Local Color

Foliage close to home: the bike trail heading to the Connecticut, North Street sunflowers, old fence on Prospect, and along Paradise Pond at Smith.

Sign Wars Stake Out Summer Street

Latest tally, as of Monday, October 26:
Bardsley 5—Higgins 4, for Mayor;
Vidal-McNair 4—Carney 2, for Ward 1 City Councilor;
Adams 1—Narkewicz 2—Silva 1, for Councilor at Large;
Mike Flynn 1, for School Committee at Large

A Tree Grows on King Street (once upon a time)

Where the Armory building now stands—and across from Dunkin Donuts—grew the country’s most celebrated elm tree, which, according to local lore, a young Yale graduate named Jonathan Edwards started from seed in 1726. By the time the famous old elm fell to the ground in August 1913, it topped 100 feet with a trunk nearly 20 feet wide. The New York Times noted the landmark’s loss in a lengthy obituary. Today, I may not have much of a view from my front porch across the way at 17 Summer, but I like to think that the Kinneys and Cohens, who owned my house around the turn of the century, enjoyed coming out the front door and seeing the famous Edwards elm and the handsome Whitney house behind it.

Memorable Markers

A few dozen local history enthusiasts turned out on a near-drizzly Saturday morning to join award-winning writer Susan Stinson on a walking tour of Bridge Street Cemetery sponsored by Forbes Library. Entitled “Jonathan Edwards in Northampton,” Stinson’s lively commentary drew from her seven years of research on the brilliant 18th century theologian who was minister at what is now First Churches in Northampton from 1727 to 1750. She's been at work on Spider in a Tree, a novel based on the life and family of Jonathan Edwards.

Vermeer Show

Vermeer’s 17th century masterpiece, The Milkmaid, has long been a favorite of mine, and it's currently the centerpiece of a special exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, drawing a raft of media coverage and crowds. I’ve been collecting postcards since I was a kid, and every time I visit a museum I bring home a batch as souvenirs. Pictured here are postcards of Vermeer’s stunning View of Delft, from the Mauritshuis in The Hague, the The Milkmaid and The Little Street from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and Girl with a Pearl Earring, also in the Mauritius, which I shot from a postcard for an iPhoto slideshow of the trip. Click photos to enlarge.

Political Boost

Last night while driving home from a rousing-good party for a political candidate, I thought back to my early years in town when I didn't know one candidate from the other, and had little time or interest in caring. Think what you like of my civic truancy, but at some periods of our lives, there are a lot of us out there operating off the local political grid. The following excerpt from an earlier blog post fills in the story. Click on photo to read..

"The other day I came across a clipping I’d saved from an August 1980 issue of The Sunday Republican. “Tell Us About Your Town” the headline urged. “What makes you think it’s such a great place?” Four people—drafted, no doubt, by their institutions’ PR departments—had been asked to flex their civic pride in 700 words or less. The attractions of living in South Hadley, Southwick, Springfield and Northampton shared editorial turf that day, with the latter town’s booster being a brown-haired Lu Stone. [I don’t know what is tougher: To come upon unexpectedly—28 years later—a photo of yourself at 42 or a piece of forgotten prose.]

I was a relative newcomer to Northampton when I wrote the article, still smitten, I suppose, by the brilliance of my decision to adopt this city. At the time, I was renting a house on one of the city’s leafier streets and commuting to a job on the other side of the river. Caught up in family activities and demands of work, I paid little, if no, attention to local politics or the town’s social or political intrigues. I could not have told you the name of the mayor or the Ward Two city councilor."

By the summer of 1983, I was remarried, and my husband and I bought a fixer-upper on Summer Street, three houses up from King . . . Right from the start, we loved our house and street; we became Summer Street loyalists, quick to defend it at any slight. it would not be long before I knew the name of my city councilor. He was my husband, Mike Kirby."

Part II: One Misstep, One Unexpected Side Trip

For Part I, see August 18th post: National Health Care—One Tourist's View

So there we were, a non-Portuguese speaking Mike Kirby and Lu Stone, his equally non-Portuguese speaking wife with a broken leg, in a remote Azorean village so tidy and still it might have been lifted from a model railroad layout. It was late morning on a Monday; the next flight to Logan would not take off until 6 pm the following day.

