Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

adventures / cycling / errands / Friday / photo — Comments Off
15
Dec 23

Hey, that’s a Friday

I took the garbage to the convenience center Tuesday because, of course, there is no waste removal service in our neighborhood despite the two companies that send trucks up and down the road to visit their customers, our neighbors, every week. And so I do it the old fashioned way, by carrying things seven miles across town in my leather-interior car.

This is at least only a once-a-week exercise. It could go longer, but I’m not trying to ruin my chariot, or funkify its old car smell. Only this week I neglected to clean out the refrigerator on Tuesday. It would have been the sensible time to do so, just before loading up the car. But I did not. Which means it still needed to be done. And since we’re talking about it today, that means I did it this morning.

Removing some old things was fast. Looking for expiration dates might have been the biggest part of it. But by then I was invested, and so I might as well clean the refrigerator. Also it needed it.

There are many sections to our fridge. The freezer is on the bottom, and that has taken some getting used to after most of a lifetime with the freezer on top. Though we recently had a seven-year experience with a side by side, and that seemed to work out OK, even as it did feel a bit small. The point, I suppose, is that I am mentally agile enough to accept a radical change in my frozen foodstuff paradigm.

Inside the refrigerator section, there are three drawers. One for fruit and one for vegetables. Each is about half the width of the fridge. Beneath them both is a third drawer. We keep all of our cold hard cash in there. Previously it was just hard cash, but now it is cold. And also the bacon. The bacon is in that drawer, almost as valuable as the currency and one is definitely hiding the other.

Above the three drawers is the main section. Big items, your milk carton sized stuff, fit there nicely. Above that, there are two more shelves. One is rather small, but seems a custom fit to hold all of the last in crypto technology. And another is a medium size. It is full of my lovely bride’s breakfast and snacks and also some various cheese varieties. These cheeses are outcast from the door cheeses, which will hobnob with condiments, but not all of their dairy brethren. And, of course, the butter has sequestered itself. Snobby, churned product that it is.

And so I cleaned some shelves. And then I took the one bag from the refrigerator chore to the inconvenience center.

Somehow all of this took two hours.

And I just wanted to ride my bike. Last nice day for a while, and all. Probably the last nice opportunity for the year. Because soon there are the many holiday events and here comes the wind and rain and precipitous dip in temperatures and already I’m riding in two or three layers and full fingered gloves. All of which makes it a little more difficult to reach my phone and get the camera app open when I see random images I’d like to capture for no reason whatsoever, which is definitely one of the points of my bike rides.

Not too much longer after that I had a flat. I was only seven miles in, but that meant the end of the ride. It meant the end of the ride because, for some reason, the universe will not allow me to fix a flat and keep on going. There is always, always, always some reason that it’s over. I’ve learned to not fight it.

So I sent a message to my lovely bride that I had a flat and I would be replacing that tube and then limping back home. This, of course, leads to the hilarious four-message sequence where I get to assure her that I’m fine and I can change a tire and it does not require two of us, or her coming to get me, but definitely we should book an Uber Ultra, just in case.

Removed the rear wheel from the bike frame. I pulled the leaky tube from the tire and wheel. I inspected the tire. A little sliver of metal had worked its way through my Gatorskin tire, a heavy duty tire designed to prevent flats. And probably they do! How can I prove a false positive?

So I pulled that little bit of metal out of the radial and reached into my pocket for a spare tube and mounted it on the tire. It only take a few moments to do all of this. Before you know it, you’re getting an extra arm workout from trying to inflate the tire with the portable hand pump. That takes just about the same amount of time. But, soon, I’m back on the road. I thought: I could just keep going. But, no, the universe. And, also, I am now only down to one spare. So I turned around to head for home.

Not two miles away there’s a four-way stop. And a guy there decided he would like to almost hit me as I took my turn through the intersection. A woman was walking by and saw it and she was aghast.

“That idiot almost hit you!”

Somehow, the only thing that came to mind was, It happens every day.

In the seven miles between replacing the tire and the house, I had to stop and reinflate that tube five times. It seems the Presta valve was failing. And so going back home was the right move.

And I only got two more ridiculous close passes along the way.

Happens every day.

Safely back home, I started some laundry. And then, I started a fire.

