Today is our second anniversary. What a wonderful adventure.
June, 2011
18
Jun 11
E-hausted
I’d tell you how tired I am, but I can’t physically reach the X key.
We rode 41.5 miles around town today. It ranged from a mild, pleasing, palatable 70 percent humidity to a meaty 94 percent humidity as we rode. We’d set out to do 35 miles, which would have been a new long for me on the real bike, but the humidity must have gotten to The Yankee (she’s not a fan). At around mile 25 she decided that she might add another few roads to our sojourn.
As we get to around mile 34 I found myself at the top of a hill and waiting for her. She decided to press on. So we did. My iPod failed. And, soon thereafter, my body failed.
My steak from last night was gone. And the two pieces of peanut buttered toast and five strawberries I’d had for breakfast had also long since departed. The last few miles were … tough.
I’m a wimp, but in a wimp’s defense, the final distance was almost double my previous longest distance. My goal is to add miles — and figure out how to defeat a few hills — but this was a bit much. (Clearly I’m not ready for a century ride yet.)
The bike itself wasn’t bad. There was simply no more fuel in my body. When we got home I started eating things directly from the fridge.
I’ve spent the rest of the day trying to feel decent again. It has been a long while since I’ve been this wiped out.
But we rode 41 miles!
17
Jun 11
The ballad of fried okra
We stood out in the garage and swayed with the wind this afternoon. When we began comparing radar, because that’s romance to us apparently, we found a dark red blob bearing down on us from the west and another coming down from the north.
Web stuff today. Working on a site for someone, which is coming along nicely, thank you for asking, and on my own stuff. I added four pages to the War Eagle Moments blog. Just click the little buttons at the bottom, there, and you can see all the neat Auburn stories from our many recent adventures.
Then the cat said stop.
And so I did, for a while.
Grilled steaks tonight. We had some New York Strips just dying to be eaten, so we obliged them. We’d picked them up from the meat lab some time back for $13. We also had okra, fresh from yesterday’s farmers’ market on campus and right off the farm.
I did not take a picture of the okra, because okra is shy. But the eggplant, now that’s a vegetable that loves the camera:
The eggplant, I’ve just learned, was once thought to be a love potion. In Europe it was once believed to cause insanity.
Okra, for its part, is thought to originate in Ethiopia, and came to the Caribbean and the U.S. in the 1700s, probably brought by slaves from West Africa, and was introduced to Western Europe soon after.
If anyone ever tells you that you don’t know where that food came from, now you can set them straight.
But I digress. There was a lot of pressure on this meal. The Yankee said if she botched the okra again — she’s just learning to make it, and it is a delicate thing — that she was retiring. No one wants this; okra is awesome. The first time she made it was quite good. And then there was too much salt. The next time far too much pepper. And then back to too much salt again.
Tonight the okra was fresh and crisp and just right.
Our veggies will live to be eaten another day.
16
Jun 11
A ride, a fisk and a video
Fifteen easy miles — I coasted on tired legs today — the last four racing home a thunderstorm. I was heading east, rounded a big 90-degree turn to face a big, dark, lightning belching cloud looming to the south. Which was great, because that was the way I needed to go.
So pedal harder, to a red light, onto a road with traffic, and then a long downhill into the light which shall not ever be green. And then back up the last hill to home. I was within sight of my road when the serious raindrops started, so I did just make it back in time.
And I did web site stuff for most of the rest of the day. First here and then on a site I’m doing for an organization and then also the LOMO blog. I’m mostly behind on everything, but I’ll catch up eventually, or it will somehow become prioritized and the least important things will be conveniently overlooked. That is the way of it sometimes.
CORDOVA, Ala. — Everybody in town heard about it.
Sounds juicy.
It was discussed openly and in whispers, over the phone and in the church pews. When it was brought up at school, the curious were quickly shushed. Eventually, the whole thing got pushed aside by other concerns, a bit of nastiness better forgotten, or judged never to have occurred at all.
So it is a rumor, then.
But Madison Phillips says it is true. He says that he and his mother, Annette Singleton, both black, were turned away from a church shelter by a white woman on the afternoon of April 27, the day of the tornadoes. And within hours, Ms. Singleton and two of Madison’s young friends, who had been huddling with him in his house within yards of that church, were dead.
That’s horrible.
There is little agreement about what happened, or whether it happened at all, and the full truth may never be known. Madison says he did not recognize the woman. The only other witness, an older man who is known around town for his frequent run-ins with the law and fondness for alcohol, is saying that he did not see the situation firsthand, but only talked to Madison’s mother as she was coming and going.
So, clearly, this is grounded in solid evidence, unimpeachable by the highest tribunal of fair men and women.
But Madison’s story has stayed consistent, prompting a nagging, uneasy question about what kinds of things are possible, still possible, in a small Southern town.
Assertion does not equal evidence. They’re unfamiliar with this notion in the newsroom, it seems. It goes on for a while, delving in stuff the author doesn’t really care about, but he finally gets back to the important part.
There is a nearly unanimous conviction among blacks here that the incident described by Madison Phillips not only could happen here, but did. Yet there is little vocal outrage.
The whole story goes on like this, trading in speculation, fully admitting that no one knows the answer, only that everyone in town might be racist. There’s a restaurant named Rebel Queen, after all.
One man has an alternative theory.
“Nobody hardly knew her,” said Theodore Branch, 74, who has been the city’s only black council member for 36 years. “If you live here and everybody knows you, it’s a different situation.”
So naturally you don’t hear from him again. What he’s talking about, though:
Ms. Singleton, who was 46, was relatively new to town. She went to church 45 minutes to the southeast in Birmingham. The two boys who died with her, Jonathan and Justin Doss, ages 12 and 10, were from a poor white family who lived in an apartment complex on the outskirts of Cordova, where Madison and his mother had lived until recently.
That’s the 18th paragraph in the story, where the race of the other two victims in a story evoking racism finally landed. Eighteenth. In the business we call that buried.
I leave you with Atticus Rominger, a former reporter with an award-winning pedigree. And, sadly, that’s about the only way you’ll see those storm stories in the media again.
Just for fun:
If I taught public speaking classes I would show this at the beginning of every semester. Somehow, he did not get the nomination.
