Posts Tagged ‘Christ Church Episcopal’

Letter from Claverack 06 04 2017 Comforting things in touchy times…

June 5, 2017

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The pearl grey of twilight is settling on the Hudson Valley and I’m playing the Joan Baez station from Amazon Prime Music in the background, wrapped in the warmth of a fleece pullover as the day has been infused with a chill closer to October than June.

We have had 4.5 inches more rain than normal this year.  Last year was a drought; this year a flood. Saturday started with rain and then became a brilliant early spring day – except it’s not quite early spring anymore.

At the Farmer’s Market, I picked up fair trade coffee and some incredible chevre from an amazing artisanal cheese maker that I discovered at the winter market.  In a way, I feel disloyal to the other cheese purveyors I frequent and her cheeses are over the top wonderful.  She is in the market, center aisle, on the east end.  Goats and Gourmets.

And all this is very hygge.  And oh, my god! Do I need hygge right now!

Donald Trump has removed us from the Paris Climate Accords.  It was not unexpected and it is disappointing.  As I watch, from my point of view, I am witnessing the President of this country diminish us with every move he makes.

It is something that saddens me every day and I know I must live with this for the rest of his term, be it four or eight years.  All this impeachment talk is not very real as it is hard, as it should be, to impeach a president.  It’s my hope that we will have only one term of this man and that the country will elect someone in 2020 who will deal with the very real problems we face.

Trump trumpeted he would spend money to restore the infrastructure of this country which is in desperate need of restoration.  His plan for that seems, to me, a little incoherent.

As is my custom, from my Catholic childhood, I light candles at church on Sunday when I come back from communion.  One candle is for me.  Call me selfish but one candle is just for me.  Another is for the people I know who are having health issues.  It includes the daughter of my friend Clark Bunting, whose daughter suffered a traumatic brain injury and the son of a former boyfriend who has a son who also suffers from that and seems to be doing well as well as all the others I know who are dealing with health issues.

And I light a candle for Donald Trump and the world in which we are living, praying we will get through this.

Then I light a candle for all the things I said I would light a candle about and have forgotten.

It is very comforting for me to do this.

One of the reasons I attend Christ Church is that I am getting older and at some point, in this getting older process, I won’t be here and I would like a community of people to mourn me.  Christ Church will.  In the last few years, I have become an integral part of that community.  My coffee hours after the 10:30 service are legendary as are the Easter brunches I have organized the last two years.

And I would like there to be a great good party on the deck of the cottage or, if that’s not possible, at the Red Dot.  I’m part of that community also.

It’s my hope it will be some long time before there will need to be a celebration but I am laying the ground work for that.  That, too, is hygge for me.

Sitting here in the cottage, I am grateful and that is so comforting, to be grateful.

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Posted in 2016 Election, Civil Rights, Claverack, Columbia County, Greene County New York, Hudson New York, Hygge, Life, Literature, Mat Tombers, Mathew Tombers, Matthew Tombers, Media, Paris Climate Accords, Social Commentary, Trump, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Letter From Claverack 04 30 2017 Without hope, we have nothing…

May 1, 2017

It is a Sunday evening at the cottage.  Jazz is playing, the lights splash the creek.  I have made myself a martini.  It was a typical Sunday, up early, read the NY Times and a few articles from the WSJ online before the shower and then off to church, where I did the readings and then coffee hour, errands before settling at the Dot for a long and lazy brunch, reading more off my phone and chatting with a few people, home to the cottage, put away laundry, got the trash together and sat down to write.

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Very hygge.

Because I need the steady rhythm of familiar things in this Age of Trump.

His aides were caught off guard when he extended an invitation to President Duterte of the Philippines to come visit him during a Saturday call.  If you haven’t been following it, President Duterte has been accused of extra-judicial killings in that country’s current “drug war.” Now those surprised aides are preparing for an avalanche of criticism as it’s hard to find a world leader disliked as much as Duterte by pretty much everyone.

Then, after unleashing a problem for everyone around him, Mr. Trump jetted off to Harrisburg, PA for a campaign style rally to “record breaking crowds,” where he railed to his supporters about the media which was, at the same time, roasting him in DC, even if he was not there.  In two events, the official White House Correspondents’ Dinner and the Samantha Bee hosted “Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner” withered the sitting President, the first to have missed this event since 1981, when Ronald Reagan was recuperating from an assassin’s attack.

