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adventures

The third half of winter

It is about time I thought on my walk from the car to the building this morning, to see a fake signal. And as I walked by one of the little patches of soil that separates the parking lot from the sidewalk, I saw it. Right on time, just like every other year we’ve been here, trying to trick me.

Even though I misinterpret it (“Spring!”) I will not be tricked. We have more cold and some snow flurries and ice this week and who knows what else in the next … six or eight weeks.

He said with the world’s most predictable sigh.

But, hey, the days are getting longer. The coats are getting lighter. And the cold is, for now, a bit milder.

This was the sun on our walk yesterday. I was only wearing a medium-weight coat.

And here are two more pictures from that walk, because I am fascinated by the idea that so many things look better in real life than they do in photographs. For instance, this sycamore is really popping in the late-day sun. And, yet …

Same with this tree, which I think is just dead. The sun is playful, the limbs are colorful, but the photographic result leaves something to be desired.

You know what else leaves something to be desired? My ability to keep things up-to-date. This show is from Wednesday night and went online Thursday and I forgot to post it here. Shame on me.

And here’s the talk show, where they focused on baseball and softball.

Which brings us to today, and here are the shows the entertainment division released today. And it seems like the late night show was evicted after a troublesome conclusion to their last episode.

That show continues to evolve in the most fascinating ways. One day they’re going to invent their own genre, I’m pretty sure.

And here’s the morning show, a production which I missed entirely, unfortunately.

I walked in from a meeting just as the students were breaking down the studio. And I am lesser for it. Watch it now, and you will be justly enriched.

I tried a new Zwift route on Saturday. I quickly regretted it. But at least I got a nice shot of my avatar in an aerotuck.

It was one of the fictional routes, and required a lot of climbing which I am clearly not good at or prepared for. But at the end of it all there’s a map. This is always amusing to me. It’s a fictional route. This is a real island in the South Pacific.

Two islands, actually. I mentioned one of them, Teanu, which is the bulk of the route you see in the graphic above, last Monday. But that part where it dips south, is Vanikoro. Apparently about 1,300 people live there, two distinct groups, in different villages, but you can’t see much from Google Maps.

Google Reviews, though … someone wrote “There is no TV 3 stars.”

That settles it for me.

adventures / cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off
7
Feb 22

To a slightly less snowy week ahead

The roads improved over the weekend, but the snow will hang around for days, which is fine. Pleasant reminders and all of that. We’ll be lulled, this week, into a false sense of “warmth.” Tomorrow the mercury will flirt with 40 and the sun will be out. We will call it nice and believe ourselves lucky. And this is as close as I ever come to understanding Stockholm syndrome on a personal basis.

We took a nice little walk yesterday, and The Yankee traipsed through the woods. I’d chosen the wrong shoes for a side expedition, so I stayed on the path. Sometimes moving around does it, but sometimes staying where you ought to gives you an iconic photo.

Iconic photo.

After which I shoveled four inches of snow and ice off the megadeck. It seemed like a good thing to finally do. Why let all of that sit there and wait to melt and damage the wood?

Plus the experience let me see this. Somehow the snow and ice was sliding off one of the tables, but hit a chair and got stuck there.

And when I was shoveling over by the fire element (the grill – ed.) I scooped off a layer of snow and found this.

The camera phone doesn’t do it justice. I assure you, there’s a bit of definition to the nose area. Just to be on the safe side, I left that example of pareidolia alone, What if the deck is haunted by a woodland sprite or something?

Elsewhere, around the front of the house, I am imagining all of this snowmelt will mean good things for the soil’s moisture content come spring.

Time to check in on the kitties. Poseidon has a lot of fun watching the birds, who are eating us out of house and home at a bird feeder in that direction.

And Phoebe spent her Friday lazing in the afternoon sun.

It was nice to be at the house to see the kitties; that won’t happen much at all this week.

I rode through Paris this weekend. You can tell because there’s the Luxor Obelisk, 3,000 years old, direct from Egypt, and a fixture at the Place de la Concorde in Paris, since the 1830s.

Zwift says they changed out the statuary in their game as cutesy little Easter Eggs for riders. So you don’t see Frémiet’s gilded bronze equestrian sculpture of Joan of Arc in the Place des Pyramides in Paris. There’s a likeness of a a cyclist, instead.

That probably aggravates the French, but it’s tucked in a little turn and you barely see it as you’re tapping out of a little seven degree hill coming out of the Avenue du General-Lemonnier tunnel. But on the other end of the fabled Champs-Elysees there is the Arc de Triomphe. It makes sense that the detailed friezess are left open and blank. We shall not speak of replacing the four sculptures at the base of the arc: The Entry of Napoleon, The Departure of the Volunteers, The Conquest of Alexandria and The Battle of Austerlitz. Their digital replacement seems like an art crime to me.

We had the opportunity to visit it in 2015. The Arc is a beautiful thing to appreciate in person, if you can.

And here’s the Champs-Elysees route.

Seven quick loop gives you about 25 miles. Now it’s time to add miles.

adventures / Friday / photo — Comments Off
4
Feb 22

And then it froze again

You’ll be pleased to know that the meeting that required hours of preparation last night was over in about 30 minutes this morning. It was a 5-to-1 prep-to-meeting ratio. If that was a rule we all had to follow, there’d simply be fewer meetings.

