Boarding School Blues, chapter 4

Cottage at Long-Sought-for-Pond in Westford

Boarding School Blues

By Louise Peloquin

Chapter 4: Au revoir!

Blanche knew how important it was to keep abreast of the news. Her parents made reading the press and listening to radio broadcasts part of the daily routine. Social agitation characterized the summer of ’65. Vietnam war protests were spreading and the Watts race riots broke out in California turning neighborhoods upside down and killing thirty-four people. “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and “California Girls” topped the hit parade and The Beatles sang “Help!”. Blanche tuned into Mick, Paul, John and Brian on WLLH much more than to breaking news as August turned into September.

Labor Day weekend, with its traditional family cook-outs was the season’s final hurrah. A dozen cousins, from three to nineteen years of age, were having a grand time jumping off the rickety wharf, splashing the adults, hurling multicolored beach balls into the warm air, racing one another with awkward freestyle strokes and counting long seconds holding their breath under water. Nothing could keep them out of the pond, not even the homemade savory snacks, crunchy cookies and juicy watermelon slices which accompanied the burgers and hotdogs displayed on the long picnic table. From Michelle the eldest to Marguerite the youngest, no one wanted to miss a second of fun. As the ripples bobbed on its surface reflecting the sun’s rays like diamond necklaces, the little pond itself seemed happy.

Passaconaway, sachem of the Penacooks. Monument at Edson Cemetery, Lowell, Mass.

Immersing her head for the umpteenth time, Blanche felt one with the pond and said an underwater “thank you” to her favorite place on earth. She was currently reading about the history of the region’s indigenous peoples, especially the Penacooks who had frequented Blanche’s pond in the 1600’s and had named it “Long-Sought-For” because it was hidden from well-traveled paths. The pond and its surrounding land provided their livelihood and Blanche discovered how much they respected its bounty: plentiful fish, berries and game. Tales of the Penacooks fascinated her. Every time she took a swim or picked a blueberry in the nearby woods, a wave of gratitude rose within her. Like the Penacooks, she yearned to live in unison with Mother Nature.

That Labor Day, she opened her mouth so much for the underwater ”thank you” that she ended up coughing quite a bit as she came up for air. Blanche knew that the huge gulp could only do her good because it came from the deep natural wells that constantly fed the pond. “Long-Sought-For-Pond” wasn’t just a fun place, it was her best summer friend. Soon she would have to leave it for several long months.

Labor Day festivities had passed. Blanche’s brothers had already started school. It was Saturday and she was readying for departure. “What a crazy day to leave home. The week-end is supposed to be two days off.” Blanche had abandoned asking why things were as they were. Questions irritated her mother and made her father uneasy. She wanted to avoid the latter at all costs.

Her brothers and sister were watching her pack. Surprisingly enough, the two boys weren’t fighting or teasing one another and her little sister wasn’t whining. The three of them were sitting on the floor, eyes glued to their big sister. Blanche guessed that Antoine would miss pranks like catching daddy-long-leg spiders and putting them into her dresser drawers or spitting into her lemonade. Most importantly, she would no longer be there to give him advice on how to charm the cute girls in his class. Byron, eight years her junior, wouldn’t hear Blanche’s stories about the Penacooks and the importance of respecting nature. Little Marguerite looked confused. “Going away is for kids who don’t listen. You listen. Why are you going?”, she asked.

The suitcases were finally closed tight. Blanche had her hair drawn back into a tight little ponytail and was wearing her Scottish kilt and matching pullover. She felt cramped in the new clothes after weeks in skimpy summer things. The goodbyes were quick but not easy. Determined not to let emotions get the best of her, she didn’t want to stretch them out. After warm hugs for her father and siblings, she mustered up enough strength to flash a radiant smile towards those she was so reluctantly leaving. “I’ll see you guys soon. Don’t give your teachers a hard time and be sure to help Maman around the house and behave for Papa. Next time I’m home the leaves will be falling and we can rake up huge piles to jump in. How good does that sound? Au revoir! Bye!” As Maman pulled out of the driveway, Blanche suddenly had so much to say to her brothers and sister that it surprised her. All she could do as the car drove off was to shout “I love you guys! I love you Papa! Je vous aime!”

The drive to Saint Felicity Academy was only about twenty miles but for Blanche it seemed like light years away. Maman kept the conversation cheery and Blanche wondered if her mother was feeling a twinge of emotion at leaving her eldest child with strangers for the first time. Was she having second thoughts? Maman’s arguments in favor of boarding school were ingrained in Blanche’s mind: SFA would provide an exceptional educational opportunity and a generous scholarship was not to be refused. But did her mother consider the consequences of separating her three younger children from their beloved big sister? So many questions filled Blanche’s head as she was being chauffeured to her new school.

