A Different Point of View

In two weeks, I will board a train headed for Washington, D.C., and the 40^th reunion of Environmental Action, where some 80 former colleagues will gather to do what people do best at 40^th reunions – talk, reminisce, share stories, catch up on gossip, lament getting older, and this year, I’m sure, discuss with both anger and sadness the oil gushing up from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

It is a dark cloud upon all of us. There is the awful reality, slowly seeping into our cerebral cortex, that the Gulf of Mexico is fucked, truly fucked, for at least the next two generations – some 40 years, if not longer. There are no technological quick fixes. The damages to our health, our economy, our environment, and our world, while seemingly evident, are not really fully visible or understood in terms of magnitude. We are all in the same kettle of fish, filled with tar balls and globules of oil. Tune in sometime in 20 years for the “unexplained” spike in cancer rates and immune-suppressed illnesses that will sweep the Southeast.

I have often made a career as an environmental writer, detailing how the best-made plans by men and women have inevitably ended in disaster. The poisoning of the Cree Indians in northwestern Quebec by man-made mercury; the industrial accident at Bhopal in India; and the threat of economic devastation and contamination from nuclear power plants in Montague, Mass., Seabrook, N.H., Barnwell, S.C., San Luis Obispo, Calif., and Palos Verdes, Ariz. Along with stories about garbage, the threat to drinking water, toxic waste, waste incinerators, global warming, nuclear waste disposal, asbestos, lead poisoning, even the threat of drilling for oil on the Georges Bank on the Outer Continental Shelf off the Massachusetts coast, I have covered the waterfront of environmental sins of commission.

As environmental activists, writers and lobbyists, we were, it seems, always ahead of the curve and in front of the wave. As such, it makes it difficult for me to watch TV news reports of the travesty, because the folks always seem to get it wrong, caught up in the “Are you for it or against it?” worldview. Context, nuance, even the basic facts, slip away. Sometimes, watching Jon Stewart, and laughing, makes the heartache go away, but not for long.

In 1978, for The Real Paper, a Boston weekly, I wrote a story, “The Siren Song of Oil,” about plans to drill for oil off the Massachusetts coastline. It began: “It’s a curious song that will infect the breezes warming the Massachusetts coastline this summer, a mechanical melody sweet with promise, its rhythm as constant as the slapping of waves on the beach. The southerly winds will carry the distant hum of machinery gnawing away at the crust beneath the ocean in search of all those tiny plants and animals that have rotted and petrified into the wealth of Western Civilization, oil and natural gas…” (The weekly never published the piece, because the editor said it was “too predictably anti-oil.” So it goes.) Thankfully, a federal judge intervened to stop the proposed drilling. Instead, this summer, 2010, construction will hopefully finally begin on offshore wind turbines for the Cape Wind project.

Let me share with you a couple more excerpts from the unpublished article, which remarkably, quoted from a report that cited the lack of environmental data for oil spills. The article concluded with the suggestion that a better investment would be offshore wind generators.

“That the sea contained oil and natural gas beneath its crust was never a great secret. In her book, The Sea Around Us, published in 1951, Rachel Carson had explained the relationship of the ocean to oil. Most of the great reserves of oil on what is now dry land were once ancient oceans. ‘Wherever great oil fields are found,’ she wrote, ‘they are related to past or present seas. This is true of inland fields as well as those near the present seacoast.’

‘Our search for mineral wealth,’ her tract continued, ‘ often leads us back to the seas of ancient times, to the oil pressed from the bodies of fishes, seaweeds and other forms of plant and animal life and then stored away in ancient rocks, to the rich brine hidden in the subterranean pools where the fossil water of old seas still remain…’

“Our search for oil, coal and natural gas in the 20^th century, more gluttonous than poetic, has become America’s manifest destiny. And, like our country’s drive westward a century ago, it proceeds at any cost. Often the land is ravaged, the wildlife destroyed, the native people uprooted.”

