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Since we seem to on the topic of dogs today, go over to BlueRidgeBlog and see Marie's image. We see this often from over in the pasture and know the air up there is some kinda cold. Sometimes you see traces of a complete circle and the sun dog images at Google Images show good specimens.
Wanna see more near-heavenly wonders? Check out Atmospheric Optics. And keep your eyes open, people. Tis an amazing world out there.
We're hoping he will grow into it, you know, like a misshappen teenager out of proportion-- all legs or trunk or front teeth. You just hope that time will bring all the parts into some kind of rough agreement and he or she will look like parts all assembled from the same species at least. And so it goes with the pupster. You see, he has a point.
Maybe this is common to all yellow labs. Maybe being black, we just couldn't see it so prominently on black labs Zachary or Buster as on Tsuga, the yellow lab pup. But he has a topknot that could be most embarrassing in adulthood if the current mountain atop his cranium doesn't finally resolve into a more molehill-like aspect.
We really don't want him to have to wear a cap all his life to hide a deformity.
Ann asks "Should we have somebody look at it?"
"No" I say in my scholarly way, "it is just a prominent saggital crest (scroll down to the bobcat skull sideview) characteristic of the carnivores. Strong jaw muscles need a prominent place to insert on the bones they pull against in order to do their work". But Dr. Science is not sure of this. The dog could be a freak. There is cause for concern. Or maybe he'll grow into it. Ya think?
But then, everything's got to have a point. Right Oblio?
This from Indigo Insights, whose author credits a certain "Don from the mountains of Virginia" who I'm sure would not mind having his wise petowner rules passed along by another mountaineer:
______________________________
Dear Dogs and Cats,
When I say to move, it means go someplace else, not switch positions with each other so there are still two of you in the way.
The dishes with the paw print are yours and contain your food. The other dishes are mine and contain my food. Please note, placing a paw print in the middle of my plate and food does not stake a claim for it becoming your food and dish, nor do I find that esthetically pleasing in the slightest.
The stairway was not designed by NASCAR and is not a racetrack. Beating me to the bottom is not the object. Tripping me doesn't help, because I fall faster than you can run.
I cannot buy anything bigger than a king size bed. I am very sorry about this. Do not think I will continue to sleep on the couch to ensure your comfort. Look at videos of dogs and cats sleeping; they can actually curl up in a ball. It is not necessary to sleep perpendicular to each other stretched out to the fullest extent possible. I also know that sticking tails straight out and having tongues hanging out the other end to maximize space used is nothing but sarcasm.
My compact discs are not miniature Frisbees.
For the last time, there is not a secret exit from the bathroom. If by some miracle I beat you there and manage to get the door shut, it is not necessary to claw, whine, try to turn the knob, or get your paw under the edge and try to pull the door open. I must exit through the same door I entered.
In addition, I have been using bathrooms for years, canine attendance is not mandatory.
The proper order is kiss me, THEN go smell the other dog's butt. I cannot stress this enough. It would be such a simple change for you.
To pacify you I have posted the following message on our front door:
Rules for Non-Pet Owners Who Visit and Like to Complain About Our Pets:
1. They live here. You don't.
2. If you don't want their hair on your clothes, stay off the furniture.
3. I like my pet a lot better than I like most people.
4. To you, it's an animal. To me, he/she is an adopted son/daughter who is short, hairy, walks on all fours and doesn't speak clearly.
5. Dogs and cats are better than kids. They eat less, don't ask for money all the time, are easier to train, usually come when called, never drive your car, don't hang out with drug-using friends, don't smoke or drink, don't worry about buying the latest fashions, don't wear your clothes, don't need a gazillion dollars for college, and if they get pregnant, you can sell the results.
UPDATE: I've just learned from Mr. Indigo that the story above originated here in Floyd County! Small world after all.
The following is from a short piece entitled "Why I Write Essays" by Wendell Berry.
..."When one receives a divine gift, one must be glad of it; one must be grateful for it; and one must take good care of it.
The obligation of giving care, of returning stewardship for divine gifts, calls us to be responsible heirs of other parts of our cultural birthright; it calls us to be good artists. I use the word in its fullest and most correct sense. The arts are ways of making, not only the works of the so-called "fine arts," but also all the other things we need: I mean the arts of food-growing, cooking, clothing, building, and so on.
To make things in a way that answers the requirements of good stewardship, we need both good artistry and considerable breadth of mind. It requires a mind that is at least broad enough to recognize its own ignorance and to make the appropriate compensations. The broad-minded stewardly artist works close to home or lives close to work, is neighborly and humble, is concerned always to limit the potential damages of ignorance by limiting the scale of work."...
Now, very clearly, say "bow wow".
Can your dog do this?
I looked out the back door this morning and told Ann "We got us a skiff of snow last night". A WHAT? I thought a skiff was a small boat. Surely that's not where the word came from! Quick Batman! To the GoogleMobile!
Along with many other Gaelic words turned into English, skiff comes from the unpronouncable Gaelic word "sgiobhag"
Some more examples include:
One of my earliest and most indelible and influential memories of early television was the Sunday evening Disney productions. Of course we didn't want to miss the animations or Davy Crockett (but 
usually did since Sunday was church night.) But maybe my favorite were the 'specials' that dealt with nature. In particular, I'll never forget the mesmerizing images of time-lapse photography. Speeding bullets moved sluggishly into and through an inflated baloon. Drops of water sent crystal minarets rising and slowly falling back in a ballet hidden in a mundane raindrop. Perhaps even more awesome to a ten-year-old were the time lapse images of days and nights-- entire seasons-- passing while I watched; clouds and passing storms forming, boiling, giving way to sun in a flash of weather-drama; fruit in a bowl rotting before my eyes -- compressed into a moment-- dust to dust. And I am sure that seeing the life history of a sunflower distilled into a single short choreography did as much to point me toward an interest in botany as any other single influence.
Plants are alive in a way more like animals than one would think, and seeing them move is a wonderful eye-opener to this other world that we miss because of our peculiar limitations in time. Gather the kids around. Go watch Plants in Motion. Serving suggestion: start with "flowers" and "nastic movements".
The subject this time around at the Ecotone, where people write about place, is "Protecting Places".
This is broad topic to which most of you could contribute. What places do you feel warrant protection from development, exploitation or cultural homogenization? What suggestions do you have for changing attitudes in our society and government that resist conservation or preservation efforts? The biweekly posting is open to anyone with thoughts on this.
If you think you might be interested in the site-- posting or reading-- start maybe with the past Biweeklies here. On any given page, down at the bottom, click on "edit text of this page" and you'll see the format for entering you blog permalink and the title of your essay, should you decide to submit one. Just 'monkey see monkey do'. This time posts go on this page.
If anybody has questions re Ecotone or problems posting to it, let me know. We'd like to see a good turnout this time. Deadline for posts on "Protecting Place" are December 01-- or any time after that you get around to it if the deadline is too close to suit you.
Bananas: the zippered fruit of winter. Abundant. Cheap. And for topping the morning cereal now there will be no competition the disappeared berries of summer. You want fruit, you eat bananas, bucko. But alas, all is not well in cereal land. There ought to be a better way in this Goldilocks world where nobody is happy because bananas-- the lone breakfast fruit of months that have "R" in them-- are never 'just right'. Fear not for I have had an epiphany.
Ann buys bananas still warm off the boat-- lime green and hard as rocks-- for herself. I can't bear to look at them in this fetal preemie state and so we keep them in a dark grotto of the kitchen while they continue to gestate. In a day or two, still mostly green, she will think them at the peak of edibility, firm as a football, all chlorophyllic and smelling like grass clippings from under the mower. When they first begin to yellow, however, she tells me they're all mine. The smell of bananas honestly and fully and wonderfully ripe makes her gag. De gustibus non desparado, as they say.
