Dialogues

Irene swung by here the other day. She overstayed her welcome and had enough spit and vinegar in her to make us respectful. Amid the branches and cannonball leaves shooting across the lawns, there was the wind and the sea and we don't use the term "among" lightly. A hundred yards from the tide wasn't far enough to keep from being glazed in salt water and, those foolish enough to go take a close look, had a slick coating of salt for our trouble.

Some sailing stories talk about big storms and that the air above the water seems to turn into some sort of vaporous mix, neither air nor water but...well..."wairter" for want of a better term. We are pretty much of the opinion that the sea is doing its wave thing, the air is doing its blowing thing, and there - just over the top or at the bottom depending on your perspective - is where the action is...where air and water talk to each other.

Logic makes us believe that water doesn't really talk with wind any more than a rock converses with a tree. But what of this logic? In a conversation with a grand daughter we decided that full moons are merely folks gathered in the sky at night to look at the fireflies down here and that stars weren't stars at all but merely fireflies who flew too high, got lonely, and "flashed" so their friends could find them. Absolutely without logic and as they say about our politicians, "the truth isn't in 'em".

But these dreams, these illogical potentials, are actually compelling bits of fancy. We would, in fact, be better off if we put aside the fact that they weren't real or possible but simply pleasant imaginaries that 1. do no harm and 2. produce some terrific realizations ...

Shave and a Haircut - 2 bits

There is so much to see in this old photo.....but it has been the original dead end of clues.

There is an online game some of us play from time to time - it has to do with a series of scenes that are rich with objects and common items e.g. balls, feathers, oars, books, eyeglasses - just lots of them and strewn all over in the picture and you are given just a few minutes to find them.  It is pretty mindless but then again so is TV or a lot of it. This photo could be from the game.

We spent a lot of time trying to identify the model 62 stove or the lighthouse in the picture and all to no avail.  We did figure it was about at the transition time for electricity as the shop is all oil lamps...but that doesn't give us much. 'Before such and such a date' can be just about any time.

We can imagine this shop in winter - the warm brownish glow from the oil lamp, the stove, the smell of the liniments mixed with the hot dry of the stove.  The shoe shine boy not making a dime but perhaps happy to be warm with some potential reward in the offing.

The barber has some accent of course and talks about the village business when asked but mostly just concentrates and listens. He is a professional - with his starched white frock and flawless technique.  No electric clippers here - just scissors with that small curl on one handle for the little finger - so he can get better control.

We like this picture and the time. We surely do.

Little rumbling in the distance....

There is a certain cleaning that comes with a good thunderstorm.  By all indications we are going to be cleaned up but good this evening.  That's nice on a late summer Sunday evening. After a great stretch of weather and thousands of folks coming to town, it is, in a nice way, something like resetting the kitchen clock, washing that last dish and getting the ironing done for Monday morning work

Thunder and lightning is supposedly one set of events that you remember from childhood - someone explaining them to you like the gods turning on the lights and stomping on the floor type of thing, or counting the seconds between when you see the lightning until you hear the thunder to figure out how far the storm is away....(hint: speed of sound is 1126 feet per second or about 1/5th of a mile so lightning flash 2 seconds to the thunder clap = 4/10ths of a mile...ok?)...so we would do the 1-one thousand, 2-one thousand thing, and that would work pretty well.

 

We were discussing the approaching storm just a few minutes ago and recalling the first time we can remember a good bit of lightning. One of us remembers being about 3 years old and sitting on the side steps to a farm house and looking over the barn in back and seeing a very vivid flash and leaping into an older sister's arms from freight.  The teller mentioned that it was over 60 years ago and one of our group opined that was about when Ben Franklin first figured it was electricity.  Harrumph.

 

Well the storms are hours away and that gives us all time to think about what is coming and take care of our business before the arrival.  On a less scientific note, there is always Fantasia - the Disney animation. 

Ya' Got Trouble Right Here ....

We have mused about this picture for some time - mostly trying to be cute and clever about the caption.  "Entertainment Nightly" was one we liked but discarded. 

We figured out from another picture that the setting for this establishment was about where Sweet Temptations is now as we found another picture with a "billiards" sign in it hanging on one of the buildings that went flush to the corner.  Aside from the "fine art" decorating the place and the lack of electric lighting (oil lamp over the table and right inside the door to the viewer's left over the fellow's hat), this is pretty hard to date.  We do think that it is from about 1910 or before but after the "Remember the Maine" incident as that is the subject of the first picture on the top left. (The second appears to be the Brooklyn Bridge - but it could be any bridge).

We like the details in all this. 

The young fellow with the horn appears to be playing a 1906 C.G. Conn and Co. mellophone - something of a french horn and we can actually find pictures of this instrument here and there.  We dug around a bit and found that the Conn factory, over in northern Indiana, made a lot of versions of this instrument starting about 1890 and this one, the "right handed" one, showed up just about then.

