Paradigms...where shift happens!

Christmas Eve Moon

I started out several weeks ago to add more frequent posts to this blog primarily posts of pictures I had taken that I was happy with. Haven't done so great with that but this one made me smile. I shot it Christmas Eve in front of my daughter's house. I think it could have been a better shot but I didn't have my tripod with me so I shot it on a mono-pod. Worth mentioning that I can be trained, the tri-pod is now permanently in my car. The detail is tough to see unless you click on the image for a larger picture.

A brain snake?

Yeah, yeah, I know...it's been ages since I've posted anything here. My brain has been clogged up like an old basement drain. So maybe this approach will get things flowing again. When I started this blog I seemed to have plenty to write about and things seemed to flow easily. Not claiming that it was all good writing and to be sure it was by turns pretty self indulgent. The good news for those of you who stuck with me is that the self indulgent crap finally ran its course. The bad news is that day after day I've been sitting here feeling guilty that this blog has been neglected for so long. It's become a very weedy garden and everyday I've told myself that this is the day to start pulling those weeds so that whatever else might grow here can have a chance to bloom.

My most recent and from a personal point of view perhaps most promising endeavor is digital photography so I'll begin today to show some of the shots I have gotten that pleased me the most and hope that you enjoy them as well.

The first shot I got that I really like was just a matter of pure dumb luck. On a hike along a tributary creek of the Potomac River we came across a family out on a Sunday afternoon adventure along the same creek. It was Dad, Mom and two red headed young 'uns. I just happened to turn and snap this shot which I call "Red Boots". Nuff said! Here's Da Boots. If this thing works as I think it does you should be able to get a larger image by clicking on the image that you see.

 

The River's Story

Summer started suddenly here in central Virginia as if someone had simply flipped a switch. After moderate daytimes and cool nights in Murrieta California I found 95 degrees and significant humidity in Washington on Monday afternoon. The jet way at Dulles Airport was stifling and my cheap self even turned on the air conditioning in the car on the way home.

Yesterday and today it’s been in the mid to upper 90’s and the humidity has peaked in the mid 80’s. That’s summer in the South.  Just upstream of the Falmouth bridge, a dozen herons gather at sunset to feed in the last rapids of the Rappahannock River, standing among the wet rocks as old men might stand by a lake in a park except they do not shuffle about. Instead they are immobile, like sculptures, immobile that is until a silver sided bit of dinner flashes in the water and brings them to life. 

Below Falmouth, The River is low and slow, the water a deep olive color.  It murmurs its story as it slowly glides between the river banks of Stafford County and Fredericksburg. This year I’m going to listen for that River Murmur and the story it tells me. There will be plenty of time to gripe about the heat and humidity in August but for now, I’m going to listen to the news from upstream.

Another Time, Another Place

AnotherTime, Another Place

 

Could we bend time to see behind,

Shift space from far apart;

How might have lives like yours and mine,

Touched shoulders, hands, or heart?

 

Repeated dreams by hope are sired,

Spin brief and fleeting bliss;

Dawn nudges light where none's desired,

Dream smoke conceals the kiss.

 

We speak in hints of shadowed care,

Of thoughts we must deny;

Muted voices in the night,

Speak quickly then they fly.

 

Within my sight yet in a place,

I cannot reach or go;

What might have been a lifetime's face,

Escapes on ebbtide's flow.

September, 2005   

I am a no-fly zone!

Every time I look in the mirror and see that there’s still no propeller on my nose and only two landing gear, my belief that God did not intend us to fly is re-enforced.  Although I can’t recall when I decided riding in airplanes was a gratuitous flirtation with a fiery demise, I can recall at least one image from my first trip by air. When I was in elementary school I flew from Roanoke, Virginia to Allentown,Pennsylvania to visit my aunt. The aircraft was a two engine propeller job of some sort and I actually climbed a rolling set of steps to board it. With two main landing gear, no nose wheel and the little training wheel at the back it sat at a definite nose up angle which I suppose ought to be looked at as a positive thing.

My negative outlook on air travel may have started in college. Our Air Force ROTC unit took a weekend trip to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton,Ohio. The trip was on a DC-1 or some such primitive plane. Shortly before we landed in Ohio, a crew member walked back to my seat and asked me to look out the window and tell him whether or not the landing gear was down. I’m pretty sure that was when it began.

Last year I went out to California to visit a friend I had not seen in 20 years. It was, I think, a measure of the value I placed on this friendship that I paid so much money to experience a 6 hour sphincter seizure.

On a cloudy morning in June, at an absolutely heathen hour, I somehow found my way to the long term parking lot at BWI Airport After standing in the rain for about twenty minutes a shuttle bus came by and carried me off to what I considered to be the gates of Hell itself.  Check in was deceptively easy but I think that was just the airplane gods trying to lull me into a false sense of security. I’m an air travel wimp but a wimp with attitude. Only in the last couple of years have I begun to accept that God, while not intending for us to fly really doesn’t mind if we do.  Because of this reactionary point of view I find myself assuming a peculiar mindset when traveling by air. I think it is equal parts fear, humor and anticipation against a background of deeply ingrained annoyance, all hopefully hidden behind a façade of being an experienced traveler.

I do not fly well. It's not just 360 minutes of forced immobility inside a germ laden flying Petri dish with 90 of my closest friends, traveling six miles above the earth at barely sub-sonic speeds in air cold enough to cryogenically preserve Ted Williams head. It's not even the prospect of surviving for 6 hours on a small bag of dime sized pretzels left over from the Cretaceous era and a sawed off plastic cup of diet Coke. It's all the rest of the dumb stuff that goes with the experience. We don't even have to be in the air for me to get pissed off.

It starts with the boarding experience. Everyone gathers around at the gate, poised in their starting blocks for the mad dash to the boarding ramp. Up front, of course, are the people in Boarding Group 5, oblivious to the order and discipline imposed by their boarding passes. Behind them are the lame, the halt and the blind along with those "boarding with small children." I saw one family on this trip with 3 small children; they should have just given them the plane for crying out loud.

