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Queen of All She Surveys

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The entire family made a concerted effort this summer to expand LunaLucia’s world. She needs it. She’s too bright, too energetic, too inquisitive, and too restless to be happy just hanging around the house.

It started with some walks around the house, around the block, and down to our neighborhood’s little Italian shops: a little soppressatta, some chocolate, and a San Pellegrino limonata later and she was on board. She’s made a few trips to the library and made a few more trips to the South End since. 

This is the first year that she’s had to take a “yellow bus” to school. She catches it a couple blocks away and gets dropped off at the same spot…on most days. Last week she decided to take the “late bus” home for only the second time this year. The main difference is that with a different set of kids on the late bus every day the driver can’t know how many, if any, children get off at each stop. Lu was a bit distracted and completly missed that the bus had stopped at the Milton Bradley School; her stop. By the time she realized what had happened the bus had ventured into an area she wasn’t familiar with. Her Relay (a phone without a screen and connectivity limited to specific people) was dead.

Instead of panicking or waiting until the end of the route to inform the driver that she was a stowaway, she borrowed a friend’s phone, called home, found a familiar landmark and a place with trusted adults (The Drama Studio), got off the bus, and waited for us there. 

Masterfully done. 

She was concerned that there might be some consequence for her distraction and imprecision. There was. Liz was super-tired and was much more worried than Luna was, so Luna got to decide where to pick up take out for that night’s dinner; a rare treat! “Things like this are going to happen” I said, “It’s how we respond that matters.” 

That, and I can’t imagine another circumstance in which Liz would allow me to walk through the door with Taco Bell for dinner; Luna isn’t very predictable in most ways, but she knows the Border is kryptonite for her mother and she just can’t resist the opportunity to inflict it on her!

Mikey and Flo

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The remnants of Hurricane Florence making for some wet going on Maple Street last month:

From my experience news outlets don’t distinguish sharply between urban, suburban, and rural areas while covering the aftermath of disasters but, for obvious reasons, I try to parse the news reports in exactly those ways. I do this because both fictional and prepper narratives do make sharp distinctions in that area, almost always perpetuating the idea that cities will be the worst of all hellscapes and that an idyllic Jeffersonian agricultural hinterland will represent the only possible end point for human civilization.

Last year’s disasters from fire, wind, and rain seemed to tell a different story as urban locations from San Juan to San Francisco seemed to better weather the impacts of severe weather than their surrounding suburbs, wild lands, and agricultural communities. The fallout from hurricanes in the Carolinas and Florida’s panhandle have created another opportunity to witness how well urbanized areas bounce back after disasters, and just how serious problems like looting and general disorder are relative to the focus more heavily populated areas receive from emergency services providers.

From my experiences here with three disasters, two natural and one man-made, the closer to the center the better. After one tornado, one too-early snowstorm, and an East Coast blackout, downtown Springfield has been completely immune to power outages, received emergency services the most quickly, and had the most immediate access to shelters. To detail those claims: Before I was able to get to my house after learning of the 2011 tornado from my then fiancé’s apartment 45 minutes away my daughters were already at a shelter which had been opened and staffed a 5 minute walk away; After the following year’s “Snowmaggeddon” Halloween our house was unaffected while 5 people from two households sheltered here as their homes were without utilities for a week and a half.

So far it would make sense to say that a thoroughgoing prepper might want to be as far away as possible from anyone who might interfere with or usurp his finely tuned preparations, but the less capable among us might do well to balance our private preparedness with an awareness of the public institutions available to assist us.

These excerpts from articles about the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Michael also hint at the wisdom of that analysis. In Panama City volunteers have already begun providing support:

Whereas very little, even the news that very little help is forthcoming, is spreading to the exurbs:

It’s the Worst

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USA Today and 24/7 Wall Street have concluded that I live in the worst city in Massachusetts, or at least that Springfield is the worst city in which to live in the Bay State. It comes from a list of the worst cities in each state. It’s hard to imagine what the justification is for even making such a list unless they admit that it’s just click bait. The instinct to bully is at its core: Given the criteria I hardly think that any of these communities weren’t already known to be among the struggling. Also, using “worst” avoids such inconvenient terms as “blackest”, “poorest”, “puertoricanest”, or “mexicanest”.

It’d be cool to click on a list like this one and see suburbs like Greenwich, Lexington, and Katonah. I mean, those places would really suck for a lot of people; say about half, who earn less than the median income but who would still insist on having luxuries like shelter. 

