Single shot

When I first moved to the Boston area in the early 1990s, my understanding of the city and its outlying areas was completely T-dependent. I knew the individual subway and trolley stops I used on my way from Malden to Chestnut Hill, for instance, but I didn’t know how these places connected above ground. When I started graduate classes at Northeastern, for instance, I’d take the Green Line from my Beacon Hill apartment to the aptly named “Northeastern” stop that let me off in front of campus…but it took my slow-witted self about a semester or so to realize the Orange Line “Ruggles” stop let me off on the side of campus where my office was located. It came as a silly surprise to realize a stop on the Orange Line could be so close to a stop on the Green: just one side of campus to the other! It was a realization I had to come to on-foot, leaving the safety of train or trolley to explore the neighborhood (and possibly get lost) on my own.

If you’ve been visiting Hoarded Ordinaries for a while, you’ve gotten some individual blog-stop views of the greater Boston area…but unless you’ve been to Boston, you might not understand how these individual blog-stations connect. So when I described Cambridge’s vintage Shell sign and freeway revolt mural as both being located at the intersection of Memorial Drive and Magazine Street, you might not have realized that these two landmarks really are so close to one another, you can shoot them both in a single shot.

 

Larger than life

On sunny days, I try to take extra pictures for a rainy day. On Sunday while I was photographing the mural on the backside of Microcenter in Cambridge, MA, I also snapped some shots of the mural on the side of Trader Joe’s, my actual post-practice destination. On sunny days, you need to save up for a rainy day, and on days when you drive to the Zen Center, you might as well stop on the way home for groceries.

Municipal murals are an interesting sort of propaganda; even more interesting are murals sponsored by a particular company. As far as I know, it’s sheer coincidence that a mural depicting the Cambridge freeway revolt is on the backside of Microcenter: as far as I know, Microcenter had nothing to do with this activism. But the mural on the side of Trader Joe’s, although painted by an established muralist responsible for other public artworks in the metropolitan Boston area, is pretty much a giant ad. If you look closely at the diverse cast of lounging locals enjoying a sunny Sunday along the Charles River, you’ll notice they’re all picnicking on Trader Joe’s products.

On one level, I have no problem with the product placements in this particular mural. The artist’s “canvas,” after all, is Trader Joe’s itself, and I’ve no doubt that the money for the project came from (yes) Trader Joe’s. If a grocery store or other business is going to paint an exterior wall anyway, why not hand a brush to a worthy artist who can put something pretty on an otherwise nondescript brick wall?

What I find interesting about corporate-sponsored murals, though, is the vision and ideals they depict. In a Trader Joe’s world, people of all ages and races enjoy a sun-drenched moment of leisure along the river. Mothers walk with children; children walk with dogs. Families and friends gather over food, and athletic types row by in their sculls. There’s a place for everyone at the “table” that is the Charles River, and there’s food enough for all. I find this brightly colored, utopian vision of a Trader Joe’s world just as tasty as any groceries I might buy inside.

I commented long ago on the amateur version of this idealistic Mural Mindset that can be found here in Keene, NH: “In our rainbow-happy world, we walk hand-in-hand with persons of all races and sizes, communing joyously with one another and with nature…” Here in shiny happy Keene, that old mural got tagged by graffiti hoodlums who presumably aren’t so happy. If your vision of Trader Joe’s, Keene, or whatever else doesn’t match that of actual locals, you might encounter some criticism…and apparently some critics carry spray-cans. It’s hard out here for a muralist.

The idealized mural view of either Cambridge or Keene reminds me of the viewbook perspective prospective students get of college campuses. In college viewbooks, it never rains or is cloudy, students of all races study and hang out together, and nobody gets sick, drunk, or expelled. Just as there’s no crying in baseball, there’s no crying in college viewbooks. No one in those pretty pictures ever gets homesick, dumped by a faraway high school sweetheart, or infected with an STD. In viewbooks, college campuses are pretty and pastoral, dorm rooms are spacious, and everyone is Best Friends with their roommate. Anyone who has actually been to college knows the real collegiate world isn’t like that, but the real collegiate world isn’t what prospective students are applying for. If a college degree is a necessary first step toward the American Dream, then a lushly illustrated Viewbook Dream is the first step toward pursuing a degree.

