The Wiles of Nostalgia

Subjectively speaking, I think nostalgia is unhealthy. Reasonable people know that the past can never truly be restored to us no matter how much we may long for it - hence the appeal of nostalgia, I suppose. We fall in love with things we can never have.

I am one of those who, given enough time for idleness of mind, can wallow around for hours in memories of places and people long gone from my life; but aside from the opportunity to learn from mistakes I have made, that inclination has been of little use to me.

Example: for many years now, the smell of freshly mown grass in the early fall has always made me think of football season. Two or three lifetimes ago, I played high school football, and every day - back when a day was a collection of torturously slow minutes divided by alarm bells and school bells and coaches’ whistles - I, oaf that I was, never suspected that anything would ever change. But when it did, the one thing that lingered immutably in the vessels and passageways of memory was the smell of the grass, those freshly-cut, wind-borne wisps and smatterings of green.  And in that visceral way that some things come back to us with inexplicable force, many other memories would return, too, riding on that same wind: the young, mud-streaked faces of my teammates when day was done, the jokes we told over and over, our daily banter and deliberate idiocy.

Yet, aside from thinking that it must have been a very fine time (which it sometimes was), none of that has ever gotten me anywhere. Granted, there must be some worth in a few moments of peace here and there, the peace of finding yourself suddenly able to suspend time…or almost…and no longer disbelieving but saying to yourself: “Well, whadda ya know? It’s true after all - I was young once, too!”

Really knowing some history, on the other hand, is worthwhile and important, and sports history, like popular music over the ages, serves to reflect the events and values of a society during a given time period. Although the steady rise in the popularity of American football might tell us much about the this country - particularly in the 20th century, with its two world wars, the rise of a powerful American military, and the common tropes describing Americans as rowdy, brawling, “shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later” rough-housers, it is baseball, in my view, that serves as a truer national portrait of ourselves. My favorite standup comedian of all time, George Carlin, first performed his famous monologue comparing football and baseball around 1975. One snippet goes:

In baseball, during the game, in the stands, there's kind of a picnic feeling; emotions may run high or low, but there's not too much unpleasantness.
In football, during the game in the stands, you can be sure that at least twenty-seven times you're capable of taking the life of a fellow human being.  (See the whole routine here: http://www.youtube.watch?v=zeCtFkHQtEo)

If you’re interested in the long version of the story of baseball, about 150 years’ worth, I know of no better film documentary than the 1994 series created by Ken Burns for PBS, simply called Baseball.

A curious hybrid between those people who are nostalgists and those who are amateur historians has emerged these last couple of decades. I do not really know what to call these people - they are not simply hobbyists or “re-enactors,” but they are certainly interested in hands-on experience; in fact, they hunger for “the real thing” and will go to great lengths to find and devour it. And yet they also seem to take an academic approach to their…avocation? Addiction? Obsession?

I know this is so because on two consecutive weekends, I attended  events in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, not far from my house in Chattanooga, which gave me some insight into the mind of the devotee of historical authenticity. The first one took place at Barnhardt Circle at the center of town; the lovely open space there is called the Polo Field, and the Renaissance Revivalist homes that swaddle it are strangely beckoning, with windows like a deceased aunt’s eyes. On the weekend of September 15, the Tennessee Association of Vintage Baseball, founded in 2012, held its season-capping tournament, the Sulphur Dell Cup, at the Polo Field.

Opening game for the Sulphur Dell Cup.

I have attended old-timers baseball games (heck, I’m an old-timer myself, if we have to talk numbers) in other towns in other times, and I have enjoyed the silliness, the baggy uniforms, the pot-bellied sluggers, the beer or two ‘leant’ to me from some friendly team’s cooler… Just watching a player trying to run to first base can bring gales of laughter, until, that is, someone ‘strains a hammy’ or trips over the bag in a slow-motion face plant into the clay. But I can tell you this: in the Tennessee Association of Vintage Baseball, there is no farting around. If this is just a form of nostalgia for the participants, then it is an aberrant, intense, vigorous, even dangerous one. They follow the rules of baseball as they were in the 1860s.

This is not to say that these players don’t have fun. Clearly they do, but it is the kind of fun your grandmother used to have when she made you go out into the yard and cut a switch which she would then use to discipline you (only across the rump, of course - even she knew when to exercise restraint). Games are extremely competitive, and yet there is an antique charm about it all, and an esprit de corps among opponents that you no longer see much these days; it is not simply sportsmanship of the shake-hands, “good game” variety, but a pervading recognition of the worthiness of anyone who really wants to win. The best illustration of that is the frequent invoking of the “huzzah!” A “huzzah!” is an interjection that dates back to the 1500s, a “sailor’s cry of exaltation,” as I learned from the Online Etymology Dictionary (okay, not very old-timey research methods). “Huzzah!” is also a word I now very much enjoy using. The term “Huzzah!” was adapted for baseball in its earliest days as a means for members of both teams to pay tribute to any player who has just made a remarkable play in the field - a diving catch or a long, accurate throw from the outfield to catch an advancing runner, for example. Baseball is filled with many such moments of beauty, of grace and speed, and a “huzzah!” is a fitting way to acknowledge them.

Mountain City players give their opponents a “Huzzah!”

And consider this: plays that merited a “huzzah!” were even more difficult during those very early times because fielders did not use gloves. That’s right, bare hands only. The ball was about the same size as is standard today, and maybe only slightly softer, being made of India rubber and yarn and covered with leather. Bats, of course, were made of wood, about the same diameter as the modern-day bat, but there was no restriction on length.

All of that and more I learned from Danny Gatti, a friend whom I often encounter as I’m walking around Chickamauga Battlefield, also in Fort Oglethorpe. He is a retired history teacher and is one of those who are so keenly interested in old methods and traditions for reasons beyond mere nostalgic indulgence. He serves as an umpire for the league, although in 1860s lingo, he is also called an “arbiter.” The arbiter is not an authoritarian. With no balls-and-strikes count in vintage baseball, petty quibbles with the batter are rare; the good-faith assumption is that the pitcher, who throws underhanded, will give the batter something to hit so that the game doesn’t go on for days. On close plays on the base paths and in the field, the arbiter can even ask for the opinions of attentive spectators.

