David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Last Picture in the Picture Window (poem)

Picture windows peer into a valley quilted in corn
and pasture, Holsteins patched in the cool
black-and-white contentment found
on milk containers.  Silos huddle by gambrel barns
and a maple-shaded milking parlor.

Unseen flies buzz a wide-lipped grain shovel and mud-
caked rubber boots beside a paint-peeling bottom-rotted
door.  Manure and diesel exhaust pinch
the nostrils.  Roaring tractor clatter consumes
birdsong and wind–sough.

Living the view is a man who thinks with his hands
and hasn’t time to peer through plate-glass.  Fingers
gnarled like clods of freshly harrowed soil, he’s busy
planting fence posts, tedding hay, nursing a backhoe
with bad hydraulics.

A Most Unusual Museum

I recently visited a most unusual museum.  Unlike other institutions by that name, I’m not sure that the Skinner Museum is “visited” so much as it is explored.  For starters, although it sits at the edge of the Mount Holyoke College campus in staid South Hadley, Massachusetts, it’s in an old church building from a town that no longer exists.  Once home to praying Congregationalists in Prescott, Massachusetts, the structure’s original location was drowned beneath the Quabbin Reservoir.  Although the exterior was saved, the church’s interior was never replaced providing a sense of incompleteness, almost as if it were never finished.  Its dislocation and half rebuilding lend the building a kind of ghostly air.

Opened in 1932 by wealthy mill owner Joseph Skinner, the Museum is the last refuge of an inveterate collector.  It is the attic of a wandering and insatiably curious mind that clearly cherished the very physicality of objects.  It is arranged like a delightfully cluttered tag sale with only rudimentary relationship between pieces and little explanation of what things are or why they are there.  A docent who’s worked there for two years says she discovers something new every time she enters.

In glass cases, on shelves, standing on the floor, arranged on tables, hanging from walls and the ceiling are musical instruments, Indian stone implements, shells, minerals, model ships, a bicycle for two, clocks, swords, china, pewter and an extensive group of watches.  There are bottles, a meteorite, and letters from famous nineteenth century Americans like Ralph Waldo Emerson, John C. Calhoun, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.   Included are guns and a wooden water pipe carved from a log.   There is are extensive toy and lamp collections, Panama Canal sand, a wide array of chairs, and enough antique farm equipment to outfit several medium sized farms from two centuries ago.  Obscured by various displays is a sword engraved to Lt. General U.S. Grant.  Not far away is an elaborate Chinese opium pipe.  The museum is a time capsule of a man’s imagination filled with connections that somehow complete a world.

At the Skinner Museum you can never see it all, not only because there is so much in the collection, but because there is stuff behind stuff.  Unlike many other museums, this place is not proselytizing a particular message.  Instead, it playfully keeps you guessing.  It stirs you to be inquisitive.  Such is its principal virtue.

Ultimately, this museum is more about Skinner than the objects which it contains.  They were collected at a time of rapid change in this country.  The collection points to what was important to a man who, as an industrialist at the height of the industrial age, was among those who shaped the nation.  Here are many bits and pieces of a world that was rapidly disappearing due to the culture-changing effects of industrialization.  Shards of the past and slices of nature were hoarded like memories against the onslaught of pavement and technology, two of the forces that Skinner and his fellow manufacturers were in the vanguard of creating.  As a result, you never know what you might find.

Nature's Seacoast Stonehenge

The oppressive heat and humidity that’s this summer’s indelible signature in the northeast afflicts me with a rubbery lethargy.  It steals my ambition and seems to turn my mind to a viscous sludge.  For refuge, I’ve been dipping into cool memories of my recent trip to the Oregon coast where chilling Pacific breezes waft across the land like air conditioning even in the brightest summer sun.    For all its delights and benefits, the best part of travel may not be the actual time away, but what we bring home with us.  Not the souvenirs or little tchotchkes picked up at shops, however endearing.  Rather, it’s the memories that sustain us on returning home.

In my mind these sweltering days I find myself walking along hard packed Bandon Beach listening to the surf roar and swoosh as it pounds the sand and rushes around rocks.  Just off shore and along the beach were tens of so called “sea stacks,” natural stone edifices, some surrounded by water only at high tide.  They appear as uneven Gibraltars, humps, wedges, pinnacles, spires and pyramids.  Some are crested with greenery.  Often they are thick with roosting, noisy birds.  They play hide-and-seek with the mist and at their base are often sea urchins, stars, mussels, barnacles and other creatures clinging for life at low tide. Not knowing the precise names and habits of these western tideland animals left me feeling furthest from where I live.  With time short, I picked up only a little information, but came back determined to gain a better handle on the animals and plants of home.  My curiosity was piqued, but if it would be of any real use, it would largely play out in the lazy familiarity of my regular precincts.

The sea stacks had a looming presence, seemed like ersatz dinosaurs frozen in stone, or the architectural ruins of a left coast Atlantis.  They were nature’s standing stones, a shoreline Stonehenge.  It will be long time before I forget their grandeur.  Yet, I found on a recent trip to the Connecticut and Rhode Island shore that the more modest, developed and quiescent features of this nearby coast were not diminished in comparison, but instead were rendered more interesting than usual by the west coast contrast I held in my mind while suffocating in the heavy, dank air.

Homemade Thousands of Miles from Home

More often than we might guess, the most intriguing markers of distant places that linger longest in memory have nothing to do with the reasons we traveled or what we expected to see.  They can’t be anticipated from tourist brochures or chamber of commerce websites.  We just have to be open to letting them happen.

