Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

1950s kitchen with wringer-washer in background

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Ronni’s bright-red time machine and my beige-y gold one whisked us last Friday into a lovely mid-century twilight zone of stage-settings from the 1940’s and 1950’s.

The remarkable thing about NH’s “Strawbery Banke” is that wandering there lets you side-slip from the many memory-objects on display there into your own private world of forgotten memories.

What a pleasure it was to wander there riffing on memories with Ronni Bennett, who has even more photos in her blog “As Time Goes By”.

Air conditioning, 1959

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

I grew up in a (New England) world with no air conditioning. I’m not sure how grownups who spent days in offices managed on really hot days–but little kids with backyard sprinklers did just fine.

Keeping our house cool inside needed different tactics.

First, our windows were opened up wide every bedtime, on the theory outdoors would get cooler before we woke up.

Second, once sunrise arrived, grownups stayed alert for the absolute instant when air outside the house got hotter than the air inside. Bang, bang, bang, those windows got shut again!

This morning in Cambridge, MA, I’m sorry to say, that slam-windows moment came at 8:30 a.m. But at least so far I don’t need the whir of my room air-conditioner, thanks to old New England tactics from long ago.

Small impromptu John Lennon tributes

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

In a beautiful riff on growing up and growings older (whose title I stole for this post) David Weinberger writes today:

By December 8, 1980, nothing had gone wrong in my life. My parents were middle middle class, although growing up I thought we were wealthy. None of my desires were frustrated (well, except for prom night, but that’s a different story)…

Another great Weinbergerism on John Lennon there: “What a great blogger he would have been, so eager to be imperfect in public.”

This photo was taken when I accidentally found myself in NYC and part of a spontaneous John Lennon memorial on the 25th anniversary of his death.

To quote John Lennon (and his Quotations Page), “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

ThinkGeek’s Annoy-a-tron might sound funny or cute–but what do you think of this email they quote from a “satisfied customer” who planted one on a co-worker?

I have watched this simple device transform an (until-now) mild-mannered colleague into a spitting, cussing, paranoid lunatic.
He has ordered all of the staff he supervises (not a small number) to locate the source of the dread beeping before doing anything else (but since they are in on the prank, they haven’t been much help). So he waits, white-knuckles gripping the edge of his desk, anticipating the next beep…nearly bursting that vein on his temple as he shouted it: “That beep has been F***ING with me for HOURS now.”
He has called the facilities department to schedule a maintenance worker to investigate. He speculates that “they” might be doing air-quality testing in the building. This beep must be some device in the ducts detecting dangerous levels of asbestos in the air. Or worse. Radon? Aerosolized mercury? Legionella spores?
The beep means something. What does the beep mean? Is it a warning? It sounds urgent, doesn’t it? It’s telling us to do something. But what? … I imagine that soon he will begin to take things apart. He will methodically dismantle all of the electrical devices in his office, creating an unusually precise metaphor for what is happening in his psyche.
I am reminded what a thin and fragile thread keeps us attached to sanity. Today, this tiny little device helped me break a co-worker’s mind, and I thank you for the sinfully pleasurable schadenfreude.

Sinful pleasure in other people’s pain is increasingly marketed to young men. Marketers vie for some bad-boy demographic that gets a charge out of guys insulting their girlfriends or a bunch of guys teaming up for hours of sport humiliating some coworker.
OK, let me be really old here and give some advice. Marketers want to sell stuff, not to make your life better. Making your life better requires teaming up with other people, some of whom sometimes will really annoy you. When you hurt people who thought you were on their team, you risk turning friends into enemies or at least skeptics. You damage the team, which was your team.
I’m a fan of ThinkGeek, but this time I don’t like what they’re selling.

Treetops with contrail

Originally uploaded by Janebug.

…because it means that I’ve had to lie on my back and look up into treetops–which I recommend to you!

Yesterday evening, the treetops were fuddled by wind, Morse-coding fast overlapped leaf-patterns against the sky. Tonight is much calmer–fewer branch motions and many more manic twee sparrows, flying in for a few friendly “tweets” before settling to bedtime.

Meanwhile, high up above treetops, airliners seek Logan Airport, leaving long sunset-tinted contrails behind. And way-up-high-sky-winds drift those contrails across the treetop-marked sky–just as those same winds push cumulus clouds around. Why did I never, before tonight, notice that contrails are just a funny-shape kind of cloud?

