RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

Seen & Heard: Vol. 29

A weekly report on things I’ve read, heard and seen since last Wednesday. 

Article: “Could Massachusetts become the first state to repeal legalized marijuana?” by Bryan Hecht, Boston Globe, July 6, 2026. It looks like this November there will be a ballot question asking voters to repeal the ballot question that made selling pot legal in Massachusetts. This article talks about some of the consequences if it passes such as lost tax revenue, marijuana businesses closing, etc. I voted for the repeal several years ago on the grounds that marijuana use was all around us so it might as well be permitted and regulated. I’m not sure how I will vote this year. The primary cause of my skepticism is this: Every day I take my dog for a walk along Pine Street. The number of cars that pass us trailing a plume of marijuana smoke and its distinctive smell is beyond belief. How can the drivers of these cars not be impaired? This article does reveal that the prime movers behind the repeal effort are Republican Party operatives which does cause me pause in allying myself with their efforts. Still, I’ll pay close attention to whatever is written or said on this issue because I’m definitely in the persuadable camp. 

Book: The Reshaping of Everyday Life: 1790-1840 by Jack Larkin (1989). I spotted a Kindle version of this book for $1.99 so purchased it, mostly because the period covered spanned the founding and early decades of Lowell. When the book was written, the author was the chief historian at Sturbridge Village which was an important validator of his expertise in this area. The book provides a practical explanation of almost every area of life including typical working conditions, schooling, travel and transportation, simple pleasures and entertainment, sex and marriage and family customs, and housing arrangements. The book was packed with details, so much so that it was challenging to remember details, however, the book’s value was mostly atmospheric, giving a good feel for life. The other thing that stood out was how much everything changed over the fifty years covered. It left me wondering if the pace of change over the past 50 years was equally drastic in the evolution of everyday life today. 

Article –‘Systemic failure’: Crash that killed Boston transit planner sparks furor over road safety efforts” by Diti Kohli, et al. Boston Globe, July 10, 2026. 36 year old Louisa Gag was a city of Boston transportation planner who was also a bicycle safety advocate. While cycling to work on July 9, she was struck and killed by a motor vehicle on Tremont Street in Boston. Her death sparked outrage among advocates of bicycling and walking since the location of her death had long been identified as a hazardous stretch of road. The fact that nothing had been done was just further evidence that even a progressive city like Boston puts a higher value on convenience for those driving motor vehicles than it does on those riding bicycles or walking. 

Article: “A smoky haze gives skies an eerie tint.” by Ken Mahan, Boston Globe, July 15, 2026. On Tuesday, July 14, I woke to TV weather forecasters predicting a 100 degree day. In the morning, I walked the dog early but it didn’t feel that warm. After lunch I went out to the porch and it was pleasant weather-wise: not too hot with a nice breeze. But there was an odd tint to the sky, almost like a storm was imminent. My weather app showed a 0 percent chance of rain with not a cloud in the sky. Yet on the porch, the sun was invisible (which kept the temperature down). At some point, it occurred to me this was smoke from wild fires. I hadn’t heard that in the news but it had happened last year and was memorable, probably because I don’t ever remember anything like it previously. On Wednesday, this story and all other New England news outlets talked extensively about the smoke.

Obituary: “Sam Neill, Leading Man Who Could Play Everyman, Dies at 78” by Natash Frost, et al, New York Times, July 14, 2026 – Best known for his role in the Jurassic Park movie franchise, Sam Neill was born in Northern Ireland but moved to New Zealand when he was 7 and remained there the rest of his life. Through his career, he appeared in many notable films including The Hunt for Red October, but I always knew him from the British TV show, “Reilly, Ace of Spies” which appeared on WGBH-TV (Channel 2) in Boston and on other PBS stations in early 1984 as part of the Mystery TV series. Neill portrayed Sidney Reilly, a real-life spy of the British secret service in the early 20th century. Reilly, who was born Sigmund Rosenblum in Odessa), was considered the first modern “super-spy”. Among his exploits were stealing heavily guarded German naval blueprints, infiltrating the German General staff during World War I, and nearly pulling off a coupe that would have deposed Vladimir Lenin in Russia in 1918. I believe the show is available for viewing on BritBox and on the PBS Passport app.

Tour de France 2026 – Last Stage

Tour de France 2026 – Last Stage

By Louise Peloquin

On July 4th, the Tour de France took off from Barcelona for the first time, and offered spectators a magnificent view of cyclists whizzing by Antoni Gaudí’s  Sagrada Familia.

courtesy AFP

     This brief is for readers who enjoy following the Tour each year.

