Plough

I wrote a love letter to the Ironbound neighborhood in Newark, NJ--my favorite place I've ever lived in...highlighting the difference between living in an assimilated suburb vs. an ethnic urban enclave in Plough https://lnkd.in/dkzjW7ba

A child of suburbia seeks thicker community in New York City’s enclaves and in a particular Newark, New Jersey, neighborhood that defies stereotypes, writes Stephen G. Adubato. https://lnkd.in/eYaFPTyc "My first visit to my family’s village?in Greece made me feel like I was in another world. Having grown up in suburban New Jersey, going to the island of Chios was a bewildering experience. I was surrounded by people who took life at a leisurely pace and who all knew and watched out for each other. There were cafés where everyone from teens to elders would hang out late at night drinking coffee and making conversation, and little chapels every few streets where you could go in at any hour to light a candle and say a prayer. Yet it all felt so familiar, resonating with something deeply rooted inside me." "My father’s family emigrated from southern Italy to Newark in the late 1800s. My mother’s parents emigrated from Greece to Newark in the 1950s, but after my mother was born they decided to move into the nearby suburbs to raise their family. Though my father’s parents vowed to stay in Newark’s largely Italian North Ward until their death, my father moved into the suburbs with my mother upon getting married. His decision was driven in part by the ideal of upward mobility that is part and parcel of the American Dream, but also by a natural impulse to get away from the violence and discord he experienced in Newark in the late 1960s." "So, after growing up in an upper-middle-class, predominantly white suburb outside of Newark, I was accepted at a Catholic university in Manhattan. There, I was exposed to a worldview and living space that were vastly different from what I had become accustomed to in the mostly secular and insular suburbs." "Living in a dorm on Manhattan’s Upper West Side gave me a taste of city life in all its differences from suburbia. But it wasn’t until I ventured out of the city’s gentrified, cosmopolitan sections and into its many ghettos and ethnic enclaves that I began to understand what was lacking in the environs of my childhood. I remembered visiting the Greek enclaves of Astoria in Queens and what remained of Newark’s Italian section as a child. But living in New York I could freely visit neighborhoods that were home to a vast array of communities still connected to their heritages. Of course, Astoria was a frequent stop, in addition to the Puerto Rican “El Barrio,” Dominican Washington Heights, the Bronx’s Little Italy (the “real” one), the Eastern European Lower East Side, Peruvian Jackson Heights, the Chinatown of Flushing, and the Little Egypt of Steinway."

"But along with the notes and the posture, my girls and I are learning the intangibles?– like feeling a little silly doing something but then doing it anyway," writes Maria Baer on learning the violin: https://lnkd.in/e8jgstCj "There’s more mathematics?involved in playing the violin than I would have imagined. It’s physics, really. You get the rich, church bell sound not by?pushing?the bow on the strings, but by?resting and gliding?it. To play louder you do not necessarily change the pressure of the bow, but the speed. Speed equals volume. Location equals tone. Vibrato is in the arm, not the fingers or the wrist; and the perfect C# is a little closer to a D than you’d guess." "Two years ago, my then-five-year-old daughter started taking violin lessons. This was entirely my idea. I spent my childhood desperately wishing to play the violin, only to be plopped in front of a piano instead (which I loved, nonetheless). So, renting that little one-eighth violin (it looked like a doll’s instrument) and placing it gently in my girl’s hands every Monday after school was absolutely an attempt to live vicariously through her. I recognize that’s generally a tacky thing to do, but being as convinced as my husband and I were of the incontrovertible benefits of learning an instrument, I thought it was probably OK in this case." "Six months went by, and I was hanging on her instructor’s every word. Six months of watching my daughter learn to form her right hand just so (for the bow hold) and her left hand like this (her violin hand), and clap little nonsensical rhythms (Mis-sis-sip-pi hot dog!), and read the notes on the treble clef. That Christmas, my husband surprised me with my own grown-up-sized violin, freshly tuned and impossibly delicate, along with lessons of my own. I was a little embarrassed. I was also thrilled."

Did you know that Plough publishes books as well as a quarterly magazine? One of our bestselling titles, *Poems to See By,* is a fresh twist on 24 classics. These visual interpretations by comic artist Julian Peters will change the way you see the world. Learn more here: https://lnkd.in/ejmYpc6k

The gift of hurricanes is that you discover your neighbors. Sometimes a few days late, writes Chelsea K. Boes: https://lnkd.in/eYPWKYTi "Since I moved in last summer,?I have observed an elderly German lady with cropped gray hair patrolling my neighborhood with a walking stick every morning. Helga?– her name, I would later learn?– moved to the blue house on the hill behind mine in Old Fort, North Carolina, half a century ago after marrying an American soldier. I’ve always been a little shy of Helga because of her stern appearance and, I admit, her stick. When out on my jogs before Hurricane Helene, I waved to her from barest politeness." "Why was stick lady in my driveway today? She appeared to be quizzing the delivery guys from Lowe’s who were hauling away my maggoty fridge." "My family had fled Hurricane Helene two weeks before in a panic. Though our house survived the storm, we didn’t think to remove the spinach, cottage cheese, chicken broth, leftovers, and egg whites from the fridge before siphoning all our gas into one car and jamming out of there as soon as the highway opened. As linemen scrambled to repair every downed line in the western half of the state, our power blinked off for thirteen days. Upon return, one glance in my putrid fridge revealed why the scientists of old supposed insect life generated spontaneously. My mom scrubbed it with a respirator mask on. My dad hauled the pieces out in the yard and power washed them." "Still, the fridge smelled like death. When I tried unscrewing the ice maker to clean the insides, more flies floated out. I didn’t know how to screw it back together. This was the last straw." "We had already tipped the delivery guy from the cash we withdrew on our exodus north. So why was he back at the door?" "He looked at me helplessly. “There’s someone who wants to talk to you.”