I wake up in the morning and find I am in a state of continuing bemusement in what is going on in Washington.  It is reality television, which is what we should have expected when we elected a reality television star to the Presidency.  With Reagan, we had an actor who knew how to deliver his lines.  There aren’t really “lines” in reality television.  There is direction but no script.  We have a President who is making up his script as he goes along, knowing he knows better than everyone else.  Even if he doesn’t.

The WSJ, a deeply conservative publication, to which I now subscribe, seems to be wanting to support him and just can’t find a way not to point out that it’s all a little…off.

And it is more than a little off.

Reince Priebus, White House Chief of Staff, said the White House was looking at ways of changing the libel laws to make it easier to for Trump to sue media organizations who criticize him.  Imagine how the Democrats responded to that, not to mention many Republicans?  Not pretty.  Do we not remember the First Amendment?  Or is Trump being inspired by Erdogan of Turkey who has been arresting thousands of people he suspects of being disloyal while cracking down on the press?  Cracking down makes it sound nice.  He is dismantling any vocal opposition to him.

One thing we should note is that the economy grew at the slowest rate in three years in the first quarter of Trump.   Maybe it’s a holdover from Obama or maybe it’s the fear of Trump.

We are in a political Wild West except in this Wild West we have nuclear weapons.

It’s a dark time in American democracy and we need to remember, in this “of the moment” world in which we live, this has not been the only dark time in American democracy.  We had the Civil War, dark time.  We survived Andrew Jackson, a really, really not nice President [who, by the way, our current President seems to identify with].

We will, God willing, live through this.

In the meantime, I will play jazz.  I will drink martinis.  I will write and I will hope, because without hope we have nothing.

 

 

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Posted in 2016 Election, Civil Rights, Claverack, Columbia County, Education, Elections, Entertainment, Greene County New York, Hollywood, Hudson New York, Life, Literature, Mat Tombers, Mathew Tombers, Matthew Tombers, Media, Political, Political Commentary, Politics, Social Commentary, Television, Trump, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Letter From New York 03 24 2016 From where we were to where we are…

March 25, 2016

Darkness has descended on the Hudson Valley; it is pitch black outside though I am heartened everyday by the weather person’s announcement we had three or so more minutes of daylight today than yesterday.

I’ve adjusted the timers on lights to accommodate the increasing daylight.  I rejoice as I am sure everyone does.

My dining room table is scattered with recipes from which I will choose the ones being made for Easter.  I am getting it organized.   I bought upgraded plastic silverware for Sunday.  Since I am doing this, I want it to be a little special — or a lot special.

In the morning I will winnow down the recipes and head out to do my shopping.  My friend Robert has given me eight dozen eggs from the chickens who live at his house down in Rhinebeck.  I had some for lunch.  There is nothing like farm fresh eggs!

While I am typing this, Christ Church is celebrating Maundy Thursday and I wasn’t feeling very churchy tonight so I didn’t go.

Probably feeling more churchy than I do, or at least one would hope so, is Radovan Karadzic, the former Serb leader who was convicted today of genocide during the horrific Serbian conflict twenty-one years ago.  Eight thousand Muslim men and boys were slaughtered in a town called Srebrenica.  Justice finally has been done though it will not bring back those men and boys whose only crime was that they were born Muslim.

At the time, when it was revealed, I felt horror and I feel it today.  There was a time when such things happened to Christians; indeed, they are happening today to Christians at the hands of IS.  It is things like Srebrenica that make IS feel justified.

It’s been a happy day for me, feeling far from all the world’s troubles, tooling around Columbia County, collecting mail, a couple of meetings with organizations I am volunteering with, a haircut, bumping into people on the street and having a good conversation with them.

While I was doing those fun things, the police in Paris foiled an alleged terror attack in advanced stages.  Obama apologized in Argentina for some of our policies and actions during their long and very dirty internal war.  I suspect we turned too blind an eye to some things.

Belgium and Europe in general are struggling to balance freedom and safety in the fight against terrorist attacks.

In America, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump are exploiting our fears in their campaigns; loudly criticized and, I think, rightly so, by Obama.  And I think by Hillary and Bernie, too.

