An Old-fashioned Fourth!

Over thirty years ago when my children were small, we lived in an old neighborhood in Philadelphia called Roxborough. Although well within city limits, it was more like a small town than a neighborhood. There was a strong community spirit and the people who lived there loved their holidays. On Halloween, the mothers made their children’s costumes from scratch and their kitchens were redolent with the smell of caramel and apples as they prepared treats for “Trick ‘n Treat” night. As for Christmas, all the fathers had dug out their strings of outdoor lights and were tacking them around their windows and doors by December 1st. And, by the 4th of July, all the flags had been up since Memorial Day, but the children rose a dawn to decorate their tricycles, bicycles, express wagons and baby-carriages with tri-colored crepe paper for the parade. Meanwhile their mothers labored inside preparing the picnic lunches of cold chicken, potato salad, deviled eggs and chocolate brownies. Only the fathers slept in. At half-past nine, the whole family trooped down to Ridge Avenue (our Main Street) to either join the parade or find a place on the curb where they could have a good view of it.

Of course, scenes like this were happening in cities and towns all over the United States. But in Roxborough there was one difference. Everyone – man, woman and child – had a tin cup strung around their neck. Why? Because after the parade every church in the neighborhood, and Roxborough was famous for its churches, of all denominations – (some services were still given in Polish and Italian to accommodate the older members) – would open their grounds to their parishioners for picnics. And, along with the grounds, every church offered a huge wooden keg of free lemonade for refreshment. I can still taste that icy liquid. Not too tart, not too sweet – an elixir of the gods, if there ever was one. After the initial rush to fill the cups, the demand petered out. But the keg remained, never running dry. You could tap it as often as you liked throughout the long, hot afternoon. Whether thirsty from softball, from egg and spoon races, or from just sitting around swatting flies, it was there for you... Excuse me, I have to go now, and make myself a pitcher...

Happy Fourth of July!

Robin Hathaway

Mi Casa, Su Casa

Last Thursday evening between five and eight p.m., 350 nice people paid $25 a head to tramp through our ‘historic’ residence in downtown Albany. We bought this house in 2006 and moved up from the City in October, 2007 (I’ve bored you with the reasons why before so not again). My 3-story red brick row house was built in 1871.

Rose and I have belonged to the Hudson Park Neighborhood Association since taking up residence in our house on Elm Street so, like good neighbors, when asked to open our home to the 2011 Hidden City House & Garden Tour, Rose readily consented and I stayed mum. In the City, we lived in a co-op apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens; in fact, in 60-plus years in NYC, I’d lived in apartments in three different boroughs so it was a mind-numbing idea for me to ‘buy’ the apartment I’d already been living in for five years. I still have trouble with the concept, obviously the invention of real estate lawyers.

The inciting incident for our move to Albany was being shown the house on Elm Street while tooling around upstate in search of a smaller city to grow old in. (NYC natives know in their marrows that as they age the odds they will become prey grow apace, unless they reside in upper-class Manhattan enclaves).

Our house is three stories: at street-level is what the realtors call ‘the garden floor’ because you walk through a country kitchen out the back into the garden. Rose found her green thumb up here and has transformed it into the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. But what really got me about the garden were two trees: upfront, a towering pear tree that didn’t give pears but whose foliage gave enough shade that you could shelter a good-sized dinner party on the deck beneath (We have); in the back, a wide, stunted tree, so ancient it looked to have turned to stone, bringing to mind good associations like seeing the movie, “One Million Years B.C.” when I was a kid in Brooklyn. I’d never owned any trees before.

In the middle, ‘the Parlor Floor’, is two rooms with original moldings, connected by ‘pocket doors’ which appear to cause orgasms in the cognoscenti. The top floor has a master bedroom with a walk-in, room-sized closet (Rose likes it), a guest room, and built-in walnut bookshelves that cover the wall separating guest room from a large enough area in the hall to accommodate desk, computer and files. I barred the tourists from the top floor.

