October 4, 2007 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

From our readers

Go purple

This month marks the beginning of something a little unusual for Chestnut Hill. For the month you’ll see the color purple around the Avenue, at shops, in the parking lot and even on the crosswalks.

The color marks a month in which many people in Chestnut Hill will take part in a number of events the proceeds of which will benefit the Lutheran Settlement House and advance the group’s efforts to raise awareness of domestic violence issues.

Lutheran Settlement House has run a bilingual domestic violence education and outreach program that provides counseling, court and medical advocacy education and training.

Events are taking place all across the city, but Chestnut Hill features prominently in the center’s campaign.

This Thursday night, Chestnut Hill will host a fashion show at Highland and Germantown avenues featuring Matthew Izzo. Admittance to the glitzy event, detailed in last week’s Local, is free, so anyone can enjoy it. The after party costs $50, but the ticket price goes entirely to Settlement house.

On Sun., Oct. 13, Chetsnut Hill will host a 2-mile walk for domestic violence.

And finally, on Sat. Oct. 20, a kids day will take place on the Avenue with lots of activities for children and a table at which people can donate items to Lutheran settlement House: food, babies’ items, clothing and toys.

That’s quite a few opportunities to take the time to participate in something that will bot only be fun but benefit a good cause. Make sure you come out and do your part.

Go Phillies

Last week I was going around the office here at the Local telling anyone who would listen that the Phillies were headed to the World Series.

“It’s going to be a Red Sox, Phillies World Series,” I said 100 times. “You can book it.”

Aside from a few perpetual optimists, most greeted my forecast with incredulity.

“Nah, this is the Phillies,” they’d say. “They’ll play just good enough to get our hopes up and then they’ll find a way to choke.”

Perhaps it’s because I’ve been a Red Sox fan for so long that I’m immune to such pessimism. Or maybe it’s because I’m not born and bred here that I just haven’t developed the proper sense of certain and preordained doom. I knew this team was going to make it somehow, even if it had to go through a four-team mini-payoff slugfest for the wild card. This team wouldn’t choke.

Well the choke happened but it took place in New York in front of 50,000 stunned-silent Mets fans, and the Phillies, one of the best bunch of gamers I’ve seen since the ’04 Sox, are on their way to the post season.

Baseball Prospectus, the online bible of baseball geeks has predicted a Cubs, Red Sox World Series.

Those guys are usually right, but I’m sticking by my guns. Phillies over Colorado in four and over the Cubs in six to win the National League Pennant and get to the World Series. (From there, you’re on your own Phills fans…)

But no matter how far they get, the Phillies have given this city a great ride. One few of us will soon forget.           

Pete Mazzaccaro

Opinion: The United States of Amnesia
by Ed (I forgot my middle name) Feldman

As various law enforcement agencies continue their slow encirclement of our Caucasian Talk Circle, (aka the CHCA — and I helped!), and as the board continues to deny, well most everything — to the point of adjourning a meeting at an unprecedented reasonable hour rather than answering a direct question from, guess who, I turn the deadly weapon of INQUIRY to another subject, at least until the next board meeting when I will attempt again to get people home to their Manhattans at a civilized 9:30. (Watch the board try to remove Feldman, guilty of assault with a query!) Besides, my book “Escape from Chestnut Hill” will bring an advance — Pete just lets me use the copier for these. (How soon before you get a call about that? deny, deny, deny, Pete.)

But here too, the tough talk will not abate. How else can one fight in times such as these, when those without morals relish good manners in their opponents as just another advantage over them. So today, dirty secrets, not about those who control our neighborhood, but about those who control our world, and about those who control the information about it — and about us as well.

My memory, long held as an advantage by me, now haunts me as I age. It works too well. I watch new sitcoms and I know the punch lines before they’re spoken. Because I’ve heard them before. Plagiarism notwithstanding, the writers may think it’s the first time these clothes are being worn. Some quote the Bard better than I, but in the canon of Sorel, Buddy, I have no equal. So I can’t watch. But in the realm of world affairs, TV news cycle memory loss, or TVNCML for those involved in the upcoming telethon, is deadly.

I’ve heard these jokes before, too. One of the funniest ones, and I remember laughing about it at the time, was that my wooden desk at Gilbert Spruance Elementary school was capable of protecting me from a thirty megaton thermonuclear device, originating in one of two — count ‘em — two countries that I was told to hate and fear.

One of these countries, where my grandparents came from, hated us because they hated the freedoms that we held dear. The other country was even worse because they were a different color and their eyes were different. I know this sounds crazy, but I was there, I heard it every day. This daily discourse shared the front pages of the day with Bull Connor and the White Citizens Council, a terrorist organization. (And IS the KKK, Aryan Nation etc. on the official list of terrorist groups yet? No? Too many registered voters I guess — Iranian Revolutionary Guard — take notice!)

