Fragments From Floyd

It hasn’t been many years since I bragged that I could do pretty much whatever I wanted. My minor aches and pains plus some slight decline in energy and motivation really didn’t slow me down if I set my mind to a task. And nine years ago on a chilly May morning, we had ourselves a task.

I watched the backhoe tear down the outhouse that stood where our new garden now stands. (I need to get you some more pictures.)

That was the beginning of six months of hard physical work on this place that I knew at the time would not be possible for Ann and me down the road a few years. This ticking clock was a great motivator to “just do it”. Now it’s done, been done, and we’re on the backside–a fact the last birthday has written in very large letters.

Turning sixty has been a sobering milestone for me and the illusions of still being “the kid” with unlimited possibilities ahead has pretty well passed. I’ve had the feeling with this largish round number of cycles that this just might be the final approach to the end of the line. We’ve finally become “old” I realize and accept.

But I had the tiny revelation this morning that I ought not pack my bags just yet. The vision passed before me of all the years ahead spread out in a receding timeline. One of them–only God knows and He’s not telling–will be the year I die. But let’s think about the future this way:

If I live as long as my mother is today, I’ll last until 2030. If I match my father-in-law’s age, 2041; my grandmother’s when she died, 2043. There could well be an awful lot of new days out there for us.

Given those real possibilities of life expectancy, I guess I’d better get back to thinking about what it is I want to do when I grow up.

Each morning even yet is full of new possibilities–not all of the ones available on the menu ten years ago, but enough to make the selection an interesting proposition over the morning’s coffee.

And you’d think maybe 60 years of experience, skill, perspective and a smattering of wisdom could be useful for something between now and 2043.

Think I’ll fetch another cup and ponder that idea a bit.

Some–perhaps many–of our virtual technologies separate us from the real events and places and times of our lives. That is exactly what so much of computer life consists of for some folks–the virtual travel, adventure, action and detachment of simulated realities that removes the X-boxer, the Second Lifer from the mundane grind of the ordinary.

Discovered this morning on my Mac a technological wonder that is like a digital knitting machine that does just the opposite of what I described above. It weaves together a tapestry of memories, experience and familiar faces using my photographs–tens of thousands of them–into a single image mosaic of another composition in time and place: a screen saver that creates an amalgam of a photographer’s life.

It begins like a normal image-based screen saver with a single image on the screen. After a short pause, that image recedes into the distance, becomes one of a thousand, and other images appear in rows and columns, also receding, growing smaller and smaller as they move into the “distance” of the monitor screen.

In the end, each of the several thousand images on the screen become a pixel in another image in the group of images I’ve selected. A first image of Ann’s Falls is joined by scanned images of our children, the dog in the snow–Buster, our dog that died in 2004; friends who visited us here so long ago I’d forgotten; various silly blog posts going back to 2002–images aggregated and oriented as needed to build light and shadow, blues, greens and golds to give shape to the “whole” of our house in the fall. This then starts the sequence again, building another whole from fragments of memory and light.

Life is like this after all–each conversation, each view out the window a metaphor mosaic of all the days, memories, language, and experience come before, nothing lost, receding into the distance called the past–pixels in our evolving grasp of who and where we are and were.

You can watch a demo of this here.

I’ve always like this word. Flow. And wondered if it were both noun and verb that captures sound and feel of the thing described. To say it is like breathing. Try it. The smooth round word pours from the tongue, teeth, lips of its own weight, moving without effort downstream, downtime, immediate, eternal and suspended.

But forgive me. That was just my hands warming to the white page empty space morning.

FLOW. That was where I was heading. For Love of Water. Hot at Sundance, not yet available on DVD. I’m thinking that, if our Earth Day event raises water awareness in our community, THIS would be a great documentary for later in the summer–maybe by then a showing in the new library conference room! Do take a look at the video clips from and about the film and the issues in it over at Waterblogged.

Flow. Work flow. Better now, thanks for asking (I know you were about to.) I am thoroughly happy to be fully reborn into the Mac world, and working more efficiently than ever. Logitech Revolution wireless mouse is a pleasure, the scroll wheel freeflowing smooth as silk, buttons all customized within each application to save keystokes and mouse miles. DevonThinkPro (the only software other than AppZapper purchased since getting the system) is a bit hard to learn but now I’m using it for all my major writing projects.

