ever-fixed mark

There are three cemeteries within a quarter-mile radius of our home. This is the kind of fact with which you become conversant when you have a dog. Dogs need to be walked, and pretty, wooded park-like areas are much better than streets. Cemeteries are even better than parks, because there’s something to read. I can entertain myself for an hour altogether piecing together the narratives represented by the tombstone inscriptions. Death narratives can be sad, like the couple who lost three infants within five years, the last two named “Hannah” after their mother — I hoped they had some children who lived to adulthood and were buried elsewhere, with their own spouses and children — but there are lots of people who lived to a ripe old age, too.

Aside from the odd monument to a 9/11 victim, most of the stones in these cemeteries commemorate people long dead. The oldest cemetery in Port City is the one adjacent to the park across the street. Its occupants were largely born in the 1700s and early 1800s. It is not easy to navigate, for there are no neat paths or formal landscaping, but it is situated on a small hill and is terribly picturesque. Even the name, Old Hill Burying Ground, is quaint. Port City’s notables are buried there, like Lord Timothy Dexter (famous for staging his own fake funeral), Thomas Savage (Bermuda’s first recorded silversmith!), General John Titcomb (Brigadier-General of the Militia in the Revolutionary War), and, of course, Jim Morrison. The place is a madhouse on weekends.

The prettiest of the three is the Oak Hill Cemetery. It is of more recent vintage, established in 1842. I call this the High-Rent Cemetery: big monuments, pretty lanes, nice landscaping. There are large family plots here bearing the names that still grace the town’s streets, businesses, and institutions today: Jaques, Lunt, Greenleaf. It is what Husband calls a “squirrel-rich environment.” When we let Dog run off-leash there (only on the most desolate days, because it is now banned), he is half-crazed.

The New Hill Burying Ground is the sad cemetery. It’s across the street from the Old Hill Burying Ground, but it couldn’t be more different: treeless, weedy, and surrounded by an ugly chain-link fence. This graveyard is notable for one thing: its headstones bear the only ethnic names in town. Sure, most of them are WASPy Smiths, Lowells, Johnstons, and Coffins, but there is one small Armenian section and a tinier corner devoted to the Greeks.

For me, the discovery of these graves prompted a question: Where are all the other ethnic minorities in town? Where are the Poles, the Italians, the Germans? Over the years, Port City’s industries have included shipbuilding, silverwork, and mills; surely these jobs must have attracted people other than WASPs, but they’re not represented here. Of course, many of them would have been Catholic, but there is no Catholic cemetery in town. What happened to them all?

It’s Hallowe’en, and I don’t see enough dead people.

From an e-mail exchange with my friend E in Australia:

ME: Last week I visited the church of saints Ambrogio and Carlo. Allegedly, there was a relic from the heart of St. Charles there.

E: Whose job was it to chop up the saints?

After talking for six straight hours in a Rome conference room, I’ve lost my voice. Again. As someone who does a lot of public speaking (AND who used to be a cheerleader), you’d think I’d have the mechanics of this thing down, but you’d be wrong. I always strain to project, and I sound like I’m straining, too. My voice is a distinctly unlovely thing.

Unfortunately, elocution lessons were not offered at my finishing school.

Friends! Romans! Countrymen! Lend me your microphone.

Yesterday, we visited the Keats-Shelley museum at the foot of the Spanish Steps. The museum is housed in the apartment Keats was staying when he died, a room with a really terrific view in which to breathe one’s last tubercular breaths. Shelley really had no connection to the place at all, but like most of the Romantics he spent a lot of time in Italy, and like Keats, he also died there, far too young.

I was reminded of the fascination that Italy held for the English, and I found myself wishing I had brought one of the many English or American novels set in this country, instead of David Copperfield, which doesn’t really set the same mood. The last time I was here, I brought The Marble Faun and really enjoyed it. Wasn’t The Buccaneers set in Rome? Or what about Daisy Miller — doesn’t she catch her death in the Colosseum? I’m positive that half of James’s oeuvre takes place in Italy, because his heroines, like Keats, were forever visiting for their health. There’s always A Room with a View, but I think I need to save that until I get to Florence.

After a brief visit, we had high tea at the Babington English Tea Rooms, which flank the Spanish Steps on the other side. Babington’s has been around since 1893, because as much as the English love Italy, they also love the comforts of home. It was easy to imagine homesick twentieth-century Brits flocking to the place like modern American college students to MacDonald’s.

