Patum Peperium

A Notice From The Proprietress To All Club Members

Madame's Nightshirt

Mrs. Peperium

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

It is time for a woman to take the bull by the horns and observe the obvious: Educating women as well as granting them the right to own property, vote, earn billions, and kill their unborn children has not made them happy creatures. They are not even contented. What is worse, they don't even understand that all that education, all that property, all those votes and all those murdered children are exactly what has made them into such nasty creatures. So, in hopes of returning women to what they once were, at Patum Peperium, from this day forward, men come first.

As a result, please note the following changes to Patum Peperium's rules and bylaws: 

1. Female members are now to be referred to as ladies.  As such, club ladies are expected to act, dress, walk, and talk like ladies. The wearing of trousers by a club lady, no matter how well tailored, is forbidden.  Hunting and riding kits are the exceptions, though all club ladies participating in equestrian sports shall be expected to be proficient with the side saddle by January 1, 2010. The wearing of knee highs by any of the ladies or gentlemen of the club is forbidden as well--the exception being a medical necessity. If that is the case, your surgeon shall provide a written note to prove a medical rather than mental condition exists.  

2. Smoking for the club men is in allowed in every room, including the library and the closet under the main stairway. Club ladies may smoke, if they must, in the Ladies Loo, only.  If a gentleman does not smoke, he is expected to take up the sport immediately. 

3. Speaking of sport, the club men and their male guests are allowed to carry concealed weapons at all times. Club men are allowed, indeed expected, to shoot the waitstaff if the waitstaff forgets its place or gets their drink or meal orders incorrect. However, duels with fellow club men are not allowed on the premises. Go off blog and shoot it out if you must.  However, Patum Peperium is a sporting club and as such mortal shots to visiting Princeton Club men in the Tap Room only are allowed on leap years.  Though it must be noted that if a shot to a visiting Princeton club man is not mortal, the poor shot shall be handed over to the constabulary immediately. And the club's legal team will not be called in to mount his defense as there isn't one. 

4. The following rooms are now Men Only

The James Bond Room.

The Art Gallery

The Turkish Bath

This is to allow unrestricted and polite conversation among the club men.  Any lady, member or guest, that enters these rooms uninvited has violated club rules. If abuse or crusty dinner rolls are hurled at her from the club men, well too bad.  Do not expect me to come to your defense.

5. As long as both the club ladies and men conduct themselves like gentlemen, all will be well. Violations of the above-stated rules will lead to immediate expulsion--a decision that may be overturned only on the appeal of 3 members in good standing.

The Proprietress

Mrs. Peperium

Well, If I've Gotta Go...

Poet's Coroner

Mr. Peperium

In former times, the legend goes,

Birds who drew the short straw chose

The ways and means of their demise.

This one picked two breasts, two thighs.

Happy Thanksgiving 

8

Great Balls Of Cheese

Madame's Nightshirt

Mrs. Peperium

Back in the days when I was doing the corporate housewife routine, one July I met Mr. P in New York City.  He had been away for about 3 weeks, somewhere, shooting something [commercials] for one of the soon-to-be either defunct or green U. S. car companies.  Mr. P had flown to New York to edit the spots and I joined him there for fun and frivolity.  Now many great and wonderful things happened that week but all these many years later 3 come first to mind:

 I came to believe in Transubstantiation.

 I witnessed a peaceful transference of power.

 I met a great cheese.  

Let's begin with the easiest first; accepting the Doctrine of Transubstantiation. Mr. P and I are the thoroughly boring types.  You know, the kind that actually go to Church while on vacation (me) or on a business trip (him) rather than sleep in and order a champagne-laced room service breakfast for two on the company's dime.  And since I had heard the rector of my Episcopal parish from my Boston days was now at St. Thomas 5th Avenue, we had made plans for my mother to hop an early train into the City, meet her at Grand Central and hoof it over to St. Thomas for morning services. Then have lunch and do some genealogical-related exploration down near the Old City Hall before putting her back on an afternoon train out to Connecticut.

All went according to plan until we reached St. Thomas.  Oh, we reached the Church in time, it was just that my old rector was on summer holiday and we had a visiting priest, I think.  But that disappointment was quickly made up during the exchange of peace with the surprise of a friend from England seated a few pews behind us who happened to be in the City for for the weekend.  But seeing that friend from England was not the only surprise in the pews that day, the other surprise was a banned book. Yes, St. Thomas employed a banned book to conduct its religious worship services. This would be the 1928 Book of Common Prayer (BCP).  To those of you not familiar with the all the baked twaddle and mental illness that goes on underneath the roof of the Episcopal Church these days, the 1928 Book of Common Prayer has been banned by all of the purple rainbowed, tolerant, loving, and welcoming to all  Episcopal Churches in this country.  This is because those Episcopalians believe the '28 BCP is  against women and their fellow travelers.  And while these Episcopalians are most happy to embrace heresy and whatnot for themselves and force it on the rest of the world, the one they they will not tolerate is anyone or anything that remotely appears to be against women and their fellow travelers. By the time I was sitting in the pews at St. Thomas, I had already learned the hard way that even though I was a woman as well as baptized and confirmed during the reign of the '28 Prayer Book, I could not express a preference for it aloud or I too would be accused of being against women and their fellow travelers.  So, it's not hard for you dear readers to imagine how great my delight was to be able to finally worship freely in the pews of an Episcopal Church.  My delight only grew as I watched my mother, whose parish had been using the '79 Book of Common Prayer since its publication just slip in the old '28 tape from somewhere in the back of her mind and recite the prayers and responses from memory without even glancing at the card the size of a proper menu St. Thomas had placed in all of the pews.

