life as palimpsest

There's only one apology I'm waiting for...and it will be a cold day in Hades when it is offered to me. As soon as that happens, I'll let you know whether I've accepted it.

The character Betty Parker in "Pleasantville."

An invitation from a friend who eventually became an enemy...

The Sacred Precinct of Apollo at Delphi, Greece, is beautiful in a rugged, primitive way. Not beautiful in the slick "Western" sense of refinement and grace, but as a revered sacred landscape for more than 2,500 years of continuous human presence. It is easy to see why the ancient Greeks chose it and equally easy to understand why Christians felt so threatened by its ability to evoke such visceral responses. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcelgermain/2153643883/sizes/o/)

Sarah Palin! No question about it...

It could be something rousing, like "A Mighty Fortress...," but I'm not religious; or something silly like "Some day my prince will come"; or something generational, like "If I had a hammer..." But instead I'll opt for the English vernacular tune "Brigg Fair," recorded on a wax cylinder in 1905 by folklorist Percy Grainger:

Brigg Fair

"It was on the fifth of August
The weather fair and mild
Unto Brigg Fair I did repair
For a love I was inclined

"I got up with the lark in the morning
And my heart was full of glee
Expecting there to meet my dear
Long time I'd wished to see

"I looked over my left shoulder
To see what I might see
And there I spied my own true love
Come a-tripping down to me

"I took hold of her lily-white hand
And merrily sang my heart
For now we are together
We never more shall part

"For the green leaves, they will wither
And the roots, they shall decay
Before that I prove false to her
The lass that loves me well"

Listen to the wordless arrangement of the melody by Frederick Delius.

Easier in this order: strangers, friends, family...but I'm working on that.

Krypton

Agincourt after dark...
A COLUMN OF LOCAL INTEREST AND INTROSPECTION
by Howard A. Tabor

“The Scarlet Number” (Act I, Scene 2)

Life is a marathon. Run the race or stand on the sidelines; I recommend running. Wear your colors proudly and don’t get in anyone's way.

Each runner bears a number large enough to be identified by race officials and fans at checkpoints along the route. Those of us running the race of life should also have to wear numbers—scarlet numbers—drawn from the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition), used by mental health professionals to assess their client/patients. Those identifying numbers would facilitate real social interaction along the way and alleviate a lot of unnecessary discomfort, disappointment and outright pain. Rooster Leer had (and probably still has) Narcissistic Personality Disorder (#301.81), though the DSM-IV’s scarlet number won’t be showing. That would entail a level of personal introspection of which she was fully incapable.

Enter Ken Tucker, the only person Rooster may have held in even moderate esteem. He was twenty-five years her senior and from Dubuque.

The family name was Taucher, of German ancestry, but it probably got changed at Ellis Island...or during WWI when being German wasn’t such a good idea...or for convenience in the business community. Soon after Ken’s birth in 1918 his father disappeared from the scene. Mom relocated from Ohio to live with a sister in Dubuque; she never remarried and died when Ken was about to enter high school. The disappearance of one parent and the preoccupation of another with family livelihood left their mark on Ken. What scarlet number would he be sporting in the race of life?

Ken married Evelyn in 1945 and they had one child, a son. Don't envy a salesman’s life; it's hard. On the road, eating in restaurants, sleeping on foreign sheets...alone. Did Ken try to be a better father than his own had been?

Ken and Rooster seem to have connected in the summer of 1976; think of it as a bicentennial project. The “time capsule” I received last week includes an ad from a 1970s singles magazine purporting to be hers. Before the internet(s), this is how we connected socially during the swinging sexual revolution. The ad portrays a woman of substance, well-employed, stable, domestic, seeking a gentleman friend; there were intimations of kink. The truth may set us free, but honey attracts more than vinegar. They met in Grinnell, about half way between. A time capsule receipt identifies the Starlite Motel; one snapshot shows the May-December couple at a wayside picnic ground.

