THE SUMMER MY BROTHER DIED
Jimmy’s mailbox, he’s inside recovering from chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer. Today Ara and I are leaving Lincoln, Massachusetts heading Northeast to Grand Manan Island in The Bay of Fundy up across the Canadian border, it’s a 400 mile drive to the ferry. It’s June 9, 2022
Our first day in Grand Manan. I’ve mowed the lawn and Ara weeds the little flower garden which is bound for complete failure. I was a soil thing I think, we dug the rockweed in too late. Our task is to open up the house, preparing for Jim’s big wish to be able to make one last visit to this his childhood summer home. - June 10.
Tate Wharf which we are trying to restore in partnership with the Tate family.. They are all fisher-people but lobster fishing no longer requires a private family wharf as it did in the days before hydraulic lifts could fly their boats out of the water for repair.
Fundy Marine - our next-door neighbor.
Kirk Brooks is suddenly killed by a truck. Kirk was a gentle-hearted man’s man, he was hit on his stationary motorcycle by a trailer-tractor truck in British Columbia where he brought skilled east-coast workers to maintain the boats of the west-coast fleet . The funeral was held on White Head Island, a small ferry ride off Grand Manan. Everyone was shocked and upset. - June 17
Kirk’s sister gave a beautiful account of his life and their relationship.
Very few remember that this was the island’s church, the site of all their grandparents’ weddings and funerals. Memory doesn’t extend much beyond yesterday’s breakfast.
The Grand Manan Funeral Home closed after their young leader was also killed on the side of a road. This hearse had to travel from the mainland to an outer island, a long trip.
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Back on Ingalls Head, Phillip Russell digs his dinner.
Prom pictures. The couple broke up before the afternoon as over - better for both of them.
Transformation
Two fishermen enter a nursing home….. is this the beginning ofa joke or is it just covid? Grand Manan didn’t get it until a year after the rest of us, but then it hit hard.
Mervin Tate”s birthday party.
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Evening on Ox Head. Carly and Sean’s day job is to lead the kayak expeditions of an Antarctic cruise ship. I suppose this is what we used to call a “busman’s holiday.”
Adam and Leslie Tate our partners in the Tate Shed project.
The feared call comes in.
Jim is taken to the hospital in the middle of the night, we rush back to Lincoln He will survive this scare, the blood transfusions are still working. Our goal is to get him back to Grand Manan before he dies. - June 23
We stop in Brunswick, Maine on the way down. Our pal Bob Mauck, a bio professor at Kenyon isn’t looking well. Four weeks later he survived a “Widow-Maker”.
Another pal, Nat Wheelwright, a bird-man and evolutionary biologist at Bowdoin with his hens
Ara dances with the “twisted Tree” in Lincoln Center
Peter born to Bob and Claire Cunningham in 1947, Jim born 1949, Bill born 1953
Jim on the Lincoln Historical Society float in the July 4th parade. Jim was also a photographer, but he made his living as a “Systems Engineer”.
Billy greets his visitor in the Lifecare of Acton Nursing Home.
He made it through the beginnings of covid, but he just got it and he’s very vulnerable. He made it through but a week later he’s still very weak, can no longer walk, I tell him he’s going to get his strength back.
Jim and Peter aat about the same time. This picture is what convinced Jim that his skin color was changing, he went to ask his doctor about that.
Jim and Peter helping build the family house in Lincoln 1952
Jimmy makes it back up to Grand Manan, a happy and tearful week. July 12.
Alison Hawthorne Demming, a poet, in a heart-to-heart talk with Jim.
Down to Tate Shed where Jim used to play.
Dinner at home with the cousins.
Sunset in Dark Harbour with Brian Tate.
Jim said goodbye to his childhood friends in Grand manan and headed back to Massachusetts. When told that he would be missed, he said that others maybe be losing one friend among many, but that he was going to be losing everyone he knows. - July 17.
Jim is nearly got the cousins arrested at the American crossing when the border guards didn’t understand he was joking.
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Jim called with the news that he would likely die this week. We left immediately, here we exit the ferry landing on the Canadian mainland- July 30
Dinner ion the road in Bangor, Maine. Culture shock.