Now, again for those of you not in the know St. Thomas is what is considered in the Anglican/Episcopalian world a High Church or Anglo-Catholic parish.  In Boston I had attended a High Church/Anglo Catholic parish and loved it.  However the Episcopal diocese of Michigan was not as tolerant as the Boston one. And it was far more liberal which somehow always manages to translate itself into to much less freedom of worship for the rest of us.  The Bishop of Michigan was at that time engaged in open warfare with the 2 Anglo-Catholic parishes in our diocese.  Mr. P and I just wanted to go to church and not be in a war so, in spite of being High Church types we took what we believed at the time was cough, cough, the easier road and joined what is called in Episcopal/Anglican circles, a Low Church parish.  And yes, it was lower than we ever thought a parish could be but I am digressing.  So, suffice it to say, I had not been to a High Church service for years and never one in such a splendid setting as St. Thomas.  My old parish on Beacon Hill was much more down to earth architecturaly,  What almost blew me down and would have if I hadn't already been on my knees was not only the discernible reverence of the 3 priests during the Consecration but instead of facing us, they faced the high altar, standing in a straight line, one right after the next down the stairs that led up to the altar.  Wow, they acted as if something was really happening during the Consecration.  Our Low Church in Michigan had stopped using it's beautiful hand-carved high altar decades earlier.  They had, thanks to Vatican II, taken to employing a flimsy Danish Modernesque table a whacky parishoner with money had made in his basement. Maybe it was just me but Communion always seemed more as if we were having Tequila Sunrises with Jesus rather than partaking of the Lord's Supper.  So, the proper tone of reverence set by St. Thomas' 3 priests during the Consecration was having a profound effect upon me which only grew when the priest presiding over the Consecration turned, walked down the steps from the altar with the other two priests behind him and approached the kneeling Congregation holding the chalice up in one hand and in his other, over the chalice was the biggest Communion wafer I had ever seen, outside of a BBC production of Dracula, and said,

Behold the Lamb of God 

who taketh away the sins of the world.

Those words hit me straight between the eyes. I responded aloud but quietly, "Oh my gosh! - It really is, isn't it?" I approached the Communion rail with my most reverential attitude to date because I believed, most fervently for the first time, that I was actually partaking of the Body and Blood. 

All these years later, I cannot say if it was by the time we got back to our pew but I know it was soon, very soon before I began asking (demanding really) of Mr. P,to tell me where this priest had gotten that line. I had never heard a priest say it before at that point in the service and if they had, well, I would have known all these years that it was truly Transubstantiation that was going on during the Consecration.  Mr. P was confused about where the priest gotten the line.  He knew enough to know the priest hadn't made it up, and it was obvious it did not come from the service we were following in '28 BCP because the words were not printed on the cards in our pews so he concluded it must have come from an even older version of the Book of Common Prayer. Which did make sense because the priest was an Englishman and in England, both the '28 and '79 BCPs were never approved of by Parliament so they are actually banned there which means  they are allowed to still use the 1662 BCP.  I was determined to find out where this line came from but my investigation had to wait until I got back to Michigan.

And when I got back to Michigan I carefully examined my '79 ad '28 BCPs for the line and could not find it anywhere in either.  So I called my mother and had her look through her 1867 or so edition of the BCP and it wasn't in there.  I moved on to having an English friend go through her 1662 and guess what?  It wasn't there as well.  Where had the priest at St. Thomas gotten this line?  Since my curiosity was more than peaked, I went and visited my local Episcopal know-it-all who happened to be the money man at our parish.  I asked him if he knew where the priest had gotten the line. His answer gobsmacked me like a sock full of wet sand to the back of the head,

"He got it from the Catholics."

The moment those words left his mouth, my nice, (sort of) comfortable and completely tasteful Episcopalian life began imploding under the weight of all the inherent structural inconsistencies of the Anglican Church and the Tudor Settlement.  "But I believe it really is the Body and Blood.  Am I allowed to?" I asked.  My Episcopalian know-it-all gave me the response he thought I wanted to hear,  "We are a big tent church.  We allow those who believe it is Transubstantiation to believe it and those that don't believe in Transubstantiation to not believe in it."  "But it doesn't matter what the people believe, what does the Church believe?"  I asked, completely unaware this was a self-inflicted mortal blow to my Protestant days.  "You'll find it under the 39 Articles.  We believe it is repugnant to the word of God and, basically...superstition."

"Superstition? What do you mean...superstition?"

"I mean superstition."

"So, the Episcopal Church lets people believe in superstition if they want to?"

"Yes.  But not everyone considers it superstition."

"But the Church isn't everyone.  The Church is the Church and it believes it is superstition."

"Yes, but the Church allows you to believe what you want to believe."

"It doesn't matter what I believe.  Or what any priest believes. The Church says it doesn't happen. And why would they let me believe in something they do not believe happens anyway? That makes no sense."

That was when I first learned of the nasty things the Church of England has done to those who simply (literally) believed in the Doctrine of Transubstantiation and why the Church learned the hard way (literally) to let those who believe in Transubstantiation to continue to believe in it.  My, what a mean Church but again I am digressing. As you can imagine, since this conversation was taking place with the money guy of our Episcopal parish and Mr. P was the type the money guy could always touch for a fiver, I didn't tell him what was dawning as he filled me in on some of the history of the Church that had been most noticeably left out of my Sunday School education : I had to become one of those Catholics the Church of England has tormented, locked up, stripped of all of their worldly goods, killed, kept out of college and far worse, not allowed them to own a horse because of their sincere believe in Transubstantiation.  All these years later, I sometimes wonder if the outcome would have been any different had the Anglo-Catholic priest at St. Thomas had really been in top form that day.  He and his two assisting priests had borrowed heavily what they had liked from the Old (Catholic) Mass. Well, if they had stayed true to the form of the Old Mass they ought to have been speaking in Latin. And when the priest  approached the kneeling congregation with chalice and consecrated host in hand he ought to have said something like,

Agnus Dei, qui tolis peccata mundi. 

And if he had, the meaning would have flown right over my head and gobsmacked someone in the pews behind me. However, since my mother, in her school days, was a Latin scholar, chances are very good, at lunch I would have learned what the heck it was the priest had said....

To be continued...

Sitting Under The Apple Tree With Ol' JP, II

Madame's Nightshirt

Mrs. Peperium

The View from Cozzen's Hotel, West Point, New York

I.

II.

Like so many of the fascinating yet completely contradictory Americans, John Pierpont (JP) Morgan was from Connecticut. However his mother Julia was not.  She was from Boston and was the daughter of perhaps an even more contradictory man than the son she brought into the world, the Rev. John Pierpont. The Rev. Pierpont is largely remembered today for being the grandfather of the great robber baron, JP Morgan as well the father of the man, James Pierpont who penned Jingle Bells. But few recall that James Pierpont while living in Savannah, also penned a popular ditty of its day, Colored Coquette.  This is an odd contradiction because the Reverend Pierpont was one of the great Unitarian Preachers/abolitionists that Boston grew tired of hearing from, excuse me, took to its collective bosom to bring about the peaceful end of slavery by shipping Beecher's Bibles (guns) to Kansas and funding John Brown to blow up anything he could. But perhaps again it is not contradictory because Rev. Pierpont's parish once brought him up on charges of moral impurity because the good Reverend was a potty mouth and employed the word whore.  So James Pierpont bested his father by employing coquette instead of whore.  Whereas the Rev.'s grandson, JP Morgan, in his advanced years, bested his grandfather by more than employing the word whore but I'm getting ahead of myself. 

