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Commentary Robert Whitcomb Commentary Robert Whitcomb

A dash of healthier salt, and no app is needed!

  How refreshing to hear about a product that’s not an app or yet another social network but a physical thing. It seems that the business pages only cover the latest digital delight invented by a 23-year-old graduate of Stanford.

Here is something real called,  called “Salt for Life’’,  distributed by Nu-Tek Food Science LLC. It’s a blend of sea salt and potassium and has 70 percent less sodium than table salt; excessive sodium intake is associated with various health problems, particularly heart disease, about which I have more than a passing familiarity. I have no financial stake in this product, but do predict that these sorts of products will be bigger and bigger with the aging of the population and attempts to curb health-care costs.

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The wine-dark Acushnet

Here's a terrific essay by William Morgan, with great pictures, about  the grand Greek Revival buildings put up in the 19th Century in and around whale-oil-rich New Bedford, which for a time was the richest community in America. The discovery of the many uses of petroleum ended that golden age for New Bedford (while constraining the nightmare of the whales -- highly intelligent mammals that the whalers consigned to excruciatingly painful deaths). See "Athens on the Acushnet''.

 

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POBA the preservationist

 Whorf  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

''Deluca's Market'' (Provincetown), by NANCY WHORF  (1930-2009), as seen in POBA -- Where The Arts Live,'' a new virtual art gallery "dedicated to preserving the works and creative legacies of exceptional artists whose talents were not fully recognized during their lifetimes.''

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The aesthetics of thread

thread thread A nice tribute, in a way, to New England's textile industry is "Holding The Line,'' a show of fiber work at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth's College of Visual and Performing Arts through Sept. 11.  The show's notes say that he work "captures a point of view,  maintains a perspective, and defends a principle through the linear qualities of thread.''

Sounds pretty windy. Still, there's real art here.

 

 

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Mirror of memories

clinton "Woodland Water Flood 2'' (acrylic on canvas), by CHERYL CLINTON, at Fountain Street Fine Art, Framingham, Mass.

She says her work is a "developing story about memory, reflection and the passage of time.''

 

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Our strange inter-species collaboration

grins4 From the "Just for Grins'' series (oil, heavy gesso on canvas) of GAY FREEBORN at the Patricia Ladd Carega Gallery, in Center Sandwich, N.H.

The relationship,  and especially the deep bonds of affection between  dogs -- those smelly, sometimes affectionate, sometimes vicious descendents of wolves -- and people, in all their complexity, never ceases to amaze me. We are both pack animals and it's astonishing how much the two packs have merged.

The "Grins'' series seems to celebrate people and their dogs in the summer, where even in New Hampshire it's possible to swim outdoors.

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The VA hospital mess: Demographics, history, hypocrisy

  This piece originated on the Cambridge Management Group Web site.

Merrill  Goozner, editor of Modern Healthcare, has written a fascinating and provocative  editorial that well explains why the Department of Veterans Affairs, which for some years had a stellar reputation for care, now faces a mess. And,  sadly, it's become a political game mired in hypocrisy.

Consider Phillip Longman's  book about VA health care, called <em>Best Care Anywhere</em>, which, Mr. Goozner noted, praised "the 1990s transformation that turned a scandal-plagued, dysfunctional system into one that pioneered the adoption of electronic health records, improvements in patient safety and coordinated care.''

He and many others note that the current scandal involving care delays  reflects the VA's inadequate preparation to receive hordes of aging Vietnam veterans and veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. But, he says, don't blame the folks who run it but the politicians who failed to adequately fund  the VA.

Mr. Goozner notes that the health status of the Vietnam vets "reflects the fact that they are somewhat poorer and less educated than the general population since that was the first conflict where college-bound young adults were largely exempted from frontline military service.''