Now, I assume that all this regimentation of the boarding process is intended to either speed things up or at least define the pecking order that will prevail once we are airborne and our miserable destiny is in the hands of Carol, Tiffany, Gina and Captain Somebody. If speeding up the boarding is the intent, what happens is quite the opposite. Once on the plane I find a line of people looking first at their boarding passes and then up at every bloody row number while struggling with the concept that rows are numbered in rational sequence, not at random. If you are at row five and your assigned row is seventeen, move the hell on! You are perfectly safe not looking at the numbers again for at least a few rows. You’ll get a hint when you're in the area; it's called row sixteen.

There is also a mysterious process that goes on during boarding. The person in the window seat always gets to their seat after the aisle and middle seats are occupied. If anyone knows why this happens please let me know.

Finally on the subject of boarding, to the folks at Southwest Airlines, God invented seat rows for a reason! Lose the colored cards and use row numbers. An airplane with a center aisle the width of Lance Armstrong’s bicycle seat is not the place to use "general admission" seating.

Airlines have rules about carry on luggage that supposedly limit us to one personal style item and a small bag which will fit in the overhead. They even have a little box thing at the boarding gate as a kind of a template for carry-on bags, the airline equivalent of the "you must be this tall" bar at an amusement park. The bar at the "Tilt-N-Hurl" ride seems to work because you almost never get puked on by a toddler there. The baggage box is a totally different story; it's there for no apparent reason other than perhaps intimidation.

Look at the bags people drag down that aisle; I've seen smaller apartments. The bigger the bag the smaller the person dragging it. Instead of that luggage box at the gate, they should have a person who makes sure that  passengers can bench press at least twice the weight of their bag. That would put a stop to anorexic waifs dragging bags so heavy they come equipped with dual rear axles and radial tires and then wait helplessly for some chivalrous soul to hoist all their earthly possessions into the already overstuffed overhead.

By the way, when you land the flight attendant always warns you to be careful when opening the overhead compartment doors because "stored items can shift during the flight." Yeah, right! By the time everyone is aboard any plane I have ever ridden, those compartments are so full, sand couldn't shift up there. They will also remind you that anything not stored above must fit underneath the seat in front of you. Dust was the only thing that would have fit under the seat in front of me.

With such bad air travel attitude, you might think I would be somewhat of a rebel once on board the plane. Quite to the contrary, I become peculiarly submissive; I grovel in fact. The flight attendants are the "alpha wolves" and I am but a mewling, freshly whelped cub. My theory on this compliant attitude is that somewhere up there, behind the clouds there are airplane spirits and I do not want to annoy them. If I’m a good airplane citizen, my good manners will somehow magically insure that my particular plane will have an equal number of take-offs and landings and I think we'll all agree that is a good thing.

Furthermore I wouldn't think of leaving my seatback in anything other than its full upright position when landing and taking off. It's unclear to me why that's required but if the flight attendant says do it then consider it done. Likewise with my table, it's fully in the up position and locked just the way they tell me. Seat belts? Forget about me because I have that puppy cinched down so tight my knees turn blue. I can drink two venti coffees from Starbucks and still cross the continent without needing to use the bathroom. Without the seat belt of course, Mother Nature would have her way and the phrase “holding  pattern” would take on a whole new meaning. I really hate it when my coffee finishes its trip before I do.

Moreover, that seat belt stays cinched down not just until the plane comes to a stop at the gate but until the ground crew has washed out the holding tanks and all the empty toasted almond bags have been dug out of the nooks and crannies underneath the seats. Then and only then will I arise from the seat, drag my belongings (ever so carefully of course) from the overhead compartments and lurch up the passenger way  into the terminal, chanting my post-flight mantra, "Aaaah, cheated death again!!!"

The flight itself was comfortable but the view from my window seat was pretty tedious. Two hours in the air had put us over one of those really flat states; the ones this Easterner can never seem to keep sorted out….Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas…somewhere with corn, cows and presumably combines. It was a delightfully clear day and I could see all the way to the ground where presumably my plunge would stop if I opened the wrong door when trying to go to the can.

After a while even my wide-eyed wonderment began to fade. They showed a movie but I passed on America West's kind offer of a headset for the paltry sum of $5 so I could hear the sound on a movie I had already seen. They wanted to sell me something they called a 'SkyBox' as well, a little cardboard treasure chest intended to fend off starvation. This time I saved $2.00 and so between the head set and the 'SkyBox', the unspent $7.00 offset the cost of the “Sandwich From Hell” which I had bought in the terminal to bring with me. Aren't I clever…that's a rhetorical question, OK?

I had to change planes in Phoenix where America West would hand me off to something called Mesa West for the one hour final leg to Long Beach Municipal Airport.  According to the schedule I would have about 90 minutes between planes to get a drink and enjoy the sandwich I had bought in Washington. I was wrong on so many levels.

Traffic at the Phoenix airport seemed gridlocked as we waited to cross a runway until what seemed like several dozen planes landed. Not waiting would have resulted in our being the lead story on the eleven o'clock news (10:00 PM Pacific Time) and that didn't seem like a particularly good thing especially since I knew I wouldn't get to see it. So, I was content to wait…and wait…and wait…  Finally, a break in the flow and we 'darted' across the main drag onto a taxiway where we again came to a stop that consumed another 15 minutes of my sandwich time. Since this delay was due to no available gates, I couldn’t help but zone on this as the airport equivalent of a mall parking lot at Christmas…parking buzzards, cruising the lanes of the parking lot, watching for signs of an imminent opening, going into hover mode when one appears.

Once inside the terminal I had only about 20 minutes until my flight began boarding. That left just enough time to grab a fifty cent drink for which I was charged three times that. By the time I got to the gate the flight was already boarding and I had just enough time to discover that I would have been better off checking my sandwich through so maybe the airline would have had the opportunity to lose it for me.