Maman spotted an ice cream stand on the side of the road and skidded the car into its parking lot. “Let’s treat ourselves to a nice big cone, chérie. What would you like? The homemade ice cream here is supposed to be fabulous.” Blanche could have made ice cream her sole source of sustenance but didn’t feel like eating it that afternoon. Her stomach was in knots and the woolen clothes made her sweat. Although she wasn’t hungry, she accepted the offer because it pleased her mother.

After examining the list of flavors, she said: “I’ll just have a scoop of frozen pudding in a waffle cone please. Thank you Maman.” Her mother chose chocolate chip in a cup and the pair sat outside at a dirty picnic table. Blanche carefully placed half of her behind on the wooden bench which was sticky with previous patrons’ partially dried ice cream. She didn’t want to soil her kilt. If her destiny was going to SFA, she wanted to arrive in style, or at least clean.

Maman eagerly gobbled spoonful’s of melting ice cream. Blanche licked and licked her cone in an effort to get the contents safely into her mouth before it dripped onto her clothes. She finished it so fast that she didn’t even take the time to chew the bits of candied fruit hidden in the frozen pudding.

“For a young lady who wasn’t very hungry you devoured your cone in no time!” Maman exclaimed with a slightly mocking grin. “I’m glad we shared this last treat.” Blanche didn’t know what to say, all the more so as the words “last treat” sounded ominous, like the “last meals” served to prisoners on death row. At least she had managed to keep her outfit clean although the white shirt under the pullover was sticking to her back. She hoped she didn’t smell bad. As her body was changing she had noticed that it had become more odorous, especially when she was nervous. The image of her future classmates calling her “stinky-poo”, as her brother Antoine often did, started to haunt her. So she turned to her mother: “Do I smell funny? I’m sweating and I don’t want to look dirty.” Maman turned her long aquiline nose towards her daughter and took a frank whiff, breaking all the rules of etiquette. After the scent evaluation, she opened her large, well-worn leather handbag which served as a portable piggybank, a haberdashery and a pharmacy all at once. She dug in, produced a small bottle of Yardley’s lavender cologne and sprayed a light mist on her daughter’s bosom. “You’ll be fine mon amour, you’ll be just fine.”

There was no chit chat between mother and daughter during the last stretch towards the southern New Hampshire boarding school. After a few minutes, the car slowed down and took a sharp right turn into a quarter mile-long driveway. As the car passed through the wrought-iron gate adorned with the school name and crest, Blanche had her first glimpse of “home away from home”, a dark grey granite, five-story, building with a center tower topped by a turret. Each story had ten long windows on both wings of the tower. They gleamed in the afternoon sun like multi-faceted insect eyes. Balconies with plain iron railings extended the extremities of the building. No colorful flowerpots decorated them. Only the lofty green pines, leafy maples and chestnut trees surrounding the austere building seemed welcoming. Blanche wondered if the Penacooks had been through those woods. As the car came to the end of the drive, Blanche counted twenty granite steps leading to an oversized black door. She had always loved images of medieval castles but this was definitely not one of those. “A fortress with a dungeon, that’s what this place looks like. And there’s no escape route in sight.”

*****

Boarding School Blues is a fictionalized story by Louise Peloquin of life at a Catholic high school in 1960s New England. The full story will be presented in regular installments over the next few months with one chapter appearing every other week.

 Read Chapter 1: The Announcement

 Read Chapter 2: Facing the Inevitable

Read Chapter 3: Readying

Lowell Real Estate in 2020

Local Real Estate in 2020

The year 2020 will always be known for the Covid-19 pandemic but it has also been an incredible year for real estate. The number of deeds recorded at the Middlesex North Registry of Deeds in 2020 and the median price of those deeds are both up 10 percent from 2019. For example, the median price for a Lowell deed, $329,875, was up 12 percent from the median price in 2019 ($295,000) and that was up 16 percent from 2018 ($255,000). The region is also in the midst of a mortgage refinancing boom. The number of mortgages recorded in 2020 (17,299) was up 50 percent from the number recorded in 2019 (11,631).

Historically low interest rates are driving this surge in activity and people in all sectors of the real estate business have used technology and innovative practices to allow all of these transactions to occur. Like the stock market and the overall economy, the positive news from the real estate market seems strangely out of sync with our lived experience since the onset of the pandemic. Still, there is no indication that the real estate market will suddenly reverse course.

Foreclosure-related filings are always a leading indicator of the direction of the real estate market. When there is a boom, there are few foreclosures. When the bubble is about to burst, the number of foreclosure filings begins to rise. However, due to a moratorium on most foreclosures in Massachusetts that extended from March to October, the number of foreclosure filings will be deceptively low.