Flow. We speak of time flowing, like water out my window flickering in Goose Creek falling from a higher place called the past, heading downstream bound for the future, relentless, silent beyond the glass, inexorable, time flows. Which is to say: I’ve seen signs of the current of time towards the future that is yet another spring. (We see only three score and ten of them, three score and twenty if God is gracious. How precious each spring becomes knowing there are not many left). Coltsfoot. One bloom only by the lilac out the back door, west facing–a scout sent to report back to legions of its kind teeming just below ground.

I’m sorry, but for winter images I’ve gone back to February past. Today, we’re expecting temperatures in the low 70s. I had planned to cut firewood, but that seems unlikely. It will be too warm. The ticks will be out. The road is a muddy mess–turned to slop the way it usually does–in mid-March.

We’re talking with our contractor friend again today about getting up 10 foot posts and a bit of a tool shed toward what we hope will be our first successful gardening year following several years of planting a “Deer Salad Park”.

It promises to be a busy time by April. The “tweens” during which I had hoped to sandwich some actual accomplished work goals are disappearing. It is no longer winter. It is not quite spring.

I miss writing. I miss my camera. I miss the smell of garden soil. Its time to get the gears to mesh again, gain traction, steer wisely. Life is short.

We’re watching “Beyond the Blue”–the musicalized version of Bobby Darin’s (Walden Robert Cassotto’s) life story. Kevin Spacey does a darn good job of singing–not lip-syncing–Darin’s best known (and some lesser known) tunes.

Not surprisingly, the movie opens with the syncopated opening bars of what most people these days would immediately recognize as “Mack the Knife.”

And yet, as I listened, it came to me that I remembered this same melody, slowed by half and played in a melancholy stranger-in-the-rain sort of way. I had known this tune very early, before age six maybe, and only now had those remnant memories resonated with Darin’s 1959 rendition. I was 11.

The song was written for the Three Penny Opera (1928) with lyrics by Bertold Brecht–though not exactly today’s lyrics, and no doubt, at least in the German to English translation, it never would have made it to the top of the charts.

Turns out, it reached the American public first by way of Louis Armstrong in 1954. That must be the version I’m remembering from farther back.

Here are a couple of stanzas from the original. Hardly makes you want to snap your fingers, eh?

Jenny Towler was found
With a knife in her chest
And on the wharf walks Mack the Knife,
Who knows nothing about all this.

And the minor-aged widow,
Whose name everyone knows,
Woke up and was violated
Mack, what was your price?

Romancing the camera

One final image, an abstraction of winter from one ephemeral half hour last week. It is this, and also it is for me a holographic fragment that holds all the information in the larger whole.

Wholeness. Will it ever exceed our grasp? The camera’s eye and memory and words are hands with which we grasp but cannot hold that larger Truth that speaks to some–but not all–in nature.

Are you a naturalist? Is there a regenerative and revelatory power in meadow or woods–cathedrals not made by hands, as John Muir would have it–that sustains and nurtures you?

And what do you think of the term “romantic” to capture the essence of the poetic versus the cold-objective term for those who wander and wonder in nature? Are you a Romantic Naturalist?

Join the discussion about the nature of naturalists at RomanticNaturalist.

And note the sidebar button to the Nature Blog Network. This list (I’m not included as I just added the script this morning) is likely to grow and morph over time. Consider this a site worth bookmarking.

Click for larger Image 

It was the striking sundog (or parhelion) that sent me scrambling inside for my camera. By the time I got back out, only a much lesser one persisted but I shot it anyway.

Inside on the monitor, it’s muted colors against the dark background pointed farther out, into Hubble’s deep space view of cosmic clouds of stellar dust. I morphed the image toward that interpretation, to remind me of the small and close that speaks of the larger and more distant realities always just beyond our hurried attention.

The microcosm reflects the macrocosm. Indeed.

Framing a single cloud gives no more comprehension of the sky than photographing a single wave can convey the vastness of the ocean. But it can remind, can point the way.

A single day, a whole lifetime, too–mere glimpses of eternity. We see a slice with every tick of the clock and should feel blessed or cursed that, among all creatures, we know.