As I crouched under my desk, I worried about the mass of protection I had carelessly removed from its surface, as I carved my initials, and “Silver Surfer Rules,” for some future generation. What if I had diminished my own chance of posterity for posterity? Too complicated? Fine, because the truth was that I never thought my desk was an adequate deterrent, even at age nine. Only the moderately stupid kids did. The really stupid ones never understood any of it and just followed orders. The moderately stupid kids listened to whatever they were told, believed it and then followed orders. These were the kids that grew up to run everything and repeat the lies. Because they knew how easily moderately stupid people believed lies.

What lies you say? That nuclear war was not a threat from the Soviets or Chinese in olden times?  Certainly it was; a crazy or stupid person or group of people can and has run governments that have crazily or stupidly unleashed death on thousands. And while logic may dictate that a reasonable person would not set in motion weapons that would force him or her to abandon the luxurious life style they worked so hard to attain for life in a bunker, cave or other undisclosed location, remember, we’re talkin’ about loonies here.

No, here is the lie. My generation, which, because of Tom Brokaw, must think up a diminished name for itself, (how ‘bout “The Generation that had such low standards that it accepted a man with multiple speech impediments for a high paying job whose only description was to read, properly, words to us written on a teleprompter”), has obviously forgotten these facts. That we were taught to hate and fear two countries because: they possessed enough nuclear weapons to destroy all life, that they have a different political and economic system from ours, specifically one that hates freedom.

I was told this EVERY DAY. What has changed? Their missiles are still in their silos and can be launched in minutes. Russia and China sill have authoritarian regimes, different from ours, that stifle and jail dissenters and invade and occupy other countries. Yet our demons now lie elsewhere. We no longer fear Mao’s little red book; now we fear the Koran. We no longer fear the People’s Army human wave attack; we fear the suicide bomber. We no longer fear the dominoes falling in Southeast Asia; we fear them in the Middle East. We can’t even name the head of the most populous country on earth, which is still communist, still has nukes, and punishes people for having children.

 WHAT HAS CHANGED?  Two things. First that the whole domino theory was made up some drunken night by Henry Luce and Allen Dulles. And the other was that the differences in our freedoms, politics and eye shapes never were the issue. It was always about money. And markets. And oil. And product. For you see, dear reader, the only thing that has changed between the demons of my youth and our global “trading partners” of today is that now they have something to trade. The greatest political irony of the century is that every time we fill up at the LUKOIL pump or shop at the WalMart we validate the Marxist Dialectic. Economics baby, and we can even laugh about it. BOO-Yah!

So here’s the good news, now that we know that it’s not about what our adversaries do, but it’s about what they sell, and that just about all of us will hate or not hate countries or peoples based, not on their actions, but whether our government and media tells us to, let’s all just decide not to care about Iraq right after we leave. Crazy you say? Who will run the country we have devastated? I will discuss that with anyone who can name the leader of Vietnam. Where we can all go and have a lovely time at a Hilton and be treated as valued customers at many local restaurants owned by former Viet Cong guerrillas. Sure they went though hard times, they even fought the Chinese whom we were told were their masters. But now it’s better.

But as a Chinese philosopher (I think it was Mel Cooley) once said, “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” That first step begins with our leaving. But what of the region and of our safety? Again I refer you to “Threat of World Communism,” and “Fear of Nuclear Annihilation.” Pardon me for not being frightened, but I haven’t had to hide under my desk in years. And any one who brings up the “dead dying in vain” needs to care a little more about the living continuing to live.

No one on earth knows whether life will get better or worse whether we stay or leave. And those who predict catastrophe have been so wrong about absolutely everything as to qualify them for leadership of the Bizarro world. And for you unabashed Cramerites out there worried about oil supplies, you haven’t been listening. We buy it from multinationals that get it from all the people we are told to hate every day. Holocaust deniers keep your SUV destroying the planet. So relax. And forget. Again. Osama Bin Who?

From Darby to the African Savannah, meeting Loren Eiseley, part 2
by HUGH GILMORE

Backstory: Growing up near Darby, Pa., getting my hair cut in Tom’s Barber shop, where all the waiting-room mags were girlie mags we boys were forbidden to touch, I eventually was allowed to read Esquire magazine, the tamest of the bunch.  In this accidental way I slipped from ogling pinups to reading modern literature. When I grew up, got married and settled down, my first subscription was to Esquire magazine, the coolest magazine around, especially because of its wiseguy tone.  Thus the surprise I felt when I first encountered the mysterious Loren Eiseley, via an article that said he was the “best prose writer in America today.” The accompanying picture of Eiseley, half in somber shadow/half in light intrigued me. I decided to read something of his and judge for myself. That was in April of 1967.

