… at ten pm at the raucous Crystal Beer Parlor was all it took to get UD all silly last night in Savannah.

She felt silly even before the drink, actually, because Savannah’s hopping and you want to hop along with it.

She’ll take a long walk now, and then meet her just-graduated student, Carolyn, for lunch at the Soho South Cafe. Carolyn lives ’round these parts.

UD will be in Savannah for a few days.

Blogging continues.

Peter Popham, in Prospect, shares his disgust at the dumps Italy has let Pompeii and Herculaneum become.

Both sites are located in areas notorious for organised crime, with rackets run by the Camorra, the Naples mafia, within spitting distance of the front gates. The port of Ercolano, the suburb of Naples in which Herculaneum sits, is said to be a focal point for the Camorra-run drugs trade. Up until the 19th century, Ercolano was a seaside resort for grandees, but today the old villas are hemmed in by squalor. Gang shootings are common on the streets.

UD is grateful that she and her mother (who studied with Wilhelmina Jashemski, an expert on Pompeii’s gardens) visited Pompeii thirty years ago, before it became derelict.

UD‘s been archaeologically lucky. When she was a kid, she visited the original Lascaux Caves. Later that year, they were permanently closed to the public. (Cool website here.)

… in our back woods. I went back and
forth with him last night, hooting.

Here’s his song.

… and you’re walking through it with hundreds of Baltimore ladies, and nothing looks anything like what you remember from your visits to your Aunt Delores all those years ago, you get a floating feeling. As though your past in this house didn’t happen.

And then you turn toward a little hallway, a hallway across from the secret whiskey passage the architect built (the house went up during Prohibition), and suddenly there’s a painting of her, done in the ‘fifties, showing her glorious beauty. She was blond, with Asian eyes, very elegant.

(Watch this to the end to see the painting of Delores.)

This brings her back for a moment – her sweetness, her bright, open joy in life.

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

Toward the end of her life she hoarded things, and the rooms were full of dusty boxes. Her children packed these away. Then the designers came in and installed an art deco bureau, a thickly fabricked wall, a three-curtain window, a nautical bathroom with stencilling.

There was no way, under these several chic layers, I was going to be able, all by myself, to reanimate the woman who lived for forty years in this house on a seven-acre hill overlooking a highway.

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

But here was Wally, her son, who had met our ‘thesdan delegation at the shuttle and accompanied us on our tour. Once I’d seen the house, I stood in the bright sun at its entryway and talked to him about her.

Landscape designers had hauled masses of potted plants up the house’s steep driveway. Ferns and hostas and black eyed susans surrounded us as we spoke.

“Yes, she had sheep.”

“To keep the grass down?”

“Not really. Just to add atmosphere.”

“Tell me about the shepherd.”

“When my parents bought the place, a mildly mentally disturbed man, John Baldwin, was just … here. He’d been the groundskeeper for previous owners. Lived in his car. He came from Baldwin Maryland, named for his family, an old and prominent family. He’d worked out this place to be, this odd life to live… And my parents of course took him on, gave him things to do. When they got the sheep he became the shepherd…”

“Tell me the story of the fire.”

“It was Christmas Eve and we were all downstairs. We huddled at the fireplace, and my mother read The Night Before Christmas to us…

We had tons of cats, and we were sort of gradually aware that they were going nuts upstairs for some reason, making lots of noise, jumping around. When we finally went up the steps, we were met by a wall of flame.

We raced out of the house.

Someone who saw the flames from the highway had already called the fire department, so as we ran down the driveway we were met by a big red fire engine.

One of the firemen had been playing Santa in a neighborhood gathering that night, and he’d gone directly to the station when he heard the alarm. I was so excited to go from listening to my mother read about Santa to seeing him in the flesh!”

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

Misfortune – divorce, the death of a child, other things – harried her in her later years, and I said to Wally, “I’ve always thought of her as having had a sharper fall than other people. Because her starting point was so high. Everything seemed perfect to me. I remember feeling that way, looking at her life then. I was too young to feel envy, but, you know. Enviable. Beauty, money, a sweet and loving disposition, lovely children… In the background, a placid flock of sheep.”

“Yes. She had it all for awhile.”

… for Baltimore. I’m visiting the 2010 Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Decorators’ Show House.

I knew this house, most of my life, as the house in which my Aunt Delores lived. (Longtime readers know that UD was born in Johns Hopkins Hospital and raised in Baltimore.) It’s an odd place, and I always enjoyed visiting her there. She died a year ago, and as soon as the BSO is through with it (this is their big fundraiser), it’ll be on the market.