As for the vets of Iraq and Afghanistan:

"Like Vietnam-era vets, the younger vets bring with them a special set of problems brought about by the miracles of modern battlefield medicine and logistics. Compared with previous wars, many more survive disfiguring bomb blasts and traumatic head injuries, which will require a lifetime of care and support.''

"Yet until last year, the VA's medical care budget hadn't increased any faster than the general rate of medical inflation, rising from $25.5 billion in 2003 to $45.5 billion in 2012, according to data from the VA.''

Mr. Goozner also notes the hypocrisy of politicians denouncing the  "high salaries'' of people running VA hospitals that are a small fraction of salaries paid to hospital execs at "nonprofit'' hospitals. "Maybe the real lesson here for Congress and the White House is they are getting what they pay for — from the VA executive salaries to the promptness of the health care services the VA offers our worthy veterans.''

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Llewellyn King: Habits to develop and monsters to avoid

No one having asked me to give their commencement address this year, I have decided to give it anyway. Here. I have been reading reports of these addresses, mostly given by public figures, some stirring debate, demonstrations and boycott. All in all, the passion is wasted because most of these addresses are not worth the fuss, the fee or the honorary degree. They occupy the unhappy space between a Sunday sermon and a sales meeting. Having exhorted the students to heights of moral rectitude they urge on them a manic menu for striving; of getting to the top of the class of life by making a lot of money and keeping America in front of China, India and, on a good day, Germany.

To read these addresses is to be told that life is a marathon in which most of the participants are from Asia and the United States is on the slippery slope to oblivion, and it missed the starter’s pistol shot.

With fine irony, it is many of those who have made a hash of national policies and foreign adventures who feel the most obliged to urge the bewildered young people of the class of 2014 to sally forth and do great things. I would humbly suggest they sally forth and live their lives: less striving, more living.

My commencement wisdom:

Do not be defined by where you work, but by what you do. Working for the dominant institution in your field may sound swell at a cocktail party, but it is almost guaranteed to be less fun and less invigorating than a lesser institution, which is not inhabited wholly by strivers. Strivers can be very tedious.

The same goes for the institution you are leaving. Worry less about where you studied and more about what you learned.

The best thing I can advise any young person is to have a well-stocked mind. It is a bulwark against adversity, a comfort in disaster, and a place where you can find strength all the days of your life; in success and disaster, in helping to heal a broken heart – and there are going to be broken hearts aplenty in this class, as there have been in all the preceding graduating classes.

Life has stages and it is worth knowing them, without being dictated to by them. In your twenties you will suffer Cupid’s arrow, the ecstasy and pain of love, make your professional mistakes, and begin the intriguing business of finding out who you are.

The thirties are the great decade: The idealism is intact, most of the mistakes are in the past, and you have the enthusiasm and energy to make your move in life. It is a golden decade when everything starts to come into focus.

The forties are for consolidating, watching children grow and deciding what is possible.

From age 50 on, you are in the harvest years. Harvest the rewards of being good at what you do, the respect of your peers, while as ever stocking your mind -- the permanent joy of learning, and especially of learning that you have not taken the human pilgrimage alone.

I have known too many people who do not know the reward and sanctuary of reading. Prodigious readers, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, would read in the five minutes before a meeting, or while waiting for a call to come through. It was the secret life that balanced the public life.

My father was not a lettered man, and reading was not something that came easily for him. As result, he missed the great community that is open to all with the good fortune to know how to read.

Do not fence yourself in — and do not let others do it for you. Do not believe that you have aptitude for this or that on a hunch: Please find out.

I have made a living as a public speaker and broadcaster for many decades. But a lawyer, in a traffic case, once told me that she would not put me on the stand because she felt I was not good at speaking in front of people. The terrifying truth is that I accepted her judgment – and lost the case.

Besides being corralled by false knowledge of ourselves, the other great monster lying in wait for you is rejection. We all dread rejection, not just those who meet it constantly like writers and sales people. Fear of rejection is a great disabler; fight it, you are not unique that way. Treat “no” as the prologue to “yes.”

