It's OLMSTED, damn it.

If you thought, as I did, that a couple of years back we (my sister and I) had finished sorting and purging the files from my Mother’s capacious and apparently infinite file cabinets back at the Orchard, you would be wrong, as I was. Several of the files in question had merely decamped to my sister’s house in Maine, “to be sorted later”. That later was last weekend. While winter behaved somewhat wintrily outside, we sat by our living room fire and went through files upon files containing my mother’s correspondence, every last letter saved, every copy of her letters saved as well.

It was after many hours of skimming and consigning to the flames those pounds of paper, heavy weight typing paper as well as feathery onionskin airmail paper, that we were rewarded with a file labeled “Olmsted.”

We all know that in life there are many things we cannot change. If you’ve ever had children or been in a relationship, even with a colony of bees, sooner or later you accept that you cannot change others. If you live in the world, you know that no amount of wishing and letter writing, no amount of gnashing of teeth and beating of breasts can alter the outcome of recent elections.
My mother knew this as well as anyone. But there were things she could change, there were solecisms she could repair, and there were misspellings she could correct. Again and again.

My mother’s Olmsted file contained copies of at least twenty letters she had written over the years in her effort to assure the name of America’s greatest landscape architect its correct orthography. The file also included the original of the document containing the incorrect spelling, and the tragically few acknowledgments or thanks she received for her efforts.
Here are selections from the collected misspellings of Frederick Law Olmsted. FLO, by John Singer Sargent. From Wiki

1. An undated flyer from The Turpin Bannister Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians, announcing their fall tours. A highlight of one was to be “lectures by two of the editors of the Olmstead Papers (sic) on Dowling and Olmstead (sic) as fathers of the American tradition in landscape architecture.”

2. 1980. An invitation from Senator Oliver Ames to a reception at his home “Langwater” in North Easton, Ma. In a paragraph describing historic Easton, we read of “the landscaping of Frederick Law Olmstead (sic).”

3. October 1981. A mailing from the Membership Director of The Trustees of Reservations, in which she referred to “a fall Olmstead (sic) tour”, and then announcing her intention to “research the Olmstead (sic) society.”

4. February 1983. The Hingham Journal. The first question in their “Hingham Quiz” was: “Who designed the period garden at the Old Ordinary?”. The answer given was Frederick Law Olmstead (sic).

5. March 1983. Newsletter from the Boston Society of Architects, a notice for an exhibit at MIT’s Graduate Center of Design about Central Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmstead” (sic). His name is also misspelled in the listing for lectures.

6. 1984. On page 502 of Samuel Elliot Morrison’s The Oxford History of the American People, the name is rendered as Olmstead (sic).

7. 1987. A flyer from the Metropolitan Museum of Art advertising their inshore cruise, “New England Collections.” It describes the carriage paths in Acadia National Park on MDI as “designed by Frederick Law Olmstead” (sic)

8. 1988. An engraved invitation from the Trustees of Reservations to the annual dinner of the 1891 Society, to be held at Castle Hill, in Ipswich. ….the gardens designed by the Olmstead Brothers (sic).

9. 1989. The Most Beautiful House in the World, by Witold Rybczynski. On page 109 Olmsted is correctly spelled once, but then in the next paragraph, it is given the usual misspelling.

10. January 1990. Flyer from The Old South Meeting House, Boston, advertising a lecture series. On January 18th the lecture was “Frederick Law Olmstead (sic) and the Emerald Necklace”.

11. March 1990. In the Society of Architectural Historians Journal, a list of winners of the Alice David Hitchcock Book Award. The award in 1974 was given to Laura Wood Roper for FLO, A Biography of Frederick Law Olmstead (sic).

12. May 1993. Article in The Boston Globe about the town of Easton, Ma.

13. February 1994. Biltmore Estate Catalogue. The pictures are elegant but the spelling is, again, wrong. Describing the “Olmstead (sic) Garden”, we read ..”Frederick Law Olmstead (sic), the noted designer of New York’s Central Park…”

14. October 1997. A brochure for the Newport Art Association about Central Park misspelled Olmsted’s name. Monique kindly suggested this might be a typographical error, as “he is too well known and recognized not to have his name correctly spelled.”
For this she received a grateful letter from the director of the Newport Art Museum.

15. October 1997. The Hingham Journal. In an otherwise fine article about the Trustees of the Reservations’ properties, the name of the “greatest American landscape architect” was, again, misspelled.

16. January 1998. The Patriot Ledger of Quincy, Ma. Monique noted “You are not the first to make this mistake, but I was unhappy to see it in the Patriot Ledger which I admire and read daily.”

17. Winter 1998. The New England Hosta Society “Hosta News”. A member’s hosta garden in Chestnut Hill was described as having been designed by Frederick Law Olmstead (sic).
In the Spring Hosta Newsletter, thanks were given to an “alert member” for pointing out the egregious error.