The house had been remade, room by room and field by field (Delores had sheep!), by scores of designers. UD, accompanied by various ‘thesdan family members, will now go there. I’ll write about it when I get back.

… will be announcing, later today, his run for Vermont State Senate.

From the candidate’s statement (not yet published):

Vermont’s unique natural beauty, so special to all of us who live here, is our most important economic asset. Environmental protections must be strengthened and, in particular, the highest priority must be placed on state-private partnerships to preserve large tracks [SOS thinks he means tracts] of undeveloped land. Farming in Vermont must be made far more economically viable.

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

Update: Peter writes to thank UD: “The problems of autocorrect.”

In this recent post, UD described a
17-year-old neighbor of hers, Gabe
Mandel, foraging through UD‘s acre
in search of edible wild plants for
his ambitious and creative cooking.

Gabe has now hit the big time.
The Washington Post

has a long article about him.

With plenty of pictures and
plenty of wonderful details.

Excerpts:

… [L]ast year, the Walter Johnson High School junior scored an internship at Murray’s Cheese in New York, then spent a month working at Cafe 2 in the Museum of Modern Art. Mom keeps a scrapbook of it all. Its most recent entry was Gabe’s two-page spread in the March-April issue of Bethesda magazine as one of 10 “Extraordinary Teen” honorees.

“I just like cooking. A lot,” he says. “Whatever I make.”

What Gabe is making these days is inspired by what grows close to home. After devouring the Peterson Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants and a similar Smithsonian guide the way he does cookbooks of progressive chefs such as Thomas Keller and David Chang, he was soon picking sweet woodruff, gill-over-the-ground, jack in the pulpit, fiddlehead ferns, wild ginger, sourgrass, Japanese knotweed and bamboo shoots.

“I think ‘wild’ is going to become the Next Big Thing,” he said on a muggy spring morning as he tromped through neighbors’ yards, reciting fun facts about each treasure. “I started foraging because there are so many flavor profiles we never use. Did you know that some plants develop flavors as defense mechanisms?” No trespassing was involved; Gabe has bartered samples of his cooking for access.

“We are happy to have him come and take bamboo,” said Joan May while she sipped her morning coffee on the porch and watched the young hunter crunch through tall, leafy stalks to reach the tender shoots.

“You want the ones that grow in the shade,” he said. “But they need to be boiled, because they contain cyanide.”

The ‘hood is also where Gabe gets to work on his knife skills. A year and a half ago he walked into Black Market Bistro with a résumé, newspaper clippings and lots of ideas. Chef Donald Dennis hired him to do prep two days a week. “He came in with a head full of knowledge,” Dennis says. “He’s fun to have in the kitchen. Certainly a lot of energy. His skills are developing, and his parents are very supportive. A lot of parents push their kids away from this industry.”

… As their son nears resolution of the looming College Question, the Mandels have huddled especially close. Visits to the Culinary Institute in Hyde Park, N.Y., the New England Culinary Institute, Johnson and Wales, the French Culinary Institute and New York University’s food studies program have been checked off the list. Traditional culinary schools don’t seem like a good fit, but neither does a regular liberal-arts institution, where Gabe would have to work at a restaurant to keep his hand in food.

“I’m leaning toward a gap-year option,” Gabe said last week. “I want to see the world.”

For now, he is looking forward to a second summer stint at MoMA’s Cafe 2 and to a seat at the StarChefs.com 2010 International Chefs Congress, to be held in New York this fall.

His folks got him tickets for his birthday.

UD‘s Aunt Delores, who died recently, lived in a strange house. It was enormous. It stood on a hill overlooking a big highway in Pikesville, Maryland, near Baltimore. She had sheep. She had a shepherd.

It’s been years since UD was there, but she remembers the complicated, rambling interior and exterior of the place pretty well…

Or does she? UD will have a chance to do a little memory experiment this weekend, when she and various other ‘thesdan family members will drive to the house and have a look around.

She can certainly expect lots of changes. It’s this year’s Baltimore Symphony Associates’ Directors’ Show House. It’s been “re-imagined by 20 interior designers and 4 landscape designers.” Ten thousand people are expected to visit.

UD will chronicle her visit here, at University Diaries.

Amid all the graduation happiness, a sad event at UD‘s campus, George Washington University. A student fell from a fifth-floor dormitory window and is in critical condition with internal injuries. This story includes a video – an interview with one of the students who found him and called 911.

Police think it was an accident.

UD has covered several stories like these over the years. There are two likely explanations. One, the student was very drunk and stumbling about. Two, suicide attempt.

