The Urge to be Someplace Else

Well, the title is catchy, but not quite accurate.  They weren’t fiddling, in the negative connotation of the word, at least. One was playing her violin and the other was playing her cello.

Specifically, M was playing her violin and S was playing her cello, FOR A SOLID WEEK, at the intensive, five-day Suzuki Camp at the Hartt School of Music at the University of Hartford.

And dad Ryan and Grandma Sue were there, each and every day!

And Grandpa?  Well, paddling might mean fiddling to some folks, to confuse the metaphor even more.

The bottom line is that yours truly totally got out of attending music camp each and every day, except for the ending performances, where the photos below were taken.

How did this all happen?  Let’s do the math.  Two children.  Each child must be accompanied by a parent/designated adult to all the classes and workshops.  Four adults:  Ryan: available and obligated; Jenn: full-time job;  Grandma Sue:  available and willing; Grandpa:  lots of fiddling to do.

So, here’s where things stood at the end of the week:

Ryan and Sue—pretty maxxed out.

Jenn—frazzled from a tough work week and planning and packing for a trip to Colorado.

Grandpa—three paddles in Connecticut and Massachusetts under his belt and feeling quite mellow, like he could easily face another week of fiddling around.

The grandchildren—same as always, rarin’ to go.

RETIREMENT:  It’s a tough job but somebody has to do it!

Simone’s Group

There she is.

Margeaux’s Group

There she is.

Ryan and his bass guested during the viola concert the evening before.

The name Borden is high enough in my memory banks that this sign caught my attention as I navigated along Burr Mountain Road in Torrington, Connecticut, the other day on my way to check out the paddling conditions at quiet little Burr Pond.

Perched behind a guardrail along the narrow road, it sits in a thickly wooded area and is itself in danger of being overtaken by the growth.  Hidden in the woods, however, runs a small stream, complete with the waterfall which once provided the power for the world’s first condensed milk factory.

Gail Borden Jr. wasn’t from Connecticut.  He was born in New York in 1801 and lived in Kentucky, Indiana, and Mississippi before following his brother and father to Texas in 1829, where he became a surveyor, a newspaper editor and a businessman/real estate agent.

And, along with all that, he was a tinkerer, experimenting with disease cures, food processing and mechanics.  He never made any medical breakthroughs and his terraqueous, sail-powered wagon never took off–in fact capsized, but his dehydrated beef product, dubbed the “meat biscuit,” was a modest hit, especially with pioneers headed west.

The meat did better in Europe however, and it was on a voyage back from business there in 1851 that set Borden on the path that today keeps him in my brain.  Disease had stricken the cows that were aboard to provide fresh milk.  The cows died, and so did several children who drank the contaminated milk.

Borden set about finding a way to preserve milk.  He was inspired by the vacuum pans used by the Shakers to condense fruit juice.  By 1856 he had obtained a patent for his process of condensing milk by vacuum.  In 1858 he teamed up with a New York financier and they formed the New York Condensed Milk Company–it wouldn’t be called the Borden Company until 1919.  Their first factory was in Burrville, where the sign stands today.

The Civil War in 1861 brought with it a large demand for the product from the Union Army.  Borden expanded and soon there were condensed milk factories in upstate New York and Illinois, then the dairy centers of the country.

The company thrived. Between 1927 and 1930, Borden Company bought more than 200

companies around the U.S. and became the nation’s largest distributor of fluid milk.  Elsie the cow came along in 1936, followed by husband, Elmer the bull, who became the symbol for the firm’s chemical division.

Following another wild acquisition period in the 1950s and then again in the 1980s, Borden became a massive holding company, with such food brands as ReaLemon, Wylers, Ronco Pasta, Cracker Jack, Beatrice, Meadow Gold, Wise Foods, Cremora creamer, and Campfire marshmallows, as well as such diverse products as PVC piping, printing inks, fertilizers, X-Acto knives and meat rendering.

The company began disintegrating in the 1990s, however, and it passed through a dizzying array of companies and venture capitalists before a final merger in 2005 meant Borden no longer existed, save for its brand name and a few isolated spinoffs.

Hexion Specialty Chemicals, as the final merged company was named, still owns the Borden name and Elsie the cow, which it licenses to a Mexican dairy company, Grupo Lala.   And the spinoffs?  They would include Elmer’s Glue and the use of Elsie on Eagle condensed milk products, which are owned by Smucker’s.  The food business is pretty incestuous!

