Spring has settled in long enough in
these parts for my favorite weed to have made an appearance. No, not that one.
I mean the dandelion. (What lawn monoculture enthusiast first declared it a
weed anyway?) Not only are they pretty, but – more importantly – they are
tasty. All parts of the plant can be eaten, most commonly raw in mixed salads,
though I’m told the roots are better boiled. I’ve never collected enough roots
at one time to bother boiling them, so I’ll pass that opinion along without
personally confirming it. Beware of chemical contamination of course. I never use fertilizers, pesticides or weed killers on my lawn, so this is not an issue in my yard.
Both sets of my grandparents made
dandelion wine, but by the 1970s when I was old enough to drink it they had
retired from recreational fermentation. I have all of their winemaking
equipment stored in my barn, but I’ve never tried to make wine of any kind
myself. Fortunately, up through the 1990s I had friends and coworkers whose
families did have an old vintner in the mix, so I was gifted with a bottle of
dandelion wine every few years until the current century. I guess the old relatives
died off by 2000. Plenty of people still made (and make) it of course, but they
were not among the gifting/regifting circle of my friends and coworkers by
then, so my free supplies dried up. What does it taste like?
Unsurprisingly, the bottles I’ve sampled varied a lot, but at bottom each was
more similar to mead (which is fermented from honey) than to other white wines,
though not as sweet as that comparison makes it sound. All tasted more
alcoholic than they possibly could have been. Alcohol kills yeast and thereby
shuts down fermentation at about 13% ABV. (You need to use distillation to
increase alcohol content over this.) So, the apparent extra kick has to come
from other aspects of the dandelion. Most online recipes for dandelion
wine are pretty similar. The biggest differences are in the amount of straining
and aging. One site urges re-filtering, rebottling, and then aging for two
years. I don’t think any of the home winemakers who ever supplied me directly
or indirectly did that. Most sites suggest letting it age in the bottle for two
months, which sounds more probable, though it is possible I received some bottles
on the very day they were corked. These recipe ingredients are pretty
typical: 3 liters dandelion flowers – just
the petals; any green bits will add bitterness 500 grams of raisins – preferably
golden, but any will do 4.5 liters of water Yeast – either bread or wine yeast;
these packets are readily available 1.2 kg of sugar Zest of orange Some recipes add a bit of this or
that – or fiddle with the fermentation with yeast nutrient and acid blend – but
doing that or not is up to you. Put the petals in a nonreactive fermenting container
(e.g. glass or ceramic rather than aluminum or iron), pour in boiling sugar
water, add the other ingredients, and lid the fermenter. You can buy
specialized fermenting equipment and valves or just use glass bottles or jugs capped
with balloons – pinpricking the balloons will allow excess gases to escape while
still preventing outside air from entering the bottle. I suggest consulting one
of the many online recipe sites for the precise steps and probable fermentation
times. Since I mentioned distillation, can
that be done to dandelion wine to make moonshine? Yes. I’ve heard of it but
never have tried it. But if you prefer hard spirits, there is nothing
preventing this step, though the result should taste more like brandy than
whiskey. I’ll leave all this fermenting and
distilling to others more ambitious than I. For now, I’ll just snatch some
flowers and mix them into my Caesar salad. I’m not averse to uncorking a bottle
this summer, however, if one is sent my way.
I don’t read much new-ish (i.e. from
the past couple decades or so) poetry anymore though I occasionally revisit some
classics. My sister, not I, was the poet of the family as both reader and
writer. (I posted a collection of hers on another blogsite.)
Nonetheless, a discount at Hamilton Books prompted me to pick up 100 Poems That Matter, a collection from
Poets.org with an intro by Richard Blanco (poet at Obama’s second inaugural).
More than half the contents are new or new or new-ish, with the remainder by
Yeats, Plath, Cummings, and other familiar names. I probably never would have
encountered, much less read, any of the new-ish ones in any context other than
a collection such as this.
