Photo Essay: Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, Kentucky

 

Bonnet on a peg board at Shaker Village - if only life could be this tidy.

Last weekend I stole away from the Kentucky Women Writers Conference and spent a day visiting Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, 23 miles from Lexington, Kentucky. It was a truly glorious fall day spent in the picturesque heart of Bluegrass country, and I hope my photos will convey some of the serenity of the Shaker Village.



 

Main Street of Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill

As a former American Studies major, I've always be interested in the Utopian religious societies that sprung up in the U.S., and I find the Shakers particularly fascinating because of their lasting influence on truly American design. I've always loved their furniture and admired their aspiration towards simplicity, and clearly I am not the only one because they have had a truly remarkable influence on American design even though their sect, due to the requirement of celibacy, was ultimately not sustainable, and of their flourishing villages only one is still in operation with five surviving members in Maine.

Pleasant Hill is a living history village, so along the way you'll encounter volunteers in traditional garb who demonstrate Shaker crafts, such as basket weaving here.



I love how here the white fences create such an orderly world.

 

Weathered and still beautiful.

 

 

 

Looking out of one of the windows in the Centre Family Dwelling.

 

 

 

One of the dining rooms in the Centre Family Dwelling -

doesn't this just make you feel all tidied up and ready to

sit down?

 

Shakers, upon joining the community, would be grouped

into "families" (male and females separately), who

lived together. So this is one "family's" dining room.

 

 

The spider and the jug - the only place where I felt the

Shakers might just have left, i.e. it felt lived in and

not too museum cleaned up.

 

 

 

It was that kind of a day for a gauzy curtain to sway in the breeze.

 

 

 

East Family Dwelling (1817) - the long and narrow windows are typical of early 19th century architecture, but the perfect symmetry is particular to the Shakers.

 

 

 

Double entrance as one side is for the women and the other for the men.

 

 

 

Looking out from the broom maker's window in the East Family Brethren's Shop.

 

 

 

A tad of whimsy from a clothes hanger.



My Six-Word Jewish Memoir

I've shared Debbie Lekousis' Star of David origami
work before, but I love it so much I thought
I'd share it again as it is sort of fitting for today.

Tonight is the evening of Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year in the Jewish calendar. I'm not really in a blogging mood, but I wanted to share with you the six-word memoir I submitted to Smith Magazine's challenge last year in answer to the question, "What’s the essence of your own or others’ Jewish life in six words?"

Here's my entry:

     Kol Nidre gives me goose bumps.

Kol Nidre is the opening prayer of the Yom Kippur service, sung to its every own haunting melody. I'm sure it will send goose bumps up my arms again tonight.

Gmar chatimah tovah to all who celebrate Yom Kippur.

I'm sure I'll re-emerge to the rest of the world somewhat refreshed on Thursday morning.

A Plant as a Companion

Our asparagus fern rules the sunporch

The other day I was reading E.B. White's One Man's Meat again, and in the particular essay I happened upon, he was talking about a rubber plant:

"This rubber plant is one I bought thirteen years ago on West Eighth Street and it has been my companion ever since. As rubber plants go, it has been a success and I am attached to it in a curious sort of way, as a man does get attached to anything that manages to last thirteen years under the same roof with him."

E.B. White is exactly right, I thought; a longtime plant does become a companion. In my case it's an asparagus fern. I am attached to it. In fact, the whole family is. My daughter named him Prickly for the tiny sharp spikes on his stems. Whenever he sends up a new shoot that will grow into another diaphanous leaf, I call everyone to observe: "Look, Prickly has a new shoot!"

My daughter firmly believes that Prickly has a mind of his own. He grows whenever he wants to, sending up new shoots in the cold of winter when the sunporch, where he lives, is icy and drafty and you'd think that's not exactly a nurturing environment. He also goes through drier periods when his tiny leaves brown and sprinkle the floor, and he blooms, sporting miniature cotton ball puffs, but not necessarily in spring, when other plants do.

