20 June 2021
We held a memorial gathering in recognition of the death at 60yo from pancreatic cancer of my second cousin, Carrington Rhodes. It was a fine experience, summoning two boatloads of those who loved him from Camden and S. Brooksville. People came from Indiana and S. Carolina. In order, we chatted, feasted, shared memories of him, and placed a stone in the Rhodes’ cemetery here. It is a ritual we do every summer if a family member has died during the preceding year. Carrington died March 2020, but covid restrictions prevented a memorial last summer. All 40+ attending adults were fully vaccinated, as were some of the teens, so when we sang it wasn’t a super-spreader event.
Carrington was, like most of us, complicated. However, he expressed a love of life in his friendships, his music, his travel, his generosity and good deeds, his stewardship of a tough length of the Appalachian Trail in Maine, and his daily attitude. He was a gifted musician, playing a variety of string instruments in numerous groups, often performing songs he’d written. He traveled widely and simply, hiking the world and building schools, churches, and, even, an outhouse in Kenya. He “adopted” a 13yo Ethiopian girl while he was working there and brought her to the US several times for camp, as well as paying for her to resume and complete school. He hiked the length of the Appalachian Trail twice, once as a through-hiker. He had his father’s gift for curt truisms: “Civilized people don’t chew gum.” He could always be depended upon and he had an admirable work ethic, moving throughout his life to the beat of his own drum. He will be greatly missed.
I had a wonderful visit to my friends, Jeff and Bonnie, on Martha’s Vineyard. They moved from Boston, after many summer vacations in the Vineyard, and are settled in a lovely home on 8 acres of woods. Bonnie is an energetic and intelligent gardener and the trees, shrubs, and flowering plants are stunning. Jeff, despite significant physical limitations from a chronic back injury and multiple surgeries, is of great good humor and has engaged in intellectual pursuits, connecting with others in the community. His shift is all the more remarkable to me, since he ran for 30 years, including the Boston Marathon twice. They are always warm and welcoming to me.
We had a squall yesterday; the wind was so strong that many young birch were temporarily bent double. Sheets of rain were followed by a remarkable hail storm. Chunks of ice up to 1 ¼” in diameter pelted down in great profusion, bouncing off the porches and grass like popcorn. As the storm approached, I began to make popcorn and just as it began to explode, so did the hail. My garden suffered some broken leaves off the kale and tomato plants, but not much more. A good reminder of Nature’s potential.
I’m reading a book Poki gave me 15 years ago. I started it then but gave up early. This time I find it gripping, stimulating my fantasies of having a serious cruising sailboat to explore the coast of British Columbia, Vancouver Island, and northward. The book, Passage To Juneau by Jonathan Raban, is beautifully written. He begins with a detailed accounting of George Vancouver’s West Coast explorations and he promises to look closely at the Native American cultures—Haida, Kwakiutl, Salish, and so forth—on the way. It’s perfect for me right now.
I did not like Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, despite testimony from Reese Witherspoon: “I can’t even express how much I love this book! I didn’t want this story to end.” Please. The issue for me is that I really, really liked her first book, Cry of the Kalahari, a non-fiction page-turner. This was simplistic about human nature: too predictable, too sentimental (ie, unrealistic, even shallow), and the protagonist was too smart, resourceful, and beautiful. It didn’t help that the heroine was quite transparently the author. Oh, well. It strikes me that it was not all peaches and cream with her hubby studying spotted hyenas’ social behavior in the Kalahari. Fortunately, there were significant distractions, like black mambas approaching their camp, a cobra in the dish cabinet, a resident leopard in their little grove of trees, hungry lions stalking around, and the threat of their funding being cut.
The air is very clean and the vegetation rich and fragrant as I walk through the meadow or into the forest. The balsam fir in sunlight, especially, is irresistible. I breathe deeply, as if next to a lover who is sleeping and I cannot get enough of her air. The breath of healthy plants is also intoxicating.
I ran an Island friend and his 4 kids into Bucks Harbor today. The kids are going to summer camp in a few days and need to present negative PCR covid tests. The Bay was glassy calm and our runabout, Tern, planes over the water at half-throttle, turning a 45 minute trip into 15 minutes. I enjoyed recalling mother’s tale of Captain Carver, who farmed on Hog Island, delivering a young heifer to the mainland. He’d stand in his flatbottomed skiff, facing forward and row the several miles while the heifer, tied to the boat with a rope, swam behind. How times have changed! What have we lost? The gain of ease is readily apparent. I think we shall get dumber as we depend more on smart, powerful machines, or simply money, to solve our problems. Plus, it isn’t as much fun, if less work.
A Psychiatrist in Myanmar 