For many years, we were all tricked into believing that baseball was “invented” by Abner Doubleday, a Union general in the U.S. Army. It is not true. Rather, baseball evolved from older forms of ball-and-bat games (cricket and rounders, primarily), but the the important occurrence was the forming of the Knickerbocker Baseball Club in New York City in 1845. One member, Alexander Joy Cartwright, a bank clerk and volunteer firefighter, took the time to draw up the first set of rules for a game that any of us, if we could streak across the time/space continuum riding a light wave like Einstein in his own dreams, would watch for just a second or two and say, “Hey, they’re playing baseball.”

Here is something about those who pay attention to baseball; it is also the thing about baseball that annoys the people who care nothing for it. It makes for a treacherous rabbit hole… No, it is much worse than that really: it is a deep, gashing pit made by a giant rabbit with teeth like freshly honed scythes, or by a sharp-tipped smart bomb or an out-of-control oil rig; it is a narrow crater that leads not to darkness but to more and more colliding sensations: sunlit grass, the smell of beer and roasting hot dogs, the rushing wind as it gathers in a cyclone of popcorn boxes and hamburger wrappers, the echoing of people’s feet pounding on metal bleachers, the swampy sound of an organ, and so on and on. But the hole also leads to mathematical abstractions, numbers piling upon numbers: runs batted in, batting averages, number of pitches thrown, number of strikes thrown, strikeouts (both swinging and “caught looking”), on-base percentages, the distance to any given point along an outfield fence, the shapes and flex of fences in different parks, the physics behind catching a fly ball, the way the human eye tracks curveballs and fastballs…on and on. At last we are left with a set of small mysteries which can be verified by fact and yet remain unexplained.

Sorry. That was me going down the rabbit hole.

On that sunny September morning, the “picnic feeling” that George Carlin described was indeed the overall tone of the day. Rather than the baggy woolen uniforms and knee socks you see in some old-timers’ games, players were well turned out mostly in colorful trousers, suspenders, collared shirts, and hats. Some of their families and friends who lolled about on blankets in the shade were also in period clothing. It was as though a box of old photographs from a camp meeting or a barn dance had been colorized and brought to life; I had the same odd sense of the familiar that I used to get whenever I looked through my grandmother’s box of old pictures (some of which were daguerreotypes), as if I were looking at people I knew, neighbors, cousins I had seen in the pews in some old wooden chapel - affable lads and lasses who were churchgoers and yet were unopposed to a beer or two along with a few laughs on a Sunday afternoon.

Even their conversation seemed anachronistic:

“Say, Bill, I heard the Mountain City team has brought in a ringer.”

“Well, bless ‘em. They need all the decent ballists they can muster.”

There were a couple of baseball diamonds, neatly lined with shiny, brown-dirt infields, at the adjacent recreation park, but in the tradition of the rural origins of the sport, the Sulphur Dell Cup was held on the wide-open Polo Field. Many of the old rules of the 1860s, now altered or dismissed completely from the modern game, quickly became evident to me: there is no base-stealing or sliding allowed, although a baserunner may take a “gentlemanly lead” if he chooses to do so; pitchers throw underhanded; If a ball is fielded on one hop, it counts as an out (a fair deal, I think, given that fielders are sans gloves), but baserunners can advance without tagging up on a one-hopper. Those are just a handful of the more conspicuous distinctions, but anyone who cares to can find the complete rules at the league website (https://tennesseevintagebaseball.com/rules-customs). The TAoVBB strives for period authenticity, but I should note that the league stresses its inclusiveness; in fact, two of the best players I saw that day were young women.

I will add that if you do attend a game as a fan, a neutral observer, or simply as a tramp idling away a late summer’s day, you should stay alert whenever you hear that distinctive knock of hardwood against stretched leather. The makeshift backstops are only about five feet high, and (especially at tournaments where two or three games might be going on simultaneously) - you may be at risk of being conked on the head with a foul ball.

When I played Dad’s Club baseball from ages 10 to 12 or so, I was not a prospect (a wild understatement of my lack of natural aptitude). My hand-eye coordination at the time…well, let’s just say that it was not at the same stage of development as that of most of the boys. I soon realized that football was my game, when I found that running into other kids at top speed helped to restore my own self-esteem. I will say this: that was in an era when we were not given trophies just for participating, and I am glad for that. Some things are worth earning, and so to the Quicksteps of Sulphur Hill, a hearty “Huzzah!” I could do my best to summon the spirit of the wonderful baseball writer Roger Angell and attempt a summary of the tournament’s outcome, but I do not believe I could do any better than the unnamed reporter who covered it for the team’s website:

This past weekend witnessed scenes of uncommon joy and exultation. In spirited contests upon the green, the Quicksteps valiantly dispatched four worthy adversaries—the stalwart Cumberland Club of Nashville, the Mountain City Club of Chattanooga, the fiery Phoenix of East Nashville, and the nimble Grasshoppers of Chattanooga.

Thus were the Quicksteps crowned Champions of the revered Sulphur Dell Cup, marking their third such triumph in succession, and their fourth in the space of five campaigns. Few clubs in our State, nay in all the South, may boast such a record of constancy and excellence. (https://www.facebook.com/QuickstepsVBBC)

__________

I hope to have Part 2 of “The Wiles of Nostalgia” ready for publication next week. That post will involve a commemorative event observing the 162nd anniversary of the Battle of Chickamauga.

Expatriates

One day a few years ago, when I was still teaching eighth-graders, a guest speaker came in to talk to my students as part of an annual school-sponsored event.

He opened his talk with a declaration: “You kids don’t need to worry about a thing,” he said, “because you all already live in the greatest country in the world!”