Unlike E.B. White, I am not sure how long ago Prickly joined the family. I can't remember our apartment without him, and we've been here seventeen years. He sat on the mantle for a while, but started to loose leaves there, so I moved him to the sunporch where he gets a lot of light. Now he rules that space. I yell at the kids when they horse around and step on one of his longer stems sprawling on the floor. I check for new shoots when I water him as if I could do anything to guard their progress into the air until they arch down as gravity takes over.


The building where my grandfather
used to live still stands. He grew
his cacti in the windows below
this turret.

It's funny how history repeats itself: My grandfather used to grow cacti in the sunny alcove of his city apartment in the former Reichenberg, now Liberec, in the Czech Republic. My dad's cousin, who was really an aunt to me, told me how he once summoned the whole family in the middle of the night to see his Queen of the Night cactus bloom. It is a cactus that blooms rarely, and if it does, only for one night. Our Prickly blossoms more often, but there's still a family gathering in a city apartment behind old fashioned windows to appreciate the doings of a plant.

Why Chapter Headings Are Useful

My Advanced Memoir Workshop was fortunate to host Wenguang Huang, author of The Little Red Guard, for an immensely informative Q&A session back in July. (Lucky for us, he lives in Chicago.) His memoir tells the touching story of a worker’s family during China’s Cultural Revolution. Beneath a cloth in the bedroom, this family hides a dangerous secret: In a country where cremation is mandatory, the narrator’s grandmother insists on a traditional burial and persuades his father to build her a coffin. At the age of ten, the narrator becomes the "coffin keeper." Thus begins a perilous balancing act between keeping a secret to honor a tradition and toeing the party line to make a living. Over time, the coffin consumes, quite literally, the family’s savings and well-being as an ever larger web of machinations is spun to prepare for an elusive funeral.

One of my students asked Wen about the use of chapter headings in the book. Since most of us memoir writers struggle with structure at some point, I thought I’d share Wen’s rather practical insight here:

Question: The organization of your chapters, with one word as a heading for each chapter [such as Demands, Veneration, Dilemma], simplifies the book and makes it very accessible. How did you come up with that?

Wen’s answer: The chapter headings were not my idea but my editor’s. I first organized the book around the timeline of the coffin. My editor suggested having subtitles or headings for the chapters, but I found them misleading, so I took them out when we submitted it to Penguin. After the first pass, my editor wanted me to change the end, and as I went back over the manuscript, I realized that without the chapter headings it didn’t flow that well. The great advantage of these chapter headings is that each chapter has a separate idea, so you don’t need transitions that connect to the next chapter. With chapter headings, each chapter naturally ends by itself, and the next chapter picks up its own idea. Often, transitions seemed too contrived, and with headers, each chapter can almost be its own essay. So I did add them back in. I still feel that some are not accurate enough, but some, like Mortality, work very well.

My Favorite Book for Rosh Hashana

Eric Kimmel's Gershon's Monster is my favorite book for Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, which we celebrate tonight. I wish my kids were still small enough to read picture books to them. Perhaps I can persuade my youngest to listen to this story one more time? To enjoy the illustrations one more time that are so infused with light and yet so stark in dark contrasts?

For years, just before the High Holidays, I'd get the "Rosh Hashana" books down from the shelf where I keep the special holiday books, pile them on the couch in the kids' room, and every evening I'd read them a different one. Or sometimes the same one over and over, like this one that is a bit scary as Gershon's sins, which for many, many years he swept into the sea, return to devour him in the form a sea monster. In a way I always found that scariness fitting for these Days of Awe when we are reckoning with how we have conducted ourselves over the past year. We're supposed to be a little in awe, a little scared, right?

To all who celebrate Rosh Hashana, I wish a shana tova (a good year)!

Photo Essay: Alcatraz

 

Pulling out of the dock, Alcatraz comes into view.

 

We had the perfect slightly gloomy day when we visited Alcatraz on our family vacation to California in August. Touring Alcatraz is obviously a rather touristy thing to do (It is San Fransisco's No. 1 tourist attraction), but it was also the No. 1 thing our younger son wanted to see on that trip. Neither my husband nor I had been there either, so we did it. Beware though, you've got to book your Alcatraz "cruise" at least a month in advance!