18. May 1998. Shockingly, in the Style section of The New York Times, in a paragraph nestled amid Bill Cunningham’s iconic photos of ladies in pastel suits and flowery hats, was this unfortunate reference: “The annual Frederick Law Olmstead (sic) Awards Luncheon…”

19. March 1999. In The New York Times, an article about Vanderbilt’s library at Biltmore, North Carolina. Monique clearly was more than usually disturbed by this. She wrote: “Please, please, please……not in the New York Times……..Banish the “a”, it belongs in homestead, not in Olmsted.”
I am happy to report that Monique received a handwritten thank you from the writer, Peter Applebome, for spotting the error.

20. July 1999. The Boston Globe. In an article about “Eastholm”, the summer home of Richard and Annie Hoe in Seal Harbor, Maine, the beautiful but now overgrown gardens were said to have been designed by Frederick Law Olmstead (sic). Within two days of the article’s publication my mother sent off a correction.

Why did she stop? Is it possible that after the turn of the century the print media consistently spelled Olmsted correctly?
Or did my mother decide that she had done all that was possible to remedy human error in this instance? What happened to her sense of righteous indignation?

When I see my mother now, in the twenty-first century, and she asks me who I am and cheerfully points out the window at the skirts (sic) that are coming inside, then sighs and says, “I saw them, they had everything there. It worked out, it worked out nicely,” I miss the mother who valiantly strove to give Olmsted the correct spelling of his name in the last century.

Journalistic License

My mother believes that newspapers in California do not ever, as in never, ever, print any news about the Pope. She believes this the way creationists believe in the 7 literal days, the way children believe in the tooth fairy, the way NRA nutcases believe in the right to bear arms, lots and lots of extremely lethal arms: that is, irrationally and in the face of all science and evidence, because it suits one’s agenda. That is the way my mother believes and insists that California newspapers are entirely remiss in this important news function. She has forgotten the names of several of her grandchildren and the words fence and English muffins, and even pomegranates, but this fact of journalistic dereliction she clings to.

Contradict this assertion at your peril. I know this, as they say, the hard way.

Now that my mother is living at the Little Red House in our backyard, we thought that it would make sense to share our New York Times subscription with her. We would thereby save a few trees and save a few trips to the DPW recycling bins.

So on any given day, when my mother is here for a meal, for a visit, or a dose of filial obeisance, we have variations on this conversation:
MOM: Have you read this yet? I’d like to take it to my house and read it. I want to cut out this article about the Pope, and send to my friend Joan. The newspapers in California never write about the Pope, so she makes copies of the articles I send her and gives them to all her friends. She is a nun. All her nun friends are grateful, because the papers there never write anything about the Pope. Have you read the paper?
ME: Not yet. I will bring it to you as soon as I have.
MOM (scanning the headlines): Have you read this paper yet?
ME: No, Mom, I haven’t. Not yet.
MOM: Well I would like it when you have, because I always cut out articles about the Pope for my friend Joan.
ME: I know.
MOM: So have you read the paper yet?
ME: Not yet. But I will later. What is the Pope up to now?
MOM: I have to read about the Pope and then I will cut it out and send it to Joan. Have you read the paper yet?
ME: Not since you last asked me. (I know I shouldn’t get testy; such testiness flouts the principles of “Habilitation”, but the testiness is coming over me, like a fucking tsunami.)
MOM: I haven’t asked you before.
ME: No, of course not. (I am chagrinned, ashamed.) You take it home with you. I can read it online.
MOM: Oh no. I don’t want to take your paper. I used to have my own paper, at the Orchard. I don’t want to take your paper before you have read it.
ME: Please take the paper, Mom.
MOM: Have you read it yet?

(I can read it online.)

Every family has their myths, the stories they tell in lieu of the real stories, the stories they tell to make themselves appear interesting or sane or law-abiding, or not. Our family had the story of my mother’s belly dancing past.
We presume the story started with my father, but he is dead now so we can’t check that fact, and even when he was alive, his memory of the sixty-plus years that constituted his life with my mother was the part of his memory that was largely eviscerated by the stroke. What remained intact, oddly, was his capacity to fully engage in the myth-making.