Much like the “best schools” lists it actually inverts the relationship between the data and what it communicates. What it tells you is not “what place NOT to live to lead a ‘good’ life” but rather in what place people who live the worst lives tend to live. Instead of “where not to move to be happy” it tells you “where to go to find unhappy people”.

And the difference matters. 

As I have said many times it does not go unnoticed by me that so many of my neighbors would take any opportunity to leave this place; the museums, restaurants, parks, architecture, educational opportunities, jobs, public transit, and health care facilities notwithstanding. What they want is away from their lives and a study like the one in question confirms for them that their problem lies in their urbs but not themselves. 

From the outside the effects are almost as insidious. As often happens at cultural events my wife found herself talking to a suburbanite. In the course of the conversation my wife said that Springfield gets a bad rap. In response…while actively participating in a wonderful outdoor event in a beautiful downtown venue…this man responded that Springfield deserved every bit of opprobrium that it received. The irony of paying for the opportunity to experience an event in an almost one-of-a-kind atmosphere like the Quadrangle apparently went unnoticed. 

Quality of life on these lists is measured by things like average income and educational attainment: Is your employer going to cut your pay 63% if you move here? Will your Master’s Degree be decertified upon taking up residence? 

I’ll spare my readers, this time, a repetition of why living here is sometimes so heavenly, I’ll just say that there are probably a few people who wouldn’t mind living my life as I live it here, in Springfield, the Worst City in Massachusetts.

A Life Changer

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What more can I say about MGM but that it is a game changer, and not just a game changer but a life changer. Since the development opened in August we’ve spent time on the property every weekend but one; at the movies, playing games in the arcade, listening to live music, or just resting while we people-watch. 

Weird stuff is happening. Red Rose lowered the curtain rods, ever so slightly, along their Main Street frontage. Where before I could only assess how full the tables were by making an effort as I walked along, now it displays itself for all to see quite easily; the bar opens the curtains completely. Last night there was nothing going on at Symphony Hall, the Mass Mutual Center, or City Stage, but Sun Kim Bop was busy every time we walked by. Groups of people were walking, walking, from Fort Street to the South End and back again; not hopping in their cars and driving 5 blocks.

There are shops where once another boring bank had a branch office. Last night there were horses, loads of them, just meandering along State Street. A group of black men assembled on Court Square chanting Christian slogans decrying white racism and declaring that God and Jesus were black. Jehovah’s witnesses were by the courthouse with their literature eager to tell people about the apocalypse. Or something. On the other end of the building kids were engaging with the architecture of H.H. Richardson with a multiplicity of wheeled contraptions. Earlier in the day a gang of tuxedoed groomsmen drifted by our house in an open top double-decker bus. There were old ladies wearing fanny packs getting pizza (bad choice*) at City Pizza.p, and North African women sitting on the brick sidewalk waiting for a bus. 

And just people. People everywhere. Nice people, excited people, interesting people, clearly heading someplace they want to go, looking for an experience, a story to tell, or some free money. We’ve seen friends and neighbors there, but mostly we see people who look like they’d never been to Springfield in their lives. Last night we had brief conversations with people from southeast Connecticut and Pittsburg, PA. Pittsburg. Stopping on their way to Vermont to grab something to eat, listen to some live music, and stretch their legs. 

(This is 4 blocks from the casino…the group in front of us here ended up going there)

As someone who loves cities, who vacations in cities, who visits cities, who reads and writes about cities, and who has lived in a handful of cities in Spain…it has been like it should be; bustling, unexpected, familiar, surprising, comfortable, beautiful, but most of all filled with people.

(Find the horses. Were they offering pony rides?)

Lots of locals have mentioned, including me, how expensive the food and drink offerings are. Spectacular. They’re busy, and on weekends they’re packed; MGM getting the most return on their billion dollar investment they can I’m sure. But anyone with any prior experience knows that, depending on the time of day, Raices, Frigo’s, Milano’s, Red Rose, Mom and Rico’s, La Fiorentina, and Homei (to just name places in the South End) are just around the corner. At City Pizza you can get fries, a drink and the best gyro* I’ve ever had for $7 ($9 if you get the lamb). At Raices you can get some great pollo asado with arroz con gandules for the entire family for $10. The empanadas are $1.50. 

