Harold and Maude - a fond look

Harold and Maude, by Hal Ashby

Harold and Maude is a perfect movie. It takes no step wrong, the story is complete and flows beautifully. And a fine story it is, too: Harold Chasen (Bud Cort) the 19-year old son of a wealthy single (never clear whether she’s divorced or widowed) society lady (Vivian Pickles), is obsessed with death, suicide, and funerals. At one such funeral, for someone he didn’t know, he encounters Maude (Ruth Gordon), who’d never met the deceased either.

That’s enough plot. She is 51 years his senior. He’s in love with death, she with life. The soundtrack is by the former Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam). And Ashby’s career as a film editor is on full display – every transition is a perfect little segue, yet they are never contrived. The movie has no wasted shots nor scenes – everything serves the story’s progress and its conclusion.

Comic and absurdist moments are abundant, from Maude’s penchant for stealing cars (having none of her own, she prefers to borrow what’s handy to get around, and carries a huge ring of keys for that purpose), to the dating-service dates Harold’s mother sets him up with, having decided he ought to get married. Ashby riffs on popular culture and social unrest (this was released in 1971), but in a way that plays up the human penchant for self-contradiction.

I recently had the good fortune to see this gem on a big screen, where it rightly belongs, and was delighted to note the theater was packed – plenty of folks who’d grown up with this movie, along with a number seeing it for the first time. Somewhere in the ether, the spirit of Hal Ashby is smiling along with our absorption in this excellent love story.

A refreshing look at Death

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From Here to Eternity; Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

by Caitlin Doughty

Reviewed by NC Weil

Even as the American funeral industry strives to sanitize death, increasing numbers of us are questioning the institutions, chemicals, caskets, and the secrecy that wall us off from those we love soon after they have died.

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This entertaining look at funerary practices worldwide offers plenty of examples of ways to celebrate the departed. Alongside this, Doughty, a Los Angeles funeral director, offers a pointed critique of societies’ relative comfort about the fact of death, and how cultural squeamishness robs us of acts of loving farewell: “A sense of purpose helps the mourner grieve.”  One of the strong points of this witty book is the abundant illustrations by Landis Blair, dispelling the revulsion and fear that for many of us surround dead bodies, mummies, and skeletons.

With Doughty as our guide, we visit communities and learn about burial practices in Colorado, North Carolina, California, Mexico, Bolivia, Indonesia, Tokyo, and Barcelona. To say that attitudes vary among this sample is the understatement of the year. In Indonesia, she visits families who lovingly dress up and groom their dead loved ones, even sleeping alongside them, during an annual festival. In Tokyo, mourners can visit the ashes of their dead relations in high-tech halls where there is nevertheless a strong sense of communion with the departed.

In Crestone, Colorado, a portable pyre enables a natural cremation celebration. In La Paz, Bolivia, indigenous villagers adorn and pray to skulls, asking for intercession in earthly matters. In North Carolina, a university professor studies decomposition in an effort to perfect techniques of composting the dead. We see there are many ways to deal with bodies, and by the time we’re done, we may be ready to think about our own flesh in a new light.

The challenge Doughty spells out for us is to push against a funeral industry that separates us not from death but from loved ones who have died. By showing how we can participate in the last phase of their bodies, she inspires us to look in the face this mortality we all await, and to embrace it instead of hiding from it. Give this book a read, then give some thought to what you want done with your remains, and what you don’t.

The Mothers, by Brit Bennett

The Mothers  by Brit Bennett

Reviewed by NC Weil

This 2016 novel, Bennett’s debut, deals with secrets and lies; behavior that seems harmless till someone gets hurt; and, yes, mothers. The narrative, primarily third person as it dips into the minds of smart but destabilized Nadia Turner, her preacher’s son boyfriend Luke Sheppard, and her shy religious friend Aubrey Evans, also rides in the first person plural of The Mothers. This group of older church ladies spend much of their time in Upper Room Chapel, praying for those who leave prayer requests in the sanctuary, but also spreading gossip as they learn fellow congregants’ secrets.

The Mothers have seen it all: girls who get pregnant too young, endure lopsided marriages till either they or their husbands flee, and every other mistake a girl or woman can make, most having to do with trusting men. So they look with suspicion at the boys and young men in their congregation, scold the girls who dress provocatively, and picket the abortion clinic, though they distance themselves from the white fanatics whose instinct is to bomb clinics and murder doctors.

Nadia’s mother kills herself violently when her daughter is seventeen, and Nadia, unable to understand that act, sees her own existence as the crippling of her mother’s potential. They are a perfect lineage, each seventeen when surprised by pregnancy. The older woman, kicked out of her home by her angry mother, joins and weds her baby’s father at the Marine base in Oceanside, California, where he is soon deployed to Iraq. Nadia doesn’t consciously meet him till she’s four, and by then she and her mother are a closeknit pair, her father on the outside. It’s an ordinary household till her mother’s suicide, but then Nadia goes off the rails.

