Howard writes most of what appears in this blog about Agincourt. After all, he lives there; I don’t. But now and then he doesn’t mind a mouse in the corner.

A sixty second romance

The lunch crowd was average—for a Saturday in October—a handful of regulars, a few new faces, a couple of travellers who had asked specifically for the rhubarb pie they’d heard about from friends. But by four, the “long, dark tea-time of the soul” had set in; Marge and her two customers were each lost in private thought.

There are dreams. Dr King had one. And then there are the bad ones—nightmares. We’re living through one of these in the Mid-East is I write this.

Let me see if I’ve got this straight: Someone in Los Angeles produced a movie which mocks Muhammed, Prophet to the third “People of the Book.” A fourteen-minute trailer for the film found its way onto You Tube, where it has been seen by millions of Muhammed’s faithful followers around the world, but especially in the Middle East. And groups of those those highly offended Muslims have taken their anger to the streets and taken aim at some of the available symbols of the United States—which, of course, had nothing to do with the creation of said film, but which also can do little to suppress it. Places where democracy is nascent may be unfamiliar with the concept of freedom of speech; it’s been a long time since they’ve enjoyed it. It may surprise us that something we take for granted (though I’m beginning to question that short list in my own mind) may be foreign—literally—to those frustrated that the Arab Spring has moved so slowly.

In Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, Belgian detective Hercule Poirot is faced with a crime committed in a sealed environment. In characteristic Christie style, Poirot assembles all aboard the train car trapped in a deep snowfall on its way from Istanbul toward Belgrade. It behooves him to solve the crime before arrival at Belgrade, however, whose police force will unreasonably complicate the lives of all aboard and delay their arrival in Paris. If you’ve not seen the 1974 movie adaptation, there is, as Poirot observes, “…the simple answer,” and adds after a pregnant pause, “There is also the more…complex one.”

The simple answer prevails. The simple answer satisfies. The simple answer will move everyone along toward their destinations more expeditiously. 

Now I’m not a conspiracy theorist—at least I don’t think so. So thinking about the anti-Islam film that has fired the current situation in the Middle East, I’d welcome a Hercule Poirot to delineate the possible answers. For example…

Recent news coveerage suggests that this much may be true: A “cattle call” went out for actors in a projected romantic film set somewhere in the Arab World. The script—pages of which have flickered briefly on your T.V. screen—is innocuous and the cast dutifully delivered them under the direction of someone whose identity seems cloudy. Some time later editors dubbed an Arabic language sound track presenting a completely different dialogue, the presentation of Muhammed found so offensive in Egypt, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere. The actors are shocked at what had been done to their craft and the director is nowhere to be found. Clearly there is more here than meets the eye and ear.

The Simple Answer

Those with an intent to goad the Muslim world into a rage can be found aplenty on the fringe of the religious Right—the likes of bufoons like Rev Terry Jones, who publicly burned copies of the Koran in a Florida parking lot a year or so ago, or more sophisiticated bigots like Pat Robertson. Jerry Falwell would be among them if he were alive. I wonder where the Westboro Baptist Church stands on this issue? The money trail is likely to lead in that direction. Perhaps hastily, that’s a bandwagon I’ve been inclined to join. But there are certainly other more complex—complicated and even devious—answers.

…and more complex ones

Suppose, for example, disgruntled participants in the Arab Spring—perhaps a minority group that lost power in the shell game of Democracy 101—decided to stir the pot. They might themselves be Muslim culturally, but less than Muslim religiously. Why shouldn’t the Muslim world be as diverse as the Christian one, I ask naively. 

Suppose the money trail leads well beyond U.S. borders, through Swiss Banks to who knows where. Is it simplistic to apply Ockam’s Razor and choose the easy but embarrassing domestic answer, one drawn from our own discomfort with the “other” in a polarized political environment? Or is it cynical to seek answers elsewhere; more complicated explanations that may cast us as unwitting boobs in a twisted international conspiracy?

Where is Hercule Poirot when we need him?