Time will tell what the net effect will be on local establishments and how location relative to the casino impacts them. We’ve never been out of the house so much and, apart from two beers and two adult milkshakes, some soda and some popcorn, we’ve done all of our eating outside the footprint; from Panjabi Tadka and the Student Prince in the north to the aforementioned eateries in the south. 

For long time readers you might recall that I mentioned that the anti-casino movement made a short list of reasons for opposing the project; the list included both the idea that MGM would prove horribly unpopular and that the traffic would be horrendous: All of the people NOT going to the casino creating horrible traffic tie-ups! What has happened has been the opposite: almost no change in overall traffic with many times the expected number of people taking advantage of the resort on a daily basis. 

The recent court ruling against the Connecticut tribes running a casino on non-tribal land has put a stop to the competing East Windsor development and probably puts expansion of gaming in Connecticut on hold for the foreseeable future; any changes to their casino scene puts their guaranteed revenue from the two largest casinos in the world at risk. That would seem like an overreaction to a relatively small casino in Springfield.

The 50+ units of market rate housing are yet to be built. The links to Union Station, the Quadrangle, and the Riverfront are still under construction. The Massasoit/Paramount hotel/theater project appears to be moving ahead. The dining district is “under construction”. Hopefully progress will continue to be steady. 

The Red Lion Inn, an institution in the Berkshires, is looking to expand into downtown Springfield. If they were to find a location that could serve as a link from MGM to the museums that would be amazing. I hope that the combination of the energy of MGM and the potential of Union Station becomes a catalyst for business relocation to the downtown. Silverbrick and Davenport are doing their share when it comes to improving the housing stock for would be downtown dwellers, Davenport will move ahead with some kind of retail project on the Zorzi site as soon as the deal for MGM placing its housing at Court Square is completed I’m fairly certain.

There’s never been a better time, in my lifetime at least, to be an optimist about downtown Springfield. 

4¢ on the $

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Check this out:


It’s the Salesforce Transit Center(!) in San Francisco. In August Jim Kunstler gave it his “Eyesore of the Month” award calling it a fitting tribute to Internet Narcissism Central. As if on cue the center was shut down and will be only partially reopened because of cracks in 2 of its enormous structural beams.

$2.2 billion and experts are saying that maybe the stresses of being a combination bridge, park, and elevated bus station were too complex to properly design the building. It could take months to understand why the cracks appeared and much longer, of course, to fix the problem(s). Who knows how long it will take to restore public confidence in the overall stability of the building?

The Salesforce Center can’t do much of anything that Springfield’s old Union Station doesn’t do, even after decades of total neglect, and without any fear of collapse. In comparison to the Bay Area terminal Union Station flip flops the trains and buses, elevating the trains instead of the buses and handling the buses at ground level. But it actually has trains. Today. Right now…

…unlike the Salesforce Center which is unlikely to see train service anytime before 2030. Union Station doesn’t have a park, but you could build a nice little one on the platform if you really wanted to, right here I suppose:

Here’s how Salesforce arches Fremont Street:

And this is Union Station crossing Main Street:

Here are some exterior shots of Union Station:



The interiors:


Union Station: 100 years old, neglected for 5 decades, works like a charm for cars, bikes, trains, and buses. Salesforce, with a 25x greater price tag is having trouble lasting a full year without bracing, and will only ever see trains if billions more are invested to tunnel into it.

Thank god for architecture. It’s hard to explain to people brainwashed by the cult of originality why so much of contemporary painting and sculpture is such absolute crap, but buildings have actual functions to perform; like staying up, keeping out water, and telling people where the entrances are. The inability to perform those functions even marginally well is a solid indicator that they are not the equals of those they came before.

As an aside, the wonderful work that was done in refurbishing the exterior and the atrium of the Union Station is undermined by the total lack of attention to the platform area.  I understand that it is a working facility, but a lick of paint and taking a weed wacker to the giant hogweed would do wonders!

A Drive Thru to Walkability?

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Maple Street and Main Street are both well built out with buildings conforming to the traditional development pattern of walkable urban environments. The only gap on Maple Street is the parking lot where this central structure used to be:


And on Main Street where various  building were lost to the 2011 tornado:


Davenport has sketched out some plans for that lot but has not acted on them yet because, in my opinion, MGM wants to use that property as a backup to cover its market rate housing obligation should the 13-31 Elm Street project fall through.