Another excerpt: “In one of the most complete forecasts on the impact of offshore drilling, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation published a 175-page book last month [January 1978] entitled, New York State and Outer Continental Shelf Development: An Assessment of Impacts. The report analyzes the entire process of offshore oil development from the pre-leasing phase through exploration, development, production and shutdown… [The report found that the informational base for decision-making] ‘is inadequate, particularly in regard to environmental data. Little is known about the long-term impacts of [such drilling], including oil spills, on the marine environment.’”

One more excerpt: “In early March 1976, L.W. ‘Luke’ Trahin, representing the Morgan City, Louisiana, Chamber of Commerce, spent a week in New Bedford testifying to how wonderful offshore oil would be. His home city, which nestles next to the Intercoastal Waterway south of New Orleans, serves as the major staging ground for offshore operations in the Gulf of Mexico. He told the New Bedford residents to “look for economic growth, no oil boom.”

When asked what would happen when Louisiana ran out of its reserves of natural gas and oil, Trahin answered bluntly, “It’s beyond man’s comprehension to plan 40 years from now. Years from now most of us will be dead. It’s not our province to worry about that. Let each generation take care of its own.”

And when a local reporter asked him what could be done to protect against a major oil spill, he responded with the faith of a true believer in the free enterprise system. “The oil industry works for the best possible environment. Spills are avoided for the simple reason that if you spill it, you can’t sell it.”

It all comes down to economic priorities. As long as the country’s appetite for oil and natural gas increases, the oil companies will spend billions of dollars to develop new oil fields, whether they be under the ocean of prime fishing grounds or under the streets of Paris [a not-so-obvious reference to The Madwoman of Chaillot, a play by Jean Giradoux, a tragic farce about greedy oil men who attempt to buy up all the sewers of Paris]. The energy shortages are real, our consumption of energy unrealistic.

…One might ask what if the billions of dollars were to be spent on the development of better solar technology, or the implementation of William Heronemous’ [an engineering professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst] plan for offshore wind generators, or a public conservation program. It’s matter of economic priorities. And profit.”

This morning, walking around the narrow point on Narragansett Bay in my new neighborhood, I thought a lot about environmental consequences – and the fact that the environmental economic costs are never quite become part of the equation.

Recently, for a publication call The Bay, I was asked to write a “neutral, objective” story promoting plans to site a LNG facility in Narragansett Bay. I ended up refusing to write the piece, because it was against my beliefs to write something that purported to be neutral about a project that was based in greed and had future environmental disaster written all over it. I asked: How could a publication that calls itself “The Bay,” i.e., covering the cultural life on Narragansett Bay, consider writing an article promoting such a project? The editor didn’t take kindly to my decision, and she told me I’d never write for the publication again. It’s a badge of honor I’ll proudly wear.

As I was walking with my dog, I started singing the words to the Bob Dylan tune, Tangled Up In Blue: “All the people we used to know, they’re an illusion to me now, some are mathematicians, some are carpenter’s wives. Don’t know how it all got started, I don’t what they’re doing with their lives… we just saw it from a different point of view...”

I think about former colleagues at Environmental Action Magazine. Francesca Lyman, who wrote about global warming in 1984, years before it was fashionable. Jim Jubak, who wrote poignantly about his own family’s relationship to asbestos, now writes about Wall Street and stocks. Kathy Hughes, who understood how to tell a good story, and now does if for public television. Rose Marie Audette, tenacious in her search for the truth, who is now a lawyer. Of course, Anne Bullen, who provided us with good taste in design.

On the 15^th anniversary of Earth Day, in 1985, we published a special edition of the magazine, “Visions,” asking people to imagine the world in the year 2000. No one, of course, predicted that Environmental Action would be go belly up in 1997. I pulled my copy out a while ago, and found it still to be relevant to the questions we face today.

Serendipity

It was one of the most amazing, outrageous, absurd coincidences in my life.

