ever-fixed mark

Dog and I were walking in the high-rent cemetery yesterday — it’s one of our favorite (pardon the expression) haunts — when we came across a human body sprawled prone on the ground in front of one of the headstones. This is it, I thought. After ten years of fruitless dog walks during which I’ve never found a body (at least, not a whole one), here was my moment in the sun. At last, when the newspaper stated, “The body was found by a woman walking her dog,” I would be that woman.

Fortunately, my involuntary “Oh, my god! Are you okay?” had the effect of rousing the supine person. No dead body to see here, folks. False alarm. After ascertaining that she was not in need of assistance, I apologized for disturbing her and we continued on our way.

She could have been sleeping off a high, but I don’t think so. As familiar as I am with that cemetery, I “know” that grave. It was erected fairly recently, and since it’s the only headstone in that section of the cemetery that was put up in the past hundred years, it stands out. Judging from the age of the deceased and the age of the young woman, I’m assuming that she was “visiting” her mom. How lovely and how sad. I’m glad she at least had good weather for her visit.

Tropical storm? Meh. We activated the Catastrophic Emergency Disaster Preparedness Plan for this?

It’s hard to prepare for a hurricane when the beach is this inviting. I think we’ll wait to start battening down the hatches until the first raindrops hit.

You’ll be relieved to know that this fine driftwood edifice withstood our recent earthquake. Actually, I was parked right in front of it when the earthquake hit, and we didn’t feel a thing, didn’t even know about it until friends started texting us. Whether it will stand up to Irene remains to be seen.

A few weeks ago, I was buying cheese at one of Port City’s two cheese emporia, and the proprietor (the better to assist me with my selection) asked, “What’s the occasion?”

“A few friends of mine get together every week to watch Masterpiece Theatre-type shows on TV,” I said, “and we always have wine and cheese.”

“Oh,” he said, “how long have you been doing that?”

“About eight years,” I said.

Then I thought: wow. Eight years. Nearly a decade of Masterpiece Theatre. How ancient does that make me sound? “The girls and I never miss our stories!” I’ll always remember that as the moment I took a right turn at Middle-Age and landed squarely in Elderly. “And we know it’s naughty, but we like our nip of sherry and wheel of Brie!” (Although we’re actually much more adventurous than that. It would shock you, the things we get up to in the cheese department.)

The spouse of one of our founding members recently christened us the Newburyport Period Piece Society, inspired by our preferred viewing material, mostly historical dramas and BBC adaptations of Victorian novels. We’ve permitted the occasional contemporary series, but we’re largely at home in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As is the BBC — surprisingly, in eight years we have not run out of viewing material. They just keep churning it out. The latest is “The Hour,” which we’re very excited about, and which we will (I hope) review on our sadly-neglected blog.

Yes, one day blogging will be a quaint habit restricted to little old ladies. In the 22nd century, the BBC will probably make a period piece about it.

Three topics frequently covered in this space aligned in today’s Daily News coverage: John Updike’s grandson won this week’s final Newburyport road race, the High Street mile, barefoot.

Per the article, he’s not a proponent of barefoot running, but he had wounded his foot and couldn’t bear the pressure of a shoe.

I call that a good excuse to skip the race.

Kenyans.

Fit men in their twenties.

Fit teenage boys.

Fit men in their forties.

Walkers who are still finishing up the 5K course.

Teenage boy in an NHS cheerleading outfit, complete with skirt.

Fit women in their twenties.

Fit middle-aged men.

People who chit-chat while running.

Women with actual boobs.

Fit women with strollers.

Preteen boys.

Senior citizens.

Walk/runners.

Men with actual boobs.

Population: You.

Thursday afternoon was beautiful, so my friend C. and I decided to spend the afternoon kayaking. Time was short, so we headed for a nearby lake that had a nice little swimming beach within a short paddle of the public boat launch. It had been years since I’d been there, though, and I misremembered the name of the access road, so we could not find the launch spot. We drove around looking for a place to get directions and eventually came upon a bait shop. C. ran in to ask while I stayed out in the car to try to Google the location on my phone.

After about three minutes, C. came running out. “Did you get directions?” I asked.

“Not only that, but dates for dinner,” she said. “Go, go, go before they follow us!”

She had asked two of the shop patrons directions to the public boat launch, and one responded, “I guess that means you’re not from around here, are you?”

“Not really,” she said.

“Then I guess that means you and your friend might be free for dinner tonight?”

She declined politely (a professional heartbreaker, she has lots of experience) and hightailed it out of there.

Bow down to her, ladies! She picked up two men in three minutes in a bait shop. She ought to teach a workshop at the Learning Annex.

In other kayaking news, I managed to coax the boys out on an excursion by tying an inner tube to the stern and trailing them along behind me. I haven’t yet told them that the the tube is usually towed by a much faster boat.