JP Morgan was very well-educated. His father had sent him to high school in Boston, then a brief study period in Switzerland and finally on to Germany for college. While JP excelled in math, he was also extremely interested in theology and actively studied it. Being at school in Germany in the 1850's, it is not ridiculous speculation on my part to assume he must have read both Schleiermacher and Spinoza.  And this might be when contradiction must have got its foothold on JP's mathematically inclined mind. We know contradiction did get a hold of him sartorially at this point because when he returned to his family, now living in London, he had changed.  He had left them as a boy and returned as a dandy.  JP's father, a most serious and successful banker did not not really understand his son's new found fondness not only for well tailored suits with swiss dotted vests and bright cravats but for drinking beer and smoking cigars too. So JP's dad did what he thought he had to do to save his son; he sent him to New York City to shake the German out of him. JP went to work for a merchant banking firm and soon he was circulating and worshipping in the best of circles. It was at Newport during the high season of 1857, that JP was introduced the woman who would not only capture his imagination but his heart as well, Amelia.  

The summer of 1857 was Amelia's first (and only I think) summer in Newport.  Her father had just a few summers earlier taken his family to Saratoga to enjoy the scenery and while they were they, he lost his eldest daughter. Naturally being a loving father, he was most reluctant to take his younger daughter to Newport as he felt the same would happen with her. And as history tells us, the father's fears were well founded.  Amelia met JP and a strong friendship began among the two.  Amelia, 2 years JP's senior, was a very vivacious brunette who studied German and also enjoyed a keen interest in theology.  Like JP during the winter months, she lived in New York City. The following summer Amelia's older sister and husband and their growing family had taken one of the cottages at the posh Cozzen's Hotel on the Hudson River in West Point. Amelia joined them and not too long afterwards JP Morgan appeared in West Point for the first time in his life.  Years later, he would build his summer cottage Cragston nearby.  That summer JP was a constant weekend visitor to the cottage, attending church and playing with Amelia's nieces and nephews.  JP took a shine to the youngest one, a toddler named "Fair".  JP bestowed upon Fair the nickname of Hercules.  You would know Hercules better as Henry Fairfield Osborn, the longtime president of the Museum of Natural History. 

The following winter found JP's father in New York on a long visit for business reasons. He was scheduled to return to his family in London in February and he asked Amelia's parents if she could accompany him back to London to visit with his wife and daughters. Amelia's family gave it much thought and eventually agreeing and promising to fetch Amelia later in the Spring so her family could do a Grand Tour. Amelia, sharing a stateroom on a Cunard steamer with JP's cousin Sarah set sail for London. Amelia, being from Connecticut, was naturally an excellent horsewoman.  She often spent her time, since her early teen days, in Fairfield driving a pony cart around her family's summer cottage and through the orchard.  When she reached London she had a riding costume made and JP's father accompanied her riding, (she on a side saddle) in the park each day, weather permitting.  After a few months of enjoying herself immensely among JP's family, Amelia's family did come over to retrieve her in May. After her father finished with meeting with all of his business contacts in London, Amelia and her family set off on a Grand Tour.  By July they returned to London finding JP waiting there and he took the reins over from his father.  JP and Amelia set off on the daily rides in the park as weather was almost always permitting.  Then a few weeks later, the whole lot of them sailed back to New York on the same ship and that had to be a most gay crossing. Then early on in the next early winter ('60), the warm friendship between Amelia and JP which had been steadily ripening for many years now had blossomed into love.  They were engaged.  The marriage was on hold as JP's father felt JP though deeply in love, at 24 years of age, was too young to marry.  

In March of '61, Amelia, though in happily love and caught up in a steady whirlwind of social engagements with JP had not been acting been really gay. Which for her was unusual. Then she grew sick at was first thought of as a cold.  It settled in her lungs.  She removed to the summer cottage in Fairfield and spent the late spring and summer months driving her pony cart around the grounds and through the orchard.  JP was again a frequent visitor and she must have driven him all about.  Though Amelia did not appear to be seriously ill, by Fall she was.  The doctors advised sending her to Algiers for recovery. JP insisted that they be married now and he take her there himself.  Both families consented.  (Now, I've always heard of the wedding as taking place at the cottage in Fairfield but can find no written record that it did so it may have taken place in the family home now on 14th Street in New York but the rest of the story is accurate.) The wedding was a small intimate candlelight gathering of family at home in the late evening in November.  Amelia was beautiful yet so weak, JP held her in his arms throughout the service.  They set sail for Liverpool soon after.  And once there, they  transferred to a steamer that took them on to Algiers. Unfortunately when they arrived Algiers had an epidemic going around and Amelia, due to her weakened state, soon caught it.  JP removed her to Nice, France where she was convalescing but not really recovering.  Her mother and younger brother reached them there in very early February.  Amelia looked frail but was able to sit with them most days and even take tea as well as dinner.  After one terrible night of suffering 2 weeks to the day after her mother's arrival, Amelia died.

An "beautiful English funeral" was held for Amelia in Nice said by the "minister of the English Church" there.  The arrangements for the return of Amelia's body to America were made but since there was not a boat for the living to return America for a time, the decision was made for, JP, Amelia's mother and younger brother traveled by private carriage to Rome by way of Genoa. The carriage ride along the Mediterranean with the change of air and scenery was a restorative one.  JP and his mother-in-law attended "the service on Ash Wednesday in the Pope's Chapel in the Vatican where the Cardinals of Rome were all present in their rich robes. They then sailed home to bury Amelia.

