Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit, I say quietly to myself as I climb out of bed, in hopes that this month will bring about a quiet change of fortune. I offer up a little prayer as well. The past couple days have been emotionally intense, so I’m writing a long personal post.

My extended family is not very close. I typically talk with my mother a few times a year, and maybe with a brother or sister once or twice a year. Over the past week, my mother called me up. She is back in Williamstown after having spent the winter in Ohio with my sister. She is slowly cleaning up the house I grew up in to put it on the market.

I'm sorry that I left you
With your questions all alone
But I was too happy driving
And too angry to drive home

Some of her slowness comes from a bad knee, which will get replaced at the end of the month and from essential tremors which cause her hands to shake when she tries to do simple tasks.

With Miranda heading off to college in August, and Mairead returning at the same time, it looked like chances to get together with her before they went off to school were rapidly diminishing. Our little Prius, which is great around town and on short trips, isn’t really comfortable for a four hour drive with the whole family, so we decided that I would drive up with the older girls, while Kim and Fiona went to visit Kim’s dad. Later, Kim, Fiona and I will head up for another visit.

The drive up was mostly uneventful. I spoke a little bit about Pirsig in the beginning of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He spoke about ghosts and about going back to face some of his own ghosts. It has been thirty years since I graduated from Mount Greylock Regional High School, and there are the ghosts of my childhood to visit.

I was thinking about the easy courage
Of my distant friends
They said I could let this bridge wash out
And never make amends

As we approached the Connecticut/Massachusetts line, we passed Kent. Some of the girls’ friends go to Kent and a little ways up the road is a campground that we had camped at in the past. Mairead remembered the little general store where we had bought kielbasa to cook over the campfire. Later, we came upon a Jeep with a bumper sticker that said ‘Hummers Suck’. I looked down at the display on my little Prius indicating we were averaging around 50 miles per gallon since the last time I filled up the gas tank, and we chuckled about the bumpersticker.

In Lanesboro, I started pointing out sites from my youth. We passed Pontoosuc Lake, which I swam and canoed in with friends from school. We passed a driveway to a camp where we had had class picnics. I didn’t go into the gory details of my experiences as a teenager. The girls didn’t want or need that much detail.

In Williamstown, we stopped and drove into the parking lot of the high school. I pointed out the gym where my thumbnail got ripped out during a game of floor hockey and where the junior high school dances were. Mairead asked if I actually danced, or if I stood awkwardly on the sides. Yes, I did dance, once or twice at such dances, but mostly, I stood awkwardly on the sides.

We drove around the parking lot. I talked about learning to drive in a 1968 Chevy Pickup whose standard transmission was starting to go. I became pretty good at starting in second and driving around that parking lot.

Can I blow this small town
Make a big sound
Like the star of a film noir postcard
Can I just forget the frames I shared with you

From the high school, we made it into town. The college has been renovating many of the buildings. The old theatre had a new façade. I talked about working there in the summers. Townies could volunteer as ushers and get to see a play at the Williamstown Summer Festival free each week during the summers and I saw many great plays that way, especially Chekhov.

We came to Spring Street. Spring Street is where I went to hang out when I was in high school. It was my group’s equivalent of Facebook and IM. Near the top of the street was the college swimming pool that I learned to swim in. Down the street were the pizza shops and bars that the college kids and townies alike hung out at. The American Legion, which many folks snuck into for drinks had moved, but it was still on Spring Street. At the bottom of the street was the college field house and skating rink. I had skated at that rink and watched many high school and college hockey matches there. I had run in fundraising relays in the field house, and even gone to a college football game or two across the street.

And I can't believe what they're saying
They're saying I can change my mind
Start over on Spring Street
I'm welcome anytime

Years later, when I moved to New York City, a few blocks away from another Spring Street, I always thought of the Spring Street where I grew up. My mind wanders to Dar Williams great song, Spring Street, on her Green World Album. Many of the quotes in this blog post are from that song.

From Spring Street, we drove past churches I attended and we spoke about my religious upbringing. I had started as a good old New England Congregationalist, but stopped going regularly when my father rejected the church because it had stood up against the war in Vietnam. We passed the Baptist Church I attended later because it was where many of my friends went.

We went up Cole Avenue and I glanced down side streets where friends had lived and then drove down the street to the elementary school I had attended. It had been a three building complex but two of the three buildings were now gone. The third, where I had gone for fifth and sixth grade still stood, but had been considerably renovated.

I talked about the Fourth of July Fairs that we had on the playground; the rides, the fireworks. When the girls were little, I often sang them to sleep with Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now. It was these Fourth of July Fairs that always came to mind when I sang the part,

Moon and Junes and Ferris wheels
That dizzy dancing way you feel
As every fairy tale comes real
I've looked at love that way.

But now it's just another show
You leave them laughing when you go
And if you care, don't let them know
Don't give yourself away.

I've looked at love from both sides now
From give and take, but still somehow
It's love's illusions I recall
I really don't know love at all.

Further down Cole Avenue, we passed the Women’s Exchange, a thrift shop where much of my childhood clothing came from. I talked about how tight money was when I was young and how much of my clothing was second hand, either from my older brothers, from the thrift shop, or if I was lucky, ‘seconds’ from one of the last remaining clothing mills in the area. We didn’t talk about how much I was teased as a kid for the odd looking clothing I was stuck with.

Well there are Spring Street storefront daisies
Floating on their neon stems
There are new shirts on the clothes racks
Should I feel like one of them

Well, not for me.