Other than the 30 yard stroll through the pizza oven they called a passenger walkway to the commuter plane and the fact that the seats on the commuter plane were padded with a single layer of 'Charmin' the next to last leg of my trip was uneventful. We landed at Long Beach more or less on time and the luggage appeared on the carousel so quickly nobody even had a chance to gripe about how long it was taking. In fact, the Long Beach airport terminal was small enough that I could peek around the edge of the outdoor carousel and see the luggage actually coming off the plane.  I almost expected to see  a very very small man in a white suit  crying out, "De plane, de plane!"

A short luggage lug across the street to the Enterprise Car Rental office where my reservation was actually in their computer at the correct price and I was on my way. The final leg would be my introduction to driving in California, an hour and a half of trying to survive on a series of roads, all of which were referred to as "The" as in "The 15" and "The 415" and so on.

A note here about California highways and driving: apparently since Erik Estrada hung up his mirrored sunglasses and knee-high CHIPS boots anything goes out there speed-wise. At one point as my foster car was rocked in the backwash of yet another barely sub-orbital SUV I thought I must have been crawling along at way below the speed limit. I looked down at my speedometer to find I was doing 85 mile per hour. I haven't driven that fast since I reached voting age. Although I was the three legged coyote in my traffic wolf pack, at least there weren’t all that many people telling me I was Number One so I must not have been doing that badly. It is nevertheless highly intimidating to be a freshly whelped highway cub in a pack of 3000 pound automotive alpha wolves.  Each of the cars that passed me must have had a steering wheel and a driver with at least one finger on that wheel but there was something subtly different about the way they moved down the highway, a sort of ballistic quality to their guidance, like a SCUD missile.

I had been given many ominous predictions about California traffic. To the contrary, I was happy to find myself actually moving on the highway. Every comment I had heard up to that point was that the difference between rush hour and non-rush traffic was that non-rush traffic actually has movement even though it may be like riding the leading edge of a glacier. In contrast the cars emerging from the morning and evening Cal-Lock have on occasion been reported to be covered with something looking oddly lichen or moss like.

So as I rocketed down "The 15" or "The Whatever" I found myself beginning to relax a bit. I had made it through a couple of fairly risky multi-lane changes without becoming a statistic and the miles were ticking off on "The whatever-the-hell-road-number" I was on. I was seeing the same town and exit names on succeeding signs with shorter and shorter distances to the points they marked. That was a good thing it seemed and so I let my mind wander a bit and began to ponder why Californians refer to the state and interstate highways as "The ###"…The 15 or The 415.

Back East we refer to Interstates 95 and 64 as "95" and "64". Adding that extra word, "The" changes it somehow, elevating the status of highways to a sort of imperial level akin in a way to the royal "we". We don't revere them here like they do on the Left Coast. Since Californians' fondness for the cult of the car is well known; perhaps this little colloquialism is consistent with that.

By the time I headed back to Virginia I was prefacing every highway number with “the” but I got over that as soon as I pulled on to Interstate 95 on my way home from the airport. I also left behind my speed demon alter-ego and became once again, a good citizen of the highways. I drove home at a reasonable enough rate that a couple of passing cars even gestured to me that they thought I was the #1 citizen of the highways…that is what they meant, right

After 90 minutes in my very small cobalt blue rented Mitsubishi Something LE (AKA 'my foster car')on California highways, I finally pulled into Alain's driveway, convinced that perhaps there was something worse than flying. At last I was out of the plane and off the road…”laissez les bon temps roullez!” I had cheated death yet again.

 

Strawberry season is here - Part 2

"Pickers, on your marks!"

Now that's what I'm talkin' about!

That's my story and, yeah, I'm stickin' to it....

Strawberry season is here!

It's a short season as seasons go, just a few weeks for the fruit and a few years for the pickers. If the weather cooperates, I'm going strawberry picking today with my daughter and my grandchildren.

The strawberries come back every year. Not so, the pickers, Ginny, Rachael and Abbie.  The wonderment of dribbling juice from fresh fruit down the chin and all over your "Winnie The Pooh" shirt lasts only a year or two. This is Abbie's year for that.
She is two now and mobile enough to hunker down in the impossibly emerald foliage and chomp a bright red juice-dribbling berry right there in the field for the first time.

My camera and I will have to watch closely because that first reaction is a micro-slice of her life that will never run down my chin again.

Yeah, it's a short season for the fruit, for the pickers...and for the grandfather.

Why do people blog?

Of course there are pot full of reasons why we do this blogging thing. Those who do not blog often seem to look on us bloggers as eccentrics of some flavor, maybe as ranters who have forgotten to wear their Reynolds Wrap skull caps to deflect the thought sucking ray beams from Alpha Centauri.

Ellie nails it for a lot of us in this post from a few days back. Her blog is one of those which I found so compelling that I went back and read everything she has posted. It was worth the effort.

Best Dog I Ever Had

It must be twenty years now since I saw the article in Reader's Digest entitled "Worst Dog I Ever Had" about an old man and a dog. This particular old man, according to his granddaughter, would seize on any mention of the dog to give it a blue streak cussin' and passed up no opportunity to tell anyone who would listen what a 'no-account, good for nothing" chow hound this dog was. It was he said, "the worst dog I ever had."

Listening to the old man, one would wonder that he hadn't dragged the dog off into the woods, tied it to a tree and put a bullet between its eyes. The true tale was told though after the dog died. As he shoveled the dirt back into the hole, the old man 's muttered, almost whispered  "Worst damn dog I ever had…" was spoken in a shaky broken voice, quiet enough that it was obvious he spoke only to himself and to the dog. 

I had a dog like that one time. His name was Charlie and he landed in our home direct from some animal rescue shelter out in King George County after a $300 stay at the vet's for heartworm treatment. We lived out in the country then and had a lot of animals already so I was somewhat less than enchanted at the prospect of another mouth to feed especially one the size he was. He was a big guy, weighing well over 100 pounds. We even ended up giving him a nickname, Bear. (Why in the world would a dog need a nick name?) Think of a smallish, almost totally black Great Dane and you'll get the picture of what I saw moving in on our critter food bill. Between the goats, rabbits, chickens, geese, cats and other dogs we were already spending more on animal food than I felt we could afford.   

