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While roaming around downtown during Winterfest last weekend, we decided to visit the Whistler House Museum. We spent an enjoyable 45 minutes looking over the historic house and viewing some of the period art – an engaging mixture of landscapes, still life paintings and portraits as well as a room full of Whistler’s etchings. Of particular interest were the tidbits of Lowell history and Whistler trivia that we picked up from our enthusiastic young guide, Vanessa. Whistler, for example, was expelled from West Point for failing chemsitry, a problem that surfaced when he varnished his own paintings and they later became brown and discolored. When a cousin of his, Edith Fairpoint Davenport, was allowed to do an exact copy of his most famous work, Arrangement in Grey and Black, more commonly known as “Whistler’s Mother,” she faithfully copied the dull brown tones. This work is now on view at the Whistler House, but if you visit the original at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris you will see the true colors as intended. We also enjoyed the painting “Lowell in 1825″ by Benjamin Mather, which showed St Anne’s church and a few brick buildings in a green, pastoral setting. In the same room are portraits of Theodore Edson Parker, long the Reverend at St Anne’s and a champion of education for girls (leading Lowell High to become the first co-ed high school in the nation), and James B. Francis, the brilliant engineer whose massive floodgate, once called “Francis’ Folly” has saved Lowell many times from the raging waters of the Merrimack. All in all, between the art, architecture and history, the museum proved to be a rich and satisfying outing for our out-of-state visitors. Even though Whistler himself moved away from Lowell at an early age and in later years would never admit to having been born here (preferring to say he was from Baltimore or St. Petersburg), we were quite proud of our city as we showed our friends his birthplace.

Last year, Jackie and I dabbled with the idea of doing a cable talk show on LTC. We took a class and learned how to use a camera, even did a couple of interviews; however, we soon became overwhelmed by the amount of work and time required. The real problem soon surfaced: neither of us wanted to be in front of the camera. Jackie could see herself as a director, me – I liked the editing part. Lacking star quality, we let the idea fade away, so we were really impressed to hear that WCAP’s former talk show host, George Anthes, was hosting a DAILY cable TV show. It’s true, Mr. Anthes has reinvented himself as a TV personality and his show, City Life, airs on Channel 8, weekdays from 4:00 to 5:30 pm. In fact, if you haven’t yet seen the show, you might want to tune in tomorrow afternoon, when Jackie will be a guest from 4:30 – 5:30 pm.

You know the ones I’m talking about. We’ve all received them: sentimental prose, a prayer, a safety warning, or a petition for some important cause—asking you to sign on, and more importantly, forward the message to 10 of your friends within the next five minutes. Good luck may be offered, or in some cases, you’re warned bad things will happen if you don’t forward the message. I usually delete those messages even if they’re sent by well-meaning family and friends, and request a reply to sender. Check out this site and you’ll see that deleting these messages, rather than forwarding them as asked, is the exact best thing to do. According to Snopes.com, internet petitions and other message-forwarding emails are often scams for access to active email addresses, which are then used in spam emails or sold to other spammers.

You can’t do better than a good bookstore for your last-minute gift buying. Our local Barnes and Noble downtown has popular as well as quirky selections, or try Willow Books in Acton if you’re down that way. My favorite, slightly off-the-beaten-path, books for gift-giving:

Half Magic by Edgar Eager – an old fashioned magical tale, good for 8 -10 year olds who like Roald Dahl. Quaint and charming, not too cute, with the marvelous premise of a magic coin that only gives you half of what you wish for.

The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander – for those 12 year olds who have read all of Rowling, all of Tolkien and don’t know what to read next. This is the first book of an engaging trilogy. Highly recommended!

The Beacon Street Girls - for those girls (11 and 12) who like The Clique but are really too young for The Gossip Girls.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by the late, great Douglas Adams – absurd, philosophical, funny. Perfect for your nihilistic 15-year old and everyone else who thinks.

Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder. For your cerebral teen, a history of philosophy wrapped in a mystery. It’s a page-turner. Or, try the wonderful Siddhartha by Herman Hesse.

For the mystery lover on your list, try the dark, yet humane detective tales from Sweden by Henning Mankell featuring Kurt Wallander. They’re highly addictive. For the inquiring mind, try The Best Science Writing series. In poetry, I treasure Given by Wendell Berry. The irascible, conservative poet-farmer has been cautioning for decades about our excesses and our treatment of the earth; prescient, backward looking, yet never preachy, his voice seems right for these times.

So, yes, there are only two more days to finish your gift-buying, but one trip to your favorite bookstore should tie up the loose ends. Happy reading to all, and to all a good night!

Whatever you’re doing today–shopping, visiting with family, staying warm at home, or traipsing through the wintery wonderland that is Christmas in New England, my prayer is that you remember what’s important and cherish your blessings. And so, in a tip of the hat to my Celtic ancestors, I share with you an Irish blessing:

May Joy and Peace surround us,

Contentment latch our door,

And Happiness be with us now,

And bless us evermore.

May today there be peace within. May you trust God that you are exactly where you are meant to be. May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith. May you use those gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you. May you be content knowing you are a child of God. Let this presence settle into your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise and love. It is there for each and every one of us.

The first time I saw Barack Obama was at a rally for Deval Patrick in Boston. I was in the pit about 10 feet away waving a Patrick sign. The oratory that night was amazing as was the energy in the room and the feeling of momentum, the feeling that victory in November was possible. I first met Deval Patrick at the Brewed Awakening coffeehouse on a cold winter night with about 20 other people, when he seemed very much a long shot. In June of that year, when he won the democratic nomination and gave his stirring acceptance speech, the convention center in Worcester was a sea of blue signs and the cheers were deafening. The Obama campaign had the same message of hope and change and the same feel of the grassroots building momentum and becoming an unstoppable force. I’m thrilled with this victory and feel that we dodged a disaster in that Obama turned out to be, contrary to the beliefs of many, very much electable, yet I hope he is able to harness the powers that put him there and to deliver on the promise of change.

Okay, to get to the point: the parallels in the Patrick and Obama campaigns have me worried. Truth to tell, there isn’t that much change in Massachusetts since Patrick was elected governor; of course, things haven’t gotten worse either. I’m not sure what I expected though, governing is much harder than campaigning and the entrenched powers on the Hill seem to make it difficult to make much progress. I think the trouble with the grassroots method, powerful and empowering as it is, is that once the campaign is over, the grassroots go dormant so to speak. People return to their lives and stop paying a lot of attention (at least that’s what I do). George Packer, in a recent New Yorker article, sums up my fears. He quotes Franklin D. Roosevelt, elected in 1932, who says that “all our great Presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.” He listed the “transformative Presidents” as Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson and Grover Cleveland. I think today we might eliminate Cleveland, but certainly FDR would make the list. There seems to be some consensus that Obama could be such a President. However, toward the end of the article Packer says:

Obama, in order to break through the inherent constraints of Washington, will need, above all, a mobilized public beyond Washington. Transformative Presidents—those who changed the country’s sense of itself in some fundamental way—have usually had great social movements supporting and pushing them. Lincoln had the abolitionists, Roosevelt the labor unions, Johnson the civil-rights leaders, Reagan the conservative movement. Clinton didn’t have one, and after his election, Reich said, “everyone went home.”

From what I can tell, the bloggers aren’t going home, but the movement is by nature diffuse, broad-based and unfocused – that is a strength. Whether the grassroots can help with governing remains to be seen.

Have you heard this one?

A recession is when a neighbor loses his job; a depression is when you lose yours.”