Out of courtesy to him - and because if one, even out of passive curiosity, questions such a remark, then that person shall instantaneously vilifiy himself to a dangerously unknown degree - I merely smiled and nodded along with the other adults in the room.

A little later, though, I wondered whether I should have at least spoken up during the question-and-answer session. After all, the speaker based his viewpoint on his time at an American military base in South Korea - not a particularly compelling measure, really. Besides, my students  were very bright, and they had only recently read Frederick Douglass’s narrative about his life as a slave in the 1800s, and they were well aware that Douglass, for one, would certainly have disagreed with our speaker.

Also, I had openly discussed with them the steady decline in the American educational system, using cold hard facts such as the results of comparative international testing in reading and math. This was not for the purpose of discouraging them, but simply because we cannot begin to treat a problem until we have seen it in the harsh light of objectivity. The chance for change and improvement begins with the efforts of every teacher, every student, every parent.

I have written about these matters in previous posts. From a broader perspective, others who might have disagreed with the speaker (albeit some of them from the grave) would have included noteworthy Americans such as Josephine Baker, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, T.S. Eliot, and current popular writers such as David Sedaris and Sarah Lieberman. That is merely a handful of famous names; many, many Americans, over our history, have left this country and lived abroad for various reasons. Many more continue to do so, not because they are socialists or communist sympathizers or terrorist recruits, but because they choose to live and work in another country, and in so doing they may come to better understand themselves and their own origins. These people are called expatriates.

The word comes from an old French verb. Originally, to be expatriated meant to be banished from one’s own country, but by the early twentieth century, it was also in use as a noun. Further, its meaning had changed to imply a willful exit from one’s homeland, rather than exile. By comparison, the word emigrant, then, merely describes a physical process, a change in geographical location, whereas expatriate suggests an attitude.

Of course, patriot is a related word which we use to express the admirable condition of loyalty to one’s country and the willingness to sacrifice for it. Expatriates can also be patriots, certainly (the ex- prefix, in this case, does not infer ‘former,’ as in ex-husband; instead it suggests ‘out’ or ‘outer’). For instance, many of the British and American expat writers and artists who chose to return to France in the 1920s had been soldiers in the great bloodbath of World War I (Hemingway called it a “colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery”).

Anyway, that is enough etymology. The more interesting question is “Why do people leave?” Is it because the food and wine are so much better in northern Italy, or because English pubs are so cozy, or because it is so pleasant sitting at a cafe table on the Boulevard St. Germaine, listening to the lilting conversation all around? In some cases, yes, it is just that simple. Historically, though, for others the reasons have been more complex and more sobering. Some of those WWI vets had been shattered by their experiences - they were searching for their own lost souls, and they felt they had little in common with friends and family back home who could not conceive of what it had been like for them, so that they sought out their fellows in faraway places. Ironically, expatriation has sometimes led to a redeeming camaraderie.

Then there have been those who have left because they became sickened by something that had taken place in their own country. What a tragedy it must be to learn to love a place and then be compelled to leave it for some circumstance over which you have no control. Perhaps greed and the ugliness it brings to a place are the cause of such spiritual illness. The wonderful neighborhood where you roamed as a child somehow turned into strip malls and noxious industrial zones. Visit any moderately-sized American city, and you will see what I mean: economic overdevelopment and sundry real-estate boons have brought about the uglification of a beautiful land. It is a predictable transformation, and yet it happens over and over again.

Capitalism is the most moral of economic systems - so long as those practicing it are also moral. It places great faith in the individual; it is up to the owner of a business to be not merely ambitious but also fair, honest, empathetic, and courteous; others depend upon him or her for their livings, and for their safety and sustenance. It all goes hand in hand with democratic principles. Yet, as we have often seen, the individual human is fallible. And so are governments.

Would I gripe about paying higher taxes in a country such as…oh, say, Spain? Yes, I would. I am a very good complainer. An expert, in fact. There, taxes are substantially higher (e.g., at the gas pump) than in the U.S., and yet I tell you, I have been in towns in Andalusia where the benefits of fair taxation are well represented, with busy public employees scrubbing away, freshly washed streets glistening in the morning light, with rows of fragrant, trimmed orange trees along them, where magnificent old buildings are restored and preserved rather than bulldozed, and clean, efficient mass transit is ubiquitous. And tidiness is contagious, it would seem: residents in the smallest, humblest houses and apartments keep them looking spiffy under the brilliant Spanish sun. Is this socialism? I am not a political scientist, but my understanding is that in truly socialist countries, the citizenry does not generally benefit from the money siphoned away from them, though someone does (read as oligarchy).

Still, having never lived abroad, I do not know what day-to-day life would be like in a foreign country. I have often thought that I would like to find out. If nothing else, the experience might contribute to a stronger sense of my own national identity, a clearer idea of where we all came from and who we want to be - even if we have somehow lost our way. Then perhaps, having been there and back again, what a joy it might be afterward to hear a familiar voice saying, “Welcome home.”

The Portuguese Barber

This past winter, my wife and I found ourselves in a fortunate situation: we were rambling around Spain and Portugal with no particular plan and under no strict obligations. In my opinion, there is no better way to travel, and so when we finally grew weary of the rainclouds that had stalled over Lisbon, we caught a train for Lagos, in the region called the Algarve on the country’s southern coast.

There, in January, the sun and the wind seem on good terms, and their daily aerial tug of war nearly always ends in a friendly stalemate, so that the tourist who wanders there at that time of year, lulled by breezy warmth, must ask himself, “All that time I spent freezing my sphincter off for five months out of every year… Why?” In my own case, having slipped and slogged through the previous seventeen Januaries in Maine, I found the weather in the Algarve to be an open window on a part of the world I had never even known existed. It is the perfect stage-lighting for the spectacular drama enacted perpetually between the sea and the land, and I know of no word in any language that might adequately describe the colors of those cliffs and caves in the crisp morning light, but they shift from a kind of rust to a deep amber to brick-red - and not just ordinary brick, but the rich, ancient bricks once used to build great castles.