Of course, some strains of Central American banana have a reputation for duplicity, and one must be on guard. I approach her yellowing hand-me-downs, therefore, with some skepticism. They may show yellowish tendencies and seem to those of us on the riper side of the maturation spectrum to approach edibility. But one whiff from a test-incision says right off that it will be another three days to a month before I can look that Cheshire Cat grinning fruit in the face again, and it goes back in the wicker basket under the microwave. There they will stay until the sentries of perfect banana ripeness-- our friends the fruit flies-- hover over these smile-shaped fruits that are finally, at last, showing those wonderful brown speckles against a black and yellow mosaic that indicate their time has possibly come.
On that happy morning when I wake up and know that the banana rights are mine, I take out the nearest table knife and slice amidships with hopeful skepticism. But I've been disappointed so many times to get my hopes up too high. Even now, it may not be that point of perfect ripeness we all long for. They may when cut-- regardless of what their peeling coloration tells you-- still smell of grass clippings and need another few hours or days, or maybe a month or more to be 'just right'. Who the heck knows. More likely by this stage, however, the skin will sag under the knife blade pressing down against the semi-solid mash inside: a condition called "squishy" in the trade. From the bruised incision a thick over-ripe custard will extrude, smelling of cloyingly-sweet banana taffee. This aroma will be followed immediately by a tiny flying circus of fruit flies, created of course, by spontaneous generation as we all know. Banana bread is in your future, my friend. Lots and lots of banana bread.
Bananas are the nobody's-happy fruit of winter, but the day is coming when this lamentable situation will end. Rejoice, brethren and sistren, I have seen the future. . . a time when over-ripe and under-ripe will no longer have meaning in the banana republic. Just as in the world of matrimony there is someone for everyone (and you may be living proof of this very fact), every banana is just right for someone in the world at some precise moment in time. In those wonderful days ahead we will teleport bananas across the known universe, from one kitchen to another, just like we send email attachments today! With the Universal Registry of Banana Preference, each person can have their breakfast fruit exactly like they like it! Not too green, not too ripe. It's gonna be glorious, ah man!
I am first to admit that this Divine Revelation could just be the Chlorphenirimine and Neosynephrin talking. Sure thing with this cold that my brain's not getting enough oxygen today. Just let me rant through the weekend. Maybe I'll be back to normal by Monday; which is no guarantee the quality of posts will go up, of course. Keep expectations low and you'll rarely be disappointed, grasshopper. And now, your Moment of zen:
Time Flies Like an Arrow…
… but fruit flies like bananas.
Update on the missing sidebar reported below (now 10 am Friday): Other reports of this prob this morning, then one saying it was back like it should be again. I'm open to any suggestions for how to problem-solve this MT issue, where I am clueless. I haven't made any template changes in a long time, so this is odd. BTW, of those who told me their browser, all are using the new Mac OS Safari. Hmm.
Got one report of weirdness going on in the right sidebar (disappearing to the bottom of the page and F5 or F11 doesn't help.) Anybody else having problems? Is there anybody out there in the blogosphere today at all to have problems? Anyone? Anyone?
Oh there is at least one Fragments reader today... someone googled "Fragments Virginia" from Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam. Yikes!
Does the Homogenization of Culture Disturb you? Download the full sized poster.
Beetle Harvests Moisture from Fog via World Changing, a blog about good things in a not-so-great world... via Rebecca's Pocket.
Beauty and the Beast ... Black Widow dressed to kill.
Save the Earth-- Dump Bush
A nice tale of courtship and finding the right one, via Happy Husband.
Anybody join me for a Turkey and Gravy Soda? Personally, I'd be happier tossing back a few Killians, then take my box of Kleenex and go to bed. Can a person learn to breathe through their ears? Some Thanksgiving. Sniff.
I was in no particular hurry yesterday afternoon. I loaded some cherry and poplar for next year's firewood and every little bit, I stood against the truck, resting, listening, being in the moment. Above me a sundog covered a circle of sky as wide as I could stretch my arms. The rains are coming. Across the creek, the house seemed too perfect, like the universal symbol for "farmhouse". The faintest trace of smoke lifted from what remained of the morning's fire in the woodstove. How quaint, I thought. How ordinary.
Last night, checking my visit logs, I found someone had read a poem I wrote last October and forgotten. It was the one below. (I changed it a bit from the original.) That I would have seen this scene and then been lead back to it by a stranger seemed to make it worthy of a post.
__________________________________
Drawn From Memory
From far away, a thin lazy ribbon of smoke
Rises from our chimney, vertical
Then above the treetops, moving east,
Sheared softly by a passing breath of air
That an hour ago hovered still over a pasture
Up in the light, beyond our world--
Bright air that flows serenely down into shadow
From the bright plateau above Middle Earth,
And carries our smoke like incense lightly to heaven.
I see the house, the smoke, through beginner's eyes
Its shape drawn in crayon by a child
And I remember houses of children--
A four year old's drawing on coarse lined paper drawn square
With a thick pencil, a triangle top and
Rectangular chimney skewed obliquely--
A looping curlyque of drawn smoke fixed above it
Young one, will your children's children
Draw instead a satellite dish on houses
When chimneys disappear and
The last wood stove goes cold?
It is a holiday. Ergo, I am sick. I have always been one of those responsible types who was too dedicated to my job role to get sick on company time (or school time back when). So, my body waits until a break to break down. Even now that I am not working a forty hour regular schedule, my metabolism still follows the old pattern. So today is brought to you by our sponsors-- Kleenex, Cepacol and Vaseline.
It's just a cold, and I'm way overdue. Haven't had one for several years. I am compelled to tell you, however, that this cold negates everything we've ever learned about "germ theory" and colds. Mine must have come either by spontaneous generation of microorganisms or as the results of a secret government biowarfare program fine tuned to Goose Creek. See, I haven't been around the requisite human aerosols to catch this sucker.
No, wait. I take that back. Church last Sunday. Likely mechanism: "sharing the peace" which involves lots of hand-shaking and such. Rename: "Sharing the P-neumonia".
In grammar school years, I was sick three Christmases in a row. While everybody else was decking the halls, my mother was decking my chest with a diaper pinned to my PJs, slathered in a thick paste of Vicks VapoRub. The stuff still smells like Christmas trees to me. So there I lay limp and puny on the couch, viewing the tree horizontally, vicariously enjoying everyone else's enjoyment with new skates and candy and such. Then, slop, here come the medicated diaper emanating those tear-gas vapors, and even the visuals went dark. Terrible times, those.
But somehow, just the recollection of that greasy gray salve has opened up my snuffy nose miraculously just now! But wait-- there's more coming to me. Tell me if I am alone in this heinous childhood indignity: It was not enough to pin on the biowarfare diaper. No. There were orifices available.
Two dollops went up the nostrils. And the coup de gras -- a fingerful went to the back of the tongue (the memory evokes the gag reflex) precisely there were all the bitter taste papillae congregated for just such a moment. I think that since my childhood, this practice has become illegal under the Geneva Convention except in a few third world countries that we usually associate with inhumane treatment of prisoners.
Well, you can see I'm delirious. I won't be held accountable for anything I might say today. Being a holiday, there won't be anybody reading blogs today anyway, so what da hey? Oh no. Where are the Kleenex. ah aH AH... watch out! the monitor! nooooooooooooooooo......
Just so I can say I have something to show for my blog-free discipline this week, here are two paragraphs from the middle of a rewrite from last year I am working on. It is tough going, but it's going. This is part of a retrospective where I am describing the period of time when I first moved back to Virginia and was trying to adjust to isolation and purposelessness, cold wind, and fog.
