Just Dessert

I don't know what is to set this world right, 

it is so awfully wrong everywhere.

— Mary Merrick Brooks

"The most beautiful young lady in town," one bewitched bachelor said of her.

Mary Merrick of Concord, Mass., spent her youth waving away suitors, until, at 22, she finally chose one, marrying Nathan Brooks, Esq., a wealthy estate lawyer, in 1823.

Harvard-educated, Nathan was a polished and devoutly political animal. And Mary was his perfect match.

But they were different people.

Nathan, unwilling to risk his lawyer's reputation, elected to keep mum on the big issue of the day—slavery.

Mary did anything but.

She spoke out, and led the town's charge against the institution, founding the radical Concord Ladies' Antislavery Society, and organizing stops on the Underground Railroad.

Although divisive, slavery was flourishing in the 1820s, legal in half of the 24 states and the District of Columbia.

Slave-owning infuriated Mary (her own father had been a slaver in South Carolina before moving to Concord, so she knew the practice first hand).

She channeled her indignation into fundraising for the cause of Abolition—more accurately, for the cause of "Immediatism," which insisted that Black slaves everywhere be freed immediately, without national debate or compromise, or reparations to their owners.

The money Mary raised was used to pay for speaking visits to Concord by rabble-rousers like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and John Brown, and for subscriptions to radical newspapers like William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator.

A hands-on fire-eater, the clever Mary searched for a fool-proof recipe for fundraising, hitting at last on sales of a tasty confection she named the "Brooks Cake."

The Brooks Cake comprised one pound of flour, one pound of sugar, half a pound of butter, four eggs, a cup of milk, a teaspoon of soda, a half-teaspoon of cream of tartar, and a half pound of currants.

Concord's society women ate it up. 

For decades, none would dare hold a lunch or afternoon tea without serving a fresh Brooks Cake—no matter her stand on slavery.

Let Go

Let go that which burdens you. Let go any acts of unkindness or brutality from or against you. Let go one breath into another.

— Joy Harjo

Known locally as "Massholes," they drive mostly black SUVs and oversize pickup trucks.

While driving in Massachusetts, I must remember Joy Harjo's poem. 

Maine Attaction

I'm tagging along with my wife in Maine this week while she studies landscape photography under the Wyeth family's official photographer, Peter Ralston.

Dogshead Island

Coastal Maine deserves its reputation as an über-romantic spot, and in mid-September teeters on Indian Summer, one of my favorite times of year.

Yesterday, we island-hopped for 14 straight hours in Peter's 37-foot lobster boat, The Raven, as he directed my wife in shooting hundreds of photos of skiffs, schooners, sailboats, shorelines, shacks, shanties, and seals. 

And lobstermen. Hundreds of lobstermen.

Our two-hour stop on Vinalhaven Island reminded me we were only miles—31, to be exact—from Monhegan Island, where artist Jamie Wyeth spends his summers.

Monhegan Island, known as the "Artists' Island," holds an esteemed place in American art history, having, before Wyeth summered there, been the summer home of Edward Hopper, George Bellows, Robert Henri, and Rockwell Kent. Jamie Wyeth in fact now owns and has lived in Kent's former island home.

Vinalhaven Island

Kent was drawn to Monhegan Island in 1905, and summered there off and on until 1953. Wyeth bought his home in 1968, but later moved to neighboring Southern Island, to escape the summer tourists.

In his lifetime, Kent was one of America's most revered artists; but Joe McCarthy put an end to his career. The witch-hunting senator accused (falsely) Kent of being a Communist. As a consequence, every museum in the country took down his paintings.

Jamie Wyeth, on the other hand, is the darling of American museums—and rightfully so. 

I love Wyeth's work. 

Serendipitously, Jamie Wyeth loves Rockwell Kent's work (most of which today is in Russia, gifted to that country out of spite by the beleaguered Kent) and collects it. He keeps his collection in his Southern Island home.

I love Rockwell Kent's work, too; maybe more.

Maine may be über-romantic, but it wouldn't be Maine after all without some weirdness. (It's the home of Stephen King.) 

Jamie Wyeth's homage to Kent, Portrait of Rockwell Kent, hints at that weirdness by including the contour of a woman falling from the rocks to her death in the background.

That's Kent's mistress, the New York socialite Sally Maynard Moran, who either committed suicide or was murdered in 1953. 

Her body was found in the ocean off Monhegan Island three weeks after her mysterious disappearance one night.

Nobody knows, to this date, what happened to her.

Above: Island Library by Jamie Wyeth. Watercolor, 28 x 20 inches. Wreck, Monhegan by Rockwell Kent. Oil on canvas panel. 7 x 13 inches. Portrait of Rockwell Kent by Jamie Wyeth. Oil on fiberboard. 34 x 26 inches. Maine photos by Robert Francis James.

The Prickly Pump

 

The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.

—H. L. Mencken

I had to gas up my car in Massachusetts yesterday and pulled into a Sunoco station. 

I removed my credit card from the pump's reader before answering all its dozen questions. 

A huge mistake.

The pump went full-scale ballistic, flashing READ! READ! READ!

I've never been verbally assaulted by a gas pump before.

My hunch: the pump has built-in AI.

Through machine learning its has acquired a wicked Boston attitude.

Lovely

We don’t need a little bit of lovely somewhere,
we need a lot of it everywhere.

— James Rebanks

On this mournful day, we need a lot of lovely everywhere.

It was medieval bloodlust that drove bin Laden's berserkers to attack the Twin Towers. Like impotent boys who realize they can't win the competition, they scattered all the blocks.

Who knows what symbol they'll knock down next? Probably the Internet. Impotence makes weak children rageful.

Today, put them aside.

Remember their victims and find a lot of lovely everywhere.