Near the end of fourth grade, I was assigned my teacher for the following year. I found out that it would be Mrs. McDonough, the dreaded. I remember saying to myself on the way home that day that I couldn't believe that I was going to have the Old Battle Ax. I do not know where I got that name for her but I know that is how I thought of her.

She was old, her hair was white and all but gone on top. She was very strict and her favorite punishment, administered at the slightest infraction was to be made to write the same sentence such as, "I will not talk in class", over again until your hands were cramped in pain. She spent a part of each day reading aloud to the class from some work of literature or tell stories from her life and knowledge. She was strict but fair, ugly but with a depth of knowledge and character and a true passion for teaching.

My fifth grade year was her last year of teaching and, near the end of that year, the Phillips Elementary School of Watertown Massachusetts held a special assembly to honor her. We, her last students, participated. I remember thinking and telling my parents that she was the best teacher I ever had. I have not had a teacher since then or before who I felt that strongly about.

Real education must be limited to men who INSIST on knowing, the rest is mere sheepherding.
Ezra Pound

When I was in High School in the early 1970s, I took, as an elective a one semester course in Anthropology. My mother used to have us watch Channel 2 in Boston which did a series filmed by an anthropologist in the twenties. There were two silent films; one was about an eskimo, the other about south sea islanders. I remember the eskimo hunting seals through a hole in the ice and building an igloo; the south sea islanders filed their teeth and tatooed their entire bodies. Later, I was fascinated with a book we had in our house called Four Ways of Being Human, which featured four different cultures. So, out of that interest, I elected to take this short course in the subject.

Our teacher's name was Mrs. Kramer. She was a student teacher or a first year teacher, I don't remember exactly but she was young and I think, still attending one of the Universities near Boston. She was plain, not beautiful in the conventional sense, not vivacious or remarkable in her personality. But she was intelligent and diligent in her work teaching us. She, in one incident, made an impression on me that I have never forgotten.

She had brought a movie for us to watch. It was about negative stereotyping of blacks in Hollywood and it started with clips from Birth of a Nation and showed young black school boys struggling with their self image. The class, our class, was not paying any attention at all to the movie. Kids were talking and generally did not have any interest in it. That was when Mrs. Kramer stopped the film. She was furious. She yelled at us and told us that this was an important subject that we ought to care deeply about and she expressed such disappointment in us and so much passion about the movie and its subject that we were struck dumb and watched the rest of the movie in silence.

I have never forgotten that teacher and it has been almost forty years. And I went from uninformed and disinterested in racial injustice to passionate about it.

Enee hymself ane zow was blak of fleece
Brytnit with his swerd in sacrifice ful hie
Unto the moder of the furies thre.

                                 

Around one in the afternoon I decided to take a look at the beach.  It was high tide and a strong wind was blowing out of the northeast.  An icy wind-driven rain was my escort over the bridge.  The surf was strong, up almost to the snow fence before the dunes.  It was too cold to stay long so I just snapped this picture.  When I got back to my truck, I was soaked to the skin.

                                    

Here are some old photos I took as a boy in my neighborhood in Watertown.This is a picture of my mother and my two oldest sisters, Janice on the left and Nancy in the middle, in our car in 1964 when our Dad was running for state representative.

This is a picture of my three sisters, Judy in front, Nancy behind on the left, Janice behind on the right.  In the middle, are Bobby and Patricia D'amico who lived across the street.  In the distant background you can see the smokestack for Lewandos by the Charles river.

This is a picture of Nancy, Bobby, Janice, Patricia and on the right Peter D'amico all are standing in front of the house directly across from ours at the head of Dana Terrace.  An old woman lived here who was over one hundred years old.  She used to sit on this front porch in a rocking chair.   Her son continued to live there for some time after she died.  There last name was Ferris.

