Something to Brighten Your Day

It's pouring with rain again but....

OK the peonies have long gone but they're still some lilies hanging in there and the clematis Jackmanii, or Jack Daniels, as I call it,  looks fit to eat.  Plus the trumpet vine, gift, as a tiny sprig from my Vermont brother-in-law, is showing off its first blooms of the summer.  Life in the swamp continues apace.....

Rural Crime: Who Dug the Hole?

 It's wet, wet, wet. Heavy rain and thunderstorms interspersed with muggy sunshine. As a result we have a new family in the front garden.

More sinister is the following, which appeared suddenly last week.

 Question is, who dug it?  A woodchuck? The Brazil football team?  No it's too small for either of those. Whoever did it, left a mess outside.
  It's  a  mystery, except that yesterday I spied a small stripy personage exiting the hole.

Nothing to do with me!  Just exploring......

The Men's Soccer World Championships

 When I first came to live in America, I thought I could never be really at home in a country that called the World Cup the “Men’s World Soccer Championship”.  At least our local paper did, in a tiny segment at the bottom of the sports page. 

  Back during the 2010 World Cup, hubby and I were in our nearest metropolis, Buffalo, when England were playing.  We finally located a bar that was actually showing the match instead of wall-to-wall baseball.   The first snag was that England were playing Germany. The second snag was that England lost 4-1. The third was that the bar was full of German tourists taking time off from exploring Niagara Falls, who ended up coming up to me and saying,  “Ve are so sorry.”  But there wasn’t a local American in the place.

  Well that was then and now is now. Things are different. Or so the media would have you believe. I’ve read all about how America is finally embracing the Beautiful Game, especially after the  valiant performance by Team USA in Brazil,  with sentimental TV trailers dwelling lyrically on the American team’s varied social backgrounds and the fact that they epitomised  “300 million Americans.” I saw thousands of American fans gathered in New York City and Chicago, got up as Uncle Sam and cheering  them on.    But that’s cosmopolitan New York and Chicago. It’s not around here.  

 I was in the hairdresser’s before Team USA’s last match and I asked her if they’d be showing it. I even said “game” in the American way so she’d understand me.  “Is that today?” she asked, puzzled.  Then she twigged,   “The World Cup?  Wait a minute.  Isn’t there some guy who keeps biting people?” 

  Having spent a couple of days at the start of the World Cup in England and seen England flags everywhere, it was a culture shock to come back to western New York and find life going as if events a few thousand miles to the south might as well not be happening.  There were plenty of Stars and Stripes flags in Tops supermarket but then I realised they were simply gearing up for the Fourth of July.

   The majority of Americans still, quite misguidedly, think of football, no, wait,  soccer,  as a dull pastime with few goals, primarily suited to women, small children and less-than-manly men.  Most of the American lads  I know wouldn’t be seen dead playing soccer much past the day their  voices break.

   International matches are a bit unfamiliar too.  In their traditional sports, American teams mostly just play each other and the Canadians. I suspect the novelty of Brazil will soon wear off, especially as Team USA lost.

     The conservative columnist Ann Coulter got some publicity when she penned a tirade  entitled, “America’s favorite national pastime: hating soccer”, remarking, “Everyone just runs up and down the field and every once in a while a ball  accidentally goes in”.   I might retort, “What about American football, where the players mostly just stand around waiting for the TV commercials and every once in a while run at each other like maddened bulls?”  but most Americans wouldn’t get it. 

   Ms Coulter also implied that the whole concept of soccer was somehow “un-American”, it being mainly popular with recent immigrants,   “I promise you, no American whose great-grandfather was born here is watching soccer”.

  That was an insult to hubby,  whose ancestor fought in the American Revolution and who was sitting right by me, yelling in frustration as we watched Team USA’s last stand.  But true, he doesn’t make a habit of it.  

     They have been showing  the World Cup matches here but the commentators are mostly British – with the occasional Mexican, so we can get to hear him scream,   “Goooooooooooooooal!”

    It’s going to take a lot to wean middle America away from its comfort zone of American football, baseball, basketball and ice hockey. Plus, America already has plenty of religious fervour  of the more conventional sort without the Beautiful Game to complicate things. 

   To prove my point, I’ve just switched on my TV and looked at the programme guide. And what does the sports channel say?  “World Soccer Championship”, that’s what.

Mother Goose

 I have a soft spot for Canada geese.   They get in the way, they, as the Americans put it delicately, poop everywhere and there are probably on balance far too many of them. But I love the way we're under their flight path and hear them honking up above in their great, pulsating v-formations.

 Meanwhile, at Buffalo Marina

 There are new kids on the block.

But things always happen when you haven't got a chance to grab the camera. We were launching the boat down the ramp and I had my hands full with lines when Ma Goose decided to launch the babies the easy way, strutting down the ramp with offspring in tow and plopping into the water at the bottom. Meanwhile the speedboats and cigarette boats and power boats and our little sailing boat just had to wait their turn.
  At the dock, their older cousins came scrounging.

 Totally disregarding the "no swimming" rule.

Smoking Valleys

Is what they call this sort of thing.

