Nantucket Memories

The view from Hinckley Lane Cliff Beach.

My daughter Michelle and her four kids (ages 18, 16, 11, and almost 2), and two special friends as well, are on their way to Nantucket. They're packed into a large van overflowing with excited passengers and lots of luggage. Imagine seven people surrounded by suitcases, beach stuff and food supplies, every electronic gadget available, and tons of things for an 18-month old.  Imagine an 18-hour or more ride to Hyannis from Sylvania, due east through Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and parts of Connecticut and Rhode Island over to Cape Cod, Massachusetts.   We used to do this every summer, plus we took along our huge Norwegian Elkhound Tryg (after Trygvie Lee, the first head of the United Nations).  Of course it's all worth it, once you get there. 

I decided not to go this year, and to plan a trip to California in the fall  to see old Toledo and Peace Corps friends.  But I'll miss Nantucket: relaxing on the ferry over from Hyannis; catching the church steeples on the horizon as we approach the island, "the Grey Lady," 30 miles out to sea.; docking in the busy harbour; driving up Cliff Road to the cottage on Hinckley Lane, passing grey shingled houses surrounded by deep blue hydrangea and wild roses. 

Last summer, July 2012.

Just thinking about it takes me back. We summered there when the kids were growing up. Vacation and family time mixed together. Still, to this day, I smell the salt air, the fresh breezes over the moors, the honeysuckle and bayberry along the lane to the beach. I hear the sound of waves crashing on the shore at Surfside and the foghorns at night.  I see the ocean from the top of the cliffs, white sails in the distance, the Jetties beach to the East, Madaket to the West.  A beautiful watercolor scene, blue and pastel, serene. I see the moon setting over the ocean, an earthly phenomenon we would rush to see after dinner, running down to the beach. 

"Nantucket's in my blood," Michelle says, "and now it's in my kids' blood, too."  She wanted to make sure of that, and she has. Nantucket memories.  They fill up your senses, live in your soul.    

Embracing Community at Asbury Grove

Gloucester, the famed fishing village where the ship in "The Perfect Storm" went to sea and never came back.
Monument to Fishermen, upper right, which is surrounded by a granite wall etched with the names of those who
 have died at sea. Sailor Stan's Cafe in the famous Rocky Neck Art Colony, and a few artists' cottages (lower right). 
 With Ilse, Carl and Bea at our  "farewell"  all-you-can-eat steak dinner at old Weathervane Tavern
 in Hamilton (lower left). "Okay," Carl called out, "hands outstretched!"

I enjoyed a slice of folksy Americana last week at Asbury Grove in Hamilton, MA, about 20 miles north of Boston.  Asbury Grove was founded by the Methodist church in 1859 as a summer camp meeting ground, part of the religious revivals that flourished around the 1850s to the turn of the 20th century. Religious groups of various denominations still "camp" at the 85-acre site, but today it is mostly a community of  privately owned rustic summer cottages for people from up and down the East coast and beyond. There's also a growing number of year-round residences.  The land is owned by the Methodist church.

Peace Corps friends Ilse and Carl invited me to their cottage in "the Grove," as it is affectionately called by the people who summer there, and I took them up on the invitation.  So did our PC friend Jud, who now lives in Washington, DC.  What a great place for a reunion of RPCVs who shared time in Ukraine!

Ilse and Carl, adventurers and world travelers, have summered at Asbury Grove for over 30 years."I fell in love with it the minute I saw it," Carl says. Over the years they've fixed up their cottage, modernized inside, added a great screened-in porch, and plan to paint the porch floor (deep aqua) and trim (eggplant purple), add "gingerbread" architectural features around the outside, and put in a garden. That cottage, in short, keeps them busy. Or, I should say it keeps Carl busy. They love it. And now their children and grandchildren do too.

