RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

What’s in a name? Does it reveal our character or destiny? by Marjorie Arons-Barron

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

The Names by Florence Knapp offers a rich exploration of identity beginning with our names – how much of our name defines how we see ourselves, how our name influences others’ perceptions of who we are – and expanding her characters’ lifelong searches for their authentic selves.

The structure of this interesting debut novel is not unlike the timeline organization of The Sisters, which I reviewed  December 18^th. Knapp follows three characters in individual chapters identified by their names, within the framework of specific slices of time over 35 years, all woven together by a shared family narrative. In the case of The Names, the characters – Bear, Julian and Gordon – are all the same person, their personal odysseys taking different paths based on the significance of their names. Here are life stories of what-ifs.

Cora, mother of Bear/Julian/Gordon, is Irish, married to Gordon, a highly respected British  physician and pillar of their London community. Accompanied by their 9-year-old daughter, Maia, Cora goes to the London registry to record the birth of her second child, under strict instructions from her husband to name the baby Gordon, carrying on a multi-generational family tradition. Husband Gordon, however, is a domestic abuser, and Cora imagines the burden the baby would bear going through the life named to carry through life “ties to generations of domineering men.”

She considers registering the child as Julian, meaning youthful or sun father.  A name meaning sky father signals the child would rise above his father. Daughter Maia wants to name the baby Bear, as someone who is strong but soft and cuddly, the antithesis of the father. Cora records the name Bear and is exuberant about doing so, but at home husband Gordon goes into a rage.

Each of the time-specific tranches of the book follows the life of Cora’s son as it would have played out if he had borne each of the three names. It starts in 1987 and picks up the stories of the three in 1994, rolling out succeeding tranches every seven years.

This intricate structure, while reminiscent of The Sisters,   proceeds in a silken way, making it effortless for the reader to be absorbed in the three versions of one person’s life.  All three of the paths are, whether consciously or subconsciously, shaped by the impact of having lived with a father’s rage, his pathological need to control the mother, a shocking murder, and the children’s lifelong efforts to reconcile their past, find themselves, build normal lives and find fulfillment.

Once an aspiring ballerina, abuse victim Cora herself labors repeatedly to express her own identity, but escaping her oppression is overridden by her concern is to protect Maia’s and Bear’s/Julian’s/Gordon’s emotional well-being from her husband’s toxic and abusive personality.

There is a purity to the story telling, and a reader can savor the author’s skill, the clarity and beauty of the writing. While it is a tense novel about searing family angst and dysfunction, it is also a book about resilience, finding one’s own individuality, and freeing oneself from past trauma to build a meaningful life. In the end, it is a hopeful book, intelligently conceived and well executed.

Lowell Politics: May 3, 2026

Several items discussed by Lowell City Councilors at their Tuesday meeting deserve comment:

Method of Electing the Mayor – A memo from City Solicitor Corey Williams responded to issues raised at an earlier meeting of the council’s rules subcommittee regarding the method of electing the city’s mayor.

From the adoption of the Plan E form of government in the 1940s up to now, the mayor has been a city councilor elected by a majority vote of the entire council at the start of each council term. The 2021 switch from electing all councilors citywide to the current hybrid system did not change that. However, in a nonbinding referendum on the November 2021 city election ballot, voters expressed a strong preference for the direct election of the mayor with 7,429 voting yes and just 2,411 voting no.

There are at least two major impediments to making this change. The first is to decide on a detailed process to be used. Who is permitted to run for mayor? In the system used in Worcester, anyone running for a citywide council seat may simultaneously run for mayor, however, a candidate for district councilor may not. In Lowell, would this citywide/district distinction be used, or could any council candidate also run for mayor? Or would a candidate have to run exclusively for mayor and forgo the right to serve on the city council if they did not prevail in the mayoral race? How is the vice chair selected? In Worcester, the second-place finisher in the mayoral balloting takes that office. What if the mayor is no longer able to serve? Does the vice chair assume the mayoralty or is there a special election? Would a preliminary mayoral election ever be needed and under what circumstances? What if the mayoral candidates who win in the preliminary and therefore appear on the mayoral ballot in the final election all lose in their council races? Being elected to the council is a precondition to winning the mayoral race under the Worcester system so I assume that would be the case here as well. Those are questions right off the top of my head. I’m sure there are many more.