There are bees in this wall.' He struck the clapboards, fierce heads looked out; small bodies pivioted.
                                          R Frost

This house still stands behind the police station in Watertown.  It is magnificent but beyond repair.  When I was a boy, there was a row of victorians here one to the right and one to the left of this one.  I had friends who lived in both of those houses.  I remember playing in their yards and homes.  Even then, in the sixties, they were pretty much beyond repair.  Saltonstall park had been ringed by such houses.   They had been built within walking distance to the railroad station and in the center of town; this was once a choice location to live before the automobile made it possible for high income earners to move farther out into the suburbs.  To the right of the house pictured above is the corner of a red brick apartment building.  The economics or the architecture of the sixties seemed to demand that every time an ornate victorian home was torn down it would be replaced by a square apartment building.

I sat for an hour in Watertown Savings Bank looking out at the Square while a customer service rep named Rachel transferred my dad's account balances into an estate account. On the wall to my right is an old painting of the very scene the window looked out on, now facing directly on the Armenian museum.  In the picture, the spot is occupied by a large federal style building with steps coming down front.  I believe this was the old town hall.   I remarked to Rachel that my dad remembered sitting on those long-gone steps as a child.  I did not say but I remembered sitting in a nearby pine tree, now twice as tall and watching the old victorian train station also in the painting behind the town hall burn to the ground.  And behind that in the picture was the top of the old wooden church torn down in the seventies. I could have told her I remembered sneeking into that church and climbing up into the bell tower and onto the roof.  On the other side of the street facing our window was the old Federal Savings Bank building I remembered that being built in the early sixties.  And I could have told her that my dad used to send me down to Mum's doughnuts on Sunday mornings to get a dozen doughnuts; it was a little shop directly across the street briefly occupying the space before the Armenian museum was built.   By the way, the Armenian museum building was originally built for Watertown Savings Bank and I had my first bank account there.

Once when I was leaving Pam’s house late at night I was startled by a large buck standing in the driveway. He bolted down the driveway with a clatter when I surprised him in the dark.


Today there were tracks of a large buck in the snow in the backyard. About 4 o’clock I followed the tracks out into the woods. I found a bedding area near the stone wall that borders the yard. It was an area of ground roughly the size of a deer completely devoid of snow and surrounded by deer tracks; there is eight inches of snow on the ground everywhere else. I followed the tracks through the woods to the open meadow behind the soccer field. There were multiple deer trails in the area, skirting the houses on one side and the soccer field on the other.

January 10, 2010


It is Sunday morning and 9 degrees above outside. I have an interview with the Norwell schools sub coordinator following my application to be a substitute teacher. I do not know how I will be able to coordinate teaching and continuing construction work. Some work is beginning to line up for the next month, unlike December when there was nothing at all in the works. This month, following Christmas, I am in financial trouble. I worked for pay a total of six hours last week. For the first time since I sold the Watertown house I have not paid my credit card charges in full or paid my lumber bill on time. I am also not sure how much I am going to owe in taxes this year. I made almost no estimated payments. I am extremely worried.

January 9, 2010

Today is Sophie’s birthday. Last night we took eleven girls roller skating at the Carousel Family Fun Center in Whitman. Following that, the girls camped out in P’s living room watching movies and playing games and talking late into the night. P got very little sleep. Today Larry and Sue and Scott and Erin came to dinner. P was mad and resentful of me most of the night without saying why.

The walkway on the Powder Point bridge is covered with snow and ice making walking difficult. There was a flock of eiders in the water and the usual pigeons seagulls and crows hanging out on the railing. It was not too cold only about 28 degrees but the strong wind made my ears and face cold. Another new sign at the beach end of the bridge warning that there are now infrared cameras watching the beach at night.  Heaven forbid a young couple might sneak onto the beach at midnight or a group of boys hang out behind a dune, or an insomniac or poet be driven to walk the beach in the dark. More cops, more equipment every year to protect Duxbury Beach from terrorists and evildoers.

Grey Monday

I got a close up look at a loon in the bay in its winter colors.  It was an incredibly graceful bird and dived smoothly into the water when I stopped to stare at it.  I did not see it come back up.  It was a  still grey day and not too cold.  I walked the bridge and back at lunch time.

Among my father’s personal effects was set of rosary beads that had been given to him by an Englishman who had found them on the battlefield during World War I. My dad had been billeted with an English couple before he was sent to France during the war. When he told the story of the English couple, he always spoke with amazement that the English who he had been taught to hate could be so good to him. They would take him once a week to a neighbors house for a bath, they having no bathtub of their own. My dad told them of his Catholic faith and the man, not being Catholic himself and having no real use for them, and knowing that my Dad would soon be in the war, he gave him the rosary beads. They stayed in touch for many years after that.