Poetry simply isn’t as prominent in
the culture as it once was. To be sure, there is a vast quantity being written,
but it is mostly read in isolated (often academic) niches. Once upon a time, poets
were rock stars. Tennyson, Eliot, Kipling, Coleridge, Browning, Whitman, and
their like were famous in their own lifetimes, and not just in Academia. Common
folk knew who they were. W.B. Yeats was so lionized by the Irish in the 1920s
that they made him a Senator despite that little pagan quirk. (Could an openly
pagan candidate be elected Senator in the US today? Maybe, but I doubt it.) All
this has changed. The last time contemporary poetry has had a broad cultural
(or countercultural) impact was the oft-parodied Beat era. Who was the last
U.S. Poet Laureate selected by the Library of Congress whose name a majority of
Americans would recognize? Or even a largish minority? I’d venture it was
Robert Frost, and that was more than 60 years ago. The current Poet Laureate,
by the way, is Ada Limón. That poetry isn’t as commonly read
anymore, however, doesn’t mean some isn’t worth reading. This collection has
100 that purportedly matter. Not all matter a lot. Actually, some (IMO)
are pretentious tripe. (Moralistic and social posturings aren’t any more appealing
in verse than in prose.) The large majority, though, do have at least something less facile to say. What
do they say? Well, your mileage may vary. Blanco in the intro makes the point
that "we needn't read poetry with the apprehension that we're only
supposed to get what we think the poet wants us to get" but rather that
"poetry, like music, relates to subjective experiences, and we should feel
free to respond to them subjectively." So, too. I’m glad he said “like music,” since lyrics,
though clearly closely related to poetry and fuzzy at the boundary, are not quite the same thing. The
simple distinction, of course, is that lyrics are sung (or are meant to be) and are (usually)
accompanied by instruments while poetry (usually) is not. Carol King’s verses are
something different from those of Edgar Allan Poe. This is why Bob Dylan when
he won a Nobel Prize in Literature told the committee that it had made a
mistake, though he took the prize money: “But songs are unlike literature.
They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant
to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not
read on a page. And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics
the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however
people are listening to songs these days.” Bob writes some pretty good lyrics. However, if,
like myself, you’ve let much time pass since experiencing verse that was meant to be “read on a page” (or
perhaps recited), there are worse places to restart than this collection.
A classic
Steve Allen bit: reading lyrics as poetry
Gene
Vincent & The Blue Caps - Be Bop A
Lula (1956)
Most of us have only scattershot memories
of events before age 5 and none at all from before age 3. I don’t differ in
this, but I do remember watching the movie Moby
Dick (1956) at the drive-in from the back seat of my parents’ Pontiac. In
the summer of ‘56 I was 3. OK, I remember only a snippet, but I do remember. I
must have liked the movie since I drew a lot of whales in sketch pads in the
next couple of years. One of my first comic books was the Classics Illustrated version of Melville’s novel. Naturally, I had
no sophistication about any of this. I regarded the story as just a monster
tale, akin to the many monster movies popular in the 1950s. (My sympathies were
usually with the monster.) I don’t remember when I first read the actual full-length
novel, but it was sometime before high school. It was the first time I gave
Ahab any serious consideration instead of simply accepting that he was after
the whale. I asked myself (along with “Why is there a whole chapter on chowder?”)
“What is this man’s problem?”
I stumbled on the answer soon afterward
in, of all places, a preface to Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. The preface was written by Ray
Bradbury who, as it happens, also wrote the script for the Moby Dick movie. In it he compares and contrasts Ahab and Nemo.
Ahab, he says, rages against mortality itself. He lashes out against a universe
that is not cruel (since cruelty requires caring, albeit of a malevolent kind)
but, worse, totally indifferent to human suffering. He seeks revenge against
the white whale as an embodied symbol of that universe. Melville was assigned to
my class in high school a few years later and my English teacher, a lapsed
monk, rounded out the religious metaphors with Ahab as Antichrist. I at last
understood Ahab’s funk, but still didn’t quite get the relentlessness of his obsession.
“Yeah, life is tragic. Get over it,” I thought. It is, of course, the nature of
obsession that people don’t just get over it. That is what makes it a type of
illness. What brings this to mind is another book entirely that I’ve been
perusing the past couple of days. True crime writer Ann Rule sometimes devotes
an entire book to a single case and sometimes publishes collections of short
accounts. Without Pity is one of the
latter containing accounts of a dozen murders and their aftermaths. In about
half the cases the motive is obsession – not being able to let go. At least
Ahab’s existential angst was about grand cosmic questions (and his target wasn’t
human), but to commit murder because your girl dumps you is not only horrific
but lame. Anyone who hasn’t been shattered at some point by the ending of a
romance either has led a very sheltered existence or has no heart, but refusing
to let go despite those feelings never ends well. Obsessive romantic attachments are
surprising common and are not limited to exes –sometimes they are a total
surprise to the object of affection. A classic case of erotomania (also called de
Clérambault Syndrome) was the Polish princess Catherine Radziwill who stalked
Cecil Rhodes in the 19th century and frequently told people they
were engaged. He wasn’t interested. (Given the lifelong bachelor’s predilection
for the company of good-looking young men, she may have been seriously barking
up the wrong tree for more than one reason.) Nearly all modern celebrities
acquire stalkers of greater or lesser persistence. Most are harmless. They just
want to imagine a relationship that doesn’t exist, but a few are dangerous
enough eventually to end up in an Ann Rule collection. This most often happens
when the stalkers start to view themselves as the victims – victims of
unrequited love – and so lash out. “Get over it” are never pleasant words
to hear. But there are times when we all can benefit from hearing them.
I’m not a collector of antiques. I have
some, but none was acquired intentionally. They just came my way because they have
family history of some sort. They are keepsakes. I hesitate to use the word
heirloom since that word connotes (not denotes but connotes) something
valuable, and none of my keepsakes is valuable in any but a sentimental sense. If
sold, all together they probably wouldn’t cover my heating bill for this past
winter. I own some of them simply because my dad was a builder and consequently
always had a storage barn where grandparents “temporarily” deposited stuff:
kerosene heaters from the 1920s, oil lamps from the 1920s and 1930s, winemaking
equipment from the Prohibition era, and so on. (Aside: It is commonly believed
that homemade wine for home consumption was legal during Prohibition; it was
not.) Half a century later the barn and its stuff were mine. Some of the items
I cleaned up and brought into the house as conversation pieces; others remain
in the barn. Then there are things my parents themselves acquired new but have
become antique over time: my dad’s baseball bat from the 1930s, his uniforms
from WW2, paintings from the 1940s, a dining room table from the 1940s, very
of-its-time plastic wall art from the 1950s, and so on.
Just a few examples: all the items including the piano (which my mom played but I do not) are keepsakes. The oxen yoke was rustic art made by my grandfather, the oil lamps are 100 years old and the clock 200.
This comes to mind because somewhat
desultorily I’ve been attaching discreet labels to the items since I’m the only
one left who knows how old they are or from where they came. For example there
is a handheld school bell from the Cranford elementary school that was given to
my maternal grandfather in 1910 when the school bells went electric. Without
the attached note, it is just a bell. The pith helmet is more interesting if
you know it is from India in 1944. You get the idea. Anyway, the labeling has
reminded me just how many of these keepsakes there are around the house. I’m
not one for clutter in a general way (typically following my mom’s dictum, “When
in doubt, throw it out”) and don’t regard myself as particularly sentimental. If/when
the time comes to sell my property and downsize, I don’t think I’ll have a
problem leaving this stuff behind. Yet while I have room for the things with
family history I balk at selling them or tossing them. I’m not sure why. Maybe
they just remind me of people and places. I don’t have kids to saddle with these
legacy items, and if I did they might not want them. A few years ago Forbes ran an article titled “Sorry,
Nobody Wants Your Parents' Stuff” that became their most downloaded short
article. It was written by Richard Eisenberg whose 94-y.o. father had died some
months earlier. He and his sister struggled to handle their father’s personal
property; it was a problem because the market for what were once called
collectibles has collapsed in recent decades. The article notes that two
generations (Boomers and their remaining parents) are downsizing (or dying) at
the same time. By itself this would create a glut of old furniture and tchotchkes.
But demand has dropped off simultaneously. The article quotes Chris Fultz of Nova Liquidation, “Old mahogany stuff
from my great aunt’s house is basically worthless.” Eisenberg adds that “auction
houses have little appetite for your parents' stuff, either. That's because
their customers generally aren't interested.” Those customers would be Millennials
and Zoomers who (money woes aside) mostly want to be mobile without junk to lug
around. Even if the stuff is offered free and from their own families they don’t
want it. For most, “sentimental value” isn’t really a thing. Xers still provide
a modest (albeit only modest) demand, but they are a small generation and can’t
carry the whole load. So, there is a high probability that my
keepsakes one day will end up in a dumpster. That is OK. I won’t be here to
wince. But just in case anyone (perhaps a cousin or two) is interested before
they go to the landfill, the items are labeled. I’m sure the executor(s),
whoever that might be, won’t mind if they are taken away – maybe to a property with
a barn.
The equinox rapidly approaches and the
usual destinations are bracing for this year’s influx of college spring
breakers. They notoriously party heartily, because who needs a vacation more
than college students? Don’t answer that. Vacations or holidays (the terms are
interchangeable in common parlance though the former is more American and
latter more British) always have been a privilege of the rich. The well-to-do
of the ancient world through early modern times were wont to travel and
frequently to spend time at country estates away from their urban quarters. They
still do that. To the extent middle class folk (craftsmen and the like) were
able to take breaks and make excursions, it was usually for religious reasons.
The ancient Greek festivals with their associated theater and sports events
come to mind. For the most part though, farmers (the overwhelming majority of
the workforce until quite recent times) had neither the resources nor the time
to join them. One cannot just say to the farm animals, “You guys take care of
yourselves for the next couple weeks ‘cause we’re outta here.” The modern middle class secular vacation
came along in the 19th century with ongoing urbanization and
industrialization. In the US, doctors and business management theorists argued
not only that vacations were good for health but that they were good for
business. They refreshed salaried workers and improved their productivity. Even
ministers got in on the act, saying they were good for the soul: hence the slew
of (especially) Methodist resorts appearing at the end of the 19th
century such as Ocean City, NJ. Rail connections to such places as the Jersey
Shore and the Adirondacks made them readily accessible. Vacation time became a
key demand in labor union negotiations with increasing success into the 1930s.
Furthermore, they were affordable. Cheap gas and lodgings prevailed from 1920s
right through the 1970s when I took a youthful three month cross-country road trip after
college. I could not afford the same trip today despite having far more
resources in real terms if one believes official CPI figures. Although 21st
century workers do go on vacation, they spend a lot on them. The growing
popularity of the so-called staycation – just chilling out at home – is no
surprise. When I was a kid in the ‘50s/’60s my
parents were adamant about taking a summer and a winter vacation – this despite
the fact that my workaholic dad didn’t really like being on vacation and grew
visibly antsy after three days. They regarded it as integral to a middle class
lifestyle, which it was important to them to attain and maintain as it was for
so many who grew up in the Depression. I suppose they also regarded it as a
duty to my sister Sharon and me. I certainly didn’t complain. They weren’t
terribly adventurous in their destinations. We regularly went to the same
location in the Florida Keys in the winter and to the same lakefront spot in
New Hampshire in the summer year after year. (In fairness, my dad had enough
travel adventure in the Merchant Marine during the war.) It never occurred to
me to question that decision, and anyway I enjoyed the familiarity of the
places.
My mom and sister Islamorada, FL; my dad and I Gilmanton, NH – mid 1960s
Since the beginning of March I’ve been
asked five or six times by various people if I plan a vacation this spring. In
a way, this is a strange question to ask a retired person. Vacation from what?
I suppose they mean the word in the literal sense of vacating the premises. In
that case the answer is no. I don’t plan one. That doesn’t mean I won’t take
one. An advantage of being old and single is being able to be impulsive. My
wanderlust has diminished from what it was decades ago though. But maybe just
for the heck of it, I’ll one day stand on a familiar beach in the Keys or
lakeside in New Hampshire.
In generations prior to the Boomers
about 10% of the population over the age of 65 had no biological offspring. For
Boomers the portion is closer to 20%. In each subsequent generation the trend
toward childlessness has intensified. For the first time ever in the US more
than 50% of women at age 30 are childless – or “childfree” as some prefer, though
each term arguably has judgmental connotations. So, while in a minority among
Boomers, I am not rare in my dotage in having no kids. (My household actually
is more complicated than that as those who know me are aware, but that is a
separate matter.) Were I concerned about family legacy (I’m not) my 11 first
cousins with a couple exceptions have been sufficiently prolific to take care
of that. Neither my paternal nor maternal family names are at risk of
vanishing. For the most part the near-steady (with
a few minor blips) decline in fertility in the entire developed world since
1965 has been voluntary. The fertility rate (the average expected lifetime
number of offspring per woman) in the US is currently 1.6, the lowest it ever
has been. In the absence of immigration a rate of 2.1 is necessary to keep the
population from declining. Some countries – famously Japan – already are in
decline. In the US, UK, Canada, and a handful of other magnet countries,
immigration more than covers the gap, but one still hears concerns about a
shrinking upcoming pool of workers and taxpayers to fund future pension and
social welfare obligations for an aging population. One also often hears
demands to encourage a higher birthrate through such interventions as government
funded childcare and lengthy legally required paid parental leaves. These
policies may or may not have merits on their own, but, despite what their
advocates frequently say (based on dubious year to year data blips of
hundredths of a point in this nation or that), there is not good evidence they
affect fertility. Many European countries have exactly those policies, yet
there is no discernable pattern between them and fertility rates. (Sweden’s
rate, for example, is 1.6 – the same as the US.) Local cultural factors are
more important. Some countries (e.g. Finland, Denmark, Poland, Russia) simply
pay parents to have children though they too remain well below replacement
rate. Hungary has an interesting approach; the government will lend 25,000
euros to couples; if they have two children within six years they don’t have to
pay the loan back. Italy (fertility rate 1.3) is expanding a similar program. In truth, the economic cost of raising
children in developed counties is far in excess of even the most generous
social welfare program currently in existence, which partly explains why they
have such little effect. The USDA calculates that it on average takes $289,000
to raise a child to age 17. Send the kid to college and add a hundred grand. A plethora of magazine articles have fretted about these figures in recent years. Yet,
these scary numbers are not the primary reason people are forgoing parenthood. In
a recent Pew study financial concerns deterred only 17% of childless adults
under 40 from having kids. The most common reason given: “Don’t want to.”