The Christian objector to war or military service is not a purist... He is so busy helping his neighbor that to interrupt his activity to undertake the task of killing is unthinkable to him, writes André Trocmé: https://lnkd.in/eUf-XyW4 "Jesus sums up in two sentences?the entire Mosaic Law and the Prophets, that is, the duty of holiness and of prophetic mission in the world: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength; and love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:30–31). Although these two commands are found in the Old Testament, what is original in Jesus’ teaching is that he brings them together. They become a singular command. Jesus is saying that we cannot love God if we do not love our brother; God will not forgive us if we do not forgive our brother (Matt. 6:14–15). In short, we shall be judged as we judge others." "Why is Jesus so rigid on this point? Because anyone who sets limits toward loving his neighbor raises a wall between himself and the God whose love knows no limits. God’s kingdom seeks to overcome barriers. This is why Jesus is extraordinarily indulgent toward sinners. He displays unbounded love and kindness toward them; he never ceases to believe in the possibility of their turning from their sin. But he is uncompromising with hypocrites, that is, with the spiritually proud who have no love for their brothers and sisters." "Jesus’ new commandment demands that we translate the rulership of God into everyday language through our bodies: Love your neighbor, serve him, heal him, even if this means breaking traditions or laws. Give in to him rather than offend him and turn him away from God. Whatever you do, don’t make yourself an obstacle on his way to God. One’s neighbor’s physical well-being is as important as his spiritual life; the healing of the body and the healing of the soul are joined in a single operation. Christ’s revolution is total, or it is nothing."

As one who could move on, and did, I’m left wondering if my years in a blighted British coastal town made any difference to those I left behind, writes @Simon Cross: https://lnkd.in/ey-3fH6J "Moments after the removal van?left, the street was just the way it always was, except we no longer lived there. After a decade and a half in a sprawling housing estate in Grimsby, a town on the east coast of England, we were gone. But what had we left behind??On a bright morning in April?I saw Dillon (not his real name) waiting by the pedestrian crossing at the bottom of our road. He was sitting on the low wall next to the garage, smoking a cigarette." "Beneath a baseball cap, pulled down low over his taught face, his hooked nose and high cheekbones were prominent, his pale skin stark against the dark blue of a thin tracksuit top zipped up to the neck, where the blue of an elaborate tattoo reached up to just below his ear. The area around it was still pink, bright against the white of his throat." “New ink?” I said, after we had exchanged the usual greetings. “Terrible, isn’t it.” He looked sheepish. “What does it say?” He inched the neck of his jacket downward to reveal a swirling script. “Die rich?…” “And I suppose that this means you’re going to die a bit poorer now too,” I said. He smiled and then we both laughed. “Quite a lot f—in’ poorer, yeah,” he admitted. We laughed again and he took another drag on his cigarette. "I got to know Dillon when I worked in the school he went to. I was a part-time chaplain there, and first remember encountering him in a small room. A local priest had come into the school complaining that some children had been climbing on, and damaging, the roof of his vestry. He had done some detective work and unearthed the incriminating CCTV footage. Among the culprits was Dillon, then a small, scrawny boy." Read more: https://lnkd.in/ey-3fH6J

An Argentinian veteran of the Falklands War experienced rejection in the society that sent him to war, but also healing through comradeship with fellow survivors. By Héctor Roldán: https://lnkd.in/eU_a9nSe "I am almost sixty years old, and although my body has aged, I still feel like a soldier in my early twenties. Every day, Malvinas1 comes to my mind, if only for five minutes. As if I miss it. I imagine things too. I wish I had not followed orders so meticulously and instead, brought my belongings back, as others did. I wish I had been more generous with my comrades there, but I couldn’t, because war makes you mean. And at nineteen or twenty, you just want to have fun. We were kids who were just starting to live. We were at war for just two months, and our whole life since has revolved around the experience. Many of us could never quite come back to life again." "In Malvinas, we tried not to think. We knew that relief was never going to come but, to tell the truth, none of us were prepared to die. I thank God I never had to kill anyone. Other comrades had to; they had no choice because that’s what war is: him or me. One dies and the other lives. I don’t know what it would have been like to carry that on my conscience. I realized these things later, but in the moment I only knew I had to fight. And still today, when they show something about the war on television, I go to my room and cry." "The hunger, cold, and damp were even worse than bullets. My daily thought was: I have to overcome the cold, I have to overcome hunger, I have to handle all this. But how could I do it if I had nothing in my stomach? I even ate potato and orange peels – I had them in my pocket and I ate them slowly. The physical difficulties we endured left aftereffects in our lungs and stomachs." "There was pain everywhere. I wanted to go home. There were soldiers who came back without a foot, or with one arm missing. But even without wounds it was hard to come home. That was the moment I had to shake hands with the darkness." "When I got back, I didn’t talk much about the war because I could see people didn’t care. Our military service was not recognized, and we had no pension or anything. I had thought that because I had been in the war I was going to get a job, but there were just rejections. I finally landed a few jobs painting or working as a blacksmith, but had to hide the fact that I had been a soldier. And then there was the mocking laughter because we had lost. They saw me as a boy, and said: “How did we expect to win with soldiers like this? Are we crazy?” I don't know how I coped with it." Read on: https://lnkd.in/eU_a9nSe

