Harbor

I live in a harbor
with no water.
Sailors cross mountains
in vessels of shoes.
Snow spray
pat, pat, pats my
hood, like a cat
boxing.
Gotta go.
Silent waves crash
and roll to the door.

The White River Touch Free Car Wash

In New Hampshire, it's the Touch Free or Die Car Wash.

Gene Burns thought I was messin' with him in 1978

THAT'S HIM, GENE BURNS

He was a radio talk show host we listened to on the job who was talking about how to make good coffee. I called him on from a house we were building and asked him to go through it step by step.

When he got to Step 17, or however many steps it took to get the coffee into the pot, he said, "Then you stir the pot."

 A lightning bolt!! Maybe I stirred the cup but never the pot. Could that be why my coffee was awful?

John Oliver demonstrates:

I expressed my enlightenment to Gene in profuse terms. (He talked like a Thesaurus.) After I hung up, the Burns baritone was beyond exasperation. "And Gene in Natick" -- instead of "Gene" he might have said, joker or idiot; you decide -- "never thought to STIR the coffee."

He was the calm before the storm of Jerry Williams, the talk-show host whose show aired next. Gene sometimes got mad but Jerry was constantly apoplectic about whatever bug had flown up his ass in the last five seconds.

JERRY WILLIAMS

By the way, stirring the pot wasn't it. My coffee is still awful.

Later when I saw pictures of Gene,  I learned he had kyphosis (a bent spine), and was severely hunched over. He never talked about it. Probably didn't want it to define him. He died in 2013, age 73.

Poem: How Ghosts are Made (from The Silo, Dec. 30, 2012)

I got my foot caught

in a train track or

it didn’t matter

what. I left my shoe

behind easy enough,

but I looked back

like my whole self  

was still unable

to move.

Then the train came

or the other killing

thing and you think

I’d be glad but I

thought, ‘There

goes the ghost.’
Even though

I was moving, I
didn't move on.

Spell (from Writing Tips for Non Writers, Jan. 27, 2012 & updated)

Joe Dwinell, the best speller I know, claims he is the worst.

I've never seen him spell a word wrong.

He is plugged-in, works in news, mines data, tweets, Instas, Snapchats, Facebooks, videos, blogs, tumbles, connects all day.

Carries a beat, pocket dictionary to check spelling. At sometime or another, he convinced himself he was a poor speller. Hasn't missed a word since.

We should all have Joe's tenacity.

Spelling correctly makes people think you know what you're talking about. It gives you authority. Makes you trustworthy.

Contrariness (from Writing Tips for Non Writers, Jan. 28, 201; updated Feb. 11, 2019 )

As an exercise, take the other point of view. Defend FOX News or CNN, whichever one you disagree with. 

Defend President Trump or say what's wrong with him, the opposite of what you normally think.

Hate sushi? Write how much you like it. Think it's great? Write why it's awful.

Be sincere. Debaters have to do it all the time. 

Saturday editor Rick Saia joke: 

Here's a debate between Chelsea and East Chelsea high schools:

Fuck you!

No, fuck you!

Former MetroWest Daily News editor Rus Lodi knew you could make a living off taking the unconventional point of view.

There was general outrage when Boston Garden was re-built and  re-named the FleetCenter.***  He said, "Yeah, I insist that the people who bought my old house still have their mail addressed to me."

***Now it's TD Garden.

MetroWest and FleetCenter are examples of camel case, (CamelCase), a pretty cool name for words smushed with the caps in the middle.

(iPhone is dromedary case.)

Skin (from Writing Tips for Non Writers, Jan. 29, 2012)

The best thing that happened to me when I worked at a newspaper was shortly after I started.

The newsroom moved from one side of the building to the other.

My seatmates changed. Across from me sat  a mentally disturbed man. 

He was from Brighton, Mass., of Russian heritage, had grown up in an Irish neighborhood during the Cold War getting the shit kicked out of him. He was brilliant and the paper's crime reporter with a dim view of people.

He had an unfathomably deep sense of humor, cliched kindness for clueless newbie reporters, and a lyrical and exotic word style that quickly got to the thrilling point of local crime news.