I awake on these single digit mornings in this century-old house and don my winter-morning uniform, grumbling in the cold. Long johns, wool socks, heavy sweats, two shirts and a bathrobe. The house won’t hold heat to keep it more than 60 degrees inside when it’s 3 outside and the wind–even high over the ridges above us and not down where we live–still sucks the warmth through every unsealed joint and chink out into the night air.

What must it have been like a hundred years ago sitting on the side of a bed at 4 a.m. in this very room, no insulation in walls or attic whatsoever, thin rugs rippling on the floor as the wind blew through the stacked-rock foundation? The fireplaces–three of them–would have sucked more heat out than the dying morning embers added. It would have been well down into the 40s most likely. I’m sure you could see your breath while donning what clothes you might have had to bring some feeling back into cold feet and hands.

There were still coals left in the stove this morning; I’m making a point to select the high-heat wood from the stack, saving the all-night logs for just before bed, so rekindling will be easy the next morning without using up too much of the stuff that has to be split from the bigger pieces. My knee injury from a week ago today still hinders me from full duty at the woodpile.

The usual workday duty of scraping Ann’s windshield was a pleasant obligation today, the crescent moon’s dark 90% a visible shadow, a bright Venus (I’m thinking) not so far off to the east, both just above the treeline from the house, just below it as I stood there in the dark scraping frost. What a wonderful world. I should not have read the morning news first thing. Bad habit.

The creek is making that muffled winter sound whimpering from under the ice; wind in trees like reeds whistles away to the southeast. And I had thoughts of spring.

In April I will celebrate the second anniversary of my 30th birthday–an historic event which, at the time, hung heavy with the portent of passage from youth into the responsibilities of full adult life. Doubled now, another threshold looms. Near 60 and on the cusp of codgerdom, I’m inclined to look both ways in time before going on.

I will ask your indulgence to ramble. Isn’t that is how us old guys in our golden years are cast-maudlin, sentimental, all gushy and teary with nostalgia? I might as well play the part for a few minutes.

In 1978 we lived in Wytheville in the drafty, rambling house on Withers Road. Our daughter (who a few weeks back visited us from South Dakota with her two daughters) was five. Our son would be born in December of that year, and he, alas, will have his own milestone #30 to celebrate or lament later this year.

A few pair of button-fly bellbottoms hung in the back of my closet, but I was most comfortable in my Levis and plaid flannel. The floppy-collared pastel polyester leisure suits spawned by the Bee Gees, “Grease” and “Saturday Night Fever” that year were appalling even then. But by 1978, married-with-children, I was no slave to fashion or the top-40.

It had been eight years since the first Earth Day, a 1970 happening that coincided with my entry as a Zoology major to graduate school at Auburn. The energy of consensus and good will toward the planet was infectious and hope for a healthier, more sustainable world for our children ran high. The greening of America, then the world, was surely at hand! By 1978, I was teaching in the biology department at the Community College, wildflower field-tripping with the earth-children, stalking the wild asparagus, feeling the love.

Gas mileage was going up, CFCs were coming down, and Ohio rivers no longer caught fire. Computers made the cover of Time Magazine that year. Technology was going to make us more efficient, more globally integrated and cooperative–more informed, for sure. Wiser, even. Things were looking better in the Middle East; the Camp David Accord offered hope of new civility in that unsettled cradle of civilization.

Perhaps just being a healthy thirty years old in those prosperous times imbued us with a passion for positive change. There were slippery slopes in world politics, the environment and in our personal and cultural indulgences, sure, but there was also a confidence that collectively, we could overcome the devils of our day.

Even President Carter espoused ethical stewardship toward a sustainable future for all. Think globally, act locally. What could stop us? “Go home and love your family” Mother Theresa answered the next year when asked what we could do to promote world peace.

And in the end, I’ve found her words perhaps the best advice to give my son-and all our children-as they confront the demons and slippery slopes of their second thirty years.

Do as we say, not as we do. Be rather than seem. Think generations ahead. And never wear polyester.

We’ll check back with you in 2038 and pray you will have succeeded in those places where my generation has not yet learned well enough how to care through time for the earth and for each other.

Published in Roanoke Star-Sentinel for Jan 3, 2008 / Fred First