This past summer, my mother and I were in a very old cemetery (founded 1704) by the sea in Fairfield looking for relatives of ours.  Out of a hundred or two of the surviving markers, two were unusually opulent for what is, in essence, a simple colonial graveyard maintained by the local DAR ladies.  As I wandered over to the obviously older opulent marker, a 8' or so tall obelisk in the center of a family plot in what seems like the center of the graveyard, I discovered it to be the grave of one of Fairfield's more reputable citizens, Roger Minnott Sherman.  I wandered around Roger's family plot reading the headstones and those of the family plots alongside and then decided to head over to the other opulent marker to see who was buried underneath it. 

Unlike all of the other markers in the graveyard this one was not carved from Connecticut limestone, it was of what I would described as a pinky grey shiny granite. The stone was simple yet very large.  Almost as tall as I, if not taller.  And it was the only stone like it in the large family plot. The name of the occupant below, due to the ravages of time and the sea air, was only discernible if I read the stone at an angle.  It was Amelia. 

Her stone read (from memory)

Amelia Morgan

beloved wife of John Pierpont 

Gone But Not Lost.

Gone but not lost.  Simple and true.  Perfectly beautiful.  And perfectly tragic.

JP Morgan who, in the years following Amelia's death, would go on to become the great and fancy JP Morgan.  But all that JP accumulated did not diminish his sincere affection for Amelia.  Every year he returned to this very small and humble Colonial graveyard on either their wedding anniversary or the anniversary of Amelia's death.  His own and far more opulent grave marker, carved 51 years after Amelia's death would be carved from the very same pinky grey granite-like stone as Amelia's.  Though his final resting place was not to be alongside of Amelia, it was alongside of his second wife, Frances, who though not from Connecticut, had summered in Maine since she was 12.

To be continued...

Editor's note: this may not be all exact but for a housewife who is not a historian it's pretty darn near close.

The Road To Surfdom

Madame's Nightshirt

Mrs. Peperium

The principle 

that the end justifies the means

 is in individualist ethics 

regarded as the denial of all morals. 

In collectivist ethics 

it becomes necessarily 

the supreme rule.

-Fredrick Hayek

More here. 

(pun intended)

A Jolly Christmas Idea

Madame's Nightshirt

by Mrs. Peperium

The Fiat Jolly, 1958-ish

Wouldn't you love to awake on Christmas morning and find this under your tree?  The seats and dashboard are made of wicker, the tires are white walls and the hubcaps are spokes which keep the brakes cool. There's a space in the back for a picnic hamper and it uses no horn.  Only a bell.

Could a car get more civilized?

Sitting Under The Apple Tree With Ol' JP

Madame's Nightshirt

Mrs. Peperium

 

 

The house I grew up in was built in 1926.  The widow of the President of the Gas Company bought a parcel of land on what had been the fruit orchard of a very prominent estate of an even more prominent family.  The property had been in this family since before the American Revolution but it took the Industrial Revolution to really bring home the bacon.  The head of the family at the time, a good man with a good head for numbers, had taken his young family into New York City where he not only made out really well, he was really well liked.  He and his business associates went on to found the Illinois Central Railroad.  But before he did that he decided to build his growing family a proper cottage on the old family property to escape from the City during the summer months. Or when plagues hit.  And he did.  Which is why I grew up a mere hop, skip and jump away from one of the first private residences in America done in the new (at the time) American Gothic style. And considering the family stories I have related in this space, the great American writer,Washington Irving, if he were making the story of my life a Gothic tale to delight Andrew Cusack, could not have situated me in a more perfect spot, but I digress. 

The American Gothic cottage is still standing to this day.  More than that, it is still occupied by the very same family.  That is a rare accomplishment in America.  But they are a very rare family.  My mother is friendly with the family members who currently reside in the cottage.  A few years back, she was invited to take afternoon tea. The lady of the cottage is into history and she had a little historical display of her family in the sitting room.  Among the items there was a handbill for purchases of fine personal items made by the man who had built the cottage.  The hand bill bore the signature of  my great -great-great grandfather who in the 1830's had moved from the pre-Revolutionary War family farm in Massachusetts to New York City to help his cash-strapped brother-in-law out with his dry goods store down by the Old City Hall.  My grandfather, understanding English goods were all the rage, sent another man to England to bring back English sterling silver flatware and personal items.  He then sent him back to bring back English silversmiths and employed them to make him items under his own hallmark - yes, thanks to my most excellent grandfather I am one of the few Americans that can claim to have their very own sterling silver hallmark. Not that I actually own any of the sterling silver that bears the hallmark but again I'm digressing. And then my grandfather sent the man to Paris to bring back jewels -paste at first, and then when Americans were rich enough, the real stuff.  And apparently the man who built the cottage was a customer of my grandfather's which makes sense as my grandfather and his family resided in a brownstone on Warren Street on Old New York. This man who co-founded the Illinois Central Railroad and his family lived just one street over and he was known to possess a taste for fine English things for he had hired the English architect, Joseph C. Wells to design his family's American Gothic cottage.  Today the cottage  has about 30 rooms, 11 staircases, 13 fireplaces, six stories and one of the greatest rooms to ever built in America, the book tower.  When the lady of cottage learned the handbill in her little historical display bore the signature of one of my mother's direct male descendants, and being the kind of lady that males are important to, she sent it off and had a museum quality copy of  it made for my mother and presented it to her as a gift.  Like I said, they are a very rare family.

But enough about the cottage for now and let us move on to its orchard.  In the 1920's the orchard, no longer needed, was divided into parcels and put up for sale.  Since the lady who built my childhood home was the recent widow of the gas company, and she was moving out of her oceanfront estate in Greens Farms to reside in the orchard with only one maid, the Gas Company still being a place at the time where niceties were observed decided to honour her late husband by running a natural gas tunnel through the orchard, right up to our home only. The other homes in the neighborhood may have had other perks like their own elevators, greenhouses, and pools, but ours was the only one with natural gas heat.  It was not uncommon while growing up to hear the mothers of neighborhood chums complain how difficult it was to incorporate the old cast iron radiators into their decorating schemes.  Even sighing aloud about how lucky my mother was.  It was odd to consider that the mothers considered my mother lucky when unlike them,  she did not have a husband and had to work for a living.  But this envy might just give a window into why, in just a few years time, our town enjoyed the one of the highest, if not the highest, rate of divorce in the country.  And may just be why today my mother's neighborhood is largely populated by double income couples but again I am digressing. 

