Sam Low
T he rich are different from you and me,” Scott Fitzgerald once said to Ernest Hemingway. “Yes,” Ernest replied, “they have more money.”
Scott was preternaturally conditioned to see rich people through a veil of romance. Hemingway viewed them simply as members of the bourgeoisie (not artists, as he was) if of the haute variety.
The family reunion in Hawaii was upcom ing — should I go? I had been avoiding the issue for almost a year. It was in July and July is a wonderful time to be on the Vineyard. It was far. The tickets were expensive. And in my dotage I have become unreasonably fearful of airplanes.
Then I heard Lizzie’s voice — that’s Elizabeth Puuki Napoleon Low — my Hawaiian grandmother, long departed from this world.
“Just go,“ she said.
On Veterans Day we rouse ourselves to an unusual patriotic fervor, waving flags, watching the marchers, perhaps even laying a wreath at the grave of a veteran — known or unknown — to give our thanks. Then we go home and resume our daily chores without looking back.
What can we do to really honor those that have served for their country in war? I wondered last Tuesday. The answer was not long in coming — reinstate the draft, make service to our country obligatory for every citizen.
L ast week, Mother Nature spent a lot of energy reminding us she was around. It was a nagging reminder, omnipresent and persistent. It’s the wind I’m speaking about, of course. Joining with her ally, the moon, Mother Nature nudged the ocean over seagirt Island roads and tossed it over the seawall in Oak Bluffs, impeding our mundane progress on errands. This wind had a particular character. Rather than giving us pelting rains and thunder storms, Mother Nature brought a boring norther — attitude rather than tantrums.
Human beings evolved to be the complex creatures we are by communicating. As our languages became ever more complex so did we. Bands of humans, joined together by common stories (what anthropologists call culture) and armed with tools they invented and shared with each other, spread all over the world at the expense of larger and more powerful animals.
I t was a long winter last year and, finding myself sitting in front of the fire a lot, I got into a frame of mind where I began to consider increasing my cultural input.
Part of the solution was to actually get out of the house and make a trip to Miami for Art Basel with my cousin Lanny MacDowell (which we documented in this newspaper) and another part was to make trips deep into cyberspace on my computer — browsing widely to find culture in the ether.