A very high tide just going out, a breeze from the east, some crows, ducks, walkers. The temperature is mild, the sky clear. In the bay are a couple of trawlers and a large red tugboat anchored off of Green Harbor. It probably towed the large barge with a crane into the harbor.

Notes on My Father’s Death

The night I left after being with him all day, Sunday the 6th of September, I held him in my arms for a minute and looked deep into his eyes. He was still completely mentally aware although his body was slipping away. We were not physically close in my memory, but there is a picture of me hanging on his pant leg as a little boy and one of him holding me when I was a baby so I know at one time we must have been. That embrace was an impulsive act on my part but it is a connection with him I will never forget. The next day he was just suffering and unable to talk clearly, then on Tuesday he died. Pam, Cynthia, Caty and the nurse were with him when he died.

A few more observations about that time:
I lost an awareness of him being old. It seemed that I was relating to his spirit rather than to one who was old, or sick or dying. And I saw him clearly, no different than as if he was still a boy or a young man. His essential being that I knew so well had no reflection of decay or death although it seemed that he was depressed and afraid at times.

There is nothing beautiful about death. He suffered, especially those last few days, pain, thirst, fear, loss of basic abilities to even reach out and control the events and circumstances around him. He began to see things that weren’t there, to reach out for things, groping, frustrated.

That Sunday before he died, Pam and I, Scotty, Paige, Corinne and Sophie all came up to see him. He was still able to get up and walk a little, he sat outside for a while, he could talk but his voice had become hoarse. The girls were very affectionate with him and I am sure those final goodbyes meant a lot to him. They meant a lot to me.

Two weeks later I am still processing everything. I do not think he was a Christian in the sense of it that I have, putting my faith in Christ, his deity, his death and resurrection. He prayed the rosary all his life, but would not attend church. But he was kind to my mother to the end of her life. And Jesus said that anyone who offered a cup of cold water to one of these little ones because they are believers would not lose his reward, and Paul says that the unbelieving spouse shall be saved by the believing spouse.

It was a surprisingly warm day following a drenching rain. There was a flock of Eiders floating in the bay, two males and nine females, as well as a few gulls that seemed to be harassing them. Perhaps due to the rain there were few people on the beach and only one boat in sight on the ocean. It looked like a tugboat, moving slowly off of Green Harbor

On the Edge of Winter

I got a chance late this afternoon to walk out over the Duxbury bridge to the beach. Work is very slow and the winter looks to be a lean one. The air was surprisingly warm and the walking pleasant.

I saw several older couples walking the bridge, several young women walking or running their dogs, I saw a cormorant fishing in the bay, and sandpipers in their winter colors feeding between the beach stones and the surf. There were about five crows at the beach end of the bridge. A bright green grasshopper caused me to stop suddenly on the way back and stare into its oddly blank eye, the intensity of its greeness shining in the late afternoon sun.

Pumpkin Moon

I have been one aquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain-and back in rain
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

Last night I walked my old route out to Cove street and back down Lover’s Lane in the dark. The moon was rising over the far beach a great orange globe suspended over the bathhouse. This evening I did it again and walked further around the circle of Cove street which is a hidden little neighborhood on a peninsula surrounded by the marshes of the back river. There was a football game in progress, the football field for Duxbury High School backs up on the marsh just off the little peninsula and in the dark the sounds of the game seemed to be not more than a backyard away.

