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.

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.