___________________________
"Trapped inside and blown to tatters the first step beyond the door, I paced the tiny cabin floor like an animal that Saturday, back and forth, feeding the cheerless wood stove miserly bites when I could see my breath inside. Cartoons on the TV were no comfort. The cat was no company. How I could possibly fill two empty days of this harsh foretaste of the long winter to come--fill them with anything that would take my mind somewhere, anywhere but here? The confinement became a worse suffering than the cold and by mid-day the walls had almost sucked the life from me.
Layered in winter garb, I found work making kindling on the lee side of the house, under the deck. Sheltered from the abrasive full force of the wind there, only the eddies of cold would spill over the roof and lick their way into my gloves and down my neck under the old plaid scarf. Then one tendril of air lifted the smell of the cedar-lined closet from that scarf-- the aroma of a safe place in the home we had just abandoned forever. The spiced, clear smell of cedar ambushed me. The truth of it took me to a place where I had belonged, had been in control, and thought I knew what lay ahead. Could this have been only a few months ago? The familiar balm of cedar spoke of age and security and warmth. It mocked my cold misery, its memory provoked the loneliness that faced me in the winter ahead. Smells can be cruel in their bluntness and honesty. Under that plaid scarf a sob swelled and lifted and left on the wind. It tumbled down over the garden fence, south, toward North Carolina."
Buster, he ain't. I suppose the time will never come when we forget Buster's ways of doing things and comparing them to the Ruling Beast of the house. Sometimes, the differences are more apparent than others. Yesterday was one of those days.
"Buster, ya wanna go to Puppy Camp?" we'd ask, and the big black dog went all wiggly. He loved to go to the vet for whatever reason, didn't matter. He loved the tidal wave of exotic smells, loved all the gals there, enjoyed the ride to town as if he were going to, well, camp! Getting T-man to town yesterday for his last rabies shot, was, as we expected, a two-human undertaking. I drove, Ann sat in the back seat of the new Forester, twisted 180 degrees at the hips administering to Hisself, and the dog rode unhappily in the back-- howling, warbling and whining even with constant reassurances and lots of treats. It is a very long way to town.
Once at Puppy Camp, Buster hopped right out of the front seat of the truck. (Tsuga may never be trustworthy to ride up front with the driver!) In his over-exuberance one time, Buster did knock down two of the staff in his eagerness to get to his bunk, so he got special treatment and was let in through the back door by way of the fenced yard beside the building. That is the last place I ever saw the old boy five months ago, wagging his black tail, happy to be among friends again. Tsuga is barely containable with the choke chain and leash, and got his first score yesterday, knocking one of the girls on her keister while we were trying to weigh him. (She's fine, it was funny. Tsuga's fine too. He weighs 57 pounds and is exactly five months old today!)
When we got home, we took our usual walk around the pasture, and Tsuga rolled in turkey poop. But that was not the end of the excitement for the day. The last big event was not the least bit cute or funny and could have had a very unhappy ending. At least we were home when it happened.
You may know how it is when accidents happen. Afterward, you can't quite put the sequence in order, cannot say what happened first or second, what you were thinking, who did what. So this will be hard to explain, and like many accidents, its occurrence was so improbable and odd that I probably shouldn't even try to describe the particulars. I'll do my best to distill the details.
We had finished dinner. Ann was puttering around in the kitchen while I sat at the table reading the mail. Tsuga, as usual for this time of day, was helping with the dinner dishes.(Come on. Tell me your pooch doesn't lick your plates clean.) I could hear out of the corner of my ear that he was particularly intent on one plate, scooting it along on the hearth in front of the woodstove. I should describe a few things about the stove at this point. There is an ash lip or tray under the door-- a shelf the width of the stove, three inches deep, curved up slightly at its free end. In the center of the stove, the draft control is a metal rod that extends about three inches beyond the ash tray and is tipped by a wound brass knob that dissipates heat. Here's what happened, best as I can tell:
The dog had pushed that plate under the front of the woodstove but wasn't quite through with his job on it yet. We were both ignoring him. And here's where it gets fuzzy. Ann suddenly is screaming something... help him help him oh no what'll we do!... The dog is thrashing about wildly at the center of the stove as if he was being pulled into it, held somehow, and he is wailing the most terrifying scream of fear you can imagine. I rushed over and could not understand what was happening. The dog's top and bottom jaw were apparently locked somehow on the ash tray and he couldn't get them off; or somehow he'd gotten the damper rod end lodged in his throat (too?). The more we tried to dislodge him the more terror-stricken he became, still shrieking like an animal being dismembered. Then I could tell something held his collar, but the way he was thrashing about, it took me what seemed an eternity to find the latch. By that time Ann had run for the scissors to cut the collar off, but I found the latch and released it. I fully expected to turn and see the dog's mouth mutilated or his jaw dislocated.
Tsuga seems to be fine. Can't find any sign of injury. Five minutes after it was all over he was playing with his stuffed animals. We, on the other hand, probably need therapy for PTSD. And we're thinking maybe goldfish, next time. Take home lesson: Murphy was right. If it can go wrong, it will. Moral: before we leave him home alone, we'll remove the pup's collar. Murphy will still win.
I never write fiction. The closest I've come is to write just a few highly charged Fragments posts (like the one the day we put Buster to sleep) in third person. It gives some emotional distance, allows the writer (moi) to stand back from the scene as an observer, and it helps avoid the overuse of I/me in the narrative.
Well. My little experiment didn't work. The three people who have read the manuscript that I may eventually submit as a sample of my "book" all called me to task on a third-person true story, saying "Why did you do this? It jumps out at me as unnatural. It is obviously about you, and the voice is coming from outside the story. It is jarring compared to the other pieces in this collection. What would happen if you told the story in the first person?"
Since I have very few third person pieces, frankly, I've never had to try to change the voice from third to first. I am doing that this morning, and I want to scream or break something. It is not a simple of matter of going back and changing all the "he/him's" to "I/me's". The whole perspective of the voice and narration changes. It is easier to just start over rather than trying to cut and paste pieces of the old into the new. And yet I want the basic story told from the old version into the new.
After two hours (admittedly not well focused time... two hours of being "dogged" by you-know-who) I have four paragraphs of converted material. If I ever finish, I'll live to blog again. Meanwhile, "I" cannot say the gaggy, saccharine things that came out of "his" mouth. Sheessh! Did I write that crap?
Wife is off today-- it will be a day of errands and put-off chores. We slept in this morning, brushing aside the dog's faithful and precise attempt to wake us as usual at 3:50. And so now it is going on 7:00 It feels as if the day is half gone and I will never catch up with it, as if I've come into a performance ten bars after the beginning and cannot pick up the melody or remember which instrument it was that I intended to play. Carry on without me.
It is not that I have nothing to say this morning, but too much. There are still reverberations from Campbell I am processing and one of those threads of thought gained a boost just last night.
To back up: While at the Folk School a few weeks ago, I was discussing my writing past and hopes with Elizabeth, with whom I share a common interest in nature writing. She had brought a couple of boxes of her books from home for her class to peruse. I was familiar with or owned about half of them. "And of course you've read Mary Oliver" she said, and began to move on to the next author in the stack.
"No, I confess I have not read nor ever heard of Mary Oliver" I admitted.
And from that lead she began to compare this poet to Annie Dillard and Hopkins and Wendell Berry and others. She described them, and herself, as "ecstatic writers". We never quite resolved what constitutes an "ecstatic" compared to a "mystic" or "aesthete"; but to make her point she pulled me away from my classmates who were busily completing a project in the classroom. She read to me several of Mary Oliver's poems outside the studio. And I was blown away. And I consider myself an ecstatic writer as well (about which we will talk further in future).
So. After the week after Campbell, I went to my writer's group on Monday two weeks ago. No one from my little group remembered I had gone as I had not talked about it much beforehand. When it came my turn to read, I selected something I had written in my week at the Folk School. And my friend Jayne said afterward "Oh that so reminds me of the writing of the poet Mary Oliver!" Small world. Last night she brought me six books of the writer's poetry and prose. I look forward to total immersion over the "holiday" and weekend which I will spend alone with Ms. Oliver.
