memories

cycling / memories / photo / site / Wednesday — Comments Off on Starting year 21
7
Aug 24

Starting year 21

Today marks the beginning of the 21st year of this website. We had a private anniversary party yesterday. A little peach crumble … a small scoop of vanilla … yes, we pulled out all the stops for kennysmith.org.

I opened this place up in August 2004, two cars, three jobs and four houses ago. I’ve been writing in this space through the advent, rise and now the fracturing of social media. I’ve been in all of those places, too, but I figured out, pretty early on, what some have only come to learn in this online cultural nadir. You post it on someone else’s site, you don’t own it. At least all the photos and other things are on my server. It has been a way to pass the time, occasionally learn new code, or, rarely, get a commission. I ramble here, all the time. Often, it seems like I should ramble more. It has been a lot of things, and I’m pleased with all of them. North of six million people have come through here. I have no idea why, but I’m grateful. Mostly, I’m glad you’re here, and that you’ve kept coming back.

Suddenly, it seems as if there should be an announcement. A big surprise. A new direction. A redesign. Something. But I don’t have anything.

Hey, next August, this place will be 21. I might think of something by then.

It has been almost relentlessly humid lately. The sort that keeps you from doing anything outside.It’s been a lot like home, actually. But, today, it wasn’t humid. It rained!

I said, How long are you going to ride?

And she explained her route.

When you drop me, just keep going, and don’t stop and wait for me, I said.

“Are you sure?”

I’ve been going slow lately. If you wait, you’ll just drop me again. Then you’ll wait and drop me, wait and drop me, and it won’t be a good ride for you.

I asked her how long she was going to ride for, she said, “I’m going for distance, and not time,” and explained the route she had in mind.

It’s always about time, so this was rare. And more fun. And this route is a new combination of familiar roads, and longer, and here I am, unfit for the ride at hand.

For the record, the types of ride, in terms of most fun are:

A vacation ride
Riding without a plan on roads you don’t know
Riding with a plan on roads you don’t know
Riding roads you know
Riding for time
Riding in severe weather

All of those are fun, to be sure, including the severe weather. I got caught in a hail storm once. It was hilarious.

Anyway, today, I was dropped quite easily and early, as I imagined. I did see this cool tractor, though. I wonder where he’s taking all that fruit.

I was in a headwind just then, and I’m usually no good in the breeze, but today wasn’t bad. And then there was the rain, which started falling about an hour into the ride.

Then, the most fun thing happened. I just kept riding. Legs felt pretty good and everything worked fairly well. Around the two-hour mark, though, I realized that the old pair of bib shorts I was wearing should really be for rides of 90 minutes or less. Something to figure out before I put on cycling kit.

Somehow, this will be easier than just throwing away the old and obviously worn shorts.

I looked down at some point in the last 10 miles or so and this little maple leaf was being pressed against the brake lever by the wind. I picked it up so I could take this photo.

When I got home I found that leaf, still stuffed in my jersey, ready for its moment. No idea why I kept it. But that changed up my routine at the end of the ride, and somehow that let me notice this daylily that I would have overlooked by the garage door.

It got plenty of rain today, so I’m sure that is one happy plant. If I thought of it at the time, I would have rung my socks out on it, too.

But I had to head over to the peach tree and get today’s haul.

Seriously, come get some peaches. We’re celebrating over here with stone fruit, and we have plenty to share.

cycling / family / memories / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off on Still not good with the seeds
6
Aug 24

Still not good with the seeds

Every English teacher you ever knew, every English professor you ever met, was always working on that one book. Or they would tell you about their book. Or they had it in them. It was the book of their childhood. Every autobiography was going to have long and beautifully intricate passages about the chrysanthemums in bloom, and their time romping with their friends and the little sisters and cousins of their lives.

It was always so silly because there would inevitably be a metaphor, but the metaphors were interchangeable and, often, not that good. You need a certain something to pull that off, and most people that spend a lot of time in the classroom, or grading papers, don’t have the opportunities to cultivate that certain something. So it all came down, finally, to a lament.

But those flowers were always there, and it was that loss of childhood, the flowers flaring, beautiful, and then fading, like so many bad lectures, and Moby Dick essays before them now

The only person that could write about it well, without it becoming a parody of himself, was when Willie Morris wrote about the jonquils blooming in his native Mississippi. He missed them from New York, where he was finding himself conflicted about so many things in the world changing around him, and he in it. He wrote about the smell of the jonquils, almost every year he was gone. And in most of his work after he went home, they didn’t seem to appear as much. You can use a metaphor up; Morris knew that, and that’s why it worked for him.

I always laughed at the cliché, but now I get it.