I was walking down the Sliding Sands Trail from 10,000-foot top of Haleakala National Park, descending into the dormant crater, heading towards its center, and the Park Ranger cabin in a spot known as Paliku.

Beneath my feet were volcanic sands, in a mostly barren landscape. The trail was an evolutionary one, stretching from rock and sand through a middle ground where mists lingered and yellow-orange poppies seem to bloom and decay with each new breath among the ohelo berry bushes, and then, as if passing through a life membrane, towards the sounds of birds, flitting back and forth above the pali, the crater’s edge, and the Kaupo Gap, where the crater had been eroded by the hot rush of lava hundreds of years before, and then, a descent into deepening green, ever richer in its brightness, towards the rain forests and streambeds which could turn into raging torrents in an instant if it rained, and finally, to the sea itself, a blue horizon stretching upwards towards a lighter blue sky, until the clouds of mist would blanket me in swirls of moisture, the sunlight piercing through it to form intense rainbows, which always seemed to be waiting for me at the end of the path I was walking down.

My destination, the ranger cabin, was where my friend, Sandy, a park ranger, was on duty, and where I would be staying during my sojourn to Maui. We were friends; she had signed me in as a volunteer in the park, enabling me to wander about the crater on my own.

In those days, I never traveled with a camera, believing that it was important to remember the images I encountered without visual aids, that as a writer, it was a mental exercise for the brain to retain encounters with the natural world that could then be translated from synaptic pulses back into words, at will. Of course, I was mistaken; the memories only come late at night, or very early in the morning, like now, awakening from dreams that I will are not remember, until the next time my unconscious takes me there, once again, past the silverswords, past the outcroppings of hardened lava, towards the most intense rainbows I have ever seen.

Descending the trail, at first, there is only the sound of my hiking boots scraping against sand and the increasing sound of my own labored breaths as I struggled with the altitude, the sun’s heat, the ache of my calves which had spent too much time sitting in an office chair, punching down keys at the computer, and the sweat pouring down my face. My own sounds were enveloped in the silence around me, as if I were underwater, traveling alone on a path towards beauty, without any human, it seemed within miles. I was very aware of my own heart beating.

Each time I had descended into the Haleakala crater, I found that I was entering a revelatory realm, because as I traveled down the path, I also traveled deep within my own thoughts, wide awake, talking to myself, and to my unconscious.

Now, it was a year later, and I was lost in my own thoughts, still unfogging my brain from the stresses of my job, when the sound of voices began to filter through the mist. Up ahead were three fellow travelers, two men and a woman, shouting and carrying on as if they were drunk and on the way to an Aerosmith concert. I was annoyed, because they were disturbing my own sense of quietude, communing with nature. And, I realized, because we were alone together in the crater, we would soon be traveling side by side, as an unintended group, much like Chaucer’s pilgrims.

One of the men, very tall, was athletic and graceful in his stride. He wore a long, flowing caftan. His companions, showing the signs of fatigue and sunburn, were clearly companions who had been dragged along at his urging. I fell in with them, and listened as the tall man told his tale.

He had been a graduate student researcher at Stanford University, working on the genetic engineering code of tomatoes, in collaboration with his professor. He had uncovered important new understandings of the genes and how they worked, but his professor had taken full credit for the work, and negotiated a lucrative research contract with Monsanto. Worse, a lawsuit filed by some crazy environmentalists in Washington, D.C., had halted the work. So, he had left the university, gone to Maui, and was supporting himself by doing magic tricks for tourists at the large hotels on the island.

His companions couldn’t have cared less about his story; they were busy sharing a joint made from buds of what was affectionately known as “Maui Wowie” and asking, as impatient children do on long trips, “When will we get there?”

But I was stunned. What was the line from the movie, “Casablanca?” Of all the dormant volcanic craters in all the world… It was Environmental Action, a national environmental group, where I was one of three editors of the magazine, which had decided to join with the lawsuit brought by Jeremy Rifkin and his Foundation of Economic Trends in 1983, challenging the tall man’s work with Monsanto on genetic engineering.

