Take a Listen

Unless you experience it, you can't appreciate the rich, sonorous, altered-state-of-consciousness-inducing services of the Byzantine Catholic Church.

I'm long since a long-lapsed Catholic cum Buddhist.  But I still consider the Byzantine Mass a gift to all faith traditions.  Take a listen.

Toad and Activism

Merriam-Webster defines nocturne as a dreamy,  pensive composition for piano.  This presentation of the Edgar Thompson Works is a visual and aural nocturne.

The Edgar Thompson plant was Andrew Carnegie’s first mill.  His first Free Library is within a long walk.  Both are effectively on the border between two Allegheny County boroughs – Braddock and North Braddock.

On the 1300 block of Bell Avenue in North Braddock a few decades ago, there were Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Ruthenian, Slovak, African-American, and Jewish families.  The father of the latter had a tattoo on his right arm …Every ethnic group had its own church.  African-American, Croatian, German, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Polish, Ruthenian, Scots, Serbian, and Slovak parishes flourished.  These were the most visible symbols of North Braddock’s demographic riches.  But an even more powerful one was membership in unions.

The USW, UMW, IBEW, and other unions reflected the diversity just described, and did more.  By wrapping their arms around second- and third-generation Americans, by showing them that, whatever their origins, they had far more in common than in opposition, unions created a powerful force for tolerance and non-violent activism.

Toad would have appreciated that activism …

The Ex Lax Paradigm

As a child of three, I regularly patrolled the 1300 block of Bell Avenue in North Braddock, pushing my toy shopping cart.  (Unlike today’s, my cart was shiny metal, rather than luridly colored plastic.)  The cart’s contents were also only three – a sunny-side-up faux fried egg, a tiny box of fake Tide, and an even smaller box of just-as-counterfeit Ex Lax.

As I walked the beat, I chatted with neighbors and relatives.  There were several of the latter on the block: Bubba (a.k.a. Grandma) Petrovsky, Aunt Martha, Aunt Dorothy, and even Cousin Betty, who’d run a speakeasy during Prohibition, but now had a legal imbibing establishment.

On this occasion, it was Aunt Dorothy who asked, “What did you get when you went shopping, Michele?”  Fancying myself urbane and knowledgeable, I replied, “This is an egg; it tastes real good.  That’s Tide; it gets your clothes clean.  And this is Ex Lax; it makes you poop.”

When my erudite explanation about the efficacy of Ex Lax evoked, not oohs and aahs but rather smiles, I was miffed.  I couldn’t understand that reaction.  After all, the information I’d conveyed was completely correct.  Why were it and I not taken seriously, and given the respect we deserved?

Dissonance of that sort has followed me throughout my life.  In adulthood, one example of the Ex Lax Paradigm stands out in my mind.  I was working as a technical writer, documenting the work of a number of engineers and programmers.  While I have a background in software, it’s not the kind of software those folks – almost exclusively male – dealt with every day.  But while I couldn’t have reproduced their work, I did document it, and well and clearly.  Several of my engineer co-workers were kind enough to compliment me on what I’d produced.  Except for one gentleman, who read me off over the phone for a mistake that turned out not to be on my part, but on his.  When I pointed that out to him, he simply persisted in his criticism, concluding with the observation that what he viewed as my shortcomings in technical understanding were because I am female.

The episode ended with my slamming down the phone and spitting out “Don’t you condescend to me, you smug son of a bitch!”  Or nearly ended.  Several of my engineer and programmer buddies who happened to be around my cubicle reacted in faux horror and fear at my outburst, and took the sting out of the moment as a result.

It’s okay for folks to smile at you.

The 1300 Block

I lived the first 12 years of my life on the 1300 block of Bell Avenue in North Braddock, PA.

On that block, I regularly heard five languages other than English.

On that block, I interacted daily with members of at least eight different ethnic groups.

From the corner of that block, I could look down past the Pennsy tracks to Braddock, and see the spires of that many ethnic parishes.

Is it any wonder that Toad's mantra of "Excitement!  Adventure!  Change!"  rang true with me?

Diamonds Everywhere

As a child, I thought diamonds were everywhere.  The graphite on the sidewalks in North Braddock, the byproduct of the Edgar Thompson steel mill, shone like tiny jewels when the sun was on them.  But the most precious-seeming stones were those in the track bed of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Those tracks ran parallel to but a few blocks below our home.  We regularly went to the tracks, to watch the trains, wave to the engineers, and shout to them to "toot your horn" (which almost invariably they did).  But we did more.  We gathered up what we thought might be real diamonds-in-the-making.  Then we took those to a local jeweler.

That gentleman was kind enough to indulge our imaginations.  Each time we brought him our trove, he got out his jeweler's loup and used it to study our finds.  Only after careful examination of same did he, gently, break the news to us that what we'd found weren't diamonds, nor on the way to becoming same.

I don't remember the jeweler's name, or that of his shop.  I do remember, fondly, those trips to the lower part of Braddock Avenue, and our consulting with our own personal gemologist.

Small things, small things ...