Good luck.

Llewellyn King, of Washington, D.C. and Rhode Island, is executive producer and co-host of  White House Chronicle, on PBS. His e-mail is lking@kingpublishing.com.

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Snobs and art lovers

Nick "Memories of Caesar's Forum,'' by GEORGE NICK, in his "George Nick: Paintings and Legacy''  show at the St. Botolph Club, in Boston's Back Bay, through June 26.

The St. Botolph Club is one of those cultural centers -- in the case of the St. Botolph mostly for visual art (of which it has quite a permanent collection) -- spawned by the new  industrial and trading money of the late 19th Century, mostly in the Northeast.

Members prided themselves on promoting an educational and civic mission instead of simply enjoying establishments where the elite could eat and drink with the comforting sense of being in the cocoon of the financially and socially very comfortable, with no Jews, Catholics or Blacks, please.

Such ethnic and religious limitations (at some clubs enforced without anything in writing) have since mostly been dropped in these buildings, though there's still a disproportionate share of the descendents of  the old Yankee mercantile aristocracy among the membership. Yes, the Brahmins.

That is not to say that they didn't offer plenty of food and drink, too; they still do. Indeed, evidence of alcoholism  has been far from absent over the years in these brick piles, especially since enthusiastic drinking could be taken as a sign of collegiality, within limits, of course.

I remember once being asked by a friend to drop by the St. Botolph on a very quiet Sunday morning and the front door was opened by member who had been staying there during the time of his divorce. Divorces were considerably more complicated and time-consuming then; at least something has gotten simpler.  (Presumably the staff had the morning off.)

The member wore a very long, Mandarin-looking silk bathrobe (or would you call it a dressing gown?) and a glass of brandy in his hands. Who could expect any less in "the Athens of America''? This member was not alcoholic, by the way. He was just trying to settle his stomach.

Botolph, by the way, is derived from the name of a  7th Century Saxon saint living in England. The place name "Boston'' is said to come from it.

A reminder of the Anglophilia that permeated these clubs.

 

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Sam Pizzigati: R.I. joins war on huge pay of CEO's

Have you heard about Domino’s Pizza CEO J. Patrick Doyle? He pocketed $43 million over the last three years running an operation that stiffs low-wage workers and rakes in taxpayer subsidies.

That news prompted the New York Post to open its coverage with a rather brilliant quip: “Hey, J. Patrick Doyle, save some dough for the pizzas.”

Almost every day, the headlines remind us how outrageous CEO pay in America has become. Will these outrages ever end?

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers in Congress give us no particular cause for optimism. But at the state level we actually may be in for a pleasant political surprise. Two new imaginative state proposals are now seeking to leverage the power of the public purse against executive excess. In California, lawmakers are zeroing in on how government taxes. New legislation pending in Rhode Island targets how government spends.

California’s pending Senate bill 1372, introduced by state Senators Mark DeSaulnier and Loni Hancock, would tie state corporate-income tax rates to corporate pay disparities.

Corporations in California currently face an 8.84 percent tax on their profits. The DeSaulnier-Hancock legislation would raise that rate to 13 percent for companies that pay their top execs over 400 times what their typical workers are making.

The same legislation lowers the state corporate tax rate to 7 percent on companies with a CEO-worker pay divide less than 25-to-1. Under the bill, all firms with a ratio under 100-to-1 would end up with a tax cut, all above that ratio with a tax hike.

Back in the 1970s, few firms in California or anywhere else in the United States paid their top execs over 25 times what their workers were making. And today? The AFL-CIO has just reported that major U.S. corporate CEOs last year averaged 331 times the pay that went to America’s workers.

The California legislation, writes Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson, would give top corporate execs a simple choice. They could either continue to “overpay themselves and underpay their employees,” a course of action that would up their corporate tax bill, or they could narrow their internal corporate pay divide and watch their corporate tax bill shrink.