Carl and Ilse's cottage

In fact many of the friends and neighbors we met on the winding paths of the Grove, all friendly and welcoming, have summered here for generations. They waved hello or stopped in for tea or wine and great conversation on every subject imaginable, politics not excluded. Roger the photographer took photos. We met other neighbors tending their gardens; admired the latest updates to a cottage; shared concerns for preserving authenticity.  We joined friends for a hearty meal at the dining hall and for a Zydeco band concert at the Tabernacle, the oldest tabernacle in America. The band called themselves the "Squeezebox Stompers," and oh boy, did they get us dancing!  Among it's tall pine trees and exuberant bright blue hydrangea, Asbury Grove also features an olympian-size pool and other recreational amenities, great for families, campers, and kids of all ages.

A precious sense of community predominates.   Fellowship, bonds of friendship, the ties that bind. It's easy to feel as if you belong, even if you are a stranger.

Residents proudly note that Asbury Grove is now listed in the National Register of Historic Places. As part of the application process, residents researched the architecture of the cottages--Victorian Gothic, Italianate, Vernacular--and the history of the community. It was a labor of love, with many volunteer hours donated.  The folks of the Grove (including Carl) continue to do research, collect records, photos and memorabilia, and work with top-notch archivists, who are also residents, to preserve and digitize their collections (I think at Boston University) for future generations.  A "wholesome" place, as Jud put it.  A community of kindred spirits, rare in this day and age.

Linda's cottage. A creative soul, a producer of plays and special events,
 she painted a spirited dragon all around it. 

On top of sharing a great community, Ilse and Carl, generous and accommodating hosts, took Jud and me to tour nearby towns along the beautiful North Cape area:  Ipswich, Halibut Point, Rockport, Newburyport, Gloucester and the Rocky Neck Art Colony, and historic sites like the Choate bridge (1764) and the General Patton house, soon to be a museum. We browsed at antique shops, souvenir stores, and various galleries; admired ocean fronts, boats, ships and lighthouses; reminisced about our PC days in Ukraine; shared fantastic meals and camaraderie.  Best of all, we savored a kinship that crosses time and space, and made many new memories.  Historic Americana all the way. A feast for the spirit, food for the soul.

Halibut Point, a beautiful site, where Carl, Ilse and friends picnic on the large granite boulders.
Powerful storms have shifted their configuration over time, an amazing phenomenon. A lovely path
leads to the rocky shore (lower right corner)
"Perhaps Loren's path," the ever-kind Jud says to me. 

On to colorful Rockport, once known for its timber (for boatmaking), fishing, and granite quarries like Halibut point.

Choate Bridge 1764 in Ipswich (upper left), then over to lovely Newburyport.  Carl on the waterfront.
Great dinner (clams, scallops and shrimp) at famed Clam Box on way back to Asbury Grove.

There's ALWAYS a line to get in. General Patton's homesite and future museum (right corner).

Egypt Emerging

ramyabdeljabbar.worppress.com on yahoo

The revolution continues.  Egypt's democracy is emerging.  But it won't be easy. It won't be easy because the Islamists won't accept the will of the people.

Morsi could have stepped up to Mandela status and listened.  He could have included more voices in his regime. He could have vetted the new constitution with people outside of the Muslim Brotherhood.  The Muslim Brotherhood could have agreed to engage in a democratic process.  Show in practice that they know what democracy means. They could have accepted other points of view, rather than talking about democracy and acting like tyrants.  Now they are inciting violence, begging for violence, killing Christians and other minorities who disagree with them, acting more like terrorists than citizens, keeping Egypt in turmoil rather than promoting a peaceful transition that the majority wants.  Really, I don't think they care about what the majority want.

Can the Islamists swallow their anger, get out of revenge mode, and step up, for the good of the whole. Have they ever done this?  We can acknowledge the critical role they played in ousting Mubarek from power, a grassroots uprising.  But did they have to install an Islamist Mubarek-type government after all that?  Did they have to turn the Arab Spring on its head? Couldn't they have been among the first Islamist government to stand for a real democracy, a secular state with separation of church and state, open and tolerant? That's the real Egypt and they know that.

I am hooked on what's happening in Egypt because I love the country and its people.  The Egyptian ambassador, Mohammed Tawfit, has told the true story: the ouster of Morsi was not a coup: it is a correction on Egypt's path to democracy begun in the Arab spring.

