In early September, during our Language Arts class, two young Christian women came to the door, dressed in their “Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes.” To avoid disruption, I hopped up to answer the door.
They politely asked, “We are doing volunteer work and wonder if you would like to hear some good news from the Bible?” I replied, “That is worthy but I am not interested now. I am homeschooling my son. But I ask you this question: what is the true understanding, the meaning of John 14:12?” They thoughtfully began to open their Bibles and I stopped them, saying “Do not answer this now but consider this as you go.”
Two months passed and recently one of the women returned with her father (younger than me), again dressed in their best clothes. The daughter wore the fashionable full length “Little House on the Prairie” style dress with burgundy flats. The father wore a tad-too-bright blue suit, crisply starched white shirt and a natty woven – not silk – tie. They were radiant in their wholesome goodness.
Standing on the front porch, we discussed grammar of the Bible passage: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father.”
I explained that “…because I go unto my Father…” is a subordinate clause. They did not see it that way. But grammatically it simply is subordinate to the independent clause, “…the works that I do he shall do also; and greater works than these shall he do…”. I focused on the verb “do” which they exhaustively counseled meant “to preach.” I countered that it referred to actions such as “raise the dead, walk on water, multiply loaves and fishes.” Flabbergasted, he laughed. Who ever heard of such a thing?!!
He opened his tablet and read from the prepared script that missionaries having gone to the ends of the earth – traveling farther than that street preacher ever could – and having reached countless millions of people means the “preaching” is “greater than.” I respectfully averred that the inverted sentence structure is complex; the object “greater works than these” comes first while the subject “he” comes last. But both the demonstrative pronoun “these” and its antecedent “works” are plural so more than just preaching is going on here.
I discussed Isaac Newton – paragon of the rational scientific mind – who also was an alchemist. He (the father) had never heard of alchemy. His daughter remained silent. We were heading into uncharted territory but my point was the deeper insight is needed, not the narrow rational. In fact, alchemy arguably is a symbolic language of higher consciousness, “base metals” turned into gold a perfect metaphor during the time when alchemy was considered heresy, punishable by death. Higher consciousness clearly does threaten the orthodox, and the street preacher – who was an avatar of consciousness – is revered not because he preached but because of what he did, which includes – as the story is told – raising the dead, walking on water, feeding the masses. Later that evening I asked my Daughter her thoughts and she readily said “works means accomplishments.” Preaching may be one of the accomplishments but “greater than” clearly speaks to something far more substantial.
We spoke about translations – from the Aramaic, to the Greek into Latin and now English; multiple languages over millennia – but he said “God guides all the translations” thus “the word is sacred.” An interesting point, but which renders the grammar moot. Even if the word is sacred, our understanding is not automatic. We need to think for ourselves, with grammar the means to insight; “these” is plural.
We briefly discussed Buddhism, which is to say alternate paths to wisdom. “All roads lead to Rome” is the saying but they held firm in their belief that the “King of kings and Lord of lords” reigns supreme.
Alas, our porch chat came to an end. They asked if they could return and I said, “Of course.”
The soundtrack of my childhood is best captured in the screech of sneakers on a parquet floor, the sharp, clear trill of a referee’s whistle, its echo down an empty gymnasium. On saturday mornings my father would drive my older brother and me to the Walden School for intramural basketball games. My brother is a gifted natural athlete who thrived there, while I found the game incredibly dull, the challenge of throwing a ball through a hoop entirely lost on me.
From my parent’s perspective it was a brilliant set-up; the house emptied for an entire morning, my Mother had quiet, my Father had no distractions and we returned home exhausted, which ensured a peaceful afternoon. My enduring intramural memory is that Mr. Sneed, who ran the program and was its referee, made his living trading eggs on the floor of the former Chicago Butter & Egg Board.
Eggs, to Mr. Sneed, were a fungible commodity, bought and sold in bulk. Eggs, in our house, were a thing scrambled, served with bacon, raspberry jam and English Muffins, for Sunday Brunch in our Dining Room after the 10:30am guitar mass at Holy Cross Church.
My Father’s day job was food merchandising. Known as the “Grocery Guru,” he wrote and lectured on three continents on how to market food at the retail grocery level. He was a stock and bond man so Mr. Sneed’s world of commodity futures contracts seemed an abstraction; foreign, opaque and mysterious. But there must have been some spark. I followed that path.
During college, I met people who worked in the markets and I visited the floor, experiencing the open outcry pits in action. Sheer bedlam, it was capitalism at its most raw and rapacious: I win, you lose, a buyer for every seller. Eventually I got a job at the Chicago Board of Trade’s Financial Futures floor, where more than $350 Billion in US Treasury bond future contracts change hands daily. It was the pits, an awful place to work, but fascinating all the same.
Eventually I became the “squawker,” reporting the 30-year Treasury bond pit action to a trading desk in Lower Manhattan, giving them an edge on market timing. The Broker for whom I worked had a superstition and would allow me to use black ink only, never red ink, which marks a loss in accounting, which he could not allow under his stead.
