My Family, Circa 1980

This is my new favorite picture:

I believe it's from around 1980. I know for sure it was taken at my grandmother's house in Tucker; that's her chair my dad's sitting in.

What I love so much about seeing these old pictures, apart from seeing myself and my brother and parents from so many years ago (Dad was only about 35 in this picture, twelve years younger than I am now!), is seeing the surroundings that at the time I took for granted but which now I look back on with great nostalgia. The built-in bookcases on the left of the picture; the stacking containers on the shelf just to the left of Dad; the skeins of yarn on the shelf in the background, just to the left of my head; the basket with more yarn on the floor, to the right of Mom; those thin, homemade books stacked on the shelf just behind Jeff, which I know contained my grandmother's poems and stories; the pole lamp with those elaborate globes; the small grandfather clock behind me; the oil lamp on the top shelf, and the pictures of Delores and Wayne beside it; the wood paneling of the room; the green linoleum floor...

I miss it all so much. The people in the pictures are most important, of course, but it all matters, every bit of it. Each skein of yarn is precious, now, more than three decades later.

Christmas Day 1973, Tucker, Georgia: For Sharon

When I think about happy times and happy places, this is a perfect distillation of what I see--not just this day, but any day when all of us cousins gathered together in that red-brick house, surrounded by our parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles, with the swing set and playhouse in the back, and the apple trees to climb, and the metal storage building where Pa kept his riding lawn mower out back, and the train set in the attic, and running and laughing and arguing and yelling and eating, and sometimes TV, and not wanting to go home at the end of the day.

It was so wonderful to be young, and to have siblings and cousins to share it with, and an abundance of grown-ups who loved us.

I wish we could go back and do it all over again. I wouldn't change a thing.

* * *

Very early this morning my cousin Sharon, topmost in the picture above, left us after a year-long battle with a rare form of brain cancer.

I can't believe she's gone.

How can it have been forty years already since this picture was taken? How can it go by so quickly?

Goodbye, Sharon. I'm grateful we had so many times like the one shown above. I'm so sorry you had to leave so early.

Recent Faux-Paintings

I've been working on various techniques for transforming photographs into painting-like images in Photoshop Elements. Here are some of my most recent efforts:

These two are from pictures I took on a daytrip to Madison, where my wife, Anna, and I lived while I was in graduate school at GCSU, last Sunday:

The last four are from a long drive I took on Wednesday, going east on U.S. 78 almost to the South Carolina border:

The Underground Theater Goes Dark

Tonight I saw a play--for the last time I'll ever be able to--at the Underground Theater, the community theater at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta. After forty-four seasons--their first production was when I was only three!--they're retiring. They went out with a wonderful production of Mary Chase's HARVEY, one of my favorite plays. It was only the eleventh production I've ever seen there, in the thirty years since I first saw 84 CHARING CROSS ROAD there (starring my high school English teacher, RoseMarie Mason); I'm sorry I didn't manage to see more of their plays, and really sorry there won't be any further opportunities to see more.

Digital Paintings

I'm working on my photograph-to-digital-painting skills. Here are four of my best recent efforts, all taken from photographs I made in the last five years:

Self-Portrait in Sepia

I had some time to myself this afternoon, so I made some self portraits. Here's me in sepia:

Recent Atlanta Snows

I've seen several references to our current weather debacle as a "rare winter storm," but I don't think that's quite accurate. We may not have the kind of winter my Minnesota in-laws do, but we in metro Atlanta get some amount of snow every year, and pretty often--at least every other year, sometimes a couple of years in a row--it gets deep enough and sticks around long enough so that we miss a day or two of school or work.

Here are some pictures from three years of snow, 2009, 2010, and 2011. In 2011 we got at least four inches of snow, and the schools were closed for a full week.

Snow on Stuff in My Backyard, 29 January 2014

Yesterday we got one of those once-every-couple-of-years snow storms here in Georgia, which put a couple of inches of snow on the ground. (It also caused all sorts of terrible problems all over metro Atlanta, which is a whole other story.) Here are some pictures of snow on stuff in my backyard:

My Trip Thru Ruby Falls: A Ten-Years-After Reflection

This is me, back in 2002.

In this picture I am more than ten years younger than I am now, forty pounds lighter, and have very little discernible gray in my hair or beard. Anna and I had been married only a year, and we were still five years away from having our first child. I was only thirty-five, older than many newly-married men, true, but still young by many standards.

When I look back on pictures like this, I often think, "Wow, I wish I had realized then how wonderful my life really was. I should have appreciated it more at the time. I should not have taken it so much for granted."

And then I realize: My life today contains so many moments that someday I will look back on and realize were wonderful. Among the best things I can do for my wife, for my children, for myself, then, is to try and appreciate how wonderful my life is right now, while it's actually going on, to not take it for granted but to know it for the gift that it is.

I am blessed. But then, we all are.

The Fishing Man

This afternoon I went to Buford Dam Park to walk in the woods and take some pictures. Here's a photo essay of a man who was there fishing in the Chattahoochee.

Stone Mountain Park Grist Mill

This morning while my daughters were both in school, I went to Stone Mountain Park to take some pictures. Here are three pictures I made in the Grist Mill area:

Stone Mountain Village Details

This morning while my girls were in school, I went to Stone Mountain Village to take some pictures.

What I found I was most interested in was the texture, shape, line, geometry, pattern, and color of what I found there, but not necessarily "representative" art. These aren't abstracts, I don't think, but it's not important to me that you know that, to pick one example, it's a picture of a window in the old train depot; I just want to focus attention for a minute on the geometry of the frame, the texture of the granite and the wood and the cracking paint, the contrast between the color of the stone and the color of the wood, and the shadow that seems to be slithering up (or perhaps down) the window and onto the sill.

It's about details that are easy to miss, but when you do notice them, they're really quite beautiful.

(This isn't true of every single one of these fifteen pictures, but it is of most of them.)