Blog #1

Now that an amazing trip to Argentina is over and its posts are on this blog, here’s how I’m looking at ongoing posts…..and I promise not to post if I have nothing to say. There will be a Facebook alert if I have posted.

What fun! An excuse to sound off on any number of subjects, issues, facts, truths and untruths, books, tempting recipes, religion, horses, editorials, getting old, dogs, travel, politics – and I’m sure more will occur to me.

What is my excuse? Well for one thing, the age-old “everybody’s doing it” (doin’ it, doin’ it) and more importantly, the release this fall by the University of Virginia Press of a paperback edition of my first book, “Never Ask Permission: Elisabeth Scott Bocock of Richmond.”

“Aunt Flighty” and “Mad Louie” (for the mad King of Bavaria who built castle after castle) were two of the other names ESB went by. I and my brother and sister called her “Mother;” (or Mamma if we were pleading with her) and we were at once both delighted participants and prisoners of her full court press through life.
She was a person of many passions and unbounded energy; possessed of a magnetic personality, beauty, and confidence so deep-seated that she never took “no” at face value. Add to this that inherited wealth gave her the means to exercise her passions, and you have a powerful person indeed.

What were these passions? First, long before it became fashionable, was a fascination with conservation, recycling, horticulture in general and the beautification of highways.
Next, her cousin, Mary Wingfield Scott, a well-known Richmond preservationist, interested her in all the houses that were in jeopardy as Richmond tore down historic houses to make way for parking lots, not recognizing the earning power of historic preservation where tourism was concerned.

Inevitably, ESB was a devotee of Jane Jacobs; and ended up by fusing her own beliefs in conservation and preservation into a theory of what makes a city beautiful and above all, livable.

As a result of concentrating on that, she often found herself on the side of the dispossessed, people whose neighborhood was being destroyed by an expressway, or residents of old houses in the path of Virginia Commonwealth University’s expansion.

When I wrote “Never Ask Permission” I didn’t think of it as particularly funny, but my readers have thought otherwise. What to me was “just mother” to others was extreme eccentricity, stubbornness, erratic behavior, refusal to bow to social norms, willfulness, winsomeness and so much else that made her one of this world’s originals.

So without apology I can say this is an unusual book about an unusual woman. I think you will be glad if you buy and read it.

And by all means come to Over the Moon Bookstore at “the” corner in Crozet 6:00 to 7:00 p.m. Wednesday, January 23rd where I’ll be talking about “Never Ask Permission.”