Rooster’s notes to Ken hint at infrequent meetings (liaisons?) for the next five years. But half a conversation is often worse than none at all. It is clear that there were expressions of love on both sides, but who knows what we mean by that much abused word. Their meetings became less frequent until the winter of 1981, when Ken asked a favor of Marielle, one final courtesy that she could do for him, something he could ask of no one else. They set a day in January at the truck stop motel in Fahnstock, but Marielle failed to appear, sending a note afterward about some medical issue, the over-adjustment of a drug and a resulting seizure. Ken returned to Dubuque, his favor unfulfilled, not knowing why until her note arrived.

A second date was set in February. This time they met at the truck stop restaurant and checked in to the motel together. Marielle left to get her things for the evening they would spend together. Ken waited. He pondered. He knew. He understood.

Ken wondered what note would arrive this time. How do you top a diabetic seizure? This time he took a different course.

He knew where she would be: her window booth at The Roost on Highway 7. As he walked toward to bar, Ken could see her scarlet mop against the glass, an adoring arc of retinue facing her. What options crossed his mind? Turn tail and run or step in for a beer before the long drive east to the Mississippi?

Harry Pogemiller was tending bar that night in 1981. Harry is cursed with total recall, so be careful what you say within earshot. He remembers that night very well, not because of any "scene," but because there wasn’t one. Ken simply walked in, unnoticed. He ordered a draw beer and then stepped to the edge of her circle, people he recognized but did not know. He saw then that it was acceptable for Marielle to be horizontal with him alone but not vertical with him in public. Whatever she got from him when they were together was something no one else should know. What might it do to her reputation? A man old enough to be her father, the father of anyone in her circle of friends.

Marielle noticed Ken. "Didn't you get my note?" she asked, startled to see him just ten feet away. "No, I didn't." He walked back to the bar.

Life drained from her face. Her posture sagged. Some minutes later she went to the restroom and Ken watched for a chance to speak with her alone. "I can't stop you," she said, staring into a corner of the entryway. Harry Pogemiller recalled the precision of Ken's next words: "I asked you earlier today to let me in, to let me know you, to let me help. Inadvertently, you've done exactly that, and I'm grateful for what I've seen, what I've learned about you and myself. Believe this: I want only the best for you, but that won't include me." He left the bar and drove beyond the gravel field of mercury-vapored light.

The accident report from the Poweshiek county sheriff’s office is a model of economy and tact. The motel clerk remembered them checking in at 7. Harry recalled their final words at 12 and the calm in Tucker's voice. Ken's car left the road a few miles east of Grinnell some time between 2 and 3 a.m. Alcohol was not a factor.

I'm anxious for the day forensic science (our friends at CSI & Co.) will have a test for final thoughts; when a swab of grey matter smeared across the windshield will yield the last thoughts that cross our mind the moment life is gone. What did Ken think a second before his car mangled that sturdy tree? I have to believe it had nothing to do with Marielle; that it had been the tragic coincidence of a patch of ice and a startled deer.

POSTSCRIPT

Mary Ellen Leer’s local career outlined last week gets wildly mixed reviews. Folks who knew her take extreme positions; few fall in the middle. But the voting isn’t over. Even death can’t guarantee a bottom line, despite society’s preoccupation with summation and assessment. There is one observation, however, that I can make about Rooster and Ken: They were both hollow; it’s just that one of them discovered it about himself and learned not to quench his thirst at a well gone dry.

Two questions persist: Why me? Why now? I searched the internet for information on Marielle Leer and located her on-line résumé; it was updated late last year. This is what I found: 1) She claims an advanced degree in Theatre Arts from Drake University in Des Moines, though the registrar’s office at Drake has no record of the university awarding her a degree; 2) She claims a relationship with the Goodman Repertory Theatre in Chicago, which the Goodman is unable to confirm; 3) Her widowed mother lived three blocks from me until her passing a few years ago, cared for by Mrs. Leer’s surviving older children. No sign of Marielle.


© 2009 The Agincourt Project

Who shot JFK?