I highly recommend reading at least one of Mary Oliver's poems on this page. All I can say is "Yes".
Gen. Tommy Franks says that if the United States is hit with a weapon of mass destruction that inflicts large casualties, the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government.
...Discussing the hypothetical dangers posed to the U.S. in the wake of Sept. 11, Franks said that “the worst thing that could happen” is if terrorists acquire and then use a biological, chemical or nuclear weapon that inflicts heavy casualties.
If that happens, Franks said, “... the Western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we’ve seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy.” read more.
So what would this mean in my life and yours... to live in a police state where most or all individual "freedoms" were curtailed? What liberty and freedom would we lose and for how long? Who would make decisions under such a military state? What plans are in place for our branches of government to persist in the face of this very possible if not inevitable event?
I don't get out much. At least not like I did when I was doing home health in the county a few years back. And so it was a surprise to round one bend recently and see three places in the distance where pasture soil had been indelicately dozed away to create a raw patch of level muddy ground. I can predict with unhappy certainty two things that will be built on those scathed patches of former productive pasture: trailers or self-storage units. We've had an epidemic of both and neither do anything positive for the viewspace or the general ambience of rural living.
It's true that many of the trailers come as conjoined twins called "double-wides" and that this euphemism is somehow thought to ameliorate the ugliness of a mere "mobile home". As in "No, it won't be trailers. This new subdivision (carved conspicuously from the Rhododendrons along what used to be a shaded stream) will be double-wides"… and to this I am supposed to breath a sigh of aesthetic relief.
One particular disturbed site of recent discovery is in a broad valley of softly rounded hills. Cattle paths trod year after year follow the contours across the nape of each like tiered necklaces winding gently toward the meandering creek. Toward the back of these green hills, gentle woods cover level-lying land back away from the road. . . a wonderful place to put a home, I thought, when I first saw the For Sale sign on this piece of land a year ago. Someone will have a south-facing building site back away from road noise and out of the immediate view space of the old homeplace that has been so tastefully modernized without changing the charm of the place.
But no. The single-wide has been insulted into the subsoil of a rude unlandscapable excavation on the north side of one of those green hillocks-- barely out of the flood plain of the creek, very near the noise of the road and directly in the view of the secluded back decks of the immaculate old homeplace (which not surprisingly, is now for sale). But there are laws against neither stupidity nor bad taste. Some county zoning ordinances would be nice. And if they don't happen soon, this and other southwest Virginia counties will become uglified and overgrown and like every other place that has allowed growth at any price. Methinks I should attend the next county supervisors meeting.
And are there really so many people in rural places with a mold fetish? Now I confess, I've never needed the cubic footage of fungal space to store my unsold MaryKay inventory or my summer harvest of Sensimilla or overstuffed future mouse habitat. But either almost everybody in Floyd County is clamoring for dark, humid empty metal boxes for storage or there is a scam or tax dodge going on here. If I weren't so lazy, I'd research this matter to figure out how to account for these self-storage "parks" popping up like mushrooms on a wet lawn. I did go so far as to find but not explore the claustrophobia-inducing industry site called "inside self storage.com"-- I shudder at the thought.
If anybody has a solution to either of these rural development issues short of the Monkey Wrench Gang approach, or if you have similar concerns in your area (especially if your county commissioners have been dealing effectively with a solution) I'd certainly love to hear from you.
There is in the posture of woody things in winter-- in vines and low trees and spreading branches a certain kind of symmetry and form . . . a carefree sort of exuberance but not entirely free-form. That there should be the rudiments of order in what appears to us as disorder is no surprise. There are laws of chaos among winter branches that we do not know; but they have to do with the same sunlight and gravity and winter wind that makes us, too, hold ourselves against cold in predictable ways. ~ FFirst
Our first new car was "the Poop": a 1974 Datsun Hatchback-- 45 mpg, shaped like an aquatic insect, baby-poop yellow. In October of that year, I left behind my wife and new daughter and my career of rat mutilation; and in our new car I traveled to Blacksburg, Virginia to go canoeing on the New River with a friend of mine. A few months later, we were pulling the Poop behind a U-Haul to Virginia. Our first new car represented our fledgling taste of adult autonomy and financial independence. It was the symbol of new life in a growing family, and a fresh start in new country. Never since has a new car smelled so gloriously new as that first one.
Yesterday, we brought home our sixth new vehicle-- a Subaru Forester. And through my window, there it sits, down by the creek all squarish and looking way too much like a miniature S. U.- know-what to suit me. It will be the car we need to safely get in and out of our mountain passes in all kinds of weather, a comfortable car for the few longer trips we might take in the next few years. But somehow, the thrill of that first new car just isn't in the one we just brought home.
We know that in a few weeks, even the new appearance will be gone. The floor mats will be shades of Goose Creek mud. An assortment of small change, pharmaceutical company ballpoints, and Cheerios will be irrevocably lodged between the seats and the console. By the end of this week, the exterior will be the color of our road (we chose gold as a body color figuring this was a good match to road dust). And it is almost certain that the right front quarter panel will at best carry only a few patches of deer hair in the bumper; but more likely, it will show the typical Floyd County Deer Dents of Distinction.
And you know, the Forester doesn't smell new. Just as well. We're too old to be fooled by new-car from a can, too wise to have excessively great expectations that we will find ultimate happiness in another mere thing, however slick at first sight. We'll pray for a hundred thousand safe miles and enough trade-in to do this all over again in five or six years. If we're not in The Home by then, driving around the shuffleboard courts on a pair of shiny scooters. Hers has will have a bell, mine a manly oogaooga horn. ANd they'll cost as much as 'the Poop' of long ago. Beyond that, any final analogies here to new car smell and geriatric scooters is country I am not prepared to drive, hobble, scoot or step in just now. You're welcome.
To Roanoke/RadioStation/Mill Mountain and back along the Blue Ridge Parkway
Who would think something as silly and windy as "sun sneezing" could evoke a richly told tale such as this one at Seedlings and Sprouts? Maybe I like it because the author approached the subject in a way not unlike my own, following advice I once heard from a wise man of letters: Immerse your reader in your subject. Feel it deeply. Dive down into it. Dive down. But come back up." And the writer resurfaces nicely. Go read.
And my buddy Patricia of travelling fame extends the conversation on dialects and stereotypes adding her theory of language-- how and when we lay down language; how, when and why we relinquish our dialects-- or not; and how we use language and other ethnocentric yardsticks to measure ourselves against others for good or ill. Visit her on LiveJournal and drop her a comment. Keep it going, folks!
It could be a mercifully quiet morning, posts-wise, here at Fragments. I need to scoot out of here by 9:00 toward the big city (Roanoke) to record a piece that will air on WVTF at Christmas. And I think while I'm down-mountain, I may wander with a sandwich and binocs and my notepad over to Explore Park; the historic display is closed for the season, but I've never been and it might be a good tonic to visit untrod trails I don't walk every day. Maybe it will generate a post or two (but then, a hiccup or sneeze is about all it takes to evoke a daily Fragment!).
We are trading in autos on a new Subaru Forrester. Tomorrow. I don't necessarily have the new-car happies. More about this soon.
I can remember it so clearly that if it were a physical object, I could reach out in space and touch it. I could feel its texture and mass, know from my fingers of its shape and purpose. But it is not 'real' in this way; it has no mass and is not a thing. This tactile fragment lives at a magical distance just beyond words . It has never existed anywhere but in my mind; or brain--both really, since it first harbored in the soup of cells in a very old part of my central self. There, where fragrances are known.