Charlie turned out to be an OK dog in the brief time he was with us. Other than the time he swallowed my daughter's gerbil whole,  he never hurt anything. Ruth had decided to show Charlie her little pet, holding it out in her hands with appropriate little girl style narrative. I'm guessing she was about half way through her second sentence, holding the critter more or less nose to nose with the a huge dog head which apparently perceived it as a snack. In a flash, he somehow sucked it in and Ruth was left not only with two empty hands but a now unoccupied empty gerbil castle in her room. We were all stunned at how fast it happened and I immediately zoned out on this little unfortunate scurrying around in a very dark dog stomach, looking for the "Exit" sign.

He was fine with all the other animals in the yard and in the house. One day he was stretched out on his side taking a nap when our parrot fluttered off his perch and landed on Charlie's hip. I figured the bird was a goner, headed for where the gerbil had ended up. Charlie slowly lifted his head and kind of looked back towards his rear end. His expression was almost one of "Oh, it's just you". He resumed his nap and the bird lived to scream another day.

One more than one occasion when a stranger showed up at our gate, Charlie placed himself between the stranger and any of us including my kids. As soon as he sensed that we were OK with whoever it was he settled down and all was well.

If you're wondering how I, the pet Scrooge, accepted this dog into our home, here's what happened, exactly as it happened.  The corner was turned the first night he was there. After dinner we were sitting on the couch in the family room watching TV. Charlie walked around to where my wife was sitting and put his head in her lap. (The oldest trick in the book, right?)

She scratched him behind the ears and said, "Don't talk to me; you want to stay, you better talk to him." He immediately picked his head up out of her lap, walked around the coffee table and put his head in my lap. He didn't even look at me, just rested his head there while I scratched him behind the ears.

Folks, there are some messages that are loud and clear without a sound being heard and there are some things you  just don't mess with. Charlie was there to stay for the next seven years. I think he already knew what we would later conclude, that he had been misplaced and wandering for years until our paths finally converged. He was meant to be ours all along. Sometimes things don't quite come together just right at first.

When his kidneys finally began to fail he went downhill quickly. The day he died, when we went down to pick him up, the vet asked if we wanted him to take care of Charlie since he was so large. I managed to say that we would take care of all that. I don't know quite how but I picked up that limp 100 pound dog by myself and carried him to the back of the car.

When we sold that house in 1994, the back flower garden included the stone marker we had made for him. It read "Miss you, Bear" I still do.

A Summer Place III

I was in Bedford, Virginia a year or two ago to pick up an old table from the Summer Place. It was in my grandparents’ house and when my uncle and I went in there to move it out we spent some time looking around the old place, now musty and mildewed but not very dusty. I suppose dust needs people or pets moving around to make it move around and settle on things.

Grandma had two kitchens in the Summer Place. She and Granddaddy called one of them the Front Kitchen and the other one was (you guessed it) the Back Kitchen. The Front Kitchen was where all the kitchen work went on. She had two stoves in there, one electric and one wood. I can’t remember anything ever being cooked on the electric stove although I’m sure she must have trusted it enough to boil the occasional pan of water there.

Anything that counted happened on the wood stove like biscuits and cooking off egg shells. I should have some folksy piece of Appalachian style wisdom here about what happened to the egg shells after they were cooked off on the stove top. The truth is I cannot recall other than Granddaddy crushing them to put in the garden or feed to the chickens or something. I do recall the smell though. It was noxious and since there was no ventilation in the Front Kitchen it persisted all day long.

There was only one hanging light bulb in the Back Kitchen and it was burned out almost all the time. If I had to speculate today I would say that it was never replaced because my grandparents saw no need to replace it since they knew where everything in there was by touch. For my brother and me though, it was a Dark and Evil place but not because anything bad had happened there. It was just dark and in the minds of 5 and 8 years old boys, dark and evil were the same thing. If we came into the house from the back door we had to pass through the Back Kitchen. I’m sure that our theory was that the faster we moved through there the less time the Evil had to get us, so we moved expeditiously, always slamming the door to the outside shut. That way, it would catch and we would not have to back track to close it thus give the dark things a second shot at us.

The Back Kitchen was also where they scabbed on the indoor bathroom that we finally got when my Uncle Buddy paid to have it installed by Sears & Roebuck. Before that addition, a night time nature call entailed a trek across the back yard, though my Uncle’s beagle pen and up to the new outhouse featuring rough cut pine boards for our voiding pleasure. Since Uncle Buddy was not terrible fastidious in his maintenance of the landscaping in the beagle pen, these night time sojourns also functioned as a chigger harvest, the fruit of which never became evident until a day or two later.

Don’t we remember the oddest things from our childhood? Anyway thanks for walking along with me on this little jaunt down memory lane….

Lisa of...

... That's Renarded fame has a new posting this morning that had me snorting coffee all over my keyboard. While you are there enjoying her writing, please note that she has moved her blog so you will need to set a new bookmark. It's easy to do, just get a Sharpie pen and circle the address on your screen. Then when you want to go back to it, just double click on the circle.

(Dear God, please tell that no one who reads blogs is Renarded enough to actually do that!)

Voices of the Rappahannock

The river has many voices. At her infant headwaters in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains near Chester Gap, she chortles just like a scurry-crawling newborn as she gambols over the rocks.

By the time she reaches the fall line and the Falmouth white water just above Fredericksburg she seems to laugh out loud, passing us here on her way through, bound for Port Royal and Portabago Bay and then to a confluence with the Chesapeake Bay.

Just below the Falmouth bridge, though, she settles into mature and soft spoken adulthood. 

Ultimately the Chesapeake Bay will subsume her flow as it did the mighty
Potomac and these matrons of old Virginia will blend all they bring with them with the Chesapeake's outflow into the Atlantic Ocean.

