On This Date in 1776

04. July 2012 · Comments Off on On This Date in 1776 · Categories: Domestic

(So I’m old-fashioned – I believe this should be read aloud at celebratory gatherings on this date every year.)
Action of Second Continental Congress, July 4, 1776.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

WHEN in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.

WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security. Such has been the patient Sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the Necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The History of the present King of Great-Britain is a History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid World.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public Good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing Importance, unless suspended in their Operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the Accommodation of large Districts of People, unless those People would relinquish the Right of Representation in the Legislature, a Right inestimable to them, and formidable to Tyrants only.

He has called together Legislative Bodies at Places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the Depository of their public Records, for the sole Purpose of fatiguing them into Compliance with his Measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly Firmness his Invasions on the Rights of the People.

He has refused for a long Time, after such Dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the Dangers of Invasion from without, and Convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the Population of these States; for that Purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither, and raising the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the Tenure of their Offices, and the Amount and Payment of their Salaries.

He has erected a Multitude of new Offices, and sent hither Swarms of Officers to harrass our People, and eat out their Substance.

He has kept among us, in Times of Peace, Standing Armies, without the consent of our Legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a Jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowledged by our Laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For quartering large Bodies of Armed Troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from Punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all Parts of the World:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us, in many Cases, of the Benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pre-tended Offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an arbitrary Government and enlarging its Boundaries, so as to render it at once an Example and fit Instrument for introducing the same absolute Rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with Power to legislate for us in all Cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our Seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our Towns, and destroyed the Lives of our People.

He is, at this Time, transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the Works of Death, Desolation, and Tyranny already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and Perfidy, scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous Ages, and totally unworthy of the Head of a civilized Nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the Executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic Insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the Inhabitants of our Frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes and Conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions we have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble Terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated Injury. A Prince, whose Character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the Ruler of a free People.

Nor have we been wanting in Attentions to our British Brethren. We have warned them from Time to Time of Attempts by their Legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the Circumstances of our Emigration and Settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and Magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the Ties of our common Kindred to disavow these Usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our Connections and Correspondence. They too have been deaf to the Voice of Justice and of Consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the Necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of Mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace, Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World for the Rectitude of our Intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly Publish and Declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES, that they are absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political Connection between them and the State of Great-Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which INDEPENDENT STATES may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

(All righty then – memories freshed, everyone? Ready to go out and ensure that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth? Good.)

Bring Me Figgy Pudding

03. July 2012 · Comments Off on Bring Me Figgy Pudding · Categories: Domestic

… and figgy wine, whole preserved figs, dried figs and jam of figs … As you can deduce, we have a bounty of figs, at this very moment. This miracle has occurred, even as the small tree in my front yard stubbornly refuses to bear more than five of six measly figs in a season, which the birds usually beat us to anyway. How is this possible? Because we have neighbors who have fig trees … one of which – of the huge-and-purple-when-ripe Celeste variety – has the most of it’s fruit-bearing branches leaning over the fence into a public space. The other – to judge from pictures – is of the small-and-pale-yellow-when-ripe Kadota variety – and is growing in the front yard of a neighbor who has given us permission to pick the darned things when we feel the need. They are both prolific trees, the Kadota especially; and there is a point when the owners of a fruit tree get damn sick of eating the output. I know this – I had something like ten or fifteen apricot trees lining the south boundary of the house that I rented in Utah, and it was years before I could bear to look at an apricot again … dried, or ripe, or especially rotting in the grass. In any case, we have gleaned nearly fifteen pounds of them this week, and have barely scratched the surface of the Kadota bounty. In other words, there appear to be just about as many unripe figs left on the tree after we’ve spent ten minutes snagging all the ripe ones in reach and filled two plastic grocery bags half-full.

Now we know why figs are so expensive in the market – the things are delicate, almost impossible to pick without bruising them or splitting their skin. The supermarket sort must almost be wrapped in bubble-wrap in order to get them to the market in any condition at all. They are almost instantly perishable, which must be why most people only know them in their dried incarnation, or as the filling for fig Newton cookies. And the only way that I can only afford to explore the myriad modes in which ripe fresh figs can be preserved … is by having access to the fresh-from-the tree source. (Warning – do not rub your eye, with fresh fig-sap on your hands.)

Fig jam is easy enough – the dried version is a bit of a challenge, because drying them whole in the American Harvest Gardenmaster dehydrator which was a souvenir of my tour in Utah … is a tough fit, at first. Even the smaller Kadota figs are too fat to fit onto the drying trays – which are designed to accommodate fruits and vegetables sliced to inch-thick or less slices. I did three trays of them sliced in half, which was not satisfactory, aesthetically or taste-wise. Then, I put a tray of them in the oven at lowest temperature for a couple of hours to shrink and dry at least a little bit … and they seem to be moving on very nicely.

