Tag: photography

Why I can’t blog

…or “the dog ate my post”

Moon over my parents’ garden. January 2020.
  • We’ve had two (or is it three?) cold fronts move through. Friday’s came through late afternoon. The past two mornings have featured wind chills in the single digits. No big deal for a lot of folks, but in North Carolina the weather-folk told us to stay indoors. Apparently they either never lived in the north, or they realize many of us down here never have. Regardless, my fingers are too cold to type, my brain is too cold to think. I can’t blog.
  • I’m having a crisis with the beer fridge. I want it to chill the beer no colder than 40 degF, preferably 42. It’s giving me 32 on the middle shelf, and I’ve got the thermostat turned up as far as I can without turning it off. (Hmmm, unless it’s backwards–maybe it’s as cold as it can go…) I need to find an external controller. I don’t have time to blog.
  • My choir director headed to England for a week last Sunday. Texts me at 4:35 a.m. Tuesday to ask me if I’ll introduce the guest organist performing a concert that very night at our cathedral. Of course, it was past 9:30 in London. I said yes. It sucked up half an afternoon (for doing things I would have done near dinnertime), and all of an evening, plus it left me a zombie on Wednesday when I got home late, couldn’t get to sleep, and stayed up to midnight “to relax with a nightcap”. I can’t think, I can’t blog.
  • Shortly after that Tuesday text, I’m showering and realize, “crap, I’ve got a blood draw this morning!” Just in time to get dressed and go. (Rule: When it’s a fasting blood draw, schedule it early.) I can’t remember my appointments, let alone remember to blog.
  • Thursday we attended a luncheon meeting about forming a seniors group at our church. If you want to see some visual humor, take a look at the car parking skills for a bunch of 65- to 90-year-olds. I can’t blog. I’m still looking for a parking spot. I’ll blog when I do.
  • I rose at 4:44 a.m. today to get myself going for a 7 a.m. mass where I was the scheduled cantor. I’m a bass. It normally takes until noon to get my voice warmed enough to hit middle C. I did it today in less than two hours. I think I strained something. I can’t blog.
  • I finished Roger Daltrey’s autobiography early in the week. Roger revealed that one of my top bands fit the definitions “irresponsible miscreants” and “jackasses”. Removing my admiration left me emotionally untethered. I can’t blog.

Or maybe it’s just that planning some very special vacations to Europe and points beyond, getting my profligate ways under control, dealing with life’s vagaries (bills, groceries, cat vomit, completely unscheduled propane deliveries), and trying to figure out how to exercise, meditate, study scriptural sources, pay bills on a near daily basis, cook, read for pleasure, write (outside of the blog), and still find time to be a husband to my wife–all of that takes more time than the day has granted me. The blog sits too far down the list. (Saint Frances de Sales, patron saint of writers and journalists, pray for me.)

Rite of Reconciliation

The trees of Monumental Mountain, outside Colville, WA. October 2019.

Mother died this way:
Her eyes snapped open
unfocused, scanning,
finding no one. Then,
she passed.

Mother died this way:
Her labored breathing 
eased for a moment.
She smiled.
She passed.

Mother died this way:
Coma-tized with
narcotics, drowning 
lungs filling up.
She passed.

I wasn't with Mother.
I don't know. In another
room I talked quietly by phone 
to Mother's cousin,
re-entered to find Mom gone.

I suspect version three,
fear number one,
want number two.
They've entwined my thoughts
for years. Always will.

On the Twelfth Day of Christmas…

Celebrating Twelfth Night.

Ah, here we are–Twelfth Night! The crazy Americans, as represented by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), have screwed up the whole 12 days of Christmas thing because Twelfth Night also is called Epiphany Eve. Tomorrow is Epiphany…except in the United States because hey, it’s more convenient to celebrate it on a Sunday and there’s a Sunday the day after so…. They do this every year. Last year Epiphany was on January 8th. In 2022 it was on January 2nd, an exceedingly horrible choice because we were just 8 or 9 days into Christmastide when it occurred. It seems to me–though no one consults me in these matters–that if one wants to insist on celebrating Advent (not Christmas) in the leadup to December 25th, then one ought to celebrate Epiphany on its appropriate day, January 6th, regardless of the day of the week. It’s important because of the Twelve Days of Christmas, i.e., Christmastide. It shortchanges Christmas to stick with the full leadup to it (Advent) only to cut more than half a week off of it for convenience’s sake. It’s not like the church doesn’t celebrate certain dates no matter where they fall: Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary; Immaculate Conception of the BVM; Ash Wednesday. Our parish just celebrated our feast day, The Most Holy Name of Jesus, on Wednesday–where it belongs.