If we were to guess, we would suppose that the fellow holding the cue is this lad's father (similar hats) but there is no way of telling and it doesn't matter much anyway other than the issue of a boy being in a pool hall/billiard room.  As Harold Hill of the music man would say "ya' got trouble".....

Yes we know it has been raining two days straight!

Tico Tico - wake up sleepy heads. Get those toes a tappin'

Thinking about Oysters

The oyster proverb first appears in Shakespeare's play 'The Merry Wives of Windsor' (1600 Act II, Scene II).

'Falstaff: I will not lend thee a penny.

Pistol: Why, then, the world's mine oyster, Which I with sword will open.' 

It appears that in about 1920 or so, Lester & Toner had a lot of oysters to shuck and indeed their world was one.  Now that oyster farming is making a pretty good comeback in this area, it is well that we consider this photo for a bit as our village was very much alive with all things oysters some 100 years ago.

Some us who wander about on local beaches notice more than a fair number of worn oyster shells.  Some banks and beaches to the east and west of town have what appears to be entire areas nearly without sand and dirt - all given way to great heap of shucked oyster shells.  Frankly it is hard to imagine  the "how many" in the harvests back then as Lester and Toner were just part of a dozen or so businesses devoted to the enterprise and we can, in our mind's eye, look at the surrounding waters and convince ourselves that oysters were as common as beach rocks.

Lester and Toner celebrated their business with something of a 'broadside" in 1926 - announcing their 10th year.  That selfsame picture above made it's way into the "announcement" and is partially covered up by portraits of the partners. Doing some quick figuring, with a business started in 1916 or thereabouts and going out of business in the 1960s, well it lasted nearly half a century.  That is a lot of oysters.

With the freight trains heading into the city every few hours, we figured that one of these fellows figured out that the market for their catch was a natural for the Fulton Fish Market and by golly there is actually a picture of the "Lester & Toner" booth there. 

We did some research because with all this history floating around and all this local oyster shucking,  Seems that oysters were pretty cheap way back then - $1.00 would buy you a beer and a dozen on the half shell.  Nowadays they are about $.80 each shucked and packed in their liquor on a retail basis so its pretty hard to judge but if they were a nickel each we would be amazed.  We did find one wholesale price from 1906 and it was for a gallon tin, net  weight 6.5 pounds for $9.00 but we don't know if that was wholesale or not but with 200 oysters to a tin, give or take that's about a nickel each.

What we suppose in all of this is that the business was only one to be in if you paid your workers next to nothing and had your own fleet to rake them off the bottom, canned them yourself and had your own booth in New York City to sell them from.  Henry Ford's principals exactly.  So now that  your mind is into oystering...here are the opening directions from eHow. Be careful.

Instructions

Things You'll Need

• Stiff Brushes
• Towels
• Oysters
• Bowls
• Oyster Knives
• Paring Knives
• Stiff brushes

1. • 1
     Make sure oysters are still alive by checking that their shells are tightly closed.
   • 2
     Scrub oysters with a stiff brush under running water.
   • 3
     Hold oyster in the palm of your hand with a towel so that you don't accidentally cut yourself.
   • 4
     Work over a bowl so that you can catch the oyster's juices.
   • 5
     Position the oyster in your hand with the cup-side down - so that its curved shell faces down and its flatter side faces up.
   • 6
     

     Insert a paring or oyster knife between the shells, near the hinge.
   • 7
     

     Twist the knife so that the oyster's muscles are detached.
   • 8
     Remove the top shell.
   • 9
     

     Scrape the meat from the top shell into the bottom shell.
   • 10
     Use the knife to cut the oyster from the bottom shell, or serve it on the half shell. 

Sunday mornings in the rain

This is very nice for a rainy Sunday morning...

Meteor Showers and Moonlight

Last evening was the Perseid Meteor Shower and it will linger a little into tonight - but then the clouds are on their way so, as the saying goes "day late and a dollar short".  It is also coincidental to a full moon cycle and last night's version was splendid - the bay area between our village and Shelter Island was that wondrous glowing blue-gray and so still it looked to be glass and walkable.  The moon was more a lantern than some far away body.

 

We went searching for meteors and saw very few and we think that is because no matter how hard one tries, the moon always grabs he eye although our little party of two felt that we prefer the lunar consistency to the off and on chance of a shooting star....especially this moon which was in our thoughts from half a century back.

Sunrise

We get it first you know - well not absolutely but if you wander on down to a wharf we know in the center of town there is a pretty clear shot to first light. 

Here fishie.....here fishie.....