The tall man went on, railing against the stupidity of such people, who didn’t know what they were talking about, who didn’t understand that there was no risk. His angry words rose up and then fell down to the crater floor, which was silent and oblivious.

Finally, after a bunch of un-huhs and reallys, I summoned the courage to tell him the truth. “It’s hard to believe,” I said, “but I’m one of the people responsible for stopping your work. My environmental group joined the lawsuit.”

The tall man was incredulous. His angry had been directed for months at some nameless, faceless group, far away, built into an incredible imagined force of darkness in his life, and now, walking down the Sliding Sands Trail, he was confronting one of the very people responsible for so much of what he perceived as his personal misery.

“Why? Why? How could you do such a thing?” he sputtered angrily

I responded: “Look around you. What do you see?”

“I see incredible beauty,” he said.

“Beyond the beauty,” I answered, “is the legacy of that beauty being attacked by foreign species of plants and animals that were introduced here, which disrupt the natural ecological balance of things. I pointed to the edge of the crater, where a fence was being built there, to try and contain feral goats that were eating all the crater’s vegetation. The fence, of course, was useless to prevent the spread of goats.

As I went through a litany of Maui’s diversity being diminished by the introduction of new foreign species, the tall man’s attitude seemed to shift. His anger dissipated, and after much discussion, he found himself agreeing with me. There were always unintended consequences when folks started to tinker with the balance of nature. Two hours later, when I left them at their destination, a small hiker’s cabin, the tall man hugged me, as if I were one of his new best friends.

I never saw him again. The lawsuit was tossed out, his former professor no doubt got rich and Monsanto Co. has pursued its genetic-engineering regiment unimpeded, with a spate of disturbing questions about the unintended consequences. A recent news story by Reuters described the growing doubts:

COLUMBIA, Missouri (Reuters) - Robert Kremer, a U.S. government microbiologist who studies Midwestern farm soil, has spent two decades analyzing the rich dirt that yields billions of bushels of food each year and helps the United States retain its title as breadbasket of the world.

Kremer's lab is housed at the University of Missouri and is literally in the shadow of Monsanto Auditorium, named after the $11.8 billion-a-year agricultural giant Monsanto Co. Based in Creve Coeur, Missouri, the company has accumulated vast wealth and power creating chemicals and genetically altered seeds for farmers worldwide.

But recent findings by Kremer and other agricultural scientists are raising fresh concerns about Monsanto's products and the Washington agencies that oversee them. The same seeds and chemicals spread across millions of acres of U.S. farmland could be creating unforeseen problems in the plants and soil, this body of research shows.

Kremer, who works for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service (ARS), is among a group of scientists who are turning up potential problems with glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup and the most widely used weed-killer in the world.

"This could be something quite big. We might be setting up a huge problem," said Kremer, who expressed alarm that regulators were not paying enough attention to the potential risks from biotechnology on the farm, including his own research.

I haven’t been back to the Haleakala crater in more than two decades. But, sometimes, when I think about going back, I wonder, what are the chances I might perhaps meet up again with the tall man again. What would he think now about Monsanto and his former work?

To recognize and to celebrate the small, everyday routines that make up our lives

I am very proud to have been a member of the first class at Hampshire, entering in the fall of 1970, graduating in 1974. My odd-looking diploma, on gray paper, with its uppercase lettering, stills hangs in my office.

I have often thought that the college was ours before we were the college’s – with apologies to Robert Frost.

Now, with the 40^th anniversary upon us, and the college planning a reunion, I am conflicted about whether or not to attend. I went to the 10^th, the 15^th, the 20^th, and the 30^th reunions. Now, it seems that the law of diminishing returns applies. The more you seek to return to places of strong memories, the quicker they disappear in the sunlight of current time. It can be graphed as an inverse relationship.