—————————————————

Update: The student who fell from the window has died.

Police are still investigating the cause.

As I write, a wood thrush is in its second hour of hurling itself against one of our tall windows in a match of wits with its reflection.

This writer witnessed the same thing:

[The thrush’s] incessant battles with its own reflection would seemingly wear out the bird as it energetically attacks the windows, then sits back as if attempting to figure another way to get to the rival that’s invaded its territory. It may then disappear for a few minutes or as long as an hour before returning to continue the one-sided battle – not realizing that its foe is really its own reflection.

Apparently this can go on for days.

… and it’s still windy as I write, on a sunny, cool Sunday afternoon. We’re under an advisory.

Already the electricity has shut down, twice, each time for a few minutes. When everything went black last night, I put down the papers and exams I’m grading (the semester’s classes are over) and drifted stupidly through the house, holding a large yellow flashlight and laughing. In Garrett Park, under the big trees, under the exposed wires, everything’s always going black.

The long brilliant midday of these days is bracing. Endless alleys of trees shake their leaves back and forth, light green and dark green, in the wind. Branches come blasting off of trunks. We walked around a lake in Germantown yesterday and everything was madly dappled. Ducklings and goslings struggled along strewn paths and high water.

This is my current pattern: I read five papers and then go outside for ten minutes to pick up poplar shavings and honeysuckle greens. Then I go back to the papers.

Up at seven, I looked out the back
windows and saw a long gray fox
walking across the grass. It moved
from the woods to a stand of honey-
suckles, probably looking for rabbits.

There are rabbits everywhere.

La Kid (blond hair, glasses, pink
headband) joins the rest of the
Sirens to celebrate their victory in the
George Washington University Battle
of the A Cappella Groups.

Click on the photo for a larger image.

Woke frightened at five this morning from the loudest crash I’ve ever heard. Shook the house. Seemed inches away, somewhere on our property.

Mr UD slept through it, natch.

I glanced at my laptop on the bedside table. Its lights blinked off, one after another — green, red, gold, white. Out.

Tripping over the dog, I went to the living room and looked out of the big windows at the back woods, expecting to see an enormous, semi-dead tree on the ground, blanketing the ground cover with leaves and broken limbs. Nothing there.

I checked the front windows for a tree on the lawn. No.

Back in bed, I woke up Mr UD. Was it some chemical explosion on the train tracks? An airborne toxic event?

He dressed and walked up Rokeby Avenue. A few feet away from our yard, one of our neighbor’s enormous, semi-dead trees had crashed into the street, taking all the electrical wires with it. “They’re hot, the wires,” said Mr UD. “They’re sparking.”

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

Asplundh trucks appeared, as did Garrett Park’s mayor (he strode up and down in front of our house, talking into his cell phone) plus the town administrator, who sat in one of the town’s adorable white trucks with Garrett Park written in green on each door, and somberly watched as the Asplundh guys set up orange cones and took out electric saws.

By eight o’clock they’d cleared Rokeby, on either side of which lay stacks of thick wood. Regular readers know that UD‘s property already has plenty of stacks of wood along its forested sides, left over from earlier tree removals. Now there are many, many more, just adjacent.

The town a few years ago planted a delicate magnolia in front of my neighbor’s house. That seems to have been wiped out.

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

So again we’re dark. We lose electricity in the winter, we lose it in the spring.

I told Mr UD I was writing a post about what it’s like, losing light and heat and electricity all the time.

“You’re calling it ‘The Ontology of the Outage’? Don’t you mean the metaphysics of the outage?”

“Yes. Yes, I do. And I originally went with that title. But consider the alliteration you get with ontology… I’ve spent the morning going back and forth between the values of style and content…”

“And you’ve chosen – of course – style. You always care more about stylish writing than about accuracy.”

“Right. What are you gonna do about it?”

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

The art of losing isn’t hard to master, says Elizabeth Bishop. But she’s kidding. Read the poem. She’s being ironic.

Losing light and heat all the time is actually pretty easy to master. Almost getting killed by trees is more difficult, but let’s put aside, for the moment, that problem.

I remember when my Uncle Mario, a wealthy developer, came to visit us just after we bought our Garrett Park house. “You don’t have grounded wires?” He was appalled. “You’re gonna lose electricity every time the wind blows. And look at these enormous, semi-dead trees.”

Oh. Pishposh. UD, an old hippie, is heavily invested in not living like a wealthy developer. If the price of her maintaining a mental self-image of debonair freedom is constant darkness, it’s a price she’s willing to pay.