Borden was no philanthropist as far as I know, but he does have a library named after him in Elgin, Illinois.  Here’s why.  Borden’s third wife was a former Elgin resident, a widow with two sons.  She described the area as beautiful and when Borden was expanding he decided to locate a factory there in 1865 and he eventually bought a house there too.

Many years later, 1892 in fact, when the town was looking for a library site, his stepsons bought a local mansion for that purpose, stipulating that it always be known as the Gail Borden Public Library.

In flashbackland, I recall always wondering, as I sat at the family breakfast table looking at Elsie the Cow on the Borden’s milk container, if there was any connection between that and the famed parent-slayer Lizzie Borden.

In fact, that very thought flashed through my mind when I saw this sign along Burr Mountain Road the other day.  Surely it’s a monument to Lizzie Borden, was my first thought.

Well, lo and behold, there is a connection!  Turns out that Lizzie Borden, and Gail Borden Jr. are fourth cousins!

Lizzie, as you know, was charged with the 1892 axe murder of her stepmother and father.  Acquitted by an all-male and mustachioed Fall River, Massachusetts, jury after just 90 minutes, she stayed in the area.

The court of public opinion was against her, however, and she remained an outcast until her death in 1927.  No one was invited to her burial.

At right are the gentlemen of the Lizzie Borden jury.

So try getting this out of your head:

Lizzie Borden took an axe,

And gave her mother forty whacks;

When she saw what she had done,

She gave her father forty-one.   

I recently had the pleasure of watching a family of robins from egg-laying through leaving the nest.  The mother very conveniently built her abode right outside my Connecticut apartment’s second-floor bedroom window.

Robins are certainly devoted parents.  Though the female alone does the nest building and the sitting, once hatching happens the feeding of these naked, needy and helpless offspring becomes a full-time job for the both of them, at least during daylight hours when I could see what’s going on.

The whole process from egg laying to fledging takes robins roughly a month, two weeks for the eggs to hatch and two weeks for the chicks to grow up and leave.

The gestation period for an elephant, by the way, is a year and a half.

The American robin’s formal name is Turdis migratorius. (That is not why this post has the word diaper in the title, however. Turdis is Latin for thrush, so stop snickering Mr. Bannister.  I will get to the diapers in a moment)

The state bird of Connecticut, Michigan and Wisconsin, robins settle in communal roosts of tens of thousands during in the winter, and pair off when back in their northern areas.

A well-known harbinger of Spring, they nest and breed early, late March or April, and I always thought that was it for the season.  So I was puzzled at seeing this new nest and family in mid-July.  Turns out that robin pairs are known to produce up to three broods in one year.  On average, only about 40 per cent of nests produce young robins and only 25 per cent of the fledged young make it to November.

The new and well-crafted nest in the tree outside my second-floor window was on a branch just a bit above my eye level, so I could not see inside it but it was obvious there was some egg-sitting happening.

And after the hatching, I had a nice view of the three newborns as they stuck their heads up with their mouths wide open every time a new shipment of food arrived.

The heads, bare at first, grew downier as the days moved along.  The feeding was constant.  One or another of the parents always seemed to be perched atop the nest with the gaping mouths of the youngsters wide open below them.  Often one parent would be arriving as the other was leaving.

As one week moved into the next, they grew bigger, and louder, and more aggressive when food arrived.  The actual leaving of the nest took two full days.  I had noticed the afternoon before that they were really looking big and occasionally I’d see some wings flapping.That final day I woke up just before dawn.  The window was open and it was noisy out there.  It was still too dark to see anything, but there was a lot of calling and flapping a mere 15 feet from my window.  I dozed off after a bit and when I woke up again it was light enough to see that all three youngsters were standing up in the nest and flapping their wings occasionally.  Then they would settle back down for a spell.

The parents still came by with food during the final day, but spent a lot of time sitting on nearby branches shouting what I guess was encouragement.

About mid-morning one baby stood teetering and flapping on the edge of the nest and quickly hopped onto a nearby branch.  It took him several hours of hopping and flapping his way to an outer branch of the tree and then finally he flew off.

It was after lunch before the second one hopped out of the nest and another hour or so before he too flew off.