The decision to read Loren Eiseley sat unacted on in the back of my mind for a while. Then one Friday night in September, after teaching all week, I drove out to Gilbertsville, Pa., to Zern’s Farmer’s Market. I went there regularly in those days because Zern’s had a genuine flea market and auction going and was a great place to buy the old, the weird, and the ugly for very little money. Among its attractions was Ruud’s Bookstall, a great place to find cheap used copies of both old and new books.

In truth I must have forgotten about Loren Eiseley by then because I remember feeling a shock of recognition the moment I saw a paperback book titled The Immense Journey. “Oh, is this that book I read about somewhere … in Esquire? … yes, it must be.” I paid 35 cents for it, congratulating myself in no small way for being so broad-minded. An English teacher who reads books about science. Fancy that.

My current self is obviously amused at my 20-something self’s pride, but I do remember being imbued, like so many young people, with a strong desire to gobble up all the world’s knowledge and make it mine. I started reading The Immense Journey that same night.

The opening chapter of this collection of personal essays is called “The Slit.” Eiseley, who has not announced his profession yet, says there are lands that are “flat and grass-covered, and smile so evenly up at the sun that they seem forever youthful.” And, he says, there are other lands that are “torn, ravaged and convulsed like the features of profane old age.”

“It was to such a land I rode,” he says. Alone on a timeless prairie, on horseback, he came upon “the Slit,” a crack in the earth. He rode beside this channel until he found a place where he could dismount and enter the crevice, leaving his horse to graze. As he descended, the sky became a narrow sliver of blue “as far off as some future century I would never see.” The sandstone walls were cool to the touch. The Slit felt sinister,  “… like an open grave, assuming the dead were enabled to take one last look.”

By descending, the narrator is passing through a cross-section of perhaps 10 million years of time, hoping to find a bone. He is, we discover, a bone-hunter, an archeologist in quest of knowledge about human history. A few more twists and pivots and then he is confronted with something he had not expected to see: a skull embedded in the wall, staring out at him, briefly illuminated by the fading, slanted sunlight.

“It was not, of course, human. I was deep, deep below the time of man in a remote age near the beginning of the reign of mammals.” Eiseley squats on his heels in the narrow, grave-like ravine. “We stared a little blankly at each other, the skull and I.” The skull’s long snout and pinched brain case reveal it to be a creature that followed its nose through the world, a world of instinct with little power of choice.

And though this creature was obviously not a direct ancestor of humans, Eiseley can see the similarities our forebears had once shared with it. And while he’s musing about these similarities, he suddenly gets the feeling that the skull, tilted upward as it is, “stared sightless up at me as though I, too were already caught a few feet above him in the strata, and in my turn, were staring upward at that strip of sky which the ages were carrying further and further away from me… .”

He writes then: “The creature had never lived to see a man, and I, what was it I was never going to see?”

A shiver went through me when I read that sentence. I’ve never gotten over it. I reread that passage for possibly the hundredth time in order to write what I’ve just written and I still thrill to those words. They’re frightening and exhilarating; they’re daring but plain; they’re honest and poetic.

When I first read that passage, barely three pages into the book, I had no sense of the world and time other than the vague notion that it was Friday night, the beginning of the weekend and that I’d go back to work, teaching, on Monday and work every week until summer came and then I’d go back in September and teach again and do that for a certain number of years, which would add up to a lot of years, and then somehow I’d slip away from this earth and … and … I didn’t know. I never thought about it once I’d vaguely drifted away from believing in the afterlife my mother and my teachers had said was my destiny.

Into this void Loren Eiseley’s simple question had arrived to rock me:

The creature had never lived to see a man, and I, what was it I was never going to see?”

I had so many emotions to contend with at the instant I read that: joy, fear, excitement, dismay, horror, but mostly a puzzling combination of joy and despair. To dare to turn the telescope around! To dare to think that life will continue, with or without humans — with or without me! To dare to think life will change.

I read on.

Like the wisteria on the garden wall, man is rooted in his particular century. Out of it — backward or forward — he cannot run.

 I felt trapped. The same words were both a prayer and a joke, and every human action was a disguised attempt to defy the confines of time and physics.

We have joined the caravan, you might say, at a certain point; we will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or learn all that we hunger to know.

I began the second chapter soberly and came upon a hinted answer to this dilemma.

Once in a lifetime, perhaps, one escapes the actual confines of the flesh. Once in a lifetime, if one is lucky, one so merges with sunlight and air and running water that whole eons, the eons that mountains and deserts know, might pass in a single afternoon without discomfort.