Top execs would have a third option as well. They could try to game the system by contracting out their lowest-paying jobs to reduce the gap between their company’s highest and lowest paychecks.

But the California legislation covers this possibility. The bill raises by 50 percent the tax rate on any corporations that increase their outsourcing.

The DeSaulnier-Hancock legislation has made it through a key California Senate committee. But final passage will take a heavy lift. The bill needs a two-thirds legislative majority.

In Rhode Island, Senate Bill 2796 would give preferential treatment in state contracting to companies that pay their highest-paid executive no more than 32 times what their lowest-paid employees take home.

This preferential treatment, says bill chief sponsor Catherine Cool Rumsey, would give firms with reasonable CEO-worker pay gaps an edge in competing for state contracts.

“We need to give companies the incentive to do the right thing,” the freshman senator told me earlier this month.

The Rhode Island legislation has already won the support of key state legislative leaders. Those senators not yet on board, notes Rumsey, fear “ruffling business feathers.”

Her message for the hesitant: Corporations that lavish pay on top execs and underpay workers are forcing low-wage families to draw on government social service programs. These corporations are costing state taxpayers millions.

All levels of government in America today, advocates for the Rhode Island bill point out, already deny contracts to companies that discriminate by race or gender. Our tax dollars, Americans believe, shouldn’t be subsidizing racial or gender inequality.

The Rhode Island bill extends this consensus. Our tax dollars shouldn’t be subsidizing economic inequality either.

Sam Pizzigati, an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow and a columnist for otherwords.org, where this piece originated. He edits the inequality weekly Too Much. His latest book iThe Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class.

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Dear Whitey

PARODY!!! (From Paul Steven Stone, at paulstonesthrow.com)

February 14, 2010

FROM: John J. O’Brien, Commissioner

TO: James Joseph “Whitey” Bulger, Jr.

ADDRESS: Somewhere in Santa Monica, CA (for internal use only)

RE: Your application for employment

 

Dear Whitey:

How wonderful to receive your application for future employment in our agency, in the event you ever return to your home state. Here at the Patronage Department we receive numerous applications, but rarely from someone so highly qualified to deal with criminals, killers and thugs.

However, as Commissioner of the Mass. Patronage Department it often falls upon me to perform the most difficult and unpleasant tasks. Thus, with a heavy heart and my hands raised high in the air, I regret to inform you I must reject your application for employment at the MPD.

Please don’t take this as a personal rejection. Far from it! With two of your nephews already on the department’s payroll, nothing would give me greater pleasure than to bring another Bulger aboard. Your brother William has written to me with expressions bordering on outright bragging about your numerous talents and accomplishments—your entrepreneurial spirit, your gang leadership skills, your hair-trigger response to challenges, your managerial finesse in parceling out punishment. All skills we could easily put to good use at the MPD.

In fact, because of the many obstacles you face in returning to Massachusetts for a personal interview, I took the liberty of having a surrogate sit through your civil service exam. And I’m pleased to inform you your score was so exceptional you already outrank almost all other applicants.

But alas, I cannot offer you a job should you eventually return to Massachusetts. Ordinarily, someone like you with glowing recommendations from the F.B.I. and the Massachusetts Senate, not to mention multiple good-0conduct reports from the Mass Correctional System, would be a shoo-in for almost any position in the MPD. But I cannot step aside and allow you to take the Commissioner’s job, as you requested. Not even if you hold a gun to my head as you—no doubt jokingly—suggested.

And so, Whitey, I hope you won’t hold it against me that I cannot fulfill your request for suitable employment at the MPD. As for your idea of serving our department in some security capacity, I can only reply that MPD employees are not allowed to carry loaded firearms, especially in the commonwealth’s courthouses. Another reason why I hold our prissy, pettifogging judges in such contempt.

Next thing you know they’ll be turning patronage into a crime!