Since our home had natural gas heating, it also meant out next to our thick slate patio in the backyard was an in the ground gas grill.  Talk about a luxury item in the 1960's. This grill stood next to one of the two surviving apple trees from the original fruit orchard.  Our backyard was really like a small orchard itself as we not only had the two apple trees, but a pear, peach and cherry tree, too.  Unfortunately for us, my father decided to cut down the cherry tree before he divorced us, thereby dispelling me early of the childish notion that only those that cannot tell lies cut down cherry trees but again I digress.  The apple trees are unlike any apple trees you've ever seen. They are about 50 feet in height with enormous canopies.  

I can recall one fine spring day (I know it was spring because the apple trees were in full bloom and the air was heavy with their fragrance) and I was about 11 or so years of age.  I was out under the apple trees practicing my archery.  Yes, my mother allowed me to play with a bow and arrow.  More than that, she also let me shoot my brother's BB gun - using the fallen apples from the trees placed on the top of a wooden step ladder as targets but the gun was taken away when my brother bagged the neighbor's grand piano.  I was getting quite good at archery and decided to put my arm to the test.  I wanted to see if I could actually shoot my arrows over the tops of the apple trees.  So, I stepped back in a classic archer pose, pointed my bow upwards and drew my string back as far as I could.  Then I let go.  And the arrow did exactly as it had been directed to do.  It not only cleared the top of closest tree but both apple trees.  I didn't see where it landed but I really didn't care.  I was so thrilled.  It was just as I was standing back in my classic archer pose, drawing my string back to attempt a repeat of my performance with another arrow, when the husband from next door appeared from behind the about 3 -4 foot wide trunk of one of the old maple trees that bordered our properties.  He had my arrow in hand and his face was red, well, as red as an apple.

I stopped what I was doing and my mouth hung open as he unleashed one of the best cases of anger I've ever developed in anyone.  After a few moments his words became intelligible and I was able to understand him. Apparently I had almost killed him.

Imagine my surprise.

Unbeknown to me when I set out that day to shoot my bow and arrows, my neighbor had taken the day off from work to plant the flats of flowers his wife had ordered him to.  The flowers were to flank the gravel path she had earlier ordered him to install in their backyard.  My neighbor was hard at work on his hands and knees, trowel in hand and with his back to me.  Thanks to the shrubbery, trees, and a small privacy fence, I never even saw him.  But as he screamed, when my arrow landed not 3 inches from his side, he realised immediately what I was up to.  After stressing how close I had come to killing him, he broke my arrow in two over his knee and told me I was never allowed to shoot any of them again.   Because next time I might not be so lucky.  Then he threw my arrow down, turned around and stormed off to finish planting his marigolds.  I ran into my house.  So, if you've ever wondered what killed my Olympic Archery career, the near killing of my next door neighbor snuffed it out completely.

Oh, and if you ever wondered what happened between my neighbor and I, a few years later I became the babysitter to his little girls. They had appeared in the years since I given up my archery aspirations. He and his wife liked me so much I traveled on very posh vacations with them. His little girls liked me so much the youngest called me "Mommy" instead of her mother. When I went off to college, he presented me with a monogrammed hoof pick "to fight the boys off with" as he had once been engaged to a girl who went to my finishing school and understood their charms.

But this story is not about the man I nearly killed by shooting my arrow over the apple trees, it's about the young man from Connecticut who, about 80 years earlier, had fallen in love under the apple trees, J P Morgan.

And technically speaking JP didn't exactly fall in love under the apple trees, he fell in love while riding his horse in Hyde Park in London. But I like to think his love blossomed under those trees as it probably did.

To be continued.....

Book Beat, Part 1

Poets' Coroner

Mr. Peperium

Since we all voted for change I’m trying a different approach this year. In an effort at reaching across the aisle, from now on I will be giving my columns titles that sound like PBS programs that nobody watches (but everybody pays for). In passing I might also observe, in the most bi-partisan spirit, that since a concerted effort is being made to link Obama's inauguration with the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth, it might be fitting to remember that the Great Emancipator once observed that you can fool all of the people some of the time...

 But I digress. Our writers (and previous contributors) should take this as the opening shot of Patum Peperium's annual Christmas Book List. Instead of me publishing an impossibly long list of reviews and offering them up as possible gifts ideas--or fair warnings--for you and yours, I’m going to put up a few reviews here and a few reviews there. You are all invited to do the same. Decking the (book) stalls, as it were. Mrs. P shall soon be emailing the invitation to contribute so stay alert.  Especially our readers in India.
 

A Struggle for Power. This book is nothing short of a revelation. For three years now, the object of all my recreational reading has been to answer one question: Why did the American Revolution happen? Theodore Draper’s answer is stunning. As far back as the late 17th Century, British officialdom was anticipating the day the colonies would grow up—shedding the strictures of the mercantilist system—and strike out on their own. While the familiar story of colonial military weakness vs. imperial strength is true, it’s just as true that by the time shots were traded on Lexington Green, Britain’s prosperity rested firmly—and for all intents and purposes solely—on her colonial markets. All of Britain's colonial policy after 1763 was driven by this unsettling realization: they had become dependent on their dependencies. Worse, both theory and history told them these dependencies were destined to someday break away. Further, that monster born of the Enlightenment, official statistics, indicated that in the the two sure indexes of power, population and trade, America was destined to overtake the mother country within a generation or so. Of course, colonial thinkers and leaders were just as aware of these facts and trends. In Draper’s hands the war becomes  largely inevitable.
 
I first read this book when it came out in 1996 and I have to admit I got a lot more out of it the second time around. Draper’s habit of throwing out names like James Otis sans explanation didn’t throw me like it did twelve years earlier. The good news for you is that Struggle is still readily available in a handsome paperback edition. But for all the good things I could say about this one, buyer beware: Dr. Johnson’s quip about Paradise Lost applies. A cross between a straight narrative history and a free-ranging analysis, Draper flits from one mode to the other and sometimes one period to the other in a way that makes you wonder, like the five year old in the back seat, are we there yet? Draper’s habit of recycling quotations to make slightly different points in different chapters lends an eerie echo-chamber effect to the book, making it seem even longer.

John Paul Jones: Sailor, Hero, Father of the American Navy. With his recent revelations about how he really feels about our president-elect (“creepy”) I wonder why Thomas chose to include the term “hero” in the subtitle of this book. Even the mantle of “Father of the American Navy” is, we learn, in dispute among scholars. And given the portrait painted here by Thomas, it’s no wonder.