Perhaps she knows that in another 80 miles she will reach Saluda as an old woman, contentedly  murmuring  memories to herself, memories and wisdom she has gathered on her journey along these history filled banks, preserving her quiet tales of years past in a whispered secret shared with those who still listen to the old ones. Mostly though, she just talks to herself as The Elders often must do. At Saluda she will bequeath 184 miles of memory and a thousand years of wisdom to the bay. 

Dooce

If you thought Dooce was all about fresh irreverant and well written humor then think again. Today's post deals with a surprise subject that is extremely sensitive in many families. She covers it well and does so with respect for her family that doesn't compromise her own views. It's worth a read. While you're there, check out the March 8th posting for an all out expose of what can happen when a man and a woman work out together.

Yeah, she is different but she is one of the best for content and viewpoint.

That's my story and I'm by God stickin' to it....

Weekend stuff from other blogs...

...you should check out today:

• Kate Smith used to have a song out that began with the line "When the moon comes over the mountain..." Doug Thompson has posted a great picture of a Floyd County moon. (Iwas so tempted to do a "Doug shoots a full moon in Floyd" but discretion ruled.)
  
• Warming the cockles of a grandfather's heart, that's the effect of the most recent posting at Blind Wanderings
• Girl Scout cookies are everywhere at this time of year. Lisa observes the phenomenon through her Renarded filter. It's the second posting from the top under the title "Charity Don't Come Cheap"

That's some of the stuff that caught my eye while you all were wearing yourselves out with spring yard work. I have mine finished already....moved my wintered over thyme and rosemary out onto the balcony...they seem to have survived the winter inside despite my best efforts to the contrary. Funny thing is that although I use the thyme all the 'thyme' the rosemary is there just because I like the look of it.

A Summer Place

A bit over half a century ago, this was our summer house. Actually it was my grandparent’s house down in Bedford, Virginia where my younger brother and I stayed during my ninth summer. The front porch railings when they were all there, were covered with kudzu vines. The way that weed grows it might have been their weight that pulled the missing railings down. In the gable at the top you see two boarded up windows. The one on the right was the window off what we called the front bedroom.

That was where my brother and I would sleep because that was the only one that ever offered any semblance of cross ventilation during the humid Virginia summers. We would get our faces as close to the open window as possible and any tantalizing hint of a breeze was as welcome as a sip of water to a thirsty man. As I recall there was only one fan in the house and 9 year old and 6 year old boys were off the bottom of the list of fan users. We used to lay there at night and listen for the sound of approaching cars, trying to guess whether it was going east or west on Route 221 or as it’s called now Old Forest Road. We lay so close to the screen that we could actually smell it or the dust on it anyway. To this day, if I press close to a window screen, the smell of it reminds me of those simple summer nights when our biggest worry was whether or not we would catch a few seconds of summer breeze. 

When you pass an old house on the road that looks as if it’s hanging on to existence by the skin of its teeth, be kind and remember that it had happier days that someone someplace remembers.

There are more things to tell you about our summer house but I’ll hold them for later perhaps.

Whenever there is a longish...

...gap in the postings here, you can pretty well count on it being due to a mental vacuum 'chez moi'. It's certainly not because I'm doing something else that is more fun...would that it were so but it isn't.

My posting lapses are more likely because I'm wrestling with what I want this blog to be. I'll have visions of being one of those serious current events commentators at one point then I'll read the wonderfully funny work of a writer like Heather at Dooce and think that's the direction I want to go in. Yesterday morning I got into a political discussion again. On my way to the office afterwards I realized that I had gotten all heated up again and I realized that I just don't have the quick "think on my feet" tools for that kind of exchange. That led me to the thought that it really wouldn't make any difference anyway because the current administration and party in power has a death grip on the process of governing and has co-opted all three branches of the government. I'm sixty years old and I just don't have the time for it anymore.

So, I'm going to leave all that stuff alone from now on. Doug Thompson and others are much better equipped than I for that arena. The best thing for me to do is to read them, which I regularly do, and try not to let what they observe and say depress me any more than is absolutely necessary. That said, I'll probably still take the occasional verbal pot shot at the occasional 'inside the Beltway nere-do-well' but I'm not going to let the surreal world of Washington DC be what this little slice of the blogoshpere (if you hate that word as much as I do please forgive me for using it) is all about.

"What the heck...

...is a blog?"

That's not the actual question I hear when I mention my blog to people but it's certainly the background thought of most people when the subject comes up. Blog is a contraction of the two words "web log"  and is well short of being self explanatory. A blog is really a public diary or journal published on the Internet.

By most accounts there are somewhere between 20 and 30 million blogs on the internet although a good many are dormant. Of the dormant ones, my guess is that they were, for the most part, started by people who abandoned them shortly after the novelty of publishing their own writing wore off.

I like blogs, I really do and I think I pretty well understand the basic mechanics of blogging.

When I began to write my blog in the summer of 2004 I wrote to clear my head. A relationship gone bad left me with more stressed out consciousness than I could handle without an outlet. The effort served its purpose and in the process I received a fair amount of positive feedback which I suspect was driven more by sympathy from friends than by the quality of my writing.

Once into this blogging thing I found myself reading other blogs and I became fascinated by the phenomenon and the more I learned the more questions I had. Very near the top of the list of questions was how to increase readership. How do I get what I write in front of more eyes?

Aside from all of the web based methods like syndication, RSS feeds, and the ever evolving world of Google it seems to me that the simplest and most reliable methods are  the hardest ones to achieve and maintain: content and regularity.  If I put things in my blog that people enjoy reading or that they learn something from then they will read it, bookmark it and they will tell others. The rest of the methods are really little more than marketing short cuts.

If I write stuff here that you like then you'll continue to read this blog. If not you'll find other ways to spend your time. As for attracting new readers, although there are several ways to accomplish that the most reliable is when you tell someone else about it and they take a look and so on.

If you don't like what's here then feel free to tell me with a comment posted via the comment function or send me an e-mail. I would really appreciate the feedback. I'm not fishing for compliments here by any means. I want to make this site better and your help is invaluable.