He was fat.

I'd look up and his baby face would be staring at me. If I stared back at him he'd blow kisses at me.

Behind me, face to face, sat the newspapers two premier columnists. 

They competed to see who got the most, meanest phone calls, letters and anger from readers over their columns.

MURDER

In college, I was a cab driver. One fall, there were two murders in a Cambridge college neighborhood. Stabbings.

I took a woman, girl really, from Boston to this neighborhood, nice apartments, lots of students. She was used to the fare and had me let her off at the end of her street rather than go around the block to drop her in front of her building.

"Are you sure?" I said.

"Oh yeah," she said. "I do it all the time."

I mentioned the murders. 

She hadn't heard. That was it. She was moving back to Manchester, New Hampshire. Didn't know how people live in a city where you always have to watch out for something. She paid and walked down the block.

People are careful when there are stabbings in Manchester, too. I told her that but it didn't matter.

AESOP

Writing is like sitting across from a crazy man blowing kisses at you. 

It's laughing at negative reaction from haters**. (And you WILL have haters.) 

It's when a nut starts terrorizing your neighborhood.

It's having a thick skin. 

**Haters is a post-2012 word. I had complainers.

Don't (from Writing Tips for Non Writers, Jan. 31, 2012)

Presumably, if you're a non-writer looking for writing tips, it has something to do with your job. 

Here are some sayings:

1. In doubt, leave it out.
2. Presumption is the mother of mistakes.
3. A dirty mind makes clean writing.*

More:

Don't say things you always wanted to say that were sidelined by company policy. 

And:

Writing for work isn't the place to talk about what's wrong at work.


*Don't use words or phrasing that are slang for sex or death. It isn't easy, sometimes.

Start (from Writing Tips for Non Writers, Feb. 1, 2012)

Dive in. Writing doesn't get easier if you wait.

You can always change what you've written before you send it.

The beginning of the day is the best time to start. Then you can look again at the end of the day.

Or start right now. 

Take a second look later today or tomorrow morning. 

The music's playing.

(Happy Birthday, Peter Burke!)

Can't (from Writing Tips for Non Writers, Feb. 2, 2012)

I can't write.

It doesn't come out the way I want.

Those two sentences couldn't be clearer. 

Noun verb object. You're done. 

Next topic. 

Writing doesn't have to be lots of words. Shorter is better.

One point is better than a bunch.

Here's the Patches O'Houlihan Rule from the movie Dodgeball, "If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball."

Write about why you can't write.

PATCHES

Bears, Part 1 (from Writing Tips for Non Writers, Feb. 3, 2012)

Write down as many kinds of bears as you can think of. 

One minute. 

Bears, Part 2 (from Writing Tips for Non Writers, Feb.4, 2012)

Give each bear from Part 1 a name. One minute.

Bears, Part 3 (from Writing Tips for Non Writers, Feb. 5 2012)

 Write a sentence about each bear, short or long, long, long, long.

Joe Bear walked.

Joe Bear walked to the store to get a carton of milk and caused three traffic accidents among drivers who took their eyes off the road to gawk at a teddy bear in sunglasses strolling down the sidewalk.

Rewrite (from Writing Tips for Non Writers, Feb. 7, 2012)

Rewrite everything.

Notes to your mother.

Your grocery list.

Everything.

Cute (from Writing Tips for Non Writers, Feb. 8, 2012)

Don't call attention to the words. The words serve the topic.

Sometimes the subject seems to need oomph. So you start over there or make jokes before you get here, to the point. 

Don't.

Journal (from Writing Tips for Non Writers, Feb. 9, 2012)

Write a private journal.

• Good practice. 
• Don't worry about what you say.
• Any topic, time or length.
• Days, weeks, a lifetime - watch your writing get better.
• Entries can be short like this.

Run (from Writing Tips for Non Writers, Feb. 13, 2012)

FROM LEFT, CABALLO BLANCO and MIKE NUTALL

If you're not sure whether to take one step or two, take three.