The only problem being that now all of my clothes are clean or are being cleaned, except for what I am wearing, which smells like smoke.

The fire pit was worth it, though. We had a nice time. And then we had an even better time with s’mores. Haven’t made those in years. Which is probably how long we’ve had those marshmallows. They were sticking together in the bag, and to the bag. But put them over an open flame and they behaved just as they should.

And, now. I am grading things. This will be the beginning of the last big push of the semester. A little more grading this weekend. The final grades to be delivered early next week and then final scores tabulated for the semester. This is momentum.

But, first, the Barbie movie.

Later: That was fun.

music / Re-Listening / Rowan / Thursday / video — Comments Off
14
Dec 23

‘Where you are is who you are when you’re sleeping’

Woke up before the alarm this morning. This sometimes happens. Usually, when it happens, it is because my alarm wasn’t set especially early that day. Today I woke up by a distant meow. It seems I’d accidentally closed the cat into the home office overnight.

He was fine, but I felt bad about the whole thing of course. Our cats, however, are incredibly forgiving. A few moments later he was cuddling and purring and, thereafter, underfoot. There’s a lesson in there, and don’t you know I spent most of the morning apologizing to him anyway.

I did a few other things with my morning and early afternoon, small things. Things that don’t even build momentum to larger things. So, in retrospect, I should have done more. I’ve had the good fortune to gear down the last few days as we approach the end of the semester, but, starting this weekend or so it’ll be time to look ahead, speed up and start making choices my students will have to live with until May. It’s the most wonderful time of the year!

Two classes today, as has been this semester’s Thursday routine. Today was our last time together. Today we screened their final projects.

I’d broken them up into groups, based on their own interests and dislikes in crew positions. Each group had to then create a two-minute public service announcement. They’ve had the opportunity to work on this for about a month. Some of them have used some of that time wisely. The pre-production part of the assignment demanded it. One group may have produced their entire video project yesterday.

All of the projects had their strengths. Most were quite creative, one or two were perfectly straightforward. I enjoyed watching them all. My favorite part is talking about them after we screened each one.

I asked the people not involved the project we watched to share some thoughts. It’s always a lot of fun to hear feedback from others, and gratifying to me to see them all reaching for something constructive and critical, but in a positive way. After almost four months of putting up with me, they’d bonded together in sympathy. Then I would ask the group members what they would do differently if they had to do it again. And then I would offer some observations. That can be as big or as little as you want it to be.

And that was it. I gave them the last big speech of the semester, reminded them of basic school-type things they needed to hear and thanked them for the semester. “Bump into me around campus. Catch me up on what you’re doing. It’s up to you. Now get out of here and go make great things.” And they all left.

The second class wrapped at about 6:30, and so I walked to the car in darkness, just before 7 p.m. There’s a peculiar feeling on a college campus on a night during finals. It’s lonely and sleepy, but alive and awake. It’s tired and full of energy. It’s full of wonder.

Or maybe that’s just me.

I drove back the long way because I missed the left, again. But I saw a lot of Christmas lights that direction and I wondered what Monday night will feel like after that class ends.

I was listening to the “Sound of Lies,” which is the next stop on the Re-Listening project. I’m playing all of my CDs in my car, in the order in which I acquired them. This is the 1997 record from The Jayhawks, and the third of their albums in a row. I bought “Sound of Lies” and the previous one, “Hollywood Town Hall,” on the same night in 2004. I bought them because, that day, I’d gotten my acceptance letter to graduate school.

That letter left me 12 days to prepare, and these records were the soundtrack, and a huge part of the musical foundation of the next year or so.

Marc Olsen had left the band. Secret weapon Karen Grotberg had been with the band a few years by now. Tim O’Reagan had settled in on drums. Gary Louris was essentially the sole front man. Probably that’s the point of the terrible cover art. But don’t judge a record by the liner notes. (It was the 90s, after all.) It does not sound like the 1997 you remember. And, as I discovered it in 2004, it was better.

The first track.

If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if you put pablum and cliches into a lyrical form … it turns out you actually get a catchy little number.

Without distinctive moments — and, really, I spun this disc so much that it’s impossible for just one event to stand out — some of these things just fit into my memory as driving here or there. Or the car in the sunshine. In this case, it’s a lot of driving in the dark. I don’t think that’s a metaphor, but it must be something.