     When reviewing the 2026 itinerary a few months ago, one sportscaster enthusiastically announced “the return of the Montmartre fury” meaning that the last stage on July 26th would once again include climbing la Butte Montmartre (Montmartre Hill) and would become part of la Grande Boucle (the Big Loop) from now on.

La rue Lepic (18th arrondissement) welcomed the world’s best cyclists last year and during the 2024 Paris Olympics.

courtesy AFP

    Details on the 2025 Montmartre climb are found on this link:

https://richardhowe.com/2025/07/15/tour-de-montmartre-in-2025-tour-de-france/

To prepare for the 2026 Tour, la rue Lepic spruced up. Back in June, worn out cobblestones were removed and replaced.

     Renovation also included narrowing the street to install flower beds, in keeping with “the greening of Paris.” Begun in July 2015 during Annie Hidalgo’s first term as mayor, la végétalisation de Paris entailed narrowing hundreds of city streets, eliminating thousands of parking spaces and planting hundreds of trees.

Now narrowed, lower rue Lepic will be all the more challenging for le peloton (pack of cyclists) to climb sans problème. And a bit higher up, the slick cobblestone will test strength and stamina.

     The 113th Tour is certainly exciting to watch. La rue Lepic is ready!

upper rue Lepic

     By the way, if you’re on site on July 26th, a 5-minute walk will take you to la rue des Martyrs which we discovered on June 23rd.

Here’s the link:

https://richardhowe.com/2026/06/23/streetwise-in-paris/

Goddesses and Men

Goddesses and Men

By Stephen O’Connor

When I was a child, my parents gave me an oversized storybook entitled Pegasus. On the cover, a brilliant white stallion charged heavenward on great feathered wings, bearing the young Bellerophon. I was smitten. My interest in classical mythology has never waned. One Christmas, when I was a teenager, my parents gave me a book I treasure to this day, Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of The Iliad.

I thank God or Fortune that I was born at a time when the written word and the human imagination were paramount. Gladstone once said that he had read The Iliad twenty-five times. “The Iliad teaches one how to die,” he explained.

It has also taught us, for nearly three thousand years, the power of words to create in the human imagination, ideas, ideals and scenes that stay with us through life. I remember as a young man, sitting in a Greyhound station in New York waiting for a bus, but worlds away in time and place, reading The Iliad. The mighty Akhilleus, driven to anger by Agamemnon, the commander of the Greek forces at Troy, is about to draw his sword to settle their dispute when

…Athena, stepping up behind him, visible to no one,
except Akhilleus, gripped his red-gold hair.

The warrior recognizes her immediately. “What now, O daughter of the god of heaven…”

This is one of those scenes that is permanently catalogued in the hall of literary scenes that every reader acquires over a lifetime: the great son of Peleus, lion in war, subservient to a goddess, his head tilted slightly backward as she grips his hair and whispers her message in his ear: he may lash Agamemnon with words, but may not draw his blood. “Obey,” she says.

He “stayed his massive hand on the silver pommel,” as he must. Though he unpacks his heart with bitter words, a tongue lashing for the ages, he is galled and humiliated. He goes and sits “by the grey wave, scanning the endless sea,” weeping, and prays to his mother, the sea-nymph, Thetis. For thousands of years, readers or listeners have imagined the scene:

…her ladyship his mother heard him
In the green deeps…
Gliding she rose and broke like a mist from the inshore
Grey sea-face, to sit down softly before him,
Her son in tears… 

No one in life will ever love us, believe in us, suffer so much for us, or be so ready to die for us as our mothers. Paul McCartney was tapping into a beautiful and universal connection when he sang,

When I find myself in times of trouble,
Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom, ‘Let it be.’

Veterans of the grisliest battlefields have related how dying men often call for their mothers, and even Akhilleus, the pillar of the Greek army, cries like a child, seeking and receiving the comfort of his mother’s care.

Aphrodite was the mother of Aeneas, and though it must have gone against her divine nature for a goddess of love and beauty to intervene on a plain where swords flashed and spears flew, she was not reluctant to do so to save her son. What mother can watch her child in danger and do nothing?

There is something about a goddess that men don’t find in gods. Maybe they see something of the longed-for maternal in a figurative sense. The embodiment of the Greek ideal of a warrior, Odysseus, who, unlike Akhilleus, relied on guile and intelligence as much as on raw strength, was naturally beloved of Athena, the goddess of courage, wisdom and the strategies of war.

There was no Olympian that a warrior would rather have on his side, and that includes Zeus, who may often remind the reader of one of the men who appear in modern advertisements, a helpless blockhead who needs the guidance of a woman. “The Lord of Storm” can be humored, and he can be manipulated. Athena is well able for him.