To attend the reunion, they’re asking for a $145 fee – as well as another $85 for a slow-cooked gourmet dinner, and $100 for an outsourced published guide to all the graduates from the school. It’s more than I can afford, quite frankly.

As a sign of my own aging, I have three 40^th anniversaries this year to choose or not to attend – my high school’s, Hampshire’s, Earth Day (I worked with Environmental Action between 1982-1985). There may be possibly a fourth – the Urban Mitzvah Corps in New Jersey, of which I was a co-founder.

By serendipity, in early May 1985, I happened to be in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) when Russia (then the Soviet Union) celebrated the 40^th anniversary of the end of World War II. By the Neva River, as ice chunks breaking up from Lake Ladoga flowed toward the sea, I saw four old soldiers embrace in hugs, tears streaming down their faces. They had survived.

I wish I could summon even a small bit of that heartfelt emotion for my years of service and survival at Hampshire College. But, the only contact in the last decade I have had with the school is the regular, impersonal appeals for money they send to me, which I promptly toss into the circular file.

Of course, I have stories to tell. My dinner in 1971 with John D. Rockefeller III, at an organic duck farm in Belchertown, eating a moose meat stew (one of the folks who lived at the farm was an undercover policeman in Maine, and the meat came from an illegally poached moose), discussing the Vietnam War with him. I had just returned with a group of Hampshire College students (we had driven down in the Outdoors Program VW bus) from anti-war protest in Washington, D.C. The dinner was a gathering of what was called the Connecticut Valley Committee, and I was one of Hampshire College’s representatives, and we were discussing the progress being made with how to use Rockefeller’s $25,000 gift to improve the environmental quality of the Connecticut River.

It’s a wonderful story – a classic Hampshire College tale. I may write it up as my next post. But, it seems, no one at Hampshire these days is very interested.

I have not heard from any former faculty or students in years. Rhode Island, it seems, is often considered an outpost, a bump in the road on the way between New York City and Boston by Hampshire’s elite. This year, I did write a card when a fellow first-year’s father died; it was never acknowledged. There is a former 1970 classmate who lives in the same town, but our contact is limited to a brief hello at an occasional town meeting. So it goes.

I thought I would share an excerpt from a larger work-in-progress, called “A Fate Accomplished,” which in part explains why I didn’t attend the 25^th reunion, and why I am not sure I will attend the 40^th reunion.

ON THE WEEKEND OF MY 25th COLLEGE REUNION, I helped move my father from his New Jersey home of 32 years to an assisted care facility in Massachusetts. It’s hardly an event that the alumni office would ever feature in its next bulletin touting the achievement of graduates, with its cheery, confident tone about the future.

Richard Asinof writes: “I recently earned an advanced degree in family dysfunction, collaborating with my sister to pack up and move my father and his second wife to an independent living apartment because they could no longer take care of themselves.”

Nor would I be likely to send in a photograph of my father as a show-and-tell of my success, capturing that awkward moment of our arrival the weekend of the move. As if posed for a new, suburban version of American Gothic, my father sat, angry and defiant, legs crossed, on a wooden kitchen chair, halfway between the house and the street on the front flagstone walk. Unshaven and ungroomed, his hair stood up, Alfalfa-style, and his mouth hung slackjaw, a cigarette in his hand with an inch of ash dangling.

Since his stroke that February (which the doctor first misdiagnosed as a heart problem), one of my sisters and I had been alternating weekends traveling to New Jersey.

Like a United Nations peace-keeping force, we had been forced to intervene in a strange and distant land where we were not necessarily welcome. Our mission: To manage my father’s life, and by default, the life of his second wife, a choice we had been avoiding for as long as we could.

For months, we had struggled against the inevitable: taking full responsibility for their lives. The actual metamorphosis from being our father’s children to serving in loco parentis for him occurred on a weekend visit to New Jersey in April, during a brief, 30-second exchange worthy of an unfunny television sitcom.

I had noticed that the front end of my father's car was damaged, and asked, as nonchalantly as possible, “What happened, Dad?”