Advice from Caballo Blanco on running the Tarahumara way.

(Caballo died in 2012, RIP.) 

Works for business writing too.

Make your writing short. Sometimes that means taking short steps to explain things.

If you're a runner or no, a worthwhile book:

1. Action action action!! 
2. Great narrative.
3. Exciting science.

Move (from Writing Tips for Non Writers, Valentine's Day, 2012)

PHOTO OF TUCKER WILSON RAY (THE LITTLE GUY) from TUCKERRAY@BLOGSPOT.COM

Move sentences.

Why?

The easiest narrative structure is time. Start when something happens and continue until it ends.

But think of your audience.

The narrative beginning may not be most interesting to your reader.***

Start with 4, the part just before the end as in 1-2-3-4-5.

Then go to part 1 and build toward part 4. It's OK to repeat part 4 when you get to it in the narrative. Part 5 is the resolution. Maybe you can even skip part 5. Does your piece make sense without it?

Headlines

A great editor said, "You shouldn't have to explain the headline."

Ask a friend what headline she would write on your post.

Paragraphs

Keep them short.

***2019 Update: A very good writer I knew (RIP) resisted starting anywhere but the beginning. His story arc was birth, life, death. 

      When I worked at a small-town daily, reporters who wrote about school often started with some variation of, "It was an average day in class ..." 

       But that's not what they were writing about. They were writing about the unusual thing that happened. (Or getting into the nitty gritty of what an average day is. Even then, start with the closely observed detail.)

       The great writer Michael Pollan talks about what he calls the laundry line for a structure. He followed a steer from birth to hamburger: 

       There’s a laundry line of this piece. Let’s say it’s the life story of a steer. I know that I have to cover when he’s born on the ranch, the day he goes to the feedlot, life on the feedlot, going to slaughter–I know those are the key elements on that laundry line. I then think, “Do I want to start on the ranch? Or do I want to start in the middle and then go back to the ranch?” That’s what I did in this case, because it’s often more interesting to start in the middle and go back to the beginning (a trick Homer taught us). And then once I know that laundry line, the basic simple arc that my pieces usually have, I figure out where on that laundry line I can hang the laundry of themes, of ideas. 

Hood Museum

War of the Colossal Beast was directed by Martin Scorsese and adapted by Tom Stoppard from Leo Tolstoy's 1877 novel Anna Karenina.

PLOT: Upon hearing of several recent robberies of food delivery trucks in Mexico, Anna (Anne Hathaway), becomes convinced that her spouse Glenn (Dean Martin) survived his fall from the Boulder Dam (as seen in The Amazing Colossal Man) after she had banished him from their home due to his infidelity. 

Anna bikes to Mexico to look for Glenn and finds that he has, in fact, survived, but was left disfigured and more mindless than expected by the trauma of his fall. 

She starts to return home to Los Angeles but on the train, she has hallucinations of the amazing colossal man and Princess Charlotte of Monaco making love and laughing at her.

Arriving at the station, Anna says to herself, "Oh God... " and rides her bicycle, which she had packed with her baggage, under an oncoming train.

The scene then flashes to the amazing colossal man, who has a shocked face as if knowing his true love has died. He is amazing and colossal but pitiably cannot find a train to throw so he picks up a bus instead (photo above) and sets off to rob a food truck.  

Exercise (from Writing Tips for Non Writers, Feb. 19, 2012)

There aren't any natural writers. If there are, they write to get better. It doesn't have to be a lot. Five minutes a day is great!

Don't overdo it.

It's like I heard this 

guy say about running once.

When it's not fun anymore, stop.

Beagan Agus A Ra Go Maith (from Writing Tips for Non Writers, Feb. 12, 2012)

Say little but say it well

byug/onn ogg/iss a raw guh mot

Audience (from Writing Tips for Non Writers, Feb. 25, 2012)

Your audience is decision-makers.

Talk to them like they are embodied in one person who grew up next door to you and became chief of police of New York City.

Do some homework. Understand what motivates that person, where she goes next, what persuades her, what facts and news is important to her.