Following the pits I ended up managing the food service in a residence for women artists. From my office desk I traded stock options on the S&P 500. While working at a wholesale flower market I traded corn futures. Eventually I ended up trading the 30-year Treasury bond futures not on the floor but from an office. I never did well enough to quit the day job, but I never washed up, either. It was an odd fascination.
And so I came to meet the Wizard, a CPA active in off shore banking who was born in the 1920s in Nemaha County, Kansas. He had been named in honor of the traveling banker who visited the town, “an old Kansas man, born and bred in the heart of the Western Wilderness.” Close to the 100th meridian, it is hard to fathom how remote Nemaha County would have been in that age before electricity, running water and phones. It was Dorothy’s Kansas.
By conventional terms he was the Father of a college classmate, but in truth he was the Wizard of Oz trading the futures markets. He was curious about my experience and we began talking. Eventually he told me about the sanctus sanctorum, the Golden Fleece, the goose that lays the golden egg, which was the “cash forward discounting of 108% bank debentures.” And so into the land of smoke and mirrors I went.
He introduced me to a financier who had helped launch McDonalds and whose Uncle had financed the Hollywood mavens: Marcus Lowe, Samuel Goldwyn and Cecil B. DeMille. I found myself managing discussions with Sheik Mohammed Had, an Emissary and Confidante to the Royal House of Saud. I flew to Manila to meet with a mild-mannered man named Jun, possessor of 100 Metric Tons of Gold Bullion stored in the underground vaults at Kloten, Switzerland. Whether or not he was the illegitimate son of Ferdinand Marcos, the Dictator of the Philippines, was an open question, which is about the way things go in the land of smoke and mirrors. I worked with Abraham, a Christian from the South of India, who possessed a 1 kilogram rough cut emerald, the largest in the world. He was trying to leverage the asset to fund development programs for his community but when the planes struck the Twin Towers, it became all but impossible to work with rare and unusual assets.
I spent hours reading at Northwestern University’s Law Library and stumbled upon Public Law 104-62. Known as the Philanthropy Protection Act of 1995, this exempts certain charitable organizations from federal securities laws. Signed into law by the 2nd Patrician of Kennebunkport, 104-62 is a loophole large enough to drive a Brink’s truck through. I contacted McDermott Will and Emery, the world’s largest tax law firm, but was declined as a client because, “Having checked our entire roster of Associates, no one has ever heard of this law and we feel it would be unethical to learn on your dime.” Although arcane, humanitarian finance is an official law. In the land of smoke and mirrors I found the path less travelled, which proved to be almost impossibly difficult to follow.
While in London, I worked with a CPA from Toronto who had helped Kuwait finance reconstruction after the 1st Patrician’s Iraq-Kuwait War. Following the liberation, the Central Bank of Kuwait revived the Dinar at an exchange rate of USD 3.47 to 1 new Kuwaiti Dinar, making it the strongest currency in the world. That the power to organize, finance and fund can change an entire country has always struck me as fascinating.
At this season of life, these experiences are long in my past. On a recent trip back to Chicago, I took my children to the Board of Trade, but the open outcry markets are gone, replaced by electronic trading. Since 9-11 the Board allows no visitors into the Exchange. This chapter has entirely vanished.
The eggs I buy to feed my family now come unwashed at room temperature, from a local school teacher. Buying as close to the source is as far as imaginable from the fungible commodities of the Chicago markets.
That the power of capitalism can be used at scale to fund the common good remains a compelling idea, which runs counter to rational self-interest. And so I keep one line in the water still, just waiting for when the Great White Whale swims into the Casco Bay.
Every milli-second of every day for the past 4.6 Billion years, at the center of our solar system nuclear fusion repeatedly has occurred, and will occur; two hydrogen nuclei collide and merge to form a single helium nucleus, thereby releasing energy which powers the sun, which creates light.
As a form of electro-magnetic radiation, the nature of light is to emanate outward from its source, in the form of tiny discrete packets of energy called “quanta” or “photons,” and travel 93 Million miles in 8 minutes and 20 seconds whereupon they warm up a solar array on the roof of the School where I work.
Since 2015 sunlight has been harvested upon that roof, with 430 panels, covering 8,000 square feet, generating approximately 135,000 kWh of electricity per year. When sunlight bathes the solar array, electrons become energized and flow between cell layers, creating an electrical current. The flow of electrons is captured by metal plates and wires; thus, electricity is generated.
Solar power generation was discovered in 1839, and the basic design of a solar collector has endured since the 1970s. It is worth noting, however, that for the past 1.3 Billion years, fungi, and for the past 700 Million years, plants, have been eating light, thereby producing oxygen while decreasing carbon dioxide. Solar power is a stellar advancement, but cumbersome in comparison to the elegant simplicity of the plant kingdom. Still though, let’s sound three cheers for human progress and our role in it!!!