Oddly, it was mathematics, though I rarely use it today. It did, however, help me learn more abstract ideas like logic and process.

Hercule Poirot

I will cease to exist as a person and my body will decompose.

“To everything there is a season…” Writing about Agincourt’s newest restaurant, Howard seems like a proud uncle.


A few figs from thistles…
by Howard A. Tabor

The Periodic Table

“The history of every major galactic civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question ‘How can we eat?’ the second by the question ‘Why do we eat?’ and the third by the question ‘Where shall we have lunch?’”—Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Who would write a history of food and its consumption in Fennimore county? Who would read it? Many of us have simply never escaped “survival” mode, so anything more speculative or analytic is beyond the pale.

Don’t get me wrong. On any given day we all find ourselves in these three phases. During that three-day mind-numbing blizzard last winter, for instance, holed up at the apartment with a pint of expired sour cream, some dried figs and a can of minced clams, I longed for Lynne Rossetto Kasper on speed dial. Until we shoveled out, my table was anything but splendid.

So, it was with considerable delight last Tuesday that I attended the opening of Agincourt’s newest eatery, “The Periodic Table” at the corner of Broad and James. Its subtitle—“elemental eating for the 21st century”—affords some insight to the restaurant’s philosophy: locally-grown, seasonal foods for maximum nutrition and minimum carbon footprint. A pretty tall order and one worth our support. Downright millennial!

Wasserman’s bins, barrels and spools of hardware are gone, sadly. But with shelves and clutter swept away, the old store is surprisingly bright, open and airy. Divided roughly in thirds, there is a bakery-coffee shop at the front—cookies, koláce, pies—with the restaurant behind, wrapping the kitchen on three sides. Watching Chef Rosemary Plicka and her small staff in action has become the best show in town.

Chef Plicka has brought us memories of Central European soul food from Omaha’s Czech community. She grew up on South 13th Street in Little Bohemia. But, at thirty-years of age, Chef Plicka also brings a youthful twenty-something take on food, its growth and preparation. Her idea is to fill the larder from vendors within fifty miles (when possible) and minimize the energy required for transport and preparation. Breads, for example, come from Vandervort’s Bakery just up the block (and their flour from the Fahnstock Mills); pork comes from Okkema Farms at Grou. Organic vegetables are growing within our city limits. Locus and focus.

The menu is broad but brief. Entrées are fresh, never frozen. Vegetables are crisp, colorful, complementary. Reductions, subtle. Service is prompt and self-effacing. It all worked so very well Tuesday night (squash soup, loin of pork, corn spätzle, balsamic reduction) that our party-of-four wonder what to expect six months from now in March. I’m eager for that experience and many others in between.

I spoke with Chef Plicka (as restaurant patron, journalist and landlord; for those concerned about conflict-of-interest, Rowan Oakes and I do own the building). I wondered about so bold an undertaking, and one so far from the beaten path. Rosemary scouted a number of locations (with her husband and business partner Brad Nowatski) and chose Agincourt because it’s already at the center of their best suppliers. She praised the quality and reliability of regional growers and was eager to participate in our downtown renovation initiative. “Northwest Iowa is a cornucopia! And your old Wasserman Block appeared at just the right moment for our business plan.” Their financial package combines personal savings, a federal loan from the Small Business Administration, and tax incentives from our “Home Grown” Program at the Fennimore County Economic Development Council. Anyone starting a business in these perilous economic times could study this as a textbook example.

Conversation during dinner Tuesday night inevitably turned to food, not only as a life staple, but also as the prime vehicle for socialization. We spoke of other community watering holes: of Adams Restaurant (a pleasant habit for more than ninety years), of the venerable Bon-Ton and the Koffee Kup (K2 to locals); and now The Periodic Table. Perhaps someone should write that history of local food, the very lubricant of our culture.

Happily, there's a new reply to Douglas Adams' question: Where shall we have lunch?