And so, Whitey, I wish you great success in finding a new career path for when you ultimately return to your home state. A career path that would support any claims of personal redemption and improved moral character you might need to offset all those murder, robbery and extortion charges.

Your nephews send their love and wish you a Happy Valentine’s Day!

Sincerely,

John

John J. O’Brien

Commissioner and CDJ (Chief Dispenser of Jobs)

Massachusetts Patronage Department

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Whatever you want

  Goldman

"Acceptance'', by HARVEY GOLDMAN, at Dedee Shattuck Gallery, in hios "Apophenia'' show, through June 1.

The exhibition showcases works from Mr. Goldman's digital series, "along with examples of early ceramic pieces, which have inspired his digital surface textures,'' says the gallery.

 

 

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ACA a boon for 'safety-net' hospitals

Except for states (mostly  in the South) that refused to accept Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, the ACA has been a boon for "safety-net'' hospitals that service large numbers of poor people. That's because the ACA, by enabling millions of previously uninsured people to get insurance (many of them via Medicaid programs), has dramatically reduced pressure on hospitals to provide uncompensated care.

See this comment in Cambridge Management Group's Web site.

 

 

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A notably timid, hypocritical Kerry at Yale

  By DON PESCI

VERNON, Conn.

The good news is that Secretary of State John Kerry is not Ayaan Hersi Ali, and therefore his address to Yale graduates on College Class Day this year was not cancelled by a tremulous administration responding to charges that the appointed speaker had needlessly denigrated Islam.
Yale, one may be thankful, is not Brandeis University, which first announced plans that it would bestow an honorary degree on Hersi Ali and later cancelled her invitation to speak at the college when students and Muslim organizations became restive.
Mr. Kerry, assuredly, is no Hersi Ali. His comments concerning the murderous assault on Christians by Muslim Salafists in the Middle East and Africa are so mild and inoffensive as to be barely noticed at all.
Nor is Mr. Kerry Condoleezza Rice, currently a professor of political economy in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and the first African-American in U.S. history to be appointed Secretary of State. Ms. Rice graciously declined the invitation to speak at Rutgers University when students at the university professed to be agitated by former President George W. Bush’s Iraq War.
Ms. Rice fell victim to academic indignation when leaders of the university’s Islamic organizations, Ahluk Bayt, MuslimGirl and the Muslim Student Organization wrote a letter to Rutgers’s president charging that Ms. Rice, in her official capacity as secretary of state, had been guilty of “grave human rights violations, defrauding the American public” and unequivocally supporting “enhanced torture tactics.”
“During a six-hour ‘occupation’ of a campus office building,” one news outlet reported, “demonstrators labeled Rice a ‘war criminal’ and suggested that her rightful place was not in front of a college commencement crowd but in the docket.”
For a good part of his life, Mr. Kerry said at Yale, hidebound institutions and conventional government had responded laconically to society’s “felt needs.” Mr. Kerry advised the Yale students not to shrink from becoming “disturbers of the peace.” As examples of the incapacity of government to respond quickly and adequately to “felt needs,” Mr. Kerry mentioned  the Civil Rights Movement, the Clean Air Act and, according to a report in a Hartford paper, “ the ending of the war in Vietnam.”
Ah yes – Vietnam. Mr. Kerry is something of an authority on the Vietnam years, a national agony that corresponded neatly with the breakdown of authority in colleges: spitting at returning troops, non-negotiable demands made of college deans by students occupying their offices, and a highly fictionalized view of the role played by soldiers in Vietnam were all characteristics of the age of protest.
The students to whom Mr. Kerry directed his remarks at Yale, unlike the secretary of state, have no personal recollection of the Vietnam War era. They depend for an accurate remembrance of times past upon such as Mr. Kerry, one of the disturbers of the universe during the Vietnam period.
Upon his return from service in Vietnam, Mr. Kerry was not one of the troops spat upon by war protesters, possibly because he eagerly joined their protests as a member of the "Vietnam Veterans Against the War.” Invited to testify before the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs in 1971, Mr. Kerry pulled out all the anti-Vietnam War stops, and then some.
He and other returning soldiers whom he contrasted in his testimony to Thomas Paine’s “sunshine patriots” had just finished conducting in Detroit an investigation into war crimes committed by American troops in Vietnam.
In his congressional testimony, Mr. Kerry reported the findings of the “Winter Soldiers” with which he strongly identified. He wished to emphasize that the details he was providing to the Congress were:
“… not isolated incidents, but crimes committed on a day to day basis, with the full awareness of officers at every level of command. It’s impossible to describe to you what did happen in Detroit, the emotions in the room, the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. But they did. They relieved the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do. They told the stories of times they personally raped, cut off the ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and  turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown (sic) up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, raised villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam, in addition to the normal ravage of war, in addition to the very particular ravaging which is done by the power of this country. We called this investigation the ‘winter solider’ investigation…”
Yale students who may have expected the heroic anti-Vietnam War protester to launch verbal missiles at Islamic terrorists who have only recently cut off the ears and arms and heads of Christians in the Middle East and Northern Africa very likely were disappointed in Mr. Kerry’s College Class Day address, a good part of which was devoted to the ravages to the environment caused by an over-reliance on oil.
China and Vladimir Putin’s Russia have just concluded a multibillio- dollar oil deal, shredding whatever serious sanctions might be imposed by Mr. Kerry on a proto-Stalinist Russia now busily dismembering Ukraine.
Don Pesci (donpesci@att.net) is a political columnist writer who lives in Vernon, Conn.
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Charles Pinning: A separate peace in Newport