The embodied energy of the solar array (energy consumed to manufacture, ship and install the panels) is approx 260,050 kWh. That amount was offset in 1.9 years and since then the roof’s array has been net positive. Over the past ten years, the school has generated 780,010 kWh which means 842,641 pounds of carbon emissions were not produced, roughly equivalent to 424,754 pounds of coal, 5 tanker trucks of gasoline or 1.1 railcar of coal. The school’s footprint is small, its impact enduring.
By a financial sleight-of-hand the school is able to make money by converting light into power. This is done by selling “Renewable Energy Credits” (REC) to the secondary market where large utilities or carbon-producing industries purchase them to meet state-mandated climate standards. If this seems abstract, then you read well; the REC is a legally defined commodity separate and distinct from the physical electricity itself.
You can spend a dollar only once, and so too, the consumption of energy. What we monetize, then, is not the energy created and consumed but the carbon offset; we monetize not what was done, but what was not done. A subtle distinction, and except for the law of the land, otherwise not possible.
RECs have value not by fact, but by fiat; they have no monetary value except to high-carbon producing utilities and only by decree. In the year 2025, in these United States of America, the shared responsibility of clean air is legislated as a State’s right. 11 states have no REC program; the carbon “red” states are politically raging red (Deep South plus Nebraska, Wyoming and Idaho) while 11 states had programs that are now expired or repealed. All of New England participates, while Maine ranks among the more stringent standards, with 2019 legislation passed to increase Maine’s portion of electricity supplied by renewable energy resources to 80 percent by 2030 and a goal of 100 percent by 2050.
Whether the REC market will continue is an open question, hotly debated as the climate continues to heat up. While America looks back to its carbon rich past, China forges ahead with renewable energy. The Economist reports: “The scale of the renewables revolution in China is almost too vast for the human mind to grasp. China generated 1,826 terawatt-hours of wind and solar electricity in 2024, five times more than the energy contained in all 600 of its nuclear weapons. In the context of the cold war, the distinctive measure of a ‘superpower’ was the combination of a continental span and a world-threatening nuclear arsenal. The coming-together of China’s enormous manufacturing capacity and its ravenous appetite for copious, cheap, domestically produced electricity deserves to be seen in a similar world-changing light. They have made China a new type of superpower: one which deploys clean electricity on a planetary scale.” And very likely the AI race will be won by cheap electricity rather than chips.
All of which brings to mind Martin Luther King’s statement: “it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated.” The RECs provide a vehicle toward a lower carbon future, and the school participates, every minute the sun is shining.
I am the “Serpent of Caesar” acting for and on behalf of the Religious Society of Friends local school. I chose this role willingly, in my position as the Facility Director of the physical plant and property. The roof leaks. Even after its repair. And so I lead the Quakers into battle.
Prior to January the terms “construction litigation” and “Forensic Engineer” were not in my vocabulary but now they dominate my thought and action. Some hoped to approach this problem amicably, asking for the help of the Architect and Builders. I turned to the Agreements signed in 2014 when the School’s building project began. Contracts are, by their nature, adversarial; they define the course to cure problems when things go wrong. And a repeatedly leaking roof, clearly, is something gone wrong.
Only an Expert can opine in construction litigation; it takes one licensed Architect to argue against another licensed Architect. As a mere carpenter my opinion is moot. Within the trades, the Plumbers and Electricians are “Masters,” because they are licensed and trained to have and to hold special knowledge. Carpenters, at best, become Journeymen, but none of us dare come to a job site claiming the mantle of “Expert.”
The first Expert retained was indeed a licensed Architect, who showed up on the job site wearing the wrong shoes. He was a cowboy, “all hat, no cattle” and “all sizzle, no steak.” He gladly criticized another Architect’s work, but when asked to design the solution he deferred, saying, “I will have to think about that. My liability insurance might not cover that.” Off into the sunset he rode. I did not look back.
The second Expert retained was a licensed Architect and member of an engineering firm founded by three MIT professors. He, and they, are the Brahmins of Boston. Meticulous and thorough, at an exorbitantly high cost, on one hot day in July they opened up the roof and did find 80% moisture content, 3” down into the insulation. By the nature of the design, to replace any of the insulation you must remove all of the roof.
And so knives were sharpened, a lawsuit was filed. When the investigations were ended, I wrote the Demand Packet to establish the damages sought. The opposing counsel’s counter arguments were brutal, a challenge not to take personally the barbs thrown my way. But they are only doing their job. This fight is about money, and they are its sentries.
The pace of a lawsuit, and its forensic investigation, is slow and ponderous, and this week all of the parties finally gathered in mediation. Dressed in business casual, all parties came bearing sword, saber or pocket stiletto. The opposing counsel – all men – were abrasive in their prevarications and circular reasoning, doing everything possible to point the other way, to avoid the central fact that the roof has failed. It was trench warfare, fought to a draw in the opening round of the long battle ahead.
The origin of our story lies centuries ago in England during the Civil War, also known as “The Great Rebellion.” The Royalists fought the Parliamentarians in a winner take all battle. Life for the Nobles was grand and sumptuous while the tenant farmers struggled, long before electricity or indoor plumbing, working from 6am until 6pm, children beginning to work as young as age 7.