“I ran into the bank,” he replied

“You ran into the bank?”

“Yeah. I ran into the bank. I hit the accelerator instead of the brake.”

My sisters and I could cope with the lost checkbooks. We could cringe at the unpaid bills and the unopened mail, be disgusted by the rancid milk in the refrigerator, and be frustrated by the missing wallet. We could openly worry about the cigarette burns on the carpet. But the image of my father careening out of control in his automobile was more than we could bear.

In April 1980, my father and mother had been in a head-on collision on the Tappan Zee Bridge. My mother was killed instantly; my father was severely injured.

In the aftermath of that tragedy, my two sisters and I had healed to some degree, slowly moving ahead with our lives. (In therapy, I had said: “ ... when my parents were killed in a car accident,” and my therapist, ever alert, pointed out that my father was still alive. “Not to me, he wasn’t,” I responded, almost too quickly. In my unconscious world, he – and my family – had clearly not survived.)

My father gave some outward appearances of healing, too. He had remarried, three years after the accident, to a woman he began dating just a few months after the accident. Her husband, also named Stanley, had been killed in a car accident, and she had been badly injured. It was a co-dependent match made in heaven.

And, with money from the insurance settlement for the accident, he had financial security, a security that had eluded him since his father had liquidated the family business two decades before. The fact was that he was deeply depressed did not surprise us. At first, we cajoled my father to get professional help. He ignored us. And so, year after year, we became witnesses, if not accomplices, as our former home disintegrated into an island of denial – and cigarette smoke.

First it was the dining room that became filled with boxes, cardboard tops of a case of beer my father picked up for free at the grocery stores, loaded up with endless piles of papers, all very important, often with lists of things to do filled out. Next it was the den, then the living room, then the spare bedroom, then the upstairs bedroom, then the breakfast room floor.

By 1995, when we intervened and took over my father’s life, there were literally thousands of boxes everywhere. We threw out, before we rented a dumpster, more than 600 bags filled with the stuff contained in these boxes.

Indeed, many of these were actually “important” papers, and we likened our search to a scavenger hunt. There was: uncashed checks, some dating back to 1981; stock certificates and bonds; and my father’s missing will. (It turned out that the lawyer who had drawn up my father’s will had died, and his firm had turned my father’s will over to another firm for safekeeping. In the middle of a stack of unanswered mail we discovered a letter explaining the circumstances, dated nine years earlier, asking my father to direct the second law firm on what to do with his will.)

Each new discovery brought a wave of anger and of sadness and of shame. We were angry that we were being forced to clean up the excrement of his life. We were sad that so much of what we had once believed about our father – and our family – should be proven not to be true. And, we were dreadfully ashamed to admit that he was, indeed, our father, and that we were related to someone that irresponsible. There was also the underlying fear that one day we might turn out to be just like him.

Worse, there was the revulsion of how disgusting the house had become. Everything – every book, every piece of furniture, every lamp, every piece of paper, every wall, every painting, every towel – was covered with a thick brown patina of nicotine, the result of two people chain-smoking for 15 years without ever really opening the windows or thoroughly cleaning the house.

Everywhere we found the signs of his serious depression. The bulletin board near the phone still had a list of important phone numbers, in my mother’s handwriting, to people mostly now dead. The same dried flowers in the antique blue pots had stayed on the breakfast room wall for 15 years. Then there were the files of my mother that hadn’t been touched since she died. We had been transported to Miss Haversham’s room, and we were aghast to find our father’s day and birthday cards and presents to him in the same boxes of unopened mail. (My father, during a brief cogent moment during the move, in a kind of mea culpa, explained to me that he kept all these things the way they were because he didn’t want my mother to disappear from his life.)

