Pale but present
Tag: photography
Missing spring already
Frivolous Friday
The piece I wrote last night isn’t quite ready, my tasks outpaced my time available, and I really want something to be posted. Ergo….
THOSE WHO DAWDLE MUST STAND ON CURB
One of the best blues-rock live albums of my lifetime: “LIVE” FULL HOUSE by J. Geils Band, released 1972. “Whammer Jammer, lemme hear ya, Dickey!” and Mister Magic Dick on the lickin’ stick takes off with some serious Southside harmonica work. (YouTube also has a 1979 video of the band performing this onstage–worth it for Magic Dick’s bush of hair alone.)
Ideas I will never write (feel free to steal):
- I was only hunting moonbeams/But my eyes got in the way
- The scariest monsters don’t lurk under your bed. The scariest ones climb into bed with you and pretend to love you.
- “He’ll worry all about the bugs on the windshield but not about the car coming at him in his own lane.” Not sure where that is from. Was it me?
- Many people will travel the world on a regular basis but will be unfamiliar with the land and culture within a 300-mile radius of where they live.
the peony’s promise
Symbolically, this peony represents why I haven’t been posting. It’s two days ago, I’ve got about 30-45 extra minutes in the late afternoon, and I think, “Hey, I better get that peony tied up before it blooms, and for sure before those hard rains hit that are forecast for tonight.” My two peonies will fall right to the ground as soon as they bloom fully. The rain didn’t materialize, but this photo, taken yesterday, shows many blooms are on their way and it’s supposed to rain tomorrow “for sure” and…you get the idea. The idea that I could instead get something posted never entered my mind.
I wrote a very lengthy essay last weekend the first of a series to explain from various points of view explaining what I think is more important than writing. Though sober (a good way to write!), I left it overnight to review in the morning, and decided at that point it just was too personal. My desire to be a writer and accept that a writer needs to write where the words will take him conflicts with my desire to be liked by at least a few people and with my desire to not expose every piece of my soul and psyche.
There won’t be many posts in the near future either, but I keep saying I’m ‘going to do better’ and maybe this time I mean it. Hey, I finally started going back to the gym after a six-month hiatus, didn’t I? And that’s for something I don’t really want to do!
Sawmill gravy
At the risk of offending multiple food groups (in the sense of those of us who eat food), let me offer up one of the more satisfying meals I’ve made in the past year. About six weeks ago I purchased Welcome To The Buttermilk Kitchen a cookbook by Suzanne Vizethann who operates a restaurant in the Atlanta area called Buttermilk Kitchen. The above photo is of a Southern staple: sawmill gravy over biscuits, i.e., “biscuits and gravy.” The gravy can be of several varieties, but the most common is a béchamel-type base with sausage in it.
It works like this: take five frozen sticks of European butter (the kind with a higher fat content than American butter); grate it coarsely. Whisk flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and then fold in the grated butter “until mixture resembles sand.” My patience level has never achieved this standard. Add 2.75 cups (1.33 pints) of “high quality, full-fat” buttermilk. Drop them on baking sheet with a 4-inch ice cream scoop and bake.
I use Michael Ruhlman’ From Scratch to make my own breakfast sausage. (If you’re into cooking, I heartily recommend this book. It takes 10 basic meals and riffs off of them with dozens of recipes for each one. For example, the sausage recipe–ridiculously simple–is in Chapter 2 which is “The Omelet”.) The Sawmill Gravy recipe starts off like a basic béchamel, veers this way: 5 cups of chicken stock and 2 cups of heavy cream. The “4 dashes of Tabasco” is perhaps not in your béchamel either. The rest is obvious. Split a biscuit. Ladle gravy over it. Sprinkle with parsley if you’ve got it. Eat. Retire to porch/living room/deck. Loosen pants. Snooze.
Repeat as necessary.
Wednesday at the Memory Corral
Plugged
There’s a logjam of words at the mouth of my brain. Nothing’s getting out. This photo will have to suffice.