Between them is this stretch of Union Street. Union Street sees steady traffic all day and night from the MGM resort, its exit/entrance ramps to I-91, and as the only alternative to State Street going east/west from the interstate to the core of the city. Yet it looks like this:

It’s hard to imagine a more underutilized stretch of high value real estate in the entire region. That said, I don’t imagine that much demand exists to develop these blocks despite the automobile and foot traffic of this thoroughfare.

My question is this though, if developers did propose to infill Union Street, but with this sort of project:

Would it be an improvement or a step back? 

The city would see more revenue from these properties.

Density, employment and access to retail would increase. 

On the other hand it would signal an expansion of auto oriented development from the Columbus avenues into the heart of the city. The currently lifeless, but unbroken pedestrian connection would become pocked with more curb cuts and vehicles entering and exiting with greater frequency.

What do you think, better a Chipotle, a Chick-Fil-A, and an Aldi between me and Main Street, or patiently wait for the 2nd Coming that “urban infill” would represent? 

It’s a Terrible Shame

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The suburbs, at least in their American Post War iteration sow the seeds of confusion in terms of our ability to comprehend the differences which have traditionally existed between the urban and the rural. This is not a moral argument, it is a pragmatic one, but if one believes in the onward and upward narrative of human progress then the urban/rural dichotomy can become as as blurred and perhaps as deceptive as the lines between races.

If our technological abilities and our capacity to extract energy from our environment continue to expand then “the city” and “the country” can continue to become relics of a primitive past. If, however, technological advances and energy have limits then the wisdom of compressing expedient agglomerations of people on to relatively small patches of land, while maintaining in geographically influenced rings about those agglomerations geometrically expanding areas for agricultural production and transportation is a necessity for human civilization to continue. I am on board with the latter.

A trip to our great New England 6 state fair, The Big E, gave me not just my yearly fix of thoroughly unhealthy foods and ridiculously unnecessary domestic products but also exposed me to this essay by Horace Moses, the fair’s founder:

That city and country are not, or at least should not be enemies or rivals but symbiotic partners is the clear message. By turning city into faux country or country into faux city we have not only made partners rivals, we’ve weakened both and made the entire organism more fragile. Last week Strong Towns, the ideological descendent of James Howard Kunstler in shouting this message from the rooftops, published an article by a resident of one of the “Hilltowns” on the periphery of Springfield calling for upgrades to infrastructure in order to bring economic growth. 

The argument for a small government investment in building four new exit/entrance ramps at the mid-point of the longest stretch of the Massachusetts Turnpike without non-emergency access is not an unreasonable one given the transition from toll booths and toll takers to overhead gantries along the pike, and wiring these areas for improved internet access doesn’t appear to be beyond the capacity of these areas to maintain with minimal subsidy from the state once they are created. 

The problem rests both in motivation and in consequences. This region is not experiencing growth in population beyond a few thousand people a year. The already existing, and of necessity maintained, infrastructures of a handful of cities, which the author of this piece willingly admits are the economic heart to which he hopes the Turnpike exits and entrances can create a better connection, could support that growth for decades and decades and doing so would only replace the population which was lost from their collective apogee nearly 50 years ago. In truth for these cities that population growth could make them better, stronger, and more resilient. Plugging the holes in our streetscapes with people, production, and the interplay pertaining thereto makes us dynamic and flexible.

Meanwhile, taking an area which provides a watershed, agricultural land, woodlands, and raw materials from the periphery of an urbanized area and using it to house people which work in the cities makes both the urban center and the rural outlying communities less able to do what they do. It is the most UN-Strong-Townsy of ideas. New infrastructures will need to be created to serve people who could easily be served by already existing infrastructure located much closer to the productive places where these people will need to work, unless productive capacity also moves to these outlying areas in which case even more infrastructure will be needlessly duplicated for no increase in overall capacity. This entire process would also change the nature of Blandford from a rural or wilderness area to a suburban and possibly industrial one all the while adding to the likelihood that existing nearby urbanized and industrial communities will struggle to maintain critical mass.

I not only harbor no ill will toward Blandford and its surrounding communities, I love them and want them to be the highest and best of what they are. Urbanizing them makes them less what they are and harms the host they mean to connect with! It transforms what have been two symbionts into two parasites, both then destined to die. I will go further. I love Springfield because I love what it IS, and if it becomes more WHAT IT IS it will be better. Blandford is dying because Springfield IS NOT THRIVING, and Springfield will not thrive if Blandford takes away more of its life blood. If you love Blandford then it stands to reason that you love it for what it is, not because it could become the exact opposite of what it has always been. 