It was Dave Pence’s 60th birthday this weekend and several of his extended family and friends gathered at a resort on Gull Lake to celebrate. I knew some of the people in attendance, so my energy Saturday evening was divided between 1) delightful home movies made by Dave’s parents when he was very young and 2) trying to remember all those new names. The cocktail hour and dinner began at 5:30, so four hours later I was exhausted. It was a busy day. By 10:30 I was ready for a good night’s sleep. Fat chance.

Some time after 3 o’clock—when I got up to use the toilet—there was a vivid dream still fresh in my mind when the rising sun woke me. I thought it worth passing along.

The night was still, the clouds dark, and the full moon was the only source of illumination.

City streets were dark and silent. No one was about; the streets devoid of cars. It was as though someone had draped a power pall over the tops of houses and trees, draining energy from everything mechanical and sapping our animal strength.

Milton and I had been tasked to go door-to-door, checking on people’s welfare and inspecting power meters in doubly dark basements and utility rooms. We were the only ones out. Some doors remained unanswered, the residents either home and hiding or away at other homes, seeking safety in numbers greater than two or three.

I knocked at one house while Milton went to the next, both of them dark and silent. An elderly woman in a threadbare housecoat opened her door a careful crack and invited me in to inspect her meters. (I don’t know that we spoke.) Threading our way through darkened rooms, she opened a door that led up to her basement. Yes, up. Dreams exist in their own reality; we accept everything in them without question or hesitation. Up is down; in is out. I can fly. No problem. So up I went.

Plain wood steps took us past the exposed framework of wood walls; studs pierced with more than enough holes for old fashioned electrical wiring that drooped and followed the stairs like hand-holds—though I didn’t dare for fear of pulling them free of their moorings.

 

But though it was even darker in this windowless pasage than it had been outside, I saw may way from a soft glow that eminated from the house itself. The old woman, silent but reassuring, moved ahead of me, knowing the way by heart. And though she did not herself glow, it was as if the house knew her and warmed to her passing. Her very presence seemed to excite its molecules and their vibration lit our way.

I wondered if she were not a Douglas Adams character, my own encounter with the Ruler of the Universe. In the “Hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy” series, Adams’ characters make a brief side trip to an innocuous planet, there to meet our Creator and guide, an elderly man living in a shack with his cat, totally unaware of his role. Asked bluntly if he ruled the Universe, while they dripped on his doorstap a from torrential downpout outside, he replied:

“I try not to,” he said. “Are you wet?” Zaphod looked at him in astonishment. “Wet?” he cried. “Doesn’t it look as if we’re wet?”
“That’s how it looks to me,” said the man, “but how you feel about it might be an altogether different matter. If you find warmth makes you dry, you’d better come in.”

That conversation came to mind while the old woman guided me to her electrical panel—where I would do something but I knew not what. Could she be the Ruler of the Universe and I had happened on her home by pure chance? I almost thought to ask. But just as I might have, I saw my situation for what it had become: She was my litmus test. My acceptance of her simple being was the test of my humanity by the Universal Ruler, perhaps the very one imagined by Douglas Adams.

Just as we reached the top of the stairs and were about to enter the basement, morning light woke me and I sat down to write these recollections. The dream was so vivid that, given the chance to return to sleep, I’m sure it would have continued and satisfied my curiosity—especially what the hell had happened to Milton.

Howard began the sesquicentennial series on a Wednesday morning walk in October 2006. He decided to challenge the familiarity of his environment; to see the ordinary and the everyday with fresh eyes.

Taking a circuitous route from home to work—from his apartment* near the Darrow School to the Plantagenet offices on Broad Street, which should have been four blocks and no more than ten minutes—he left home at 7 o’clock and arrived at his desk about 10:30. Sure there was a breakfast at the Koffee Kup and a half dozen brief conversations with friends along the way. All told, it was a productive morning.

He walked southwest toward the Krause Foundry and Syndicate Mills; past Luke, the Physician (our hospital), the old interurban depot (now the power company headquarters) and Adam’s Restaurant (resolving to return for rhubarb pie at 3:00); past his grandparents’ old home and the Episcopal and Catholic churches on the way to the cemeteries. Making mental notes along the way, Howard outlined the first few articles and arranged to have lunch with Hal Holt, family friend and head of the local historical society.