According to the USCCB, tomorrow is a “Christmas Weekday”. Not in Twelvetide, unless you’re Orthodox. Maybe they’re just giving back one of the days stolen in previous years?

Twelfth Night has various traditions including eating king cake, chalking the door (with a set of religious symbols intended to bless all who enter during the year–see photo below), singing carols, and of course, in some countries, going to church. It’s been considered unlucky to leave Christmas decorations up past Twelfth Night, but I tend to favor Epiphany for this. I base this on the idea that Epiphany celebrates when the three kings, Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, visited the Christ Child who still resided in a manger in Bethlehem (according to our tradition). Still, if I adhere to the superstition, not removing the decorations by sundown tomorrow (or tonight if we’re going to strictly observe Jan 6th as Epiphany) means we have to leave them up until Candlemas which occurs on Feb 2nd. That would be overmuch, don’t you think?

We chalked the doors at the start of 2020. In our local tradition, the initials for three kings was placed in the middle of the year. As you can see, we’ve not been real good at keeping up the tradition. January 2020.

If you’ve followed all of these entries, you have my sympathy. After Epiphany I will return to more poetry, essays, and photography.

On the Ninth Day of Christmas…

…oh a-dither, a-dather! Do we riff off of “pipers piping”? Or go with the 1909 version of “ladies dancing” (now moved to number 12)? Or “drummers drumming” in a competing version from 1907? Or, my personal favorite, “bears a-beating” from a 1900 version? And there are others involving other barnyard animals. It’s my little conceit, this 12-day run of posts: I’m picking the bears. I don’t have nine of them in one photo. So….

Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park on the Tennessee side. May 2004.
Grizzly bear ponders life beneath his fountain. North Carolina Zoo, February 2006.

…and multiply by three…

On the Eighth Day of Christmas…

…it should be something to do with maids a-milking, but the only thing that got milked on my New Year’s Day was time as I tried to recover from over-celebrating New Year’s Eve on top of staying awake for about 20 hours. A formula for slow-maneuvers the next day. Let us then ponder this:

Plato’s cave wall has nothing on my hallway–or on my sense of reality yesterday. August 2023.

On the Fifth Day of Christmas…

“…FIVE TA-A-A-AH-COS!” Okay, there are only three in the photo but I had five last night after wa-a-a-ay too much beer, and they were delightful.

A trio of tacos. These are shredded pork simmered in appropriate spices. Last night’s featured a ground pork picadillo. February 2023.

On the Second Day of Christmas…

…brought to me, two turtles of lassitude…

Lake Lynn turtles, Raleigh, NC. October 2023.

Yep, all that celebrating is catching up with me. So many more days to go! If one simply must attend to a few bills (as I did today), at least having a good soundtrack will help. Today we had The Night The Guitars Came To Play by Micky Moody and Bernie Marsden.

On the First Day of Christmas…

…this blog gave to me…a discourse meant to bore me…

[a pastiche of thoughts as Christmas begins]

NC Chinese Lantern Festival 2023. December 2023.

Yes, we’re into the Twelve Days of Christmas. Generally Twelvetide runs December 25th through the very end of January 5th, Epiphany beginning on January 6th. (This information primarily comes from Wikipedia.) The Council of Tours created it in 567 AD–and yes, I’m using AD not CE on purpose. For various reasons some Eastern churches celebrate the twelve days starting with the day after Christmas.

