12
Aug
Sandpiper at surf”s edge, Assateague, VA, May 2008
During our newlywed days in Baltimore, Seelye began his dissertation. Early mornings he walked to his lab, returning about 5 pm for a 45-minute run, bath, and dinner. Usually he spent two more hours after dinner in the lab.
I mourned my mother, wrote thank you notes for lovely wedding gifts that manifest to this day the love held for both our families and friends. I read cookbooks and searched Baltimore markets for fresh and new ingredients, learning scientifically to plan, assemble, and produce nutritious and multi-ethnic meals.
Of his mother Lucy’s cooking Seelye claimed that college food was better, but she had discovered Adele Davis and bequeathed to us blended smoothies, use of whole grains, and son Carl’s favorite carrot cake, the cream cheese icing decorated with healthy currants and candy red hots. While Seelye delighted in my mother Grace Mary’s meals, her advancing alcoholism rendered consistent teaching and reliability dicey. I did make sure to learn her vinaigrette, stove-top souffled omelets, and the festive Seeley family rolled stuffed crepe recipe called “Germans”. During my high school years, the Bulgarian-born neighbor, Jeannie Robell had schooled me to eastern European delights, Russian borscht, baklava, chicken and leek pies, bureki, even the process of presenting a sheep’s head!
To compose his title and opening sentence, pad in hand, Seelye stretched out on our sofa and I on the polished wooden floor of our sunny walk-up apartment, head to toe so we could talk. He intoned variations on “The Slow Motion of a Finite Flat Plate Towed Through a Viscous Stratified Fluid,” convulsing us in giggles. The word flat cried out for a companion silent e. Not intuitive with the physics, repetition imprinted the words. I grasped the metaphor of the forward and rearward wakes generated in the wave tank of salt-layered water of graduated densities. How to cut in life a forward wake of appropriate energy, confidence, buoyancy, neither too weak, nor too strong?
In 2008 we visited Gettysburg, PA, during the 145th anniversary of the battle, July 1-4. Narrated by Morgan Freeman, the explanatory film in the brand-new Visitors Center raises three questions: 1. What is the meaning of the union? 2. How to end slavery? 3. What is the meaning of citizenship? Accompanying the narration, the historic pictures of African Americans as slaves, free persons, and soldiers enlivened the Civil War more than I had ever experienced. That the narrator emphasized also that the third question is still most active today resonated with Sarah Starkweather’s doctoral thesis on issues of citizenship for expatriate Americans, their children, power to vote, and secure Congressional representation. Sarah and our son Carl married in Seattle on July 20th.
Although the scenery of Gettysburg is pastoral and beautiful, the bloodshed was horrific and sadness pervades the memorial stones. Cubic markers at ankle height along both lines record L.F. and R. F. for left flank and right flank, indicating just how densely packed the combatants stood, how vulnerable the men, horses, trees and plants were to the intense fire. Philadelphians, 80 miles away, heard the bombardments.
Today, those three same questions loom in our public and private lives: How to create and preserve union, how to end slavery, gender/racial stereotypes, and what does citizenship mean? What are our wakes, fore and aft? How to be a wake, be awake?
Sailing to and away from Rodebay/Oqaatsut, Greenland, 17 August 2008
Leaving Upernavik, Greenland, watercolor by Maria Coryell-Martin, 2005