The second impediment is the Federal Consent Decree the city entered into to resolve the lawsuit that precipitated the change to the hybrid system. The US District Court retained jurisdiction over the decree and any changes to it – including how the mayor is elected – would have to be allowed by the court.

According to Solicitor Williams in his memo, he contacted the attorney for the plaintiffs in that lawsuit (as the council instructed him to do) and asked about their willingness to accept this proposed change. The plaintiffs’ attorney said they would be open to considering it but not until a detailed plan that addressed the kind of questions I posed in the preceding paragraph are answered. That puts the ball is in the council’s court. In other words, the council must compose and agree upon a detailed process rather than the vaguer “let the people elect the mayor” rhetoric that has ricocheted around the council chamber whenever this has come up.

There is another factor that only arose this past Wednesday when the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision in Louisiana v. Callais. In that case, the court held that a Congressional Redistricting Map was unconstitutional because it was drawn to benefit African American voters which, per the court’s reasoning, illegally discriminated against “non-African American” voters.

The entire rationale of the now unconstitutional redistrict map was to comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Ace. Specifically, the plaintiffs had argued that the prior map diluted the votes of minority members which violated Section 2. While the Supreme Court did not expressly invalidate Section 2, they trimmed away the circumstances in which it can be used to leave it entirely ineffective.

This is relevant to Lowell because the basis of the Voting Rights lawsuit against the city was that the old “all at large, winner take all” method of electing councilors violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by diluting the votes of minority voters. With this week’s Supreme Court decision invalidating that as a cause of action, the legal basis of the plaintiffs’ case was extinguished.

Whether the city tries to take advantage of this change in the law is another question. In my view, the Supreme Court’s decision erases the history and context of the Voting Rights Act, but that is nothing new for this court which has found that it is illegal for colleges to consider prior discrimination in the admissions process and that it is illegal for the state to consider prior discrimination in elections when drawing district boundaries while at the same time holding that it is permissible to consider race when detaining an individual  for immigration enforcement and that it is permissible for the president to ban people from countries that are predominantly populated by people of color from entering the United States. In other words, if a law helps members of minority groups it is unconstitutional, but if it harms members of minority groups then it is OK. I’m not sure the council wants to jump aboard that train.

Notwithstanding the role of morality in adopting a legal argument, it’s possible that the mere existence of this new Supreme Court decision may have some unilateral (and detrimental) effect on the Consent Decree, quite apart from anything the city might advocate.

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School Spending – A memo from Conor Baldwin, the Assistant City Manager for Fiscal Affairs, responded to a Councilor Vesna Nuon motion asking for itemized “chargeback expenditures” for the Lowell Public Schools. The memo provided numbers responsive to the motion, but its businesslike tone masks ongoing conflict between the city administration and the public schools over school funding from the city.

Here’s some background: The Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993 was enacted by the state legislature in response to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision in McDuffy v. Secretary of Education. That case held that the Commonwealth’s reliance on local property tax revenue to fund the public schools violated the fundamental right to an education guaranteed by the state constitution since it create vast disparities in resources between wealthy and poor districts.

The new law created a “foundation budget” for every school district that established the minimum amount of money needed to provide an adequate education. To help poorer districts achieve their foundation budgets, the state sent massive amounts of money to school districts like Lowell to help equalize educational opportunities. However, to ensure that municipalities continue to pay their share, the law requires municipalities to spend at least a minimum amount, called Net School Spending, on their schools.

However, the form of the city’s contribution to the schools is flexible with some coming as cash that the school district can spend as it sees fit, and some coming as “in kind services” the value of which are credited towards the city’s mandatory contribution amount. For example, if a DPW worker plows snow from a walkway leading up to the school, the value of that service may be counted towards the city’s net school spending requirement.

In general, the school department would prefer most of the contribution be in the form of cash to give it flexibility in how it is spent, whereas the city would prefer most of the contribution be “in kind” since it is already paying for the employees and equipment doing the in kind services and the more in kind credit is compiled, the less cash has to be given to the schools which would preserve it to pay for city council priorities like paving more streets.

The city cannot unilaterally decide on the cash v. credit mix. Instead, it’s controlled by an agreement between the city and the school department that is ratified and monitored by the state department of education. The agreement currently in effect was executed in 2011, although the city proposed a new agreement earlier this year, however, the school department has not yet accepted it.

