Maggie's Farm

It was one year ago that my Mom died of complications from a hip replacement. Dad died four months later from the same thing, but he didn't really desire to live without her sparkling, upbeat, and charming company.

Editing this website has been a good distraction/outlet this past year. It's been a tough year for Bird Dog, with long-forgotten memories and regrets flooding in relentlessly. That's the way it's meant to be, I guess.

Pic is a newspaper shot of Mom at age 80 receiving some conservation award, and pic below is her car. (Indeed, she did weed all of her perennial gardens at home and at the farm in the Massachusetts hills, and found great pleasure in it. She liked to work hard and play hard, never knew the word "relax" - "too fancy" was her harshest epithet and she hated any form of pretension or luxury - and all of us kids inherited those New England Yankee traits from both Mom and Dad.)

Mom was active in her two (CT and MA) communities in more ways than I can count: socially, conservation, church, clubs, tennis groups, the Granges,  government, etc. Involved, engaged, a real American citizen who took her citizenship seriously. The Farm, after all, was in her family before the Revolution but I think her ancestors were Tories. Politically-naive? My gosh yes. She wanted to believe that everybody was like her family: innocent, highly moral, God-fearing, scholarly, and with all the Yankee virtues, values, and manners. She had genteel refinement and insulated herself from the rough edges of life and from the rough people. A true subcultural WASP in the best sense. Television? No thanks. Books.

I learned at her funeral, from one of my sisters, that she had been writing a weekly gardening column for two newspapers for 25 years. Had she been younger, she might have had a gardening website.

A little snobby and discriminating, perhaps, but she had good taste and she had good pals from every walk of life, and lots of them. She had a talent for connecting with people, so home always had friends and neighbors stopping by unannounced for tea or cocktails. You would never know who might stop in but it was always fun and interesting. As a kid, all sorts of people came by: old farmers, Leonard Bernstein and his "Mrs.", Robert Penn Warren, neighbors, bankers, the local Pediatrician, retired yard guys, lonely widows, the Pastor looking for a glass of Scotch and a jolly chat. Relatives looking for a warm chair by the fire and a hot toddy. Robert Frost and his family stopped by too, but I was hardly conscious then. Mom was pals with his daughter, I think, or his niece. Their two homes - town and country - were open houses, and everybody knew it. Their kitchen (with fireplace and comfy chairs) was rarely empty of people.

Ol' Rodney stopped by too, at least twice a week for a morning coffee. The autistic son of a local farmer who had died, farm sold out to developers, he rode his bike year-round all around town. Mom would let ol' Rodney do some yard work, but he would not accept payment. He just wanted connection and to be useful. Rodney was a true old-style New Englanda' with the old accent, and he never missed Sunday at church.

Mom loved her old reliable CRV and, old-time Yankee that she was, she was a cheapskate and hated to spend money on anything except her yacht club and beach club, the Metropolitan Opera, her favorite charities - and on international travel. Dad, a Yale Prof, a cranky intellectual, and a tough and intolerant SOB with a rapier wit who served in two wars and had some off-the-chart IQ and graduated from Harvard at age 17, was devoted to her happiness, and rightly so: she had spunky vitality and could fly airplanes, ski Killington, win horse-jumping championships, garden-club awards, and sailboat races. A life-long literary amateur scholar too, who could write the world's most gracious Thank-You notes. What's not to like about her except her Yankee moral and cultural sensibilities which could be rather harsh and judgemental? Ouch. Produced 5 fairly average kids, too. In their prime, my parents were pretty cool and embraced life and people in every way that they could.

A beautiful life, well-lived with lots of energy and a commitment to community. We would all like to have that said of ourselves, would we not?

"One could do worse than to be a swinger of birches." My wish is that my kids will absorb all of this family tradition.

A friend sent me this link and quote, with his comment about Fleck:

This guy Ludwik Fleck was an MD virologist. Really interesting fellow and life. He was put in concentration camp by Nazis and told to make vaccine against cholera to give to soldiers. He made the vaccine, vaccinated his fellow inmates and gave barrels of neutralized (useless) vaccine to the Germans. Lived to emigrate to Israel. Notice how they call him a Polish-Jewish scientist.; would be like calling me a German-Jewish or Polish-Jewish scientist. I think he was a fore-runner to Thomas Kuhn.

The quote below is from Ludwik Fleck -

"When people begin to exchange ideas, a thought collective arises, bonded by a specific mood, and as a result of a series of understandings and misunderstandings a peculiar thought style is developed. When a thought style becomes sufficiently sophisticated, the collective divides itself into an esoteric circle (professionals) and an exoteric circle (laymen). A thought style consists of the active elements, which shape ways in which members of the collective see and think about the world, and of the passive elements, the sum of which is perceived as an “objective reality”. What we call “facts”, are social constructs: only what is true to culture is true to nature. Thought styles are often incommensurable: what is a fact to the members of a thought collective A sometimes does not exist to the members of a thought collective B, and a thought that is significant and true to the members of A may sometimes be false or meaningless for members of B."

Cropsey was a landscape painter of the so-called "Hudson River School."

This is the Adam and Eve Mountains in Orange Co., NY.

Parrish (1870-1966) was an enormously popular New Hampshire illustrator/artist whose prints and posters are readily available. For me, they are highly sentimental and corny in a charming way. He frequently decorated his landscapes with lovely nymphettes. This is River in Ascutney. That is Mount Ascutney in the background, and the CT River.

Too busy for links this morning.