For fifty years it has remained in mind, holographically, somehow, as the most enduring of memories. There are not even good words to say what this neuro-nothing is, or was. It is the aura of the memory of orangeness at Thanksgiving. Not the fruit, not the orange thing itself, but the room-filling bite it leaves in air when its skin is broken-- a molecular mist mingled with other perfumer's "accords" or undertones… of cranberry, celery, old wool, silver polish and heat from the kitchen on Thanksgiving day.
Ackerman says "smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines, hidden under the weedy mass of many years and experiences. Hit a trip wire of smell and memories explode all at once."
What memories of the "mute sense" of smell can you conjure from Thanksgiving Days in your long-ago? What trip wires explode into memories of oyster dressing, family, cold Novembers and home?
I've posted Writer's Mistakes-- the joke version-- here before. This one's for real. Pat Holt offers this "Don't Do" list that we've all heard before (or not) and I am guilty of all of these.
Good writing, even if it is 'only' on a weblog, is a responsibility we all must assume. Writing well is not a faerie visitation on the few. We all can improve our ability to say what we mean in engaging ways and in proper form. I get corrections regularly from readers and consider it a compliment, a sign they hold me accountable for errors of spelling and syntax and expect me to be less lazy when it comes to such matters. Thanks to non-blogger librarian friend Tim for pointing us to this list excerpted below. (There is much more on the linked site)
REPEATS: Crutch words are usually unremarkable. That's why they slip under editorial radar.
FLAT WRITING: Flat writing is a sign that you've lost interest or are intimidated by your own narrative.
EMPTY ADVERBS: They suck the meaning out of every sentence. (The only thing I wrote down from Campbell: "Use verbs that have muscle and adverbs of exactitude")
PHONY DIALOGUE: you can't get away with lack of credibility in dialogue.
NO-GOOD SUFFIXES: Don't take a perfectly good word and give it a new backside so it functions as something else. Try to use all "ingly" words (can't help it) sparingly.
THE 'TO BE' WORDS: Attune your eye to the "to be" words and you'll see them everywhere. When in doubt, replace them with active, vivid, engaging verbs. Muscle up that prose.
LISTS: It doesn't matter what you list - nouns, adjectives, verbs - the result is always static.
SHOW, DON'T TELL: The moment we can visualize the picture you're trying to paint, you're showing us, not telling us what we *should* see.
AWKWARD PHRASING: Awkward phrasing makes the reader stop in the midst of reading and ponder the meaning of a word or phrase.
COMMAS: Compound sentences, most modifying clauses and many phrases *require* commas.
Carnival of the Vanities is at Peaktalk this week. Fragments brings up the rear. I tossed the Where I'm From in there to see if we could find a few more poets amongst us.
Ecotone turnout was a bit slimmer than usual and new posts still trickle in. This biweekly topic was How Visitors Affect Your View of Place. Several reflect the concern that what used to be local character of hospitality is quickly turning into the Hospitality Industry. Local culture is being prostituted (what little of it may be left) for tourist dollars. Authentic by franchise. How can local communities keep posession of their deepest and most genuine selves in the face of commercial growth, shrinking populations and persistent stereotyped expectations of nomadic tourists?
Along similar lines, consider what cell phones do to one's sense of place. Link thanks to Chris O.
And while I'm squeezing in little chunks of orphaned info... check out the concept of Cradle to Cradle (as opposed to the usual flow of materials in our economy from cradle to an early grave). This idea has merit, and this link from one of the originators and this one from SlashDot (and link to NPR National Press Club webcast) can point you toward other links. There are some great ideas floating around in the babel of this wacky world, good people doing good things. Think on these things!
And finally, a quote: "The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying." ~ John Berger from Today in Literature If it were not so miserable blowy wet and gray out today, this quote might not have as much appeal. Color me melancholy.
We are being swept to sea by Noahic-calibre rains. See you downstream.
Wx Update: Our floods are bad but Boone's are worse. Scroll down the page for more images.
Also known as "Autosomal Dominant Compelling Helioopthalmic Outburst Syndrome" or ACHOO for short. (Honest. I'm not making this up.) I got it. Had it all my life. I run across references to it from time to time (yesterday in Ackerman's book) and am comforted to find that I am not alone. There was a time this condition made me something of a sideshow oddity.
Every day at the end of seventh period, after the final clangorous firehouse bell released us from our bonds, my group of neighborhood pedestrians gathered by the huge front doors at Woodlawn High. The little knot of two or three friends swelled to a half dozen waiting for me-- despite my name, always the last (my locker was in another building). And as they waited, the artillery of adolescent commotion rose. It careened from the high arched ceilings to the sullen plaster walls, it ricocheted off the trammeled floors like a stadium of voices in a railway tunnel. A thousand liberated lemmings surged toward sunlight, louder and louder. I hesitated at the threshold between darkness and light because I knew what was coming.
My friends went on ahead and stood shuffling about impatiently waiting for me at the flag pole by the bottom of the steps. It was a familiar ritual. They didn't even miss a beat in their conversations while I paused outside the door as the sun (or even brightish clouds) made it happen. Maybe the worst part is that nobody believed me. "It's the sun" I'd tell them. "It makes me" and ahh ahhh I'd sneeze exactly three times. Always three times. Sometimes I'd draw a crowd. At times there was applause. I was a freak.
There'll be no hanging chads from a touchscreen computer voting machine, no sir. All those Florida problems are memory scars of the past. Right? Maybe not. Perhaps we've just feathered the nests of a few with billions of bucks in expensive computer expenditures to buy a more sophisticated form of voter fraud.
There seems to be some evidence that this is just what we may be in for with touch screen voting. This Common Dreams article on this subject is by Colleen Redman, a member of our little Floyd Writer's Group. Whayda go, RedWoman!
I'm trying to make good on a resolution to focus my time and keystrokes better. In the information age, there is such a thing as too much data. (I'd direct you to an interesting and helpful thread going on at Coffee Sutras, but that would violate the terms of my focus). Finally, I've begun reading a book on my shelves now for almost a year, recommended by a Fragments reader in response to something I wrote long ago about the abilities of the sense of smell to transport us into memories, and about the failure of language to help us name or describe these most animal sensations. She recommended Diane Ackerman's The Natural History of the Senses, and I have waded-- or perhaps I should say "wafted" --through the first thirty pages this morning. It is the chapter on SMELL.
I was reminded about a very interesting NPR segment I heard back in March that dealt with a new theory of smell that challenges the ruling orthodoxy. If you have interest in this fascinating and so-poorly understood sense, here is a 15 minute interview that deals with the life and work of Luca Turin, the "Emperor of Scent". And at this fork in the road I am totally diverted, my tiny train off on a sidetrack miles from the switching yard and me with barely a reverse gear to regress and regain my forward motion on the rails.
Not only am I pulled apart by wonderful side-spurs to the topic I'm reading, for the first time I am attempting to use a new demo (but fully functional, only time limited) software to organize thoughts about what I read in Ackerman's book. I've mentioned it before, now I am using it, and most likely will purchase... ho ho ho... Merry Christmas to me! Student cost is about $40. Here that hint, sonny boy? It is (dare I confess) Microsoft's OneNote of which I speak. Free 60-day download is available here. It has it's strong points for sure. Not perfect, but it is showing its usefulness only now that I am putting it to some practical application. Let me know what you think
if you try it. Now. Back to "the Personality of Smell".
Plan: occasionally post "Journal" entries that represent undeveloped ideas, snippets of material for later perusal, internal dialogue publically displayed. The weblog is a searchable database of daily thought and the phrases that come from them. Indulge me this brain dump. I'll always just post the first bits on the main page, as few will want to read all of any of them. This one is left over from last week, orphaned in my word processor.