The third one was still in the nest at nightfall, like the last remaining adult child living in the parents’ basement.  He didn’t take off until the afternoon of the second day.

The old song “Rockin’ Robin” sprang to my mind during all this.  In my research I never found what it was about robins that inspired song writer Leon Rene to pen this, but I’m thinking it comes from the bird’s distinctive hopping walk behavior–and the alliteration.  Leon by the way seems to have been captivated by birds.  He also wrote about those swallows coming back to Capistrano.

And Rockin’ Robin, in case you’re interested, is also the moniker of professional wrestler (well, WWF) Robin Denise Smith, who retired in 1990, and of another equally un-famous celebrity, a singer/dancer in the rock band Radioactive Chicken Heads.

Oops, almost forgot that other Robin tune, “When the Red, Red Robin (Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along).” Harry Woods wrote the words and music to that back in 1926.  It became the signature song for singer/actress Lillian Roth in the 20s and 30s, and even inspired the name of the Red Robin restaurant chain.

It began as Sam’s Red Robin in Seattle in 1969 because owner Sam was in a barbershop quartet that sang the tune a lot.  He was bought out eventually, his name was dropped and eventually there were little franchised Red Robins all over the place.

Now to the point of all this:  During my week of nest watching I noticed that one or the other of the parents occasionally had something white in its beak.  At first I thought it was a bit of a white flower or even a small bit of discarded bread.

And then I happened across this passage on a website:

“Nestlings produce a ‘fecal sac’ – a white bundle of poop wrapped in a clean, tough gelatinous membrane – after each feeding.”  One of the parents can just pick that up and trash it.  A single nest can produce 60 to 70 such bundles a day.

Makes the term ‘sack of shit’ come to life, doesn’t it?

How convenient!  About the equivalent of a human baby pooping promptly after every meal and delivering a tidily wrapped disposable diaper to the kitchen garbage can, I guess. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Except for this icky factoid:  Because baby robins’ digestive tracts aren’t very efficient and there is often some nutrient value left in the sac, robin parents are known to eat them.

I once owned three dogs who had the run of a fenced-in yard.  They almost succeeded in completing such a closed circle.

Icky yes, but it kept the yard pretty clean.  Not as clean as a robin’s nest though.

All of the photos are below.  Just click on one and you can scroll through all them in a larger format.  (All Photos by Ron Haines)

Today was a day of firsts for granddaughter Margeaux.

We tallied them up as we drove from the house in West Hartford over to quiet and small Lower Bolton Pond in Bolton, CT, for our first paddle outing together since the Mystic Harbor evening.

The bright red, cheap 8.5-foot sit on top kayak in the trailer behind us has been in our possession for a couple weeks.

But it had not been in the water. Until today.

We discussed the firsts as we drove: 1. The new kayak’s first time on the water.  2. Margeaux’s first time in the new kayak.    3. Margeaux’s first time in a boat all by herself.

It was a brief but productive paddle outing.  Dark clouds were visible to the west as we unloaded.

Another boater with a weather app on his phone said a band of thunderstorms was coming our way.

I made the call: Let’s get on the water and stick close to the launch so we can get off fast if the clouds get closer.

We did just that. Twenty minutes out and we were back at the ramp.  The raindrops were right behind us.  We sat in the car a bit, the boats still at the ready, but it became obvious this was not going to let up soon.  So we packed up as the raindrops pelted us and headed for home.

So, it was a short, but very successful, outing. Margeaux was comfortable in the boat and moved it where she wanted it to go with ease. Some photos below.

Complete with personal flotation device and emergency signaling device: following all the rules for Connecticut paddling.  (Photo by Ron Haines)

Another byway with a warning sign, this one in Exeter, Rhode Island.

An appropriate signpost I guess, given that this small settlement of 6,000 or so is the site of one of the best documented cases of vampire exhumation.  No, I do not know if the exhumation occurred on this particular road.

The Mercy Brown vampire incident occurred in 1892 and wasn’t an isolated occurrence.  Indeed, it was part of the wider New England vampire panic that accompanied a large outbreak of tuberculosis in the late 19th century.

The cause of the disease, called ‘consumption’ because it appeared to consume the body, was unknown at the time.

Now known to be bacterial, the illness spread easily within families of course.  When one died, others soon took ill. Folks began to believe the deceased were draining the life from other family members.