My Christmas present to Mrs. BD was piano lessons from a fine teacher who comes to the house. Mrs. BD had lessons in youth and had an incredible music education later. She is music-oriented, but now can only easily play basic things - Happy Birthday and Christmas carols and Auld Lang Syne - she reads music but wants and needs to be able to play chords, jazz riffs, serious pieces, etc., especially since we replaced the old and now have my late Dad's Steinway baby grand. What a sound! It fills ye olde cabin with rich noise. I don't care about missed notes or the sound of practicing. I love to hear it all, including the "damn, damn, damn."

Barking dogs, "damns" from the pianny, drier thumping, vacuum cleaner roaring, the scullery maids dropping pots, doorbell ringing, Blue Jays squawking outside, a young 'un yelling "Where's my sneakers?" - the lovely sounds of home sweet home.

Mrs. BD "gets" music, but pretty much dislikes pop music, country music, rock - and Dylan. She's not a snob, just finds them all annoyingly juvenile, unrefined, and stupid - except for a little Motown. What she loves is opera - and anything you can dance to. She wins Charleston competitions, and that's saying a lot, because the youth these days are into vigorous retro dance.

I am musically-retarded and tone-deaf but, in my wasted youth, a little cannabis plus a history of music course helped me hear, seemed to open my ears and, for some reason, that effect has lasted despite being drug-free since college. I still have to close my eyes to listen. You can get WQXR via the internets. Good fun.

So are Bob Greenberg's Great Courses. We love them.

When I grew up, we had an upright in the kitchen for kids' lessons, and a Grand or Baby Grand for the grown-ups in the parlor. I am told that the life span of a fine piano is 40-50 years if kept away from heat, sunlight, and given proper humidity - and then it's worthless junk, useless if not pretentious decor to put pictures on, or a $20,000 factory refurbishing. Unlike fine violins, old pianos are basically garbage which you have to pay somebody to get rid of. I placed Dad's in a northern corner of the parlor which has no nearby heat source except a fireplace that we only light up about 15 times per year for a few hours, for holidays and winter parties.

I am going to coat those windows with that UV stuff to protect the wood. It's around 25 years old, so it still has a good life left in it. My Dad would bang out Mozart for an hour a day on this machine, during cocktail hour. The good old days. "Damn, damn, damn" when he missed a note.  Mom would do Christmas songs and children's songs with nary a "damn."

The previous family piano was a black Chickering Grand piano. Like all pianos, it aged and was junked.

Those excellent Legacy speakers? I can play pretty good Bach on the CD player and my old Denon record player. Recorded music mostly destroyed the American family music culture which was based on home-made music. Well, that plus radio and TV all turned Americans into inert and passive blobs.

A medical man, "C.T. Azeff," is interested in this newfangled blogging biz. He emailed me this initial offering which is partly in response to If Obamacare Doesn't Kill Small Medical Practices, Bureaucratic ICD-10 Coding Requirements Might :

OK class, take out a pen and piece of paper, I am going to tell you a bit about ICD 10.

First, don't be alarmed by the prophets of doom who say you docs will be required to use this carefully crafted taxonomy in order for the insurers to refuse to compensate you for your services. This is true. I had dinner with an oncologist friend who is in bankruptcy because even though his patient's insurance company gave prior approval for a $100,000 course of chemotherapy they maintained that did not obligate them to actually pay for the cost. He already had, and on multiple occasions.

Back to ICD 10. This document will allow you to kick back and have some laughs about the conditions you likely will not be called upon to treat. The Monty Python crew had a field day constructing this and they've arranged for the ICD 10 office to be right next door to the Department of Silly Walks. Viz:

V9733XA: Sucked into a jet engine, initial encounter
V9733XD: Sucked into jet engine subsequent encounter (Should this person be allowed on runways?)
V9733XS: Sucked into jet engine, sequelae  ( this is for the litigators)

But, don't overlook,
Index to External Causes of Injury
Accident
E919.1   Bore, earth drilling or mining

            Land  or seabed
E919.7 Bulldozer
E909.9 Cataclysmic:
            Earth surface movement or eruption

So, be grateful if you only have to deal with intangibles and won't get blood on your shoes.

I'll be back soon to discuss Scott Stossel's heroic battle with anxiety and transgressive therapists.

CTAzeff

Read this question, come up with an answer and then scroll down to the bottom for the result. This is not a trick question. It reads:

A woman, while at the funeral of her own mother, met a guy whom she did not know. She thought this guy was amazingly appealing. She believed him to be her dream guy and soul mate so much that she fell in love with him right then and there, but never asked for his number and could not find him. A few days later she killed her sister.

A good friend left off this load of split Beech last weekend. I have to unload it, which is fine. An excellent gift. Beech is heavy as lead and as hard as nails, so hard that it destroyed saws so foresters left it alone until power saws came along.

All of the majestic old Beeches around here are dying of a bark fungus.

Here's the place where your editor Bird Dog spends many hours in work and study. Kids and wives wife were never really welcome in here except to search for books to read - but dogs, friends, and cigars are always welcome. No TV in here, thank you, but there is a radio and CD player.

I was experimenting with camera settings, and this was not really as sharp as I was aiming for. I was hoping to be able to capture the antique Eskimo animal carvings on the mantle, but it does give a general idea of The Inner Sanctum on a dark, snowy winter evening. A comfortable if humble study, perfect for me:

Goldberg on Groundhog Day.

I think it's a religious movie.

Of course you recall that story: in a dangerous lose-lose scenario, you change the rules, break the rules.

This, found at American Digest, reminded Mrs. BD of Kirk's KM Test as a student at Starfleet Academy. In this case, thinking outside the box - inside the box, as it were: