… crowd.

He’s having a busy day. Picked up his renewed passport (which now says on its cover European Union/Poland), at the Polish embassy; is now wading through the soccer crowd; will in an hour or so meet an old friend for coffee on upper Connecticut Avenue…

… where we – along with family and friends – floated along in the strange trance that close proximity to beach, water, wave, and firmament generates.

The silent-Prius trip back to ‘thesda, through Delaware’s immense, flat cornfields over which child’s-picture-book white clouds hovered, kept the trance going.

I’m beginning to shake out of it now; blogging resumes when I am fully functional.

UD, as longtime readers know, lives in Munro Leaf’s house in Garrett Park, Maryland. She is honored to do so, and has two bull topiaries in the front yard, a little engraved sign near the front door that says FERDINAND HOUSE, and images of bulls inside her house.

A Jessye Norman fan, UD was delighted to read that she loves Ferdinand.

… for Rehoboth Beach, where they will spend the next two weeks in an apartment so close to the Atlantic that you can hear the waves.

This constant wave sound is very lulling, but UD can blog through it.

Which she will do with the same compulsive regularity as… the tides. Ne quittez pas.

So here’s what it’s like right now, three twittering chicks with their necks outstretched and mouths hysterically open, gulping the worms galore their parents are finding all over UD‘s half acre. This nature story is taking place midway up a honeysuckle bush a few yards to my left as I sit in our office with one of the windows open. There’s also a hummingbird nest in the front azaleas, but I’m not observing that one. It’s so small – they’re so fragile – let them be.

Plus there’s a culture story taking place a few yards away and directly in front of me in our driveway: The installation of a new water heater for Les Soltans. Their old one stopped working after almost twenty years, a lifespan unheard of dans le monde chauffe-eau. (Les Soltans specialize in superannuated appliances – their washer/dryer was also Margaret and Munro Leaf’s washer/dryer, and Margaret died in 1988.)

Yikes. Even as I type this, one of the guys – Kevin? – is right behind me in my bathroom using the sink to make strange hissing sounds. I’m staying here! I don’t want to know! Just let me know when you want me to pull out the checkbook!

I’m truly looking forward to washing my hair.

La Kid and Ed Fitzgerald
(Irish boyfriend; La Kid
moves to Galway soon)

exhausted and sunburnt on the
New York City subway after a
long day showing Ed NYC.

… when you live, as UD does, in the heavily wooded Washington suburbs, hard by Rock Creek. UD’s town, as longtime readers know, is Garrett Park, an arboretum, so all the birds hounded out of high trees by Bethesda development flock to our prolific, carefully tended, big old forest. Predators like owls love the birds, not to mention the rabbits and voles and snakes etc. The orange cat who shows up every afternoon and stands very still on a log alongside one of our woodland paths loves the birds too.

Spring means that all of this and much more (I just had to interrupt my writing to shoo a raccoon away from the trash container – I’m outside) is bursting. It’s Grand Central Nature on the acre around our little brown house, and I’ve spent today observing it.

At five AM we woke to the creaky song of the catbirds. They seem to have reproduced recently, and they and their offspring are buzzing the house big time. They were soon joined in song by the thrushes, whose voice is lovely and famous (one is supposed to feel privileged to have thrushes in the garden) but, as I’ve mentioned in seasons past on this blog, never-ending. Thrushes are loud and they don’t quit.

To my immediate right, in the upper branches of a honeysuckle, is a very active thrush nest, so we will be getting yet more thrush song.

All day rabbits have strewn the lawns front and back. I seldom see solitary rabbits anymore; it’s all coalitions.

Midday I was clearing one of the paths, and I heard a close-by and unfamiliar bird call. Suddenly a few feet away from me was a pileated woodpecker tapping a poplar.

Pleased to see a vine twining along one of our fences, I snipped a group of three leaflets to take them inside for identification. Good thing I was wearing gloves. Poison ivy.

Rotund bees press into the white azalea blossoms.

As I was cutting back the front yard azaleas this morning, one of my neighbors walked by. “Happy Mother’s Day, Margaret!” he called.

“Thanks, and the same to you!” trilled idiot UD. “I mean the same to your wife.”

Thanks to a Scottish kid named Jake, she has been able to identify these bones. (Read more Jake here.)

UD was just now clearing the winding paths she’s created through her woods, and from her first glance at the bones she thought deer (given that vast herds of them live atop her back hill), but she also ghoulishly played with the idea of human child for a moment.

This is exactly what the lower bone looks like. And who knew you needed it for – uh – boning your boots?

So where’s the rest of it? Jake always seems to score the whole skeleton. UD poked around, but has found nothing. She thinks maybe these bones washed forward in the recent very big rains.

… is Havre de Grace. (It’s Number 12 on Smithsonian Magazine‘s list of best small towns.) UD remembers Sadie Rapoport telling her that she left Port Deposit for – she pronounced it Have Er Dee Grayce – on the occasional Saturday to play Bingo.

Today’s the Decoy Festival at Havre De Grace, so Les UDs are expecting some excitement.

… Breakfast. Elk Forge is one of those names that tells you in a small way about how the mind works. From the moment we reserved the Baltimore Suite here, I’ve had trouble remembering the name Elk Forge, while Longwood Gardens or Red Fox Inn or Seven Gables or Green Gables are all easy, though they’re a bit more complicated. Elk Forge’s two simple monosyllabic words have tended to elude me, and I think it’s because my mind fails to find a connection between an elk and a forge. Foxes come in red, and gardens may feature long woods, but what an elk and a forge are doing together I have no idea.

Plus I think I’m registering my uncertainty about the nature of those words as they’re put together. Two nouns (though forge also can be a verb). Is elk an adjective of some sort here? Are they two self-standing nouns? Nor have I ever before encountered those words together. So novelty, muddy usage, and lack of relationship, UD figures, are all scheming here to throw her off…

There’s a mild chill in the air, and a certain drippiness left over from last night’s storm, but the Elk Forge balcony is a pleasant place to watch the sun come up. There’s good tea in the “too Victorian” (Mr UD’s description) tearoom behind me (white woods and rattans, with ferny potted plants and – UD will agree – tchotchkes a mile a minute), but no one’s refilled the hot water canister yet, so UD will be patient… There’s a none too healthy oak center stage here. At its feet pond water purls over goldfish, and beside it three sort of pointless trellis arches lean toward the creek walk.

******************

Sun went in and it got a bit too cold out there, so I’m now in the tearoom, where naturally Pachelbel’s Canon in D is being piped in… It’s version 12,491, with recurrent piano “in imbecile symbiosis” with a violin. Water falls from an interior lovebird fountain directly to UD’s left and… You get the picture… Calming to the point of valium… And who’s complaining? Not I.

… today. For ten years it’s been an upscale seafood restaurant, Backfin Blues. They were closed when we walked by this afternoon, but UD noticed people in there, preparing for the dinner crowd, and asked if she could look around. They were glad to oblige. The manager said he knew that the place, fifty years ago, was a department store, but didn’t know it was called Rapoport’s.

This YouTube includes a shot of the front of the building – unchanged since my grandfather’s day.

UD instantly recalled the place – long, dark, narrow, with low ceilings… It hadn’t changed. Hadn’t been allowed (Historic Register) to change. An outside seating area with views of the train tracks and the river had been added, but that was the only truly new thing. The first floor balcony on which wee UD sat chatting with her grandfather was exactly the same, but with outdoor seating.

We had lunch outside at a place directly across the street from my grandfather’s old store, so I was able to gaze at the place at my leisure, recalling its massive sunny kitchen and dining room on the third floor. The manager said the floors above the place remain private apartments.

The broad beautiful Susquehanna shimmered in the background of all of this.

Loud obnoxious bikers stormed through town in groups of five and six every few minutes, reminding me what misery they brought to Key West when I lived there.

We had encounters with old-timers and new. I pushed open the door of an old Methodist church and was greeted by its groundskeeper, who showed us its unusual windows. He gave me the phone number of his aunt Audrey for more history of the town. A well-heeled character who recently bought one of the pricey riverside condos in town told me about his amazing views, but also about the frustration of living in a town that “should be like Ellicott City, but is just going nowhere.” It’s true that the endless nothingness of the Tome School/Bainbridge Naval Training Center ruins, plus the bad condition of many of the town’s historic buildings (lots of them empty and long on the market), gives Port Deposit a town that time forgot air. But the sheer trippiness of its location – one long architecturally distinguished street with massive cliffs instead of backyards on one side, and the Susquehanna River on the other – makes you excited to be there. Mr UD loved it.

… eaten at a sunny table overlooking a koi pond in Elk Mills Maryland. Over breakfast, UD tried to remember as much as she could about her grandfather’s store in Port Deposit, her visits there… She knows more about her mother’s side of the family, the Wassermans and Kirsons, than she does the Rapoports and Snyders. She knows that her father had a Dickensian childhood, his parents’ marriage a disaster, his mother eventually institutionalized with depression (she died institutionalized), no money. After her death, Joe Rapoport married Sadie Glass, a down to earth hard-working woman, and they ran Rapoport’s department store in Port Deposit together. The store thrived because of the naval training base established in town soon after they moved in. (They lived above the store.)

It must have been in the early ‘sixties that they sold the store and moved back to Baltimore, where they retired to an apartment in a part of town full of people just like them – old observant Jews. I remember visiting them there and always leaving the apartment with pickled lettuce and tomatoes that my grandfather made. He died in 1974, in his eighties.

Off to Port Deposit.

… has been successfully accomplished. We drove from ‘thesda to Longwood Gardens, PA (questions under consideration during the drive: Why are people so upset about the Duke undergraduate who pays her tuition by appearing in pornographic movies? Is UD shocked by Russia’s vile aggression in Ukraine because she was born after World War Two, or is she just naive by nature? Should we use the GPS on our new Prius to get to the gardens, just because we can? Will we get over 51 miles to the gallon on this trip? Where’s a good place for dinner in Newark Delaware?), and we tromped all over the place. Our favorite location was a simple woodland garden through which a modest waterfall fell, but most of Longwood was of course far flashier than this – an orangery with massive palms and ferns, and bright blue hydrangea flowers interspersed with bright yellow lilies; smartly symmetrical European water gardens with toad sculptures… We also liked very much the not there yet wisteria-on-pergolas garden. It didn’t interest anyone else – most people were oohing at the just-opened tulips – but we found the dark, about to green trees moodily pretty.

We’re at our bed and breakfast now, resting up before dinner in Newark. We go to Port Deposit tomorrow morning.

From 1938 to 1968 (I’m totally guessing these dates – I know they include the war), UD‘s grandfather, Joseph Rapoport, ran Rapoport’s department store in Port Deposit, Maryland, a small town on the Susquehanna River (vintage postcards here). He did pretty well there at first; and then, starting in 1942, when Roosevelt opened the Bainbridge Naval Training Center and thereby doubled the population of Cecil County, he did spectacularly well. He was able to put my father, as well as his two sons-in-law, through graduate school.

Wee UD visited her grandfather in Port Deposit, staying with her parents and siblings on the second floor apartments (with balcony overlooking the river) that you can see in the photograph in this post’s first link. She remembers sitting on the balcony and chatting while looking at the river and the train tracks beside the river. She remembers visiting the family that lived in the stone house (also visible at the link) across from the store. There was a bar on the other side of the street, and she remembers being wakened at night by drunks.

All of these buildings remain intact because all of Port Deposit is on the National Historic Registry. So UD can see it again more or less as it was, the whole streetscape, and that’s what she’s going to do this weekend. She and Mr UD will spend today, tomorrow, and Sunday at a nearby bed and breakfast in Cecil County, and then walk around Port Deposit, while UD sees whether it stirs any more memories. They will also visit the world’s most persistent “brownfield” site, what’s left of the naval base, which itself used to be the beautiful Tome School. We’re not sure how much access we’ll get to the ruins, but it’s clear that they’re pretty cool, set on a bluff overlooking the river.

They will also visit nearby Longwood Gardens, not only one of the world’s great gardens, but liable to look amazing (spring; floods yesterday; sunny today), and walk (sail?) along the Chesapeake Bay, and who knows what else.

UD will insta-blog every millisecond. Stay tuned.

As UD‘s metro train, yesterday afternoon, lifted itself out of the tunnel under Wisconsin Avenue and ran above Rock Creek Park, UD looked down and saw thick brown water heaving past the creek’s banks. Croppings of wildflowers barely showed through the flood, and the sycamores were all shaken up. UD was shaken. This scene, usually a calm span of green between the Beltway and Parkside Apartments, was turbulent and strange; and the rainfall wouldn’t break for awhile.

Earlier, in Foggy Bottom, she’d watched the sky disappear, watched her office windows go gray and fill with long streaks. She had the closed-in feeling you get in an airplane taxiing in a storm: There was the turbulent world, inches away; here was a world weirdly – barely – immune.

Later, watching the fast river Rokeby Avenue became, she remembered Henry Miller’s nod to James Joyce in The Tropic of Cancer.

“I love everything that flows,” said the great blind Milton of our times. I was thinking of him this morning when I awoke with a great bloody shout of joy: I was thinking of his rivers and trees and all that world of night which he is exploring. Yes, I said to myself, I too love ev­erything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with its painful gallstones, its gravel and what-not; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul; I love the great rivers like the Amazon and the Orinoco, where crazy men like Moravagine float on through dream and legend in an open boat and drown in the blind mouths of the river. I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund. I love scripts that flow, be they hieratic, esoteric, perverse, polymorph, or unilateral. I love everything that flows, ev­erything that has time in it and becoming, that brings us back to the beginning where there is never end: the vio­lence of the prophets, the obscenity that is ecstasy, the wisdom of the fanatic, the priest with his rubber litany, the foul words of the whore, the spittle that floats away in the gutter, the milk of the breast and the bitter honey that pours from the womb, all that is fluid, melting, dis­solute and dissolvent, all the pus and dirt that in flowing is purified, that loses its sense of origin, that makes the great circuit toward death and dissolution. The great in­cestuous wish is to flow on, one with time, to merge the great image of the beyond with the here and now. A fat­uous, suicidal wish that is constipated by words and par­alyzed by thought.