1 January

Carol In The Kitchen

by Jon Katz
Carol In The Kitchen
Carol In The Kitchen

Carol Gulley’s dinner plans fell apart when the “trash-can” cooking of the Turkey fell short, she shift gears calmly and quickly to ham as her kitchen filled up with dishes and pots and pans. Kitchens are always the center of farmhouses, there is coffee going around the clock, warm fires and stoves, pots and pans, rich smells, a big table where the family hangs out and gossips and talks.

Carol was unflappable, talking to the grandkids, shooing the dogs away, keeping an eye on the comings and goings outside, managing seven different kinds of food at once. The kids call her “grammy.”

1 January

Hi From The Gulleys

by Jon Katz
Hi From The Gulleys
Hi From The Gulleys

I have always been powerfully touched by the lives of farmers, and I can’t say for certain why this is so, since I did not grow up around farmers, spend much time on farms, and I am not a farmer now, but a writer with a farm, which is quite different.

I respect the farmers that I known, they work brutally odd, against overwhelming odds, with little or no understanding or much appreciation from the world beyond them. The ones I know are honest and open, accepting of me, trusting and welcoming. Farmers grow the food and harvest the milk we drink, and they rarely have any money.

Their lives are an obstacle course, a minefield of the animal complications and uncertainties, government bureaucracy and the never-ending onslaught of corporate competition. Many tell me that righteous and clueless animal rights politicking is helping to suffocate them and their lives.

Yet I am often invited into their homes and barns, given coffee and pie, permitted to take my photos, listen to their stories. I don’t know, there is a connection there, I can’t say I have figured it out. They seem real to me, genuine, and graciously embattled. And I have never met people who love animals as much or care about them more.

There is a reason, I think, that the life of the small family farm has played such a giant and mythic role in the life of this country and the imagination of its people. Everywhere, family farms are dying, and I am compelled as a writer and photographer – and the grandson of immigrants – to capture something of their lives before they are gone. The Gulleys are a good place to hang out, Ed’s farm art has created a welcome wall just outside of the house. You know right away where you are.

1 January

New Year’s Dinner: The Gulley Family. Bejosh Farm

by Jon Katz
New Year's Dinner
New Year’s Dinner

Maria and I were invited to Carol and Ed Gulley’s Bejosh Farm this afternoon for their annual holiday dinner, usually held on New Year’s Day. The Gulleys have four children and ten grandchildren (two of their children and their families couldn’t make it today). Carol and Ed run a small dairy farm in White Creek, N.Y, I met Carol in cardiac rehab and we became pals, we often text each other.

In rehab, Carol found herself on the treadmill alongside of a writer whose books she had been reading for a few years, she was quite surprised to find me there.  Cardiac rehab is a very egalitarian place.

I learned that my Swiss steer Elvis originally came from her farm and Carol agreed to be first reader on my play, “The Last Day Of  A Dairy Farm,” to have a staged reading at the end of January at the Hubbard Hall Arts And Education Center in Cambridge. She and Ed both cried, she said. We hit it off, Carol appears to be very quiet and shy, she is neither. She has a great sense of humor.

Ed comes from an old farm family, the farm is his life, it forms his inspiration, history and boundaries. He wants to retire in a few years and run an antique store.

These are are true individuals, part of a fading way of life, people who spend their lives working and raising their families on small dairy and family farms. The big corporate farms are spreading everywhere, and it has become more difficult for the small farms to compete, they are pressured by competition, animal rights-sponsored legislation, and crushing government regulation. These two are among the most passionate animal lovers I have ever met, the farm is crawling with creatures, six dogs, a goat, 50 or so cows, chickens and they seem to know and love each one of them.

Ed is also a folk artist and antique collector, there is farm art everywhere, old Bibles, cabinets, tools. More than anything, I felt a strong and powerful sense of family, which is, I think, what the lives of the Gulleys really revolve around. Their animals are one family, their kids another. There is no computer in the house, nobody in the family spends much time on Facebook. In between courses, the kids raced around the farm outside.

Carol had her heart surgery in the Spring, she is on the tractor at the farm most days, working long and hard hours alongside of Ed. They have been married for more than 40 years.

She had planned to serve a turkey dinner – they had raised a 35-lb dinner, but this year they experimented with a “trash-can” turkey, a turkey cooked over hot coals in a trash can hanging from a tree. But the turkey was too big, they had to switch to ham at the last minute, nobody seemed to mind or notice.

The sense of family made me sad – I thought my lost and scattered family, far away and disconnected from one another – and also happy to be there. Carol and Ed are much loved and revered, and the family stories started flying around the table as soon as dessert was finished. Farm kids are not raised like most kids in America, they can run outside and play freely, they visit cows, climb the rafters in barns, cuddle with goats, explore dark and musty corners.

They learn a lot about life, and about how to navigate the world and make decisions. Their lives are far from perfect, but they are filled with love and connection and they learn quickly about the real world, and the real world of real animals.