A touchy, preening peacock of an ego who seems to have had one (admittedly glorious) victory to his name and then dined out on it for the rest of his life. The term “creepy” definitely applies here. As might be expected from a member of the MSM, we get plenty of the American-Revolution-as-Egalitarian-Morality-Play storyline. And as the son of a head gardener on a large estate in Scotland, Jones was probably motivated by some of the feelings that template imposes on his biography. But the book begins with far too much psychologizing backed up by far too little documentary foundation. From there the story is one of a single-minded drive for glory and renown. Of course, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, LaFayette --even the wispy James Madison--were similarly driven. But in the case of Jones you get the—yes, creepy—feeling that there wasn’t anything else behind the drive.
 
But all is not lost. Mrs. P plucked this one out of the stacks at a library sale, figured that a dollar wasn’t too much to hazard on a book that so obviously catered to her husband’s interests. And I have to admit that the chapter on the Bonhomme Richard-Serapis fight is gripping. The rest of the book moves fast—a welcome change of gear after Theodore Draper’s illuminating but methodical approach—but it’s a narrative speed that begins at times to look like mere shallowness of insight.

The Man Makes Me Giggle

Happy Birthday!

The Eccentric Observer

Old Dominion Tory

.

Happy 

233^rd Birthday 

to the 

United States Marine Corps.

 God Bless 

the 

United States of America

and

Success to the Marines!

Semper Fidelis

Happy Say Something Nice About George Brinton McClellan Day

Poet's Coroner

Mr. Peperium

 

One hundred and forty-six years ago today--also a Saturday--George McClellan was in the process of relinquishing command of the Army of the Potomac. He had often referred to it as "my army" and he was right. Picking up the pieces in the aftermath of First Bull Run, he had reorganized it, trained it--even named it--and given it the spirit of dogged determination that would carry it all the way to Appomattox. True, that dogged determination was born of a sense of inferiority--McClellan never tired of reminding his army that it was outnumbered and over time that conviction ossified into an almost fatalistic expectation of defeat. But as everyone who has opened a book on the Civil War knows,  the real inferiority resided in the soul of George McClellan, the author of the defeats from Ball's Bluff to the Peninsula that fueled that fatalistic expectation. Worse, at least to me, was the ease with which he could suggest to higher ups that the men he professed to love so much were perhaps not quite up to the task at hand. 

In short, it's not hard to find fault with George McClellan. Nevertheless, he had his good points as a soldier and I officially designate this day as the day we should remember them. His legacy to his army went beyond a bad case of hero-worship and a psychologically debilitating chip on its collective shoulder. He also contributed materially to the Army of the Potomac's ultimate victory by making two crucial appointments in the aftermath of the Peninsula Campaign: Rufus Ingalls as quartermaster and Henry J. Hunt as Chief of Artillery.

Both men served in these positions to the end of the war. The efficient Ingalls, an Old Army friend of Ulysses Grant, worked hand in glove with the Lieutenant General in the Overland Campaign of 1864. Hunt's direction of the artillery at Gettysburg came close to breaking up Longstreet's final assault  before it even reached the Angle. To the end of his days Hunt insisted that, had his orders to husband ammunition during the Confederate barrage been strictly followed, no Southern infantryman would have reached the stone wall.

Making appointments and organizing army corps are not the occupations of your standard military hero. History, as Nathaniel Greene complained to George Washington, does not remember quartermasters no matter how efficient. But brisk military administration and an eye for talent have their place. These gifts George McClellan possessed in abundance. Even Lincoln, the man whose forbearance McClellan tried most sorely, could be just. As he confessed to his secretary John Hay, if the general could not fight, "he excels at making others ready to fight."

A Room With A View To A Kill, II

Madame's Nightshirt

Mrs. Peperium

A Room With A View To A Kill, I

Dear readers, where do I begin to tell you the story of how great a love can be? Well, being a girl who wore black stockings while at school in Boston and dated Harvard boys, even having a snowball fight with one of them during a snowstorm in Harvard Yard which I lost big time because he was on the baseball team, I could just slip in Andy Williams and let him croon Love Story to you.  But I suspect many of you would not like that. At all. Besides, James Bond is hardly a Harvard boy. And our affair was hardly Love Story, it was something much more real.  I surmise you would rather hear the story of James Bond and myself from me. But, sadly for you, I've never been a kiss and tell type. However, I will share with you how we met.  

It was in Newport (Rhode Island for our overseas readers). There had been a regatta that day and there were sailors from every compass point under the sun at this party.  I had grown tired of my conversations going into needless nautical knots so I turned to a man who was a decade or two my senior and to the not so obvious left of me who I had noticed earlier giving me the once over and pausing noticeably when he reached my breasts.  "Eh, who cares?" I thought before asking him if he sailed.

"I'm neither the sailor nor the writer my father is." he replied.

"Really?" I asked, giggling. "I always think self-deprecating humour is a very good quality in a man. "

"Who's being self-deprecating?" he asked all wide-eyed.

Foolishly I laughed.  It must have been the gin. "So, what does your father write?" I asked.

"Oh, he has a magazine where he's standing athwart history yelling "Stop"."

"Is it stopping?"  I asked him.

"Not if I can help it."

Again, perhaps it was the gin or that I'd read Hamlet plus taken psychology 101 in art school but that remark did cause me to laugh.  And his confidence seemed to get a visible boost from my laughter. "You might enjoy his book on the Queen of England." he said.

"Harumpf.  I don't think so.  Especially if its got Prince Charles, Diana, or Camilla in it."

"No, it takes place well before their time- the 50's and its all about her canoodles."

 

"Her canoodles?"

"Yes."

"Does the Queen really canoodle?   With her husband I mean.  She is the Queen.  And she is English.  Well, no she's German which only makes my next point clearer.  He husband's name might be that of an English Lord, because she gave it to him, but deep down he is a Greek.  And at some point with all men the blood does out, doesn't it? Especially with royal marriages, don't you think?"  

The guy just threw his head back and laughed.   Then he said, "I think I need to stand atop you yelling "Stop!" Which only caused me to laugh.  "One of my father's closest friends is Greek and a writer.  In fact he writes the sex scenes for my books."

"He does?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I'm not very good at it."

"You mean not very good at writing about it, don't you?"  I asked.

"No.  I'm not good at it both in theory and practice."