Our cabbie took the shore route out of Sete Cidades, providing his hapless fares one last—and strangely intimate—view of the lakes and hills that had appeared mysterious and aloof from our earlier perch along the volcano’s rim. At the end of the narrow road, he stopped and pointed ahead to two signs bearing the names of towns that meant nothing to us. One pointed left, the other right.


We shrugged. He nodded, a firm nod of approval, and turned left. This was not the steep, twisty farm road the bus from Ponta Delgada had plied that morning up from the coast. As we cruised along the high ridge, fields and forests suddenly gave way to a breathtaking view, the kind tourists take a detour to see: A parade of villages strutted up the coast for miles, their white buildings dazzling in the sun, the waves rolling off the wild Atlantic, crashing against the rocky shore. Our cabbie slowed down so we could appreciate the sight. Sitting in this makeshift ambulance in need of a painkiller while oohing and ahhing over a view bordered on the absurd. I would have reached for my camera, but by now we had discovered it had been left behind during our scramble in or out of our rescuers’ car.

About a half hour later, around one o’clock, the taxi dropped us off at the door marked, Urgenica, of Hospital do Divino Espirito Santo, a big up-to-date facility in Ponta Delgado. “Do you think they take credit cards?” I asked Mike as an attendant pushed my wheelchair into a crowded waiting room. The meager amount of Portuguese I’d picked up on earlier trips to Portugal had vanished somewhere back in Sete Cidades. But, hadn’t I read every schoolchild in the Azores takes at least two years of English.

I soon discovered that Hospital do Divino Espirito Santo was not my hometown Cooley Dick, where spouses and loved ones are allowed to tag along into the ER, and patients await care in little examining rooms, with chairs set up for the worried family, and squadrons of health professionals rush in with monitors and machines. Here, I was going to be on my own; no husbands permitted beyond the swinging doors. Here, I’d do my waiting in the hallway.

I waved good-bye to Mike who had a busy afternoon ahead: call the kids back in the States, talk to referrals at Valley Medical Center, wrestle with a SATA airlines rep to cancel the flight to Lisbon and rebook our homeward trek, hit the nearest ATM for a wad of euros. I joined a gang of about two dozen people lined up outside the x-ray room. I waited nearly an hour until my name was called, and during that time I decided to try to forget the stabbing pain in my leg and my sense of helplessness—and anger at allowing a measly piece of gravel to cheat Mike and me out of two weeks on the Algarve—by viewing this whole crazy adventure as a fascinating side trip, one tourist’s inside view of the Portuguese health system.


For more than an hour, I chatted with a young woman on the gurney next to mine about Katrina, George Bush, the diversity of the Azorean people, her stress-related headaches, and the logistics of Portugal’s tax-funded public health care. Neither of my roommates in the orthopedic ward where I spent the night spoke a word of English. For one night at least, our triple became a hangout for a group of curious schoolboys on the mend from broken bones, a gathering place for anyone wishing to practice their conversational English skills at an American’s bedside. The cup of Sanka served each night at nine o'clock to patients; the tea and biscuits, coloring books and crayons thoughtfully distributed by a staff member every hour or so to the waiting room; the starch-less white cotton coats that looked like dimity aprons worn backwards sported by doctors. There was a lot to see, to help pass the time, so much to tell Mike on our way home.

In the end, the doctors and nurses and aides of Hospital do Divino Espirito Santo took good care of me. They set my leg, painful as that episode was, with near perfect anatomical accuracy, dressed its wounds and applied a temporary cast that would hold until my return to Boston where I’d seek treatment. They administered shots and meds to kill my pain and avoid complications, followed the protocol for x-rays, kept me overnight for observation, armed me with meds and warnings for the five-hour flight home, and arranged an ambulance to transport Mike and me to the airport.

Just as I was about to leave, the ward's team of nurses, doctors, aides, technicians piled into the room and gathered around the bird-like old woman sitting on the edge of her bed. A nurse whispered that my roommate was about to learn she would not be going back to her home on the tiny island of Santa Maria; she needed a nursing home. I was impressed by the number of hospital staff that had come to break the sad news, to rally around her, hold her hand. Somehow I knew my spry little neighbor who had loved to hop out of bed and socialize up and down the hall, stand at the foot of my bed and smile, would never be going home. She began to cry. I went over and hugged her. There was nothing I could say, but I think she understood.