You want the best track on the album? You want the best track. This is fundamentally, subjectively, perfect.

O’Reagan is doing the background vocals there, and that’s just the appetizer. Also — and no one tell my lovely bride, because this is stealing her gimmick, but … — I butcher a lyric in this song every time. The way I sing it is so nonsensical it works. But probably not as well as the actual line.

But back to Grotberg. She puts in these amazing vocal runs and plays the piano. None of this works without her, and I’ll be humming this for days. It’s all her fault.

Does everyone know what the sound is at the beginning of this song? Least favorite song on the record. But it does have a random Nick Cave reference. Nick Cave, I think, is everywhere, if we but look for him.

Matthew Sweet, just a year or so removed from perhaps his biggest hit, sings on this track. I only mention that here because we’ll hear from him in the next installment.

Here’s the title track, #12, the last song on the CD. It probably should have come up earlier, because it’s a weeper to end on.

And so we’re not ending on it. Instead, I’ll backpedal to track 11 because O’Reagan wrote and sang “Bottomless Cup” and I listen to this song over and over and over again when this CD is being played.

Whenever there’s a track that has Tim O’Reagan’s name on it, I feel like I could take a master class on song writing. He produced one solo record, in 2006 when the music industry was imploding, and I should pick that up one of these days. Hang on. There, it’s in my shopping cart.

Anyway, The Jayhawks are playing right now, and touring again next spring. Oh, look, they’ll be near me in May. I might have to be there.

But that’s for a different day — and not our next visit to the Re-Listening project. Up next, here, we’ll have a supergroup of sorts.

cycling / history / markers / photo / We Learn Wednesdays / Wednesday — Comments Off
13
Dec 23

In the shade of history

Finals begin tomorrow. The emails should begin any moment now. The grading continues apace. Every time I feel like I have my arms around it, I find a new thing to look at. So I grade some more. Then I’m done. And then a late assignment rolls in.

Which will allow me to move effortlessly into the deadline talk as the big, final, speech of the class. Everyone will love that.

Something else just popped up for me to assess.

None of this is hard, mind you. It’s part of the job. It’s a bit like laundry, though: you’re never done, not really. All day long like this, and yesterday and most of Monday, too.

Oh, here’s two more things in the ol’ inbox now.

It was three degrees warmer today. The thermometer said 47, but the wind chill held things down to an uncomfortable 39 degrees. I went out for a bike ride at the ~~warmest~~ least cold part of the day. I quickly realized I was under-dressed. Wrong jacket. Also, I forgot the ear muffs. But my hands and toes stayed comfortable.

The wind was everywhere, and that’s what we’re blaming the whole thing on. It wasn’t that my legs were bad, it is that there was a headwind in every direction. I rode a big rectangle, so I rode in every direction, and there was always the wind.

And the close passers. Drivers were brutal today.

All of it was enough to make me cut the ride short. But I got in 20 miles, and I was able to see this, whatever it is.

There are fresh produce stands all over around here. They’re all empty now, of course. Some of the smaller ones got rolled away from the road at the end of the season, but most seem like semi-permanent fixtures. So, too, are a few of the homemade-built bus stands. I’ve found no little libraries, as yet, and I don’t know what’s happening here at Cedar Lane Junction. Maybe it’s a mini-pharmacy, or a bait shop, or both. I do know, from archival map photos, that sign has been slowing peeling away for a little more than a decade now.

Sometimes you see a stand of trees and wonder if they were left there, or planted there. Someone had a room with windows to the east of these trees and they knew there would come a day when they’d get tired of sunsets. Serious astrophysical prescience.

That’s a simple stand of two rows of trees. They are bracketed on each side by houses. And, no, that UAP to the right of the sun is not a Photoshop artifact. It’s in the raw photo, a lens flare within a series of them. That’s just going to happen when you’re shooting from the hip.

Anyway, I liked where the sun was and how the clouds were lined up, and I began to wonder about the chance nature of trees on old farmland.

A century ago this land was owned by a couple named Campbell. Asbury’s family could trace it’s roots back to the colonial era, right here in this community. Alice was the granddaughter of Irish immigrants. I wonder if they ever stood around that spot and stared off that way. I wonder what they dreamed about. The man died in 1992, not far away from here. She died in 1999. It looks like he served in World War I, but that’s a rabbit hole I’m saving for a different day.