She deserves respect, wants you to be warm, get to the point, get enough of her attention quick enough that she can consider next steps based on what you say.

And another thing.

Decision-makers rise and fall on the good ideas they can, not only use, but explain  how those ideas are useful to their constituencies.

And another

You're also addressing people who want to be decision-makers, and people looking for good ideas to bring to decision-makers.

Vary (from Writing Tips for Non Writers, Feb. 28, 2012)

When you have to write a long and complicated sentence to explain something, follow it with a short, easy to understand sentence to give the reader a chance to digest and understand the long, complicated sentence.

Done.

Fly (from Writing Tips for Non Writers, Feb. 29, 2012)

ANDY AMBUEHL - OREGONSTATE.EDU

Bloggers aren't protected.

You not only compete with other blogs, you compete with everything.

Make your blog the first thing people want to do.

More than a tail wants to wag.

More than a writer wants to procrastinate.

More than, hold your breath, oh not more than that. Never more than that.

Hey, you're an eagle. Someday.

Breathe (from Writing Tips for Non Writers, March 3, 2012)

Is clavicular breathing good or bad?

This is a writing exercise.

Outline (from Writing Tips for Non Writers, March 7, 2012)

1. Think.
2. When thinking gets confused, stop.
3. Write ideas.
4. Tackle a difficult one.
5. Do an easy one.
6. Move ideas around.
7. Delete some.
8. Add some.
9. Repeat 7 and 8 as needed.
10. Done.

Personalize (from Writing Tips for Non Writers, March 10, 2012)

Even the best business blogs, like the Harvard Business Review, lapse into general speech and theoretical language.

Not necessary.

Blogs are afraid of leaving someone out. Like the water might miss the crack that splits the boulder unless it wets the whole rock.

Watch firefighters. They aim a hose at a flame and pound away.

Do that.

Be personal.

Imagine one person with one problem.

A woman's hair is on fire.

Save her life.

Save her hair.

Other people will see you do that.

They'll get it.

Oops (from Writing Tips for Non Writers, March 11. 2012)

Jesus is walking past Heaven's door. 

St. Peter is not busy.

Jesus takes St. Peter's place.

"Ask people what they did with their lives," St. Peter says.

The first person is an old man. 

"What did you do with your life?" Jesus asks.

"I had a son," the man says.

"That's it?" Jesus says.

 "He was not human," the man says.

"Explain," Jesus says.

"He didn't start out human but became one. People loved him."

Jesus has never met Joseph the carpenter. "Father?" he says.

The man reaches for his glasses. "Pinocchio?"

Don't assume.

The Point (from Writing Tips for Non Writers, March 28, 2012)

Two mistakes

1. Not getting to the point fast enough.

2. Missing the point.

       1. Writing for Boston Globe West edition in early 2012, I was fascinated by the way organizers of a beauty pageant handled being locked out of their practice space. The lede:

        "Construction barriers and caution tape, scaffolding, a cherry picker hanging inches over their heads in the freezing parking lot of a church that looked long-term closed, the two women wore short skirts, filmy blouses, both had phones in each hand, 4-inch heels, traded jokes and called their contacts."

       It had nothing to do with beauty pageants.

       I cut all that behind-the-scenes stuff just to get indoors and get the story going.

       I should have cut more.

     Lesson: Get the reader to the point.

No (from Writing Tips for Non Writers, April 4, 2012)

Sorry this is late but keep it in mind for next year and forever. April Fool's parodies never work and always cause trouble including losing your job. If you have to, have to, have to post a parody on April Fool's Day, take the day off.

Rules (from Writing Tips for Non Writers, June 6, 2012)

I came across a book called Rules of Thumb*, published in 1983. It was among the books I had that I was selling on Amazon.

I made a living for years on the half-dozen things it says about writing. I gave it to a girl I know who's going to the University of Vermont next year. Here are a couple of things I remember from it.

A Rule of Thumb is a good idea. It's not ironclad but usually works out well.

From a book editor: In any book manuscript, you're pretty safe cutting the first two-and-a-half chapters.

Short stories: Cut the first page and a half.

