Author Archives: John Cutrone

May 15 2016
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Pentecost

Connexions: Inspiration

Inspiration

My very first Sunday Meeting at the 1794 Meeting House at Chosen Land, the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community in Maine where I interned as a printer in the late 90s, happened to be on Pentecost Sunday. It was a blustery day, the sort of day when laundry left on the line to dry takes on a life of its own, the shirts and dresses and jeans dancing with each other as they catch the breeze and fill and empty of air and sunlight.

The Shaker Meeting House at Chosen Land is modest but beautiful in its simplicity. I entered on the left side, for this is the door through which the men enter. The women enter on the right. The room you enter into is large and uninterrupted by posts or columns; the roof is supported by boxed beams that span across the room. The walls are white plaster and the wooden beams and original benches are painted blue. The blue takes your breath away. It is the original milk paint, dyed with Maine wild blueberries, from 1794. The floor is wide plank wood. To look at it and to step upon it is to think of all the Shaker brothers and sisters who walked and danced and twirled upon it throughout its history. All these years later I still think of that wood floor and think of doing rubbings of it for a book project someday. History has seeped into every corner and crevice of this building, and this is the building I’d stepped into that First Sunday of Pentecost in 1996.

If you’ve never been to a Shaker Meeting (and chances are good, I realize, that you haven’t), here’s what happens: Sister June reads a prayer to open Meeting, then Sister Frances announces which set song will be sung from the Shaker Hymnal. There are three Bible readings. And then Brother Arnold will say a few words about their founder, Mother Ann Lee, and remind everyone to “not feel strange or a stranger.” And this is an invitation for spontaneous songs and testimonies. The songs are any of thousands of Shaker songs handed down orally through the years. And the testimonies are from the heart, inspired by the atmosphere of the Meeting.

Pentecost never meant much to me but it did after that day. Father Bob Limpert, an Episcopal minister from New York, was there, and the Shakers let him give a more formal sermon. Father Bob was inspired by that blustery day to talk about the relationships between words like gust and ghost and of course it was Pentecost, the day the Church celebrates the coming of the Holy Spirit… which, when I was a kid, was better known as the Holy Ghost. And here was this day of gusting wind ushering in holy ghosts of all kinds in this old building dripping with history: gust to ghost to spirit. And spirit brings us to inspiration.

And this always reminds me of one of my favorite professors from college, Myriam Swennen Ruthenberg, who, in an Italian Literature class, perhaps over Dante or Bocaccio or di Lampedusa, spoke one day of the connexions between words, too. Her words that day were the Italian versions of respiration and inspiration and their common Latin root: spirare, breath. We breathe in and out in the act of respiration, but we also breathe in and out inspiration: we are inspired by what we take in, and what we exude or breathe out hopefully inspires others.

If you’ll follow along on my winding trail, these things all connect: the gust and ghost of Father Bob, the breathing in and out of Professoressa Ruthenberg. All are not so much of the earth as they are of the air (ghost/gust/spirit/breath/respiration/inspiration) and so they lack heaviness and instead are light and ethereal. Inspiration comes to us sometimes as fleeting as breath, a ghost seen just briefly from the corner of the eye.

This is a reprint of a Convivio Book of Days chapter originally published on Pentecost, 2014. I find I can’t describe the day any better than I did then, and I still am filled with wonder over the connexions that can be drawn and with fondness for this place I love so much. I hope to visit my friends at Chosen Land again this summer. Image: Taking a deep breath, crossing into the unknown. A 16th century engraving from the dust jacket of the book The Discoverers by Daniel J. Boorstin. Happy Connecting.

Should you find it a little chilly today, too… well, today is Cold Sophie. Brrr.

 

May 11 2016
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Cold Sophie, The Ice Saints

Cold Sophie & The Ice Saints

Very Cold at Paris

Most all of these Convivio Book of Days chapters come to you from a small wooden cottage built in 1949 in Lake Worth, Florida. Lake Worth has had numerous slogans over the years, but one of the earliest was this one: Where summer spends winter. This is a town that knows summer. Even our coldest months of the year are filled with days that will remind any northerner of a beautiful summer’s day back home. It’s a tough life, I know. But we pay for it dearly each summer with heat and humidity like you wouldn’t believe. It’s not unbearable, but it does take some getting used to. A Florida summer is not for the faint of heart.