Which happens a lot around here.

On misty mornings

When the fog seems to get trapped between the hills.

Like candy floss.

Or as they call it in America.

 

Cotton candy.

 Another of those expressions that evolved differently in the two countries.

And when the weather's as humid and thundery as we've been having, it seems, since the beginning of the summer.

The western New York valleys, regardless of health warnings, are smoking more than ever. 

Farewell Louis Zamperini, Local Hero

  Happy Fourth of July everyone - and since red white and blue are also the colours of the Union Jack, I can wear them today and no one will suspect I'm toasting the Queen Over the Water, as it were. Not that I mind celebrating with my American friends of course.
  But a bit of sad news today - the death of Louis Zamperini, an American hero and what's more a local hero at the ripe old age of 97.

Coincidentally, I'd just written a piece about him for the Catholic Times in England. It went to press just before his death was announced. So here it is, as I wrote it.

                                      ***********************************

  Our local small town, Olean,  in New York state, isn’t normally feted as the birthplace of heroes. It’s an unassuming spot and like many parts of western New York,  has seen better days.

  At once time – something like a hundred years ago – Olean was a centre for oil production, hence its rather fanciful name, which is meant to make you think “City of Oil”.

  It had an exciting period in the 1920s when some gangsters, including Al Capone, frequented the town but these days, well, it’s got a few industries,  some pretty houses, many now dilapidated, a few nice churches, a YMCA, a run-down shopping mall and a main street that was once picturesque but fell prey to “urban renewal”, losing its old theatre and many of its quaint flat-fronted shops to a Rite Aid chemists and a fast food chain.

  It’s still a good place to live, though, with some big-hearted people who would be very pleased to hear about anything that could put Olean on the map and encourage some visitors.

  And the other day I heard an interesting tale about an Olean local hero, one who I never knew was born in the town.

  One of the most popular books in America  in the past couple of years has been Unbroken , by Laura Hillenbrand. (She wrote a previous bestseller about the racehorse Seabiscuit ).

  Unbroken is about an extraordinary man called Louis Zamperini, who was born in 1917 in, yes, Olean, New York.

  It’s one of those stories that’s a dream for biographers and strikes any number of chords with the American public.

  Zamperini was the son of Italian immigrants and here I have to admit that he only lived in Olean until he was two years old and then moved to California but don’t let that spoil a good story.  Young Louis had a troubled childhood and youth, apparently smoking, stealing and drinking before he was even nine years old. Then a police officer suggested he put his skills at running away from trouble to better  use.  He pulled himself together and became a noted athlete, running  in the 5,000 metres in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. He didn’t get a medal but ran the last lap so fast that Hitler insisted on shaking his hand. (Apparently he also shinned up a flagpole and stole the Fuhrer’s personal flag.)

  In 1943, during the Second World War, Zamperini was a bomb aimer. His  B-24 Liberator bomber crashed into the Pacific and he survived for 47 days on a small rubber raft, subsisting on rainwater and raw fish and close to starving to death. Only one fellow crewmember survived with him.

  As if that wasn’t bad enough, he was captured by the Japanese and languished for two-and-a-half years in a Japanese prison camp, enduring  gruelling punishments, beatings  and humiliation.

  But fate had still more to throw at Louis Zamperini.  After the war, he suffered from alcoholism and post-traumatic stress disorder  but yet again,  with the help of the evangelist Billy Graham, he picked himself up, became a born again Christian and was determined to become a missionary to Japan where he preached forgiveness for his former captors . (In the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, his hosts asked him to carry the Olympic flame as part of the torch relay. )

  Back in America,  he set up a charity for troubled boys and became an inspirational speaker, which he still is, at the age of 97.

  In 1957 there was a project to film Louis Zamperini’s life, starring Tony Curtis but it was never completed. But now Angelina Jolie is directing a new film about him, written by the Coen brothers. It’s due for release in America in December.

  Now Olean citizens want to honour Louis Zamperini with a granite marker and a bench and are sending out an appeal for funds.   Says the Tribute Committee, “We hope to provide the youth of Olean a real life, hometown, inspirational hero to look up to and respect , as opposed to a cartoon, comic book or video character.”

    So what if Louis Zamperini moved to California?  I’m sure he’s still a western New York boy at heart.

Welcome to the Jungle

 As I settled down to cheer on Team USA (well someone's got to do it - the much vaunted new American love affair with soccer is conspicuous by its absence in rural western New York) it was partly an excuse not to bite the bullet and tackle the garden. After 3 week's absence, coinciding with a period of steamy heat and rain, everything has exploded into a lush green tangle of weeds and soon-to-be flowers. But mostly weeds.
  Here's one of several hundred baby sumac trees that have popped up in the flower bed I painstakingly dug out using our local master gardener's "lasagne method". This was a combination of compost, mulch and old newspapers and three weeks ago it looked great....

These weeds sportingly colonised the whisky barrel planter. Now I don't need to buy flowers for it.

Others grew up around the wheelbarrow. That, I repeat, is three weeks' growth and there was a lot more before I got the whacker out.

I sometimes wonder why we bother planting flowers. The weeds do so much better on their own.