In 1651 “Leviathan” was published with the infamous sentence that “Life is nasty, brutish and short.” This work is foundational for political realism, defining the authority of the State over the individual to avoid the “war of all against all” that results from the pursuit of rational self-interest amidst the absurdity of death.
Also in 1651, a Dissenting Preacher was imprisoned for challenging the orthodoxy of the King’s Church, and his sentence then doubled for refusing to take up arms in Cromwell’s army fighting against the Royalists. That preacher’s core tenet was that the “inward Light” belongs to every man, woman and child; no intermediary is needed to receive divine guidance because the sovereign is not the King but God, itself. And so George Fox formed the Religious Society of Friends.
In 1681 William Penn, one of Fox’s adherents, was granted by King Charles II 45,000 square miles along the North Atlantic Coast of North America. Such then did the Quakers settle on virgin soil, acreage which today constitutes Pennsylvania and Delaware, and a different form of political realism was practiced, which became foundational to the American experience. Colin Woodard, a local historian and author who lives in Freeport, Maine, described Penn’s social experiment:
“Penn envisioned a country where people of different creeds and ethnic backgrounds could live together in harmony. Since his faith led him to believe in inherent goodness of humans, his colony would have no armed forces and would exist in peace with local Indians, paying them for their land and respecting their interests. While all the other American colonies severely restricted the political power of ordinary people, Pennsylvania would extend the vote to almost everyone. The Quaker religion would have no special status within the colony’s government, the Friends wishing to inspire by example, not by coercion.”
Penn’s “Holy Experiment” became the sine qua non as Philadelphia emerged as the largest and most influential city in the Thirteen Colonies. Thomas Jefferson wrote there, in a rented home at 700 Market Street, the most radical progressive sentence in the history of politics: “We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union…do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Friends Schools have been central to this “social contract” and “holy experiment,” in the belief that spiritual, social, and intellectual growth are intertwined. Since 1656, when Quakers first arrived in Maryland, the schools have always taught both boys and girls.
And so 368 years later I arrived at the Quaker school bearing a Transcendentalist message from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Your goodness must have an edge, else it is none.” Kindness alone is not enough.
Circa 30 AD the street preacher taught in Aramaic: “ܗܐ ܐܢܐ ܡܫܕܪ ܐܢܐ ܠܟܘܢ ܐܝܟ ܐܡܪ̈ܐ ܒܝܬ ܕܐܒܐ؛ ܗܘܘ ܗܟܝ” which circa 120 AD was translated into the Koine Greek – the lingua franca – as “…γίνεσθε οὖν φρόνιμοι ὡς οἱ ὄφεις καὶ ἀκέραιοι ὡς αἱ περιστεραί,” but when the Italians settled the Holy See where Nero’s Circus had been, circa 382 AD, the Latin Vulgate was translated, “Estote ergo prudentes sicut serpentes, et simplices sicut columbae” until 1611 when all the King’s scholars and all the King’s scribes wrote the masterpiece which is the King James Bible: “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.”
For two millennia this wisdom’s fulcrum, its hinge, is the humble conjunction and: “wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” Life’s complexity does not reduce to either/or but more often is both/and, which is especially challenging when waging war over a leaking roof.
“All the world is a stage” is repeated so often it has become a cliche. Shakespeare’s monologue from “As You Like It” opens with this:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.
Concerning that stage, Nietzsche argued the apex of artistic achievement and high point of civilization was achieved on stage in Classical Athens by the tragic dramatists, particularly Aeschylus and Sophocles. When their Apollonian and Dionysian met in balance – order, form, reason commingling with chaos, passion, ecstasy – the citizens of Athens confronted both the suffering of life and the majesty of its beauty, experiencing an integrated whole comprising the breadth of the human condition.
But how, precisely, does the stage work?
Who better than a playwright from Chicago’s south side to make plain the inner workings of the stage? David Mamet, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, playwright on Broadway and member of the American Theatre Hall of Fame, screenwriter for Hollywood, author of 223 books, published in 1998 “Three Uses of the Knife: on the nature and purpose of drama.”
He wrote, “It is in our nature to dramatize. At least once a day we reinterpret the weather – an essentially impersonal phenomenon – into an expression of our current view of the universe: ‘Great. It’s raining. Just when I’m blue. Isn’t that just like life?’ The weather is impersonal, and we both understand it and exploit it as dramatic, i.e., having a plot, in order to understand its meaning, for the hero, which is to say for ourselves.”
Drama’s structure plays out in three acts. “In act 1 Our Team takes the field and, indeed, prevails over its opponents, and we, its partisans, feel pride. But before that pride can mature into arrogance this new thing occurs: Our Team makes an error, the other side is inspired and pushes forth with previously unsuspected strength and imagination. Our Team weakens and retreats.”
And so begins act 2, the play’s midlife crisis. Conflict is present, a new set of problems arise. Our attention narrows toward climax, denouement and conclusion, but a challenge must be overcome while the playwright holds the audience’s attention. Again Mamet, “Joseph Campbell calls this period in the belly of the beast – the time in which the artist and the protagonist doubt themselves and wish the journey had never begun.” The ease of act 1 becomes complex.