"Oh."

"Don't tell anyone, please. It could hurt my image. But I am able to understand why you would ask if a nice German Queen sent her English ladies-in-waiting into the Royal Bedchamber with Zorba the Duke.  Shall we stroll about while I tell you all?"  

"Oooh, yeeess we certainly shall."  I replied taking up the arm he was offering.

And stroll about we did. Chatting and laughing as he told me his about father's books and his father's Greek friend's stories of failed hook-ups. Unfortunately for this man whose arm I was still on, he misread my all too obvious admiration for his father's work and mirth for his father's Greek friend's foolishness as admiration for him.  It was when we were passing the darkened and deserted ballroom, he asked if I had ever seen a herringbone patterned  parquet dance floor? 

"No."

"Then you've got to see this one."

The details of what happened next are really much to boorish to go into, so suffice it to say, this writer thought my good humour was evidence of a willingness on my part to play the old Boston parlor game, "Shag the Scion".  And soon I found myself trying to take refuge inside the enormous chandelier suspended in the middle of the still darkened ballroom.  Yes the scion had not turned on the lights so I could see the herringbone patterned parquet floor. I was hanging from the chandelier trying to swing myself up into it with the Scion jumping up and trying to grab my ankles to pull me off of it each time I swung past him.  As Wodehouse might have put it, I felt like a beleaguered garrison  down to it's last cartridges and the water supply giving out who, above the din of the oncoming savages, hears the tramp, tramp, tramp of the United States Marine arriving -as they always do-right on time when the chandelier was suddenly, almost magically, illuminated.

"Does the lady require some assistance?" a voice I did not recognize inquired.

I turned my head in the direction of the voice but was unable to see my Marine Corps rescuer because he had blinded completely me by turning on the chandelier.

"Yes!  Help, please! He's after me and you've gone and blinded me. Some Marine Corps rescue."  I yelled.

"I am not a member of the United States Marine Corps." he replied.

"Well what are you?"  I demanded, still blinded but thinking I was detecting a really wonderful British, maybe even Scottish, accent.

"It's not what I am, it's who I am."  he calmly and very smoothly replied.

Quickly absorbing he was indeed of British origins, I decided to appeal to his stiff upper lip, "OK Sherlock, you obvious haven't figured out that being blind and hanging from a chandelier is not exactly the best position to elicit witty banter from a woman."

"Oh I don't know about that." he said with an obvious smirk - though I couldn't see it.

"Look, since I can't - thanks to you, just tell me who you are so you will move on to getting rid of this creep so I can get down off this chandelier before I fall off and break an ankle in my blinded state."

"Bond...James...Bond."

Right then, as if on cue from Cubby Broccoli, my sight returned.  James Bond was standing right beneath me.  And my eyes understood he was everything Ian Fleming ever said he was.  

"Where's the creep?"  I asked softly.

James pointed in the direction of  French doors that opened to a terrace.  One was ajar.  

"Gone."

"Golly."

 James gently removed me from the chandelier.  We returned to the party, had drinks, enjoyed a light conversation and danced a bit.  The next day he took me sailing. Before I knew how it had happened, he showed me I was wrong. Really wrong. It is totally possible to elicit witty banter from a woman while she's hanging from a chandelier.

This had all happened a few years before James had been detailed by Margaret Thatcher to garrote the Peggy Noonan with her Savowroski crystal-studded g-string.  Peggy really should not have written all that nasty stuff about President Bush and Sarah Palin, or voted Obama. But hey, it's her funeral now.  And it won't be a State one. But who cares? James Bond is on his way to my apartment for dinner. I, of course, must be ready.

To Be Continued...

A Room With A View To A Kill

Madame's Nightshirt

Mrs. Peperium

Many years ago when still in the full bloom of my youth, I was in the kitchen of my apartment with a view of Bunker Hill preparing my dinner after a day at the office. In the midst of sauteing onions, garlic, chopped tomatoes and dried herbs the doorbell rang.  Answering it I found my two of my three landlords standing there, completely potted. Though they were not inebriated enough to have lost their sense of smell. Their noses immediately caught the fragrances coming from the kitchen. One asked if I was entertaining.

" No, I'm  just cooking dinner for myself."

 "You make dinner for yourself dressed like that?" the other one asked.

I looked down to see what confused them.  I was still wearing what I had worn to the office; a very pretty grey dress, black stockings, a rope of pearls, and patent leather heels with an apron tied around my waist. I looked back up at them and answered,

"Yes."

"And it smells this good? asked the other one."

"Well, yes.  It does.  Thank you."

The careful reader may be gathering by now that these two landlords were not like most traditional landlords and they would be gathering rightly.  I had 3 landlords. These two had gone to Harvard together and the third one was one of these drunks' wife.  And if you knew her, you'd understand why the man drank.  After doing extremely well in the business world and then, even better in the inheritance game, the three of them had decided to  get even richer by becoming upscale slumlords. They had snapped up architecturally charming late 19th century flophouses that were conveniently located near the even more architecturally charming Charlestown Naval Yard.  And holding true to the upscale slum lord golden rule of never spending money on your properties, they hired a Fly-By-Night creep (who, according to our 3 landlords when trying to elicit sympathy from my 2 roommates and I, everyone had warned them against hiring) to renovate the former flophouses into posh apartments for Boston's young working girls and boys.

My apartment was more than charming.  It was gorgeous. But, thanks to the Fly-by-Night creep who renovated it, it had major structural flaws.  The FbN Creep had neglected to put insulation between the floor of our apartment and the ceiling of the apartment below us.  And there were three girls in my apartment that all wore 2+ inch heels and walked across the original wide plank maple floorings, every morning and night.  To solve this problem for our downstairs neighbors, our landlords had asked my roommates and I if we would wear carpet slippers, only, while in our apartment.  We had asked for a deduction in our rent in return to which they had naturally declined. Negotiations were still underway when 2 of these landlords had shown up drunk as the skunks they were, to fix the newest problem in our apartment.