Funny thing about traveling for an extended time in such splendid places, though: once in a while you emerge from your wild dream, your inexhaustible sense of amazement, and realize that you must tend to some mundane thing. “Hm,” you might say. “It seems I’m all out of clean boxer shorts” (or tightie-whities, if that’s your preference), or perhaps: “I say. Looks like somebody needs to trim his toenails. I hope I remembered to pack some clippers.” Unsavory, I know, but true. In this instance, I woke up one fine morning in Lagos, looked in the bathroom mirror, and discovered that I was in urgent need of a haircut.

Oh, I might easily have let another languid day unfold of its own accord, sans appointments, sans deadlines, sans responsibilities, sans haircut. After all, it was a warm winter day on the Algarve, and the sun was smiling and winking like an old beer-drinking buddy from college days, but I managed to gather my resolve, and shaggy-headed and hang-dogged, I turned away from the sea and the sand and took the path into the village in search of a barber.

Now, it is a trivial fact about me that I am not particular about my hair. I have it trimmed every now and then so as not to frighten small children, and in the last two decades, my moniker of “the Silver Fox” has been exchanged for “the Old Guy with the White Hair.” There are simply some things that no barber, however artistic and accomplished, can repair. So, with my accustomed determination merely to get things over with, I tramped along those winding, tiled streets.

From the neighboring hillsides, Lagos hangs like a glimmering pendant over the breast of the sea, but when you are actually in the place, you must face the fact that you will become lost - that is, if you are honestly trying to learn your way around and not relying on your cell phone. The narrow streets and alleys, constructed and extended and enjoined over many centuries mostly at the whim of the resident engineers (such as they are), follow no grid. There is none of this “Let’s have all the avenues going this way and the boulevards running perpendicular.” Oh, no. “If the Oliveira family wishes to build their butcher’s shop here, on this spot, then by God, we will build them a road to get to it!” So you end up with a labyrinth, an unplanned network, a web, if you will, and you are bound to get lost when you come here for the first time. Still, it is a delightful lostness. You might turn down one particularly quaint alley with lovely blue or green tiled homes and then find yourself exchanging pleasantries with a nice old lady who has come out to water her flowers; or you might find a shady cafe with good local wine and end up spending the better part of your day there.

Not I, however. I had business to attend to. I passed two or three salons with well-appointed ladies under hair driers and the stylists bustling back and forth, but my old-school mentality concerning personal grooming led me onward, and after a few random twists and turns, I saw a red and white barber’s pole (which always reminds me of this symbol’s medieval origins as a rack for drying bloody surgeon’s bandages - just the kind of dark history I love), Within, no one was waiting, and the barber was sitting in his own chair thumbing through a magazine. I kept walking. Next amid the buzz of a row of gaudy shops, I came across a “Man’s Shoppe,” as the sign in English read, with two rows of chairs, half of which were occupied by youngish guys in t-shirts and tropical prints, with trendily-attired coiffeurs snipping away at them, and I shook my head. Too…new and clean, I thought. And probably too expensive.

Then, a few coiling streets away, I found it, wedged in between a shuttered bar and a used bookstore: a small shop with one antique chair and a vast mirror along one entire wall and a sink and set of shelves with all manner of combs, scissors, razors, gels, and powders, and with the morning’s clippings scattered about the floor. The barber was busily slathering shaving cream behind the ears of the tall man in the chair, and on a bench just outside the shop, two more men sat talking in quiet, easy tones; they were clearly locals, older, in their checkered, collared shirts, a bit beefy - perhaps they were fishermen enjoying the offseason and getting their haircuts whenever they felt like it. The red and white pole hung by the door, but there was no sign.

I opened the door, and the old smells I had known all of my life, since my father had first taken me into a real barber shop long ago - the powder and the soap and the aftershave - came over me like a vivid, instantaneous plunge into the past, and the barber paused, his razor in midair.

“Bom dia,” he said, smiling.

“Hi. Any chance you can squeeze me in?”

He looked out the window at the two fellows on the bench. “Well,” he said. “As you see, I have two gentlemen waiting now…” His English was quite good.

“Shall I make an appointment for tomorrow then?”

He thought it over for a moment, looked at the state of the head of the man in the chair, and then looked up at the clock on the farthest wall. “I’ll tell you. It’s just noon now. Can you return at two o’clock? I can save you a spot.”

“Perfect,” I said, and closed the door.

The two-hour wait made for a leisurely interlude. I had retired from full-time schoolteaching the previous spring, and I was still getting used to the idea of having nowhere to be, much of the time. I meandered around, took in a free art installation at the town offices (mostly ceramics pieces), bought a copy of a local newspaper to practice my Portuguese, stopped in a cafe for a cup of dark roast, and somehow, I had found my way back to the unnamed barber’s shop by the appointed time.

He was just sweeping the morning’s detritus into a dustbin. Apparently he had not taken a lunch break.

“Ah,” he said. “Please sit. I will be right with you.”

As he washed his hands, I looked about the little shop. The pale paint was old and flaking a bit here and there, but otherwise, things were orderly - a dozen or so combs sat submerged in a jar of some sort of solution, several pairs of scissors hung from finishing nails along the side of a shelf… Everything had a proper place, as in a good mechanic’s garage. There were only two indications that the proprietor had any sort of personal life of his own: tacked to the far wall was a photo of a dark-haired woman and a teenaged boy (whom I took to be his family), and above that hung a well-scratched Portuguese guitar.

Having sustained a significant interest in stringed instruments for many years, I had taken a tour of a guitar museum in Coimbra and had also attended a dinner show in Porto, and I had learned a bit about Fado, this country’s famous native musical form. The Portuguese guitar looks like an octave mandolin to me, but it is throatier, distinctive in tone, and it is probably a derivative of Arab moorish instruments of the Middle Ages.

Gesturing toward the lovely, slender wooden thing, I asked, “Do you play?”

The barber looked over and shook his head. “No. It is just a wall ornament.”