Hoping you will pass the word.

That's my story and I'm stickin' to it...

Swoosh!! Just do it

April 3, 2005

The sky was jumbled yesterday after the off and on rain that we had since sunrise. Highest were the seemingly immobile white clouds and below that were these tattered grey remnants of the day’s rain clouds crabbing off to the east, seeming to move quickly against the lightly textured white above them. The temperature had dropped and the tatters seemed like a warning that the respite from the unsettled weather would not last forever.

The view from my window is vaguely northeast and so when the sun sets whatever light there is throws itself at the power poles and signs along Route 1 and then seems to bounce up to reflect off the sides of the light tan of the National Bank building. If I look out at just the right time, when the sun is very low but not yet below the horizon, just before sunset, the effect is one of flood lights aimed at those walls. Yesterday the light came in just that way, the air so clear that the new spring grass along the highway was impossibly green. The illusion was of a photograph printed on high gloss paper.

My apartment balcony has a particularly good aspect for viewing rainbows except for all the power lines and buildings in the foreground. Yesterday, a swoosh of rainbow was all there was but it was quite wide at the base. I don’t know if an artist could do a single brush stroke with so many colors but that’s what this one reminded me of…as if God were saying, “Just do it!” If He wears Nike’s he is definitely a power forward or a center.

About two hours later Pope John Paul II died…make of it what you will.

Gardens of Stone

"Gardens of Stone" was Nicholas Proffit’s image of Arlington National Cemetery in his 1983 novel of the same name. In the late July heat, tourists with blank faces just like me snapped picture after digital picture of the Eternal Flame at the Kennedy grave site before they trudged uphill to the Tomb of The Unknown Soldier in this garden of stone.

After Saturday, I wouldn’t quibble over that imagery except that it is only a single dimension of a multi-dimensional experience. The dignity and respect accorded to the men and women who are buried there is clear. Signs reminding the visitor that respectful conduct is appropriate are tastefully displayed and for the most part everyone I saw behaved accordingly. Yet there was, somehow, a cognitive disconnect from the reality behind those 260,000 graves.

One reality was the memory of that frigid November morning in 1963 when two friends and I stood curbside in Washington to witness the funeral procession of a president, a memory light years removed from the flatness of the Kennedy gravesite today, a flatness broken only by the 6 inch high pedestal of the eternal flame.

The ultimate reality though is quite different. The United States has been involved in one armed conflict after another over the 141 years since Arlington was first designated as a military cemetery by Secretary of War William Stanton. With only 260,000 graves there, we seem to have gotten very good at the craft of war.

Southern Summer

I just stepped out on my deck to see how much it has cooled since the sun went down. Our high today was 99.4 and the heat index was 120. Now it's 9:00 PM and the temperature is 91 and the heat index is 114. That's summer time in the south...sporadic heat lightning but no thunder and not even a hint of rain. It's the kind of weather that goes with a front porch, a rocker and the almost inaudible murmur of a wide summer drained river. Even the crickets have slowed down and the dog sleeps with her tongue hanging out.

Where, the hell is the windchill when we need it?

That was then, this is now...

One night in the late fall of 1957 when I was 12 years old I stood, probably barefoot, on the dry sharp St. Augustine grass in our back yard in Waco Texas, staring up into the central Texas sky. My friends and I would have been barefoot because the central Texas summer is late to fade. It was usually a weather front blowing in off the Texas panhandle that would drop the temperature by 20 degrees in a matter of minutes and force us back into shoes during non-school hours.

The Russians had launched Sputnik on October 4th and we were trying to watch for it as it went overhead. I tell my self that I saw it go over but I really can’t be sure. Things I have read since then imply that it would not have been bright enough to see. I’m pretty sure I recall something, more than likely the booster rocket but we were in Texas after all and everything is bigger and brighter there, right?

No matter; the point of this is that today, less than 50 years later, I sat in a place called Camille’s Sidewalk Café and connected to the Internet through their Wi-Fi link and a laptop computer. One of the headline stories on CNN.com was about Opportunity getting out of the sand that had it bogged down for the last 6 weeks.

You’re thinking you don’t recognize that name, “Opportunity”, right? It’s one of the two Mars rovers and it was manipulated out of the sand by remote controls operated by scientists here on earth. The article included pictures of its own wheel tracks stretching out behind it as it moved away from where it had been stuck.

In 1957 we watched black and white TV and heard them play through the static a beep, beep, beep from a silvery sphere that would have looked like a chromed basketball with whiskers and then went outside to try and see it as it orbited over the flat land of Central Texas. Today I sat in a café in a Virginia shopping center as the screen of my laptop computer displayed pictures of man made wheel marks from 65,000,000 miles away in the deep dust of the Mars.

Now if that’s not a paradigm shift, I don’t know what is…

Red Lake Minnesota

The story was there in the white pine forests of Northern Minnesota before March 21st.

Before Jeff Weise shot and killed his grandfather and 8 other people at Red Lake High School around 3:00 PM Monday, there was a story...it was about a community of about 5,000 souls with an unemployment rate estimated to be as high as 65 percent, a high school graduation rate near 60% and 40% of families living below the Federal Poverty Guidelines.

Few of us knew or cared until people died. It took children’s blood on the floor to attract the press piranhas who have descended on that small community of 5,000 as they scramble for 30 second film clips and sound bites that will be the core of their coverage of the deaths in the remote and reclusive Red Lake community. Certainly, unemployment numbers, poverty levels and drop out rates will be squeezed into the reports but they are numbers you and I would never see if people had not died.

Long after the 3 day wakes are over, long after the grass has started to grow again on new graves, those numerical signs of our failure as a nation to care about the well being of all, will still be there. A year from now, will we even remember what the term “Red Lake” means? Columbine is frozen in our minds, maybe even the stand off at Wounded Knee but what will become of “Red Lake”? Will we remember the unemployment and the people living below the federal poverty level there in Red Lake?