When Morsi was elected, hope ran high.  Tawfit and many like him suppored Morsi, hoping he would get a new democratic government on track. Now THAT would have been a revolution!  Instead, Morsi did the opposite.  When you refuse to open up the government to other than Islamist voices, when  you call for jihad, and start calling opponents "infidels,"  you are not running a democratic government.  You are imposing a totalitarian Islamist government on the majority of the people who hoped for better and want a democracy.

The Muslim Brotherhood is showing it's true colors by inciting violence and refusing to participate in a new process.  They are talking democracy and acting like extremist religious nuts.  That's the worst aspect of this whole thing: the Islamists can't seem to rise up to expectations for a tolerant democracy that includes many voices.

So Egypt remains in crisis.  We all hope the interim president can hurry up and offer new elections and begin again the promise of the Arab Spring. When it comes to the Middle East, I always say "hope springs eternal."

Egypt Erupting

Reuters/Suhaib Salem, Protestors hold Egyptian flag, 2 July 2013

"In one camp are the president and his Islamist allies, including the Muslim Brotherhood and more hard-line groups. They say street demonstrations cannot be allowed to remove a leader who won a legitimate election, and they accuse Mubarak loyalists of being behind the campaign in a bid to return to power. They have argued that for the past year remnants of the old regime have been sabotaging Morsi's attempts to deal with the nation's woes and bring reforms.

Hard-liners among them have also given the confrontation a sharply religious tone, denouncing Morsi's opponents as "enemies of God" and infidels.

On the other side is an array of secular and liberal Egyptians, moderate Muslims, Christians — and what the opposition says is a broad sector of the general public that has turned against the Islamists. They say the Islamists have negated their election mandate by trying to monopolize power, infusing government with their supporters, forcing through a constitution they largely wrote and giving religious extremists a free hand, all while failing to manage the country."  AP story on Yahoo, July 1, 2013

I'm stepping into another minefield here, but it's sad to see Egypt go from Arab Spring to Arab Winter, from hope to hopelessness, in this protest by millions of people against Islamist president Muhammed Mursi. The numbers alone are staggering, proof of the depth of the discontent.

This is how I see it now, not as any expert, but as a concerned citizen and lover of Egypt and its culture.  Mursi, of the Muslim Botherhood, won the presidency a year ago with a narrow 51% margin. It was the first free election in Egypt in decades. People cheered, but they were also cautious. I remember the interviews and stories at the time. Fear lurked just beneath the surface of the celebrations.

Why?  Because Mursi had one major agenda item: first and above all else build a secular multi-religious and multi-ethnic coalition government representative of Egypt's diversity.  Mursi himself recognized this, said so, and made promises to the people.

But Mursi not only failed to do this, he's done the opposite: consolidated Islamist rule. It's what everyone feared. In so doing, he lost the trust of the majority of Egyptians, and also that of the secular-leaning army, which continues to have enormous power.  The trust issue remains paramount.  "Egypt does not want a religious state," the army generals have said. It looks like they mean to enforce that position.

On top of Mursi's huge failure in governance, his broken promises, the Egyptian economy has gone downhill:  the value of its currency is sliding; wages remain at $2 a day when one can get work; prices for basic necessities, like bread and fuel, have gone up; access to communication, transportation, and electricity have nosedived; the misery index has skyrocketed.

But the real "tipping point"?  Mursi's open support of Syrian tyrant Assad at a recent rally, and his calls for jihad, a holy war.  (Reuters article on yahoo by Yasmine Saleh and Tom Perry, "Mursi Role at Syria rally is tipping point for Egyptian Army," June 2, 2013).

The army has kept the balance of power between hard-line Islamists and the majority of Egyptians, who long for a secular democracy with religious tolerance and separation of church and state. The army understands the will of the people.  It is more in tune with the protestors' unrest, distrust and demands than with Mursi, and it has made this known. Ongoing tyrany leads to ongoing unrest. The army may be, therefore, the only force for maintaining peace and establishing the secular state most Egyptians want.

This is how I see the situation in Egypt now.  Anything could happen.  Anything can change.   Hope springs eternal.