Blogs are more than a little like viewbooks and murals. When I showed J this picture of a larger-than-life beagle that bears more than passing resemblance to his real and life-sized one, he wondered where I’d taken it. Although J’s been to this very same Trader Joe’s, he’d never noticed either the mural on its side or the beagle included therein. Given all there is to notice during a shopping trip, on a college campus, or in a city the size of Cambridge, can we be blamed if we miss a detail here or there?

If the mere act of perception is selective–if we can’t see and notice it all, but only bite-size bits either randomly or consciously chosen–why shouldn’t we act like a master muralist, picking out, zooming in, and blowing up those details we want commemorated? I know there’s a graphic artist who Photoshops cigarettes out of the the candid campus photos that get included in the Keene State College viewbook, and I know there are details of my days I don’t mention on-blog. If you can’t squeeze everything into even a larger-than-life canvas, why wouldn’t you choose the brightest, most colorful, and rainbow-happiest images to include? Given the stocked grocery-shelf called Life, wouldn’t you add only the tastiest items to your menu?

 

Strength

Never underestimate the strength of a group of angry Cantabrigians.

As long as I can remember, there’s been a mural on the backside of the Microcenter store on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, MA commemorating the 1970s freeway revolt that is the reason why Interstate 95 goes around rather than through Boston. It might seem easy to pave a neighborhood: who in their right mind, after all, would stand in the way of the bulldozers of progress? Some twenty years before I moved to Cambridge to live for two and a half years at the Zen Center that’s only about a mile from this mural, a bunch of residents stood up to the road builders and said “Not in my backyard.” In a very real way, I owe the ongoing existence of the neighborhood that once was my neighborhood to folks I never met apart from their symbolic representations on this wall.

I was back in Cambridge yesterday giving consulting interviews at the Zen Center, a role that still feels foreign to me. I’ve been a Senior Dharma Teacher in my Zen school for four years now, but I still expect to be sitting on the student rather than the teacher cushion in the Zen Center interview room. Who am I to be giving anyone advice about anything, I wonder every time I pick up the bell that says “Next!” to Dharma room meditators awaiting an interview. On a good day, I’ll try to share a glimpse of what I’ve experienced during some eighteen years of Zen practice, and I let the person on the other side of my mat decide what to keep and what to reject. On a bad day, I take the tenuous job of “teacher” too seriously, saying more than is technically helpful and breaking the Number One Zen Dictum, “Open mouth, already a mistake.”

Spending any amount of time in meditation–on a certain level, eighteen years, eighteen minutes, or eighteen seconds are merely microcosms of the same immeasurable experience–feels a bit like standing up to an oncoming bulldozer. When I first began meditating, I’d often experience bouts of panic where I thought I’d literally die from the terror of simply sitting and watching my own karmic crap. In daily life, there are countless ways to ignore, drug, or drown out your inner insecurity, insanity, or inanity. When you’re sitting on a meditation cushion, however, you can’t reach for a drink, the TV remote, a bag of fattening snacks, or your preferred Distractor of Choice. When you’re sitting on a meditation cushion, the only defense you have against whatever you’ve spent your conscious hours ignoring is your own breath, and that’s a shield that feels as flimsy as air.

One of my favorite Zen sayings (and one I observe much more faithfully than “Open mouth, already a mistake”) is “You’re stronger than you think.” I suspect that had those nameless Cantabrigians who saved what would eventually become my erstwhile neighborhood seriously thought about how big a task standing up to a bulldozer is, they might never have undertaken it. Instead, activism starts with one action, and one action leads to another. The way you sit out a Dharma room panic attack, I’ve learned, is to use the mantra of “One more breath” like a lifeline: you can live an entire life surviving from breath to breath. I suspect the secret to a successful freeway revolt is something similar: signature by signature, you fill your petitions; moment by moment, you refuse to be moved.

Today, some twenty years after the citizens of Cambridge said “no” to the freeway that would have bisected their neighborhood, the citizens of Boston’s North End, who have lived in the shadow of Interstate 93 since the 1950s, saw a long-promised park open where the Central Artery has since gone underground. There’s one sort of strength that says “Hell, no”; there’s another sort of strength that says, “Someday, this too shall pass.” The citizens of Cambridge earned their freeway-free neighborhood; on a sunny Sunday, even Memorial Drive is closed to vehicular traffic so locals and visitors alike can walk, jog, push baby-strollers, roller-blade, escort dogs, and otherwise move motor-free down a normally busy thoroughfare. The residents, too, of the North End amply deserve the parks that have replaced the freeway there. The last time I was in the North End, I kept looking slack-jawed at the sky, shocked to see air where an ugly Artery once stood. It’s been a long time coming.

Each of us, individually, is stronger than we think; collectively, gathered into neighborhoods and united by even the smallest vision of what could be, our strength is greater than bulldozers. One breath is the merest tickle; many breaths become a mighty wind. Heaven help the power that tries to fight that strength.

This is my belated contribution to last week’s Photo Friday theme, Strength.

 

Layers

The first (and last) time I posted a picture of this faded, multi-layered Coca-Cola mural on Washington Street here in Keene was almost three years ago. At the time, I was married and leading a Zen group in this same building; now, I’m divorced and no longer lead a Zen group, only an informal meditation group on campus. This mural hasn’t changed much in the almost three years I’ve known it, but I feel I have changed a great deal, having moved from a narrow, crowded place into a happier and more expansive one.

What I love about this mural isn’t simply its age and the fact it endures; what I love about this mural is the way time has laid bare its layers. At one time, this brick wall boasted Coca-Cola’s “Delicious and Refreshing” qualities; at another, Coca-Cola was lauded for its ability to “Relieve Fatigue.” Which Coca-Cola is the better and truer version? Which Coca-Cola do you prefer? It strikes me that we as living creatures are always in process–always sloughing off layers of identity like snakes who grow from the inside out, splitting at their seams and then shedding when they exceed the limits of their own skin.

Where and who will I be in three years? What new layers will accrue, and what deeper layers will be revealed? If Coca-Cola promised to be an prognosticating elixir, I might hazard a guess…but for now, only time will tell as individual days with their translucent layers gradually unfold.

 

Happiness is…

…an afternoon chat with a friend. This photo, snapped during a daytrip to Ann Arbor, Michigan with Gary several weekends ago, is my contribution to today’s Photo Friday theme, Happiness is…. For another take on the same theme, see my January post of the same title.

 

The writing on the wall

A decade or more ago, when I was married and living in Boston, my then-husband and I spent an impromptu weekend in Montreal, where he had occasionally traveled on business. I remember precisely three things from that weekend. First (and probably at my insistence), we walked around the Parc du Mont Royal, climbing the humble hill that gives Montreal its name. Second, we went to a Saturday night hockey game in which the at-home Canadiens were beaten by the visiting Senators. And third, we walked down Rue Ste. Catherine on Sunday morning while proper matrons in church-going finery walked past strip clubs displaying full-length posters touting the earthly delights within.

Although this weekend I didn’t stroll down Rue Ste. Catherine, that image of church-going women in dresses and heels clicking past life-sized strip-club posters remains indelibly etched in my memory, an emblem of how French Canadian sensibilities differ so greatly from the puritanical dualities we are saddled with here in the States. South of the Canadian border, we Americans see sex and spirit as being irrevocably separate…and we let loose to cheer on our sports teams only when we’re sloshingly soused. At that long-ago Saturday night hockey game, there were women who were similarly attired as those church-going ladies on Rue Ste. Catherine: although passionate about sport, the Canadian fans I observed a decade or more ago weren’t smashingly drunk like the hockey hooligans you’d encounter at a Boston Bruins game. In French Canada, it seemed, people knew how to indulge their appetites both appropriately and in moderation, not fearing the bodiliness of either sport or sexuality but allowing both body and spirit their proper expressions.

I hope, over time, to remember and cherish more than three things about this past weekend’s return to Montreal, this time husband-less and accompanied by a band of blog-friends. My bloggish appetite for word and image, I think, has awoken me over time to the writing on the wall: whereas a decade or more ago I didn’t dare admit the puritanical abstinences and ricocheting excesses that marked a marriage headed toward dissolution, these days I’ve honed myself both to look and see. Montreal and cities like it are no longer his destination, places I visited as a tag-along as if travel were the ultimate Gentlemen’s Club: this weekend I drove as Leslee navigated, and I saw Montreal streets as if for the first time, again.