…the rest of your life…
Among the plethora of button-pushing statements to set me off is, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” No. Shit. The sentiment behind it? Okay, sure, don’t drag yesterday’s baggage into today. Yet who among us feels wise enough to know every single one of the elements from the past which represent baggage (versus valuable life-informing lessons)? I’m a Jacob Marley sort. I drag a long, long chain of emotional bondage behind me, all the little boxes filled with guilt, remorse, sorrow, and pain. I’ve been blessed/cursed with an excellent memory so all of that stuff remains instantly retrievable. (My family: “How do you remember all of that?”) I’ve been blessed/cursed with an exactitude which drives me to excel and drives me to repel. And I’ve been taught by my father to dwell on failure, hold it close, never let go, and fixate on the darkness behind instead of the light ahead. This works especially well if one can punish oneself for some splitting-hair issue which no one else can perceive.
With that in mind, it’s perplexing how much of an optimist I am, and to that end, over the past week or so I’ve felt yet another “new” beginning in my life. Maybe it’s caused by looking ahead 70 days to the eve of my 70th birthday. (Huh. That’s numerical coolness right there!) More likely it’s just the relief of warmer temperatures coming to join the much longer, much brighter days. Whatever. I feel the same soul-searching and goal-setting vibes as I do at the beginning of Advent or the New Year. I’m getting in shape! I’m rededicating myself to my scriptural studies! I’m planning a cool getaway that’s been on the books for over a year! I’m getting back to writing more, photographing more, and posting it all here! Yes! Yes! It could happen!!
Perspective says, “No, you know it won’t happen that way. You’re going to light a birthday-cake’s worth of hope-candles which will be snuffed out quickly in the winds of your ever-changing mind and the vagaries of life. You’ll move on. You’ll declare a New Normal. You’ll dive, you’ll soar. It will be Life As Usual.”
Okay then. I’m leaning into life as usual, but I’m redefining usual! So there, Perspective!
And speaking of perspective, this last thought: I recently told a friend in his mid-80s that I had been dwelling on “how much time do I have left” and it saddened me that I had so little time remaining to study the underlying scholarship to the Bible. His immediate reaction: “Why would you do that!” He noted I likely wasn’t ready to pursue the studies until I did. Generalizing from there: one does what one does when one does it. Would I have had a different life if I had listened to my inner voice of reason in 1992 and said, “no, I’m not moving to Philadelphia just to pursue a fling with a young woman?” Sure. Your life flows through the geology of existence, creating a channel called My Life. I’ve tried to choose the most natural, easiest path on the theory it represents what’s best for me at that time. It led to many wonderful things, but I can’t say any one decision made differently wouldn’t have led to many other wonderful things.
Perspective–it’s a bitch. That’s why old folks are so bitchy–we have more perspective.
The power of manatees
Near Tampa, the Tampa Electric Company (TECO) has what appears to be a waste-to-energy power plant near Apollo Beach. It discharges warm water into a man-made cut connecting to Tampa Bay. During the cooler winter months, manatees crowd into this cut to stay warm. TECO has built and supports a manatee-viewing area of boardwalks and elevated viewing platforms. It’s easy to get to, easy to walk around, and well-developed (not just a platform but hundreds of feet of boardwalk). While there one also can see shorebirds and many kinds of fish.
Spring arrives when it will
Among my pantheon of pet peeves I count the astronomical definition of the seasons. People look around on March 21st–or 22nd, because They Say So–expecting some radical change. You can almost hear the globe laughing. Let’s leave astronomy to matters of astrophysics: rotations, revolutions, light years, and such. Let’s leave Spring to what our eyes see, our noses smell, our ears hear, and what our skin feels as it collides with our sun’s radiant energy and the increased load of humidity it can carry. Here in central North Carolina, it’s definitely the beginning of Spring. For over two weeks I’ve posted photos of such, and this past week left no room for doubters:
The star magnolia has hit full bloom…
The camellia has busted out its peppermint blossoms, and in its exuberance, an aberrant deep pink one:
…and daffodils (or relatives thereof) are blooming everywhere:
A screeching blush of robins stopped by a week ago, but I had no time to properly photograph them. Just arrived from further south to torment those who stuck it out? Or just a gathering to kick off the aggressive mating season? One of them has been attacking his own reflection on my side storm door for ten days now. The bird feeder needs filling about five times more than usual. Yes, it’s good. Soon I’ll note that first sheen of green as I look through the tops of the until-now bare trees, a sheen foreshadowing the imminent burst of leaves as we launch into the heightened glory of full Spring.
all the voices in my head 