Recently I journeyed to Bandon, Oregon (known for its beaches, harbor on the Coquille River, and for berry growing), about 3,000 miles distant from home, to be with my ailing father.  After a couple days of reality television and news programming generously interspersed with childhood reminiscences and verbal wrestling over current events, I needed to get out of the house and took a ride about thirty miles south to Port Orford to walk a Pacific Beach below the bluffs of Cape Blanco.

As I set out on U.S. 101, the coast highway, I wasn’t particularly hungry and passed up a chance to grab a bite at The Greasy Spoon in Langlois.  Port Orford is a series of low quirky buildings and standard highway architecture like gas stations stretched along the blacktop.  Perhaps it has more than its share of well-worn motels and funky eateries and taverns.   But it was Jutta’s Kitchen, a small, old-fashioned camping trailer squatting in a vacant lot on a corner near the center of town that caught my eye and got my salivary glands going.

The mobile eatery’s name is hand painted across the top of the trailer beside a smiling sun and the slogan “Fresh Homemade Foods.”  There was a bucket of magenta petunias out front and a second smaller container on a cement block pedestal.  Behind the trailer was a picnic table.  It’s the kind of place sure to draw the attention of a deep traveler, but it was Jutta who was the real attraction.

Jutta is a stout woman with a well tanned face and reddish hair that glows in sunshine.  She wears one of the warmest, most beautiful smiles I’ve ever had the pleasure to have turned in my direction.  It’s impossible not to meet her as she pops out of the camper to help customers with selections from a colorful hand-printed white board.

Although she sells hot dogs, most items are of her own devising.  I order “No Spray Himalayan Basmati Rice and Steamed Vegetables.”  She warns that I’ll have to wait five or six minutes while the cabbage, carrots, broccoli, cabbage and beans cook.  “Everything is fresh,” she says cheerfully.  I’m not a patient person, but it’s a pleasure it linger in the warmth of the sun and her easy conversation.

As customers stop to read the menu, Jutta joins them to give advice, describe how she prepares the item and the provenance of the ingredients.  On this unlikely corner she creates a micro-community, gaining a first name familiarity with customers, many of whom she may never see again.

Independence Remembrance

Setting aside the usual fun, a few solemn moments made this Fourth of July especially meaningful and satisfying.  Over the years I’ve enjoyed picnics, ball games and parades.  I’ve soaked up rays on the beach and watched the rocket’s red glare of fireworks on muggy nights.  But nothing beat standing in the uniform of a Civil War soldier this past Sunday as a monument to local men who served a century-and-a-half ago was dedicated at Legion Park on Block Island, Rhode Island.

As one of seventeen re-enactors with the Second Connecticut Volunteer Heavy Artillery, a unit which saw service as infantry at Cold Harbor and Cedar Creek, Virginia, I was honored to stand watch while a large bronze plaque was unveiled following a band’s dignified rendition of the National Anthem and a brief prayer and speech.  Next, the flag was lowered to half-staff and a ship’s bell, once belonging to the U.S.S. Block Island, was struck as each Civil War soldier’s name was read.  A crowd of well over a hundred was moved to silence and even the ever-present Island breeze seemed stilled as the names faded with the bell’s reverberations.

We re-enactors were there, not so much to provide interest and color for the parade to follow, as to honor those who served to save the Union by standing in their stead as a vivid act of remembrance.  By our presence the people gathered would not merely see names on a plaque or hear stories, but could better visualize and more fully grasp the humanity of faces in those uniforms of long ago.

Once the last name had faded in the humid air, taps was sounded and then the soft echo of taps.   Finally, a rifle salute thundered from muskets that would have been familiar to the commemorated dead.  We then began marching in a parade along with servicemen, veterans, antique cars, fire trucks, and the usual participants.  It was a hot two miles into Old Harbor on a noisy route filled with cheering throngs of residents and partying tourists.

Afterward, I got a ride from island native and U.S. Army veteran Bill Milliken to the windswept Island Cemetery which overlooks a slate-gray sea.   But for the breeze, it was quiet as I made my way to the simple rounded headstone of Noah D. Ball, Block Island’s only Civil War veteran to die during the war and be buried at home.  Inscribed on the stone is a poem, a stanza of which reads:

 The toilsome march, the battle strife,
 The war scourge that has wasted life
 Has fled away, and smiles again
 Over every hill and plain.

Men like Ball have ensured that our Independence Days are filled with smiles such as parades, ballgames and picnics bring.  Only by remembering can we, however inadequately, repay them and more fully connect with a past that exists all around us every day.

Last Siege (poem)

His cancer-rotted throat a rusted stovepipe from decades
of stogies, General Grant sat on his porch pouring
memories onto a yellow legal pad while tourists
gawked.  Water was liquid fire more caustic
than war-time whiskey.  Once shouting over snapping rifles
and cannon thunder, his voice faded to a weak rasp
and dissolved.

First in war and last in finance, his family destitute
from one business failure marching after another, the man
who bombarded Vicksburg into surrender and unleashed
ferocious assaults at Shiloh now fought on the battlefield
of his own shrunken body.  Armed with a pen, he struggled
to outflank death with supply lines of cash from a book
whose last words would bugle taps.

In a dark frock coat and black top hat he marshaled
thoughts like troops with words as sharp and clear
as military orders, verbs ready to charge with bayonets
fixed.  Weakened and wasting, caught in the jaw
of excruciating pain and a fog of morphine, strength
must have come from distant days in brass
buttons and blue.

Tour of duty over, the agony ended a week before Grant
became a casualty.  Courage and tenacity saved a family
with ink and paper as much as a nation with Minnie balls
and artillery shells.  Cauterized in memory
is the triumphant warrior graciously refusing the sword
at Appomattox, but the shriveled scribbler is forgotten.
Few know who is buried in Grant’s tomb.