News: Cut the first couple of paragraphs.

There's one that the father of the girl going to college remembered. If one of your shoelaces needs to be tied, they both do.

By the way, there's a Rules of Thumb 2 and like a lot of sequels, it's a disappointment.

In 1983, there wasn't the type of instant communication and business blogging we now have, but we could still make the same sort of rules of thumb.

Don't deliver bad news in text.

Over-punctuate, especially for praise!!!!

Don't try for nuance or sarcasm!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The rules about cutting at the beginning, even in short posts, still apply.

See how blogs read if you cut the first two paragraphs.

This post, and most posts, would be fine, businesslike and professional without the back-story or the warm-up. Get straight to the information.

*There are now books called Rules of Thumb for different professions, including writing, and the original Rules of Thumb by a fellow named Tom Parker, who uses the same author photo as in 1983, is now called Rules of Thumb, a Life Manual.

Fun (from Writing Tips for Non Writers, July 4, 2012)

If you don't have fun writing it, people won't have fun reading it. 

You get paid. 

What do they get?

2019 Update: This is not necessarily true but for non-writers, drudgery shows. Know what I mean? Try to enjoy yourself.

Touch (from Writing Tips for Non Writers July 7, 2012)

Save time in writing and in life.

When you get an email, tweet, piece of paper, act - beginning, middle and end. Touch it and be done.

The writer I know who does this http://www.universalhub.com/ singlehandedly outperforms the two Boston daily newspapers for neighborhood news. He has lots of contributors these days, but boy is he fast. 

He's funny too.

It helps in your personal life too. (Not with lovers, please. They need lots of touches, not one.) 

Bills, car repairs, that sort of thing. 

Schedule it for when you can afford it, do it, pay and done.

Write (from Writing Tips for Non Writers, July 8, 2012)

Business blogs are like stores. Why should a customer go into one rather than another?

When she goes in, what prompts her to buy something?

First, be welcoming. Do that by being confident and straightforward.

Explain what you're talking about. Skip the blather.

Then,

1. Get to the point.
2. If there's an action item, say it. 
3. If there's a date and time - an event or deadline - when is it?
4. Is there a cost? 
5. Where can the reader go to act on the blog's recommendations?

You don't need anecdotes or techniques to make a business blog worth people's time.

Writing is a way to put words where people can see them, not a way to make words fancy.

Remember that and you'll be fine.

December 01, 2011 Boston Globe West

Watch the birdie, and hit it back hard

Local badminton club scores a coup as host of US team trials

By Gene Cassidy, Globe Correspondent

In the late 1990s, Yvonne Chern and her husband, Wen, moved to Wayland and joined the Maugus Club in Wellesley. At the club, Wen, who was born in Malaysia, found, to his delight, badminton courts.

This began a series of events that will culminate this weekend with the country’s 40 top players competing for spots on the USA Badminton Team at a venue in Westborough conceived, designed, and built by Yvonne Chern.

The full-time head coach at Chern’s facility, the Boston Badminton Club, is Andy Chong, also a native of Malaysia. He remembers stringing a net across a narrow street when he was 10, batting a birdie back and forth, taking the net down for a car to pass, and putting it back to continue the game. By the time he was 16, Chong was the singles champion of Asia. He retired from competition as an internationally ranked player, is a former US Olympic coach, and is the current coach of Team USA.

Eighteen years ago, Beth Sopka’s friends took her to the Gut ’n’ Feathers Club in Marblehead. She saw that the badminton club was not just a place for her to socialize, but a place for her 8-year-old son, Ted Shear, to play. As Ted got older and Sopka got more involved, they traveled the country and the world playing badminton, sometimes even competing together in mixed doubles.

Sopka said she has enjoyed the sport so much, she is president of the Massachusetts Badminton Association, and was the driving force to bring the USA team trials to the East Coast. The event taking place tomorrow through Sunday at the club on Flanders Road in Westborough is the first time the trials, a key step in the Olympic selection process, have been held outside California.