Although people in the school department are more tactful about it, there has always been a suspicion that the city holds more leverage in reaching the agreement and that some of the credits allocated for city services are inflated to minimize the cash that the city must contribute to the schools.

Keep all of this in mind in the coming weeks as the School Committee establishes its budget for the coming fiscal year, which will then be sent to the City Council for its approval. Even though the overall school budget for the coming year may be higher than last year’s, the rate of increase in costs exceeds the increase in the budget which will result in a net cut in resources.

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Tree Committee – A longtime quest of the city council to create a citizen Tree Committee is moving towards realization. A memo from Sustainability Director Katherine Moses outlined all the actions that have been taken thus far, and City Manager Tom Golden reported that more than 50 residents have volunteered to serve on the committee.

An urban resident might reflexively think that tree advocacy is more of a suburban thing than an urban priority, but the fact is that trees are essential for a community like Lowell. Trees help combat “urban heat islands” that harm the health of residents and increase energy costs. Trees also help manage stormwater runoff and enhance property values. Also, Lowell has been harmed by the irresponsible cutting down of clusters of trees by private developers and paving contractors, so a committee could set ground rules for cutting down trees and then monitor enforcement of those rules.

The memo predicts that an ordinance creating the tree committee will be ready for council action by the end of this month with the tree committee established the following month.

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This week in Seen & Heard, I reviewed the 2024 book, “Kent State: An American Tragedy” by Brian VanDemark; I commented on a New Yorker article by Louis Menand called “How to Lose a War” which identified disturbing parallels between the start of the U.S. war in Vietnam and the current conflict against Iran; and I wrote of my enjoyment with a Boston Globe Op-Ed by Lowell’s Steve O’Connor, “My dog doesn’t read your lawn signs.”

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Back in 1987, a team from the American Folklife Center came to Lowell to conduct a months-long study that became known as the Lowell Folklife Project. The researchers documented ethnic neighborhoods, occupations, and community life in Lowell with a particular emphasis on the newly arrived Cambodian residents of the city.

Earlier this year, a representative from the American Folklife Center returned to Lowell for the March Khmer Diaspora Conference held at Middlesex Community College. As part of the conference, I joined with Sanary Phen, the executive director of the Cambodian American Literary Arts Association, to lead a walking tour through the Cambodia Town neighborhood.

Now, the American Folklife Center representative has written about the conference and the tour in the context of the earlier project. Her article is available on the Library of Congress website. It includes photos and recordings of Lowell’s Cambodian community from 40 years ago and is well worth checking out. Here’s the link.

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Finally, Bob Forrant and I are teaming up to lead a free walking tour on Lowell and World War II to be held on Saturday, May 23, 2026, at 10am from the Lowell National Historical Park Visitor Center at 246 Market Street. The tour will take approximately 90 minutes and requires no advanced registration. Just show up.

Lowell Cemetery tours on despite rain

This weekend’s Lowell Cemetery tours will be held despite the rain showers in the weather forecast. Just bring your umbrella.

The tours are Saturday, May 2, 2026 and Sunday, May 3, 2026, both at 10am from the Knapp Avenue entrance of the cemetery.

Those Who Marched Before Us

Those Who Marched Before Us

By Rich Grady, April 2026

Whatever of true life there was in thee

Leaps in our age’s veins;

Wield still thy bent and wrinkled empery,

And shake thine idle chains;

To thee thy dross is clinging,

For us thy martyrs die, thy prophets see,

Thy poets still are singing

(Excerpt from “To the Past” by James Russell Lowell, 1843)

The Minutemen were hardened by steely resolve and patriotic fervor on their march from Acton to Concord in the early morning hours of April 19, 1775. They were solemn in their double file columns, and quiet except for the sound of their boots and the rhythmic beat of the snare drum and the shrill notes of the fife cutting through the stillness of the surrounding farmland and bordering stonewalls. They might have heard a galloping horse as a messenger approached with updates on the British advance. They were well-trained and committed to the cause of an emerging new nation, and they knew that British Army regulars stood in their path. These ordinary men – farmers and stonemasons, gunsmiths and blacksmiths, husbands and brothers – were on an extraordinary path.