I’d love to have been sitting at the next table. Few people had a greater command of local history than Harold Holt, who died in 2008. So by press time on Frinday afternoon, Howard had a sense how the series would proceed, and his first column appeared the following Saturday morning.

In it, not incidentally, there was mention of a cat.

Mrs Schoenfeld’s Cat

Somewhere between the Christian Science church and the synagogue, Howard was startled by the sudden appearance of Clara, an American short-hair cat belonging to Agnes (Mrs Seymour) Schoenfeld, an acquaintance of Howard’s aunt Phyllis. What he didn’t notice, though—bending over to stroke the cat behind its ears and breaking his stride for a minute or so—was the near collision a block ahead between a UPS truck and the very nearsighted eccentric Forrest Fahnstock, whose license should have been suspended years ago. Without that unplanned interruption, Howard would have been in the thick of it and might easily have become a pedestrian casualty. Howard believes in God and the prospect of Divine Intervention (one of the many differences between us), while I’m far more inclined to credit the cat.

Other than the occasional watchdog at my dad’s gas station—like Ol’ 66 that I wrote about some months ago—I didn’t have pets as a child. We call them “animal companions” now, but my grandmother would have had nothing to do with them in her house. She did have canaries before I arrived on the scene and a parakeet or two while I was very young. Four-footed critters, on the other had, were forbidden; it never occurred to me to ask why.

In the last twenty-five years, however, I’ve made up for lost time: five dogs and two cats, all of them refugees from the pound. Not to mention my friends’ pets: Eddie and Kya and Alfie and Gunnar. One thing I’ve learned is that animals have senses we humans lack: more than intuition and a hair’s breadth shy of second sight. They see things we don’t. They smell things we can’t. They hear things in a range beyond human ability. They experience the world directly, a world in which they could be our intermediaries, if we would but let them.

So what about Clara the Cat? Do you see her on the stair landing? I think she may have intervened in many more lives than Howard’s.

*Since then Howard and his partner Rowan Oakes have moved to the old Wasserman Hardware store on Broad Street and James (northwest corner). The rest of the second floor is a bed and breakfast, while the ground floor houses The Periodic Table, Agincourt’s newest eatery.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the little courtesies of life—all those niceties that used to lubricate human interactions, like holding a door open for someone with their arms full or who is disabled or older than you; like expressing gratitude for a favor or a gift; or reciprocating, when possible and appropriate, the kindnesses extended to us by others. Not because they’re required but because they aren’t. 

Excusing a burp. “Blessing” a sneeze. All these little courtesies are fewer and farther between than they once were; gone the way of penmanship and the subjunctive, I suppose, into the burgeoning museum of the curious and the quaint. I expect there’s a room there reserved for me. So you can credit (or blame; you decide) Clara Frances Markiewicz Ramsey, my grandmother, for whatever social skills of the antedelivian sort still cling to me. 

Following my parents’ divorce in 1953, I essentially became the ward of my grandmother—a woman born in 1891, the third oldest of thirteen children in a working-class immigrant family from the very small town of Lemont, Illinois, where you were either Polish and Catholic or Swedish and Lutheran. I imagine the cultural cleft in that community extended to what car you drove: either a Ford or a Chevy. Shades of Lake Wobegon.

[There is, by the way, another fictional community near Lake Wobegon that I may write about some day. Imagine the citizenry of Lake Ilbegotten and all their eccentricities. I can.]

Clara tutored me in ways that were already antique when I learned them: saying “please” and “thank you” and being defferential to my elders. Well, now I am one of those elders and feel pretty odd when I hold that door open for “older” people.

Even Agincourt isn’t immune from the 21st century’s erosion of social skills. Though “erosion” may be  too strong a word; perhaps they are simply morphing into twitterable bits and bites below my radar. I am after all a computer nitwit; a novice in the ways of the interweb, barely distinguishable from Dubyah. My friend Howard is more adept on that score than I, but he seems as distraught at the passing of civilized life as we knew it.

How this is manifest in Agincourt, I haven’t yet heard…but it has something to do with this picture.