A lone guide waited for the crowd to get off the boat.
 

 

Even though there were lots of other people touring with us, my main memory of visiting Alcatraz is the serene and somewhat ethereal atmosphere that was already evident in vistas like this one on the way up to the main cellhouse. I hope I managed to capture it with some of these images as thankfully, the audio tour you now get to take lets you roam at your own pace.

 

 

Farther on the walk up, the ruin of the former officers club.

 

 

 

 Up and up, the roof of the Sally Port building.

 

 

 

 

Looking out over Sally Port.

 

 

 

The Cypress and the Bay

"Broadway" - one of the main cell blocks

 

Park Ave

 

On the audio tour, one former inmate tells how they used to have concerts on New Year's Eve when everybody who played an instrument was allowed to have it in his cell, and they'd bounce a tune from cell to cell.

 

Sunrise Alley

 

This section wasn't polished for us tourists and showed what Alcatraz would look like if it weren't maintained for tours. I took this picture over the barrier.

 

Cell at Alcatraz

 Not so serene. Bleak would be the word.
 

Peeking in at the library

After lining up all these images, I still think this one of the empty library shelves at Alcatraz is my favorite.

 

 

 

The former Warden's House on Alcatraz, destroyed by fire in 1970 during the Indian Occupation

 

The Warden's House has an almost 360 degree view of the bay, but I think this picture could be called "Empty Windows."  On the audio tour, the daughter of the former warden shares how she grew up here as a little girl, taking the boat to school, and enjoying a rather peaceful existence right next door to some of America's most heinous criminals.

 

 

 

 

A peek through the fence of the former Exercise Yard. If you look closely, you can see the outline of the Golden Gate Bridge to the right.

 

If you must be in prison, I'd say you'd rather have this view than one of Midwestern flatlands or the baking Nevada desert from today's maximum security prisons, right?

A 9/11 Tribute

I wrote about my 9/11 ritual last year, but I will write about it again this year, and probably in years to come as well, because that is what a ritual is: Something you do over and over again, on a certain day, for a certain occasion.

Last night I took Portraits 9/11/01 off the bookshelf and put it on the ottoman that serves as our coffee table, just to make sure I wouldn't forget my ritual of reading about some of the people who were killed on 9/11 before I mosey about my day. I'm afraid 9/11 has reached that point where it is in danger of becoming a fleeting thought, an "Oh yeah, today is September 11th..."  In paging through the Wall Street Journal this morning, I did not find a single mention of 9/11; and that in the newspaper that has the widest circulation of any in the U.S., and is named for a tiny street that was buried in rubble 11 years ago.

Even the Portraits 9/11/01 book has become yesterday's thought - my heart sank when I checked on amazon to find it is out of print. Nevertheless, I spent a few minutes this morning, while sipping my coffee out on the porch, reading some of the obituaries. This always brings back that feeling of dread and loss. This time I was especially struck by how young so many of the victims were, taken from the very middle of their lives, which of course makes sense since they were of the working class, many working in the World Trade Center buildings, or nearby, or rushing in to help.

On a whimsy, I read a few of the first and last entries today. I'm giving you their names, the little epitaph the New York Times came up with, and their age:

Gordy Aamoth - Looking Good (32 years old)
Edelmiro Abad - One Office, Two Families (54)
Andrew and Vincent Abate - Brothers at Work and Play (37 & 44)

Paul Zois - Games as Sacred Rites (46)
Andrew Zucker - A Blessing on the Way (28)
Igor Zukelman - Ugly Car, Beautiful Dream (29)

May their memory be a blessing.

The Library at Alcatraz

In the library at Alcatraz

From all my pictures of our recent visit to Alcatraz, this one has stuck in my mind, and so, since I was on the topic of libraries yesterday, I thought I'd share it with you today. I'm not sure why, but for some reason I found the empty shelves of that library particularly poignant. Perhaps they conjure, more than iron bars and dreary cells, the tragedy of wasted lives, those of America's worst criminals, and even more so, those of their victims and families.

