Vines Gardens Haiku 5

Fuzzy hanging fruit

and a twisted, knotty trunk--

what is this strange plant?

Vines Gardens Haiku 4

Abandoned hothouse

at the edge of the gardens--

weeds prosper there now.

Three Vines Gardens Haiku

Selfie by the lake

as summer makes its exit

this lazy Wednesday.

Faded red flowers

of plastic still standing watch

the boy now long dead.

Essays left to grade:
sixty. Yet the air is cool,
this swing, inviting.

Feeding the Crows

The crows I feed in our backyard are very cautious.

I threw out half a bag of old Tostitos for them about ten minutes ago. One of the crows has been perched on top of a pine tree just on the other side of our fence, gazing down at the Tostitos and scanning the area, for about five minutes now, but hasn't yet descended into the yard to eat. I haven't even heard him caw out to his family that he's found food.

I think the problem might be that it's rainy and sort of dark outside, and since we have our kitchen light on, he can see through the sliding glass doors to the table and watch me and Jessica and Elyse as we drink our chocolate milk (and coffee, in my case) and eat our muffins and plan (I'm sure he believes) his capture.

Or maybe he thinks if he waits long enough, I'll throw out some salsa or queso to go with the Tostitos.

Bats!

We have bats! Not living in our attic, I hope; that would be bad. But living in the woods behind our house, in natural bat territory.

This morning I got up at 5:30 and went outside and sat on the patio with a cup of coffee and an oatmeal square. Within a couple of minutes I saw out of the corner of my eye a flitting motion, something flying a little less gracefully than the chimney swifts that dart across the sky this time of year (sorry bats, but birds are more ballet-like in their movements), and something not quite bird shaped.

The thing about seeing a bat fly that is different from seeing a bird fly is that--to me, at least--they don't look like effortless fliers. Unlike most birds, bats actually look like they are working really hard to stay aloft. Their wings appear to be flapping furiously, and the way they dart around gives the impression that they are always recovering from a near-fatal nosedive.

I know none of this is true, of course. Bats are expert fliers, fully the equal of birds. Their flight looks different, I imagine, in part because they don't have feathers, so the aerodynamics are different, but their wings are perfectly adapted to flight. (I say all this in case any bats are reading, and considering leaving nasty comments.) They dart about erratically because they are chasing tiny bugs that I can't see.

Anyway, I watched the bat for a few minutes, catching occasional glimpses of it as it flew twenty or thirty feet directly overhead or over near the swing set or above our neighbor's yard. After a while it occurred to me that I was seeing the bat appear in a part of the sky that was quite a bit away from the point at which I had last seen it, and I realized there were two bats. If I watched carefully, for a second or two I could have both of them in my field of vision at the same time. Shortly after that, a third became obvious, though I never managed to have all three in my sight at the same time.

I watched them for about fifteen minutes, and then I came in and got my camera, but of course that coincided perfectly with the end of their nocturnal day, because I didn't see them after that. It was almost 6:00 by then, and the sky was growing ever lighter in the east. Time for bats to go to bed.

Bats are welcome (by me, at least) in our neighborhood not only because bats are inherently cool, but because of all the spots in our backyard and behind our property--the drainage culvert especially--where there is often standing water; that leads to a mosquito problem. Bats eat mosquitoes. The more mosquitoes the bats munch on, the fewer mosquitoes there will be to munch on me!

Christmas with Charlie McCarthy

I think this picture is from Christmas of 1976. It's clear, I'm sure, why I say it's from Christmas; here's why I peg it specifically to 1976: I was in fourth grade then, and for Christmas that year my best friend Bobby Py and I, by complete coincidence, both got jerseys bearing the number 42. (Was 42 the number of a famous player of the day? I have no idea, and I didn't know then, either. If Bobby knew he never said anything about it.) We spent the second half of that school year trying to orchestrate us wearing our matching shirts on the same day, but I think we only managed it twice.

The star of this picture, of course, is my cousin Scott and his Charlie McCarthy ventriloquist dummy (or "figure," as I believe they prefer to be called). We spent hours and hours playing with Charlie McCarthy, though I don't think either of us got especially adept at ventriloquism. I don't know that we even tried that hard. But playing with puppets of one type or another was part of childhood back then; we also had Bert and Ernie dolls, and Cookie Monster, and perhaps Oscar the Grouch. We would put on shows and charge our parents a dime to watch.