"I'll Take Paper, Please."

Sometime in the 1960s or 70s, The New Yorker ran a cartoon of a man, spiffily clad in bathrobe and slippers outside his apartment door, hugging a thick Sunday paper to his chest. Tears of joy ran down his cheeks, his smile as wide as the hall of his pre-war building. No caption needed: the New York Times was back. The strike which had shuttered newspaper pressrooms all over the city for weeks had been settled.

I remember that strike and earlier blackouts at the Times and the other big city dailies, and how bleak mornings were with no New York Times to scoop up from the apartment doormat or front porch, to pluck off the pile at the subway newsstand or corner store, and then, hungrily spread open on the kitchen table the pages with the dependable typeface and layout or, read, folded according to narrow subway requirements, on the bus or train.

My allegiance to the Times began freshman year in high school when student subscriptions were 25 cents a week, copies delivered to our homerooms every morning. Carrying the Times around Henry Snyder High School in Jersey City rated us as sophisticates, or so, we thought, our admission ticket to the city only a PATH ride across the river. Meyer Berger and Gay Talese became my favorite reporters, their prose style, sense of narrative carefully studied; the crossword a daily, and lifelong, ritual. Fifty-five years later, my addiction to the morning Times shows no signs of abating. [And have you noticed that the Times, albeit punier in size, has been publishing chewier, longer articles, ceding “the news” we read online hours earlier to the electronic outlets?]

In the last few years, my household has opted for a paperless Boston Globe and Daily Hampshire Gazette, reading the two dailies online, but even at two dollars a day, and a budget-busting six dollars on Sunday, we cling to our paper New York Times. We’ve already experienced a “paperless” New York Times more than once in our lives and that was enough, and Jacquie and David at Cumby’s around the corner would miss us every morning.

National Health Care—One Tourist's View from a Hospital Ward in Portugal

A recent spate of newspaper articles (two in Sunday’s Times, alone) reports the encounters of American ex-pats, journalists and visitors with nationalized health care in Europe. Their experiences dealing with the medical establishment overseas were overwhelmingly positive, and may even temper a few recalcitrant attitudes toward public plans in the U.S.

So, maybe, it’s time to add my experience as an American tourist who one day found herself swept into the national healthcare system of Portugal. It was late March 2006, and I was in the Azores—staying on the main island of San Miguel—with my favorite travel companion. From there, we planned to fly to Lisbon, and take the bus to the Algarve, for a two-week stay.

But a nasty patch of loose black volcanic gravel tripped up those plans, and landed me in a Portuguese hospital with a broken leg, or in orthopedic-speak, a closed fracture of my left distal tibia and fibular.

We saved a visit to the Azores’s most spectacular setting—the scenic sister lakes of Sete Cidades—until our last day on the island. Lagoa Verde and Lagoa Azul are set in the center of a volcanic crater, their names literally reflecting their special attraction. On a cloudless day (not a common occurrence way out in the Atlantic) when the sun shimmers upon the waters, one lake appears green, from the surrounding hills; the other, blue, from the sky.

We spent a glorious morning meandering along little-used paths high above the lakes. The weather was cool and sunny; the lakes shimmered in greens and blues, the lush hills and fields, a rolling show of Pantone greens. By now, it had been hours since we had seen a living soul, a farmer hauling hay to his fields far ahead.



As we began to head downhill and begin the long trek into the nearest village, where the bus from Ponta Delgada had deposited us earlier, I slipped, twisting my left leg on the hard volcanic litter. I instantly knew that I’d broken something and, given the acute pain and the big bump beneath my left sock, that I would not be walking out of Sete Cidades or sunning on a beach in Algarve anytime soon. Stranded on a remote cowpath a long walk from telephone, transportation, painkillers, human beings, a helpless 60-something woman in tow, was definitely not the memorable holiday excursion Mike Kirby had planned.