For more glimpses of the library at Alcatraz, click here.

On Having Your Own Library

When my grandparents were expelled from their hometown in Czechoslovakia after World War II, they lost their house and all their possessions, but the loss my grandfather lamented the most was the loss of his library. When he later tried to regain entry and claim, in vain, Czech citizenship, he tried to attach some value to his library, for it contained not only all the volumes that were dear to him and that he had amassed over the years of teaching German, Geography and History, editing a newspaper, writing theater reviews and his own poems, plays and stories; he had also inherited his father-in-law's library, who had been a writer, poet and lover of German literature. Between the two of them, it was quite a collection.

Some of my grandfather's books, now on my book shelf.

It took me awhile to appreciate his loss because, when I first came across his letters to the Czech government and claim forms listing his library, I thought to myself, what's the big deal? You can always buy books again, can't you? And why do you need to have all those books? They are such a nuisance when you move, voluntarily, of course, in which case you schlep them along in many heavy boxes. However, over time I have realized that some books you cannot buy again. They go out of print, or are written in a script no one can read anymore (such as some of my books in old German lettering that I can still read, simply because I was stubborn enough as a child to plow through them).

But a library is so much more than a bookstore. It's a reflection of who we are if we are the kind of people who read and care about books. I was reminded of that again the other night when I could not find the readings for the memoir class I am teaching that starts next week. I did have my old syllabus, and while I tweak it a little every year, I pretty much use the same memoir excerpts. Could I recreate those readings? Did I have all the books? Turns out I had most of them, but not all. It was more disconcerting, though, that if I had indeed lost those xeroxed copies of chapters and passages, I had also lost my notes on those readings, unless they were in my books. And that's one of the beauties of my own books: They have my markings in them, underlinings here and there, flags attached to a passage that I like to use to show how to write about smell, for instance, or pages that are dog eared because I loved a particular phrase. Those kinds of things you cannot recreate by buying a new book if you've lost your library. (I did find my packet of readings again, thankfully.)

Another thing: A personal library is instantaneous. The books are right there. Some of the books I had copied readings from were from the public library. Getting another copy would have taken time, which I didn't have much of as I tend to assemble materials at the last minute. The same goes for buying books, whether online or at a store. So I decided, right then and there, to put those missing memoirs in my Amazon shopping cart to extend my own memoir library.

There's also a certain inheritance that comes along with a personal library. What kind of books you have says something about who you are. They are, in a way, a giant diary. This summer, my daughter had to read The Merchant of Venice for her AP English class. I was almost giddy with joy when I told her we didn't have to buy the book because I have a full collection of Shakespeare's plays. A few weeks later she was worried that I'd be upset that my copy of The Merchant of Venice, a Penguin paperback from the 1980s, had fallen apart at the spine while she was reading it. On the contrary, I was happy that it had gotten such good use. We can always reassemble it and stick it back into that row of paperbacks on the shelf, and it will be a testament to our reading habits.

Living in post-war West Germany, my grandfather was never able to build the same kind of library he had had before, but I do have some of his post-war books that now seem old and precious. How much more precious would it have been had my siblings and I inherited his library and, along with it, our great-grandfather's. We did not know our grandfather well as he died when we were very little, and we never met our great-grandfather. But I am sure that we would have met some of their personalities hidden in those books.

On Easing Separation Anxiety

I remember those days of handing a screaming child off to a preschool teacher very well. The first time around it was tough to leave my two-year-old son, especially when I heard later that he spent a good part of the morning standing by his cubby, holding his lunch box. But I had to leave for work, and so did my husband, and ultimately, those swift good-byes helped establish a routine that we all got used to. Mind you, after a few weeks our son took to standing in a corner with a bucket over his head when all that classroom commotion got to be too much. In the end, however, he adjusted well and loved preschool.

See my current article in NPN's Parent to Parent Magazine for a preschool teacher's tips on how to ease separation anxiety.