He was distinguished-looking, with short hair graying about his temples; he was trim, and as he prepared to reckon with my bushy head, I noticed a pronounced grace in his physicality, especially in his arms and hands. He snapped the pin-striped sheet out into the air theatrically, let it float down over my chest and shoulders, and got down to business.

After a few silent moments wetting and combing my hair flat against my forehead (always a humbling experience), he suddenly asked,

“So, you are a traveller here? From America?”

“Yes, I am an American traveller.” I liked the sound of that.

“And where have you been traveling?”

“Well, we were in southern Spain for a month or so, and we’ve been in Portugal for several weeks now.”

“Oh? Yes, of course. And what places have you seen in Portugal?”

“Porto, Coimbra, Sintra, Lisbon…”

“Ah. I know Lisbon well. Did you enjoy it?”

I supposed this was just routine Portuguese barber/tourist chat, but he was very good at it. He was soft-spoken, but there was a compelling warmth in his voice, and each time he asked me a question, he looked up at my face’s reflection in the mirror and listened thoughtfully.

“I did enjoy Lisbon, but it rained for two weeks straight. It was still raining when we left to come here. We did the touristy stuff - you know, visited some wineries, went out to hear some Fado music…”

He had selected a pair of scissors and had begun snipping, but now he stopped abruptly, scissors poised a few inches above the crown of my head.

“Fado. You say you heard the Fado music in Lisbon?”

“Yes. Some friends had recommended that we do so. They said it’s a great Portuguese national art form. I’d only read a little about it but had never actually heard any of it.”

His mouth opened slightly as he gazed at my reflection. He stood up straight and held the scissors against his chest. “And…what did you think of it?”

“It wasn’t what I expected, to be honest. I’d been told that it’s a kind of folk music. But the show we saw wasn’t like that. It was very…slick.”

“Slick?”

“Yes, you know, over-produced, I guess. Too well rehearsed. Not much spontaneity.”

It was true. We had gone to a “Fado dinner.” The vocalist was an attractive woman of about forty. She wore a glittering black dress and her two accompanists, who were very good, had worn suits and ties. The woman sang beautifully and vigorously and dramatically, even histrionically, but when the evening had ended, I found that I felt nothing.

The barber looked sadly down at the floor. He sighed. “Yes. That’s how it is now in some places where the Fado has lost its original meaning.” He put the pair of scissors back on its own nail and folded his hands behind his back. Again his gaze met mine in the mirror, and he smiled.

“BUT,” he said, “in many other places, it retains its energy, its life’s blood, its sense of truth. Originally, you see, this music was about our daily lives, the slow daily drama of life in a Portuguese village, with its petty jealousies and its grandest aspirations - all of it. Angry husbands, conniving women, betrayals, magnificent love affairs, and even the occasional murder.”

As he spoke, a depth of passion had ebbed into his countenance, but then he reached out somewhat sheepishly for his electric razor.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I become agitated when I talk of the music. It’s the only thing I really know anything about besides cutting hair.”

“It’s quite all right,” I said. “I’m interested, really. How did you come to know so much about it?”

He rubbed warm shaving cream into the back of my neck and then began to run the razor gently and precisely over it.

“I cannot say that I was taught by my father or that I am a musicologist or anything of the kind. The truth is that I fell in love with a woman many years ago. Her name was Sonia, and she was a singer, and she sang the Fado, and she was extremely gifted. She was blessed by God. She sang the real Fado - her voice could make you weep. Her nephew, who was only sixteen at the time, was a virtuosos on the guitar.”

I glanced as furtively as I could toward the photo on the far wall.

“Yes,” the barber said. “That is a picture of the two of them. And I resolved that I would learn to play the Portuguese guitar, and that we would form a trio, and I would help her to realize her dream.” He rinsed the razor and set it on the shelf., then picked up a different pair of scissors. He held them up, looked contemplatively at them and then at the thatching above my ears, and remarked, “It was all she wanted, to sing. She was young, as I was, and we knew nothing of the cruelties of the world.” Now he held the scissors behind his back, strode over to the mirror, and fixed his eyes upon mine.

“On many nights, we would meet here, in this very shop, and we would practice late into the night, and then - “

“But if I may, sir,” I stammered. “I thought that earlier you told me that you don’t play the Portuguese guitar.”

He turned to face me. “I do not play - not anymore. But I did once, for nearly three years.”

He worked in utter silence for several minutes, his scissors whirring about my eyes like a small bird.

“Again, please, forgive me,” he said at last. “You merely came in here for a haircut, and now I have regaled you with a mad man’s ranting. When you expressed your curiosity about the Fado, I should simply have given you some recommendations for listening and a little history. For instance, if you want to know Fado, you must first know that like all other great art, it survived wars and revolutions and times of repression. For so long, it persisted as an oral tradition, but after the revolution of 1974, it flourished again. The great singer Amalia Rodrigues was a link to this fabled past, but you should also listen to current artists such as Mariza, Anna Moura, and Carlos do Carmo. In fact, I will make a list for you.”

He found a scrap of paper in a drawer and scribbled wildly for a minute or two. Then he loosened the paper collar around my neck and then held up a hand mirror so that I could inspect the back of my head as well. Then I looked to the front, and then to the back again, and suddenly it occurred to me that I had just been given the best haircut I’d had in a long, long time. He had taken an aging man’s white, flaccid mop and turned it into a masterwork of craft. It wasn’t simply that the lines were straight along my part and my collar line; there was an element of artistry there, a sort of sculpture, and the kind of glow that one sees in a great painting.

“My God,” I said. “You…how did you… I mean, this is probably the best haircut I have ever had in my life. Somehow I look like I’m ten years younger.”

He shrugged his narrow shoulders and removed the sheet from me. I stood up, and he slipped the list of singers’ names he had made into my shirt pocket.

“How much do I owe you?” I asked.

“It’s twelve euros.”

I could only shake my head. “Here’s twenty. I’d give you more, but this is all I have on me. Please keep the change.”

He smiled and made a little bow.

“Please,” I said. “Before I go, I have to ask. What happened to her? To Sonia?”