And how was this done? He lay on his back in the Platte River and allowed himself to be carried away, feeling as though he lay suspended while the continent itself drifted by under him in a parallel to the passage of geological time. He opened his heart and mind to feeling himself as part of the universe and not as its master.

There are many beautiful, poetic, philosophic passages in The Immense Journey, but I have time today for just one more.

Eiseley describes his reaction to the international space exploration programs then just emerging by describing an encounter between himself and a frog.

“Whenever I catch a frog’s eye …  I stand quite still and try hard not to move or lift a hand since it would only frighten him. And standing thus it finally comes to me that this is the most enormous extension of vision of which life is capable: the projection of itself into other lives. This is the lonely, magnificent power of humanity. It is, far more than any spatial adventure, the supreme epitome of the reaching out.

I finished reading The Immense Journey that weekend, feeling like I’d been knocked for a loop. Going back to school on Monday I felt restless and eager, wanting my life to change in a way that let it catch up to the changes in my mind and heart. But how?

I considered and reconsidered the direction of my life — my teaching, my goals. I reread Eiseley and looked for more of his books. I dreamed of somehow talking to him in person someday, but knew I’d never dare.

 I still can’t figure if what followed was chance or fate.

As for my quest to read 100 books this year: I just finished my 74th, despite having watched nearly every one of the Phillies’ 162 games this year. Eighty-nine days to do 26 more books.

Doubters be damned
by CLARK GROOME

There were so many doubters. Way back in spring training many felt that the 2007 Phillies had a good shot at winning the National League East. Then they got off to their patented ugly April start and loads of folks began to feel that they had dug themselves a hole out of which they could never get.

Early on, the highly touted starters Jon Lieber and Freddy Garcia were injured, creating another hole from which the team needed to escape. The young and talented, but relatively inexperienced, Cole Hamels became the staff ace, but he, too, spent some time on the disabled list.

As the season went on, the core of their team — Ryan Howard, Ryan Madson, Brett Myers, Chase Utley and Shane Victorino, most significantly — spent considerable time on the DL. That hole was getting deeper by the minute.

But hold on, this team seemed to say, “We can still do it.” And do it they did. After Chase Utley broke his hand when he was hit by a pitch, two significant things occurred: the reliable old pro Tadahito Iguchi was stolen from the Chicago White Sox at the bargain cost of minor league pitcher Michael Dubee, son of the Phillies’ pitching coach. And Pat Burrell, the maligned multi-millionaire who had not produced up to expectations over the last three years, came alive.

Slowly, the Phils dug themselves out of that hole, just a little bit at a time. Every so often they’d slide backwards — remember that heartbreaking 8-9 loss to the Braves after they went into the 8th inning leading by 6?

So how’d they do it? They did it the old fashioned way — with hard work, strong leadership and, perhaps the most important element, faith in themselves.

Listening to them after the most disheartening defeats, you could always hear the optimism that tomorrow would be better. It almost always was.

Seventeen games before the season ended, they trailed the New York Mets by seven games. Insurmountable? Seemingly, but who better than the Phillies, who pulled the classic el foldo in 1964, to understand just how possible it was to win against impossible odds?

They would need help, not only from the players on their team but from the Mets and a whole slew of other teams. The Mets folded (no tears here about that) and the Phils played the best baseball of their remarkable season.

This was a season marked by the super-human and MVP-caliber year that Jimmy Rollins had both defensively and offensively; by Tadahito Iguchi’s taking over for the then MVP-bound Chase Utley and not missing a step; by the young pitcher Kyle Kendrick coming up from Double-A Reading for a spot start and staying to go 10-4 with an ERA of 3.87; by the offensive contributions of Chris Coste, Greg Dobbs, Jayson Werth and Michael Bourn; and by remarkably good starts and timely jam-ending relief from Jamie Moyer, Kyle Lohse, J.D. Durbin, Tom Gordon, J.C. Romero and Myers.

All of the above were guided in his seemingly bumbling way by Charlie Manuel. Sure, he butchered the English language and often made unfathomable moves. Through all that he had faith in his team and they in him. Clearly, after all the adversity this team faced this year, Manuel should be National League Manager of the Year.

It has been said that this team has caught Philadelphia’s imagination, just like the 1993 team that went to the World Series did. But this team is different. This team isn’t winning in spite of who they were, as the often disreputable if appealing Daulton/

Dykstra/Kruk/Wild Thing squad did. They are winning because of who they are: optimistic in an almost naïve way, devoted to each other, talented and filled with a class that shows not only on the field but off.

What an honor it has been to watch this team this year. The nice thing is, with the exception of the final outcome, the contents of this column would have been exactly the same if they had lost on Sunday and were going home for the winter.

Doubters be damned — this classy team defied us all! This makes what they did all that much sweeter.