Ha, ha. Very funny. Last night at a meeting I heard that we are now “officially in a recession.” I know they call Economics a (dismal) science, but it seems more subjective than that. Some economists are saying that the recession actually started in December 2007; a quick google will give you stories about the recession from last January, March and April. Two consecutive quarters of declining GDP is the standard definition of a recession, but that doesn’t take into account (rising) unemployment rates and (falling) consumer confidence. And lest you feel that at least a recession is better than a depression, know that a depression is simply a really bad recession, and we probably won’t know we’re in it until we’re out of it.

I don’t know about you, but my my head is spinning between inflation, stagflation and now the dreaded deflation. (Deflation means prices are falling, but apparently that’s NOT good news, as witness yesterday’s plummet in stock prices). After years of being chided as big spenders and bad savers, it is now apparently the scared-to-spend consumer who is undermining the economy. How to make sense of all this, or should we even try? As the NYT blog, Econimix, explains, the spector of Japan’s “lost decade” (the 1990s) looms:

A banking crisis led to a tight credit market, which was dragging down the economy. In response, the Bank of Japan lowered interest rates to zero. Still, banks refused to lend. “Prices for pretty much everything declined, following a bust in the real estate and stock markets…” wrote Bill Powell in a recent article for Time magazine. “The country entered a decade of stagnation.”

Now, that’s depressing.

It feels strange to be agreeing with Mitt Romney, but I have to second his opinion (in yesterday’s New York Times) that Congress should not bail out the Auto Industry. First, you have the ludicrous example of the three top Execs from Ford, GM and Chrysler all flying to Washington in their (separate) private jets. Representative Gary Ackerman (D. NY) is being quoted all over the web today with his witty comments, the clever analogy to a guy in a soup kitchen wearing a tuxedo as well as:

“Couldn’t you have downgraded to first class or something, or jet-pooled or something to get here?” Ackerman asked the executives at a hearing held by the U.S. House Financial Services Committee.

Rep. Brad Sherman (D. California) also chided the industry execs, but added:

“I also, though, must recognize that you’re in trouble mostly because of the economic downturn.”

I think it’s more than that. Romney calls for a total restructuring of the way the auto industry does business, something that a managed bankruptcy process would make possible. He calls for a collaboration between labor and management to end “the huge disadvantage in costs relative to foreign brands” as well as “accepting sanity in salaries and perks.” In The Economist last week, they agree that Chapter 11 is the solution:

The United States created Chapter 11 precisely to help companies that need protection from their creditors while they restructure their liabilities and winnow out the good business from the bad….The stigma of Chapter 11 (held up by the industry as poison for their business) would fade, obscured by price cuts, advertising and most of all news that the car companies were tackling their remaining problems…In many ways, Chapter 11 is more stable and predictable than depending upon the government.”

Over at the Huffington Post, Nora Ephron has written an amusing and insightful post about Bill Kristol, which caused me to remember that about 5 or so years ago I was wondering what a Neo-Con was. The term had started popping up here and there, but I was never really sure who they were, so deep in the shadows had they been operating. Then, in 2004, I was shocked to discover that my Libertarian Father was going to vote Republican. I soon traced the culpirt behind his unbelievable defection from longheld beliefs about the shortcomings of both parties – he had been reading The Weekly Standard, where editor Bill Kristol has carried the banner of the neo-conservatives into the limelight. It was he who, with Cheney and David Brooks, like a trio of Frankensteins, patched together the new Republican party from fear and bits of normally opposing ideologies creating a monster with the head of George W. Bush. (This clever metaphor is from Stephen Colbert). Now that the monster has been running amok and the pieces falling away, Bill Kristol continues to write his column in the New York Times and appear on John Stewart’s show to make less and less plausible arguments for his hawkish positions. Nora Ephron highlights Kristol’s role in getting us into Iraq, but also talks about how good it is to have him out in the open – on liberal talk shows and writing for the Times. She hopes as I do that he will continue these activities, where he can be watched. In the meantime, my Dad’s gone back to voting Libertarian.