Our world generally has forgotten the distinction of seasons, of singular dates. Seasons orient around only the salient events. We don’t appreciate the days between Thanksgiving and Christmas–hell, between Halloween and Christmas–as anything but a lead-up to Christmas Day. I don’t think you have to be a Christian to acknowledge that there just might be something happening between those two dates nearly 60 days apart (besides Thanksgiving). As a Christian, it mystifies me when I try to figure out what Christmas means to the non-religious or non-spiritual person. It seems an inchoate, indefinite span of peace-love-dove (and don’t forget the shopping), marked primarily with traditions whose meanings have been lost to time. Ah, well. This old guy still enjoys pausing to remember all the examples of saints on All Saints Day and all the dearly departed on All Souls. I like to build up to Thanksgiving the way we used to, focusing on the stories (true or not) about how the day’s traditions came into being. I spend the days immediately after Thanksgiving focused on Advent, leaning into the promises of Christmas rather than a bustling, have-I-got-everything-done race to the 25th. This actually handicaps me because I tend to not get things done such as preparing the Christmas newsletter, setting up decorations outdoors, or getting the tree up. On the other hand, I don’t race to do so. Christmas starts on the 25th, and we are in celebration mode now for 12 days. The tree stays up until January 6th; the decorations too.

Christmas Day started at midnight with mass (see here). Two sleep-deprived adults, who retired at 3:30 a.m. and woke about 5.5 hours later, reached for adult beverages sooner than is rational. Fine brews, expense-be-damned, dominated the day: Duvel’s namesake offering; Chimay’s Grand Reserve (the blue label), inexplicably available from Costco every year about this time; N’ice Chouffe from Brasserie D’Achouffe; and Oakspire from New Belgium, a deep amber ale somewhat like a Scottish one, aged in bourbon barrels from Four Roses Distillery. My wife shies away from the dark end of the beer scale; when I shifted to the Oakspire, she went with Sierra Nevada’s Celebration Ale, which has evolved over the past 20 years into a red IPA. If you know anything about these beers, you’ll realize we didn’t have a lot of cares as we approached our festive but subdued meal. I offered up a standard ‘guy meal’ of wedge salad with a homemade blue cheese dressing, thin slices from a 3-inch thick ribeye (seared and minimally roasted), baked russets, and broccolini with pecan butter. (No we don’t do dessert. It’s just a thing.)

My wife and I quit exchanging presents about five years ago. We’ve found Christmas posseses a peculiar dynamic when you don’t have children. You’ve never built up that tradition of mesmerizing the children on Christmas Day. You’ve never sacrificed all year long for those children, welcoming a bit of liberal spending to get a few things you’ve wanted throughout that year. We finally acknowledged an obvious truth: we get what we want when we want it. (Example: my wife accidentally soaked her tablet on December 17th. We replaced it with a purchase three days later, and she set the new one up less than a week after she drowned the previous one. Retired people understand the concept of cash flow.) Christmas gifts are a superfluous thing, coals to Newcastle. Instead we work on intangibles such as vacation plans, entertainment, planning our elevated meals for Twelvetide, and…each other.

That’s where things stand on Boxing Day. We’re looking forward to a near-fortnight of special meals peppering our evening meal plans. Lurking like aspiring actors in the casting office: stuffed quail; a NYD menu of pork, collards, and black-eyed peas with a side of cornbread; a re-run of the Sicilian Swordfish Stew from Christmas Eve; and perhaps some holiday tamales. Okay, no, I’m not going to the effort of tamales, but enchiladas doesn’t sound half bad.

Merry Christmas, y’all!

Merry Christmas ’23

Holy Name of Jesus R.C.C., Raleigh, NC. Dec 24th (still!), 2023.

From the choir loft of The Holy Name of Jesus cathedral in Raleigh. The photo above was taken minutes before the choir-and-brass-and-organ musical prelude began about 11:15 p.m. After those 45 minutes, mass starts at midnight–the first service on Christmas Day. We welcomed about 1800 worshippers. It’s wearing for old folks…especially when they return home at nearly 2 a.m. and crack some holiday cheer!

As I feared, no postings for 3 weeks while I scurried around with Christmas stuff and poured my creativity into this year’s Christmas newsletter. It was particularly aggravating this year (the newsletter), requiring nearly a week’s more time than planned. I learned some cool things though, like an artistic superimposing of text on photos.

Now begins the 12 days of Christmas which I passionately celebrate. Unlike so many these days, Advent is Advent, not “the Christmas season”. It’s nigh impossible to listen to only Advent music–“O Come, O Come Emmanuel” and “Lo, How A Rose” leap to mind. I therefore avoid most Christmas music until only a week or so before the 25th. Now I celebrate, all the way to Epiphany on the…5th or 6th of January, depending on how you count it! Lotsa time for writing and relaxing.