By CHARLES PINNING

An enemy ambush had separated me from my battalion and I was alone in the field. Crouching in the tall grass, I took a long pull from my canteen and wiped my lips. The noon sun was beating down and I would have to handle my water carefully. I squeezed some dirt and smeared it on my face for camouflage.

A big, orange monarch opened and closed its wings only a foot away. Running to my position, I’d flown past blackberry bushes that had ripped my pants. My goal was to reach the ocean where, hopefully, I would find a landing craft to get me the hell out of here.

I checked my compass and looked up at the sky. In a house at the edge of the field, a woman was hanging laundry on a clothes line. A cherry tree in the yard had lost most of its pink blossoms. There was a small shed in the yard and a sandbox. I squinted back into the field, scanning the tall grass for any movement that might signal the enemy.

I pondered when to make my move.

The woman hanging clothes looked out across the field and I lowered myself. There was no telling whose side she was on. One couldn’t be too careful in these parts.

A funny sound came from a stand of trees and I flattened myself to the ground. Footsteps, many footsteps. I unholstered my .45 and lay still as a corpse. They passed by, without seeing me, not more than 10 feet away.

When I raised myself again to look around, a girl in a red blouse was standing in the yard next to the one where the lady had been hanging clothes. She waved to me. I signaled her to stay quiet and as she retreated into her house I lowered myself back into the grass.

I reached down and touched my leg where the blackberry bush had ripped my pants. When I brought my hand up there was some blood on it. This was not good. The enemy had dogs and the smell of blood would only make me more easily discovered. I fingered the leather handle of my trench knife. I would have to kill the dog first, quickly, with the knife in its throat and then shoot the handler with my .45. That would be loud and, I hoped, unnecessary.

The thing to do now was inch forward on my belly. Slow work, but I would remain invisible as well as be able to spot any mine trip wires.

Suddenly a plane came in low and strafed the field. I drew my helmet down over my head and gritted my teeth as the ground around me jumped up like popcorn, then it was gone. The butterfly opened its wings again on the blade of grass and I took another pull from my canteen and wiped my lips. The water, what was left of it, was warm but I was grateful for it.