I finally got my hands on a copy of Yankee City, William Lloyd Warner’s anthropological study of Newburyport from the early 20th century. As I’ve written about earlier in this space, a small army of academics studied Newburyport up, down, and sideways for almost twenty years, producing this five-volume series about the social structures and economic habits of our little town. For months I’ve been pricing the various volumes on out-of-print sources through Amazon, wondering if I was ordering the right thing or if the book would be in terrible condition. Then I had a brainwave: Hey, I could get it through the library! And one interlibrary loan later, here it is.

(Digression: When I inherited my millions reached the point in my life where income exceeded outflow, I stopped borrowing books from the library. The main reasons are 1. that my typical book-reading postures (over dinner, floating on large bodies of water, frequently both at once) are not library-book friendly, and 2. I have a mental block about returning library books. A third reason, though, which I didn’t realize until I read Super Sad True Love Story (on my Kindle) was that I dislike the smell of old books. SSTLS is set in the near future, where text is streamed via smartphones and “credit poles,” and books are viewed as dirty clutter, redolent of death. The characters go on and on about how nauseating books are, and I was nodding my head in agreement: Yes! That’s exactly how I feel about them! I used to fetishize books, but now I’m more than happy with my library in the Cloud.)

Anyway. I now have Yankee City in my house, and while it does pong, it’s fascinating enough that I don’t care.

Warner, a thorough empiricist, divides the town into six social classes, somewhat confusingly named Upper-Upper, Lower-Upper, Upper-Middle, Lower-Middle, Upper-Lower, and Lower-Lower. This pigeonholing of people into systems, I believe, is what pissed off John Marquand, whose rejoinder to Warner, Point of No Return, I’ve also been meaning to read. (Hey! Maybe the library has it!) Warner favors a dry academic style that is often unintentionally hilarious: here’s an example of his matchless prose:

Large proportions of the upper-upper and and lower-upper houses and almost none of the lower-middle, upper-lower, and lower-lower are big and in good condition. On the other hand, large sections of the lower-lower and upper-lower houses but none of the upper-upper are small and bad….. Houses which are in good or medium repair are of high significant in the three highest classes and of low significance in the three lowest levels…. Bad housing, whether the place be large, medium, or small, is a characteristic of the lower-lower group and no other class is significantly high for all three of those types. Moreover, the lower class does live in significantly low numbers in all types of houses which are in good repair.

News flash: Rich people live in nice houses. Poor people live in crappy houses. We have the data to prove it!

Husband and I frequently debate whether or not there are class divisions in America, and if so what the criteria are for dividing the classes, and whether class prejudice is stronger than race prejudice. Yankee City provided me with a real aha moment; Warner makes it clear that, while there are class divisions, the class system is permeable by design. Although it’s not easy to move between classes, there are social vehicles that provide opportunities for those who wish to do so, most notably the school system, which allows children of different classes to mix, and selected social organizations, which provide the same function for adults. I had always thought of a class system as set of inviolable rules for who sits where; Warner points out, rightly, that this is actually a caste system, not a class system, and that a capitalist economy needs to facilitate a certain amount of class mobility.

Fun fact: At the time of the first study there were 357 “associations” (clubs, charitable societies, women’s leagues, etc.) with over six thousand people occupying twelve thousand memberships — this out of a population of just 16,000, just slightly under what it is today. You think of Great Depression-era people sitting on bread lines and stuffing newspaper in their clothes to keep warm, but they were also apparently going to book club and Junior League, cementing or improving their social station.

The local hospital is constructing a new wing, but has hired non-union electricians to cut costs. The electricians’ union, accordingly, is picketing the hospital and associated medical office buildings with signs bearing web site addresses such as “drsmithexposed.com,” which detail malpractice settlements for doctors associated with the hospital.

So now whenever I need to, say, visit my endocrinologist to see if my cancer has recurred (it hasn’t! yay!), I have to run a gauntlet of protesters lending the hospital the delightful ambience of an abortion clinic. Their cause may be just, but this is stress I don’t need.

What irks me more than anything is how ineffectual the whole thing is. I mean, if I see union pickets in front of my supermarket, I drive on two-tenths of a mile to the next one and buy my provisions there. The store that’s gouging its employees suffers the short-term consequence of the loss of my weekly grocery money, giving it further incentive to settle the matter quickly. See? Effective.

Now here I am driving up to my doctor’s office, seeking an adjustment for my thyroid medication. I spy the protest signs. Do I call another endocrinologist in Boston who’s on the right side of the angels and electricians? Contact my primary care doctor to arrange for the necessary referral? Fax my current doctor to have all my records transferred? Wait four months until the new doctor can see me? Hell, no. I keep on trucking as large men with sensational signs sneer at me, and my doctor receives my copay and insurance money as usual. How does this inconvenience anyone but me?