The myth was not complicated. The myth was that she was a belly dancer in her youth. My mother (known to my readers as SBM, or Sainted Belgian Mother) grew up in mostly in Cairo, Egypt. She was not Egyptian. She was the lithe and elegant daughter of a Belgian oil executive and his beautiful Belgian wife. Whatever African blood my mother had was last seen when her earliest ancestors departed East Africa and the mitochondrial Eve, headed north, crossed the Red Sea during the African Ice Age, and ended up in the Anatolian/Caucasian region. Eventually they traveled west in Europe, coinciding with the spread of the Aurignacian culture. As you can imagine, from there it was a mere matter of a few thousand years to waffles, frites, moules, 800 varieties of beer, TinTin, and Manneken Pis.
My mother did not have a belly dancer’s build, which as children we were led to believe involved serious avoirdupois, particularly in the mammary glands and the ventral region, that undulating belly of a thousand and one nights. But according to the myth, despite her slenderness and flat chest, the young Belgian schoolgirl one of Cairo’s most sought-after and scintillating belly dancers. Her specialty was the Dance of the Seven Veils, which she performed with seventeen veils. It was on an early business trip to purchase cotton waste from purveyors of the famously soft Egyptian cotton, that my father was taken for a night on the town, and encountered La Monica of Belgica, Belly-dancing sensation. He was smitten, and the rest is history.
My father loved to tell us this story. When he and Mom returned from vacations or dinner parties, he often vividly described how my mother, only slightly inebriated, would willingly belly dance atop a table and impress the assembled friends, and business acquaintances with her skill and dexterity. As children, we too were impressed and frequently told our friends that our mother was a belly dancer. As far as we could tell, they all believed us.

Then this morning, I read in the New York Times, that the popular Al-Tet ‘belly dancing channel’ is being forced off the air for ‘operating without a license’. You can thank the Muslim Brotherhood for another cultural icon thrown to the infidels.
Is it possible that SBM must now single-handedly carry the banner of belly dancing into the New World?

Seeking Yemeni Honey & an Explanation for Twin Beds

I used to consider CSB and me as quite daring, middle-aged scofflaws engaged in apian civil disobedience, tending our rooftop beehives while the NYC ban was still in effect. And I relished the fact, because the truth is that beekeeping does not have all that many opportunities for criminal behavior.
It seems I was wrong.
The other day I was reading about sugar and specifically the sugar trade and how it has impacted the course of history. None of this is news but I always find it interesting because of my epiphanies while perched on the perforated metal walkways of the infernal sugar mill at Taboga, watching tons of cane being fed into the maw of the crushing molinos. In an aside the author mentioned that, back in 2001, Osama bin Laden was laundering money through retail honey shops all over the Middle East.
Why honey stores? Honey is an important food in Islamic culture. The average Saudi Arabian family consumes 2 pounds of honey a month, which seems like a lot until you consider that the average Saudi Arabian family may include several wives and their offspring, all with sweet teeth.
Additionally, honey is sticky and messy and that makes it a perfect medium for shipping both weapons and drugs, because no one wants to inspect a shipment of honey very closely.
Al Qaeda has a strong foothold in Yemen. And Yemen is the epicenter of this honey-money laundering, because the purest and by far the most expensive honey in the Middle East comes from Yemen.
This tickled my fancy and I wasted the better part of an hour seeking Yemeni honey on line. I did not acquire any Yemeni honey, for several reasons. The websites were largely in Arabic, not my first tongue.Or else they were translated unintelligibly:
Yemeni Sidr honey is called to the proportion of trees known in Hadramout, which produces this honey bee, including, where blooms of the trees at the beginning of spring to the end of each calendar year.
Yemeni Sidr honey is the best honey varieties in Yemen and Upscale, which is characterized by pure and powerful scent and color of golden light, as distinguished from all other types of taste wonderful. Value of the purchase of liquid honey.
Yemen Sidr Honey is very expensive and is more expensive types of Yemeni honey , and Yemeni Sidr Honey To treat all diseases, Collection which is on the prairies and valleys.
The honey cost upwards of $100 for a small jar. They don’t ship honey directly to the United States anyway. Unless you care to order the opium steeped in honey, and then they will send it via UPS International. Yemen’s finest honey comes from the nectar of ‘ilb flowers, growing in the desert. Not only is it delicious, but also it is highly sought-after for its aphrodisiac powers.
I found the article about bin Laden’s honey connection through the New York Times search engine, which also led me to a 1903 article titled, “Hints for the Raiser of Bees, A More Profitable Occupation than Keeping Chickens”. This tugged at me since neither of those enterprises seem remotely profitable to CSB and me. The article’s writer claimed to know of a beekeeper who in one year earned more money than the President of the United States. It was in the New York Times, so I have to believe it was true.
Because it was hard to read on the computer screen, I printed up the article, but instead of being easier to read, it was much much harder and in fact required a magnifying glass because what the printer spat out was – of its own volition – a miniaturized copy of the entire newspaper page. And there at the bottom of the page was a small paragraph about beds: “ Twin Beds Growing in Favor”. Based of watching television in the fifties and sixties, I had always assumed that twin beds were a uniquely American phenomenon.
I was wrong. In 1903 twin beds were just beginning to invade the American consciousness. Twins are described as a custom brought over from Europe. Doctors started prescribing twin beds as a cure for nervousness. Mattress manufacturers rushed to fill the need. And thus, Ozzie and Harriet were made possible.
It seems to me that if you are going to the trouble and expense of ingesting the potent Yemeni honey, you are unlikely to want twin beds.