I was curious so I stuck around as a fifth wheel. The Historic Albany Foundation sent shock troops to funnel the gawkers in and out, giving them a spiel on what’s-what in each room. They were eight ‘docents’ in two shifts spaced throughout the premises, including the garden. Nice enough folks (I’d never met a docent before), especially when they’d point to me and call me ‘the owner’ and I’d smile and recount the provenance of the art on the walls (Rose and I have been collecting art, separately and together, forever). Rose had laid down lengths of plastic sheeting over our outrageously expensive Pakistani carpet purchased at Bloomingdale’s in the City—sort of a ‘yellow-brick road’ to guide their 650 feet through the parlour. As they began to stumble on the bunched-up plastic, however, a bossy lady docent ordered it taken up. As a former police officer, I recognize a command voice when I hear it. The plastic sheets were taken up with all deliberate speed.

A funny thing: I enjoyed meeting and chatting up my 350 paying guests. At the end, one of the docents whispered to me that all the visitors said our house and garden were the most beautiful on the tour. . . Guess we’ll have to have them over again sometime soon.

Robert Knightly

Perhaps you're thinking, "She's gone mad"

Those of you who have been following my personal blog (kategallison.blogspot.com) for the past couple of weeks have doubtless noticed that I have embarked on a long rant about the War of 1812, the one we fought for two years against Britain. Perhaps you're asking yourselves, "What is she thinking? Here she has a new book coming out scarcely six weeks from now under the name of Irene Fleming, The Brink of Fame. It's about early twentieth-century Hollywood, not the War of 1812."

This is true. It's also true that under the name of Kate Gallison I'm hard at work writing a suspense novel, set in the present day, which has nothing to do with the War of 1812 either.

And yet. The story of Bucker Dudley, the girl who dressed as a boy and went to sea on a merchant ship, only to find herself pressed to serve on board the British frigate HMS Macedonian, is still rattling around in my head. I think it's worth pulling together. This is the tale I was telling my friend Donna Murray some years ago as she drove us to Pittsburgh to the Festival of Mystery. At a certain point in the story she became so enthralled that she nearly ran the car off the Pennsylvania Turnpike. So it has a certain narrative force.

And I'm still fascinated with that war, the last armed conflict we had with the British.

I tuned in to BBC news the other day and saw two talking heads discussing economic conditions in California, which they said were not good and prefigured the general ruin of the United States. I thought I saw one of them smirk, like a spiteful cousin at the Thanksgiving table who hears that you've just lost your job. Yes, we fought them, two hundred years ago, a war between cousins. Some of it was glorious, most of it was kind of pathetic. I know a lot of stories about it, and I want to tell some of them, even though there are forty things I'm supposed to be doing instead, including publicizing Irene Fleming and The Brink of Fame. I just want to.

Or it may be that I've gone mad. Bwahaha.

Kate Gallison

Beware the Angry Goddess

Jeanne Matthews

Today I am very pleased to introduce a guest blogger. I met Jeanne Matthews at Left Coast Crime in Santa Fe this past March, on a panel of people who write about exotic locations. Here she is to tell us about her new book’s location and some of the lore that forms a background for another of her fascinating stories.

Jeanne Matthews was born and raised in Georgia. She graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in Journalism and has worked as a copywriter, a high school English and Drama teacher, and a paralegal. She currently lives in Renton, Washington with her law professor husband and a West Highland terrier.

– Annamaria Alfieri

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Mauna Loa

The largest and most volcanic of the Hawaiian Islands is Hawai’i, which is often called The Big Island. It is bigger than all of the other Hawaiian Islands combined and still growing. There are five volcanoes on Hawai’i. Two are extinct, one is dormant, and two are active. A sixth “baby” volcano remains 3,000 feet below the surface of the ocean, but it’s growing by leaps and bounds. Volcanologists expect it to poke its head above sea level about a thousand centuries from now. Mauna Kea is the tallest of the island’s volcanoes. If measured from the ocean floor, it would be the tallest mountain in the world – taller than Mt. Everest. And Mauna Loa, Long Mountain in the Hawaiian language, dwarfs every other mountain on earth in terms of volume. It is sixty miles long and thirty miles wide and comprises over half of the land area of the island. Mauna Loa doesn’t tower above the surrounding terrain. It is broad and round, like a native shield. All of the Hawaiian volcanoes are called shield volcanoes and when they erupt, lava flows out in all directions.

