We have a large honeysuckle in the backyard. It grows over a little metal trellis, which we had to replace because it was rusting through. Also, the bush had overtaken it, grown top heavy and had become unmanageable. So, a few weeks ago, we cut the thing back. We had to abuse it pretty well to extract the old trellis which was buried deep into the soil and supported by some rebar and other fantastic off-the-cuff solutions the previous owners had installed.
That was the better part of an afternoon.
Anyway, this evening while I was strolling around outside taking a break, I wandered over to see how it was doing. You’ll be pleased to know that it seems our honeysuckle is as hardy as most any of its kind.
It looks weird right now, and it will require a bit of training and some actual pruning — which hadn’t happened in a long, long while, apparently — but it is still green and shows signs of new leaf growth.
There’s probably a metaphor in there somewhere. Feel free to fill in the blanks.
This honeysuckle has a crimson flower. And, like all honeysuckle in my adulthood, it doesn’t seem to have the amount of sweet nectar of the first ones I ever discovered as a child. Those all yielded yellow and white flowers back home, and they could be unruly masses, growing and thriving most anywhere. At our house growing up, the previous owners had strung honeysuckle along a set of clotheslines they didn’t use. It took years to get all of that out. But, in the process, you could enjoy the flowers. I still clearly remember learning about the treat inside those flowers. It’s a fond memory.
Honeysuckle always seemed its most fragrant right about the time that school wound down. Maybe that’s why I wandered over there tonight to check on it.
Anyway, the grading is now done. I have, in the last 10 days, read and evaluated some 650-plus pages of undergraduate work. A lot of it quite good, and some spectacularly so! Now I’m going to give my eyes a rest. Tomorrow I have to turn in the grades.
photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on As my deadline approacheth, I make good progresseth14 May 25
I may have been disturbing Phoebe’s attempt at a nap. She might have been judging me for it.
She was definitely put out by my interrupting her sunbathing in the western window.
Poseidon, seen here purring while having his head carefully for the camera, got into a pot in the sink, and enjoyed a bit of sauce before I could stop him.
He is embarrassed we noticed.
The kitties are doing great, thanks for asking. Though they aren’t doing much of the school work around here.
This week I’m reading finals and final projects and doing so under deadline. Everything has to be submitted by Friday. I’ll have approximately 130 papers to work through between now and then. But before I get back to that, here’s a bit on the weekend.
We headed north on Saturday evening to see the in-laws and dote on my mother-in-law. My father-in-law made nice steaks on the grill for us Saturday. Sunday we attended her church. They’ve just gotten a new minister. He’d been serving there in an itinerant capacity, but this was apparently his first service in the full time role.
He did a youth service in the middle of things. It’s an old church and there aren’t a lot of kids there, but the minister said, since it was Mother’s Day, he would sing a nursery rhyme that his mother sang to him. And he wanted the kids, and us, to think about it. So he worked slowly through “Hey Diddle Diddle” line by line, leaving time for the youthful reaction to what is going on in this tale.
When he got to the “the cow jumps over the moon” part, a little boy yelled out, “THAT DEFIES PHYSICS!”
We had dinner at their favorite Italian restaurant. They did not have what I ordered, so I ordered something else. But that’s fine. We’ve been going there for years, it is always terrific.
Today, my father-in-law wanted to take us fishing before we headed back home. So we went to this very nice private club, where he has an in. He brought enough waders and rods for all of us. He paired up with his daughter, and his friend, who is a big shot financial guy and a member of this club, got stuck with me.
I say stuck, because there was a great deal of teaching going on. I’ve been fly fishing exactly one time. I’ve cast a fly on exactly two occasions. (The first time being a parking lot, and I’m not sure that counts.)
Anyway, the scenery at this creek is much, much better than that parking lot.
The full cast was a challenge. I figured out how to roll cast with a little coaching. Doing a sidearm cast was the most natural thing in the world. It seems I could put the fly wherever I wanted with that method.
Anyway, I had a very patient teacher, and I needed it.
I caught five or six fish. Each of them off the hook and back in the water, though I did stop for a moment to admire the two rainbow trout I caught.
So now I’ve caught trout. I think, somehow, everyone here thinks I’ve never been fishing before. Never caught fish before. I grew up on boats and on the shores of lakes and ponds. But fly fishing is new to me. And this was fun enough, but just standing out under the trees and listening to the ware would have been a great day, too. I’m pretty sure I remember the day that I didn’t have to actually go fishing to enjoy fishing. I was with my uncle on his boat, on the river he lived his entire life on. It was peaceful. I was probably in junior high or high school. I thought about all of those experiences a lot today. I learned how to catch small pond fish and catfish with my grandfather. I learned a little bit about bass fishing from some family friend, father figure types. I learned about trot lines and how to catch everything else from my uncle.
And they were all good teachers, too. Teaching a person to fish is more than a proverb. It’s a rite of passage, I think. But they didn’t know much about fly fishing, I guess. There’s not as much of that going on in the Deep South. But up here, in New England, toss out a line and you’re liable to snag someone, like Joe, who was helping me today.
You’ve never seen anyone so determined to help someone else catch anything before. It was kind of him to spend a coaching me up. Never put the first line in the water himself, but he was urging me on at every turn.