© 2009 The Agincourt Project

"The Horse's Mouth" with Alec Guinness was a childhood favorite of mine and continues to this day. Actually anything with Sir Alec is high-priority viewing for me, despite their filming in black-and-white.

Few people are more detached from contemporary culture than I am. Perhaps I choose to be. Ideas fundamental to living—today or at any time; distinctions between acquaintance and friendship, notions of common sense and common courtesy, of responsibility and respect—bear little resemblance to the templates from my youth. Things just don’t mean what they once did. Change is not always comfortable.

My friend Howard Tabor is bothered by this, too—this craving for universals in a fractured time. There is no history; there are multiple, sometimes contradictory and overlapping histories. While, contrarily, FaceBook® has reduced the nuanced spectra of personal association to a single choice: friend. Take it or leave it; be it or don’t. Another social networking site limits you to 600 contacts. Six hundred contacts! The mind boggles. I have a tough enough time managing a Christmas list of fewer than twenty-five.

Howard’s piece this week troubles me still and will for some time to come, I suspect, because it strikes so close to the heart; a tale worthy of Nathaniel Hawthorne.


Agincourt after dark...
A COLUMN OF LOCAL INTEREST AND INTROSPECTION
by Howard A. Tabor

“The Scarlet Number” (Scene 1)

This week the U.S. Postal Service delivered a time capsule to my desk.

Wednesday’s mail brought a plain manila envelope, nine by twelve, with no return address. Was that white powder something toxic like anthrax or just the residue from my morning doughnut? In the interest of national security, I flirted with calling the county hazmat team. But curiosity trumped common sense. It often does.

The stamps on the envelope, for example, were an assortment of miscellaneous postage issued during the 1960s and 70s in single-digit denominations, celebrating everything from statehood anniversaries to the Oregon Trail and Helen Keller. It was postmarked Des Moines on the previous Monday. Very curiously, my address was typed. No, not word-processed; typed. On a typewriter. With a fabric ribbon. I thought the last of those were either at municipal landfills or the Smithsonian Institution.

I opened it with sweaty palms and fluttering heart.

The folder inside contained an equally motley assortment of clippings, snapshots, receipts, ticket stubs; the stuff of scrapbooking. My Wednesday had unexpectedly been redirected into a day of recollection; of sleuthing, googling, phoning and faxing that lasted until one o’clock Thursday morning. I forgot to eat. What emerged from the envelope’s miscellanea was an intimate one-act play with a small cast of characters. I actually knew one of them, so will change the names for modesty’s sake. Let’s call her…

Rooster

Mary Ellen Leer was born a couple of years before me, the last of a middling brood of five or six kids. Mary Ellen may have been that last accidental child of aging parents; I recall there were a dozen years between her and the nearest sibling. She was an ample girl, certainly taller and better endowed than her contemporaries, though perhaps uncomfortable in her own skin for those reasons. She was also two years ahead of me in high school, so I was aware of her, though she took only small notice of me, I suspected, because of my family’s prominence in the community. Mary Ellen’s principal physical asset was her hair: a mane of intense, unimaginable red. Some said it came from a bottle, but others in a position to know said the carpet matched the drapes. During the years of our acquaintance, she was always called “Rooster,” and it was meant in every sense of the word.

Rooster Leer could have been a politician; could have been anything, I thought, because of her innate ability to network. We didn’t know that word in the 60s, but Mary Ellen played the game better than many today—and without a blackberry. At school she bore a nimbus of entourage, a halo of classmates eager to bask in the warmth of her flaming hair: on the stairs, by her locker, in the cafeteria at a scale unmatched before or since. It wasn’t her sexuality that drew them to stand, kneel or sit within the radius of her aura; it was charisma, another word with growing currency in the 60s. After all, we had JFK.

And the pattern continued at college. I frankly can’t recall what her major may have been—if any. She was in most respects a generalist, with an emphasis in socialization. One skill did emerge during those turbulent Vietnam years: Rooster found her voice in the Theatre Department. It was perhaps a natural escalation, the focus of her strutting and fretting upon the stage of life. As Lady Macbeth in “The Scottish Play” she was awesome—not the least because it was her own hair that carried the part, not some polyester mop.