Syrian troops loyal to Assad are in the suburbs of Palmyra in the early stages of reclaiming the city from IS, which has this year lost 21% of the territory it controlled.  The monuments destroyed are gone and it will be good if the city can be liberated.  It has suffered terribly.

At the same time, Iraqi troops are advancing into Mosul, using lessons from the recapture of Ramadi to help them win back this important Iraqi city.  Many of the historical treasures there are gone also, never to be seen again.

I do not live in their mindset and cannot come close to comprehending why it was necessary for them to destroy the heritage of the planet.  But they did.  It ranks up there with the killings at Srebrenica.  Maybe it doesn’t.  At Srebrenica those were living beings that were destroyed.  At Palmyra and Mosul, it was the artifacts of the past that helped create the world in which we now live.

There are echoes of that world here in the cottage.  I have treasured artifacts from the past and things that echo them.  Someday, when I am gone, all this will be scattered, some thrown away but in the time they have had with me I have been grateful for their presence.

There is a small collection of masks, a recreation of a bust of Athena from Greece, a painting from India that evokes Alexander, a Renoir re-strike, a wonderful painting from a Provincetown gallery of Alexander. 

We need the past to build the future, to connect ourselves from where we were to where we are going.

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Posted in 2016 Election, Brussels terror attack, Claverack, Columbia County, Daesh, Elections, Entertainment, European Refugee Crisis, Hudson New York, IS, Life, Mat Tombers, Mathew Tombers, Media, Mideast, Political Commentary, Politics, Social Commentary, Syria, Syrian Refugee Crisis, Trump, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Letter From New York 11 28 15 Walking toward Christmas…

November 28, 2015

First Sunday in Advent.  Christ Church Episcopal. Shooting at Planned Parenthood. Obama. Media and Society. Pope Francis. Kampala, Uganda. John F. Kennedy. Erdogan. Putin. Climate Conference. Justin Trudeau. Queen Elizabeth II.

Christmas. Pandora.

It is the Saturday after Thanksgiving.  I’ve been up for a while but am still rubbing the sleep from my eyes while sipping my second cup of good, strong coffee.  It is a long, lazy day ahead of me. 

The day is very grey and the deck of my house is wet with the results of light rain through the night.  In other words, it is drear out there.  The unseasonable warmth has receded and I am warming the interior of the cottage with the soft sounds of “Cool Jazz Radio” on Pandora.

Today, at 3:30, young Nick is coming over and we’ll do what we do every Saturday after Thanksgiving.  We will put up the tree and decorate the cottage for

Christmas.  I will begin to play Christmas music and the season of celebration will commence.

Tomorrow is the First Sunday in Advent.  I enjoy the sense of community I get from attending Christ Church Episcopal.  Back, a long time ago, a friend of mine described herself as “quite spiritually moist” when asked by her boyfriend, an evangelical Christian, if she didn’t feel something was missing in her spiritual life?

I guess I might describe myself as “spiritually moist” myself.

Yesterday, I almost started to write a blog but didn’t.  The shooting at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs affected me rather badly.  What, ANOTHER shooting? 

For reasons I don’t quite fathom, it rocked me; I felt broken in some way.  Obama has said, “Enough is enough.”  True but how to achieve it?

Today is better.  I got up and wanted to write.  The coziness of the cottage is alluring.   I could sit here and do my best to ignore the world but how can I?

On January 20th, I will start teaching a class at the local community college called “Media and Society.”  Can’t turn my back on the world while teaching that class…

300,000 people attended a mass in Kampala, Uganda offered by Pope Francis on his first trip to Africa.  Another 150,000 young people attended a “pep rally” at an unused airfield.  Francis urged Ugandans to be “missionaries at home” by attending to the old, ill and abandoned in that country.

For all his many flaws, John F. Kennedy was a beacon in his time.  Francis is a beacon of hope in this time.  In Argentina, he was known as “the bishop of the slums” of Buenos Aries. Now is the Pope to the slums of the world.

Paris, if it is even possible at this point, has increased security in advance of the Climate Change Conference coming there this coming week.

The young man who was the mastermind of the Paris Attacks on November 13th, planned more attacks, on Jews and on transport and schools.  He had grand plans for terrorizing France.

Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan is hoping to have a private moment with Putin at the Climate Change Conference in Paris, hoping to tone down the tension that has been rising between Turkey and Russia since the Turks shot down a Russian warplane.