There was one summer many years ago that found a car with Alaska plates parked on North Palmway, one of the neighborhood roads. I drove by that car every day after work, and each time I did, I thought of the person who drove it here from Alaska, and I wondered how they were faring. Was it the poor soul’s first summer here? Were they drinking enough water? Were they languishing in bed each morning as the thick, almost liquid summer air poured into their lungs? Did they dream of moose and white pine?

Yesterday, as I began writing this, it was a hot one. It is mid May and summer is gaining its foothold here in this strange green land. And yet we come now to a few days devoted to a group of saints who are known as the Ice Saints, or in German (for this is a legend of Northern Europe) as die Eisheiligen. They are Saints Mamertus, Pancras, Servatius, Boniface, and Sophia, their ringleader. Their feast days begin about now: on May 11th for St. Mamertus, and they continue on this week, each saint to his or her day, through to St. Sophia on the 15th. She is known in Germany as Kalte Sophie: Cold Sophie. In Central Europe, particularly Slovenia, you might hear her called Poscana Zofka… Pissing Sophie, for there, she is associated with rain. The days of Cold Sophie and the Ice Saints are traditional weather markers, and it is a fool indeed who would plant crops before Cold Sophie had time enough to wend her way through the land. She represents winter’s last hurrah, and even if it’s been warm and summery, tradition warns of a blast of cold air from the North at this time of May.

And there seems to be some truth to this. It may have been a hot one here in Lake Worth yesterday (and probably will be today), but we have just come out of a spell of amazingly beautiful weather. It rained cats and dogs last Thursday, and on Friday, we awoke to an azure sky, not a cloud to be seen, with temperatures in that absolutely perfect range where the sun is warm but the air is cool and dry. It was downright chilly at night. This lasted for days, up until just the day before yesterday. It was, I’d say, an early brush with Cold Sophie and the Ice Saints. It’s not very likely they’ll be back, not until our Lake Worth summer has played out. But it was lovely while it lasted.

Image: “Very Cold at Paris,” a hand-colored etching by an anonymous engraver, published by R. Ackermann, March 1, 1806. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

 

May 08 2016
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Mother's Day

Some Mother’s Day

Nunleys

I am not known for my powers of memory, but the paradox to that is I am known for remembering the finest details of the strangest things. Like the time when I was a little boy, probably no more than four years old; it was me and my whole family, my parents, my sister, my grandparents, in the basement of our house in Valley Stream, and it was a Sunday, and I’m pretty sure I wanted to go to Nunley’s, the amusement park that was not all that far away. “No, Johnny,” I was told, “we’ll go some other day.” But I heard it as, “We’ll go some Mother’s Day,” and I always thought that some Mother’s Day we’d go to Nunley’s.

As it turns out, we never did go to Nunley’s on a Mother’s Day, though we did go plenty of times outside of Mother’s Day. My favorite ride was the track car ride. Going to Nunley’s was probably a lot more fun for me than it was for anyone else in the family (though they were all pretty good at Skee-Ball compared to me). But these are some of the things you do when you have kids: you do what you can to make them happy, even if it means setting them down in a kid-size slot car that has not one but two steering wheels and watching them as their little car motors around the wooden track, waving at them as they watch you. It seems I was always watching my folks while the car drove me around; I was never watching the road (it’s a good thing those cars were on tracks), although I am pretty sure my hands were always somewhere on the wheel.

And so today it is Mother’s Day, and we remember all that our mothers have done for us. We honor them, our mothers given and our mothers chosen, for sometimes there are more than one in our lives. It does take a village, as the saying goes, to raise good children. And so I think of my mother, and my grandmother, and my sister, who all were part of the raising of the me that was a little boy. I hope I was not too much of a handful. It is a job that comes, at times, with little thanks. Like the time I barfed in the car on the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut. Mom took care of that. It was not a pleasant task, but she did it, because when we are small we are not very capable and our moms know this and they look out for us and they take care of all that is not right so that it is, eventually, right again. To all of our mothers on this Mother’s Day: Thank you. A thousand blessings upon you all.

 

Image: The track car ride at Nunley’s Amusement Park in Baldwin, New York, circa 1960. That’s not me in the picture but ten years later it could’ve been me. Look closely and you’ll see the two steering wheels in each car. The amusement park closed in 1995. Its historic carousel was saved and relocated to Garden City, New York, where it now is part of the Cradle of Aviation Museum. The rest of the rides and amusements were dismantled and sold off piecemeal. They say that now there’s a Pep Boys on the site of Nunley’s, there on Sunrise Highway in Baldwin. So in a way, it’s still about cars. The last time I was there was probably about 1976; it wasn’t long after that that we up and moved away to South Florida.

 

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