The Place of Salmon

I went to the local library tonight to research the town's history. The library is, itself, an historic building, housing a few peculiar artifacts that I'll detail in later entries.

It is small, but with books well chosen. In other words, there was an appealing randomness to it all, with enough to make me think I could go a few years and read hard there and not tap the stacks. I applied for, and received, a library card and took out, for my first borrowing, Richard N. Smith's history Divinity and Dust. Smith himself had an interesting voice. The book is tightly written, and slightly eccentric. He graduated from Harvard in the 1970s, had dealings with the state Republican party (a Mass republican) and peppered his chapters with enough quotes from Emerson, Thoreau, and Jefferson to make me think he'd be a great drinking partner on a cold night.

Maybe I'll try to track him down. Scratch that. I will track him down, and report back here.

*

Random Townsend facts and insight:

1. The town is multicentered and, aside from the barrel industry, seems given to cottage industries. A history of the Finnish in Townsend listed occupations as various as auto dealer, musician, upholster, oil furnace repairman, educator and photographer.
2. Speaking of Finns, the Finnish name for Santa Claus is Joulu Pukki.
3. Speaking of Finnish, they came to speak a mixed language called Finliskaa, which was mostly English words in a Finnish accent and with Finnish endings. Example: bedirooma.
4. Speaking of autos, early car owners padded their garages because of the unreliable shift from forward to reverse. Additionally, because the early Fords were built with reverse as the strongest gear, people typically climbed Bayberry hill backwards.
5. Townsend boasted one of the last paternalist-oriented industries, barrel making. When the industry declined in the fifties, with barrels generally only bought by the whiskey manufacturers, one of the major figures in town, A.D. Fessenden, owner of the local barrel plant, seemed to take personal affront when his workers unionized. The plant closed in 1960, but the workers didn't seem too upset. They quickly realized they could make nearly twice as much money doing less monotonous work in nearby Groton.
6. I enjoy the random. Shrubs was a popular drink in the town's early days: it combined a fruit base with rum or brandy. This was a popular New England drink. I'm game. Pour me a pint.
7. I live near the Squanicook -- I read today that the word means "Place of Salmon."

*

I still haven't managed to secure either a water heater or the money to buy one with, but I worked a lot of overtime last week, so I'll pick one up on Friday. Two more days without a dishwasher or shower. Nothing compared to farm life, but still.

I told George that Jess was working to get me into the painter's union. "You were just talking about teaching and becoming a paralegal!" he said, exasperated. "I need to make money!" I said. For me, there is no different, material or otherwise, between painting and teaching and I just need to help pay the mortgage. Obviously, I would rather write for a living. I can join the painter's union and still get into teaching down the road.

So, then. I must be doing a lot of writing, right? Well, I did some research in the library tonight and got home at eight, my first period of rest since leaving for work at six this morning. It's now almost nine. All I've had to eat was a slice of bread and a half of a cold baked potato. And yes, I'm still tinkering away, writing short articles for websites and trying to keep myself to 400 to 600 working words a day. Easy enough, but not. My mother called me four times today, crying, because her computer had crashed and she couldn't figure out how to make it work. So I'll put in a likely nine hours tomorrow, and then go deal with her computer, and then drive all the way here, and I'm hoping, at that point, to have one concentrated thought that isn't just I should but my fingernails or a slice of pepperoni pizza would be delicious but yeah, I've got 600 words on the subject of Townsend, or MMA, or food, or beer, or the economy, or Obama, or AC/DC, or sex and patriotism, or early country blues, or the cold, or the dog, or any manner of beginning and ending that might rise or not . . . .