From my breast pocket, I withdrew a letter from my wife, Pamela. She said all was well at home and that everyone prayed for me all the time. God, my leg hurt from the blackberry bushes. It was possible a thorn was embedded. I was susceptible to such things, having had blood poisoning twice from thorns.

I missed Pamela. I missed our walks in the neighborhood and I missed riding our bikes together. If I ever got out of this hellhole alive, I’d tell her every day how much I loved her paintings. She’d painted the side of our Pontiac station wagon: flames streaming down the sides from the front wheels.

Now, she was in our house in Newport, probably having lunch. A sandwich. Probably turkey and cheese, her favorite. God, I was getting hungry! And my leg hurt. What if I did have blood poisoning again? And stuck in this hellhole!

Back home, my team might have a baseball game tonight. I played in the Sunset League, an adult league. We played down at Cardines Field just off the bay. Pamela came to all of my games. She brought snacks. After the game, we’d sit in the stands eating celery and peanut butter. She had freckles. God, I loved her freckles. She didn’t like her freckles.

I was probably going to have to make a break for it. Between the blood poisoning in my leg and my hunger, I had to get out of this hellhole!

Slowly, I rose to my knees. I adjusted my helmet strap, checked everything hanging off my equipment belt and made a run for it. I zigzagged through the high grass to make myself a harder target, was almost there when I was hit by machine gun fire. I dove down, knowing I’d have to crawl the rest of the way if I had any hope of making it alive.

But as I dove into the grass, a stiff piece hit me in the eye.

“Raaah!”

I dropped my rifle and ran toward the backyard. My mother came running out and immediately saw the stalk of grass sticking out of my eye. She threw me in the station wagon and we drove straight to Dr. Grimes’s house, where he’d just sat down for Sunday lunch with his wife and 12 kids.

He brought me into his office at the front of the house and removed the stalk. I was going to live. I was going to be fine. He put a pirate’s patch over my eye.

At home, my mother made me take a bath and then daubed Merthiolate on my scratched leg and put me to bed. She ferried up a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup.

Pamela, who’d heard me screaming earlier, came over and sat on my bed. She brought her sketch pad and drew while I thumbed through a Mad magazine. I thought about how pretty she looked in her red blouse. Suddenly, she crawled up and kissed me on the cheek.

“I don’t want you playing war anymore,” she said. “I don’t want to lose you.”

I sighed. After a rough start, it had become a perfect summer’s day.

 Charles Pinning is  a Providence-based writer and the author of the New England-based novel "Irreplaceable'', about, among other thing, the art world.

 

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The faces of art

Liebeskind Work by BILL LIEBESKIND, in his show "We Make Art: 1,001 Artist Portraits'', at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, in Dennis, Mass., through June 14.

This artist has fashioned 1,001 heads of artists (including alive and long dead) from modeling clay. Incredibly, it took him only two years. Not surprisingly, he also makes comic books.

This project is educational in a number of ways. One is that it's  way for people to see what famous artists whose faces are little known actually looked like. (The faces of only a few famed artists are well known, such as those of Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali.)

That might help viewers understand their personalities a bit more.

The museum's blurb says that, in addition to his art about fellow artists,  he is "inspired by current events, such as the destruction of the World Trade Center and the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. Liebeskind attempts to make sense of the chaos in the world by using such powerful imagery in his work.''

Don't we all  try to make sense of the world's chaos -- until, usually later in life, we give up trying?

 

 

 

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'Mastery of the human condition'

Bernstein Girlhood'', by  the late THERESA BERNSTEIN, in the show "Theresa Bernstein:  A Century in Art'', at the Heftler Gallery, Beverly, Mass., through July 11.

The show is meant to acquaint viewers with "her mastery of the human condition.''

As often is the case in these days of identity politics, Ms. Bernstein's relative obscurity is blamed on her being a woman and so not being given adequate respect and publicity. I don't know about that, but she certainly was a fine painter.

 

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