York Corner
If you ask the right questions, there's almost no place where you can't pick up a little philosophy.
At York Corner Gardens two Sundays ago, proprietor David Coombs gave us a variation on the glass-is-full perspective when the subject of the Red Sox came up.
"They're only five games out and people are digging their grave when they should be building their foundation for the next championship," he said, with the grin and bounce that are his hallmarks.
Alas, the Sox's sinking fate since hasn't worked to buoy spirits, but we can report on somebody else we met there that day who was very happy just to be in this region, and who, we discovered, had brought his own message to it.
He was Scott Tyink, an educator from La Crosse, Wis., who'd been in Greenfield, Mass., and in St. Albans, Vermont, for a week and a half, "teaching teachers," as he put it, at workshops.
With a free weekend before him, he'd asked Vermonters' advice about where to spend it, and they'd recommended this area - Portsmouth, N.H., and southern Maine.
"I've been stumbling on some great stuff," he told us as he picked up some peaches from David, and he explained, when we asked, that he'd heard folk-singer Suzanne Vega in concert, that he'd been ocean- and marsh-kayaking with an eye out for a rare South African heron recently spied in these parts (he didn't see it) - and that he'd happily indulged in what he'd been told was "a typical New England lunch," clam chowder, a lobster roll and a whoopee pie.
But all of that, we discovered, had happened in Portsmouth, and when he said he was looking, next, for Ogunquit's Marginal Way, we spent some time encouraging him to take in some of York's sights en route, and left him headed (we hoped) to Route 1A.
In the process, we learned that La Crosse is on the Mississippi River; that he teaches for a non-profit Minneapolis-based organization called Origins, and that he travels a lot to do so.
Curious, we later Googled him and found Origins' website ("a website for educators … Building Community Since 1979"), including a couple of articles Tyink had written about what he'd learned from eight years of teaching middle-schoolers.
Finding required topics "dry and uninviting" in that teaching, he wrote, he "spent a lot of time coming up with clever games, one-man skits and exciting projects. I felt that if I made content 'jazzy' enough, kids would enjoy learning. And they did. Kids liked the projects and games I created, but the work they did was a mile wide and an inch deep …"
He's since found, he continued, that "the greatest cognitive growth happens in social situations … I now spend much more time in the area of social learning. I have been very successful in teaching problem-solving, conflict management and responsibility. … Kids are innately interested - especially in middle school - in the social dimensions of life. I need to make social learning the basis for my curriculum."
Put in more concrete terms - and with a curriculum focus, one year, on "What is my relationship to the world?" - Tyink wrote that what that means, for example, is "rather than just studying relationships of animals of the Mississippi, we could study the ethical and social implications of various river uses such as boating and fishing. From this we could use our problem-solving skills to address issues such as overfishing a certain sort of fish or the zebra mussel [an invasive species] problem. We could then create a public service announcement for local television. That would be curriculum that is social, ethical, rigorous and authentic."
Origins, we discovered, puts philosophy like this to use in a program that impressed us called Responsive Designs for Middle Schools; you can check it out on your own at www.originsonline.org.
Back at York Corner Gardens, David was almost simultaneously gloating over the fact that his very own corn, grown in the field right behind the stand, was ready to eat - "the first corn in 58 years grown at York Corner Gardens!" - and deploring a problem with his golf game.
Last year, he said, his golf problem was slicing. This week he was announcing, "I'll give you free blueberries for life if you can cure my pull hook," and when we asked what that meant, he said simply, "Golfers will understand."
And somehow, in between telling us all this, eating his lunch and manning the cash register, he found time to duck outside and help two customers by shutting off their car alarm for them.
The customers proved to be Ti Randall, a New Yorker retired from commercial real-estate sales, and Ann Burgunder, also a New Yorker, who described herself as "a bread-maker."
Ann makes bread, she explained, for Amy's Bread in New York City, and she's been doing it since that company started in 1992. The company began then with a staff of 10 or 12, she reported; it now employs 135 at three locations, one at 672 Ninth Ave. in Hell's Kitchen, one at Chelsea Market (75 Ninth Ave.), and one in Greenwich Village (at 250 Bleeker St.).
Ann actually manages the Chelsea Market shop, she said, which led David to quip, "You mean you don't own the place so you're not in the dough?"
Strapped for time, Ann and Ti were off to Ogunquit, to Parsons' Post House on Shore Road, where, they said, they always stay, and so we didn't get a chance to talk further.
We did appreciate one other little bit of philosophy with which they left us.
David asked if Ti was an artist.
"No," Ann tossed back over her shoulder, "but he has an artist's sensibility."