Back in Lincoln, we visit our neighbors who removed a big rock from their bedroom, Andy is pointing to where it was. The original owners of the house were New Englanders, a culture in which having a granite boulder inside the house is an attractive feature. If you’re from Ghana, a rock in the bedroom is not something you want to sleep with.
Billy is reminded how to turn on the radio. He loves music but forgets about it. Jim raises his middle finger when I pick the camera up, I think that’s an indication to stop.
Jim made it through the crisis with more blood transfusions. He’s becoming less friendly to my camera so I stop making pictures of him. A day of driving agot us to the ferry and back on the island.
We are welcomed by a neighborhood pot luck on Tate Wharf. We had hoped the restoration would remind the family of their common roots and rebuild a sense of community that has been shaken by the convenience of Facebook communication.
It’s working.
We also want the kids to grow up knowing they come from a specific physical place, they aren’t just randomly generated digits from nowhere.
Brian and I decide we don’t need expert carpentry help to repost and rebuild the floor in the left-side “bait shed”.
The rising tide drove us out for a couple hours.
Another Eva appears, she loves coming down to watch her dad build the new floor.
Evas figured out the bathroom question.
Sheneeda has been abandoned on our shore. We plan to plant her upright in the field, a writer’s retreat or a kids playtoy.
The field between our house and the shed.
Tate Wharf at low tide. This end section has yet to be rebuilt.
Our trusty handbill craft at rest. I’m repainting the name, “Fogseeker” after my father who bottled and analyzed fog as a scientist.
Chased out again by a rising tide.
Picnic in a thin fog.
Family time.
Movie night. It’s mostly pictures of themselves as children.
Loading wrinkles (periwinkles) - the men are amused.
Do NOT leave live wrinkles in the fridge overnight.
In the old days, a Grand Manan party looked a bit different. People would sit in hard chairs set along the four walls of a room and the host would bring tea and biscuits. There wasn’t much conversation.
Beware artists at work: Adventures in The Grand Manan Museum Ara Fitzgerald performs “The Hook of Wonder”
Wendy Dathan launches her book on Grand Harbour with Chapel Street Editions
HOLY MACKEREL- Chris and Doug bring home the bacon. Tate Wharf via Farmers Ledge - August 20.
A successful experiment in fine dining. This group includes a Christian minister, a Zen Priest, an ornithologist, a poet, a script writer, an outdoor adventure leader, a sailor, and a dancer. And I was there too.
Meanwhile, back in Massachusetts., life goes on, my brother is enjoying his days, he wants to scan more of his old pictures.
VISITORS FROM AWAY: Eve Marko wrote a children’s book while she was here. It’s about these two boats, Thumper and Fogseeker. Thumper is a big boastful commercial fishing boat who brings back wild fish to feed the people. He asked Fogseeker what he does to justify his existence, Fogseeker says he just looks for fog. Thumper has fun with that one until he gets lost in the fog only to be saved by Fogseeker. They then float together at the what as best of friends.
Fogseeker and Thumper.
Eve’s dog Aussi waits patiently.
Steve and Lesley visit. Bird people see things that we don’t see.
Here Mark is discussing the modern rules of shipping dangerous cargo with Yvonne Keller in Seal Cove. Yvonne wrote the book…literally, Mark is holding it. Karen, Yvonne’s partner makes mats from discarded rope.
Jon-Mark Seimon visits from South Africa via New York. It was this big, really.