In my father's color slides taken during the sixties, there are two photos; one my Dad took of me standing on a country road on a fall day with a shotgun across my arms, and another that I took of him in the same pose. That was a scene from one of the best times of my childhood. My Dad used to take me hunting in the fall to a place in Littleton, Massachusetts.
Leaving my mother and sisters behind, we would leave early in the morning from our house in Watertown and drive through Belmont, past McLean’s Hospital and onto Route 2, passing, each time, the familiar landmarks which were, for a boy, the opening up of the wide world, passing the granite walls of the road cuts oozing ice, stopping at Howard Johnson’s for coffee and doughnuts, going around the rotary at the Concord Reformatory and then driving west to the woods and farmland of the Nashoba valley.
We would always park the car at the same spot at a farm where there was a dirt access road through the fields leading to the woods beyond. We would take the guns out of the trunk of the car, careful to leave the shotgun unloaded and open and walk down the road between barbed wire fences and manure piles. We walked on cornstubble, crunching the stalks and frozen, half rotten apples, and fallen leaves, between juniper trees and under the great old pines into the wild to walk all day and see, as Thoreau said, what men who stay at home in parlors never dream of.
It was cold starting out but I would soon warm up from walking. The sun would rise up and the ice in the edge of the dirt road would melt. The little ponds would sometimes make whooping sounds like someone striking a large piece of sheet metal. When we stopped to rest, the chickadees would fill the branches in the pines near ground level calling chee dee dee to each other and the bluejays would call from higher up. I became attached to the sounds and sensations of the woods and to the easy measured pace of traveling by foot, fortified against the cold by an inner furnace. The woods were a place of escape, a place of freedom and peace. There were old stonewalls, overgrown gravel pits, rusty farm machinery; harrows and plows, and abandoned cars usually filled with rusty bullet holes. They were relics, to me, of a distant and mysterious past; these signs of a long history of people working the land gave me a sense of place in time no less than if we had walked through the ruins of Rome and Greece.
He was careful to teach me to carry and use a gun with great care and responsibility. He told me, never point a gun, loaded or unloaded at another person. The first time I shot it I aimed it at a little dead tree as he stood behind me to brace me. I still remember the copse of woods and the uneven ground under my feet and the feeling of dread and anticipation, the squeeze of the trigger, the leap of the barrel and bang of the gunstock against my shoulder, dead leaves fluttering, and the giddy feeling as my brain tried to piece together what had happened; the blast by my head exploded the world for a brief instant. It was a thrill I’ll never forget, I think I was seven years old.
He knew what gunshot wounds could do to the human body. He had served in Graves Registration in the army during the second world war, which meant that he had to take the bodies off the battlefield, prepare them for burial and bury them. The war to me was like those old cars from some lost age, but was, no doubt, hardly passed to him. The boots that he wore only on these trips were from the army; he had worn them in France and in Belgium. And his field glasses were a German officer’s, for they buried German as well as American dead, taken from the battlefield, an officer whose brothers and sons and parents were likely still living. Older men stack up decades in their memories like old newspapers but I had little perspective on time and place when I was scarcely ten.
By noon, we were pretty hungry and had walked probably for four hours, so we would make our way back to the car and drive into Littleton to an old time diner in a silver-bodied railroad car to have lunch. My dad's favorite was liver and onions, I would have a hamburg or a clam roll and a chocolate frappe. There is nothing like good food after working up an appetite.
After lunch, we would hunt on the other side of the road where we parked where there was an apple orchard. My dad explained to me how the pheasants would run ahead of you in the grass until they ran into an obstacle and then they would take flight. I remember many times scaring them up into the air with their loud drumming wings, and then the blast of the shotgun and my heart pounding. He sometimes came home with a pheasant or a duck when he went hunting with his friends, but I don't remember ever bringing one home when we went together, and I don't think I cared. We rarely, if ever, shot an animal just tin cans and dead trees.
We estimated we walked ten or twelve miles a day, so by the late afternoon, I was tired, the light and my energy fading rapidly. There are two things that mean a lot to children; one is routine or repetition because it creates anticipation and a sense of security, the other one is candy. My father knew how to provide both. A short way up the road heading home we always stopped at the country store. It had real cracker barrels and cheese wrapped in cheesecloth and it had a glass display counter filled with bins of different candies for a penny a piece. He would let me pick out what I wanted and I would eat it all on the way home. We sat quietly in the car and hardly said a word retracing our route to Watertown, looking out at a long line of red tail lights, going home to a smaller more confined world.
That was what we did each autumn, from the time I was 5 or 6 until I was in my teens. I scarcely think about it now, about how much that simple activity meant to me. About the age of fifteen I lost the ability to talk easily with my parents. I entered adulthood with mixed feelings of anger and love for my parents which took me years to sort out. But I had something I think many boys never had and that's a father who spent time with him and taught him about the world and his place in it and who taught him about himself. And who gave his son the things that boys need from their fathers and who really knew how to make him happy.