So, on to a recipe from a much-lauded Southern cookbook, which calls for them being washed in a bicarb-of-soda and water solution, and then simmered and steeped over most of a week in a sugar solution; this has promise, I think. And I will bottle them, and save on the pantry shelf, which is now taking over the top shelves of various closets in the house …

I don’t know quite why I am moved to do all this now. Something in the air, I think. Even thought it is scorchingly hot now … there is a winter coming. And I want my pantry shelves to be full. I want my household to have food to eat – to have pickles and jams, and canned bounty. It’s one of those atavistic impulses, I know. But winter is coming.

The Grand Adventure – Patrick Leigh Fermor

29. June 2012 · Comments Off on The Grand Adventure – Patrick Leigh Fermor · Categories: Domestic, Uncategorized · Tags: ,

“You’ll simply have to read his books, if you want to understand about Greece,” my next-door neighbor told me, very shortly after my then-three year old daughter and I settled into Kyrie Panayotis’ first floor flat (which is Brit-speak for second-floor apartment) at the corner of Knossou and Delphon streets in the Athens suburb of Ano Glyphada, early in the spring of 1983. Kyrie Panayoti did not speak any English; neither did his wife, or his wife’s sister, Kyria Yiota, who lived upstairs with her husband. The only inhabitants of the three-story apartment house who did were Kyrie Panayoti’s middle-school aged sons, who were learning English at school. And I – dullard that I am with languages aside from my native one – only retained a few scraps of high-school and college German. Given the modern history of Greece, and the long memories of older Greeks, a German vocabulary was neither tactful nor useful.

I can’t recall exactly when we hit the first linguistic snag, but it must have been within days of me moving in, lock, stock, barrel, toddler-aged child and household goods. In mild frustration, Kyrie Panayoti leaned out the kitchen door of his apartment, and shouted in the general direction of the apartment block next door, a distance of about twelve or fifteen feet away.
“Kyria Penny!”
Almost immediately, a woman’s head with an old-fashioned kerchief tied around it, appeared out from one of the first floor (or second floor windows) – and that was my first introduction to Penny. She was English, married to a genial Greek accountant named George. She was slightly older than my own mother, her two sons were teenagers. Penny had been the British equivalent of a State Department employee, and in that capacity she had been assigned to various British consulates in Europe until she came to Athens, met and married George, and settled down into tidy domesticity in the three-floor, three-flat apartment building next to Kyrie Panayoti’s. Penny’s mother-in-law lived on the ground floor, Penny and George lived on the first – or second floor, exactly opposite mine – and George’s widowed brother and his two children lived in the top-floor flat.

I rather think Penny missed speaking English regularly, anyway – and we became excellent friends because of a mutual love of books and mad passion for Greece, ancient and modern. A love for Greece in general, on the part of us English and American eccentrics is one of those inexplicable things – rather like enduring affection for an exasperatingly self-centered boyfriend with one or two bad habits. He’s devastatingly handsome, georgously scenic in all the right ways, erratically but theatrically devoted – but just when you have given up all hope and resolved to cut him off – he does something so heartbreakingly gallant, at something of a cost to him and with no thought of personal gain – that all is . . . well, not forgotten or overlooked (until next time). Anyway, I loved Greece, being a history wonk, and cheerfully overlooked all kinds of disincentives . . . a very real terrorism problem, chronic anti-Americanism, and a certain slap-dash approach to everything from driving habits to telephone company service. No exaggerating there: getting a land-line telephone in Greece in those days was . . . interesting, and supposedly took years, well above the time that any Americans serving at Hellenikon AB were prepared to wait. Kyrie Panayoti’s flat and Kyria Yiota’s each had a single telephone jack. Mine might have had one also; I never cared enough to look for it. But there was only one actual telephone unit between the two families. They passed it between themselves, I guess according to need. Many was the time that I heard someone calling between apartments, and observed the telephone being hoisted or lowered past my kitchen window, in a plastic market bag at the end of a long length of rope.

Among the first books that Penny advised me to read – was Gerald Durrell, who wrote about his childhood in Corfu in the 1930s. He was Lawrence Durrell’s little brother; I rather think that Dad must have been a child like Gerald Durrell; entranced by wild animals of whatever sort, to the mystification and horror of his parents – eventually being a zoologist and all, and as the four of us grew up, giving the very best nature-walks ever!

And the second of Penny’s recommended authors – Patrick Leigh-Fermor, especially his books about Greece: Mani and Roumeli, respectively southern Greece and Northern. Penny’s redoubtable mother-in-law was from the Southern Peloponnesus – the Mani. I read them both, traveled down into that part of the country when I could, and read the first of his books – A Time of Gifts – about the journey on foot that he had made at the age of 18; as the title goes, “On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube” in the fateful year of 1933. He took a little more than a year to make that journey, but writing about it took up the rest of his life. I bought a copy of the second installment, Between the Woods and Water as soon as it came out, the year after I had left Greece. At the time of his death a couple of years ago, the last installment of that journey was unfinished.