And when did I ever before stare up into sky-treetops? One quick assessing glance, maybe, when I was a kid, before starting my own climb up the tree’s branches. Now that I’m 60, I look and appreciate without demanding to conquer.

Tonight gives new meaning to that old New England saying, “Look up, not down.”

Or to quote all of it,

“Look out not in.
Look forward not back.
Look up not down.”

Good advice, and may you enjoy it without having to get any pinched nerve in your neck!

Air conditioning, 1959

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

Two bathing suits–as you can see from my suntan–that’s all it took to get through the hottest of summers, pre-air-conditioning.

There were lots of cool places, even when fear of polio shut down the swimming pools. Our barn’s old cellar, shady and full of good earth smells. Our annual treehouse. A nearby mini-pine forest that had (I think) once been planned as commercial Christmas-trees.

Today in Cambridge in May, temperatures floated in between 80 and 90. After multi-errands to air-conditioned places, this felt too hot! But then I found a shady place outside, a book to read, a little breeze, and the distraction of visiting squirrels and sparrows soon brought me back to the idea that this is fine weather.

Lake Massabesic, springtime 2007

Originally uploaded by Broompl.

Scrawny NH pine trees and pale springtime sky–Lake Massabesic reflects them.

Tonight I’m missing my beautiful NH, even though I now enjoy similar cold, wet springtime in Massachusetts. (My daffodils are coming up, but no buds yet!)

Lake Massabesic provides drinking water to my hometown of Manchester, NH. My raffish and beloved great-uncle Joseph P Devine and his wife, the former Mae Kelly, lived right on that lakefront, when I was a little girl. Of course, it is forbidden to swim in that water–but not to sail boats on it.

Let me digress to say more about my Uncle Joe, aka within the family as “Darlin’ Joe.” Much more than my grandfather Maurice Francis Devine (his baby brother) Uncle Joe carried on the traditions of his Irish parents–and he was their favorite. He and Aunt Mae took over both the family businesses that had grown out of the very successful carpentry trade built up by Patrick Devine–the Devine Funeral Home (because carpenters build lots of coffins) and the Devine Travel Bureau (because recent immigrants want to take those coffins home to be buried in Ireland.)

But whenever the humor was upon Uncle Joe, he and Aunt Mae would shutter both those businesses (which shared one building) and gather up some of the many children who loved them both for some new adventure. Often they’d take a whole bunch of us to Hampton Beach, bringing us home bright-red with sunburn, full of lobster dinners and saltwater taffy.

Once they completely terrified my poor parents by keeping us out until something like 2 a.m. at a drive-in movie where we saw a wonderful double-feature of Nelson Eddy and Jeannette McDonald. My mother assumed that “dinner and a movie” was an event that would get her four children home by maybe, at the latest, 9 p.m.

Now, with that preparation, I hope my dear readers will not be shocked to learn that on one very hot day in one long-ago summer, my Uncle Joe took us four Devine kids on a boatride onto Lake Massabesic, in which, I repeat, you are not allowed to swim. We were all wearing life jackets because you must, on a boatride.

In the middle of Lake Massabesic, Uncle Joe stopped. “Now,” he reminded us, “swimming is forbidden here. But sometimes it just happens … that you fall off a boat!” He then picked me up and threw me far into the water! Yes, remarkably, all four Devine children “fell” into Lake Massabesic on that hot day and had to swim back to the boat.

Not that I’m recommending to anyone else to be as naughty as my Uncle Joe. But now, looking back, I realize just how lucky I was to have known him.

My little sister and her little white dog

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

I miss my own little white dog Marianne.

But now that I’m in Florida visiting my little sis, at least I get to play with her little white dog.

Palm trees — blue skies — feeding pelicans on the St. Petersburg pier — these are all spiffy.

But spending a week with my sister is even more so.

One of the lovely things about snow is the way it reminds us of all our past snowfalls.

• Above, from a just-today scanned box of old slides, my little sis in a long-ago NH winter.
• In 2003, my little dog was thrilled by two feet of snow.
• In 2004, with Frank a just-named Nobel laureate, a Swedish TV crew photographed us walking through November snowfall.
• In 2005, maple-syrup candy in snow created (a miracle!) the shape of Kokopelli.
• February 2006 piled blizzardy snow up over my boot-tops.

Thanks to my blog (and Flickr) all these snow memories are still here to enjoy. I wonder if, fifty years from now, their zeroes-and-ones will be as accessible to future someones as the dusty old box of slides I just scanned into jpegs…

Is free public wifi the new air-conditioning?