembling and the desk was no longer upright and now balancing sideways on my lap as I continued to reverse the work I had done and then CRASH!!! It escaped my grasp and dropped on the floor accompanied by the sound of cracking wood.

If you’ve ever assembled a piece of IKEA furniture yourself, then you are likely familiar with the little wooden pegs that you insert on the ends of the larger pieces of particle board to join them together. They are called dowels. My dropping the desk sheared off a bunch— broke them into pieces! I was angry and that gave way quickly to despondency.

Because of my innocent mistake I quickly looked for a scapegoat. I blamed IKEA and VOLVO and ABBA and all of SWEDEN. I asked myself what would Henrik Ibsen do? Yeah, I know he’s Norwegian but that put him in the neighborhood and I didn’t consider him an innocent bystander.

I was mentally treading water in order not to sink further. My mind, working like it does, suggested I write a tragic play with a title— A Dowel’s House. Even spell check thought it was a stupid idea.

I left the desk in a heap for two days while I fumed and considered my options.

I could call IKEA and while trying not to curse, order lots of replacement parts or even demand a new desk for free.
I could find a carpenter to take over and have him or her try to repair the damage.
I could just put the damn thing back together as best I could and live with a gimpy drawer if in fact the desk could even be resurrected to an upright condition again.

I chose the last option and have pulled out that drawer just now. For the first six inches it’s fine, after that it’s a bit of a tug…

“Going around Robin Hood’s barn” is an expression I’ve heard used to describe someone who has taken a long time to get to the point. And although I’m not aware that Robin Hood ever had a barn, I’ll plead guilty to having wandered through Sherwood Forest and confess that my IKEA experience is the setup to how I’ve been feeling increasingly about what’s happening to our country. I’ve been watching us disassembling.

Here’s the short list of some of what has been astounding and appalling…

A president who is pathologically ill and a convicted felon
Judges who have given unprecedented power to the executive branch
Appointees and advisers of remarkably dangerous and/or incompetent sycophancy
A country now populated by what has become an unimaginable number of our fellow citizens who believe an ever widening range of conspiracy theories, distrust medical science and science in general and look the other way at the chicanery, corruption and cruelty of Donald Trump.

These things are increasingly distressing to me and that’s why I’ve been remembering the moment the IKEA desk fell off my lap. It was sudden and shocking but looking back I believe inevitable. All the taking apart of what I had put together had weakened the desk to the point that it collapsed.

The United States is not a piece of IKEA furniture and perhaps equating my desk to what I’ve observed taking place in America is ludicrous. But I am convinced that we are witnessing things that I believed in and took for granted about our nation all my life being disassembled piece by piece— screw by screw.

I realize this is a downer of an analogy but hey, I’m sitting at my IKEA desk that I didn’t know was salvageable until I decided that I’d attempt to put it back together.

The desk has held up with its sheared dowels and served me well for 16 years. But here we are in the reality of 2026 and I worry that the institutions and laws that have served us well for way longer may not withstand the pressure that surely will further test them.

This past weekend Jo and I saw a copy of the Declaration of Independence that the Maine Historical Society possesses and is currently being displayed county by county in the state. It brought home quite emphatically how far we have strayed from what this nation was not so long ago.

The Declaration of Independence is a list of grievances against the King of England George III enumerating the colonists’ reasons for a total break and separation from his monarchy. Now, two hundred and fifty years later we can produce a list of many of the same grievances against our current president— the man who would be a king.

Here are a few of those grievances from 1776 that stand out as as we experience history repeating itself.…

“He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers” and “made Judges dependent on his Will alone.”
“He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.”
“He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures” and “For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us.”
“For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world” and “For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent.”

Presidential overreach is certainly not unique to Donald Trump but with a cowardly and complicit Congressional majority in both Houses and deferential, if not aligned, Supreme Court justices who have legitimized his actions, America is today experiencing what our Founding Fathers had hoped would never happen.

Can the America we’ve known that this president and his retinue are disassembling be reassembled again? Or have we already become a very different country beyond reclamation? I sure hope not.

Ella And Louis Record An Album Together Day!

We already have more holidays than we can keep track of starting with the 11 official ones set by Congress that close federal offices, banks, the postal service and give federal employees the day off.

By the time Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald made their first record album together, both had been making records separately for decades and had only cut a couple duet singles together in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It wasn’t until 70 years ago today that they went into a recording studio and made the album simply titled ella & louis.

How the two got there wasn’t exactly planned but could be a song title. How about It’s Alright with Me?

Here’s an explanation: The night before their recording session both had performed separately at the Hollywood Bowl in a concert that also included jazz greats Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson thrilling an audience of over 20,000 who packed the venue.

The program’s producer was Norman Granz who had founded Verve Records less than a year before after signing Ms. Fitzgerald to a recording contract. His plan was to build his new company around her.

The next morning Granz took both Fitzgerald and Armstrong to the newly built Capitol Records Building just north of the intersection of Hollywood Blvd. and Vine. They didn’t need to be coerced. The two knew each other’s talent and work very well. They mutually admired each other but their busy touring schedules rarely put them in the same place at the same time. This day they were and amazingly, with essentially no rehearsal, the entire album was recorded in one session.

Granz selected the songs— all ballads —and chose numbers that flew in the face of what both artists were most known for individually. Armstrong was okay with this and the album’s slower tempo was a switch from both singers’ usual upbeat show stopping live performances and recordings.

Ella deferred to Louis on all other decisions. She sang the songs in the keys he desired and in her key only if she felt it was necessary. The no preparation approach apparently made the session run smoothly with a group of elite accompanists also playing in the service of the two voices.

The musicians who Granz assembled to accompany Armstrong and Fitzgerald included the Oscar Peterson Quartet with Peterson on piano, Herb Ellis on guitar, Ray Brown on bass and Buddy Rich on drums and of course Armstrong on trumpet.

The album was an immediate success and by year’s end ella & louis ranked at the top of the Billboard Jazz Best Seller list and reached 12th place on the mainstream pop chart. A strong and rare showing for a jazz vocal album competing against the emergence of a new popular music genre— rock and roll. Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel and Don’t Be Cruel were the number one and two best selling songs in 1956.

Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong went on to record two more albums together… Ella & Louis Again in 1957 and Porgy and Bess in 1959. In both of their over half century careers they recorded hundreds of albums and thousands of songs. Their first album together is a rare musical, if not artistic accomplishment. It was praised as a triumph— a classic —when it was created and has been revered ever since.

Through the decades, other musicians have recorded their best known work at the Capitol Records Building in the studios where ella & louis was created. The list is long and includes Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole as well as the Beatles and the Beach Boys.

The circular building is today a Los Angeles landmark. When I would drive within sight of it, I thought it looked like a stack of phonograph records. The architect denied that was ever his intention and Louis Naidorf, who was 24 years old when he designed the Capitol Records Building, insisted for the rest of his life that it was a coincidence.

Here’s the playlist for ella & louis…

And here’s a YouTube link for listening to the complete album…

ella and louis

Tag: american-revolution

The Pawned Accordion 2026 (Part 3)