He looked steadily at me, and I understood that he had been waiting for me to ask this question.

“She simply moved away,” he said. “Neither her nephew nor I had any notice at all. Only a note left on the seat of this chair, saying that she had gone to Lisbon. We had no idea why. That was many ears ago now. In my desperation, I followed, of course, but she had left no trail, no trace, no forwarding information. For three weeks, I searched the streets of the great city, walking up and down, day and night, visiting all of the cafes and bars, prowling the alleyways, seeking her in sunlight and shadow. I never really understood.”

“Did she ever become a professional singer?”

“I don’t think so. I went to every establishment that hosts Fado music, and I could not find her. I only wanted to know why she had left without a word. Had I said or done something to upset her? Had she met someone else? I finally gave up, surrendered myself to the fates, and I returned to Lagos to devote myself to my profession.” He nodded toward the instrument on the wall. “That was the day my guitar became a wall hanging.”

Even now, I could see that he was suffering, and yet he bore it with inscrutable dignity. “I…I have no words,” I muttered.

He mustered a wry smile. “Oh, it’s likely that she is married and has been living quietly all this time. Most of us abandon our dreams at some point. Things seldom work out as one hopes, you know.”

He was right, of course. I walked out into the slanting afternoon light.

I confess that I have not yet taken the time to listen to any of the Fado artists recommended by the barber. When I returned home, I tucked his list into a desk drawer, and every so often I see it there - another scrap of paper to remind me of a thing I have not yet gotten around to.

The Great American Garage

If you are in the same sub-genre of nerd as I am, then you are likely to be unduly interested in word origins. Nearly every day, I find myself dwelling upon some word or other, and soon my rumination turns into an urgent need to know: where did it all start? In English, you know, every word has an entire history behind it, having made a journey through time and space. I am, in fact, a logophile (a term that derives from Ancient Greek, by the way), a lover of words and word origins.

Recently I was edified (and yes, that term is related to “edifice”) to learn that “garage” comes from the Old French verb garir, meaning “to shelter, take care of, protect…” That helps to explain why American English quickly absorbed the term around 1902, with the first blush of our ongoing love affair with the automobile. You see, a garage is not simply a place to store a car. Oh, no. It is a haven, a gathering place and a place to be alone, a place where dreams are made, nut by nut, bolt by bolt, where tools and oil and polish are handed from one generation to another, and where stories become legend.

Okay, maybe I am over-romanticizing. Still, I can say for certain that, for the most part, the word “garage” does not elicit quite the same associations among people in other countries around the world.

Let’s say, for instance, you are driving around in Spain. You have managed to locate your airbnb, and now you wish to park your shiny rental car indoors for safety’s sake. However, if you ask the proprietor for the whereabouts of the garage, he or she will no doubt direct you to the nearest mechanic’s shop. After all, a car is merely a machine designed to get you from one place to another. Why take up valuable real estate by giving it its own room?

Although, as the Atlantic reports, many European countries now boast higher percentages of car ownership among their populations than in America, garages still seem to be far less common there. In my own travel experiences, I have observed a distinct absence of the cavernous garages which have become a prominent feature of newer American homes. Drivers seem much more content with street parking and underground lots. And in Britain, about sixty percent of homeowners with garages say they do not actually park their cars in them. Instead, they use them for storage. That’s a lot of mutton.

By contrast, in the US, the mere idea of a garage has taken on its own unique cultural significance over time. It has become an essential part of the American household. Walk down any street in any suburban neighborhood comprised of houses constructed in the last fifty years or so, and you will see rows and rows of blank overhead doors staring silently back at you; they dwarf the meager front entrances through which the people pass. The children may come and go, the beloved dogs and cats - sadly - will move on to Pet Heaven…but the car, nowadays, is built to last, and if properly cared for, it will be still be sitting there ready to roll when the EMTs have pried the TV remote out of the homeowner’s cold, dead hand.

I know very little about cars and their innards, frankly, but there have been a few I have really liked. My mother earned her driver’s license a bit late - I think I was eight years old or so - and her first car was a 1965 cherry-red Ford Mustang with a white leather interior. God, if only I had that beauty today. A high-school buddy of mine owned a ’72 Chevy Nova, dark green, with a roaring engine that made the girls walking along the strip at Atlantic Beach gaze over at us in a way that made me feel all tingly inside. And in college, I owned a small Datsun pickup with a camper top, not because it was any good at all as an automobile but because it became a party to my youthful ramblings as I drove it to hell and back again. I think it died beside a county road somewhere in South Carolina.

Around that same time, I was studying in the creative writing program at the University of Florida, where I got to know the novelist and raconteur Harry Crews. He was animated in his hatred of cars. I once heard him call the automobile “the great tit on which we are all made to suck.” I could see his point even then - yes, a car can be a lot of trouble, it can drain your checking account, it can fail you at the most inconvenient moments, and when you are behind the wheel, you must always remember that there are any number of people just as dumb as you are who are also out there careening around in flying hunks of metal. But Harry was unusual (in so many ways, but all of that is fodder for another blog, another time) in that he grew up in an area of rural Georgia where whatever roads existed were made of red clay and likely to be rutted by wagon wheels rather than tire treads. He was born in 1935, but he might just as well have come straight out of the 19th century, really, and thus he was not afflicted with that most American of addictions - an acute fascination with motorcars.

Most of us are or have been, though, and that is why I cannot believe that self-driving cars will ever become popular here. Here we LOVE to drive, to feel that throbbing under us and the wheel in our hands and to know that we are the captains of our own destinies and directions. We do the driving, not the car itself. And mass transit? Trains? Busses? NO! Let the French ride their fancy high-speed trains with their wine and cheese in the club cars, but here in America, no one is going to tell us exactly when to leave and when to return and how to get there. We will not stand there peering up at a monitor to find out what platform we must go to and mill about on sheepishly, waiting for the appointed conveyance at the proper time. No, we are far too independent for that, and the automobile is inexorably wrapped up in that spirit.