One of my lasting memories, he wrote in his best Robert Redford voice, is walking out back to the garden my grandfather kept. He would hold an old dull kitchen knife in his hand. It had a silver handle. Solid but light. It was, I think, the boning knife, that long thin one. He carried a salt shaker in his back pocket. It was a dull white plastic. A little beaten up. Probably it had been around for forever. I followed him as he stepped confidently over ground he’d trodden for decades. And out there, in the hot, bright summer sun, he’d find a great, big, ripe watermelon. He’d pull it from the vine and walk with me over to the edge of his row crops and, there, he delivered to me the secret indulgence of sun-warmed watermelon.

For a long time after he died, I wouldn’t eat watermelon. And then, for a while, I only did when someone brought it out, and only a little, to be polite, and I felt bad about the whole thing. It felt disrespectful.

But now, I do eat some watermelon. It comes with a weird mixture of that same great regret.

And there is also a maudlin nostalgia beneath the rind, the sadly sweet memory in the sweet flesh. I can’t not think about all of that. I thought about it when I cut this one up yesterday. It was a small melon, we got it from a local farm as part of a weekly produce box. I thought about it when I ate part of it yesterday, and again when I had some more today. I will think of it when I finish the thing off tomorrow.

I’ve always thought I was learning the incredibly valuable lesson that fruit was the best when it was still warm from the sun. Putting watermelon in the fridge is an awful act. I thought about setting it outside for a while and eating it the proper way, I thought I’ve never had before, but that really would have been stepping out. This is the thing I have difficulty reconciling. Maybe that’s what grandparents are trying to pass to us. Maybe, a grandparent’s lesson is really about what we can prize about what we had. Maybe it was something about those little yellow flowers on the vine, and the metaphor they hold, briefly, within. Or that salt shaker.

On today’s ride, I set out alone and, ultimately, turned in another slow one. I went through some of the nearby pasture lands and some of the row crops. I pedaled by the winery, turned left toward the gas station and then left again toward the park.

Past some sheep, on a beautifully paved road that has some nice curves into an old neighborhood that leads into the town. Through the town, and out the other side, I wound my way down to the inconvenience center and beyond.

It was that time of day, on a dramatically cloudy day, when you have to plan your route, and be ready to adjust it, based on the light. So I rode on two new roads out that way, watching the light, confident in my bike’s lights — one on the seat post and one blinking through my jersey pocket — and in the three mile downhill back to town. After that, it’s easy, through the town in just under a mile, and then four miles of open roads, and a reasonable bike lane, back to the house.

There’s one spot, in between two hills, and under a dense canopy of trees, that felt dark. But after that, it all opened back up to the same, even, gray light we’d had most of the day. It was 8:30, and I still had time to pick up the day’s peaches.

So many peaches. We’ve only just begun.

Please come get some peaches. If you do, I’ll promise to not torture you with literary allusions.

family / memories / Tuesday — Comments Off on A life well lived
23
Jul 24

A life well lived

He was three years older than my mother. Shaggy haired as a youth. Tall as the trees. He was 6-foot-4 and stood with a deliberate hitch in his leg and hip. It gave him a coolness where he could lean against things or loop a thumb in his belt. He got married a few hours before I was born, a full generation apart, miles apart, not that far apart. For as long as I can remember he called me to wish me a happy birthday and I would wish him a happy anniversary. As a younger man, he was aggressive without being risky. Loud without being obnoxious. Rowdy, but never in trouble. It was a vestigial part of youth that he aged out of, as most of us do, but since he was young, and I was young, and his family was young, it all felt a little adventurous. He was mischievous, with a wicked, good-spirited glimmer in his eye. He was fast and careful. He knew when to be which. He knew a lot.

My uncle was a father, a father-figure to many, a friend of everyone he encountered. He had a lot of friends. Everyone became his friend, because for as tall as he was, his personality could be bigger, and it was full of good cheer, laced with being a merry prankster. His was a personality full of love.

Tony worked at GE, running the software that kept the factory working. Odds are he had a small hand in your kitchen. He was a shortwave radio guy. His license plate, for all my life, was his call letters. He was a volunteer firefighter. He was a handyman. He was a fisherman. He was a Godly man. He was a deacon in his church. I have a dim memory of seeing him preach once or twice. But what he really was was a song leader.


Circa 2007
If he wasn’t leading the singing, you could stand in the back of a full church and find where he was sitting just from listening for his voice. Tony’s voice was strong and sure. It was pure. I was delighted when I learned how to single out his sound. A tenor, for a few years he led a talented a capella quartet. I remember helping him set up amps and microphones and him patiently waiting for me to get it right.

He wasn’t a teacher, but he could have been. There was always some lesson or practical explanation he could share. He knew a lot of things and he was generous with what he knew. He wasn’t a comedian, but he might have been. He delighted in making people laugh.