On rarified occasions, in an auditorium, drama achieves that pinnacle of insight and cultural healing. But more often the drama is bawdy and common, played out on the street, a vaudeville stage or in the daily news.
“The stoics wrote that the excellent king can walk through the streets unguarded. Our contemporary Secret Service spends tens of millions of dollars every time the president and his retinue venture forth.
“Mythologically, the money and the effort are spent not to protect the president’s fragile life – all our lives are fragile but to protect the body politic against the perception that his job is ceremonial, and that for all our attempts to invest it with real power – the Monroe Doctrine, the war powers act, the “button” – there’s no one there but us.
“Our Defense Department (sic) exists neither to ‘maintain our place in the world’ nor to ‘provide security against external threats.’ It exists because we are willing to squander all – wealth, youth, life, peace, honor, everything – to defend ourselves against feelings of our own worthlessness, our own powerlessness.”
What to the Christian mystics is the Trinity, to the German philosophers was thesis, antithesis, synthesis and to playwrights and poets from the dawn of time has been the 3-act structure; the “Rule of Three” as an axiom of psychology and communications provides clarity and order to simplify decision making, to navigate life.
Given conflict, act 3 moves us into climax and resolution. The hero finds within themself the will and strength to continue. What Sophocles called the tragic flaw, Shakespeare termed “this mortal coil,” Nietzsche saw an absurd void, while Mamet writes of “our own worthlessness, our own powerlessness.” Such is our conflict. But reason cannot resolve this.
“The purpose of theatre, like magic, like religion…is to inspire a cleansing awe….Most great drama is about betrayal of one sort or another. A play is about rather terrible things happening to people who are as nice or not as nice as we ourselves are.
“But reason, as we see in our lives, is employed one thousand times as rationale for the one time it may be used to further understanding. And the cleansing lesson of the drama is, at its highest, the worthlessness of reason. In great drama we see this lesson learned by the hero. More important, we undergo the lesson ourselves, as we have our expectations raised only to be dashed, as we find that we have suggested to ourselves the wrong conclusion and that, stripped of our intellectual arrogance, we must acknowledge our sinful, weak, impotent state – and that, having acknowledged it, we may find peace.”
If reason wants to reduce life to an either/or, the dramatist knows that life is a both/and proposition: the apex was reached in the perfect balance between Apollonian order and Dionysian ecstasy. Nietzsche argued that it was art that allowed humans to overcome the absurdity, and so too Mamet:
“It is our nature to elaborate perception into hypotheses and then reduce those hypotheses to information upon which we can act. It is our special adaptive device, equivalent to the bird’s flight – our unique survival tool. And drama, music, and art are our celebration of that tool, exactly like the woodcock’s manic courting flight, the whale’s breaching leap. The excess of ability/energy/skill/ strength/love is expressed in species-specific ways. In goats it is leaping, in humans it is making art.”
Recent world events have brought remarkable promise, for the hope of peace, in a region where crushing violence has been the norm for centuries. It has been achieved by actors on the great stage, using common people as pawns, in their quest for domination. The signing of the Gaza peace plan was described by one publication as “a brutal lesson in realpolitik.”
Realpolitik is the pragmatic approach, valuing practical and material factors while ignoring ethical questions or abstract ideals. The term was first used in Germany in 1853. Niccolo Machiavelli and Henry Kissinger are its standard bearers, but the world today is rife with alpha strongmen practitioners.
“The Great Man Theory” was developed in the same era as realpolitik. The Scottish man of letters, Thomas Carlyle, developed the idea, in 1840, arguing that history is the impact of highly influential individuals – men – of superior intellect, heroic courage, strong leadership even divinely inspired:
“Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realisation and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.“
Realpolitik is, essentially then, the effect and the Great Man the cause of much of world history. And so these alpha males build monuments to themselves – arches or obelisks or pyramids or ballrooms – to reassure us by the monuments’ material presence, of the superior level of their being, of their vast accomplishments. Immense is the energy and treasury spent to remind us (or actually to reassure themselves), but history teaches that the common people, in fact, can get the last laugh.
Barre, Vermont is known as the “Granite Center of the World.” In the early 1800s vast granite deposits were found, which brought immigrants flooding into the Capital Region of the Green Mountain State. “Barre Gray” granite is sought worldwide for its grain, texture and superior weather resistance. It is estimated that one-third of all monuments in the United States are made from granite quarried in Barre.
Italian stone masons emigrated en masse to Vermont and these dark hair, dark-skinned people were among the lowest of the social register, the Venezuelans of their day. But their work was of the highest quality, and so when John D. Rockefeller – an alpha of American industry – began making plans for his family’s burial sites, his mausoleums and obelisks were crafted by the Italians of Barre. John D was buried beneath a 70’ tall obelisk, the tallest in Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland, from the largest single piece of granite ever quarried in America, carved by the lowly Italian stone masons.