I belong to the Boxborough District Minutemen Company, and we exist to keep the memory of the original Minutemen alive.  A big part of that in today’s world is volunteer work in the community to help where needed, but it also involves marching in parades and participating in commemorative events, and raising money for scholarships. Patriots’ Day weekend is a big deal for us, and this year I gave a lot of thought to what we were doing, and why.  In typical Socratic fashion, I came up with more questions than answers, particularly about the thoughts and motivations of the original Minutemen.

During the weekend, I tried to imagine what thoughts were going through Luther Blanchard’s head on the morning of April 19, 1775. Perhaps his concentration on hitting the right notes kept him focused and in the moment. Luther was the fifer in Captain Isaac Davis’s Acton Minutemen Company – the first unit to confront the British Army regulars at the North Bridge – and he was the first man wounded at the North Bridge. He survived his wound initially, and fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775, and was listed on the rolls of the enlisted men for the Continental Army in August of that year. Historians generally think that his wound became aggravated and eventually contributed to his death in September 1775 in Cambridge where General George Washington had his army headquarters. That is what his brother Calvin believed and told other family members – he was also serving in the Continental Army at the time, and had also fought in the Battle of Concord and the Battle of Bunker Hill. From all indications, they were raised with a strong sense of duty and liberty. Getting wounded or killed were possibilities that they were well aware of, but they were both committed to the cause.

Their father, Simon, was killed in 1759 at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, Quebec, during the French-Indian War. Luther (b. 1756) was 3 years old, and his brother Calvin (b. 1754) was 5 years old, when their father died. They were likely told of his courage and valor in battle and that he was a man of honor. The family farm was in a rural section of Littleton that is now part of Boxborough, which was not incorporated as a district until 1783, and as a town in 1835.  Luther is on Boxborough’s town seal, and also on our Minutemen Company’s flag. We honor his memory with a town festival in June every year, called Fifer’s Day (June 20th this year).

Leading up to the Battle of Concord, both Luther and Calvin were apprenticed to Deacon Jonathan Hosmer of Acton to become stonemasons – they were strong young men.  A monument marks where they answered the alarm and left for Captain Davis’s house on the morning of April 19, 1775. It is located on Prospect Street in Acton, where Hosmer’s farm used to be.  Deacon Hosmer’s son, Abner, was a friend of the Blanchards, and he was killed at the North Bridge along with Isaac Davis. The annual reenactment of this historic day starts at 5:30 AM with a short march along Hayward Road in Acton to the homestead of Isaac Davis, Captain of the Acton Minutemen in 1775. Like Luther, I marched with the Acton Minutemen, but I am not a fifer. At the homestead, we were met by townspeople, including descendants of Isaac Davis.  Many of these people marched along behind us as we continued onward with the 7 mile march to Concord after a brief ceremony at the homestead, which included a musket volley.

According to historic records, there were 37 Minutemen marching with Captain Davis on the morning of April 19, 1775.  Many of them had fought in the French-Indian War, so they had experience in warfare and had seen bloodshed. Some likely knew Simon Blanchard, and gave Luther and Calvin encouragement. Undoubtedly, they all had a heightened sense of alertness to their situation – they had all trained for this moment, for this day. A certain sense of pride probably coursed through their veins, knowing that they were first responders that others were relying on. And yet, no doubt there were fears of bad outcomes, whether for themselves or their brothers in arms. In all likelihood, a rider on horseback had reached them during their march with news of the deaths of fellow Patriots in Lexington from a battle with British Army regulars.

As for the modern day Minutemen, I can’t speak for all of them about how they felt about this day. In my case, I felt a solemn sense of purpose and humility as I retraced the footsteps of Isaac Davis, Luther Blanchard, and the others. When we got to what is now known as the Old North Bridge and fired a musket volley, I thought of the Redcoats retreating to Boston as the original Minutemen tended to the dead and wounded before giving chase. These Minutemen stood for liberty and government by the people – they opposed the tyranny of King George III – and they stood up to British Army regulars. They fought in a long bloody war – a revolution – to accomplish their dream of a new nation, and many didn’t make it to the war’s end, including Isaac Davis and Luther Blanchard. They were ordinary people who launched us on an extraordinary journey as a nation – a journey that needs to get back on course.