Some of the old grocery stores where closed; Eddie’s, McNichols. We came to the bottom of Henderson Road. It is a standard story that parents always tell their children about how far they had to walk home from school. For me, in the mornings and on the afternoons that I didn’t stay late for band, for theatre, or some other event, it was only a quarter of a mile; a very pleasant walk. But in the late afternoons, it was a mile and a half, up a steep hill. I pointed out my bus stop to the girls as the car began climbing up the hill. It was an even more tedious hike for me in that I was often carrying a heavy baritone saxophone.

We gut to the junk yard, and I told the story of when I ran into a junk yard Doberman around a sharp corner, in the middle of the road on my little moped. There were no street lights there, so when the moped stopped, there was no light, only me on the ground, and an angry Doberman somewhere in the darkness.

I got my moped going again and quickly got home, in spite of the handles being askew and, as I found out the next morning, my collar bone being broken from the crash.

My mother was still up and we spoke for an hour or so before we all went to bed. Her face has lengthened and she looks even more like her older sisters. She hobbles around fairly well with her bad knee but her tremors actually seem a little less severe than other times I’ve seen her.

We got up slowly on Saturday morning. My mother had expressed interest in going to the Clark Art Museum or to Mass MoCa.

I can find a small apartment
Where a struggling artist died
And pretend because I pay the rent
I know that pain inside

The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art is at 87 Marshall Street, in North Adams, Massachusetts. It is the old Sprague Electric headquarters. I worked at Sprague as an intern during my college years.

Before Sprague moved there, I believe the buildings had been part of the textile industry that eventually moved south. The buildings are old, but have been nicely renovated.

We passed the gatehouse where I would check in each morning, and building one, where I worked. Building one is being used as office space, and isn’t part of the exhibition space. We drove to the building where the box office was, and got a wheelchair that my mother could use to see the exhibit.

The exhibit on the ground floor was Spencer Finch: What Time Is It on the Sun?. The webpage starts off with, “Spencer Finch wants us to consider the question: Is it possible to see yourself seeing?” If the question makes you think of Heisenberg, you are on the right track. One fascinating piece was “Abecedary (Nabokov’s Theory of a Colored Alphabet applied to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle).” The webpage continues with “Finch blends scientific method and a poetic sensibility in his work.”

Bridget Goodbody reviews the exhibit in the New York Times saying

Spencer Finch takes viewers on a journey — equal parts psycho-autobiography, travel log and science experiment — to demonstrate that even with light and eyes, vision doesn’t give you unmediated access to the world.

The exhibit will be there through next spring, and I look forward to going to see it again.

The Williamstown Public Library has a wonderful program. You can check out passes to local museums. My mother checked out the pass to Mass MoCa, so the trip was free, with the exception of the lunch we had at the pavilion.

Yeah, let's watch the tour bus stop and tell us
Here's the scene of a spring green life dream
Take the best part
Write it in your caffeine diary

So, I’m blogging about the trip and the exhibition. As I wandered the old building, I thought about how Finch brought together a great scientific and artistic vision. It made me think of e.b. white’s One Man’s Meat, and other collections of his essays, where he brought together daily life with astute political observations. That captures some of what I want in my caffeine diary, being a conceptual blogger, pulling together the wonderful stories from blogging communities, with what is happening politically.

Heading home from the museum, we drove around Williamstown a little bit more as I looked at what has changed. Stores come and stores go. The old Chevy dealer is now an Agway store. We stopped at my sister-in-law’s house and spoke with her for a little bit and my niece came back to my mother’s house with us for a little while. She is a few months older than Miranda, though they’ve rarely spent time together. They chatted, made fun of me, and exchanged email addresses as I helped configure a computer for my mother.

It is an older computer that my father was getting rid of. It needed some reconfiguration, but is working fine. Unfortunately, my mother’s tremors are enough to make the touchpad or a mouse very difficult to use, and her typing is probably also very frustrating to her. I suggested that she should use the computers in the local library and see if there is someone who could help her.

The human computer interface, whether pointing device, keyboard, or even voice recognition, is ill suited to people with essential tremors.

And I can't believe what they're saying
They're saying I can leave tonight
Start over on Spring Street
I'm welcome anytime

Finally, it was time to head home. It was dusk. In the distance, it had been raining and a broad rainbow appeared down the road for us. Is there a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow which we are approaching? We didn’t reach it on the drive home. Was the rainbow part of God’s promise to us? “Some day I'll wish upon a star and wake up where the clouds are far behind me”

As the rainbow faded, the full moon arose. Growing up, we didn’t have a lot of money. We did have fireflies to chase and full moons to gaze on. I’ve traveled a long way since then, making a lot of money on Wall Street, and now back to worrying about how we will pay for food and rent. Yet the full moon still rises. As I drove, an old Zen story came to mind.

A Zen Master lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening, while he was away, a thief sneaked into the hut only to find there was nothing in it to steal.

The Zen Master returned and found him. “You have come a long way to visit me,” he told the prowler, “and you should not return empty handed. Please take my clothes as a gift.”

The thief was bewildered, but he took the clothes and ran away. The Master sat naked, watching the moon.

“Poor fellow,” he mused, ”I wish I could give him this beautiful moon.”

Miranda spoke about how we haven’t gone to see fireworks as a family in a long time, and then, beside the moon appeared fireworks. We pulled into a Dunkin Donuts parking lot and watched the fireworks show in New Milford, before finishing our drive home.

So, I still utter “rabbit, rabbit, rabbit” as I roll out of bed into a new month. I still offer up my prayers that my fortune will change, but I cherish the moons and Junes and Ferris wheels. I hold onto the promise of the rainbow.

And that's to say, yeah I'm leaving
But I don't have to go there
I don't have to go to Spring Street
'Cause it's spring everywhere... "