So to protect the living the dead were exhumed.  A corpse was deemed to be feeding on the living, or “undead,”  if it seemed to be unusually fresh, especially if the heart or other organs contained liquid blood.

If so, the simplest remedy was to just turn the body over in its grave.  Or the fresh organs could be burned and everything reburied.  Decapitation was also performed, as well as inhaling the smoke or consuming the ashes of the burned organs.

Back to Exeter, Rhode Island.  Mary Eliza, the mother in the Brown family, was the first to die of the disease, followed in 1886 by eldest daughter Mary Olive.  Another daughter, Mercy, was then stricken and died, and soon son Edwin became ill.

Friends and neighbors believed one of the dead family members was a vampire and had caused Edwin’s illness.  Father George Brown was persuaded to allow exhumations.  It was done on March 17, 1892.

The bodies of the mother and daughter Mary Olive were suitably decomposed, but that of Mercy showed almost no decay, and still had blood in the heart.  (This sign that she was undead was probably because her body was stored in freezing temperatures above ground for two months after her death.)

Her heart and liver were burned and the ashes mixed with water to make a tonic, which Edwin drank.  His disease nevertheless progressed and he died two months later.

Sounds rather quaint in the context of today, doesn’t it?

Some perspective:

The oldest evidence of the disease has been found in the remains of bison in Wyoming dated to around 17,000 years ago.

In 2017, there were more than 10 million active cases and 1.6 million deaths from tuberculosis, making it the number one cause of death from an infectious disease.

More of my street warning signs are here.

The nice kind of strings, fortunately…the melodic kind.

July 4, as always, was brought to me by the kindly folks of Contoocook, NH, who annually stage a very nice children’s parade and a longer adult one, always on July 4, whenever that day falls.

And it was also brought to me once again by my brother Rick, wife Ginni and various family and friends, who provide the lodging and the food.

July 4 in Contoocook has become a bit of a tradition for us as you can see by searching for July 4 on this website.  Each year the granddaughters are bigger and more independent in their participation in the kids’ parade.

I was glad I staged a photo of them before the event this year, because I could hardly keep track of them once they were off and running with all the other decorated youngsters.

The adult parade has remained comfortably much the same through the years.  The VFW at the front, followed by the band on a trailer (with the addition of a blue tarp roof this year to provide some badly needed shade on a very hot day), a bunch of old cars and a long line of noisy fire engines.

The strings this year were special, brought to the gathering by granddaughters Margeaux (violin) and Simone (cello), son-in-law Ryan (violin), grand-niece Evelyn (violin), and Georgia (violin), guest of nephew Jon.

As I said, it’s comfortable.  If you want, take a look at last year’s festivities.

The Ford family with cousin Evelyn, pre-parade.  Below are various photos of the kids’ parade.  Click on one to bring up the slide show.  (Photos by Ron Haines)

Photos of the strings are below.  Click on one to bring up the slide show. A couple shots of the adult parade are below that.

Another generation of paddlers

Third-Gen.  I guess that’s what I’ll call granddaughter Margeaux now, the third generation of paddlers in my family.  She had been out once before, but that was three years ago on a short excursion with her younger sister, parents and I on a small lake in Manchester, CT.  Boredom set in quickly that day.

This time it was the real deal, no boredom involved.  A month shy of her ninth birthday, she got to go paddling on her own with Grandpa.

She had her own seat in the front of a tandem canoe, her own paddle, and her own responsibility for helping the boat move forward.  She filled the seat, worked the paddle, and handled the responsibility well.

The occasion was an evening excursion with some of my friends from Paddle Killingly, a loose amalgam of leisurely paddlers from eastern Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

We were out for a bit over two hours and covered about four miles in the harbor at Mystic, CT.  Margeaux paddled nearly the whole time and on the way back insisted on trading paddles with me so she could use my double-bladed version.  She needs one like that of her own, that’s for sure.  She kept the boat moving and I added a few strokes and did some steering with her small, child-sized paddle.

I had rigged a chair in the middle of the boat, anticipating I might have a bored, tired

passenger on my hands at some point, but she used it only a couple times to take short  breaks and grab a snack.

The rest of the time she was up in that bow seat, paddling.  I could feel the boat move at her every stroke.   We pushed against a breeze and incoming tide to the outer end of Mystic seaport and then back to the launch near Interstate 95.