Before the pandemic struck, we recorded 12 foreclosure deeds in January, 5 in February, and 15 in March. But there were also 23 orders of notice in January and 25 in February. (An order of notice marks the start of the foreclosure process). From April through December there have been a total of 17 foreclosure deeds recorded and just 14 orders of notice. Those numbers will likely rise substantially in the coming months as lenders catch up to the many individuals who have been unable to pay their mortgages due to lost income. Because real estate values continue to rapidly increase, many homeowners at risk of foreclosure will be able to sell their homes and realize enough money from the sales to pay off their outstanding debts and thereby avoid actual foreclosure. However, those same people will still need a place to live. (Tenants facing eviction face a crisis equal to or worse than homeowners facing foreclosure, but the registry of deeds does not have data on rental properties).

In addition to the increase in volume of deeds and mortgages, the total number of documents recorded was also up, rising from 60,104 in 2019 to 69,191 in 2020, an increase of 15 percent. How all those documents got recorded presents an interesting story: From mid-March until the end of the year and continuing, in person access to the registry of deeds has been prohibited or severely curtailed due to the pandemic. And just as the March shutdown began, the registry moved from its home of 165 years in the Middlesex Superior Courthouse at 360 Gorham Street in Lowell to the new Lowell Justice Center at 370 Jackson Street, also in Lowell.

In both locations, customers have been able to leave documents to be recorded in a “drop box” at the entrance to the building and the registry still receives US mail and Fedex and UPS deliveries. But the vast majority of documents filed come through the electronic recording process. From 2016 through 2019, electronic recording accounted for more than 50 percent of all recordings, but since the pandemic lockdown in 2020, nearly 90 percent of all documents arrive at the registry that way.

Every indication is that the pandemic will persist well into 2021 so the registry’s new manner of operation will continue as well. So will the boom in real estate although that will likely be tempered by steadily rising foreclosure rates.

Atlantic Currents, Connecting Cork and Lowell Through Learning

Atlantic Currents is an anthology of sixty-five writers from Ireland and the United States. The book grew from the efforts of John Wooding, a former Provost at UMass, to have Lowell designated a UNESCO Learning City. Working with co-editors Paul Marion of Loom Press and Tina Neylon of the Cork Lifelong Learning Festival, this unique anthology seeks to enrich the the experience of readers by presenting a variety of writing from both sides of the Atlantic. Featured this week is an essay by Wooding on learning and the critical role it plays in our personal lives and in society. The book can be ordered at www.loompress.com

Lowell: City of Learning?

by John Wooding

I was once asked what my best “learning experience” had been – an interesting question, especially for someone who has spent way too many years in school and even more teaching.

I thought about it a while and remembered something from long ago, when I was around 11 or 12. It must have been about 1964. The Beatles had just taken the country by storm, and I was on the cusp of becoming a teenager. My grandfather, then long retired and already in his 70s, was showing me how to make a mortise and tenon (the mortise and tenon is a simple piece of carpentry and the most basic of joints). Grandad had lived through two world wars and the Great Depression and knew a thing or two about thrift. He had taught himself woodworking so he could fix up his house, but also, I suspect, because he knew the power of working with your hands.

What was it about that moment that made it so special?  I was working with someone I loved in a place warmly familiar (Grandad’s old shed in the back yard), full of comforting smells and little make-shift shelves. I can still recall him rolling his cigarette before showing me how to glide the chisel across the oil stone until the tip shone like a diamond, the cigarette resting up in an ashtray made of part of an old shell casing he had brought back with him from France in 1918, while he worked the stone. I still have that chisel. My teacher was patient, encouraging but critical, as he showed me how to saw straight and to chisel. Perhaps more than anything the moment resulted in something that I made with my own hands, under the guidance of someone who knew what they were doing.  It was about learning a skill, of figuring something out, of being with my grandfather. In that moment skills were being passed on and connections made and that is, perhaps, the essence of all learning.

I bring this up, not for the nostalgia, but for what it says about why learning is important and why it can go on, and be valuable, in the odd moments in life and in many places. Most of us, I would guess, have experiences like this: learning something outside of the classroom or any educational institution where the experience was better and more lasting than in anything we got in a classroom. This memory of woodworking with my grandfather (and the question that prompted my recollections) made me think a little more deeply about learning in general, knowledge, how we learn, how and where and what we teach. We know that people learn best by doing. We know that learning should never stop.  We know that learning together is better than learning alone. We also know, at least we should, that nearly everyone has knowledge, skills and wisdom from which we could all benefit.  Students can be teachers and teachers can be students. For far too long we have accepted that knowledge comes only from a credentialed expert standing in front of a class or on a stage. Yes, learning can go on that way, but too often it is boring or irrelevant or ignores the knowledge that we all carry within us. The lesson? By breaking out of the classroom and seeing (and seizing) opportunities to gain new knowledge and new skills, we build confidence and community. After all, learning is an act of intellectual and democratic engagement. Learning is good.