My father’s second wife, who subsequently underwent treatment as a drug addict for abusing painkillers, spent most of these years in a drug-induced delirium. She was always in pain, always for some exotic illness, and graphic in the description of the various ailments of her bowels and intestines and stomach. We often wondered why my father stayed with her. The answer, apparently, is the punch line to a Woody Allen joke about the guy who stays in a relationship with a chicken – because he needs the eggs. The night before the move, deep in Percoset land, she prattled on, telling me about her recent conversation “with little baby Jesus” while I packed her belongings….

Now, I’m sure that all this doesn’t count for much in the annals of alumni accomplishments. I wish I could say that without the benefit of the unique college education I received, none of this would have been accomplished. That the living-learning philosophy imbued in me by my education provided the insight to understand and cope with my father’s disintegration.

So, it’s not surprising that I am often conflicted about how to respond when my alma mater sends its fund-raising appeals amid the glossy bulletins describing the achievements of graduates. My story – my life – never seems to be able to fit in.

“There are all types of stories about the way alumni are helping to change the world,” declared a letter, announcing plans for the 30th college reunion. “Please feel free to let us know if you have ideas about individual alums or general stories that might be of interest to the media.”

My story is not one that will ever be chosen and retold in order to market the success of the college as measured by the accomplishments of its graduates. It is not a work of art that can be displayed in a gallery. It is not a movie that will receive words of praise by a reviewer. It is not a tale upon which the college will be able to build its endowment. I have created no wealth, fame or status worthy of harvesting by the college – in the college’s value judgment.

But it is a life filled with value and meaning and challenge. It is a story, I suspect, that may resonate with many.

In the four years between our forceful intervention in my father's life and his eventual death, my life was mostly about raising a family while saying a long goodbye to my father – and all the crucial interactions and life forces that come into play. Falling behind in paying the monthly bills, taking on free-lance work to make ends meet. Trying – and sometimes failing – to be a good father and a supportive husband. Trying to have another baby and then coping with miscarriage. Shredding my Achilles tendon. Scraping, sanding, washing, sanding, priming and painting the clapboards in front of the house one summer. Walking my son to school in the morning and being late for work. Coping with our 100-pound dog whose kneecaps on his back legs eroded congenitally and had to be repaired, one at a time. Putting together a group of citizens to try and prevent a farm from being swallowed up by developers, only to have the group dissolve in bitterness. Being talked into running for town council and losing. Selling a second house that was a rental property (where the tenant committed herself after a weekend of binge drinking, resulting in her father removing her belongings from the house under my supervision). Having my boss fired at work, having her replacement removed six months later, then having the firm's president resign in scandal.

And, of course, spending most of my free time on weekends dealing with my father’s latest crisis.

These were the things that made up my day-to-day existence for the last few years. But, it’s hard to imagine that they would ever fit in the larger-than-life sketches of accomplishments that fill up the alumni reports from my college.

Nowhere in our society – which is driven by the need to perform for status and accolades and achievement and outrageous accomplishment – do we recognize and celebrate the small, everyday routines that make up our lives….

This past winter, I went to a memorial service for a colleague’s wife in Shelburne Falls. Thirty-five years ago, I had once lived across the river, in Buckland, in an old cape, taking graduate courses at the University of Massachusetts and working nights at Zelda’s as a cook. Today, Shelburne Falls is a tourist destination; when I lived there, it was a hardscrabble place, the storefronts and houses in disrepair, where darkness and violence were never far from the surface.

It was very much like being a ghost and returning, there were so many people from my former lifetimes. A copy editor who once sat at the next desk to me at the local daily, a lawyer from a firm for which I regularly did communications work. And, there was a former neighbor from Montague Center with whom I was arrested at Seabrook. The woman sitting in front of me was a former Hampshire College student and a former housemate at a farmhouse in North Amherst; we hadn’t seen each other in 36 years.

The memorial celebration was an uplifting event, filled with song and words. I am still hopeful that the 40^th reunion at Hampshire may prove to be so, too, even if I am ghost-like there, too. But, as the lyrics go from Mel Brooks theme song for the movie, “The Twelve Chairs,” hope for the best, expect the worst.