After his return to Ithaca, Odysseus, outnumbered and apprehensive, lies awake knowing that the following day he must take on the throng of suitors with the help only of his son and an old swineherd. He is visited during the night by “the grey-eyed goddess.”

Why so wakeful…?
Though a hundred swords sing for your blood,
With me by your side you will come away unscathed,
And steal their cattle.

As Christianity spread across Europe, a new sort of goddess, the Virgin Mary, replaced the old. Athena herself had been called Athena Parthenos, the Virgin. A virgin goddess is beholden to no man and can act independently for the supplicant. In his book The Uses of the Past, Herbert Muller, spoke about Henry Adams, and his feeling that “the love of the Virgin Mary which had raised the cathedral of Chartres, was ‘the greatest force the Western world had ever felt,’ or even ‘the highest energy ever known to man.’”

The recitation of the rosary is a long meditation on and a prayer to the Virgin Mary. It’s a religious practice I saw my grandparents and parents perform as Irish Catholics, and for many years my wife has said the rosary in Spanish every evening on Zoom with her family.

So humans in Western religious tradition have long sought the help of goddesses. Ancient Greeks, like modern Catholics, wanted a heavenly woman on their side, just as on this mortal plane, men generally need a woman on their side; a mother, then a wife or a trusted friend, and let the Fates and the jealous gods do what they may.

Epic tale of caste and class in Pakistan by Marjorie Arons-Barron

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin, is a totally captivating novel starting in 1950’s Pakistan, colored by the caste system that frames the past, present and even future for its people. The backdrop is the turbulence following Partition, the 1947 separation of Pakistan from India. The story continues through 2013.

In a gripping beginning, a little boy has been abandoned by his mother in the bazaar of Rawalpindi. Barefoot, he sits clutching to his chest a pair of shoes, waiting, waiting for her to return for him. Ultimately he is taken in by Karim Khan, the kindly operator of a tea stall and curry shop, who creates a space for him to sleep in a former store room. Karim teaches him to do small chores and names the boy Bayazid. As the years pass, Yazid takes on more and more tasks for his guardian. Karim himself is illiterate, but Yazid teaches himself to read. He makes friends with comfortable middle class boys from a nearby private school, and, at 14, he becomes infatuated with the sister of one of them. But class differences mean the relationship is not to be.

The book, published in January, then jumps to the countryside, feudal in its social and power structure, and a wealthy family one of whose properties is a huge farm just outside of Lahore. Mueenuddin, who attended Dartmouth and Yale Law School, is himself the son of a family with a farm outside Lahore and splits his time between there and a home in Oslo.

In the second section of the book, he introduces the reader to a whole other set of colorful characters. There are the super-rich who jet off to city parties in Pakistan and beyond, who sleep with the wives of their friends and indulge in drugs and porn. Then there are the hired managers of their properties (munshis) who enrich themselves by skimming off the top of the family-owned businesses, the underpaid laborers whom the munshis influence by threats and violence, and the corrupt Punjab police who extort vendors and low-level business people, with tools of persuasion that include brutal torture.

Chapters later, we meet again the orphan Yazid. Now a mature man, grown tall and muscular, approaching middle age, he is in the employ of that wealthy family, first as the trusted chauffeur of Colonel Atar, a powerful industrialist and member of the government, and – after years of proving himself – working for Atar’s son Hisham and daughter-in-law, Shahnaz.

Yazid, now enjoying access to the world of the wealthy and widely respected in the nearby villages, takes under his wing a young man named Saqid, son of the trusted gardener on the estate. But Saqib is impatient to become rich and is willing to cut corners to achieve, even if that means betraying the trust of his mentor Yazid, his employers, and the economic and cultural system that has permitted him a level of advancement based on his intellect and apparent business acuity.

Mueenuddin’s character portrayals are intimate and enticing, many drawn from his own personal background. His Pakistani father was a diplomat and landowner. Despite the author’s upper class status, he writes with deep empathy and understanding of the plight of the underclass. In an interview, Mueenuddin says he modeled Yazid on a man who drove for his father and was his companion when he was a youth. Collections of Mueenuddin’s short stories were finalists for the Pulitzer and National Book awards in 2009 and 2010.

His use of language is colorful and polished, bringing the reader equally into the geographical landscapes and the interior of his characters. His storytelling is brilliantly crafted, and his saga is spellbinding, raising questions that will gnaw at you long after the book is closed.

What are the rules of the discriminatory system within which one can advance but just so far? How can a code of morality still matter within a corrupt and violent country? How far can one go in playing the system without self-destructing? This is a remarkable book, taking the reader to places one sees only in simplistic headlines, if at all. It will stay with you for a long time.