I don't intend to give a blow by blow of the Folk School week, although I had this intention initially -- to keep careful notes of details, times, places, notions as they struck me on the drive down, do this for the whole week. At least this idea made me more aware than usual of the thoughts that raced past as I drove. I found myself taking a special care of the stuff of my silent thoughts in the long, boring interstate miles heading south. In a general and consistent sort of way, writing has made me more likely to notice and retain bits and snippets of internal dialogue than I used to. Now, I hoard the smallest scrap of insight, scoop up the thin or more meaty scraps of thought, the alliterative couplets, those things that make me smile at my own cleverness or silliness. I pull in tiny fish and keep them in trust with remote promise that they might someday in some setting in an odd paragraph be just the string of words called for in that moment. I don't throw 'em back. I am a collector of these things now. Some of them stink; some I will mount on the wall.
I've thrown away a lot in years past that should have been saved. I imagined that I could see myself rummaging through a dumpster looking for a discarded phrase I thought I would never need. I used to throw away so many notions. There was no use for them, no purpose or place to store them, no readers, just words falling in the forest. The weblog is just a huge storage bin for these oddities. And they do come back to me. I find myself searching in my archives for phrases to fabricate a thought like a tinkerer would dig in a drawer to ferret out a spring or washer, a wire or transistor-- whatever it took to complete the invention he was fabricating to make it work. I do use them-- bits stashed away a year ago or more now-- more and more often when I write. I hunt around, trying to find a way to express something. I concoct a phrase in my mind, and wonder "now where did I read that?" and realize "Oh, I'm quoting ME!"
The photographer in me and the writer are less distinct now, merging like adult-onset Siamese Twins. Photographic composing comes naturally after decades of attention to light and shadow, form and color. Occasionally I still frame a scene in a mask made of my thumbs and index fingers in opposing "L"s, pulling them in, out, first in portrait, then landscape views of my subject. Now I find I am doing something that feels very similar to thoughts, metaphors, compositions of words. Stand up close, move back, rearrange, then re-examine. Snap the shutter to capture them for later perusal. Albums of words.
To say "I am a writer": How can you call yourself a writer? I still feel pretentious saying that I am something I will have to grow for years to become, maybe never be. And how will I know when it has happened, this becoming? And the devil on my other shoulder gives me a rude poke in the side of my neck. "Stupid-- listen. If a man is carrying a gun into the woods he is a hunter. So, if you set out stalking word pictures, find some spoor, maybe get off a shot or two, but never eat your kill (okay its a stretch to getting published)-- aren't you in the same sense a writer like Elmer there is a hunter?" Okay. I set out every day to find words and arrange them in some fashion on a page. Therefore, I am a writer. Still, an occasional kill would be nice... and maybe a few heads mounted on the wall above my computer.
The conversation recently about why we talk the way we talk reminded me of story that may be somewhat related. Or not. I'll try to tell it, and you draw your own parallels.
The husband sat on the couch reading his Sunday paper. Out of the corner of his eye, through the large open archway into the kitchen, he could see his wife at the sink, struggling, grunting with effort, wiping sweat and a coil of hair from her forehead with back of her right hand. The hand held a lethal-looking butcher's saw that she wielded with terrible zeal.
"What are you doing?" he asked. His concern came mostly from the fact that her commotion played hell with his enjoying the sports page.
"I'm chopping off the end of this ham before I cook it" she said, as if he should have known this without asking, even though they did not know each other all that well. They'd been married just long enough for the honeymoon to be a stale memory. The monotony of ordinary marriage had settled in slowly like a kind of subliminal rigor mortis.
He dismissed her answer about the ham without asking for an explanation. And their lives lurched along through the years, and every couple of months, another ham, another Sunday butchering to cut the end off the ham bone before baking.
Finally after decades, the man grew curious enough to ask about this odd preamble to his workday sandwich meat.
"Honey, I'm just wondering why it is that you work so hard to chop the end off the end of the ham before it goes in the oven."
The wife stopped suddenly in mid-amputation and stared off in the distance the way people do when looking for a lost lyric or buried memory. "I do it this way because this is what my mother always did before she baked a ham" she said in an exasperated tone.
A few months later, the mother came for a rare visit from her home far away. That Sunday, the wife planned to have their favorite ham wrapped in pineapples and dotted with cloves. She told her mother proudly that she always followed the example she had learned as a girl in the kitchen and always cut off the end of the bone before baking. To which the mother replied...
"Law, girl, I only did that because I never had a baking pan long enough for a whole ham bone to fit inta."
The husband, wise by now in ways of marriage, read his paper, pretending not to hear.
Best I can figure, I've listed all the "where I'm from" poems that were posted on other blogs. If I've missed anyone, please email me and I will add it. Others have told me to expect theirs and so there may be future amendments to this list, so check back. As I mentioned to some of you, I've asked my kids to do this for us for Christmas. You might ask your parents to do one for their children or grandchildren by simply writing it out simply in their own hand.
This was an interesting exercise-- which, btw, I didn't invent but only propagated. Seemed too good an idea not to share, hope you benefitted from time spent. -- Fred
Fred ~ Alison ~ Malta Girl ~ Kiril ~ Clarence ~ DocRoc ~ Dan ~ Michelle ~ Pica~ Curt~ Bill~ Butuki
And Teacher Patricia is has finished working with her class to complete their 'where from' poems, including hers. Take a look.
Pre-blogger Jessica sent hers and it is posted in the "continue reading" after this post, go read it.
Jessica's WHERE I'M FROM
I am from padlocked gates, from Chiclets.
I am from the tile floors in the wide open livingroom. Shiny faux marble 12x12 squares, the lingering scent of PineSol.
I am from the bougainvillea, the thorny lime tree.
Lime juice to spike the green mangoes, avocados, bananas, papayas, grilled corn, coca-cola, and salad.
I am from Sunday morning waffles and pinchable chipmunk cheeks, from Erica and Stratton and Rude.
I am from Geeks and ex-Peace Corps Democrats.
From "Don't you know you NEVER" and "Dad wants."
I am from Union Churches, visited with mom once or twice a year. Handfuls of English speaking Baptists Lutherans Presbyterians Methodists allying into one acceptably sized congregation.
I'm from the capital city where I've never lived and Ethiopian ingera and wut for extra special meals.
From grandma who skipped heartily and never left Wisconsin and grandma called Mem-Saib who rode a camel in Pakistan.
I am from gentle Mom giving others the sensible benefit of the doubt.
I am from soap operas in Spanish satisfyingly concluded in a 12-week run. I am from firecrackers on Christmas Eve and the singed remnant papers ankle-deep in the streets.
I am from grandma's photo albums, meticulously documented, arranged on the top closet shelf. Wash my hands and sit with them for hours, till it's time to go.
I'm from Gringa in a foreign land and Yankee in my own land. I am from being at home in the role of outsider.
Suggested Grounding Exercise: Every morning this week, view this magnificent Hubble Image retrospective. At the end of viewing this each day, ask this question: Why is there something instead of nothing? and sit quietly with the question. After Friday's viewing, write down your answer. (Turn on your speakers before viewing)
-Sunday 16 Nov Update: I've decided to post all three images and "field notes" together in one long entry, so this post will be amended again on Tuesday. -- FF
In most any of my pockets you'll find a tri-folded piece of scratch paper. On that folded sheet will be my to-do lists; random thots I've had while away from home; and what Campbell workshop Elizabeth called "jots". I have taken mental notes for years, but been more methodical in the past couple to capture snippets of thot or possibly interesting ideas on paper (or while driving, on my little digital recorder) before they evaporate from the synapses-- a disappearance that happens more quickly as the years march on.