A career in the theater followed graduation, or at least the semblance of one. She found a stage name—Marielle, a contraction of her given names—but the parts that came her way were few. She auditioned with our local community theater and with larger professional companies in Des Moines, Sioux City and Omaha. She sent résumés to Chicago and New York. Her reviews were good (“…wonderful spirited performance…”), but the parts seemed to take second place to a larger role as the center of her own Ptolemaic cosmology: the precise center of adoring adulation; the heart of a personal firmament. It’s arguable whether the theater attracts narcissists or creates them.

Now here’s the odd part. Despite the upper triple-digit number of her ever-increasing retinue (“Did you see Mary Ellen in ‘Our Town.’ I cried!”), there was no appreciable intimacy. I asked her once how she prepared for a new role. Did she study what others had written about the character; did she scour old reviews for other interpretations? “Who has time to read,” was her reply, possibly the only conversation we ever had. And probably the most insightful.

She took an apartment downtown above the Bon-Ton Café but lived in seclusion. There may have been back-stair beaus but I never knew who they might have been (male or female; her sex was certain, but her gender orientation was ambivalent, perhaps purposely so, for how better to expand one’s entourage). Here’s the inherent contradiction for a narcissist: the absolute necessity for keeping people within arm’s reach simultaneously requires they be kept at arm’s length. We were invited close and encouraged to imagine ourselves a part of her inner life, but if Rooster had one, it was a carefully guarded secret.

The infrequent roles that came her way afforded marginal income, so she moved back to her parent’s small house on the southeast side. Whether basement or attic, we never knew. None were invited there. Instead she lived a public life, that is to say, a life lived in public: by day among a constantly shifting group of friends at the Bon-Ton, in a booth unofficially reserved for her use; in the evenings at The Roost, the bar/pool hall/bowling alley out on the Fahnstock Road. (See any irony here?) Income came from low-prestige, low-paying jobs in restaurants (my guess is her tips were astonishing; she knew how to work a crowd). For nearly a year she was also an information operator for Iowa Bell (that stage voice serving her so well). Day jobs came and went, but always with a snippy observation about their mismanagement, misapplication or misunderstanding of her not inconsiderable talents.

Marielle Leer slipped from our radar. Someone thought she had moved to Chicago to promote a theatrical career. And her story might have gone unexplored, had it not been for the Wednesday mail.

This is has been Scene 1.

Last July I wrote an entry here about an architectural drawing I'd acquired on eBay. It seemed to me to be evidence of the connectedness that has been of such interest to me--six degrees of separation. I have some information to add that brings the drawing even closer to home.

Not quite half way through Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast Trilogy, I've become a true believer. While the books are astounding, there is also a worthy BBC adaptation from 2000 which merits your attention...remarkably true, it seems to me, to the vastness of Peake's conception in only four hours. [Not incidentally, half the cast seem to have come from "Harry Potter" and Nanny McPhee"!]

The opening credits of the BBC Gormenghast are accompanied by the music of Richard Rodney Bennett: a setting for boy soprano of a Peake poem given to the tutors at Titus Groan's school, I offer the lyrics here for their melancholy:

Hold fast
To the law
Of the last
Cold tome,
When the earth
Of the truth lies thick
Upon the page.
And the loam
Of faith
In the ink
Long fled
From the drone
Of the nib
Flows on.
Till the last
Of the first
Depart,
And the least
Of the past is dust,
And the dust
Is lost.
Hold fast!
Gormenghast!

This quote, unattributed, comes from the homepage of Knize & Co., a haberdashery in Vienna:

"Die unausweichliche Frage nach dem eigenen Stil beginnt mit der Uberwinding der Mode." Sorry about the lack of an umlaut... Luckily for me, the site provides this English translation: "The unavoidable question of style begins with the overcoming of fashion." As a teacher of architecture, I can think of no more succinct statement of the current dilemma in design.