I was browsing in one of the outdoor markets near the Trevi Fountain this afternoon when this soulful picture caught my eye:

It wasn’t just a photo of a guy in a cassock, though. It was an entire calendar of provocatively-posed priests, the better to inspire impure thoughts the whole year long!

Well, maybe not the whole year. Father August looked rather like Mr Bean, but the other eleven months were definitely chock-full of holy hotties.

I’m heading off to Rome tomorrow: part business, part vacation. My mother, who is Italian but has never been to Italy, is coming with me. I am really looking forward to visiting the Old Country and soaking up some of that Eternal City atmosphere.

Weather-wise, it’s the perfect time to visit Rome. Skies will be sunny but there will still be a little fall nip in the air — at least, it will be cooler than here in tropical Boston. But money-wise, it’s the worst time to visit Europe in recent memory. The euro is worth nearly a buck and a half!

I happened to be in Paris on the day that the euro was first introduced as physical currency, way back in ‘ought-two. One day I was calculating HOW MANY francs to the dollar, and the next I was enjoying the ease of a nearly one-to-one ratio of currencies. The euro was worth about 90 cents then, so there was the satisfaction of knowing that everything cost a little less than my rough estimate.

But now the euro is a big, strong currency and he’s thumbing its nose at the little people he climbed over on his meteoric rise to the top. Sure, you’re the big cheese now, €, but currency markets are volatile, and I’ll never forget that I Knew You When.

A number of “learning centers” have opened up in and around town recently. These places offer classes for pre-schoolers and young school-age children, and they are aimed at stay-at-home moms who want to get themselves and their children out of the house. Each has a slightly different slant. One is geared toward crafts, another toward “themed learning,” another toward music education. Through the mothers’ club mailing list, they send me messages with message headers like this:

“Join us for Dress-up, and Manicures, and Afternoon Tea!”

“6-Week Faerie Princess Class!”

“Thursday afternoon Pirate Party!”

I view the princess parties with only slightly less loathing than the unsolicited entreaties to enlarge my penis that likewise pour into my in-box, but in principle I find nothing wrong with the concept. When I was at home with the boys for a few days a week, I tried out some of these kinds of classes. In theory it seemed like a good deal: five bucks for an hour’s worth of entertainment and a way, hopefully, to wear out the kid before naptime. In practice, they seemed a little awkward. The boys never really enjoyed them that much, and frankly, neither did I. It’s too much effort to keep them on-task in a strange environment. I prefer activities where they can run a little wild, and I don’t have to monitor their behavior so closely.

Many of these learning centers seem to be businesses opened by stay-at-home mothers who think it will be a good way to generate some extra income while still staying home with their kids. I worry that a lot of these people aren’t starting off with a solid business plan and that they are going to lose their shirts. Let’s say you’re able to rent a space and buy supplies for $500 a month. At $5 a pop, you need to run 100 kids through each month just to make back your expenses. That’s 25 kids a week. At about 8 kids a party, that’s about 3 parties a week, assuming each is fully booked. That’s a big assumption, though. These spaces are competing with the more exciting, better-funded activity spaces, like the bouncy castle place, indoor playgrounds, climbing walls, etc. They’re also competing against other free or cheap activities run by the library, nature center, and the like.

To make some money — say, to take home the $600 a month that would be the rough equivalent of a half-time minimum-wage job — you’d have to find 220 kids at $5 a pop. That’s 55 kids a week, which is about 7 parties or classes a week. If each party or class is an hour and involves about an hour of prep/cleanup, that’s 14 hours a week. Sure, you’re beating minimum wage by a bit, but only if you can keep the classes fully enrolled. If you have a bad week or need to hire someone to help you or to watch YOUR kids, you’re back down to “just meeting expenses.”

I don’t think many of these places will survive, but the concept of outsourcing bits and pieces of stay-at-home motherhood is intriguing. Some savvy marketer out there will be able to make a go of it. And I predict the trend will continue for older, homeschooled kids. There will probably be learning centers where you can bring your kids to learn Spanish or jump on a trampoline or use art supplies or do any number of things that a homeschooling parent might not have the resources for at home.