These ideas were really put into focus for me in April last year when I visited Cork, Ireland, during that city’s week-long Festival of Learning. About 12 years ago Cork had followed the lead of many cities around the world to declare itself a UNESCO Learning City. Now it celebrates that designation with an annual festival that brought the streets alive. Throughout Cork and in the streets and in the neighborhoods, there were hundreds of learning activities: everything from Architecture to Zoology. I saw glass-blowing being taught in a small studio by the river, drawing lessons in a pub downtown, a group of kids learning to play guitar led by a young man in a cafe, older adults puffing their way through a physical fitness classes in the school gym, vegetable gardening at a community plot, lectures on history and music in the local library, art exhibits in a couple of stores, and a session on how to crochet in a local coffee shop. The city was brimming with activities, all free, and many led by just ordinary folk. Cork was vibrant.

When I came back to Lowell it was easy to imagine that Lowell could do what Cork and many other cities had done: be designated as a UNESCO Learning City. All the elements are already here. The idea of Lowell as an educational hub is built into its DNA going back at least to Patrick Mogan’s vision in the late 1970s of Lowell as “an educative city.” The National Park was part of that vision and is a vibrant educational force. We have the institutions: a major research university, an excellent community college, and an excellent school system. We have the museums and art galleries, we have the artists of all kinds and heritage workers, and we have hundreds of community groups most of which offer educational programing. As is often said, you can go from kindergarten to a Ph.D. and never leave the city.

First UNESCO Learning City in the United States?

Lowell could become the first UNESCO Learning City in the U.S.  So, what is that? UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (founded in 1945), defines a Learning City as a place that:

“…supports and improves the practice of lifelong learning in the world’s cities by promoting policy dialogue and peer learning among member cities; forging links; fostering partnerships; providing capacity development; and developing instruments to encourage and recognize progress made in building learning cities.” Learning cities exist because they mobilize resources in order to:

• Promote inclusive learning from basic to higher education,
• Revitalize learning in families and communities,
• Facilitate learning for and in the workplace
• Extend the use of modern learning technologies
• Enhance quality and excellence in learning
• Foster a culture of learning throughout life

 What better place than Lowell for such an idea? Lowell has reinvented itself many times as Mill Town, immigrant city, cultural and creative city…all of these visions of Lowell are really about learning in new and old ways, of bringing people together to discuss, explain, help, communicate. Most of the things I saw in Cork are already happening here. We could easily create a curriculum for the city that brings together young and old, students and residents, professors and artisans, cooks and plumbers. We have already kicked this off with our five-day Festival of Learning in April of this year. We can build on this and develop a theme for every month of the year, leveraging some of the key activities and festivals that already make Lowell a place to live and to visit. Why not a month of learning about music and musical traditions built around the Folk Festival in July? Or on writing, reading, and poetry in October using Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! as an anchor? We could focus on a continent by using the African festival to understand more about Africa’s past and future. The possibilities are limitless. Students could become teachers, professors could bring their knowledge and work into the city, classes could be in restaurants and cafes, on plazas and in parks. We could all, in a very real sense, learn from each other.

If we apply to become recognized as a UNESCO Learning City we not only put an exciting frame around what Lowell already does well, but also drive the idea that the city is a place of culture, of tolerance, and of engagement. A place where people can learn new skills and refine old ones. If successful in a year or two, we could become the first-ever UNESCO Learning City in the United States, connecting us globally to similar cities on every continent. In the end there would be a lot to like and learn about Lowell.

John Wooding is professor emeritus in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, where he served as Provost for four years. On campus, he advanced interdisciplinary study and research on a regional economic and social development. With Kristin G. Esterberg, he co-authored Divided Conversations: Identities, Leadership, and Change in Public Universities (Vanderbilt University Press, 2012), and with Charles Levenstein co-authored The Point of Production: Work Environment in Advanced Industrial Societies (The Guilford Press, 1999). He is also the author of The Power of Non-Violence: The Enduring Legacy of Richard Gregg (Loom Press, 2020), the first biography of a mid-20th century pacifist whose writings influenced Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others. John continues to lead the Lowell: City of Learning campaign.

Cartoons by Nicholas Whitmore

Who?

Semiotics

Quiz