After four hundred years, John Donne’s?*Devotions*?still contain truths we need to hear, writes David K. Anderson: https://lnkd.in/eTnYGRuf "In the last weeks of 1623 London was in the throes of one of those infectious disease outbreaks characteristic of the era. A “spotted fever,” most likely typhus, was cutting a swath through the city’s tightly packed neighborhoods, and in late November it laid low England’s most famous preacher. John Donne was fifty-one years old, and dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, though he had come late to holy orders. In his early days, as a womanizing gallant, he had authored the most scandalous and original love poetry of the era. Life, though, had transformed the young scapegrace and reordered his concerns. An inopportune, though deeply devoted marriage had brought poverty and a dozen children, a tragic number of whom failed to outlive their infancy. Finally, Anne Donne expired following the stillbirth of their twelfth. It had been but a few years since Donne had found a measure of material comfort and prominence; now it was slipping away into pain, fear, and indignity. He lay racked by fever, chills, palpitations, and delirium, assisted, if we can call it that, by physicians who purged and bled his already weak body and, in a gesture that seems absurd even for early modern medicos, laid dead pigeons at his feet in the hopes of “drawing the vapours from the head.” "Twenty-three days after the disease announced itself, Donne discovered that he had survived. Yet the illness left an imprint on his soul, as witnessed by the frenetic burst of writing that immediately followed his recovery. On January 9, 1624 – less than a month after the crisis had passed – a book was entered in the Stationers’ Register entitled *Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and severall steps in my Sicknes.* At once thorny and lyrical, vexing and profound, Devotions prompts one to ask, on the four hundredth anniversary of its publication: What it is about the ordeal that spurred such urgency in the book’s drafting and publication? Why did a man, so recently freed from his deathbed, spend the next few weeks filling page after page with a quill pen, until his hand and back must have ached and his eyes watered?" "Part of the answer is implied in the very form of Devotions, which is made up of twenty-three chapters called “Stations,” no doubt in reference to the traditional contemplation upon the Stations of the Cross. Each chapter, comprised of a “meditation” on a phase of the illness, an “expostulation” or personal response to that phase, and a concluding prayer, chronicles a day on the road to Donne’s personal Calvary and eventual rising. Thus, the book is Donne’s coming-to-terms before God with those long, wearing days spent in the Valley of the Shadow of Death."

A first-year medical student takes time to find out who her trauma patients really are, or were. An excerpt from Abraham Nussbaum's *Progress Notes*: https://lnkd.in/eHruJMA7 Megan Kalata is the first?of the students to meet her second dead patient. She’s on trauma surgery, just a few weeks into her clinical year. The trauma pager goes off?–?GSW?[gunshot wound]?to the head ETA five minutes. Megan, a petite woman in her twenties who clips her shoulder-length brown hair in place, races with her team to the emergency department. In transit, the surgery resident preps her, in a shorthand fashion. “Just so you know, people who have gunshot wounds to the head generally don’t survive.” Duly warned, Megan arrives at the trauma bay as it fills with more than a dozen people. The room smells of latex gloves, industrial cleaning supplies, and the sweat pearling up on the clinicians despite the odorless air conditioning. Megan moves away, huddled together with a classmate in an out-of-the-way corner of the room to watch the teamwork. A bullet’s entry point requires little skill to observe, but the skilled people in the room know the distinctive destructive paths different kinds of bullets carve inside the cranium. They know how to work determinedly, and together, to stop bleeding and prevent further damage to the brain. The hospital has a reputation as one of the best and fastest trauma centers in the country, but this time, the team is moving with less speed than expected. Watching the half-speed clinical bustle of the trauma team, Megan catches a peculiar energy. The clinicians are behaving, she senses, as if their work will soon be over. Confirming that hunch, the team calls the students up, like rookies off the bench to finish off a rout, to stand at the center table. Her friend does chest compressions for a full two minutes, then Megan takes over. Megan’s resting expression is a smile that involves her whole face, while masking her resolute determination. Megan places the heel of one hand over the sternum and interlaces the fingers of her other hand to keep them off the patient’s chest. Then she presses down and up, down and up, worrying about whether she is doing it right. Read more: https://lnkd.in/eHruJMA7