Montreal is a city of paradoxes, an alluring mix of the sacred and the profane. What better place to meet in the flesh (either again or for the first time) some of the virtual strangers with whom I’ve felt spiritually akin over the years. A decade or more ago, I learned the hard way that sharing even a bed doesn’t preclude you from loneliness…how odd, then, to meet this weekend someone like Dale, a blogger with whom I’ve meditated across time zones for 100 days and then some.

What does it mean to “commune” with a person? Must you have sat together in the same place and at the same time? Or is it enough to have glimpsed glimmers of the same Self, or to be on the path toward such glimmerings? Christians sometimes talk of living amongst a “cloud of believers”: an intangible aura of persons past and present who support and watch over one’s way. If spirits can transcend space and time, why can’t living souls? Is friendship something that walls, distance, or even bodies can contain?

Saturday was unrelentingly rainy in Montreal, much as it was when I visited that girl in New York in October, where we toured Chelsea galleries with one of the Anonymous Ones I saw again this weekend. The Internet, they say, is a World-Wide Web of connections, but it would be wrong to say these connections are merely technological. Walking the rain-slicked streets of Vieux Montreal on Saturday with a barely contained band of rowdies–at times walking together, at times wandering apart–I was struck again at how easily the essence of individuality is communicated across the Internet ether, each of these blog-friends seeming exactly how I’d imagined them, only more so.

I’ve met enough virtual strangers by now to have thought long and deeply about the process: what is it that makes meeting a long-time blog-read seem so natural? There’s nothing, of course, intrinsically natural about typing words onto a screen and clicking “Send” or “Publish”…and yet as social creatures, we’re always reaching for both connection and mutual understanding. In meeting long-time blog-reads this weekend and in the past, it strikes me that these in-person relationships start in medias res: instead of frittering through the usual geting-to-know-you chitchat, you can settle in to talk about the things that truly matter, things that longtime friends or even spouses have never touched.

What I’ll remember from this weekend won’t be the things people said, for I’ve already read plenty of words from Beth, Dave, Tom, and the like. No, what I’ll remember from this weekend are the ephemeral images of memory: Dave’s ivory-billed woodpecker hat, the curl of qB’s perpetual grin. Tom is taller than I’d imagined, and he was surprised at my shortness; Beth has a hitherto unsuspected ability to appear almost silently and to instill a palpable sense of calmness on a bustling Rue St. Denis coffee-shop, the sort of funky hang-out where I’ll now eternally imagine her.

On Sunday morning while the others went to church, Leslee, Dale, Rachel, and I played pagan, watching unleashed dogs cavorting with human and canine companions in the Parc Lafontaine. After a weekend of massive (and massively talkative) meet-ups, it felt appropriate to wander as a small group, there being little need for profound conversation. As I’ve said here before, “with a dear, true friend, there’s so much more to say than words can capture.” I’ve read enough writing on the virtual wall to know the best time in blogging is when the blogging stops: when presence replaces words, and you and several cherished others can dwell simply together in the place called Real Life.

 

Masterpiece

Today’s Photo Friday theme is Masterpiece, so here’s a rerun of an image I posted in March after a sight-seeing trip to the Short North district of Columbus, OH. I’m in Ohio this week, so maybe I’ll capture some more midwestern masterpieces during my visit.

 

Not my Daddy’s Flytown

When my Dad grew up in Columbus, OH in the neighborhood around High and Goodale Streets, they didn’t call it Italian Village. Back then, when this neighborhood was an ethnically-mixed, working-class ghetto you wanted to get out of, the poor folks who lived there called it Flytown.

Last weekend while day-tripping in Columbus, Gary and I took a stroll through the Short North, the now-gentrified neighborhood near the area where my Dad grew up. The murals in this upscale gallery- and boutique-laden strip between downtown Columbus and the Ohio State University campus quickly clue you into the fact that this is a place trying to recreate itself. Downtown’s Union Station is long gone, only a single archway having been preserved…but the grandeur of the grand building’s facade is replicated on one side of a High Street parking lot while the trains that would have thundered in and out of the station are depicted on a nearby wall (click on the image below for a larger version):

My Dad’s name is Joe…but this posh Short North coffee-shop isn’t named for him. When I last lived in Columbus in 1980s, the Short North was not a neighborhood where you wanted to stop for coffee…unless, of course, you were a cop stopping for caffeine after another night of busting teenage prostitutes and the shady businessness who patronized or pimped them.