It’s a well-stocked creek. The biggest challenge, for me, was getting the fly where I wanted it to go. The biggest challenge for him was patience, and finding new ways to tell me to stop breaking my wrist. He was great, though. And it was kind of my father-in-law to make the arrangements and take us, of course.
But, really, I could have stood there listening to the water all day. He loaned me some new waders. State of the art, he said. They were comfortable and kept me dry and not at all cold. He said they cost $900, making them easily the most expensive thing I’ve ever worn.
And that’s how you know I won’t be taking up fly fishing anytime soon.
It’s Friday, you should always do something fun on Friday. Some of us might not have conventional work weeks, and that’s great. Your Friday could be any day of the week. That just means you have two Fridays. Mark them both accordingly. And, today, we’re going to do that with a bit of music.
So we’ll return to the Re-Listening project, in which I am very behind. The Re-Listening project, if you haven’t been paying the closest attention, is where I am listening to all of my old CDs in the order of their acquisition — well, mostly, I’ve got some of the CD books confused. It’s a great trip down memory lane. And, I figured, I could write about it here. It seemed like a good idea at the time! Pad out the site … add some music … have a memory or two. And mostly it is a good idea. Unless you don’t like my music. Some of it is a little obscure. Some of it regional. Some of it is very obvious. None of it is astounding. So let’s just assume you like some of it, that it was a good idea when I started this a bunch of years ago now.
You know what has always been a good idea? This next album, which not a lot of people heard, and that’s a shame. The band Mr. Henry released two records, their debut in 1998 and “40 Watt Fade” in 2000, each on minor labels. Their blend of Americana was at the right place at the right time for alt radio. And while it was released in 2000, I picked it up in 2007, and it has never, ever disappointed.
I think I listened to it three times in the car this go-around.
This is the first track, sneaking that organ in there was pretty genius. The chorus here is probably the most reductive thing on the record.
By the third track, the choruses get much better, but the lyrics throughout are pretty generously full of imagery.
At which point it would be easy for me to embed the entire album. Here’s the brilliance of the fourth track, for instance. If you ever needed a ballad for hurtling down the highway in the middle of the night, they’ve got you covered. Once you get around the distortion in the twangy guitars they’ve really got something here. Though it feels like it needs another lyric.
It’s weird how I append that to non-specific memories of so much music: there I was, speeding up the interstate from here to there …
Just to prove I’m not playing the whole tracklist, we’ll skip ahead to the seventh offering, which is fundamentally a perfect song for the period, plus it has an unironic accordion.
In a similar vein, but somehow even better, if that’s possible, is this one, which trades in cliches, lends the record it’s title, offers an acoustic guitar driven chorus and more of those nice little harmonies the band was figuring out. Also, it sounds like a bunch of motivational posters.
Don’t worry, I’ve found the pattern on some of my musical preferences. I haven’t named this one, but maybe I should call it the Tim O’Reagan genre. He’s not in this band, but this sound, a sort of wearily optimistic traveler’s lament, is his sound. Also, there’s a lyric in here that’s so obvious, but still blows me away, decades later, and typies the album for me.
U-Haul chases big county lines
No FM reception
just a box of B-sides
There’s a real lament in there somewhere, and an obvious word play. Maybe the only one you can make there. But it surely does work for me.
So Mr. Henry split up sometime after 2000. There’s not a lot out there. The lead singer, Dave Slomin is now working on a new project, which is called Waiting for Henry, in a not-at-all confusing way. Waiting for acknowledges Mr. Henry. The bassist is playing with The Gravy Boys, which have released four Americana records. The drummer, Neil Nunziato, just published an Instagram post saying the band will play a one-night-only show in New York next month.
Maybe it’ll go well and they’ll figure out something for the future.
The next album is a Hootie & The Blowfish disc, a band which I enjoy mostly un-apologetically. Their South Carolina sound appeals to my South Carolina sensibilities. Anyway, “Musical Chairs” debuted in 1998. For some reason I didn’t buy it until 2007, apparently. It peaked at number 4 on the Billboard charts and was certified platinum, but music people were disappointed. Music people are only interested in unit sales, and have no appreciation for the come down that the hottest acts experience. And Hootie and the Blowfish came down somewhat. Their 1994 debut was certified platinum 22 times. The 1996 followup went platinum three times. So I guess the writing was on the wall with the music execs. But, come on, how can you expect anyone to even approach that again?
Anyway, they hadn’t tinkered with the formula, and if you liked it in ’94, you would have enjoyed this in ’98. Or ’07, or today.
This might be my favorite song on the record. Every time it plays, I will play it again. And maybe more. That’s the memory: the re-plays. There’s just a lot going on there to appreciate in two minutes and 21 seconds.
Any song that name-checks an Aunt Inez will get my appreciation. Especially if you just casually drop in where she’s from. I think that’s just a rule in our part of the world.
This could also by my favorite song.
I feel like a dare was involved here. “What if we put Darius in a leisure suit and gave him a lounge act vibe?” It amuses me.
The hidden track could also be my favorite track on the disc. So there are easily three favorites, and some other strong stuff on here, too.
I think I saw Hootie and the Blowfish when they were touring supporting this album. Probably an ampitheatre show, maybe in Atlanta. (Why is 1998 suddenly so fuzzy?)
And so are we. Touring that is. Lower New England, specifically. It’s a quick Mother’s Day trip for us. And a happy Mother’s Day to all those who celebrate, as well!