Astonishingly, the Oval Office has thus far been silent on the Red Lake tragedy. I wonder if that silence has something to do with the Administration’s proposed 2006 budget which includes $100,000,000 in cuts for Indian programs including health and education. The sincerity of a hand held out in consolation is a tough sell when the other hand is cutting money from programs designed to help the very people being consoled.

Maybe I just don’t understand what “compassionate conservatism” really means. Is it code for something else?

The shadows of my mind, indeed...

save0036A.jpg
20 KB

The UPS guy just came and delivered a CD from “slowazon.com”. I ordered it over 3 weeks ago and it finally got here. Into the CD player with it and it’s 1965 all over again. I am only 19 idealistic years old…at a free concert back in Cabell Hall at UVa. From the stage, the crystalline voice of Carolyn Hester floats above us, a sound so delicate we are afraid to breathe for fear of disturbing the air and shattering the sound.

It was the peak of the folk music era. We thought we were out there on the cutting edge of the free thinking sixties but nobody even had a car, much less a VW bus with flowers on it. A few were into a little pot from time to time but Budweiser was the drug of choice. Most of us at UVa didn’t so much do the sixties as watch them on the evening news. Charlottesville was a difficult venue for any movement but conformity. There were a few rebels among us but this was Mr. Jefferson’s “academical village”after all and professors were still known to excuse a student from class who was not wearing a coat and tie. Our biggest concern was keeping our student deferments so we didn’t have to exchange our UVa uniforms for olive drab.

Women were not admitted to the school until 1970 so ‘out of class’ activities were driven less by social consciousness than by testosterone. Downtown by the ABC store, black men would hang out, waiting for the under 21 students (the ones without fake ID’s) to give them a couple of bucks to go in and buy liquor for them. Each transaction was furtive as if we were selling secrets to a foreign power. We were nervous, certain we would get caught and I’m sure our “connections” were snickering at the dumb ass white boys with enough money to pay someone else to buy liquor for them. Most likely it wasn’t legal back then either but nobody cared enough to enforce whatever law there was.

So what does this little trip down memory lane have to do with my new Caroline Hester CD? Not much really except that the songs playing now lit up some corners of my memory.

I cannot remember now what my dreams for the future were in 1965 but that’s probably a good thing.

To paraphrase: “That’s my recollection and I’m stuck with it….”

The Sea Part 2

The Sea
Part II

And so the hopeful child returned,
Seeking the open arms of Mother Sea.
Full of yearning for rest and peace,
Needing comfort she could not describe.

Eyes wide with hope at the new day, 
She felt the breeze of her Mother’s loving breath
Gently caressing her brow as if
To renew the soul with her healing touch.

Dim visions of dawn-lit gulls
Scallop-cut the air with wings of grace
While ripple washed jewels gleamed
And shifted beneath her feet.

Dolphin arcs teased her
With waves of welcome
Like cousins at a reunion
Who had left all care at home.

Spring’s grace-filled hope
For healing budded anew
Heedless of the Fall to come,
As if the leaf would never die.

But all she knew was of the air
And of the struggling earth
That bounded the soothing murmur
Of her Mother’s loving lullaby.

Mother Sea embraced her but a while,
Held the child’s hand to her heart
Hoping the rhythm of her love
Would ease the anxious soul.

For the doubting restless child,
The truth she sought waited not
Beneath or atop the waves,
But in the world she now must face.

Life within her waited, poised
To burst forth on a flood of
Liberating inner light and peace
And freedom from yesterday’s trials.

And the last wave breaking across her feet
Was her Mother’s gift of boundless love
For this part of her, this precious girl-child,
Whose tears she also cried.


November 2004

A short story to be read to a child

                                                                 The Tree & The Dove

Once upon a time, a very long time ago when animals and trees could talk, there was a beautiful white dove. Although she had the whole wide sky to fly in, at night time she always flew home. Day after day she would soar up into the clouds to explore and see all that she could see. Some days she would fly through great white clouds as fluffy and soft as cotton but other days the clouds could be dark and stormy.

When the clouds were white and the warm yellow sun was shining through, flying was easy and fun. It wasn’t so easy though when the dark clouds gathered. Then the little dove had to use all the strength in her beautiful white wings to fly through them. The winds around the dark gray storm clouds were as strong as they could be. They bounced the little dove around in the air and ruffled her feathers. One day in a storm she got so tired she knew she just had to find a place to rest. No matter how hard she looked she could not find a single tree to rest in. By the time the storm was over and the gray clouds had gone away she had been blown far far away from her old home

In the days that followed she tried very hard to find her way home. Each night just before it got dark she would find a rocky corner on the side of a mountain and rest until the sun came back up in the morning. Day after day in the warmth of the morning sun she would fluff her wings and soar up into the sky, always looking for her home. Sometimes at the end of the day she felt very sad and was afraid she would have to live among the cold rocks forever. But deep down inside she had a feeling that there might be a place of rest and safety just beyond the next cloud, a shelter where she could rest and be safe from the strong winds that came from the huge gray clouds. Day after day she flew on, searching and hoping that this would be the day she would find the home she longed for.

One day as the beautiful dove was flying along she saw a mountain far off on the horizon jagged and rough looking standing out against the sky. It was near the end of the day so she flew nearer to the mountain and began to look for another place where she could stop and rest. All the mountains she had seen in her long journey had been very tall and rocky. At first this mountain looked the same but as she flew she saw it was different because on the side of this mountain there was a very scraggly looking little tree growing out on the edge of a rocky cliff.

This sad looking tree had been clinging to its rocky little spot on the mountain through storm after storm for many years there on the cliff. Because it lived on the cliff it only had a small bit of rocky soil to put its roots in. With so little good soil to get water and food from it could never grow tall and straight towards the sky like all the other trees that lived below it in the valley.