Not incidentally, the Knize shop on Am Graben was designed by Adolf Loos, who said many similar things, if not this quote itself. I'll have to do some checking. Does anyone recognize it?

We are at war. Howard just wanted to remind us that all wars are different...at the front and at home. This column appeared in The Plantagenet for 22 November 2008


A few figs from thistles...
by Howard A. Tabor

Victory…one tomato at a time

I don’t get out of town often enough. Except for a Minnesota Twins game in June, I haven’t been away overnight for nearly a year. Agincourt seems to be my world.

So when Bobby and Melissa Frobisher suggested hitting some estate sales in Omaha last weekend, Rowan Oakes and I were glad for the chance to tag along and, perhaps, snag some stuff that will probably show up in our own estate sales years into the future. Bobby found a banjo; Rowan, an Arts & Crafts area rug; Melissa, some sheet music from the 'teens. I bought a World War II uniform from the widow of Frank Ferris, a serviceman who had landed at Omaha Beach for the liberation of Europe. (Do you suppose Mr. Ferris enjoyed the coincidence?) My conversation with Mrs. Ferris turned to Tom Brokaw’s recent book The Greatest Generation, the very generation that her husband represented.

During lunch at the Bohemian Cafe the four of us began to list Agincourt’s war efforts on the home front: from selling war bonds and foregoing meat several days a week to knitting socks and walking…everywhere; the war was borne on the backs and feet and in the stomachs of ordinary citizens. War was a shared experience endured everyday by everyone. How different from the conflicts of recent experience.

Crossing the Broad Street bridge on the way home another local effort came to mind: Agincourt’s “Victory Gardens” that once stretched half a mile west of the bridge, along the sunny north bank of Crispin Creek.

Growing up just after the war, I recall my mother’s hoard of old magazines in the attic; a stack of Your Victory Garden was among them. I was just learning to read and these had more pictures than text. Monthly issues treated topics that would find eager and appreciative audiences on HGTV today—propagation and planting; insects and blight; drying and canning—each of them aimed at spreading the burden of wartime deprivation more equitably. Mom had a plot there; so did her sisters and aunts. But it wasn’t entirely women's work.

Our “Victory Gardens” had already been the scene of causal horticulture, so the county commissioners in September 1942 only made official what had been common practice for several years. Janice Mainwaring, head of the Domestic Arts division at the Fennimore County Fair, was the genius who made it work. With paramilitary precision, Janice surveyed the area south of Milwaukee Road, between the bridge and mill raceway, dividing it into 25-by-25 foot allotments. Then, with assistance from the Department of Public Works, they installed a watering system at 100-foot intervals along the road, with several two-horsepower engines drawing water from Crispin Creek. Remarkably, some of these improvements are still working after more than sixty years.

Janice’s original notes, correspondence and drawings preserved at the historical society tell the rest of a fascinating story. A few folks had “squatters’ rights,” holding on to plots they had gardened for years, while everyone else waited for a Thanksgiving lottery to allocate the remainder.

A quick comparison of Mainwaring’s list with our 1943 telephone directory tells me that nearly half the households in town participated. From March 15 through Labor Day, the street railway company offered free service after 6 p.m. and all day on the weekends. School groups competed for free books, movies and ice cream treats at Van Kannel’s soda fountain. It was a family affair.

Plowing, planting, pruning; watering and weeding; harvesting and canning. These shared activities strengthened our sense of community. They also reinforced the idea of continuity through the seasons and cycles of Nature. I was too young to help but young enough to enjoy its benefits: a unity of purpose; an awareness of America as “us.” There was neither “red” nor “blue”; just purple, like the Purple Heart won by Frank Ferris, a stranger whose uniform fits me like a glove but whose shoes I could never fill.

If there is an Afterlife, I suspect Ms. Mainwaring and Sgt. Ferris have recognized a common purpose in their lives and become good friends.



©2008 The Agincourt Project