All of it, his good nature, his size, his generous spirit, made him the center of a room, even though he wasn’t the sort who needed that, ever.

Even in his struggles, he would steer himself to a joke. Twenty years ago, or so he got a bad diagnosis. A tremor turned into Parkinson’s. The prognosis wasn’t great, but it came at a time when those prognoses were changing. Medicines were improving, science was making leaps, and activity and the physical therapy helped him continue to enjoy life far beyond that first doctor’s projections. There were always jokes and puns and stories. They got a little slower. A bit more halting. It made us all patient, and even in that he was giving us an example, an opportunity to learn from him. It’s one of those things you might wonder if a person is aware of doing it, or if it was purely instinctive and genuine personality. Either way, it was important. There were always some of the tiniest members of his family around. There was always a trip, or a cookout, or something. This horrible thing was going on, and he was rising to meet it. While he wouldn’t deny it, he wouldn’t let it define him. At the same time, it was rough. As his body fought against him, he lost the abilities to do the sort of finer work he really enjoyed. Even then, on balance, he kept his spirits up, and that meant a lot for the people around him, and maybe for him, too.

He was always an example, whether he intended to be or not, the rest was up to us. That’s how I always saw him: he did his best for you, and around you; the rest was up to you.

At the core of his varied interests, he was a real family man. Tony had a daughter and son, a flock of grandchildren and a mess of noisy, beautiful great-grandchildren. He loved them all. The man loved everyone, and he made it obvious, and he was easy to respect and love in return.

We buried him today, the singer, the programmer, the tinkerer, teacher, prankster. The patient and enduring man. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people came to the visitation last night. Strangers from his regular breakfast haunt came. Today, more people came in, including the entirety of the people from his boxing therapy group. They, with their own troubles and struggles, all came and filled three pews. My mom always said that she thought her brother liked going to that group because there were people who understood what exactly he was facing. That may well be. They came today because of how he made them feel through what they were facing.

People from all the churches he visited, all the churches where he would go to their singings, came too. And, so, when it came time to sing the room was filled and the air beyond it, too. The songs were chosen specifically and everyone who raised their voices did so with verve. It was terribly sad, and joyful. For all of this, a good man’s suffering has ended. I hope that, where he’s gone, he can walk and run and be loud and tinker with things and be young again if he wants, even though he’d matured so well into a quiet, gentle man, a gentleman. However it works, that choir sounds better today than it did last week.

He is at rest at his church, a place I know well. I visited it a lot as a child. As kids, his children, my cousins and I, were all pretty close. I’ve always just been so grateful they would share their dad with me a little. It always meant a lot. But there was always plenty of his enthusiasm to share.

His examples and his joy and his curiosity and his enthusiasm go with us. The rest is up to us.

memories / music / photo / Re-Listening / swimming / Tuesday / video — Comments Off on ‘Step high and light’
16
Jul 24

‘Step high and light’

Just when you thought the sinusitis was done with you, the head thickens once again. Otherwise? Feel great! Except for right around the middle of the head. It’s just a head pressure thing, a let me go and move on abut my day thing, an enough already thing. It’ll be fine soon.

So, it’s back to the OTC pills.

I treated myself to a nice long swim today. The water was warm, 92 degrees the thermometer said, and it is true what swimmers say, you swim faster in colder water.

That’s why I went slow, you see. Has nothing to do with taking forever to get my arms warmed up. Nothing to do with poor form. Nothing to do the continued head cold recovery. It was all about the warm water.

But I did have a nice 3,000 yards of it.

It gave me a lot of time to think of something legendary swim coach David Marsh told me. He has won 12 national team championships and 89 individual NCAA champions, and he’s coached 49 Olympians, so you come around to thinking he knows a thing or two about what happens in a pool.

On a show I hosted, he told me, “You have to respect someone willing to spend hours and hours, swimming hundreds of laps, to shave a thousandth of a second off of their best time.”

I didn’t swim a lot then, but I thought I understood his point. But now, swimming lots of laps of my own, I appreciate the point a bit more.

See? I’m slow in the pool.

I’m never shaving anything off my time.

But I bet if Marsh stopped by, he could give me two pointers that would improve everything.

Too bad he’s busy just now, Olympic year and all.

We return to the Re-Listening project. I’ve been playing all of my old CDs in my car, in the order of their acquisition. The real point is to just enjoy the music, but I’ve doubled my value by using it as a way to pad out the site with a few memories and some good music. These aren’t reviews, far from it; there are enough of those, and then some, out there. Besides, we’re going back to 2005, or 2006, to discuss a 2000 record.

I picked up “Smile” without knowing anything about it, because I’d been fully bitten by The Jayhawks bug. It was their sixth studio album, and it was a move in a somewhat new direction for the band from Minnesota. The alt-country, jangle-pop sound gave way to a more straightforward pop, sonically.

