Alexandersmap

    Month: February 2018

    • LII and Counting

      Super Bowl LII is tonight.  I’ll be 52 myself this year.  For almost 1/3 of my life the Patriots led by Tom Brady and Bill Belichick have been in or contending for the a place in the Super Bowl.  It’s been a memorable run.  Tonight they’ll play in another one.  We all know that it won’t go on forever.  We know that someday they’ll both retire.  Time catches up to all of us eventually, and in sports it seems to happen even faster than in life.

      I watch my dog Bodhi getting older, and I look in the mirror and see it in myself.  There’s something cruel about the lifespan of a dog.  You grow together over the years.  Those first years together are full of energy, discipline, and sometimes anger and frustration.  I’ll always remember the time I planted daffodil bulbs in the garden, sprinkled with bone meal fertilizer.  I came outside later to see Bodhi wagging his tail and my garden looking like a scene out of World War I – large holes dug, dirt and bulbs scattered all over the place.  I questioned having a dog in that moment.  Nowadays I watch Bodhi struggling to stand up and walk up and down stairs, and I wonder how long we’ll have him with us.  I hope for at least one more year, but we’ll see.

      Time is ticking along for all of us, and we’re really only guaranteed this moment.  As I watch Brady get older (on paper anyway), I wonder how long he’ll keep playing.  He’s a major injury or a candid conversation with Giselle away from hanging up the cleats.  Today I’m going to live in the moment, enjoy the Super Bowl for the spectacle it is.  We’ll be with friends and celebrating the Patriots getting there again, and rooting for another win.  And I’ll hope for at least one more year, but we’ll see.

    • On Coffee

      This morning I’m sipping a Starbucks Italian Roast coffee.  I could have chosen Peets or something else.  I’ve grown lazy in my coffee habit.  I have coffee beans and could have ground them using my hand grinder, poured them into a French press and savored the rich results.  Brewing coffee is a ritual.  Some days I’m into ritual.  Today I’m into having a cup of coffee in my hand in under a minute.

      Coffee probably came to New England sometime in the early 17th century, but New Englanders were tea drinkers like their cousins in the mother country.  Coffee didn’t really take off here until after the Boston Tea Party, when coffee became an anti-establishment beverage of choice.  Boston still wasn’t known as a coffee mecca though.  Coffee was something you sucked down to give you a boost or warm you up on a cold day.  And the choices were the same as in most of America – Folgers, Maxwell House, etc.

      Now anyone from Boston better mention Dunkin Donuts when talking about coffee.  Some of my earliest childhood memories were sitting at a Dunkin Donuts counter eating an Old Fashioned Donut.  Coffee memories with Dunkin started much later.  Back before the McDonalds lawsuit, I remember the coffee was scalding hot and you had to wait it out for a bit before you could safely drink it.  Being of questionable intelligence, I always tried to start drinking my coffee a bit sooner than I should have.  Since that lawsuit coffee seems to have throttled back on the temperatures.  Probably for the best but it does take some of the adventure out of the morning.  We all must be protected from ourselves.

      Like many people after college I started paying more attention to the stuff I ate and drank.  Beer was the first thing to get upgraded.  Coffee followed shortly after.  I know it’s sacrilege in New England, but to me Dunkin Donuts is like that K-Cup coffee.  It does the job, but it’s not something I’ll savor.  But savoring coffee wasn’t a thing around New England for the first half of my life.  It became a thing in the 90’s.

      Around Boston, Coffee Connection was our first exposure to a truly rich coffee experience.  It was a place you stopped in when you went to Harvard Square.  Then they started growing and you could find it elsewhere.  Coffee Connection peaked in the mid-90’s and then was acquired by Starbucks.

      Starbucks changed the way we looked at coffee.  It changed the way I looked at coffee.  The first time I had it was on a ferry between Seattle and the San Juan Islands.  I was in line to buy a coffee and when I got up to the front they had two kinds; “coffee” and “Starbucks”.  I remember asking “What’s Starbucks?”  The answer, “It’s like coffee but stronger.” still makes me smile.  Starbucks coffee is not just stronger coffee.  It’s more robust, more flavorful, richer coffee.

      Starbucks jump-started their presence in Boston when they acquired Coffee Connection.  And started a religious war in the process.  Starbucks vs. Dunks.  West vs. East.  Lakers vs. Celtics.  Flashy and expensive vs. working class.  Dunkin Donuts has seized on this in their ads, and customers followed suit.

      I’m an unapologetically diehard Starbucks fan.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ll buy DD when I need to, and I love Peets and some of the local coffee houses that serve rich dark roast coffees.  Coffee, like beer, is something to savor.  And the growth of microbreweries coincided with the growth of the coffee industry.  But it’s not for everyone.  Just as InBev owns 45% of the American beer market, and MillerCoors owns the next 26%, Folgers and Maxwell House own the majority of market share in coffee.  Sometimes taste matters, sometimes people only care about the net result.