We paddled past a lot of very large boats and went under an open-trestle railroad bridge just in time for a very loud Amtrack train to go roaring through about ten feet above our heads.  That was a little unnerving!

We didn’t get to see the huge counterweights of the quaint, 100-year-old drawbridge on Mystic’s Main Street  in action because of what looked like a mechanical problem, but we did  witness the opening of the long swing bridge that carries passenger rail traffic across the water between Groton and Stonington.

Margeaux says she had a good time.  I know I did and I was pretty sure she was enjoying herself.  The only boredom was on the drive there so she kept busy with the paper and pen I had in the car.

The end of a paddle is never the most fun time of course, with all the trips from the water’s edge to the car with the boat and all the gear.  After all the hauling and as I was finishing up the ropes holding the canoe to the trailer I noticed Margeaux had retired to her car seat and closed the door against the slight evening chill.

I figured she was just tired out and in fact might be falling asleep already.  But when I got into the driver’s seat she handed me this:

She did fall asleep on the way home, but in a most adult manner.  After dinner at Angie’s Pizza with my fellow paddlers it was nearly 10 pm when we turned on the GPS and headed for home. She asked for my phone so she could call her mom with the ETA and she was asleep shortly after that.  She kept my phone in her lap and I heard the alarm on it go off about five minutes before we arrived home.  She had calculated the ETA and set it!  By the time we pulled into the driveway she was awake and ready to walk inside and hit the bed.

Well done, Margeaux!  Here are some photos of your mother in the same boat:

And some more photos from your trip…

As a journalist in the late 1970s I developed a fondness for Plains, Georgia.

It was the hometown of our peanut-farmer president, Jimmy Carter, and a place where I could get a quote out of his mother Lillian; sister Ruth,  or better-yet, brother Billy, good enough to hang a story on, if I asked the right questions.

I remember rather unfondly that long drive to Plains from the Atlanta airport, but more pleasantly I remember the feeling I always got in Plains that this president was of decent, albeit a little wacky sometimes, stock.

The 39th president of the U.S., James Earl Carter was for me the most down-to-earth leader this country has had in my lifetime.  He was a former Georgia Senator and Governor, but somehow didn’t act like others of the political establishment in this country at that time, or now.  He was maybe too down-to-earth and too naïve to get himself reelected, unfortunately.   He got shellacked by the first actor this country has elevated to the highest office, Ronald Reagan.

In recent years I have found his comments and opinions about the politics and politicians of the day sometimes pretty irrelevant and often just plain wrong, but there is one thing I cannot fault him for at all and that has been the way he, along with wife Rosalyn, has led his life as a former president.

Just this past March, with the passing of George H.W. Bush, Carter became the country’s oldest living former president.  Still a Sunday school teacher at his church, Carter’s continued peacekeeping and humanitarian work since leaving office have gained him a lot of admirers.  The image of him in hardhat at a Habitat for Humanity house-building site is perhaps what most people will remember of him when he is long gone.

So there was no question when I was traveling up to Atlanta from Florida a few weeks ago with some spare time on my hands that I would take the detour to Plains to spend the afternoon.  Enjoy the photos.

It was a real treat for me today to see my two granddaughters all decked out in the Ethiopian dresses my daughter and I brought back for them on our recent trip there.

The trip was a revisit to Ethiopia, where I lived fifty years ago, when the traditional clothes were way more prevalent then than they are now.

Margeaux and Simone wore their outfits for a musical performance with their dad, Ryan, at the Unitarian Universalist Society East in Manchester, CT.

More photos from today are below. I also tossed in three photos of folks in traditional dress from our trip.  One is of an  Ethiopian youngster who danced for her fellow passengers at Lalibela airport, the second is of a woman displaying a traditional Ethiopian coffee service, and the third is of a woman I met in the countryside. (The daily log and all the photos from our trip are here)

It’s nice when there are street signs that actually let you know that it’s a place you just don’t want to go:

Scrape Bottom Road, Scottsville, NC. (Photo by Ron Haines)

To Do List Lane, Chauga, SC. (Photo by Ron Haines)

Drown Road, Pomfret, CT. (Photo by Ron Haines)

Purgatory Road, Exeter, NH. (Photo by Ron Haines)

Toll Gate Road, Comstock, CT.  (Photo by Ron Haines)

Bedlam Road, Mansfield Center, CT.  (Photo by Ron Haines)