She and Luke spend as much time together as possible, sneaking around his parents’ house in their absence, so her pregnancy should come as no surprise. Luke helps her, but that assistance comes at a cost too high for everyone their lives touch: Nadia, Aubrey, Luke and his parents, his friends… the reverberations of Nadia’s and Luke’s actions go on for years, intensifying when they could have ebbed, and throwing many lives into chaos.

Nadia thinks about her mother, about the pregnancy at seventeen that derailed her life: “Nadia had invented versions of her mother’s life that did not end with a bullet shattering her brain…Her mother traveling the world, posing on the cliffs of Santorini, her arms bent toward the blue sky. Always her mother, although in this version of reality, Nadia did not exist. Where her life ended, her mother’s life began.”

A handful of years pass. Nadia’s upward trajectory – college and law school – is interrupted by her father’s health. Luke’s hopeful return to football after a devastating early-college injury is derailed, opening the way for a more meaningful life. Aubrey, who has carried Nadia’s and Luke’s secrets, keeps her own locked away where they fester. And the Sheppards, leading their church as pastor and First Lady, must pay the consequences of helping Luke end Nadia’s pregnancy.

None are guiltless, all undermine their own promise in ways alternately thoughtless and self-sabotaging. Like all of us, they make their tainted choices for what seem the best of reasons, and so we sympathize even as we shake our heads at the damage they cause.

The Man Who Thought He Owned Water, by Tershia D'Elgin

My son the hydrologist recommended this book, the biography of the author's father in relation to water laws and usage and rights in Colorado. In this state, as in those to its west and south, water is an overdemanded resource. Since the settling of the West, observant explorers have noted the scarcity of water and dryness of the landscape. All the same, residents continue to dodge this reality. From the 1880s on, "Rain follows the plow" was the myth that lured sod-busting homesteaders. The 1920s and 30s drought that picked up that plowed dirt and blew it up into massive dust storms, proved it wrong - and yet, builders of cities were able then, and continue today, to pull water from the rivers and the aquifer. At the cost to farmers.

D'Elgin's father, Bill Phelps, heir to the Eatons (his great-grandfather Benjamin Harrison Eaton was Colorado's 4th governor), moved to the family's property on a bend of the South Platte River west of Greeley, and became a gentleman farmer, enough family money behind him that he didn't have the same depth of worries other farmers struggled with. The water rights on his property were very old ("senior," as the term goes) - and yet, over time, as cities procured western slope water and permission to draw from the Platte, the right of farmers, including Bill, to draw from wells as they always had, was suddenly challenged. 

The details are many and complex, and if you want to take a look at water law as it affects humans, this book is a great place to start. Decades of farmers' handshake agreements with local water managers suddenly collapsed as water courts ruled consistently in favor of cities. Though water speculation was outlawed, clever men found a work-around on postage-stamp-sized parcels by creating semi-public water districts - given special status in Colorado law - which could then buy water rights and sell them to the highest bidder - always cities, since farmers have no money.

D'Elgin's wrath is mostly directed toward the mindless water use of city dwellers - what are we doing with water that's so valuable, compared to raising food? The water we waste maintaining lawns does not return to either groundwater nor the rivers. We're lulled by the certainty that when we turn on the faucet, water gushes out. More people move to cities in the West every day, many from regions with abundant rainfall. If their neighbors have jewel-green lawns, well, why shouldn't they? Meanwhile, the "buy and dry" method of acquiring water rights from desperate farmers guarantees once-productive land will return to dust. She notes the high incidence of suicide among farmers.

The lot of farmers has long been tragic, and she recounts reasons: Big Ag controls the crops: they pay less than the farmers' cost to grow corn, but offer a guaranteed market for it, and with the difference provided by government price supports (the Farm Bill), farmers survive. Any who want to grow something else have to convince banks to lend for crops without those established markets - and bankers would rather not take the risk. And of course, farmers are more vulnerable to weather than the rest of us - a hailstorm can destroy a year's crops in a matter of minutes. Drought in the absence of irrigation is a death sentence, but cities will always have more money to buy up water than rural water districts. 

It's worth remembering that Thomas Jefferson, at the founding of this country, identified farmers as the backbone of the new nation. Since then, fewer farmers run larger acreage. In the paper today, an article notes yet again that the number of farms has shrunk, with the average acres per farm increasing. This is Big Ag, whose monocropping and reliance on pesticides and chemical fertilizers have played havoc with the former ecosystems of land and water. There's a blues line we'd do well to remember: "You don't miss your water till your well runs dry."