    • What’s in a Name?

      I live in Southern New Hampshire in a town that used to be part of Massachusetts.  Borders changed a lot back in the day.  The area I’m likely saw many turf wars between the Pennacook and Abenaki over the centuries.  Both tribes were part of the Webanaki Confederacy.  Webanaki means “People of the Dawn Land” because, well you know, they lived along the Eastern coast.  I think we should adopt that name again, both to honor the native population we displaced and frankly because it’s way cooler than “Yankee”.

      The name “New Hampshire” didn’t come along until 1629, when Captain John Mason, previous Governor of Newfoundland, split Northern New England with another well-connected gent named Captain Gorges and named the region between the Merrimack River and the Piscatagua River – you guessed it – New Hampshire.  Back then explorers and settlers didn’t venture too far into the wilderness, so Mason wasn’t envisioning the shape of the Granite State back then.  In fact, he never set foot in New Hampshire.  He died before he could sail over to check out his new stomping grounds.  But plenty of other folks did.  And of course, this brought violent conflict and atrocities hard to imagine today.

      There are hints to the past if you look closely enough.  Massacre Marsh in Rye, NH marks the site of a raid that killed 13 settlers.  Worlds End Pond in Salem NH once marked the end of civilization and the edge of the vast northern wilderness.  The Dustin Garrison in Haverhill MA was built to defend the region from Indian Raids.  It was a harsh, unforgiving world.  The people who settled here had to be tough, resourceful and resilient, or they simply didn’t survive.

      The name New Hampshire wasn’t an accident.  Mason had lived in Hampshire, England and it probably seemed like a logical choice to tack on New.  And the New World was looking for settlers, and naming the region after places familiar to the population back in the Old World was a nice marketing trick designed to entice settlers to drop everything they knew, risk life and limb sailing across the North Atlantic and find a piece of land to clear and farm.  And hopefully grow some food, hunt some game and fend off raids, wars and the brutal cold of winter long enough to put down roots.  New Hampshire, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, New France, New England…  and on.  Most people never think about the names of the places they live, or the life and death struggles of the people who came before us.  The bones of the past are all around us, if we only open our eyes to see.

    • Ice and Snow

      New England in winter is a land of ice and snow.  Sure, there’s all that other stuff here, but when you live here you’re always aware of these two things that encroach on your daily routine more than anything else.  Want to double or triple the time it takes you to get to the office?  Add ice and snow.  It’s the one thing New Englanders never get tired of talking about.  Well, that and sports.

      This morning we got a dusting of snow.  Maybe half an inch of fluffy white snow.  Nothing for us, especially on February 1st.  Now on April 1 we might think half an inch of snow was psychological warfare, but we wouldn’t even bother shoveling it.  You do the math when you live in New England.  Snow in April will go away quickly.  Even the crocuses would laugh at half an inch of snow in April.  Back in February this barely registers.  Just brush of the car and move on, right?

      The wild card with this snow was the ice underneath it.  Snow is a headache but we know it well.  Ice is our other headache, and we deal with it.  Put ice on top of snow and you get a nice crusty treat that my dog Bodhi loves to snack on during our walks.  Crunch & munch the entire walk.  He’s never met a crusty snow bank that he didn’t love.  Add a little road salt and he’s in heaven.  Ice on snow can be beautiful as it glimmers in the sun.  You aren’t making snowballs out of this stuff, but at least it’s nice to look at.

      Ice and snow in reverse is a different story.  Put a half an inch of snow on a patch of ice and now you’ve got a minefield of comic, sometimes tragic proportions.  Add a slight decline and the magic happens.  Slip-sliding, arms waving, eyes-widening magic.  Caught unprepared, snow on ice let’s you know quickly who’s boss.

      I feed birds.  I don’t feed them in summer, when they have plenty of food.  Mostly because I don’t feed bears.  Do we have bears here?  Maybe.  I’ve seen or heard almost every other kind of wildlife native to this area.  So bears are a possibility.  But in February they stay indoors bing watching Netflix, so I feed birds.  Birds bring motion, color and life to the frozen landscape.

      The bird feeders are on a pole out back where the lawn meets the woods.  I realize having bird feeders close to the house would allow me to see birds close up.  That’s nice.  Mine are farther away.  Out beyond the snow covered ice.  Filling bird feeders back there is like going north of the wall.  You need to be prepared.  Dress for success.  I was dressed.  I felt prepared.  I neglected to wear my micro spikes over my boots.  Turns out I wasn’t prepared.  I wasn’t dressed for success.  And so I brought my own motion, color and life to the frozen landscape.