Ergo, I understand the compulsion of the wealthy and the famous to buy fleets of Porsches and Ferraris and Lamborghinis, one for each day of the month, at least, and stow them in high-tech, pristine garages with more square footage than the houses where most of  us live. Jerry Seinfeld owns over 150 cars, for example, and Jay Leno has 181. Why? Because they can, I suppose. Obviously, expensive cars are status symbols in America, but there is something more deeply rooted than that: a longing for the objects of our collective past, perhaps, when great care was taken in the making of them; a childlike collector’s mentality, with which some fortunate souls graduated from arrowheads and buffalo nickels to vintage Jaguars; and a refined appreciation of speed and power and thundering engines. The rich man’s sprawling garage is in reality an aggrandized version of the boy’s shelf where once stood his Revell plastic models, painted painstakingly using those little glass bottles of Testor’s enamel model paint.

(Photo by New York Times)

But most American garages are not like that. They may double as storage areas for gardening tools and hand tools, workshops for hobbyists, a place for an extra refrigerator or a meat freezer, or perhaps most oddly and charmingly, as social gathering spots. My neighbor in Yarmouth, Maine, where I lived for seventeen years, had converted his garage into a sports pub, with a couch and a picnic table and a perpetually beer-stocked fridge and, of course, a television. How many pleasant Saturday and Sunday afternoons we spent there watching “the game,” which was actually any game at all, no matter how inconsequential - baseball, football, ice hockey, basketball, golf, cornhole, and so on, languishing in our brief escape from the tribulations of work and domestic routine.

My brother-in-law, who lives in the deep, swampy woods of central Florida, has outfitted his garage with a full kitchen, along with a table and chairs and a stock of whiskey that rivals that of many a bar, and there the stereo resurrects the original Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers, Marshall Tucker, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - essentially all of your favorite dead rock stars. And there, it is always happy hour.

For that matter, simply drive around in any average suburban neighborhood on a warm summer’s early evening, and you will see them seated in lawn chairs in their driveways, just at the entrance to their garages - mothers and fathers with their cocktails, perhaps with the grill  close at hand, pink steaks set to sizzle, and the kids, maybe on their bikes or shooting baskets, or if they are small, splashing about in the kiddie pool on the emerald grass. And there behind them, in that well-lit cave also filled with tools waiting to be used and trash waiting to be thrown out and half-full paint cans and half-deflated basketballs and footballs and old Christmas presents that nobody wanted, the car - or more likely, cars - wait to be beckoned into service once more tomorrow morning when, like the sun, the dream will live again.

(Norman Rockwell, Homecoming GI, 1945)

Wine Tour

Some things exist in this world that can actually unite us, and one of those is wine.

When traveling for pleasure, I am generally skeptical of tourist excursions - double-decker bus tours, guided walking tours, a horse-drawn carriage ride with a driver sporting a fake cockney accent, that sort of thing. Who knows whether what one is hearing is factual or simply the overflow of a demented imagination? “You are now standing on the very spot, ladies and gentlemen, where Sir Walter Raleigh invented abstract art by splattering the feces of captured Spanish sailors across his freshly washed linens…”

I would have hastened to add winery tours to this list of things to avoid while traveling, until I took one in Portugal’s Douro Valley. Perhaps it was the place itself that made the difference. That is old, true wine country: small, mountainside villages swaddled by acre upon acre of green vineyards, all neatly gridded and fastidiously tended by hands that have always known what to do. The grapes are the heart of those places and the vines the bloodstream, and the livelihoods of all those who live there depend upon them.

Our journey into this land of fables and antique labels began in Porto, a city which is lovely in the sunlight, but like most cities, gritty and gray in a chilly rain such as we had that morning. As our small bus pulled itself into the hills, great drafts of heavy mist engulfed us; soon, though, patches of sun and blue sky began to blink past us, as though the mountains themselves were just awakening. Rita, our tour guide, was a short, fiery woman - the sort of person the old folks used to call a ‘live wire’ - and she began to move about the bus in order to speak face-to-face with everyone on board, peppering us with questions about ourselves.

My wife and I were seated in the front row, and I had already noticed that the beefy fellow across the aisle from us had paid no heed to Rita’s admonitions that we must not eat or drink anything on the bus, lest we be put out by the side of the road. Immediately after her introductions (in English, Spanish, and Portuguese), he had ripped open a giant bag of Lays and begun chomping down chip after chip. Now, as I eavesdropped on Rita’s conversation with him, I realized that he was Croatian and knew only a few words of English and, apparently, no Spanish or Portuguese at all. I scolded myself for having rushed to judgment.

Soon we stopped for breakfast and bathrooms in a small town called Amarante. When all twenty or so of us had huddled around her on the sidewalk, Rita presented another side of herself with a salacious tale about a 13th-century Benedictine monk called Goncalo, who was beatified by Pope Pius IV in the 1500s. Somehow he gained a reputation as a matchmaker even though he was a hermit, but nevertheless a church was named in his honor and a statue of him was installed there. “The legend goes,” she said, “that if any unmarried, virginal woman - which is to say, one who does not know what it is like to have a man - approaches the statue, pulls on the rope around the saint’s waist and then lifts the cloth skirt and observes an erect penis, then that means she will find a husband very soon.” I remarked to myself that this must be a miracle in indeed, since most statues were made of stone, terra cotta, or plaster in those days.

Now, I have done a bit of research on Sao Goncalo since our tour and have found that there are various accounts of his special talents, but I’ve not come across anything quite as sordidly detailed as Rita’s offering. Still, in my view, she wins points for style and entertainment value. She was also absolutely correct when she added that bakers in Amarante still honor the saint daily by making pastries “in a certain shape. And ladies,” she added wickedly, “you must eat these pastries very slowly in order to enjoy them properly.” In fact, my wife and I found the statue and the pastries, but discretion prevents me from revealing which of the females in our group I observed testing the authenticity of Rita’s remarks.

