This New England

"Upstairs at Margaret's,'' by Alanna Fagan, at the Silvermine Guild Arts Center, in New Canaan, Conn. in a show running June 12-July 14.

This lovely oil on linen by Milford, Conn.-based Fagan evokes to me a sense of the missing, as if you're revisiting -- alone -- the New England house you grew up in but all the relatives you knew there are long dead.

Everything is still and the floors have recently been repolished to make the place attractive for sale to yet another generation of people capable, for a while, of taking care of it. Behind the stillness you feel the cries of still painful and irreconcilable arguments, the breaking of glass and then the heavy weight of sullen silences.

(The eye of the '38 hurricane passed over Milford...)

XXX

This is the golden age of "get it off my desk and on to somebody else's'' and "take the money and run'':

Some Wall Street bankers and other executives loot their companies, clear out with carloads of cash and the re-establish themselves as philanthropic and socialite luminaries with their ill-gotten gains. Many members of municipal unions most of whose members don't live in the cities that must pay for their hefty compensation and very early retirements take the money and move to Florida as soon as they can.

Sometimes I think the whole country and every institution in it should declare bankruptcy and start all over again. A little of what they called "Moral Rearmament'' back in the '50s is in order.

Certainly a lot of cities (Providence and Hartford included?) might be better off declaring bankruptcy and give themselves a clean slate.

The auto companies might be on to something. Now if GM would just reopen a big plant in Framingham. After all, a plant will soon be making batteries for cars in the old mill town of Auburn, Mass.

Read the new novel, Telluride Promise, by W. Edward Massey, about a small-town banker in Colorado to see in emotionally resonant form how people should act. I suspect that Tom Hanks will be called upon to play the hero in the movie. More to come on this.

 Tags  Alanna Fagan Framingham Moral Rearmament New Canaan Silvermine Guild Arts Center The Telluride Promise W. Edward Massey

Comments

Alanna Fagan said:

Dear Robert Whitcomb,

I love the drama that you have inserted into what I thought was a tranquil corner of this old sea captain's house, which, incidentally, though reminding me of my own childhood house in Mattapoisett, is actually in Governor's Harbor, Eleuthera, Bahamas. Thanks for your kind comments and backstory.

Best regards,
Alanna Fagan

p.s. We had a cousin named Robert Whitcomb. Our family name is Raybold - any relation?

Link | August 4, 2009 11:07 AM
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