This is a new meeting for me. I’ve had it three times. And I’ve now developed a system. It’ll serve me well and help me through the next several of these meetings, until they aren’t mine anymore. And I won’t be working on the prep stuff until 8:30 the night before.

It was announced yesterday, at 5:30 or so, that work on Friday would be like work on Thursday. I knew that already, because I have windows and a thermostat.

I don’t think the mailman even ran his route yesterday. That old chestnut about the rain and snow and the appointed route is a Persian motto. It’s an engraving, not a motto. USPS employees walk under it in New York, but they don’t live by it. And certainly not in weather like this.

Not that you could blame them. It’s cold.

In addition to being cold, it is also bright! We went for a walk at the end of the work day. Our road is solid ice. You could skate on it. You could play hockey and demand a zamboni service it between periods.

We have a miniature icicle on the mailbox. The mailman did visit this afternoon. I wonder if he noticed it.

I’m sure he kept count today and is putting the totals on his social media accounts.

We shoveled the sidewalk, just being neighborly. I like the clean lines.

Usually I shovel the entrance to the walking path, so people don’t walk into our yard. It was just too cold yesterday. And today! It was 20 degrees when I took that photo, the high mark for the day. Also, look how deep that sidewalk is!

I got photobombed.

Worked out better that way.

If you’ve read this space the last few days you’ll remember that the city paves the walking path behind us, but not the road in front of us. This was the condition of that path at 5:30 today.

You could skate on the road, if you can skate through the snow.

adventures / history / journalism / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
12
Jan 22

Let’s read century-old newsprint

I woke up, because a bit of daylight was peering through the blackout curtains, 73 minutes later than I’d intended. My phone battery died overnight. No phone, no alarm. And despite making it out of the house — showered and shaved, in 15 minutes, and on time for my first appointment of the day — I could not shake that unsettled feeling. Despite that, it was a lovely day.

It got into the mid-40s here today. Positively chamber of commerce stuff.

I gave a tour this morning, reasserting once again that I would have never enjoyed being a tour guide. And yet. Then I did a little text work, then a little video work. That was the day, flying by as they do, except for the slow parts.

He said, after rethinking the parts of the day not worth writing about here.

Let’s look at some newspapers. This is what was was going on 100 years ago in the town where all of my family lives. Not my hometown, mind you. I’m not sure, anymore, if I have one of those. People talk about a hometown as the place where you were born, or where you grew up or where you live. I’m not in the one I’d prefer, and the rest hardly apply. And though I never lived in this part of north Alabama, all of my family is from around this area. And most of our ancestors were there when this paper was published a century ago.

Ain’t that something?

Read this over breakfast.

You wonder what led up to that over the previous year.

Earl Dean was convicted in April, and sentenced to life. He was paroled a decade later. Dean died in 1951. His sister, the wife of the well-known William McCarley, died at 81, in 1966. She never remarried. The McCarleys had five kids, the last born just after the murder. He passed away, aged 75, in 1996.

There’s still a Wofford Oil Company, but I believe it is a different concern. As for that gas station?

Long gone.

Also, why is the paper telling me about yesterday’s weather? Sure, it was cold and wet yesterday. We lived it.

Will build new church.

The First Methodist Church opened in a log house in 1822. Their third church got them to their current site, in 1827. Two versions later they had a brick building, which burned in 1920, so just before this newspaper. The new church went up on the same spot in 1924 and was renovated a few decades later. No one calls it the new church anymore.

I just wrote about the dam in this space recently. I told you the river and the dam and the TVA figured into everything. In the 1921 paper the writers were discussing its future. ‘Would the government keep the dam project up? And just look at how this dam thing has insulated us from the doldrums some other parts of the country are experiencing. We sure would like it if this continued.’ It’s easy to get the sense that they knew this was their path to prosperity and maybe a touch of that modernization that people talked about, the better parts of it, anyway. Also, there were sad tales like this.

He was one of 56 people who died during the dam’s construction. I know many of the family names on that plaque.

Finally, my grandfather smoked Camels, right up until the day the doctors told him another cigarette would kill him. So my grandmother made him quit. I can still picture, though, the coloring of the package, and the crinkling of the cellophane. No matter what this ad copy says, I can still imagine that god awful “cigaretty odor.”

After my grandfather stopped, my grandmother would go outside and sneak a Raleigh every now and then. That was her brand, and I never understood the distinction. They both smelled terrible to me. And there was a lot of that in their house.

My grandmother was a lovely hostess, though, the archetype grandmother. She always made sure to send me home with food or a plant or a toy, and a suitcase full of clean clothes.

The first thing we did when I got home was put all of those clean clothes go in the washer again. The smoke smells were baked in. It’s hard to imagine these days how ubiquitous that was, and not so long ago. How we were just … used to it. Sorta like cigarette ads in a newspaper.