The locals tell the story of how those craftsmen tricked the old man, using superb granite on their work-for-hire while keeping the superior stone for themselves, their night job, handcrafting their own tombstones. Hope Cemetery – called the “Uffizi of Necropolises” – in Barre is famous for the quality of its tombstones, 75% of which were designed by the occupants of the graves.
One might find comfort that when John D. Rockefeller, and those of his social strata, lay upon their death bed, mighty proud of their own accomplishments, self-certain of their immortality, it was the unnamed stone masons of Barre who saw clearly the vanity and sham of their monumentality.
The world today seems to run on realpolitik but let us hold hope that it is we the real people who hold the key to a brighter future. A fact laid bare in Barre, Vermont.
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Credit goes to Professor Nate of White River Junction, Vermont who shared the tale of Barre Italians. Thank you, Nate.
As a wee young boy, my parents occasionally on Friday night had cocktail parties. My siblings and I were told to clear out, to go upstairs to our bedrooms so the adults could play. But we would crawl down, then crouch upon the stairway in order to espy the party going on in the Living Room down below.
The men wore blazers and ties, the women skirts and high heels. Booming laughter abounded, cigarette smoke filled the air, until the next morning – like Forensic Detectives – we would examine the ash trays. We could tell who smoked each cigarette by the lipstick. Sharp-edged Aunt Ruth always came dressed with lips scarlet red. I was certain then that the adults had everything figured out. Life seemed just a series of choices, easily navigated, victory preordained.
As a young man, in my 30s and 40s, I came to realize how foolish I had been. Adults, by and large, had no grand understanding, life was but a battle of inches, decisions made at best with partial understanding. The simplicity of my childhood gave way to a bewilderingly broad vista, across which my peers pursued their sense of self. Careers being launched, some moved with bravado and found early success, others less certain struggled to get by, some dropped out all together. I moved off grid, then battled for social justice, flew too close to the sun and crashed, ending up working with my hands. I chose to live close to the ground.
Now in my 60s, life changes yet again, and I adjust, best as I can. Almost certainly I am finished framing houses (never say never). My peers – who pursued a more conventional path – are likely approaching retirement, many as grandparents. My children still live at home; there is much work yet to be done, which I tackle not with the vigor of mid-life, but seeking a more balanced sustainable approach.
And then I consider my Mother, she in her 90s, how different must life become, yet again, 30-years hence. The family house has been sold, she has moved into an assisted living facility. She seems happy and content, the food is quite good, she is respected, life’s complexity pared to a contemplative calm.
I become aware of a parallax of perception, which must be the subjectivity of how we understand our life, which perception seems far different from life itself. Parallax is an abstract noun, defined as “the apparent displacement or the difference in apparent direction of an object as seen from two different points not on a straight line with the object. especially : the angular difference in direction of a celestial body as measured from two points on the earth’s orbit.” The simplest example, which everyone has experienced, is the effect of objects viewed from a speeding car. The closer objects seem to quickly pass by, while objects in the distance appear to move slowly. But the objects are stationary while it is the viewer who is moving.
In this age of alternative facts, we are bombarded by the constant noise and babel of social media. In an age when might makes right, the sheer onslaught of images and news is overwhelming. We seem to thrive on arguing, rather than simply co-existing. “Rational self interest” is our central logic, but might that be self-limiting, in fact? What if the underlying cultural assumptions are ill-founded? What if, to use an analogy, we are looking through the binoculars from the wrong end, making what is easily near at hand seem impossibly far away? Which only would amplify the parallax of our perception.
Few are my answers but many my questions. Increasingly it feels like a cultural re-examination is just over the horizon. So it may be wise to pause and consider the Roman Stoic Lucius Annaeus Seneca, who counseled, “All life is a preparation for the moment of death.”
Whether death be near or far, it seems time to settle our emotional accounts, to let calm the ripples on the pond of our collective consciousness.
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Persephone soon departs, the dark season is just weeks away. The Milkweed blows. Mary Oliver comes to mind.
The milkweed now with their many pods are standing like a country of dry women. The wind lifts their flat leaves and drops them. This is not kind, but they retain a certain crisp glamour; moreover, it’s easy to believe each one was once young and delicate, also frightened; also capable of a certain amount of rough joy. I wish you would walk with me out into the world. I wish you could see what has to happen, how each one crackles like a blessing over its thin children as they rush away.
When I was a child growing up in Deerfield, Illinois the ancient saying “Money is the root of all evil” still held currency in the culture. People actually thought that way, but now, decades later, that quotation seems less often spoken. An AI search reports that the phrase is popular on social media, but I would not know this since I do not frequent those haunts.
The sentence is a misquote from the Bible 1 Timothy 6:10 “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils.” So money itself is value neutral, while its craving and lust are the stuff of sin, a defining trait of this dark age of Mammon.
When I was a child growing up in Deerfield, Illinois there lived a young woman, whose father was from Guatemala and her mother an Anglo, a bi-racial family in a very caucasian Judeo-Christian small town. When her father died young, her mother’s strength held them strong and taught them to take pride in their work, meager as it may be. When that young woman came of age her work ethic and ambition lead her to food service, and eventually to found a catering company – with $300 dollars – called “Food For Thought.”