Well, back on the bus, it was hard to imagine what might come next. I focused on listening in to our guide’s ongoing conversations with the other passengers and learned that some of us were from Scotland, some from India, from Germany, Estonia, Mexico, Texas, and of course, Croatia. None of us seemed to know very much about wine, but we were all eager to learn. Soon our bus burst out above the clouds and we were suddenly in a world of light, and the Douro River, the River of Gold, spread its treasure across the green valley. It was January, and the air was chilly, but it was impossible not to be warmed by the rich, bright colors that had emerged all around us.

I made the error of looking out the bus window and downward. The road was so narrow that it was not even visible from my vantage point, but a sheer drop of about 500 feet down the mountain was all too clear. It reminded me of those video reels you see on Facebook and Instagram of daredevil mountain bikers in the Andes or the Himalayas, flying wildly around curves so minuscule it seems death is the only possible outcome. However, the icy nerve and skill or our driver, Hamash, were up to the task, and somehow we made it to the first winery.

As I shuffled off the bus, I shook the driver’s hand. “How did you do it?” I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders and answered, “E meu trabalho. It’s my job.”

It was a welcome respite to walk out into the cool, bright air to stand on a path among the rows of vines (all quite dormant at that time of year, but lovely nonetheless) and listen to someone talk about wines. And this was not simply the server at your favorite restaurant or even the maitre d’ explaining the wine list to you. No, this was a man with the love of wine in his voice and eyes, telling us about grapes and about the lavender and olive trees planted near the grapes because they helped the soil to retain moisture. He told us about how the growers had to cautiously predict the volume of their wine production from year to year because drought was a certainty every two years. This was a large winery, he noted, and they put up gigantic oak barrels of millions of gallons of white, ruby, and tawny port every season. Eventually the empty barrels would be sold to Scottish whiskey distilleries, where their interiors would be charred and used for aging Scotch.

He then informed us that “all Portuguese wines in the Douro have American roots, quite literally. The roots of American grapevines are combined with our own.”

Well, I thought, there’s at least one contribution we’ve made to world culture. Could it redeem us for the McDonalds and Burger King joints I’d seen in Spain and in Porto, or for the Jonas Brothers? Probably not, but at least it might be a start. And then the wine expert continued:

“You see, this is because in the 1800s, an invasive American insect called a phylloxera killed all of our vines and many more across Europe. They enjoyed biting the roots and sucking them dry. So many magnificent wineries were lost, and so many jobs for the people. Finally, the Americans began sending their roots, which are resistant to the disease, to be grafted with our own. Fortunately, the wine industry here was ultimately restored.”

Oh. Hmm. Damn. The balloon of American pride I had experienced for a moment was now burst. As we made our way indoors to try some wine, a sense of guilt crept over me: should I apologize on behalf of my country for nearly destroying Portugal’s economy? Start speaking with a British accent so as to throw off suspicion? Ask if there were any chores I could do around the place to show my contrition? I decided it was best simply to remain mum and try not to attract attention to myself.

As I’ve made clear, I am by no means a sommelier, but I believe I can at least taste the difference between a bad wine and a decent one and between a good one and an excellent one. The three we had at Quinta do Roeda were very good, to my palate. If you’ve ever had port wine, you know that they tend to be on the sweeter side (and it’s the grapes that are sweet - no sugar is added), but the ones we tried struck just the right balance, especially the white and ruby. And our hosts poured generously into good-sized glasses - not the little sippy cups you might be served on some tours.

Port also has a higher alcohol content than most wines, typically around 20 percent, because brandy is added during fermentation. The prevailing belief is that originally this helped to preserve the wine and stop its degradation as it traveled on ships to more distant lands. It seems many people very much liked the sweeter taste and the added punch. I only raise these facts - which I gleaned on our tour, of course - because it might help to explain some of the things that happened on the next part of our journey.

To be frank, Most of us were slightly drunk (some more so than others), and the morale had risen considerably. The barriers between nations had dissolved, a sense of good will prevailed, and everyone chattered and chirped happily on the bus as Rita cranked up the classic-rock party music. I was glad to observe that Hamash was still very much in charge of the situation behind the wheel, having not partaken in the sampling, obviously. That was our job. This worked out very well, for if there were ever an urgent need for a designated driver, it was just at that moment. My confidence in him was brimming, and I did not even bother looking downward from my window as the bus climbed ever higher. In fact, all of our crew seemed to have forgotten any and all worries and were singing and laughing - except for our Croatian, who had immediately fallen fast asleep and now began to snore sonorously.

The next (and last) winery was even more magical than the first, though it was much smaller, producing only a few thousand bottles per year. It is delicious wine, though, and again we downed three glasses apiece as we gathered in the barrel room and listened as a very nice, very patient young man named Nicholau informed us about this wonderful elixir. We hung on his every word as though he were Winston Churchill delivering a wartime address, and in turn, whenever any in our coterie asked even a less-than-intelligent question (“Why don’t they have the ladies stomping on the grapes anymore?” or “Whose job is it to fill up all these bottles?”), Nicholau would reward the curious one by topping off his or her glass. Needless to say, most of us had questions. The Croatian man’s was the best:

“Do you drink this…” he struggled for the words in English…”every day in life?”

“Of course,” Nichoau said, refilling our companion’s glass. “I’m Portuguese.”

Finally, by the sheer grace of God (or maybe of Bacchus), someone came and led our troop of strolling drinkers to a large patio, and we were fed a very timely lunch. I have to admit that I don’t remember much about the pork I ate, but it was delicious.

After that, it was time for us to return to Porto. Hamash was again vigilant and alert in the driver’s seat, and he somehow made negotiating those treacherous, winding roads look like a walk in a vineyard. The mood on the bus grew contemplative now, then drowsy, and even the lively Rita settled down in her seat and tuned the cable radio dial to mellow jazz.

Soon, aside from the soft throb of the bus’s engine, the only sound was the Croatian’s heavy, rhythmic snoring.

Hamash turned for just a moment, winked at me, and put his finger to his lips. “Shh,” he said. “The baby is asleep.”