And maybe one day there will be a place that gathers all of those experiences under one roof! And you could send your children there for hours at a time to learn things, instead of chauffeuring them from class to class! And they could call it…SCHOOL.

Back in July, Husband and I took a little trip to Castine, Maine while my parents watched the boys.

Coastal Castine, the picture-perfect site of the Maine Maritime Academy, manages to be both moneyed and authentic. There are few McMansions here; instead, imagine modest but expensively-landscaped and painstakingly maintained Victorian cottages.

If you live in a Victorian, you realize how much money it costs just to keep a house like this attractive. Those windows have been replaced; the wood siding has to be scraped and painted every few years; the roof has been reshingled recently; the stone wall and border take more upkeep than a huge front lawn.

There were lots of opportunities in Castine for Hopper-esque house portraits, but I quickly grew tired of perfect cottages and went looking for some imperfect ones.

I liked to think that this place is owned by a former mobster who long ago pissed off his capo and has come to hide out among the WASPs in Castine, but consequently is afraid to hire a landscaper for fear he will rat out his location. A good thing, too, because can you imagine mowing that vertical lawn?

This guy can. I was afraid that the lawnmower would tumble down on him while I was shooting this picture.

Castine is about as sleepy as these pictures make it look. It’s not really a tourist destination as much as a seasonal place. The locals don’t trouble themselves about anyone they don’t recognize as year-rounders or summer people. The women at the Castine Variety, for example, ostentatiously ignored us until they finished conversing with the known patrons. Then they would turn and not quite make eye contact, as if to say, “Here’s your window of opportunity. If you want to order, you may address me now.” The lobster rolls were pretty good, though.

We awoke to fog on our second day, the day we had planned a six-hour paddling trip. We started off optimistically, convinced it would get better. It didn’t; by early afternoon, it was like kayaking through a dream sequence. We hid out by a little island on one side of the channel while our guide monitored the radio for boat traffic. Enough boats went by without radioing their position to make her nervous about attempting the crossing. We had to paddle up to a narrower crossing, one with a sandbar that usually deterred motorized traffic, and visibility was so low she had to use her compass to set a course. But we made it back in one piece, and even with the pea-soup fog we were able to see porpoises, a seal, ospreys, a blue heron, sea urchins, and starfish.

How foggy was it? Well, this is actually a color photograph.

Minor is talking a lot now. He has always been a pretty enthusiastic communicator, unlike Aitch. Aitch never hit any of those speech milestones on time, even the pre-verbal ones. He couldn’t be bothered with sign language. He wouldn’t even do those standard baby signs that every kid picks up — “so big,” hand clapping, bye-bye, and so forth. He did start talking at a typical age, but he was never that interested in it. If we said, “Say doggie!” he wouldn’t repeat it. (Don’t worry, though. He seems to have caught up. The other day, frustrated by a stuck zipper, he spontaneously exclaimed “Jesus Christ!” at the appropriate time. Imitation? Check.)

Minor was a delightful contrast. He caught on to signs right away and moved quickly to words. He seemed thrilled finally to have some method of communicating his many and nuanced demands. To our great shock, he learned words spontaneously, and when we specifically asked him to repeat words he thought it was a fun game. A few months ago, he started combining two words, a skill that eluded his brother until the two-year mark. The other day he pointed to the letter “S” on one of his brother’s trains and said, “Sssssss.” I realize that all of this is perfectly average, but after our experience with Aitch, Husband and I found it very precocious. The word “genius” was bandied about.

One thing that Minor doesn’t do well, though, is enunciate. Many words sound like some variation of “Buh,” even those that don’t start with B. “I love you” is “Buh boo,” and so on. This is also in contrast to Aitch, who may not have spoken early or often, but was always clear as a bell.

So when Minor repeats a word, it usually bears only a passing resemblance to its model. When he repeats a sound, though, he is spot on. If you sigh or groan or burp in front of him, you may be disconcerted to hear a tiny echo of your emission. He also imitates ambient noises, animals and machines and such. And when he walks backwards, he thoughtfully beeps like a truck — to alert the people behind him, I suppose, in case he can’t see us in his rear-view mirrors. I marvel that his mimicry skills are so poor with words and so great with other sounds. Maybe it’s the consonants, which are plentiful in the words but not so crucial in the sounds?

Tune in to Letterman in twenty years to see him demonstrating his prize-winning duck calls. Or, maybe, truck calls.