We had lunch today at Chick-fil-A, which is to say we ordered it via the app and got the parking lot delivery and drove to a neighboring parking lot to enjoy our sandwiches. We parked in the lot of the now defunct K-Mart. It closed in 2016 and is presently being demolished to make way for apartments. The view from that parking lot is the Target parking lot just across the street. There were perhaps fewer cars there today than at any time during the pandemic. (Both locally, and across this state, we’re setting all sorts of pandemic records right now.)

This is our usual lunch date, once a week. While we’re there, I like to imagine we’re sitting over a broad, lazy creek. Today the mental image was enough to make me overlook this little message on the back of the cup.

And that’s true enough. So keep it up, won’t you please?

adventures / family / friends / memories / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
5
Jan 22

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes …

We got a text in the pre-dawn hours this weekend, the sort that comes with a sting and a great ache created by a newly formed hollow place.

Our friend Brian’s father passed away. He’d been fighting some heart-related problems and things were starting to improve until, suddenly, the doctors and nurses had to say they’d done all they can do. It’s just terrible.

Tom was a husband, a grandpa and a father. He is the father of one of the most steadfast men I know. Brian and I worked together for four-and-a-half years. Everyone called us office spouses. We shared a cubicle, mostly because I didn’t drive him crazy. I only didn’t drive him crazy because I admired him so much.

And that was the guy at work. Away from keyboards and glowing screens, Brian is the person that knows my wife and me as a couple longer than anyone. He delivered the toast at our wedding. He helped us move. Multiple times. For many years, when we lived in the same town, we dined with Brian and his wife, Elizabeth, weekly. We have celebrated countless little successes with them. We have boasted unceasingly about the achievements of their brilliant daughter. We have all held each other and cried in the most unimaginable grief.

Tom and his wife, Janet, who (I’m trying to find a not-clichéd way to say it, but she) is just about a perfect gem of a human being, took us in for no other reason than we were their boy’s friends. It is part of their shared generous spirit to the world beyond their door. A lot of people do that, sure. The McAlisters made it feel like it was just for you, like you were the only lucky people that got added, which was far from the case. Felt like it, though. They met because they were spelunkers, and it worked. They had two sons and their family, official and otherwise, just grew and grew and grew.

Here’s Brian and his dad, Tom, after Brian’s daughter’s birthday party. She was a wee thing then and is a certifiably genius college student today. I don’t have a great frame of reference for father-son moments, but this felt like one, almost 14 years ago, to the day.

It looked important and cool. I didn’t want to intrude.

What’s more, their welcoming spirit was familiar. Felt like part of my family. My grandmother was that same way. Never met a stranger. She ministered with food and laughter. There for most anyone for most anything at most any time. Tom and Janet, always gave off a known sort of kindness. Their easy, unspoken, cherished bosom buddy sort of personality was normal.

One terribly sad year, Brian and Elizabeth decided to not have Thanksgiving. Their son passed away a week before and they needed some time to themselves. Rather than think of them being alone, I invited Tom and Janet, the grieving grandparents, to my grandparents’ for Thanksgiving dinner. They didn’t live that far away and it was the obvious gesture. I don’t recall if I asked my grandmother’s permission to bring people into her home. Probably I did, but I knew she wouldn’t care. These were good people because they were my people and that would have been enough. Besides, that’s what she did. There was never a “Why?” but “How many plates do we need to set out?”

And so Tom and Janet drove over and 10 of us sat around the kitchen table. In the blessing, I prayed for the family that was with us and I prayed for those who were elsewhere. I asked for strength and health for those who needed it and peace and patience and understanding for those seeking it.

Eight days earlier they lost a grandbaby and had to watch their son and daughter-in-law crumble before them. And Tom and Janet were rocks, smoothed and weathered by time and sharpened by experience. They were the great, steady, oaks of the forest. They were the comforting lights in the night. Only they were better than all of that. We don’t have imagery for such an inconceivable thing, really. After one of the services, I wrote about our friends, Tom and Janet, “You don’t know of pain until you see a parent who knows they can’t comfort their child. You don’t know strength – a true strength borne of love – until you see them do it anyway.”

That Thanksgiving, I realized that you don’t know vulnerability, real human rawness, until you’ve seen people unabashedly share their grief in a stranger’s kitchen. I also learned that you don’t know the best stuff of the human spirit until you’ve seen strangers grieve for new friends.

We laughed, too. Everyone told tall tales and we all tried to talk about other things. Tom and Janet, so grateful for a brief evening of normal, stayed a long time. I was proud we could all do that and not at all surprised that they were sent home with food.

I’ve always thought of that as a story about my grandmother. It’s one of my most precious and fondest moments with her, the materfamilias, always teaching the best of her traits by example, always demonstrating that the simple things are the important things. But I’ve come to realize it’s a story about the family I was lucky enough to get, and the family I was wise enough to choose.

I’ve been writing this with teary-eyed emotions, but now comes the hard part.

Four years later, when my grandmother died, Tom and Janet made the drive over again. For just a moment, in a way I couldn’t have anticipated, dear sweet friends covered the unfillable hole.

Since we got that early morning message I’ve thought of little more than how difficult it is to fill such a hole, even temporarily, for the people you love. How I want to do that for my friend Brian, and his mother, Janet, and that lovely family.