I loved the afternoon at the Gulleys, it was a special time for me. Carol asked me if I had family around, and I said no, I think she was bewildered by that, it was, I think, out of her experience. I felt a real connection to this family, I hope I see more of them. We will get them over to the farm for some of my white clam pizza. It was a great way to spend New Year’s afternoon.

1 January

Happy New Year

by Jon Katz
Happy New Year
Happy New Year

I have never quite figured out how to feel about New Year’s Day. The holiday always seemed a bit forced and contrived to me, suddenly eruptions of joy and shouting at midnight, but always this sense of unnatural emotion, something contrived to fit a television moment. I have never quite grasped the important of the falling ball in Times Square, I can’t help but think of all those frozen people shut up in their pens.

I see we need rituals and traditions, and that is the one we have chosen to mark the transition to a new year.

Still, in the past  year or two New Year’s has grown on me. It is perhaps the only holiday yet that the corporate beasts devouring our nation have not yet figured out how to co-opt with giant discounts and manufactured days. There seems to be no end of the time, energy and space people will dedicate to discount shopping or just plain old shopping. Black and Green Fridays, Cyber Mondays.

Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas have been swallowed up by retailing marketers, online and off, much like a giant python devours a deer or a rabbit. My neighbor’s daughter told me she loves Thanksgiving best of all because her family spends  most of it online or at Best Buy. Somewhere, Jesus Christ is weeping, or perhaps accepting and rejoicing over the fact that so many people love this idea of a holiday so much.

They haven’t gotten to New Year’s yet, but I know they are working on it. It still retains some innocence. Older, perhaps more weary people, make a point out of staying home, if you ask them what they are doing at New Year’s Eve, they say proudly, “nothing! We are staying home to watch the ball drop.”  They are proud to be still. Perhaps New Year’s Day is now a day of rest for Americans exhausted from months of shopping.

Teenagers are in Times Square or thinking about it. You couples head for bars and parties.

There is no true unifying element for New Year’s as there once was for Christmas and Thanksgiving. But the lack of corporate  hoopla and greed – even beasts have to rest – has left me free to fill in my own blanks. For me, New Year’s Eve is about three things – gratitude and hope and creativity.

I am grateful to be alive this year and grateful for the many riches in my life – Maria, my work, the animals, my photography, my friends, the chance to breathe and live and feel and love. That is what it means to me to be a human.

Looking ahead, there is hope. I wish my blog to continue to prosper and grow, my book writing to find a happy and supportive home once more, I want Maria and my friends to find their dreams and pursue them. I am excited about my daughter’s upcoming marriage. I have more healing to do, more recover to work on, more things to figure out. My broken heart is still healing.

A challenge for me and for all of is us to stay grounded, peaceful and hopeful as our leaders devolve into angry, bitterly feuding people and ideologies. Mostly, I ignore it, as many of you do, but I’m not sure that can be true forever. Sooner or later, we will have to decide what we are willing to do to get our country back. Could be an exciting chapter for me as I continue to grow older.

More than anything, I wish to continue my hero journey, my struggle to self-discovery and purpose, my passion for creativity and growth. Maria is a miracle that has entered my life in it’s later stages, and brightened every corner of it. The joy of my existence is watching her grow, find her voice, practice her art and fulfill her destiny, stand in her strength. She does it every day.

I am deeply grateful for the existence of the Creative Group At Bedlam Farm, a community of several hundred disparate but intensely creative individuals who have come together to create a new kind of virtual community, a safe and creative place that becomes a genuine community of brothers and sisters more and more each day. After my heart surgery in July, members of the group  raised more than $5,000 to send Maria and I do Disney World in January, to rest and be warm and cap my recovery. I still can’t quite believe they did that.

Love can wear but it can also deepen. A close friend warned me that our love for one another would fade and become strained, that is the fate of couples, she told me. This has not been the case. She is my heart, and our love beats stronger every day.

So I guess New Year’s is a time for reflection, and I should not leave out the animals. Red is a wondrous companion and soulmate to me, he is my partner in the game of chance, a gifted therapy dog, a valuable and cherished farm helper. He is a third arm and leg. Thanks so much to Dr. Karen Thompson for trusting me with him, I will not every betray her trust or let her down.

I am proud of Simon, his story is shining all over the world, he is a symbol and inspiration to me and others.

I am learning to love cats, my barn cats have come inside for the cold weather, they help fill up our house with life and warmth.

And there are the horses, these wonderful spirit beings who have entered our lives. The New York Carriage horses and their struggle to survive in the city have affected me greatly, and affirmed my sense of myself as a journalist and author. I feel they have led me to a new kind of social movement, a community of good people and animal lovers who wish to keep animals in our lives and treat them and the people who own them with love and compassion.

Our farrier, Ken Norman, and his gofundme project are a symbol of this movement, a community that supports each other, understands each other and stands together in our love of animals and people.  In several days good people from everywhere came together quickly to make sure he and his family get through his knee surgery comfortably and safely.  They raised more than $28,000 for Ken in a few days. For me, the true spirit of the New Year. I will not abandon the horses, or forget about them and the carriage drivers this year, not as long as there is a single one of them left in New York, and I hope their powerful spirit will never stop talking to me.  Happy New Year all.

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