It’s telling that the City of Springfield owns so much territory in Blandford. The author of the Hilltowns piece regrets that so many bodies of fresh water are off limits to recreation in Blandford because they must provide drinking water to Springfield. He doesn’t seem to fully process that they only exist because they were created to do that job. Citizens from Springfield made the Cobble Mountain RESERVOIR, and the Borden Brook RESERVOIR in order to have drinking water, had they not done so those bodies of water wouldn’t exist for recreation or for any other purpose. 

The underlying theme of the Strong Towns piece, overtly stated, is that Blandford needs to be connected to Springfield to survive. That is true. What may surprise is that the theme of this essay is that Springfield needs Blandford (and many other Blandfords) to survive as well; agriculturally focused outlands to feed and provide resources for the urban core.

The dearth of Turnpike exits was an expedient of a bygone era it is true. The differently structured Interstate 91 with its many multiples of exits in comparison created much more metastatic growth in the valley in the past 40 years. We should use the lessons learned from the destruction to cities and farm lands along that north-south corridor to teach us how to proceed with changes running from east to west; by all means give people in the Hilltowns access to the Turnpike, perhaps right at the already built out “rest areas”, but do not subsidize “growth”. Learn the lessons of the Curbside Chat and the Suburban Growth Ponzi Scheme and do not fall for the importuning of developers.

I never had a son, and so it’s been years since I visited the Horace Moses Boy Scout Reservation. If I do go back someday I may use an exit near the Blandford Plaza. It would be fitting, given his words regarding the interdependence of city and country, if the landscape which greeted me was one that Horace himself might have recognized as the “country” he fought so hard to protect and not as suburban tract homes and strip malls on the outskirts of a dying city he once called home.

Other pieces I’ve written on the city/country symbiosis:

The Hills Are Alive

Rational Ruralism

No Exit

Lobster Dogs

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An interesting discussion has been taking place at Strong Towns about whether or not the public wants drastic change; for me there are a tremendous number of right answers to this question, all of which contain some truth and many of which seem contradictory. Do people in suburbia want to change the way they live? No. They want to keep doing what they’ve been doing but with different outcomes be they financial, social, or environmental.

A long time ago Chuck Marohn used the hot dog versus lobster example to elucidate the preference for suburban living. While I experience urbanity as the crustacean and the suburbs as the frankfurter in my own gastro-urban aesthetic what he goes on to say  is that the suburban subsidies present in the build out phase of suburbia gave people the option of choosing between lobster and hot dogs without accurate information regarding their relative costs and so people have become accustomed to getting the high cost option without regard to its expense.

Now that the costs are becoming harder and harder to hide with further growth within the Suburban Ponzi scheme, asking if that public wants drastic change is, perhaps, a question which is too easily, if willfully, misinterpreted: Drastic change? Yes, in that they want a drastic change in the reality which doesn’t allow them to consume lobster at hot dog prices indefinitely. 

As a resident of a city where the entirety of the preceding is nearly meaningless, my experiences with the public have been starkly different and in many ways inverse. Here we’ve been paying a different price for a development pattern which, while a bit more on the hot dog end of the expense continuum, has managed to leave us impoverished in many ways and in the here and now. Many people here, especially those who haven’t been exposed to places where the traditional development pattern has continued to function without the baleful impacts of suburban vampirism (i.e. continental Europe), still see auto oriented development as the road to prosperity even as its first adopters fall into decline. 

What this means is that much of “the public” wants buildings razed and the space devoted to parking increased, among other things. As with cargo cults, what they have witnessed is that certain behaviors have brought sought after results but they do not know that the circumstances under which that relationship obtained were provisional. What makes it even harder is that in the case of auto oriented development the benefits of acting out the cultic rituals still bring immediate benefits; if I am the only retailer on a strip of traditional Main Street with an exclusive parking lot the harm to walkability accrues to all, but all the benefits belong to me. This more or less invisible externality gives the public not just erroneous but inverted market signals.

It’s not surprising then that the public often begs to have its throat cut on the altar of sprawl.