In the ’80s, “Short North” was the Columbus police department’s shorthand term for an urban strip of High Street where not much good was going on. Still, when developers came in and began gentrifying the working class neighborhoods along High Street, a lot of average working folks found themselves priced out of their homes. Although my Dad’s mother, sister, and brothers had long since left Flytown for nicer neighborhoods, when gentrification in the area soon-to-be-renamed the Italian Village began, my Dad astutely noted that had they kept the old house they’d been so quick to move out of, they would have ultimately been sitting on a goldmine: prime real estate in a neighborhood destined to be Yuppified.

When Gary and I mentioned to my folks that we planned to spend part of our day in Columbus strolling the Short North, my Dad didn’t regale us with stories of his old ‘hood…but he did make a point of mentioning that the lightbulbs in the area’s signature arches, designed to create a historic ambience by replicating the gas street-lamps from the good old days, aren’t and never really have been functional. You can renovate a neighborhood out of a ghetto, but you apparently can’t repair the ghetto out of that neighborhood. The Short North and Italian Village are now among the priciest places to live in Columbus…but the area is still somewhat funky, with undeniable aspects of urban squalor that some would call “charm” and others would consider “overpriced hype.”

Whether or not living in the Short North is worth its fashionable price-tag, the fact remains that this once-shady district is now a premier place to hang out. As Gary and I window-shopped High Street’s various upscale boutiques, I kept marvelling that this was Columbus we were browsing; when I was a teenager in Columbus, there was virtually nothing to do downtown other than maybe roll tumbleweeds down the all-but-abandoned streets. These days, you can go Gallery Hopping the first Saturday of every month, or simply sightsee (and be seen) every other fabulously fashionable day.

Believe me, when I lived in Columbus–and when my Dad grew up in Flytown, long before the Short North was cool and “Italian Village” even existed–they did not have arty murals on the brick walls along High Street:

If you want to live in one of the Mona Lisa condos, you’d better act soon…and be prepared to pay a pretty penny for the privilege of tossing your trash next to La Gioconda’s enigmatic smile. The Short North and Italian Village have gone from being a slum called Flytown to being the hippest place to live and play. One of the truest signs of changing times I saw during last weekend’s stroll was this banner for a yet-to-be-completed condo renovation:

In case you can’t read that condo-banner, here’s an enlargement. As if having a Short North address isn’t fashionable enough, the Yukon Studio Loft condos boast Ikea kitchens, something my Dad definitely never had in the Flytown home of his childhood. If it seems odd to sell real estate on the basis of its kitchen appliances and furniture, keep in mind that there are no Ikea stores in Ohio, but there are Ikea fanatics there. Apparently the best way to furnish a tony Short North condo is with funkily fashionable Swedish furniture…and I’d be willing to bet that Swedish-made lamps work better than the Short North’s stylish but non-functional street arches.

So if you’re looking for the “urban lifestyle” of one-bedroom lofts, non-functional street lamps, and arty murals, the Short North district of downtown Columbus, OH might be just what you’re looking for. The art scene is hot and the hangouts are cool…just don’t offer an over-priced cup o’ Joe to an old Italian Daddy named Joe, or he might regale you with stories of the old days when this was a ghetto called Flytown.

 

4×4

Leslee recently tapped me for the following meme, so rather than waiting forever post it (as is my wont), let’s get this party started…

Four jobs you’ve had in your life:

• grocery store product demonstrator. This was my first job: I handed out coupons for the bakery my dad worked for as a truck driver. I was so zealous about my job, when my dad’s boss came to check stock, I tried to sell him his own bread.
• retail sales clerk. Through my years as a grad student (and teaching fellow) at Boston College, I worked part-time at a ma & pa toystore in Faneuil Hall Marketplace. Since I made some commission on top of my minimum-wage salary, I learned how to sell toys (i.e. flirt) with the businessmen who were in town for conferences. My favorite trick was to wear a miniskirt with my uniform shirt since more expensive items were on the top shelf and businessmen liked to watch me climb a stepladder.
• typist/word-processor. Also while I was studying at Boston College, during my lean and hungry years, I made money typing papers for undergrads (this was back in the days when not everyone had or used computers, so some students would write papers by hand and then hire someone to type and proofread them). Luckily, none of my own students ever hired me to type or proofread their papers…
• legal secretary. Through a typing/word-processing flyer I’d posted at the library at Boston College, I met a lawyer who was writing a book on Massachusetts landlord-tenant law. Through my work typing and doing edits on this book (yes, he thanks me in the acknowledgments), I worked for a while as a secretary in his office, filling in for his wife when she took days off.

Four movies you could watch over and over: (and since I sometimes show films in my writing and literature classes, these are movies that I have seen repeatedly)

• The Color Purple (and I cry every time!)
• Smoke Signals (a great film for my Lit of the Open Road class)
• A River Runs Through It (what woman wouldn’t enjoy a young Brad Pitt in wet trousers?)
• O Brother Where Art Thou? (another Lit of the Open Road fave)

Four places you’ve lived:

• Columbus, OH
• Cambridge, MA
• Randolph, MA
• Hillsborough, NH

Four TV shows you love to watch: (Leslee thought this would trip me up since I don’t have a functional TV, but I watch my favorite old TV series via Netflix…)

• Sex in the City
• South Park
• Seinfeld
• The X-Files

Four places you’ve been on vacation:

• Sedona, AZ in an RV with a dog
• San Francisco, CA in a Zen Center
• Quebec City in a hotel like a normal person
• various parts of Ireland in a minivan dubbed the Terror Mobile

Four websites you visit daily:

• Yahoo to check mail
• Bloglines to check blogs
• Rhymes With Orange and
• Spot the Frog for giggles

Four of your favorite foods: (this was the hardest question since there are very few foods I don’t like)

• homemade lasagna
• hijiki rice salad (a favorite from my almost-macrobiotic days)
• scrambled eggs or omelettes with hash browns
• nearly anything chocolate

Four places you’d rather be:

• in Rome sipping Italian wine
• somewhere in Mexico savoring a margarita
• in an Irish pub putting back a Guinness (someday, that girl, someday…)
• somewhere in Spain tasting Spanish wine

Four albums you can’t live without: (well, there’s no album I can’t live without. But here are four perennial faves…)

• Peter Gabriel, Passion
• Van Morrison, Veedon Fleece
• the Beatles, Sargeant Pepper’s
• Bjork, Post

Four to pass this meme along to:

• Diana of Seeking Clarity
• John of Pragmatik
• Mark of Spot the Frog blog
• Rurality of (yeah) Rurality

 

Off the wall

In the past, I’ve blogged pictures of the two Coke murals here in Keene, as well as a picture of the Parrish Shoes mural left over from filming of the movie Jumanji. Of the various sights I notice and collect, old advertising murals are among my favorites, so I was amused last week to see more than a few faded glories in both Findlay and Toledo.

When I posted that first picture of one of Keene’s two Coke murals, I mentioned that such painted signs remind of the old Mail Pouch tobacco murals you used to see on the sides of rural barns. So I had to laugh when one of the first things I saw in downtown Findlay, OH was a brick wall sporting ads for both products: tobacco and soda.

Judging from the abundance of old soda murals, Ohio must be a particularly thirsty state…either that, or Midwestern folks are so hard-working, they need lots of reminders to stop and pour a pop. (And yes, Ohio is the heart of pop country, “soda” being a word I taught myself to use only after moving to New England.)

It seems that in the olden days, if you were thirsty in northwest Ohio, you had a wide choice of soft drink options. You could have enjoyed a Pepsi at Johnny Tobak’s Nite Club…

smiled with a Coke by the pawn shop…

or sipped a 7-Up at the Paradise Grill & Bar.

After you were sufficiently hydrated and ready to get back to work, you could take a cue from this faded sign by going shopping for “Everything for the home, farm, garage, or factory.”

Some old murals are so faded, they are no longer legible. This wall used to advertise something, but now it’s difficult to determine what.

Whatever products they sold, faded brick murals continue to fascinate me, standing as they do like isolated islands from a nearly forgotten past.