In another reflection of the sport’s growth, students from seven area high schools - Newton North, Newton South, Milton, Medfield, Boston Latin, Sharon, and Winchester - last year started the Massachusetts High School Badminton League.

With the USA Trials here, a professional coach, a state-of-the-art place to play, Sopka’s savvypromotion, and high school interest, Greater Boston is becoming a hotbed for the sport.

Speed and skill on display

Bap. Bap. Bap. Bap. Bap. Bap. Bap. The sound is as steady as a metronome. The strings play the same note each time the cork-topped birdie meets racket face during a warm-up session for Alex Cheng, 15, of Westford, and Phyllis Lin, 15, of Acton. They face each other on a court at Boston Badminton, skimming the shuttlecock just over the net faster than a big-league hurler’s out pitch. Bap. Bap. Bap.

Their next warm-up shows why the brochure for Boston Badminton emphasizes its 32-foot ceilings. Cheng and Lin send the birdie up as high and hard as they can, back and forth.

It looks like a blast, and sounds like someone giving a bottle rocket an extra whap with a bat just as the fuse ignites.

And because of the shuttlecock’s feathers, an odd thing happens. Birdies not only hit dragster speeds crossing the net, they have brick-wall brakes - their forward motion slows, and then they drop straight down.

During a competitive match, players return a lot of shots when the shuttlecock seems clearly about to sail over the line and out. Then witness a warm-up exchange like this, where the players let the birdie drop. If players don’t return the birdie before it goes whizzing by, they may see it lose all momentum and hit the court just inside the line. Ouch.

There’s one last thing to notice about the high-flying shots between Cheng and Lin: The shuttlecock doesn’t get lost in the lights. Boston Badminton, and all good badminton facilities, are indirectly lighted with dark backgrounds, so players, and spectators, can follow the birdie.

For the best, strategy is key

Coach Chong likens singles badminton to a game of chess, but one that requires checkmating an opponent 21 times.

“For the elite players, I teach strategy; they should already know how to play,’’ he said recently while training a group of juniors at Boston Badminton.

Chong retired in the late 1980s as the 22d-ranked singles player in the world.

Physically, he said, the game calls for a mix of skills - a volleyball player’s leap, a marathoner’s stamina, a sprinter’s speed, and a hockey goalie’s quickness. Chong said he first trains his students how to train, then he trains them to learn, then trains them to compete, and finally trains them to win.

“For the little ones,’’ he said, “I train them to have fun.’’

MassBad president Sopka brought Chong to Marblehead in the late 1990s on a special visa, as an extraordinary athlete, after he graduated from college in Florida. In addition to coaching in Marblehead, Chong coached at the Maugus Club too.

“Andy’s coming here was a key component,’’ Sopka said. “All these players gravitated toward this area.’’

“If your kids play soccer,’’ said Yvonne Chern, “they have one of the parents as a coach. Andy used to be a world-class player.’’

Local home for world sport

Boston Badminton opened in January. Most of the people playing on a recent night appeared to be of Asian descent. Badminton, competitive rather than casual, is a huge spectator sport in much of the world, from Great Britain across Europe to China, Japan, Korea, and throughout Asia.

Even in Canada, Chern said, any sporting goods store has high-quality badminton rackets, shuttlecocks with feathers, and shoes designed to allow lateral movement and reduce sprains.

Some sources trace badminton’s origins to paddle games in ancient Greece or China, but all agree that the modern game, with nets and stringed rackets, was brought back to England by British Army officers serving in India in the mid-18th century.

As Chong trained his young players at one end of the eight-court facility, the rest of the courts filled with men and women playing after work.

Vineet Singh is 30 years old and lives Southborough. He has competed nationally and internationally in tae kwon do. His club was in Cambridge, and when he and his wife moved to the suburbs, he couldn’t find another club where he felt he fit. Cambridge was too far.

Singh passed Boston Badminton a few times and his friends suggested he try it.

“I know badminton is supposed to be an Indian thing but I had never played,’’ he said. “I thought I would kill it.’’

Singh said he has grown to love the sport, even while humbled by how difficult it is to play well.

“It helps relieve stress,’’ he said.