OK. We buy that stuff in a jar...with the white sauce - tangy - with onions and we often mush it on crackers on Sunday mornings when our cholesteral level is in reasonable shape....ahhh very hot black coffee and creamed herring...my my.
We are what you could call a fish in a barrel fisherman. ... as in those damn things need to be in a barrel before we can catch one and then only with a net. So when we saw this story and having lived in Stockholm for years we were dutifully impressed.

We had been to Sweden perhaps a dozen times before moving there about 30 years ago to this day.  It was a strange set of occurances to say the least but Stockholm in early February is hard to describe as a 'treat for the senses'. The sun came up at 9 and set at 3.  The 6 hours were filled with trying to get things done and get myself arranged before we lost my sense of direction and got lost in the gloom of night. 

Our flat was on the third floor of a turn of the century building on Valhallavagen just west from Sturgarten and across from the 1912 Olympic Stadium.  There are any number of good stories from that time - most of which we are forbidden by law to recount - but we moved in after a month in the Doremus Hotel down the block and felt very cosmopolitan almost immediately.

The subway/metro was nearby but mostly we walked as the path from the flat to the Opera House took us through a wonderful park, past the Coq Roti restaurant down to the central square with giant chess pieces and a bandstand where the most god-awful community band played nightly in the summer.

Stockholm is on a series of islands near the town center (old town) and the water was clean and people fished all the time or at least on the tides. We never saw a whopper herring like in the picture but having nothing to do one day gave in and rented some poles and some bait from a vendor and gave it a whirl.  The trick was you were supposed to toss it out into the real current but that skill eluded me so I just dropped it almost at my feet over the cement walkway.  A few kind hearted Swedes wanted to help me but we had no desire to catch anything - just to sit in the then April sun and watch a harbor scene with the old town in the distance that was a view unchanged for 6-700 years.  Folks had come to that spot (Nybroviken) for 7 centuries to catch fish and to look at the old town.

We got extremely lucky (for one of us in particular - the aforementioned "can't catch fish in a barrel") and simply caught a whopper - emphasis on whopper.  The light fishing gear was no match and we were also fishing in 10 feet of water so there was little time.  Our now colleagues came running to help - Amerikanen fångat en fisk - and they landed the beast and we were suddenly Nimrods. One old fellow who we had spoken to nearly daily for a month or so was shy with envy so we asked him if "he would mind cutting me a fillet for our dinner and perhaps if he would like to take the rest home for his home to enjoy we would appreciate it".

He looked at me with amazement and we made a friend for life.  "Perhaps you should come with me to my house for dinner tonight to enjoy this wonderful fish".   Our honor.  He scratched out his address and left with the fish.  We went back toward my flat and stopped at a little pastry/bakery shop in Osterralm that we silently frequented for our morning sugar fix.  Feeling quite the fishermen and now having something to say we recounted my adventure to the counter person who had been kind enough to exchange chit-chat with Americans with horrible Swedish skills for the past months. We had to draw the "fiske" now as long as we were tall and with great gesturing she felt in the presence of Ahab and the Great White Whale.  For the next years we were known as Amerihanan yrkesfiskare.  A local honor.  This fish was so large as to only get smaller by describing it......

We went to dinner that night somewhere past the wonderful art museum with its Rembrandts and down to a little house with only 4 rooms and very low ceilings. It was very old. His wife, was completely shy and said almost nothing as we were "as she finally announced" the first Americans to ever be in their home. She never thought that the day would come and admitted that she was anxious about having an American visit because her home was so plain and we lived so well as she had seen on her TV.

The fish was poached in milk and dill with some other ingredients that she had found in the market. We had purchased the very best Aquavit at the control store that we could afford and we had some with herring that was not from a jar but some that she had put up from her husband's catch and with a recipe she said was as old as the city..for curing and keeping so not to waste.

Aquavit is, in our opinion, Scandinavian Grappa and to be consumed only by the teaspoon and never - EVER -  by the bottle. Liquid death is another name it goes by. The Swedes call it the drink that loosens all tongues. No kidding.  We - the group of us - consumed a lot of that wonderful stuff to my host and hostess's glee and anyone that thinks that the Swedes are stoic folks who sit around and go "hmmmm da ser gut" have a surprise in store. We all liked Sibelius - a Finn and thought Rembrandt was perfect for here and not in the Dutch area.  They had a deep seated dislike of the Germans per WWII and decried the neutrality of Sweden during the war....dirty swedes...was the term.

The hour grew late and we left them to find our way back. April or not,  it was snowing when we walked out and up the street to the underground to find our way home.  To this day we have not made any further contact although we have their address in my keepsake box but are certain that they are long since gone.

We write this remembrance in that a friend from the past made contact with us or us with her on facebook of all things after having gone missing for 35 years or so. Her sister appears to have lived in Stockholm for a bit and we knew her well and can remember her after all this time..both of them really...Gail and Linda..both absolute geniuses and special kids back then...the ones you look at and say "oh my..how lucky to be that gifted".

The value of social media.