Her "jots" were a way of remembering details of an outdoor experience; the other three students in the class were new to the idea. I felt encumbered by her insistance that they be terse, no more than a word or three, so mine tended to be longer. I've sat down my notes from the last day at Campbell, and I will share some of them with you, along with images that elicted the words-- although sound and other senses too played a part. Some day, maybe, one or more of these snatches might be just the feeling or word-image I need when writing something else. Especially with the pix, I'm not likely to forget the warm November day these notes were taken-- on Fires Creek, near Campbell Folk School, Brasstown, NC.
Marvel: that along a wooded stream the eye can adjust without a blink to light intensities from mouth-of-the-cave darkness in the thick shade of rhododendrons to the blinding brilliance of unfiltered sun amplified by ten thousand lenses of frenzied water
The smooth rocks are slippery with a thin gloss of edible slime, a living skin on which snails and larval stoneflies feed, and trout upon them, and so on up to the chief predators. It is a heady experience being at the top of the food chain. And perhaps an illusion. Regimes, too, have to eat.
The dancing spray of droplets thrown up into sun-- like liquid confetti.
Cold currents stagger drunken
Down the stairway of a mountain stream
Grumbling, muffled like empty kegs rolling
Over an endless flow of steps -- while a far-off crowd cheers
The creatures that live their lives in the calm cleft of the torrent, under the edge of a rock, sheltered from forces that would sweep them away. This is where I want to live and I think of home as such a shelter
How you kill a stone by taking it out of water, its clarity and luster, sheen and hue drying a pale death before your eyes
Reflexively I pulled an itchy speck from the back of my neck. Between my thumb and fingers an organic excrescence a moment before had been a living green half-inch worm. You just never know when your number is up.
A leaf falls into moving water, one final trip that enacts its monogram, the letter "L". It begins the stroke more or less vertically, with a flourish of flutters and spins in air. It hits the water with a tiny gasp. Whisked along straightway by the current in the horizontal stroke, it is held up safely by surface tension for tense moments with hope it might survive the trip to the open sea. It takes on water, listing as it flows, a few smokestacks above water yet. Finally foundering in an eddy, it is lost with all hands.
I accept that all these boulders, fixed and hard, are far from their birthplace, passing through. They are every bit as moveable now as the day a thousand years ago when they were dropped here, borne along effortlessly for miles-- as easily a child's rubber duck spins and lurches along the spring branch. Boulders are not fixed. Nor am I. We both bear the illusions of immortality, my frailing body and falsely immutable stones.
A water strider is only the suggestion of a creature, a wisp of wire and thread--
That walks by faith, its changeling shadow
Of globular gray paddles are fringed in sharp mirrors
It moves against current, just enough
I was told once as a child that sounds never die. Their waves spread out in space like ripples on a pond as big as the universe. Somewhere those sounds in disordered dilution still live, they said. I wonder if it is into moving waters that lost sounds go. I hear them in this stream but cannot understand, only that they are happy released from its surface.
I did go to hear Silas House in Floyd Thursday night. In a voice proudly sugared with Kentucky dialect he spoke of stereotypes and prejudice inside and outside of Appalachia.
On his book tours across the states, he's been appalled at the ignorance of those from "off" (that's what we call y'uns who are not from these mountains) about what life in Appalachia is like. Hundred year old images persist and more recent media portrayals are long in dying. "Do you have the Internet in Appalachia" one asked? Another told him during a question and answer session that, why, she'd driven through Appalachia once, and saw pigs going in and out of open front doors, naked children playing the yards, and moonshine stills about every 100 yards". One sincere woman, to make him feel better about his unfortunate roots, told him she had heard recently on NPR that inbreeding actually could have some benefits! His tales went on and on.
From his first words, you knew he was not from California, Minnesota, Vermont or Texas. When he spoke of bright stars and I knew, too, that he was not from my home state of Alabama where "bright white light" is spoken without any trace of a long "e" sound after the "i"... just a broad open long, long "I". His bright light was braht laht-- the "a" is short, resembling its sound in the word "father". He said that when he spoke in New York City for the first time, he was nervous, half expecting his listeners either to walk out, assuming he was ignorant, or laugh openly at his odd speech. He quickly understood he had nothing to fear. NYC is the Star Wars bar room scene of language oddities, and his was no more strange than a dozen others, and he was relieved.
The language of a particular district, class, or group of persons. Dialect encompasses the sounds, spelling, grammar, and diction employed by a specific people as distinguished from other persons either geographically or socially.
He confessed his own childhood stereotypes of "yankees" as rude, violent and mean. He went to a small college near his home in Ivy, Kentucky, about an hour north of Knoxville. Until his book's successes a few years ago, a weekend trip to Gatlinburg was about as "worldly" as his life ever got. Now, he's met people all over the country. I came away feeling that he is as much a missionary of good will from Appalachia as he is a writer; and in his mission, he carries his authentic voice. Carries it proudly, retaining his unaltered Kentucky twang intentionally. He deplores the homogenizing influences and pretension that are setting up local dialects as something to hide or be ashamed of.
I guess maybe there was a time I was, if not ashamed, at least very self conscious about the way I talked. Some time during college, I decided that, if I was to be taken seriously in the larger world, I would have to disguise my native Alabama dialect. I remember how hard it was to break myself from saying "can't" with a long "A": Kayn't. Or to start saying "going to" instead of "gonna". "Of" never had an "f" in it, and "to" was just the "t" sound. "I'm fixing ta go ta th' store and git a bottle a pop." No matter that I had a healthy vocabulary and could speak in correct
English. My speech linked me to bumpkins like Andy Griffith and clueless hayseeds like the Beverly Hillbillies.
Now, when someone tells me, as they often do, that I don't sound like I'm from Alabama, I don't know exactly how to feel about it. Is denial of dialect an abandonment of character and distinction? Will there be any regional differences in a hundred years, or will we all sound like Tom Brokaw or a universal computer voice?
How about you? Has your dialect changed since childhood? Got examples? If it has changed, is that by intention? If it has not, do you think your distinctive speech has hurt you or helped you in any way?
Anybody got a party going on tonight? It's barely six o'clock and I'm wondering what I'm going to do til a reasonable bedtime. Wifey is off to Richmond for continuing ed and I am home being a bored continuing Fred. Not that Tsuga is not a simulating companion, provided dental stimulation is your bag. Man, it's not even winter yet and I got the house crazies. Gonna be a long winter, bloggeroos and bloggerettes. So. Up for a game of checkers? Gimme a call. BR549. I have 4 New River Pale Ales. They're cold and they're portable. Anyone?
On the second day at Campbell, I gave Elizabeth (the 'teacher') the Autumn section of what may someday become my little book as the requested sample of my writing. Some of the selections were accompanied by images that had appeared in Fragments. Being a spider fancier, she was especially drawn to the spider pieces and images (including the one about the Gossamer Spiders from a year ago). She and I had discussed publication in magazines-- an field in which she has a lot of experience. She thought an editor would see something out of the ordinary, sit up and take notice if he saw a longish well-crafted essay plus images on spiders. So, she suggested that I find another funnel web spider like the one we had seen on an afternoon walk, and get to know this late-season ground-dweller.
So, there I sat, cross-legged at the edge of the woods, clipboard held in the crook of one arm, staring intently into the many eyes of a spindly spider standing at the mouth of his tubular web. I felt somewhat foolish, but this is a familiar experience throughout my tree-hugging history, so made good use of my time and I took a few notes. When I got back to the studio, it turned into an interview with a spider. I don't know that this is what Elizabeth or I were expecting, but I share it with Fragments readers because you've already read nuttier stuff here before. If you're new here, no, I'm not on any medication to go off of.
| THE SPIDER TIMES |
I realized how little I knew of this creature I planned to visit for an interview this morning. My mind was full of questions and the resident spider was not talking. I warmed him up with small talk.
I notice that your web here faces south. Can you tell me if this is the result of chance or design? If by design, would you please tell me the purpose? I can imagine the early sun warms your cold joints, begins the flow of juices in your arachnid brain like my first cup of morning coffee.