I can relate. I didn’t want to. Perhaps
we should fuss less about all this. There are 8 billion people in the world and
(despite Elon Musk’s concerns) no immediate danger they will go extinct – from low
fertility rates anyway. Besides, it must be better for the kids to have parents who want them. If a decline in working age taxpayers someday puts a
strain on public spending, perhaps we just need to adjust our spending
priorities. (Also, a tighter job market generally means higher real wages,
which are not a bad thing.) When I was born there were 180,000,000 fewer people in the US than there are
today (332,000,000 in 2022). No one thought the country was underpopulated back
then. If the net (albeit unlikely) result of individuals making free decisions today
is eventually to return us to 1952 numbers, so be it.
It is that time of year. Next month we
must pony up taxes, so now is the moment to assemble our documentation. To some
degree it is always that time of year. Property taxes are due quarterly (in
most jurisdictions) while there is never respite from sales taxes, phone taxes,
energy taxes, etc. But income taxes are due April 15 – this year April 17,
actually, because the 15th falls on a Saturday. I use a professional
to file. This year (sorry to say) the numbers are so simple that I don’t really
need one, but there have been years when they were not simple at all. It is
best, therefore, to have a history of my records in one place, just in case
they get complicated again, so I continue to employ the same accountant. Taxes are as old as civilization.
Arguably, taxes are the primary business of civilization. Taxes always at
bottom have been a protection racket. The ancient Sumerian peasant tolerated
the predations of the local king because they were less than the predations of
lawless bandits against whom in principle the king offered protection. (If
either predation became too severe, the peasant could head for the hills to
hunt and gather instead, though that becomes an ever harder choice the more one
has to lose.) The king, of course, got wealth and power out of the deal. The
initial problem was how to calculate taxes in the absence of money. Civilization
dates to some 3000 BCE but coinage didn’t come along until the 7th
century BCE in the West – a few centuries earlier in China though little of the
early Chinese “spade currency” was gold or silver, and so was closer to being
fiat money. The solution was payments in kind (pigs, goats, bushels of wheat)
and labor (an obligation to work for the king in fields or on walls or whatever
for a given term). As economies became monetized so did
taxes. By the time of the Romans we have recognizable tax collection: property
taxes, inheritance taxes, port taxes, sales taxes, and poll taxes. Julius
Caesar added a gross income tax: complex income taxes with deductibles and
profit/loss statements were too difficult to administer at the time, so the tax
was on gross revenue; whether you made a profit or not was your problem. China
favored granting monopolies on certain goods and services while taking a piece
of the action in return. The American Revolution was famously a
tax revolt as was to a large degree the French Revolution. The irony in both
countries is not lost on current taxpayers. One sometimes hears that income
taxes were unConstitutional in the US prior to the adoption of the 16th
Amendment in 1913. This is untrue. They did, however, require a complex
apportionment among the several states based on the census. The 16th Amendment
eliminated this speed bump: “The Congress shall have the power to lay and
collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment
among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”
That is pretty open-ended.
While I have my own opinions on the use
and misuse of tax policy both for government funding and social engineering, I
won’t carry on about them here. I’ll just write what checks may be due to the
Treasury and the State of NJ. I do suspect, however, that we are closer than
one might think to fully digitized currency. (I wrote a short story based on
this called Fool's Gold.)Not long after, the feds and state will
simply deduct what taxes they want when they want. I’m sure we’ll get an
e-statement.