The Problem of Distinguishing Good from Evil.

to say all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds is to say we cannot distinguish good from evil. Quoted from the CED mailing list

I have trouble trying to understand why so many Christians support the war in Iraq, which, to me, seems unequivocably wrong. It is true that some good could come out of it, the fall of Saddam, the re-building of the country etc. And it may also be true that it is part of God’s plan, as in the book of Revelations we see Him visiting war on humanity as just punishment for evil. Can it be then that George Bush is God’s instrument of vengeance. On one hand I can see that possibility, however, for the most part, for the apparent motivation, and manner of the attack on Iraq, I do not see the hand of God at work myself, perhaps others do. Yet the possibility alone leaves me baffled and unsure of what is evil and what is good as the atheistic contributor to the mailing list uses just the same stumbling block to justify his atheism.

In an an attempt to reply and to clarify my own thinking I made the following notes.

All of us can innately distinguish good from evil. This is my first premise and what I actually believe to be true.

The question is, does it matter? If there is no God, it does not matter if we do evil or do good. Debate about the matter becomes irrelevant because good has no intrinsic worth and evil no intrinsic harm. If the rapist rapes, it does not matter that he is doing evil, at least from his perspective. We should say that without God, good and evil are irrelevant because the consequences are relative, and not say that good and evil themselves are relative because even the rapist will acknowledge that his actions are evil, although he might rationalize rather than admit.

If God punishes an evil world with evil, is God evil?

The world generally is about evil on evil.

Human beings innately know good from evil and they have an innate system of justice expressed as a craving for vengeance when evil is done.

My biblical reference for this is Deuteronomy 30:11-14

Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. It is not up in heaven so that you have to ask, “Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so that we may obey it?” Nor is it beyond the sea so that you have to ask, “Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so that we may obey it?” No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so that you may obey it.


And in Romans

8:28:

All things work together for good for those who love God, for those who are called according to his purpose.

1:32

Although they know God’s righteous decree, that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.



Topic: The Distinction between Good and Evil

Thesis: We are all innately capable of distinguishing good from evil.

Discussion:


The argument that the contributor to CED gives for his conversion to atheism for stumbling on the block of Good versus Evil are:
1. In the Old Testament God occasionally commands men to kill, yet he also gives the general command, “Thou shalt not kill”.

2. Bad things happen to good people. And we say it was the Lord’s will or that all things will work together for good, apparently unable to distinguish good from evil. And then he says,

“But if we cannot distinguish good from evil, then all our moral judgments are
compromised -- including any trust in any so called covenant with the deity that created that condition”.
3. God has shown that he will break his promise because that is what is really good for us.

This man is saying that :

1. God is a hypocrite.
2. God is a shallow ingrate, not rewarding those who do his will or punishing those who do evil.
3. God is a liar.

These personal impressions are what lead him to state that we cannot distinguish good from evil, therefore we cannot know that there is a God, therefore he does not believe there is a God.

Or perhaps he is saying that if there is a God, based on his personal observations and reading of scripture, he is a hypocrite, an ingrate and a liar and he chooses to have nothing to do with him.

Questions:

Is the pain one experiences at the dentist or the doctor good because the end result is good?

Is pain good because it warns us forcefully of damage occurring to our bodies?

The real evil is the damage, the pain is symbolic.

…
In the case of the war in Iraq, either I am misinformed and my conclusion about the evil nature of our part in the war is wrong or I am not misinformed and my conclusion is correct. There is no possibility that Bush is doing good but disguising it as evil. In other words it is possible to distinguish good from evil.

My Dad has signed the hospice care papers and agreed to move into my sister's house. She does not expect him to live much longer because he is not eating. I know he does not want to live as an invalid, or have extreme procedures done to prolong his life. He has even stopped drinking Jack Daniels.

I bicycled out to the beach this evening, strong wet winds, heavy surf, there was seaweed all the way up to the snow fencing and it appeared that the last section of walkway had been swept away.