Mayor of the commuter car

I am told I am the mayor of the car I sit in (third from the front, both inbound and out) on the commuter line. I did not campaign for this high position, but now that we are about to move to a maritime region unblessed with commuter trains (or even commuting), I find myself a little reluctant to give up my office.

The only real requirement for the job is that you get on and get off at the furthest stop on the line. For me, that's Lowell's station, at right. For everyone at the other stations, it is like you never leave the car.

The mayoral duties are not onerous. Most of the time they involve a nod of the head or a mild smile exchanged with other passengers; nothing too abrupt or challenging for the sleepy folks in the morning or the weary folks at night. We share newspapers. We tut-tut over the weather or the safest headlines to discuss. My high points have been the two or three times when I have stifled folks playing loud music, and defused a potential fight. The rest of the car expressed its gratitude in smiles.

I have been chatting idly for years with people on the car whose names I don't know, but about whom I have come to care. There is the young lady who gives me a fist bump most mornings as she goes past, bright eyes and teeth flashing against a mahogany South Indian face; and yet she was born here and is more of a local than I could ever be. There is the geeky, precise technician for a major non-profit, who once had an epic meltdown because the edge of someone's coat was intruding into his seat space.

Knitting Lady and the Embroidery Duchess, needles flying, have a good-hearted competition to see who can complete the current project the fastest. There is a crowd of future leaders in business and medicine, who rarely raise their eyes from the texts they are highlighting.

In the morning there are The Cheerleaders, three redheads who I imagine have known each other for years. They are sociable enough with each other; but I have seen them turn on a young man who tried to insert himself among them, and peck at him mercilessly until he fled the car.

Their counterparts in the evening are the members of The Club, men and women who met on our train car and now hang out together outside of the commute . They are a bit older, a bit more battered than The Cheerleaders, and would scorn to twirl a baton except to bop someone over the head with it. They sit where they can amuse the conductor by talking bawdy.

Ah, the conductor.... He's a calm and courtly man, willing to be the target of jokes for the sake of good humor in the car. He spends his days off tracking down rights of way of vanished rail lines, and I am sure dreams of the Age of Steam.

I sit near a door, facing down the length of the car. I can reach across from my seat and haul the door closed as we leave each station, for the sake of our ears. I sit there mainly for the legroom, but it is a great place to scan the faces all down the car and let my speculations wander about the other passengers.

The place where I sit is designated for folks with disabilities, so of course I often give up my seat to men in wheelchairs, women with small children, the halt, the lame, and the blind. I say "of course" because this is what one is supposed to do, but some persist in finding it gallant and gentlemanly of me. If so, then we should all be gentlepersons; we should all aspire to the title of "mayor of the car" and carry out the functions of the office as I have described them. It would make the whole daily work experience--commute, labor, and commute again--more delightful.

No bomb can destroy the city

Earlier today I walked through a Boston shocked but not overthrown by explosions at the finish line of the Boston Marathon; the deaths; the maimings. 

What struck me as much as the efficient energy of the security folks was the "keep calm and carry on" work of train conductors, bus drivers, traffic cops and others who kept the city's circulatory system flowing and helped reduce panic.

Heroes come in all sorts of uniforms, and are heroic in the everyday pursuit of their duties, not just when they rush into the flames.

Playing in public

We went to a feast on Easter day, on a horse farm in Hadley. The horses were in the fields around the house, not on the menu, I am happy to report.

What was a little more stressy was that we were on the menu. We were sitting down with a musical household, and part of the deal was that we should bring along our banjos and take part.

I have played the banjo for decades, and used to play in public fairly frequently; but for the past 15 years or so I have played mainly for my own pleasure. I am mine own iTunes service. Rebekah has just taken it up this past year, although she has made much more progress in that time than I have in all my years of playing.

Even when I was playing in public it was mainly to enable group singing. Not for me the lightning three-finger plucking or power frailing you hear from "real" musicians.

I have rarely played with other musicians. There are two main reasons. The first is that I know clearly and painfully how very, very good I am not. I don't practice rigorously, and I follow no plan for improving my skills. I just plink.

The second reason has to do with repertoire. Banjo players often form part of bands that play lovely, lively pieces while everybody else swings their partners. For the musicians and the dancers to really lose themselves in the event, everybody needs to know three music really well, and to be confident about what will happen next. You could put an eye out with a fiddle bow or an elbow, otherwise.

So there is a quasi-mythical list of The Hundred Songs You Have To Know. And I know maybe three of them. On the band platform, I am mainly useful as ballast.

So tensions were a little higher than was ideal when we set out for the feast. But the resident musicians were gracious, and we even got to play a couple of our party pieces that are not on The List, but that we actually know.

And the whole experience reminded me that, while I definitely should not play my banjo at every unprotected ear, there are occasions when it, and I, can actually adorn the pleasure of an event. And that I should definitely dare to be an adornment more often.

Hello again

Hi, all. I've been away from this blog for a bit. There were too many other things going on, and at the end of the day I generally felt too tired to write about them.

However, I now have a backlog of things I want to write about, so I intend to start posting regularly again.

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New over old

Lowell is refreshing and renewing some neglected factory streets just south of the downtown core. They have ripped up old road surface and the trolley lines that were under them, so they can lay down a broad sidewalk with shade trees.

I was glad to spot even older structures deeper down, like the brick arch you can see in the attached photo. The old Lowell will never completely go away.

What country is this?

Here's a map of my favorite country:

Actually, it's a "cartogram" of the results of the recent Canadian election. Every electoral district is proportionately represented, so it really shows how the Canadian population is packed into southern Ontario, southern Quebec, and, to a lesser extent, Vancouver. It also shows that the Liberal party (red), although much diminished, is still a significant presence in the land--that fact is obscured using a traditional map to show the results of the election.

The article this cartogram comes from, "Two Maps One Election", is here.

Goalscape to the rescue!

I am co-producing a monthly television show for a couple of local public-access stations in Massachusetts. The show, "Live from Studio A", will feature staged readings of short plays by local playwrights, so as you can imagine, it is a herding-cats sort of project.

So of course I reached for Goalscape. I have one Goalscape for tracking general start-up tasks (design logo; set rehearsal schedule...). Here is my other Goalscape, covering the specifics of the first six episodes:

I'll be living by this for the next little while...will let you know how it goes. The episodes will eventually be available as streaming media, and I will link to them when that comes to pass (in the fall of 2011).