In my experience the planners and the experts in economic development HERE have been just as ignorant as the general public on all of these issues until very, very recently and so asking about whether “great men” should contrive to “push through” their grand plans in contravention to the public’s ignorance isn’t a thing I’ve contemplated. I have learned from reading and listening to people whose opinions I respect that other places are very different in this regard; in some the leaders are enlightened and the populace is benighted, in others the reverse is true, yet still in others minorities of the enlightened, or not, hold sway over their adversaries disproportionately. In some areas meetings last into the wee hours with multitudes wishing to have their say, in others, no one gets involved.

Finding a “one size fits all” process which can be trusted to give a desirable outcome is the procedural equivalent of a mega-structure or silver bullet. The processes by which to create the drastic change we need from a system in which the momentum of even the desire for drastic change often flows in opposition to the change that’s needed will have to be as emergent as the change itself.

Perilous Peaches

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One recommendation for preparing for any future discontinuity in the culture or the economy is to collapse now and avoid the rush. My neighborhood involuntarily did just that and so it sometimes provides living breathing examples of the things preppers warn people about.

Our largest peach tree ripens at about the same time every year that our neighbor decides to hire someone to hack down the weeds in his back “yard”. This year he was also talking about making major changes in order to expand his parking area to provide weekend visitors to MGM with a place to deposit their cars. As has happened every year his grand gesture falls short of his vision, but our garden becomes much more visible and easier to access from Union Street.

(The defect in our neighbor’s fence which allows entry from Union Street)

We’ve had incursions into our backyard before, especially when the three historic vacant buildings across the street and their environs were developed; the neighborhood lost an easy place to duck in and out for sex, drug use, or to defecate. In response we locked a gate in the back which led to an alley off of East Park Street and we placed a tiny gate in the alley leading to Maple Street as well; that one creating more of a psychological than a physical barrier. It worked and the drug fueled orgies ceased immediately.

The peach situation is different. We like to share with our neighbors. Some of them are our friends, others help us out with various issues whether regarding trash, parking, or ice and snow removal, and others simply keep an eye out for things when we’re gone, and even when we’re here. The problem is not that our neighbors and friends want a bag or two of peaches, it’s that there are enough people of questionable character wandering about that every once in a while they wander into the yard for a little treat.

This year our visitor was named Aeneas. My wife confronted him in our back yard after he had had a long and aggressive conversation with a neighbor first about her, then about our garden. He wriggled through a weak spot in our neighbor’s fence and began to harvest some peaches. He revealed his name and that he was staying in a nearby shelter having recently been released from prison. Some on line investigation uncovered that he had spent time in jail for stabbing a man 12 times and had also sexually assaulted a fellow patient at a mental institution. To quote my wife: “Lovely”.

(Aeneas on one of his foraging forays into our garden)

He reappeared a few days later offering us his services as a chef and caretaker; I demurred. He reeked of alcohol and, despite the fact that I believe that his intentions might be honest, too much familiarity with people who can easily fall into crisis can shift your role from ally to mark in a heartbeat. We locked the alley gate again (We don’t like to do that as a few of our neighbors enjoy the privilege of sitting in our backyard and of picking tomatoes, peppers and peaches). We called a fence company to investigate placing a fence between our property and our neighbor’s, we took the wire we had used to train our grape vines and created a temporary fence and affixed a “No Trespassing” sign to it. I placed bike chain and lock along the gap in our front fence. 



Aeneas returned one more time, ignoring the sign and stumbling over the makeshift fence. I opened the window and told him that he was no longer welcome, that he had taken more than his share of peaches, tomatoes, peppers, and grapes already and needed to leave by the same route he came. He did so. He hasn’t returned. This may seem harsh to some, but his inquiries as to my work schedule among other things, perhaps attempts at pursuing friendship but also easily understood to be clumsy attempts at casing our home, along with his history of violent assaults, including those of a sexual nature, make me steadfast in my resolve.

We will likely not go through with the installation of a fence. We may ask our neighbor if he might repair the defect in his own perimeter fencing. We have enough in the way of grape vine and fruit tree branches to improve the “natural barrier” we built in the spring to delineate our yard from our neighbor’s. It has been heartening that so many of our neighbors noticed what has happened and have offered to be more vigilant in securing our back yard and its contents; by sharing so much of our abundance with so many people around us it has made them take an interest in seeing our garden space protected.

As a coda to this story, one of our neighbors from the large apartment building out back did some of the “weed work” for the aforementioned patch next door. He used some tools made available to him, we suppose, by that attorney. He told me, in Spanish, that the attorney wasn’t sure where they came from and so he could keep them when he was done with his part of the job. The day after providing him and a friend with a dozen or so peaches he came by and gave us those tools as a gift, since he has no land on which to use them.