I infer from the dusty old records that they sold the land in the 1930s, an all too common tale of the era, I’m sure.

Let’s go back even farther, though.

This is the 20th installment of We Learn Wednesdays. I ride my bike across the county to find the local historical markers. Including today’s installment, we’ll have seen 38 of the markers in the Historical Marker Database. And this one is pointing to one of the older moments the county recognizes. It’s colonial-era, even.

The fabled oak the sign references was about a quarter-of-a-mile away. It fell to the ground in 2019, having cast cool shade on man and beast for an estimated 600 years. That was the spot, according to the legend, where the original Quakers signed a treaty with the indigenous residents. That tree was in my grade school books. Probably yours too! Probably because it was one of the rare treaties with native populations that was honored. Beneath that tree was where the earliest white residents were buried. Indeed, Betsy Ross’ father, a third-generation immigrant from Wales, a man named Samuel Griscom, was buried there. He owned a lumberyard and was a master carpenter. (He helped build the bell tower at Independence Hall!)

Every town in the state, 565 of them, was given a seedling from the Salem Oak after it fell. (A follow-up story will soon be demanded.) Other groups of Quakers got still more seedlings for replanting at their meeting houses. This group, the Salem Friends, apparently maintained ownership of the tree and they were giving away leaves and small bits of the tree as keepsakes.

I’m glad I wasn’t here for that. I would have wanted a piece. Perhaps I would have gotten one. And then there would eventually be the desire to make something interesting with it. And great pains would be required to be sure it was done correctly. The curse of a not at all accomplished confident or competent craftsman.

When someone uses the old blood and sweat expression, this is what I think of.

I bet old Samuel Griscom would have known what to do with it, but I digress.

They had a memorial service for the tree. One of the Friends wrote an obituary that summer:

The Salem Oak’s life span was double the 300-year average of most white oaks. In that time, she witnessed the clearing of her forest home and many other events that history has forgotten. She saw Lenni Lenape, early Quakers, European settlers, free African Americans, and their descendants, grow, build, and gather around her. She watched as Revolutionary War soldiers marched through her peaceful town. She impressed Charles Lindbergh with her fall foliage as he flew over Salem on Oct. 21, 1927, on his way from Atlantic City to Wilmington, in celebration of his solo trip across the Atlantic Ocean. She saw travelers and shipments of goods arriving at the Salem port down the street, and witnessed the birth of industry in Salem, as a huge bottling plant was built behind her.

The mighty Oak watched generations bid farewell to their loved ones as they were laid to rest around her. She offered silent comfort to those who came to visit their deceased friends and family, embracing them with the shelter and cool shade of her vast canopy. She offered a peaceful place for sunrise services, social gatherings, and quiet reflection. She enticed hundreds of children to try to stretch their arms around her massive trunk and provided them with a giant prop to run around and hide behind while playing. And she inspired local artists to try to capture her beauty, her significance, her peacefulness, her impressive stature, and her sheer awesomeness, in every medium.

In 2000, she was bestowed the honor of being named a Millennial Landmark Tree, through the America the Beautiful Fund. This recognized her as one of the top 50 trees in the country with historical significance. In 2016, she was declared the largest White Oak in New Jersey by the Department of Environmental Protection. At that time, she towered 103 feet tall, with a circumference of 22 feet, 4 inches. She had a crown fit for royalty, spanning 104 feet.

It’s easy to see why people are romantic about trees.

In the middle of that oak’s life, all of the land around it was a proprietorship. The Quakers owned it for about 30 years, having purchased it from Sir George Carteret, who was strapped for cash in the 1670s. (And weren’t we all?) In 1702 it returned back to Queen Anne, as a colony. That’s an entirely different saga.

You wonder how that sort of thing weighed on the people who walked into this building during that time. These walls would look familiar to them, but so much that they would see from the doorway, today, would surely be a shock.

These were the people that sailed to the New World to find some freedom, so perhaps they would be pleased that their religious descendants are still here.