The final drive
The call From Jim came again, this time the call was not a false alarm. Jim had previously had a medical bed installed in his room. The night before we arrived he had been taken to Emerson Hospital. His room was left with this image on the screen, I don’t know how that happened. I met with him at the hospital. He was beginning to see that the medical system had very little left to offer, the blood transfusions no longer worked. Together we made lists of things that had to be done, Glenn, the funeral director, arrived and gently quizzed Jim on his wishes. One more blood transfusion allowed Jim to get home where he would last another week. August 26
Sunyan from Tibet and Louise from Congo attended to Jim’s death which came on September 3rd while he lay peacefully in his own bed, just as he would have chosen. When she perceived that the had passed Louise opened all the doors and windows so his spirit could fly. Jim was not a spiritual person but I’m sure he would have appreciated this African custom. Sunyan came to officially pronounce the death and to empty all of the medication bottles. When they finished their work after midnight, they stayed for another hour here in the room with Jim’s body. They both shared stories of their immigration experience and of the Tibetan and Congolese communities they are part of here in the Boston area Boston has changed for the better since I was a kid. Our grandfather Cunningham - the only non-Jewish ancestor - was Irish. He was born into a city set against Irish advancement - he was the first city catholic kid to be admitted to Harvard in 1904 - when he died, Irish men ran the town. Now the local leaders including Governor and Mayor and Attorney-General are women, one is lesbian, one is Black, and the third is Chinese.
This was the picture he chose to represent himself. It’s a Cornell where he funded a program for individual projects in the4 engineering school. Here he’s with a racing car that his team built. JFC35 is his tag.
Jim put a lot of care into his house on Lexington Road.
Boxes of our father’s Cloud Physics material await pickup by Cornell.
Cousin Janet, a Doctor from California, volunteered to be the executor
We are so grateful to Janet and her husband Carlos. We visited them out there two months after.
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Jim wished to be buried in the Lincoln town graveyard. There was some controversy about the exact plot but with the help of family friend Susan Frommer, we figured it out.
Next to Jim’s plot is the gravesite of our parents’ best friends. Our mother Claire’s roommate at Smith during the war was Jane Row, her maker says’ “xxxx yyyy zzzz”
Glenn Burlamachi of Concord Funeral Home. Glenn was extremely helpful. It’s part of Glenn’s job to be comforting and serious on the job, but we managed to crack that open once in a while.
Jim did video and sound for the Lincoln Minutemen so they showed up to honor his passing. As did much of the town administration staff, Jim ran the town TV channel, he televised all the important meetings. The testimonies were honest and heartfelt, they bore witness to both Jim’s gifts and his foibles.Surrounded as we were by the graves our our ancestors, people that the speakers knew when they were among the living, Ron Row spoke to how the event felt like a performance of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. I was very surprised at how moving this somewhat spontaneous ceremony turned out to be. The day before I thought it would be just us and Glenn. But the community rose to the occasion, it was quite beautiful.
The Lincoln town flags fly at half mast and the Minutemen fire in salute.
LIFE GOES ON
And for those of us left among the living, the twists, the ironies, the daily tasks and little adventures, they continue. Here above, the empty train station across from The Concord Funeral Home.
On the Red Line into Cambridge
Havard Square
Trash
Treasure. Jim’s precious “Pendleton Blankets” are to be delivered to new homes in Grand Manan. We hit the road an hour after the burial service.
We exit the ferry on Grand Manan and stumble upon our friend Carly Fleet throwing a 3rd birthday party for Misha, the child of Ukrainian refugees living on the island. There are seven such families, the island has opened its arms to this cause.
Ara finds a gun on Ross Island, now a nature sanctuary. September 10
Back on Ingalls Head, Maverick finds a crab.
Saturday night.
Sunday morning.
The Thoroughfare:: LOBSTER PURGATORy
FISH IN THE WEIR: Pat’s cove
Herring
the cod are gone, but the wallpaper remains.
Getting ready for the opening of Lobster season. Brian Ingalls’ crew loads bait. There’s not enough herring being caught in the weirs this year so fish The price is high.are being trucked in from Newfoundland.
Real Men weave trap heads.
Putting in.
Peter’s raft. (a failure)
Fogseeker at high tide.
Chris, Brian, and Ian help an old man get his boat put away for the winter.
Nightlife.
Fiona runs East of Grand Manan, we weren't badly hurt. Newfoundland was.
Hurricane Fiona. Ara’s son Hale Appleman mourns the passing of Ye Ol’ Apple Tree.
The past gets edited, a cleansing.
I found an artist in Brunswick, Maine who is making sculptures out of discarded transparencies. These were recycled.
November, we return to the USA for the oncoming Winter.
Jim’s stuff has been deposited on our doorstep. Life is just one thing after another. And so it continued.