The dove was curious about this crooked little tree and so she turned toward it. Closer and closer she flew until she found herself settling down onto one of the crooked little tree's twisted branches. She rested there for a few minutes as she looked the tree up and down to see what it was like. “It’s as good a place as any to spend the night”, she thought so she fluffed her feathers up against the chilly night air, and tucked her weary head under her wing to wait for the warm morning sun.

After a bit she became aware of a faint vibration in the branch where she was resting. She didn’t know what to make of that. And then it stopped. As she tucked her head back under her wing, she felt the vibration again. And then it stopped again. Once again she put her head under her wing to wait for the morning light. Then, there it was again...a vibration.

Since the vibration started every time she nodded off to sleep, the little dove thought maybe the tree was trying to tell her something so she remained very very still and listened carefully trying to hear what message this twisted little tree might have for her. She soon realized that it was talking to her.

It wasn't long before she began to feel peaceful and safe for the first time. Puzzled at this, she cocked her delicate head to one side as if to listen more closely for something from this poor stunted tree that might explain this new feeling of calm and safety. She felt the tree telling her that it understood she needed shelter and rest and she could stay as long as she needed to. If she would perch very close to his trunk he would try to protect her so that she could rest and regain her strength for the rest of her journey.

For many, many days she stayed, gaining strength with each passing day. And as she began to think it might be time to continue her quest she became aware that perhaps this was what she had been looking for, this was what her quest was. And so she decided to stay a bit longer.

One morning, many months later, the little dove awoke and looked around her and felt the tree's vibrations again. Now, the tree had not talked to her for a long time. As she listened this time ever so carefully she realized the tree was singing. While she listened to this beautiful tree she looked closely at the tree and noticed a wonderful change in her poor little tree. It had not gotten any taller but it had grown strong and its branches seemed a little straighter. As she felt the tree's song vibrating through her now rested wings she understood what had happened.

This tree had only needed a reason beyond its own pride to grow. With the little dove there to shelter and protect, the sad little tree wasn’t sad anymore and so it had forced it roots down through the cold rocks to the soil beneath them and found the nourishment it needed to grow strong because at last it had a reason to grow. It had another to soul share the days with and to care for. So the little dove decided to stay there, in the gentle sheltering arms of her crooked little tree while the tree continued to vibrate its beautiful song of life through its branches and into the life of the beautiful white dove.

Even though this happened long, long ago and even though trees and birds can no longer talk, their ancient songs continue to echo, reminding us that having someone to care for and protect is surely the greatest purpose and source of strength any of us can have.

Sea Flakes

Retreating ripples shift one and all,
Sunlight and wrinkled water
Shine each in turn as they tumble
Back beneath the swirling foam.

And in the scramble of tumbling gems
A teasing sparkle flirts with the sun
And settles for a moment,
Watching the wonder in my peering eye.

September 2004

Moments of Resonance

I was talking with someone the other night about this on line matching thing I am on. She asked me what I was looking for on there and I was kind of stumped for a moment. Someone to do things with, to share life days with? Was it as simple as that?

Then a phrase came to mind and I told her that I thought that what I was looking for was a person with whom I could experience “moments of resonance”…those times when everything that needs to come together for a perfect and probably unique slice of life does so. Athletes and performance artists sometimes call it being in the zone. I once heard k.d. lange sing an old Roy Orbison song, “Cryin” and even with just the sound of the radio I could tell that she had gone somewhere else and had become one with that song.

Sara Hughes, the 2002 Olympic figure skating gold medalist had that moment of resonsnce when she landed her first triple axle or whatever it was in her final routine. The instant her skates touched down on the ice, she knew she was there, knew that at that split second in time everything that followed was going to be flawless and I’ll bet money she also knew that no matter what the judging outcome, she would never be better than she was right then. You could see it in her face like the first light of sunrise…”I’m there…this moment is mine and I am going to wring every last ounce of energy and life out of it that I can.”

It can be so quiet you barely know it has happened…you feel it and don’t know it until later. As gentle perhaps as a butterfly on the windowsill or as complex as an orgasm that drains the body and subsumes the soul leaving only enough of you to lay there with your lover and breathe together .

That is the core…to find a person with whom I can experience a series of all sorts of moments of resonance….a coming together of spirits that happens perhaps without warning or preparation  but yields the improbable equation, 1+1=3 against a backdrop of a breaking wave, a shooting star, a dripping icicle…resonance…yep…resonance.

Anyway, that’s my story and I am, by God stickin’ to it….

Disturbance & Tranquility

calm2.jpg
41 KB

I don't know if I wrote this for me or for you:

Where careless force
Disturbs your peace,
May tranquility claim the day
And calm subsume your soul.

Separation anxiety?

It was a Saturday morning
and as I puttered around my apartment I wondered how you were doing.

I gather chaff to fill the hours,
You are away from me
But not from my heart,
Not from my thoughts,
And not from feelings for you
That threaten to flood my soul.

Posted on 8/19/2004 at 12:20:08 PM

The Sea Part I

 
Posted July 27, 2004 at 11:47:49 AM

In April,I went to the beach for the weekend. While roaming the beach early one morning I took a picture that came out remarkably well. Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in while. I printed it and then added this little piece to the picture. I can't post the picture here out of repect for the privacy of the lady in it but here is what I wrote to go with the picture. It started with the first line which is a quote of something she told me she felt when she walked to the ocean's edge for the first time in a while.

"Do you remember me?" She asked the Sea
"Of course I do, you are my child"
"How can you remember me?", She said
"There are so many of us who come to you."

"True" said the Sea. "Why do you come to me?"
"I do not know how to say it. I feel it though."
"What do you feel? asked the Sea
"Is it that you are home?"

"Maybe. When was it that you first touched me?"
"When? Don't you remember standing at my door?"
"I don't think so. Did I knock?
"You did not need to, I knew you were there"

"The spindrift across your feet was my welcome.
My gulls and terns told me of your innocence.
And shifting sand beneath you as the water flowed
Was my answer that you were my child."

And then the Sea murmured and shrugged,
Her glassy shoulders as if to sigh in gratitude
That her little one was still her child.
Innocent still, with outspread arms.