Singh said the workout he gets is comparable to the physicality of tae kwon do. He got his wife Suma to join.

Serious exercise

A workout is something Chern said she was seeking for her children.

“I think I speak for a lot of moms when I say I was just looking for something to keep kids away from a screen,’’ she said.

In 2006, having caught the badminton bug from her husband, Chern asked the Maugus Club if she could clear out a room where props were stored from the days when the club staged community shows. She learned to frame out a floor-to-ceiling space for badminton, which, she said, turned out to be great practice for building her own place years later.

Maugus went from two badminton courts to three, but there still wasn’t enough room for camps or tournaments, so Chern began looking for new space.

It took her years, she said, to find the Flanders Road spot. Now her son Lee, 16, is the national juniors champion in the 19-and-under age group, and this weekend will try out for Team USA, as will her daughter Min, a graduate student at Bentley University in Waltham.

Chern said she sees a couple more needs to fill if badminton is to really take off in the United States.

Television coverage, for starters.

“Sponsorships include a few bags, some shoes,’’ she said, “but it’s not like tennis.’’ The players from the West Coast taking part in the Team USA trials will buy their own airfare. Without television, she said, there is no money.

Next on her list is diversity.

“This is not just for Asians,’’ Chern said.

At courtside, Sopka said one of the best things about badminton is that a parent and child, or a good player and a beginner, can play without watering the game down. The good player, Sopka said, can practice placing shots, while the new player can concentrate on just hitting them back, “like Yvonne’s doing with that girl over there.’’

And there she was, Yvonne Chern, former aquaculture professor turned badminton impresario, going bap, bap, bap.

December 25, 2011 Boston Globe West

Nancy and David Haines. Photo by Debee Tlumacki for Boston Globe West. 

Turning the pages of Quaker history

Hopkinton booksellers keep huge stock of writings

Nancy and David Haines run Vintage Books from a handsome, tan clapboard barn next to their 1818 red-brick farmhouse on Hopkinton’s Hayden Rowe Street.

Though their 35,000 used volumes range across topics, the Haineses are one of the world’s largest dealers of books by and about Quakers.

“It’s quite a mess up there,’’ Nancy said as David climbed upstairs in the barn, where most of their 6,000 volumes of Quaker-related books are stored. The loud “thunk’’ of a pile hitting the floor punctuated her words.

The Haineses didn’t set out to become a clearinghouse for Quaker history. David was raised as a member of the Religious Society of Friends, as Quakers are formally known, in Indiana. When Nancy walked into her first Quaker meeting as an adult, she said, “I felt like I was home.’’

Today the writings of early Quakerism - emphasizing women’s equality, peace, eradicating slavery, and speaking truth to power - resonate and help shape modern discourse.

David Haines also teaches chemistry at Wellesley College. Nancy, originally from Virginia, is retired from a career as an industrial engineer. They met at a Quaker meeting in Silver Spring, Md., in 1986 when David was on sabbatical from Wellesley, working in nearby Washington, D.C., for the National Cancer Institute.

Some of the volumes piled or shelved upstairs in the barn - and some cherished volumes, papers, and handbills in the house - are the only copies in existence. Some are 300 years old or more.

During the years of their book buying, which David started before they met, they picked up Quaker volumes here and there. David prizes books that have been signed by Quaker families as they passed through generations, books with authors’ handwriting from centuries ago.

“It gives them meaning beyond just the content,’’ he said.

But like the many purveyors of new books that have been squeezed out by the Internet, so too are used-book sellers struggling. Nancy can cite several stores in the region that have closed recently. In Framingham, Annie’s Book Stop closed this year.

Could Vintage Books, she asked, be part of the last generation of booksellers?

“It’s anybody’s guess,’’ she said.

The speed with which electronic screens have replaced paper has been the subject of serious discussion among members of the Massachusetts & Rhode Island Antiquarian Booksellers. Shipping warehouses have replaced high-rent retail locations.

“If you ask any person who runs a bookstore if they could have anticipated any of the changes that have happened in the last 25 years, they would have said, ‘No way,’ ’’ said Peter Masi, the booksellers association’s president. He wonders whether in as few as 20 years there will be any used-book stores left.