“Smile” reached number 129 on the Billboard 200 and number 14 on Billboard’s Top Internet Albums chart, which no one knew existed.

If you picked up this album, the first sounds you heard were also the title track.

It isn’t entirely devoid of the jangle-pop sound we all loved so much. But you can chart the progression all throughout the record.

But you couldn’t overlook the new direction. Probably it didn’t sit well with the purists, but Gary Olson was gone (for the first time) and this was their second album without him. It was like they were looking for something. And it took a little getting used to.

They were clearly exploring new distortion pedals. If you sit with it, though, the lyrics are still strong in spirit. Most importantly, the harmonies were still shimmering.

This was always a car CD for me. A lot of back-and-forth to work, 20 or 25 minutes at a time, for quite a while. I was probably late a lot. Hurried parking lots and the like. I remember I bombarded The Yankee with it, because we were carpooling at the time, but she preferred other Jayhawks records, I think. I also think it’s hard to go wrong. What you get, across their catalog, is material for a lot of different moods.

The Jayhawks are going back on the road next month. And, in October, they’ll be playing a show about two-and-a-half hours from us. This was the first band my lovely bride and I saw together. They were about that same distance away that night. And the next day we decided we, in our late 20s, were too old for driving that far and back in one night for a show, with work the day after. (We were both working morning drive at the time and being in the newsroom at 6 a.m. the next day was not easy or pleasant.)

But this show is on a Saturday. Something to think about.

And with that we are, for the time being, caught up in the Re-Listening project. But there are still about 150 CDs to hear again, and share with you.

Come back tomorrow, we’ll talk about a neat little light.

Instagram / memories / Thursday — Comments Off on We moved a year ago today
27
Jun 24

We moved a year ago today

One year ago today we were cramming the last of everything into our cars, taking one last shower, still finding things to pack up, and then, finally getting in those overstuffed cars and driving east. We spent the night in Ohio. (We try not to make a habit of it, but in this case it was a good contingency plan and a great idea, because we were physically and mentally beat — but emotionally upbeat!

That night I wrote:

Moving is a terrible thing. Packing is a tedious, physical chore. And if that’s not physical enough, there’s the move part. This is why people don’t do it frequently, if they can help it. But thank goodness, thank the universe and thank Providence for movers. At 8:30 this morning, precisely when they said, the movers arrived.

The owner of the company is the former student of one of our colleagues. And that professor has hired this company twice for moves, and is about to hire him a third time. A good endorsement.

Four guys come in. Two of them former D-1 football players. All of them strong and young and confident. All of them, “Sir” and “Ma’am” and “May I put my water in your refrigerator?” and “May I use your restroom?” These guys were great.

They were taking our things out of our hands because, as they said over and over, this was their job. And that’s true, but you’d feel like a total heel if you didn’t help.

One of the guys loaded his pickup with the last bit of junk and trash for the nearby dumpster run and followed me there to help us get it out of the way. These guys were great, and they worked hard.

And so have we! I told you about the packing. Things hurt on me, and part of that is a direct result of this. Moving is a terrible thing.

[…]

The thing I learned this evening — while loading up my car, full of a “You want it to go, I’ll get it in here” bravado that was mostly sincere — is that there’s something sad about some of those last few things that you put into the car when you’re moving your entire life.

Oh, some things you need. And I stupidly put my suitcase in the middle of the back seat, so everything is on top of it. Some things are important or are sentimental, and they go in their places. Some things are practical. We needed the vacuum and cleaning supplies for the last run through of the house for the buyers (a nice young family of four, first time home owners). And then there’s whatever else you keep running across in your last half dozen walk throughs of every room. And some of that stuff, dear reader, is just pitiful.

But now, underway, in a hotel, with pizza topped with plans and dreams and contingencies, we are past the hardest, most hectic part of the move. We packed it all. It all got loaded. Everything is in motion. It is almost difficult to believe it all came together, considering where we were on Friday.

Everything that well went well because of these guys. We came across them because the man that owns the business is the former student of a colleague. That colleague had hired him for two moves and was about to use him for a third. Friends, if you get someone that wants to re-hire movers, take note.

We’re not moving anytime soon, but if we were, these are the first people we’d call. They were phenomenal.

I won’t keep returning to the sequence of events. If I did, tomorrow I’d write about driving through Pennsylvania all day and sleeping at my god-sister-in-law’s house (just go with it). Saturday would be about the morning of signing a million documents and the afternoon of the incredible guys from Ballew telling us to stop helping. We did not stop helping. They did not stop working. We were so grateful for them.

Guess what I did for about four hours this afternoon.

It was a celebration, you see. One year in the making.

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