In next week’s installment of We Learn Wednesday, we’ll take a glance at a 19th century home and store. If you’ve missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.

memories / music / photo / Re-Listening / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
12
Dec 23

Hanging a memory

Today I learned that a hack saw, a fine-tooth blade designed to cut metal, will slice through plastic with no trouble. Go figure. The plastic I was cutting was a little winged flange near the top of one of the outdoor garbage cans. I’m sure it provides strength or stability, or both, to the rim, but it’s also tearing at the weather stripping in the trunk of my car.

It’s doing that because I have to take the garbage the seven miles to the convenience center. Today was that day, so I deployed the hacksaw. And, wouldn’t you know it, the can got in the trunk just that much easier. In the backseat, two more bags a tub of recycling and a handful of cardboard. It’d been two weeks since I’d made this run, hence the extra haul. It took three minutes to unload, and about 26 minutes to make the round trip.

It was sunny, but cold today. A bit windy. I talked myself out of a bike ride. Listen to your body, they say. I didn’t argue the point. I just didn’t feel enthusiastic about it, given the temperature. Tomorrow, then, when it’ll be two degrees warmer.

Besides, Joe The Older was outside. We have two neighbors named Joe. The one across the way is Joe The Older. Retired developer and buckle-winning horseman. He built most of this neighborhood. Knows everyone in the tri-county area. Related to Betsy Ross. Apparently an uncle of his once owned FDR’s favorite yacht. Stand there and talk to Joe The Older for a while and you’ll get a history lesson of the Forrest Gump order. He’s a delightful man.

Just this weekend we met Joe The Younger, who is on our side of the street. They’ve only been here about a year longer than us. He’s in regional sales. New dad. Keeps an impressive yard. Big, easy smile. And so this is how I will keep them straight: Joe The Older, and Joe The Younger.

Anyway, I had a plumbing question. Figured the wise older gentleman would have an answer. Turns out, he did! The answer: nothing. It’s the best kind of solution, really.

We chatted for a while, he was taking a break from washing his truck and telling me about the deer and the foxes and the neighbors and the soil. A man so thoroughly invested in the land he knows where the marl ends and the sand begins. I told him my seven soil category story. No one likes that story, but Joe The Older respected it. My kind of guy.

I finally framed this newspaper plate. It was a stressful little exercise, trimming aluminum to fit a frame with oversized tin snips. This plate is for the front page of a 2015 newspaper. It’s a one of a kind, so there were no do overs. I checked my measurements very carefully.

This is the campus newspaper that I advised a lifetime ago. Every year we got a few of the plates from the printer. We gave one to the outgoing editor-in-chief as a thank you and keepsake. I kept one too, and for this very reason.

I had Sydney in a class her freshman year. She was the quiet, smart one. Severely smart. Sat in the back. She just wanted to do the work. I don’t know how you can be that quiet and, still, have everyone around know what you’re about. She is kind. Everyone came to admire her. Everyone saw how hard she worked, and how talented she was. In her senior year of college she was a section editor of two local papers and the editor-in-chief of her campus paper. I think she took over at least one of those locals that year, too. She was also a 4.0 student. She had, and she earned, every accolade.

Sydney won a Pulitzer Prize last year for a national reporting story she worked on for the New York Times. I work that into every conversation I can. And that’s why I have this plate on display.

This was a successful newspaper. Alongside Sydney on that year’s editorial board there’s a big shot investigative reporter. There is a business owner, two people at different agencies. Another does PR for a national construction concern. One of the prominent writers is now the director of a museum out west. They’ve earned a lot of success for themselves in just a few short years. I think about them from time-to-time. And, now, I’ll have that to glance at. A Pulitzer Prize winner put that together in her early days, and I had the good fortune to work with her for four years.

I’m about two chats away from telling Joe The Older about it.

Let us return to the Re-Listening project, where I am playing all of my old CDs in the order in which I acquired them. I’m writing about them here to pad out the site a bit, but also to enjoy the trip down memory lane, and to publish some great music. And that’s where we are today, talking about a record that was published in 1992, but I bought it in 2004.

I bought it, in fact, on August 7th, 2004, the night that I was admitted to grad school. I went to the movies and bought two CDs that night. It was, as you might imagine, a big celebration.

The record was “Hollywood Town Hall,” by The Jayhawks. I’d just finished “Tomorrow the Green Grass,” and wanted to backfill the catalog, and so those CDs were older Jayhawks projects. They were as good a choice as graduate school was.