The Goddess Pele
by Arthur Johnsen

The old Hawaiian word for lava was Pele, also the name of the fire goddess worshipped by the early Hawaiians. To them, Pele personified all things volcanic. She was the fire, the lava, the steam, the new-formed land, and a temperamental goddess – hard to predict and hard to appease. Pele has spawned almost as many myths and legends as the volcanoes have spawned scientific studies.

Like the Greek and Roman deities, the Hawaiian gods and goddesses demonstrated all of the foibles of human beings. They were lusty, vain, evil-tempered, prone to spite and jealousy, and utterly ruthless when angered. And like most deities, they didn’t communicate directly with the hoi-polloi. Shamans called kahunas interpreted the actions of the gods and conveyed their will and their laws to the common folk. Most of these laws had to do with behavior that was kapu. The Polynesians invented kapu, a code of conduct intended to suppress objectionable desires by imbuing the desired object with peril. Kapu forbade what was dangerous and stigmatized what was unclean. Kapu also carried connotations of sacredness and it wielded a profound psychological power over those who believed, and even those who didn’t. To break a kapu, even accidentally, subjected a person to immediate death and the Hawaiian religion designated an oppressive number of things kapu.

Many of their kapu laws would be considered deplorable today, but not all. The Hawaiians were early environmentalists. They made overfishing of certain types of fish kapu to maintain long-term viability of the species and they invoked kapu to restrict certain land use practices in order to safeguard water and natural resources. A deep, spiritual connection to the land is intrinsic to the Native Hawaiian psyche. The cycle of destruction and creation, death and rebirth, was a fundamental tenet of their religion. Pele sent the fires that gave birth to the land and then her lover Kamapua’a sent the rains that extinguished the fires. Wild boars dug up the lava and softened it so that seeds could take root and plants and trees eventually covered the land until Pele sent her fires and devoured the land again.

In my new book “Bet Your Bones,” Dinah Pelerin learns just how deep this Native Hawaiian love of the land runs and how persistent the influence of a pagan goddess can be. Pele is the land and even in modern-day Hawaii, there are those who remain bitter about the United States’ annexation of the islands, those who resent the ouster of their constitutional queen and the degradation of their customs and their culture. There are some who wouldn’t stop at murder to prevent the desecration of prime ocean-front real estate, especially if sacred ancestral bones lie buried beneath.

Jeanne Matthews

Moods and the Reader

Recently I’ve been reading a lot of thrillers. Nothing else seemed to hold my attention. In a few weeks I may feel like reading something less ominous and gripping — Jane Austen or P.G. Wodehouse, or something mind-improving such as an historical tome or even a textbook (unlikely). The point is, we all have reading moods, and these moods determine our reading choices. These moods can be affected by something as simple as the weather; in the summer I tend to go for cozies and lighter novels. In the winter, I might happily settle down with a trilogy like The Forsyte Saga, or even War and Peace.

While having these thoughts, it occurred to me that maybe — just maybe — agents and editors have similar reading moods. And what if the agent you’re querying about a thriller, is in a cozy mood, or vice-a-versa? Or what if the editor to whom your agent sends your noir manuscript is in the mood for a light-hearted romp? What then? Hmmm? Perhaps our rejections are simply the result of a passing mood. You know, when the rejection reads, “Nice, but not what we’re looking for,” they may be looking for it next winter when they are in a more somber mood. Or when the rejection reads, “Not for us,” they may simply mean not for us today, but tomorrow when my indigestion passes, I may be eager for it.

This revelation is not very helpful as far as getting your book published, but it may make you feel better to know that your work may not be at fault, it just hit the reader when they were in the wrong mood.

Robin Hathaway