I worked with that company at its beginning, serving endless platters of Chicken Dijonnaise and Phyllo-wrapped Baked Brie, in the era when the Silver Palate Cookbook was changing the rules of the game, and American Cuisine was taking root. “Food For Thought” grew over the decades to become Chicago’s leading provider of corporate, social, and cultural event services with revenues now exceeding $22 Million per year.
In our Wise Women writings, we have discussed the “Commanding Intellect” – which this young woman had in abundance – but more fundamentally her’s is the gift of “Empathy” which is “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” Empathy’s first cousin “Forbearance” is “restraint and tolerance” by “demonstrating patience and showing tolerance toward others who are imperfect or have wronged you.” This woman built Food For Thought but what she did next is the story that bears mention, that demonstrates her wisdom. Commanding intellect built her first business. Empathy expanded her reach.
$80.7 Billion dollars are spent annually in the United States on public prisons and jails. Approximately 4,000 companies work in the for-profit prison industrial complex generating $5.2 Billion dollars in revenue annually. It costs more to send a teenager to a correctional facility than to put them through Northwestern University. Our Heroine reasoned that she could give the “throw away kids,” the gang-affiliated, the pregnant teen mothers, the dispossessed, the least among us a chance, to learn a trade through food service, at a cost less than $10,000 per child. She leveraged her food service savvy toward social justice by opening Curt’s Cafe, in Evanston, Illinois.
Curt’s Cafe (Cultivating Unique Restaurant Training) works to “improve outcomes for young adults (ages 15-24) living in at-risk situations through work and life skills training.” Over 650 students have completed the Cafe’s work and skill training, learning how to prepare and serve a full menu of breakfast and lunch items, how to work the cash register, how to do basic accounting, how to open a checking account, how to find an apartment. Nationally, the recidivism rate for ex-convicts returning to prison is 86% but at Curt’s Cafe only 1% having returned to prison. 1%! The average wage of incarcerated workers is $0.86 per day, but Curt’s Cafe provides its workers a living stipend and hope. These numbers only scratch the surface. The human stories are richer, deeper, and more meaningful.
It is best now to let Susan Trieschmann tell her own story:
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In other news, this week I helped install a sculpture down in Kennebunk. Jesse Salisbury is the esteemed maker of this seat carved from Basalt, a hard black volcanic rock. Heavy lifting 1.5 tons up that hill, but well worth the effort in the end. Ars long, vita brevis.
Two score and three years ago, to discipline my young mind I enrolled to study Latin. Nothing in my past forecast that choice; it was a decision wholly without precedent. My father having just died, I was given the gift of education – anywhere on any topic – and Classical Languages & Literatures was the choice that I made.
Because it was close to my childhood home, I enrolled at Northwestern University. I studied there beside wizened and wise men of letters. Stuart Small taught me Greek and Latin literature, while Erich Heller – a lion among the European literary cognoscenti – and I broke bread, and discussed German literature. Erich made a comment once that is marked indelibly upon my mind, “There is a mysterious link between grammar and the mind.”
In this year 2025, at our Art Farm Academy, my son explores this link as he learns to parse sentences, grammar’s deep structure, whereby thoughts are made manifest. This week’s topic was “The Verbs of Action and the Predicate” wherein my son thought deeply upon verbs transitive or intransitive; objects direct or of prepositions; simple versus complete predicates; adverbs and adverbial phrases. He marked a line dividing the subject from the predicate, determined whether a verb was transitive or intransitive, identified the direct object – when applicable – and demarcated the prepositional phrase. Intellectual heavy lifting, he stayed the course.
In homeschooling, a student cannot hide in a classroom of 20 fidgeting students. This is one-on-one, face-to-face, question and answer. For a young man coming of age, who feels anxious in social settings, his Language Arts class presses buttons. His teacher, the Magister, is firm but fair and it is probable that nothing could benefit him more.
The mysterious link between grammar and the mind is like a yoke, focusing the mind, as it frames our thoughts. For millennia yogis have regarded the yoke as a symbol of union, of body, mind and spirit, which is the “being” at grammar’s root, an inlet to consciousness.
In this age when AI will override STEM, at the dawn of a post-literate society shaped by videos and memes on a screen more than words on a page, nothing could be more salient. The power to focus the mind and to frame thoughts is the power to articulate and to question authority.
Let us parse from among the greatest speeches in American history:
“Four score and seven years ago…” is but a phrase, not even a clause, but has a poetry that most every American can repeat from memory;
“We have nothing to fear, but fear itself” wherein “fear” is both verb and noun;
“I have a dream…” uses subject verb and object to drive the essence of simplicity, clarity and hope;
“Ain’t I a Woman?” changes the syntax to verb and subject but no object, using the vernacular, for emphasis;
“Give me liberty or give me death!” is an impassioned hortative, in binary form: two independent clauses of verb, subject, object using a coordinating conjunction as fulcrum;
“…stay hungry, stay foolish.” repeats an imperative verb, with contrasting adjectives, using parallelism to form an inspirational slogan [delivered by Steven Jobs, 2005, to graduates of Stanford University (but which slogan he lifted from the Whole Earth Catalog)].