I will never understand the forces at play behind what transpired next, those serendipitous strands of our lives linking people, time and place in stunning, unexpected ways. Call it a miracle, we have, because not five minutes after that fatal step, a tiny car, the sort hired by tourists, merrily bounced down the path. How did these people get here! On a narrow footpath, no less! Could you believe it! What’s the chance this would happen!

Our good Samaritans turned out to be a Norwegian couple touring with a male friend from Sweden. They stopped, quickly made room for us and our packs in their car, and five tourists, two of whom had never been more astonished—or relieved— in their lives and three who spoke little English, took off for the next village. Our driver cruised through empty streets, hoping, in vain, to find a police station, clinic, town hall, any sign of help. Sensing that our rescuers would rather be sightseeing than hauling their needy American cargo around on a beautiful day, we suggested they drop us at the café/bar where we had stopped that morning for coffee. “We’ll get a taxi here,” we assured them.

Despite the café patrons telling us there were no cabs to be had in the town, ten minutes later, to our amazement, a big, spanking new SUV pulled up. Now, where did he come from! We hadn’t the foggiest where we were headed; the driver spoke little, if any, English. but we were on our way at last, and that’s all that mattered. Little did we know, our smiling cabbie was about to give his two American fares the ride of their lives.

to be continued . . .

Yes, We Have No Tomatoes

Our resident vegetable gardener was bereft—he’d just spent the afternoon tearing up the tomato plants he’d grown from seed and fussed over for weeks. Sadly, his ample crop of Romas, Big Boys and Grapes had become one more victim of the Tomato Blight of 2009. The annual ritual of cooking up batches of tomato sauce was not to be. This winter, the freezer wouldn’t be holding dozens of plastic containers, filled to the brim, ready for quick, tasty meals.

The rest of the seedlings fared better. Snap peas, squash, greens, white radishes, peppers took off and landed on our dinner plates and salad bowls. Zinnias started from scratch also thrived. On the flower front, the thinning out and transplanting I had done last fall of perennials like Shasta daisies, speedwell Veronica, coneflowers, bee balm and coreopsis paid off handsomely. For my neighbors and me, one of the great rewards of gardening on Summer Street is seeing—and chatting with— the many passersby who stop to admire our hard work. And it’s especially gratifying to watch the renters on the block catch the gardening spirit, adding swatches of color to their temporary turf.

Calming Influence Needed

Every time I come back to Northampton from visiting family in San Diego, I prepare myself for digs about crowded freeways, fast drivers in flashy cars, and, of course, the last word: “I wouldn’t want to live there.” Admittedly, driving the I-5—instead of pokey Route 9—to get to Target or Trader Joe’s may not be everyone’s idea of a thrilling afternoon excursion. But, once you get off the Five and land in, say, La Jolla, Del Mar or any of the towns along the Coast Highway, you’re in the slow, or, at least, slower, lane.

Welcome to the wonderfully sane world of roundabouts, speed bumps, generously timed and cleverly lighted pedestrian crossings, and, best of all, four-way stops galore and bike lanes. The nifty red signs are not only found in residential neighborhoods, but in shopping districts and along highways, as well, and, I might add, those maligned California drivers actually come to a full stop. I lived for eight years in a busy market/college town that was a county seat in central Pennsylvania. Four-ways stops were on nearly every corner. I saw how effective they were at slowing down traffic on my street (a direct route to a mall about a mile away) and creating safer passages for walkers and bikers, especially the kids on the block.

So, why, I’ve long wondered, the hue and holler in Northampton whenever some sensible traffic calming measure like the roundabout on Route 9, at Look Park and Bridge Road, or the traffic light for the new bike path on King, comes on the scene. The obvious suggestion of putting four-way stop signs at ugly intersections like Finn and State, Trumbull Road and State, or at other unsafe crossings throughout the city brings out the inevitable naysayers or municipal procrastinators.

I read somewhere that living in the city helps to keep seniors at the top of their game. Part of the reason is the challenges they have to negotiate the minute they step outside: tricky, unsafe street crossings, aggressive drivers, skateboarders and bikers on sidewalks, broken sidewalks, pedestrian lights that go red too quickly, a cast of street characters. Well, I guess, I need not have any worries as long as I call the city of Northampton “home.”<

Fourth on the Vineyard