This is the first track. The right guitar, the dreamy organ, Gary Louris with Mark Olson singing the harmony. It was a terrific start.

The singer-songwriter Joe Henry wrote the liner notes. Today it reads like this is a concept album. Henry has worked with the Jayhawks on a few records, but he doesn’t appear in the credits here. Maybe he was just being clever.

The album cover feels like that, too. Someone had to drag that sofa out into the snow for this photo series.

The album, which got to 11 on the Billboard Heatseekers chart and number 192 on the Billboard 200, takes its name from that place, population 1,060 in 1992. It’s no bigger today. I wonder if anyone there knew the record and enjoyed it. It certainly seems out of place in 1992. There was grunge, late-stage guitar rock, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston and Ice Cube. And then up in Minnesota these guys were playing music that sounded like the Flying Burrito Brothers.

This song is one of my favorite alterna-pop tunes of all time. I play this on repeat every time I play the record. Since 2004 I have occasionally tried to figure out what falling rain and water sounds like. The paper and napkins I’ve scribbled on, trying to balance onomatopoeia, simile and metaphor. To everyone’s delight, I never get it right.

So this was August 2004 for me. I listened to these records, and probably not much else, for the next six months. So, apologies to anyone who had to be in a car with me. Because of that, though, when I saw them live late the next spring my future wife was well versed in the catalog.

In the next installment of the Re-Listening project we’ll hear The Jayhawks’ 1997 record. I bought that one the same night, but the five years between them was a lot of time. The “Sound of Lies” was different. A bit out of step, and out of time, but their own time. Karen Grotberg returned, Marc Olson left, Tim O’Reagan stepped in. The band was re-shaping itself, in the studio, in front of their fans. The experiment continued with sweaty drinks and art galleries. Or something. For me it was sunny days, blaring stereo speakers and trying to figure out what that one sound was … but we’ll get to that.

cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off
11
Dec 23

Bring on finals

This is the last week of classes and, near the end of the week, the beginning of finals. The pace of things will simultaneously slow, and also speed up. It’s a fun time!

The highlight of the weekend was right … here. Or somewhere in this mile.

This was mile 20,000 on a bike for me. It took two bikes, two bike computers, three helmets, three pairs of cycling shoes and probably five or six chains, but I made it to 20,000 miles right there, on that 35 mile ride. The cycling spreadsheet — yes, I have one of those — told me it was coming. It’s a round number, sure, but arbitrary enough. So I’ve been eyeing it for a good while now. And then, suddenly, it seemed like I might hit it this year. And then it was inevitable. And now, here we are.

What that means is … nothing really. It’s just a number, right? It isn’t even a big number, not really. What means something is the quality of the rides. And they’re good. And this one was delightful. When I wasn’t huffing and puffing I was smiling at the opportunity. It was December and I was out in shorts and a short sleeve jersey. An early Christmas gift, really.

It also means I’m going to start shopping for a new bike. OK, it means I’ll start looking in the spring. Getting a new ride and watching it sit inside for two or three months seems a little cruel. Hitting 20,000 miles was the goal, though. And even though I could see it coming on the spreadsheet, now I have to make bike decisions.

That’ll be difficult. Maybe I should have set the goal at 25,000 or 30,000.

Time, once again, for the site’s most popular weekly feature. Let’s check in with the kitties. I say that every week, but everyone agrees, and the stats prove the point: this is the most popular thing on the site. The cats think so, most of all.

Phoebe, in a cabinet, surveying all of the lands and fields within her dominion. It is full of abundant resources and majestic views. All of her subjects are at peace, and all of her needs are meet. It is a bountiful realm, and she is pleased.

Poseidon, meanwhile, the court jester, is staying warm with the radiant hit from the oven.

You could stop that, but his neediness will exceed your patience, every time.

It is definitely snuggle season. If they’re together, it is too cold.

In the 20s at night. It is too cold.

I saw this combine on Sunday. There are still a few cornfields around that the farmers have to get to — fields where dent corn is drying I assume — but they are still out there doing the weekend work.

And I just wanted to remind myself, once more, that I saw a nice concert Friday night.

We’re still singing about it today.