They were our tools; stolen many years ago now, obviously, it turns out, by one of the random individuals our neighbor employs to do the consistently “half-ass” job of clearing out the weeds in his back yard at the same time our peaches begin to ripen. It’s not exactly an O. Henry short story, but it’s still pretty weird that I got my garden tools back in exchange for some peaches from a guy who had nothing to do with stealing them but whose work unintentionally led to this year’s peach peril predicament. 

P.S. My wife suggests a naming contest if we do install a fence. Dibs on Fency McFence Face.

P.P.S. As I finish up thi post yet another stranger contemplated entry into our back yard, upon finding the gate locked he came around to the front where the bike chain was sufficient to discourage him.

Aim Low 

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I could not go so far as to say that I’ve never tried to keep up with the Joneses, but my unorthodox lifestyle choices have always given me the upper hand in that my rules for the game in which we were competing were always different and subject to immediate change. By me. When you’ve never lived, as a straight white middle class parent, in a neighborhood with another of your kind nearby it makes turning on that part of your brain which needs to compete very hard. It’s possible that my combination of competitiveness and contrarianism would always have ended up in some kind of similar circumstance; winning by running down an empty path.

In this era when middle aged white males are self destructing at record rates I think my contrarianism has had a very positive, if unintended, outcome; I’m not mourning the loss of the American Dream because I never believed in it. I remember my apartment in Jerez de la Frontera, the balcony opening up to the street, the light well in the center; and that became my ideal for a living space. The white picket fence around a suburban home never had a place in my imagination. 

Fulfilling my dream was easy because for my peers it constituted a nightmare, and at the dream store nightmares are 50% off. Even back in the 80’s getting a 1,200 sq foot condo with a 300 sq ft “hobby room” and indoor parking (a space we rented for cash) for $79,000 was a good deal. Walking to work or taking the bus from time to time was not anything that any of my peers wanted to do. Being surrounded gay couples and retirees on one hand, and minority families on the other made striving or competing difficult; like being given a javelin and a croquet mallet and finding yourself on a tennis court.

As I age my aspirations for retirement don’t involve warm weather climates, golf, or bus trips to a casino; I’d like to ditch my car, putter around in the garden, walk to something interesting now and again, and have enough money to eat and keep warm. I’ve always believed in lowering the bar for success. In business I would always recommend keeping expenses to a bare minimum so profit can be realized with even modest sales. In real estate, buy so low that only disaster could wipe out your principal. In aspirations, aim low and almost never be disappointed.

Norman Vincent Peale said to shoot for the moon and so even a miss would land you among the stars. Leaving aside the issue of relative distance, if you’re so primed for life on the moon, however, that landing among the stars feels like failure then depression is a likely outcome. I stand by my assertion, despite many contrary claims, that the American Dream of the 50’s is as accessible now as it was then, the issue is that the expectation has now outsized the ability of even the world’s largest consumer economy to satisfy it. If we were content with a 1,000 square foot homes, camping vacations at Lake Richie Cunningham, bowling, one car in the driveway, the occasional dinner at the rotary club, and sending the smart kid to college, we’d be fine. 5,000 sq ft homes, yearly vacations to Hilton Head, 5 cars, skiing in the Rockies, dining out every night, and sending even idiots to 4 year Sandals Resorts of higher learning was never anything but an aspirational fantasy created by Robin Leach.

I can’t imagine a scenario where I get the pension I’ve been promised. I hope I can get 30% of it. I think we could live on that with a chunk of personal savings and the potential transformation of my home back into the rooming house/apartment building/medical office it was during the first half of the 20th century. 

If it turns out, of course, that my vision of the future is overly pessimistic, and somehow the State of Connecticut comes up with 65,000-75,000 of un-inflated dollars to give me in my golden years then I doubt I’ll react to it by jumping off a bridge. I call b.s. On the whole self help, goal setting, “The Secret”, aspirational conglomerate. I’ve never written down a goal in my life, I’ve usually taken the easy way, and rarely put myself at great financial risk. I don’t work hard OR play hard and yet I live in Victorian Mansion, have summers, weekends, and holidays off, travel to Spain now and again, and never have to ask anyone else to pick up the check at dinner.

Aim low, young man, aim low. If you focus on how little you really need to be happy, it’s amazing how much you can have.