At this art farm, our core curriculum centers upon “the grammar of being.” We go forward, building confidence, into the future.
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It is October and we glean the garden. Beans harvested, are shelled, put up for winter.
Henry Ford’s broad vision for business success included that his vendors and subcontractors should make a reasonable profit from doing business with the Ford Motor Company. Wholistic, he understood that everyone in the supply chain should be treated fairly for the system to thrive. He famously said, “A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.”
My son and I talked about this during the summer, when he took a job seal-coating a 5,004 square foot parking lot. It was his job – I, his crew and driver – but I advised that he should issue a quote in advance, so the client knew what to expect. With great confidence he named his price including a modest profit. The client understood the final invoice would be on a time and materials basis.
The job went well, but in fact was more demanding that expected. The crew pulled it through, but when it came time to submit the final bill my son realized that what had seemed – in advance – like a windfall, felt too small after the fact. He learned what hard labor meant and wanted to charge more. And so we talked about Henry Ford and what a “reasonable profit” meant. In the end, he settled on a 20% profit which equalled $52.50. The client was pleased and paid the bill gladly.
About Henry Ford we have kept talking, and our history curriculum is built around the farm boy from Dearborn who quit school with a 6th grade education. Encouraged by Thomas Edison, in 1903 he founded the Ford Motor Company. Models N, T and A followed and his River Rouge Complex would become the world’s largest, iconic and most efficient integrated factory. Detroit has a rich history, and Mo-Town adds a phenomenal soundtrack.
To make history tangible, we drove to the Professor’s house in Lyman, Maine to work on a small internal combustion engine. The Professor is a journeyman carpenter/philosopher, who not only has every tool known to mankind, but knows how to use them all! Pedagogy unfolded under a shade tree at the Lyman town center.
The Professor sagely required my son to write a summary of the experience. Given the complexity, my son dictated while I was his scribe, and we then parsed the grammar – nouns, common or proper and concrete or abstract; verbs and adverbs; prepositional phrases and their objects; subordinate clauses – and ended up with his summation:
“With Professor Nate, I worked on a Toro Recycler lawn mower with a 22” deck. The first thing we did was try to start it. It would not start. We realized that it did not have an air filter.
“We put it up on a table and looked at the spark plug. The spark plug had a lot of carbon, so we tested the plug to see if it had a spark. It did, but it was orange. The color of the spark can determine how much voltage is being generated from the engine. Red is poor, orange means power but weak, a blue spark is a strong: voltage follows the rainbow spectrum. Our plug had an orange spark. Nate had a new plug that we tested, but it had no spark at all.
“So then we tried using some 1,000 grit sand paper to sand off some of the carbon from the tip. After trying that we tested the original plug again and it had improved. We put it back into the motor, tightened it first by hand and then used a torque wrench, with approximately 30 foot-pounds of torque.
“We checked the oil and gas. We drained the gas bowl, which is under the engine on the left, to see if there was dirt in the fuel. There were specks of dirt and rust, and the fuel was green from the stabilizer. After we drained it, the fuel looked good.
“The Toro Recycler is supposed to have front wheel drive but it wasn’t working. We took the cover off and one of the belts was completely snapped. There was a stick lodged in the belt and a lot of grass had built up inside the housing of the belt. We put the belt cover back on. That should be the problem for the drive.
“We took the blade off using a pneumatic impact driver. We sharpened the blade, simply grinding the edge down. We put the blade back on using the torque wrench.
“We put the mower back on the ground and it started. It did not sound great at first, but slowly the sound improved as the motor circulated the new gas through the engine. It mowed well.
“Next we will get a new air filter, new drive belts and a blade. We need to clean the mower. We are also studying Volts, Amps, Ohms and Watts as part of our science class.”
While the Professor teaches the “how-to,” my son’s cousin, the Lizard-whisperer, is teaching him the pure science of electricity and magnetism; voltage and current; protons, neutrons and electrostatic fields. From all angles we are unpacking the mystery and majesty of an internal combustion engine.
The lead photo above is my son’s Great Grandfather John, standing proudly beside his Ford Model A touring car, circa 1928. John was a coal salesman in the Ohio River Valley, who made frequent trips throughout the coal rich hills of Appalachia. His car was for work more than pleasure.
John’s customers included Detroit Edison; he would purchase the entire output of mines in Eastern Kentucky and Ohio and then ship the coal north by the train load. But John’s coal did not fire Henry’s furnaces.
Henry’s revolutionary self-sufficiency controlled costs by owning the entire production process: 16 coal mines powering the electric plants that generated the voltage to run the steel mills producing the parts for the cars ever rolling down that assembly line at the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge Complex.
A 6th grade drop out has much to teach our 7th grade home schooler.
an Art Farm 