Behind my cousin Catherine, on the left side of the picture, you can see that the lid of the record player is open. I would love to know what record was on the turntable at that point. I would also love to be able to go through my grandmother's collection of records--mostly John Gary, I recall, though I can picture an Irish Rovers album in there too.

The nativity scene on top of the record player; the just-visible artificial tree on the table on the right, decorated with red doves and bows; the red skirt, under the tree--these things, subtle though they are in this photograph, speak to me of joyful Christmas seasons past. Everything else in the photograph--the framed pictures on the wall above the stereo, especially those oval Victorian scenes that I had all but forgotten about; the fern in the corner, fake, I'm pretty sure; the curtains you can just glimpse along the right-hand edge of the frame, which I think were paisley though I didn't know that word at the time—and all that you can't see in the photo, but which I know was there, especially more cousins and parents and siblings and aunts and uncles and grandparents—everything else, seen and not seen, speaks to me of year-round joy, and happiness, and reminds me of what a wonderful time it was to be a little boy.

But why, I wonder, was the Santa Claus figure on the floor under Scott's chair?

Me and My Les Paul, Lilburn Living Room, 1980

I got my first electric guitar in 1979, when I was twelve years old. It was a black Les Paul copy made by a cheap-guitar manufacturer called Memphis, and my parents bought it for me at the now long-defunct (but I suspect sorely missed by a lot of guys from my generation) Joe’s Music in Norcross. I also had a twenty-watt Crate combo amp; it was solid state, but if you turned it up all the way to 10 it produced a decent sounding distortion. Not quite what Pete Townshend got out of his Hiwatt amps, but not bad.

But when I look at this picture, me awkwardly fingering a D chord on a guitar I barely knew how to play is only a small part of what I see, and maybe not even the most important part, now.

Behind me, I see my mother’s Sears typewriter, on which Mom typed my grandmother’s poems and stories from Granny’s longhand drafts on lined notebook paper.

And look on the corner of the desk. There’s a baby portrait and a pair of bronzed baby shoes; my brother’s, I think. Do people still do that? I hope so.

Just above the desk, there are pastel or crayon drawings of my brother and me, which I almost remember sitting for when I was eight or ten.

Farther behind me, on the built-in bookshelves that my Uncle Wayne put in for us sometime in the mid-seventies, there’s a set of 1977 World Book Encyclopedias, and below that, a set of Childcraft encyclopedias. I spent hours poring over those volumes when I was young; perhaps I’m just romanticizing, but I swear they were better than Wikipedia or anything else the Internet has to offer.

And see those top shelves? A couple of bowling trophies that my Dad won in the Ingleside Presbyterian Church bowling league, back when such things existed. On the shelf below the trophies, there are a few books between a pair of sword-through-the-books bookends. I used to think those bookends were the coolest thing. On the shelf below that, there’s a painted clay vase that I made in (I believe) my sixth-grade art class.  It's unidentifiable in this picture, but I can see it clearly in my mind.

Beside the bookshelves there’s the fireplace, with a scattering of framed photographs on the mantle. The one on the right--you’d never be able to tell this unless you already knew it--is me in my Cub Scout uniform, circa 1977. On the left edge of the picture, right on the middle of the mantle, is an Olan Mills portrait of me and Jeff. I can’t tell from this picture, but I think in that picture we are wearing matching shirts that my mother made for us.

Every old picture is a treasure trove of sorts.

Addendum: My father posted this comment to the Facebook version of this post:

"The drawings of you and Jeff were done in 1978 by an artist in Silver Springs, which is in Ocala, FL. I remember because we were on our way to Daytona Beach, and I wanted to stop at Silver Springs to see where some of the underwater scenes from 'The Creature from the Black Lagoon' were filmed. That is my all time favorite horror movie I remember the year because I had just bought a brand new 1978 Chevrolet Monte Carlo and this was our first trip in that car. I remember the sticker shock I had when I had to pay over $7.000 for a new car! You're right about the matching shirts; Cherry made one for all four of us."

Stone Mountain Self Portraits

This morning while the girls were in school, I went to Stone Mountain to make some self portraits. Here are two of my favorites, the first converted to a pseudo-watercolor in Photoshop, the second one not:

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.