Of Patrick Leigh-Fermor’s greatest adventure? He never really wrote about that himself, although in certain circles his exploits as a British SOE agent during Crete in WWII became legend. He and another SOE officer, in a daring strike by Leigh-Fermor’s band of Cretan guerillas, kidnapped the German officer commanding the whole island, spirited him across the Cretan hills and mountains, and had him evacuated from Crete to North Africa. His co-conspirator, W. Stanley Moss wrote about that in his own book, Ill Met by Moonlight – which was made into a movie, in the days when movie-makers appreciated such real-life exploits. One of the grace notes to this adventure is that Moss and Leigh-Fermor left documents behind; clearly explaining that it was British commandos who had taken the general-commanding, so no point in going all reprisal-ish on the local Cretans.

About thirty years later, a Greek television version of This is Your Life reunited many of those participants. And Patrick Leigh Fermor lived for most of the rest of his life in Greece, regarded with awe and wonder, almost as a local saint.

This and That – Jubilee Edition

04. June 2012 · Comments Off on This and That – Jubilee Edition · Categories: Domestic, Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

We were distracted Sunday morning by the Jubilee procession of the boats on the Thames, as covered by BBC America. Blondie noticed that none of her various friends in Britain were on-line Sunday morning; presumably they were all off at various street parties, celebrating Her Majesty’s sixtieth year on the throne. She turned on the television and we were glued to it for an hour and a half: yep, the Brits really do know how to pull off a spectacle, although the dogs were increasingly distraught because it was time for walkies, dammit, and we never watch TV during the day, so there was their tiny domestic universe being rocked. The various long shots did look like Canaletto’s views of the Thames; the parties, the people, the banners, the displays along the riverbank buildings … and above all, the boats. What a feat of organization that must have been – to get them there at the start, to keep them together for the convoy up the river … and then, of course, to disperse them all afterwards.

I looked it up – the last Jubilee was Queen Victoria’s, in 1897. There probably isn’t anyone alive now who remembers that one, unless they were a drooling infant at the time and have lived to be over 110 years old. You have to go back to Louis the XIV and the 17th century to find a monarch who lasted longer. There won’t be another Jubilee for a British monarch in our lifetime, so you really can’t blame them for going all hands on deck for the Jubilee. It looks as if it is all a fantastic celebration … and I hope, more than anything that it gives ordinary Brits a kind of sense of self, and of national pride again. They were a great nation, with a glorious past, who did fantastic things all during the 19th century … and I hope against hope that something – anything can arrest the horrible downward slide, which everyone who visits Britain or lives there has noted. My grandparents and great-aunt all recollected Britain fondly; it was once a rather pleasant, industrious, sober and polite place, full of small pleasures and quiet beauties; eccentric perhaps, and definitely class-ridden, and certainly not devoid of snobbery and injustice, but still… All of Britain’s nicer qualities are now comprehensively wrecked, seemingly – unless you are very, very rich.

I can’t help seeing that when one of the British papers that we read online; whenever they run a photo-feature of times of yore – there was one just this week, of pictures taken of British life the year when Elizabeth came to the throne – the comment sections fill up with nostalgic memories from readers; It wasn’t all that bad, back then, and there is this pervasive feeling that the best of Britain’s gifts and capabilities have been shamefully squandered, and the working and middle classes beaten constantly over the head about all those things they should be ashamed of by the intellectual class. The past is not just a foreign place, but a better one and a more honest one, even with the defects noted. I wonder if this doesn’t account for the popularity of all those TV series and movies set in the 19th and early 20th century. Even with economic disparities, painfully ugly industrialization and poisonously suffocating snobbery – that past was a confident, optimistic place, a successful and a safer place for individuals, with wider horizons than are presently available.

Anyway – Long may Elizabeth II reign; so do we all wish, especially when considering Prince Charles. Oddly enough, in pictures of the Thames flotilla, he looks every bit as old as his father.

Old Time General Store

01. June 2012 · Comments Off on Old Time General Store · Categories: Domestic, Old West · Tags: , ,

Visiting the Bergheim General Store and Post Office is a bit like going back in time to what a general mercantile over a hundred years ago. The Bergheim General Store is itself 109 years old; it stocks a a little bit of everything, and everything in it’s place on densely-packed on the shelves. The aisles are narrow, much of the place is erratically lit — in places with neon beer signs. No where is there any shred of conventional 20th century marketing wisdom … nor does there need to be, as there doesn’t seem to be any other retail outlet for ten or fifteen miles in any direction save for the gas station quickie-mart about a block away. So it is the best source for catfish bait, a couple of potatoes, soft drinks, jeans, work cloves, odd bits of hardware, cured sausage, vegetable seeds, a quart of milk and a pair of pliers for all those people who don’t want to drive to Boerne or Bulverde for it. Four generations of the same family have been running the place since 1903, so it’s pretty safe to say that they know what they are doing. Aside from having electricity and air conditioning introduced sometime in the last 109 years, the inside is pretty much as it was when built: plain narrow-board floors, plain whitewashed/painted stone walls. It’s a trip back in time – and I found it very useful in visualing the various general stores that the Becker and Richter families started at the end of the Civil War. And there will be more in the next book, too – about Magda and Hansi’s commercial ventures. I don’t know when I’ll have The Quivera Trail done, but it’s up to eight chapters this week.

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