Keeping in mind these two landlords had been roommates at Harvard and worked in the corporate lawyering world, they were here on my doorstep, as they informed me to fix my upstairs bathroom.  Yes, you heard that right, they wanted to fix my bathroom. The upstairs shower stall had sprung a leak and was leaking through the ceiling down on to the original wide plank maple flooring.  This discovery was made one morning soon after we moved in when in the middle of a mad dash to get out the door I hit the puddle left by my and my roommate's morning ablutions in my 2" + heels and skidded right across the floor, hit the door and landed in a crumpled heap. Ow.  So, a real plumber had shown up and he determined that the FnN Creep who had renovated the flophouse had not put in whatever was that not only needed but actually code as well underneath the shower stall. This thing not being there was the reason for the daily puddles on the living room floor. The plumber had told my my landlords it was going them to cost several thousand dollars to fix the shower.  And then they'd have to hired some drywallers to replace the ceiling they had cut out to install whatever it was that was needed but was code as well in. These two landlords met had met for drinks at the Copley Hotel to discuss their plight and after enough scotches decided they could actually fix the shower stall themselves.  Which is why they were standing on my doorstep, still dressed as if they were at their posh offices, without any tools.

So, I lent them my bucket and let them go upstairs to fiddle with the shower and resumed cooking my meal with my Old English Sheepdog at my feet.  She was against the terms of the lease that I had signed, and my landlords knew this which is why all of our negotiations were proceeding along with such an unusual amicable attitude from me. The aroma of my Italian dinner wafted up the circular stairs with the original wooden bannister and hand-turned bannister rails to the bathroom at the head of the stairs while a steady stream of water fell through the recessed lighting in  living room ceiling on to the original wide plank floor.  It took the two drunk Harvard-educated corporate lawyers recently turned posh slumlords about 15 minutes to realise two things:

 1. They were not plumbers.

2. They were starving.  

So they departed mumbling about going to grab a bite at The Warren Tavern and sending a plumber along at some point in the future.  The plumber did arrive about 2 months later. It probably took that much time to convince our other landlord (the wife) who had not only gone to Harvard Law School but to La Sorbonne as an undergrad and was a Class A Bitch, that there was a real problem with our shower.  And that problem required her to spend some of her money.  However, she was their problem not mine.  And my landlords' most candid (because they were drunk) reactions to not only my cooking and but to my attire while cooking was one that has stayed with me.  It taught me two very important lessons.

1.  Men like to eat.  

2. And they like it when women not only cook well but like in the bedroom, they appreciate it when women dress well while doing it, too. 

Recently, I have been most amused to watch Sir Basil enter  the world of recipe posting.  Well, let us give the man some credit. This was a bold step for him. Most bold. But as longtime readers know, Sir Basil believes me to be sincerely misguided on many things like men's shoes, James Bond, and sex, - it's all about what the man wants according to him.  Not so I insist.  And it will come to little surprise to our longtime readers that when it when it comes posting recipes Sir Basil is misguided. Most misguided.  Going back to the old days, where Basil actually resides most of the time, I'm surprised to learn he has forgotten that softly scrambled eggs was the very first dish young ladies were taught to prepare in Home Economics class.  Do we really want to believe James Bond, as the James Bond in the book and not the movies, would serve a dish that 12 year-old girls used to prepare for their delighted dads on Saturday mornings to a comely fallen woman he hoped to have more than his way with ?  

No we don't.  

But I prefer not to argue with Sir Basil over his softly scrambled eggs on toast points and pink champagne being the choice way to begin an evening. I say Let Him Eat The Eggs. All of them.  Hey, if they work for him, then dig in Tiger. 

Eggs, however, would not work for me.  What would work asks the careful reader? Well, I'm about to tell you.  But first I must set the stage by asking all of you to disconnect yourself from reality.  For the purposes of this story, I am about 32 years of age, single, not Catholic at all, and James Bond and I have a thing going. Yes, a thing.  Nothing big.  It's just when he's in the States, he always finds my door open and he walks through.

And in this story, James has just hopped up from D.C. where he had been detailed by Margaret Thatcher, as I've just learned, to garrote Peggy Noonan by using Peggy's Swarovski crystal-studded g-string.  Not that James Bond told me he was the one behind the garroting of Peggy Noonan.  He would never.  He's a professional, unlike Peggy Noonan. I had merely put two and two together after hearing Katie Couric gleefully report  on the 6 o' clock news the discovery of Peggy's body and the crystal studded g-string with how Peggy had betrayed Ronald Reagan, Pope JPII, Pope Benedict XVI and the Catholic Church by voting Obama and concluded the Iron Lady with the Velvet Gloves had had done her in as a result.

Women are like that, you know.

To Be Continued...

 

What Will Be, Will Be

Old Dominion Tory's Political Prognostications

The Eccentric Observer

Old Dominion Tory

Although you will read this on Election Day, I am writing it late in the day on November 3. Based on all that I have seen over the past week as well as on Monday, this is what should happen in today’s elections:

Presidency: Obama-298 electoral votes, McCain-240 electoral votes. No doubt, McCain is surging in the campaign’s final days, but I don’t think it will be enough to push him past Obama. McCain will win Missouri, Indiana, North Carolina, Florida, and Virginia. However, despite McCain’s best efforts and some last-minute revelations about his energy policies, Obama will capture Ohio (narrowly) and Pennsylvania (not as narrowly but not in the double digits) as well as Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico, four of which were won by George Bush in 2004. 

Senate: Currently, 51 Democrats (to include Independents who caucus with the Democrats, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut) and 49 Republicans. Of the eleven contested seats currently held by the GOP, Democrats will win seven—North Carolina, Oregon, Virginia, Colorado, New Hampshire, Alaska, and New Mexico—and the Republicans will win four—Minnesota, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Georgia. The Republicans’ best shot for a pick-up is in Louisiana where the race between Mary Landrieu and State Treasurer John Kennedy has tightened up considerably. In fact, some polls show the race as even. With McCain up in this state by 14%-16%, I’ll crawl out on a limb and give the Republicans a close victory. So, come January, the Democrats will have 57 seats and the Republicans will hold 43. 

House: There are some interesting races in the House that could see some established Democrats lose (e.g., Murtha and Kanjorski in Pennsylvania), but, all in all, it will be a somewhat bad night for House Republicans who will suffer a net loss of 20-22 seats. Keep an eye on New Hampshire 1 and Connecticut 4. If the GOP loses both races, there will not be a single Republican representing a New England state in the House. Also, there might be a surprise in Idaho 1 in which the Republican incumbent, Mark Sali, is not well liked or well funded. Likely balance: 258-260 Democrats, 175-177 Republicans.