David remembers his first trip to an antiquarian bookstore in the Midwest 30 years ago.

“It never occurred to me that you would sell books,’’ he said. “If you had books, you just kept them.’’

He began collecting books a few at a time. In 1987, the newly married couple returned to Wellesley by way of Bar Harbor, Maine, making a tour of Route 1 bookshops, collecting the volumes for what would be the first Vintage Books, a general-interest bookstore in downtown Framingham in 1988.

There was no Amazon.com. The idea of a World Wide Web that would change commerce, communication, and governments within 20 years was unknown outside rarefied military and scientific circles.

The couple closed their Framingham store in 1993, and they now sell books over the Internet or from their Hopkinton barn, which is usually open for business, as their website (www.vintagequakerbooks.com) says, Tuesday to Saturday, from noon to 5 p.m.

Books on every topic fill the barn’s downstairs shelves. Politics, poetry, suspense, sports, the lives of the great, the ordinary, and the imaginary wait beside a rocking chair and in quiet corners.

Near a door to their house, a 9-by-12 framed handbill from Colonial times endears itself to Nancy for the phrase, “The Lord Shall give the Word. Great is the Army of the Women Publishers.’’

David treasures a Quaker broadside sent from England after the hanging of Mary Dyer on Boston Common in 1660, titled “To New England’s Pretended Christians, Who Contrary to Christ, Have Destroyed the Lives of Men.’’ Dyer was hanged after returning to Puritan Boston from Rhode Island yet again after being banished from the community three times for being a Quaker, David said. Her crime: Grievously and publicly sinning by trying to preach in violation of a ban against women preachers.

Quakerism was started by George Fox around 1650 in England. Much of the information about those early days was published two years after Fox’s death in his collected journals.

According to the journals and a 2008 biography, “George Fox: A Christian Mystic,’’ by Kenyan Hugh McGregor Ross, Fox was a brilliant young man. But he disapproved of his colleagues’ drinking “debates.’’

Fox, his journals say, briefly sided with other dissenters to the Church of England, but split with them when they insisted that women, children, and slaves had no souls.

Fox came to believe, and Quakers still believe, that God dwells directly in people and everywhere. There is no need for a church bureaucracy or buildings. These beliefs, recorded in his journal during intense spiritual reflection in the late 1640s, are among the basic tenets of Quakerism.

There are Quaker meeting houses in several area communities, including Framingham and Wellesley, as well as Boston and Cambridge. The services are not led by a preacher; rather, Quakers sit silently until someone feels they have something to say.

Nancy and David married by reciting vows to each other. Another member of the Religious Society of Friends acted as clerk and recorded the documents.

In 1996’s “First among Friends: George Fox and the Creation of Quakerism,’’ author H. Larry Ingle described how the religious sect gathered force in mid-17th-century England and became a threat to the traditional church institution.

Tithes to the church supported the government. Church members fought in the military. Fox’s views that the church bureaucracy was unnecessary, and that war was wrong were radical. They challenged not just theology, but society’s organization.

So Fox, and most early followers, spent time in English jails. The story has several tellings, Fox’s own in his journal, but in one version of a sentencing at Derby in 1650, a judge asked Fox, who bowed to no one but God, to remove his hat. Quoting the Bible, Fox told the judge to tremble before God. The judge called Fox a “quaker’’ before throwing him in jail. Rather than taking insult, Fox took it as a name.

David Haines said he suspects there will always be a market for historic Quaker papers, such as a journal of Fox’s writings that was compiled by his followers and published 316 years ago.

Nancy Haines, who is revisiting each book on their store’s general-reading shelves after a recent computer failure, is more a champion of the everyday. She said she sees the Quaker books “almost as a ministry.’’

As a customer rang up an armful of books on a recent afternoon, Nancy asked whether she had found what she wanted. The woman said she wasn’t after anything particular, just some Christmas presents.

That’s what their store offers, Nancy said: “The serendipity of finding what you didn’t know you wanted.’’