On his way to the Climate Conference, new political heartthrob, Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, stopped off at the Commonwealth Conference in Malta.  He, of course, toasted the Queen of England, Elizabeth II and commented that she had seen more of Canada than most Canadians.  She responded: thank you for making me feel so old, said with a smile.

Yesterday it was nearly 66 degrees.  Today it is 37.  I am tempted to curl up in the cottage and ignore the world but I won’t.  I’m off to the gym after a Thanksgiving break and then to the Dot for food and this afternoon, the tree.

Despite the world’s woes, I am going to push myself toward my inner Christmas self and celebrate what is right with the world and not what is wrong.

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Posted in Mat Tombers, Mathew Tombers, Mideast, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Letter From New York 07 19 15 A weekend in Claverack…

July 19, 2015

It has been a grey weekend with very little rain but constant threats of thunderstorms. As I exited the car tonight there were the rolling sounds of thunder and my phone has alerted me there is a tornado watch in effect.

My friends Lionel and Pierre arrived on Friday night for their monthly visit. We met at the Red Dot, a group of us, Lionel, Pierre and me, as well as another three from Christ Church Episcopal. We had a great evening and then came home, Lionel and I having our traditional “cleansing vodka” while catching up with each other’s lives.

Saturday was a particularly difficult day. Lionel awakened to two texts. One of them informed him that our mutual friend, Nick Wright, had been diagnosed at the age of thirty something with an aggressive lung cancer and had been transferred to Sloan Kettering for treatment. The other message was that the man who was largely responsible for Lionel and Pierre meeting had committed suicide the night before at the age of 35.

Devastating news from every corner.

On Saturday, my friends Mary Ann Zimmer and her partner, Mitch, arrived and Lionel, Pierre and I gathered again with them at the Dot with Bill and David and their friend Laurel, having a lunch rendezvous as they were returning to New York. There was an afternoon nap, some reading of a mystery novel, an appearance at a fundraising event for the Hudson Library and then dinner at Lionel and Pierre’s. Mary Ann and I stayed up until two, catching up.

There was a long morning drinking coffee on the deck, reading the NY Times, followed by a lunch with Larry Divney. Mary Ann, Larry and I all worked at A&E Networks in the 1980’s. There were reminiscences about our time there and the people we had worked with, known and, in many cases, loved in our own special way.  The three of us formed a bound there that has lasted through the years.

Six months after I purchased the cottage, a mutual friend told me I couldn’t be far from Larry and his wife, Alicia. I was in Columbia County and they were in Columbia County and Columbia County is only so large. I got their local number, left a message and went to Walmart for a shop.

He and Alicia were there, stunned to find me. With my now ex-partner, we went back to their house and sipped champagne and it was the beginning of an enhanced friendship. Since then we have celebrated Thanksgivings together and Christmases and Sunday afternoon lunches, parties and long talks.

It has been one of the most satisfying parts of my life here at the Cottage, to know these two people and have them as friends. Last year we were together for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Thanksgiving was at their house and Christmas was at mine.

I am very lucky. My friendships are deep and rich. I live in a very special little corner of the world. I look out the windows from the desk at which I am writing and there is a panorama of green. I am doing my best to soak in every moment and aspect of my world here.

Soon, I suspect, I will leave the city of New York and become a full time resident of Claverack, to watch the seasons come and go, to revel in my couple of acres of wilderness, to sit on my deck and read books and to enjoy the latter years of my life.

Here the world feels far away. But it is still very available, thanks to technology.

Donald Trump has stepped in it with his comments about John McCain. He questioned McCain’s classification as a war hero. It was finally too much and the pack of Republican candidates are doing their best, at last, to distance themselves from Trump.

His comments on Mexicans didn’t provoke them but his comments on McCain were too much.

Trump still leads in the polls and is unapologetic.

Greece is struggling to make sense of the deal they have done with the EU. In this round, David lost and Goliath won. But there is some talk of debt relief, which might mean, in the end, Tsipras has accomplished something.

It is both national and world news that someone has drowned in Demi Moore’s pool. Why?

Despite the sound of thunder when I arrived home there is no rain, only the grey that promises that it might happen. It is the end of a lovely weekend of friends and food and joy while the world has ticked on.

May it tick well for you.

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