Do you build this web new each day? Is this design up to you at all? Or in your building and feeding and thought are you bound by the knee-jerk hardwiring that passes for decision and choice in your tiny world? And I'm sorry, but your funnel web is, shall we say . . . rather modest by comparison to your superiors who build wide artsy webs in the food-filled air overhead. Is yours then a subordinate position? Were you not able to compete in the larger, busier world above? How is it that you make any sort of living at all here on the ground?
"No comment", said the spider. I groped for my next topic.
Well, with your basement shop here, I suppose that your meals consist of drop-in guests … springtails, maybe and goofy neophyte grasshoppers that simply leap with abandon because it is what they do, having no earthly idea where they will come to ground. Perhaps you hope in a silver tube that is your dining table?
The spider looked past me with all of his eyes, unfocused, at something in the distance.
Okay. I was hoping that you would be able to tell me a bit about what the world looks like from your perspective standing there at your front door those long hours, waiting. Watching. I believe that with your larger eyes you can see movement in a fuzzy uncomprehending sort of way, and can move toward the motion or away according to some crude on-off pattern. Is this correct? But I'm especially curious about your simple eyes that merely detect light from dark. You see, in my world too there are those who claim to have these eyes that can discern the Dark Evil Ones from those who, like themselves, are of Pure Light and Truth. But that is a matter for another time.
If you will forgive me, you do seem a captive of this web of yours, and by your low caste in the Great Chain of Being. Perhaps this is enough. Monotony is security, n'est ce pas? But don't you sometimes wonder what life is like, floating like gossamer spiders on fibers of light, drifting free of funnels, of boundaries, of gravity itself?
Of course, you do have your little store to mind. It is what you know how to do. I'm sorry to have bothered you. I'll be in touch.
Issue: We are almost exclusively visually oriented in our thinking and sensory focus.
Assignment: Sit for at least five minutes with your eyes closed. Ignore your thoughts. Attend only to what you hear in the external world. Describe your experience.
Problem: I left a quiet place on Goose Creek for a busy crossroads-- human and vehicular-- at the Campbell School. This task was disturbing to me.
Results: I came back after a half hour with language that expressed my dis-ease in trying to hear past the effluvium of human busyness. I've tried it as a prose piece, but think, even though I confess ignorance of the mechanics of poetry, it works better this way.
The Unnatural History of Sound
Engines hum and whirr, across the valley, along the road
they rise and fall in doppler waves like distant breakers
or the persistent rush of wind.
I winnow sound, I sift it
Straining to discover voices
Beyond the vocabulary of human hurry.
A tufted titmouse peter-petering overhead
rises briefly above the surface of the sea of noise
and quickly drowns to rise no more.
Grasshoppers invisible behind me or their ghosts
crawl unsecretly under crisp leaves
That crackle with their long steps as if on fire,
They stir the tannic smell of oak
that rises in air too warm for November.
A solitary Peeper
Throws its voice from a thicket -- twice
Not intending for me to know if I've heard or imagined
The rising inflection of a note out of season.
A bird. A grasshopper. A frog. These sounds alone fall from the chaff.
From the whine of human busy-ness
From fragmenting friction of the engines of our days
Wheels against rock roads roar
Before the hiss, the vacuum of their passing
Hurried and anonymous in insipid air.
On my back the center of earth
pulls me heavily closer to the hot core, I abandon hearing
Giving up sound like the putting away of an artist's dry brush,
I am aware only of the coming and going of my own breath
and a small uneasy voice without words.
It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am the more affection I have for them…. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say. ~ Thomas Merton
Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation...Tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego.
~ Jean Arp
We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature--trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence...We need silence to be able to touch souls.
~ Mother Teresa
The words the happy say
Are paltry melody
But those the silent feel
Are beautiful--
~ Emily Dickinson
Thursday night I'll be in the small audience at the Floyd Presbyterian Church, hearing author Silas House talk about his books and his sudden launch to fame since publishing his first book, Clay's Quilt just a few years ago. The second printing of his second book, A Parchment of Leaves, was run before the first printing hit the shelves. He is in his early thirties. Four years ago he was a rural Kentucky mail carrier. I hope to ask him if his books began in the monotony of sorting junk mail and dodging potholes on dirt roads. Don't you imagine getting the words to paper was like lifting the net on fish swimming below the surface in his thought-world for years?
You can hear him read one of his frequent NPR essays, a short story called November Snake. He makes no effort to disguise his natural voice that talks about the 'far wood' that heated the home of the heroine in the story. And one would hope he also doesn't exploit the local dialect to boost the appeal of a backwoods boy made good.
It's interesting to discover that I feel the remotest twinge of envy of his success and the lifetime of writing opportunities ahead of him. If you asked me if I aspired to any kind of recognition as a writer, I would deny it. But it would be the tiniest of lies. Or maybe somewhat bigger than that. Then I remember a time long ago when I would have given my first-born to get a PhD in botany from Chapel Hill. I envied the grad students I met in that department, who, discovering that I had a secure teaching position in a small college in a nice part of country said-- to a man, "I'd swap places with you in a heartbeat." The grass is always greener...
I wonder if there will be times young Mr. House will look back and think he'd gladly go back to the easy joys of the stories that he told to himself sitting on the wrong side of beat-up old Subaru, sorting Christmas catalogs on Kentucky dirt roads.
Okay. In the past few days, we've had Tsuga the Forlorn; Tsuga the Fierce. Now, Tsuga the Friendly.
Notice he has his hunting season clothes on. Of course, if a hunter will mistakenly shoot a milkcow with a bell around its neck, a gold bandana may not be the ultimate defense against the deer warriors. We'll avoid early and late day, hope nobody wanders on our place without permission (have somebody that asked coming this morning) and make lots of noise when we walk.
I am from an old house with double porches, a room filled with good ghosts and creek laughter in the mornings before first light.
I am from Liriodendron and Lindera, butterfly bush and mountain boomers
I am from Dillons and Harrisons, Betty Jean and Granny Bea-- frugal and longlived, stubborn and tender, quick to laugh. Or cry.
I am from a world whose geography my children know better than I, from a quiet valley where I am the proprietor and world authority of its small wonders.
From barn loft secret passwords and children who can fly if they only try.
I am from oven-baked Saran Wrap and colds caught from jackets worn indoors.
I am from pire in the blood Baptists and from the cathedral made without hands, the church in the wildwoods.
I'm from the Heart of Dixie, son of Scarlett O'hara. From War Eagle, Wiffle, UAB and PT, from Walnut Knob's blue ridge and the sheltered sanctuary of Goose Creek.
From a "fast hideous" dresser and a home body from Woodlawn, from a grandfather I never knew that I can blame for my love of nature and my stubbornness, they tell me.
I am from fragments, the faint smell of wood smoke, and familiar walks among trees that I know by name, from HeresHome and good stock. A man can hardly ask to be from more.
Be sure and check Comments below or the original post where this "assignment" first appeared. Several have left links to "where they're from". It's interesting to see how unique each of these creations turn out to be, both of course in the details but also in the rhythm and phrasing, the degree of honesty or distance one chooses to incorporate. I'll bring all the submitted links to a summary post in a few days. Keep 'em coming! This is fun! -- Fred
Something a wise photographer does not do is put the camera down at Tsuga-eye-level. This point of view is an open invitation for attack. A split second after the shutter closed on the image above, he was on me like ugly on a frog. You can see it in his eyes. He is bad to the bone.
Of course, it's my fault he was worked into a frenzy. Who can resist a running fit when given a pop bottle full of water! You bite a hole in it with sharp puppy teeth (top ones are now rounder adult replacements! yippee!) and it squirts water in your face every time you grab it. This makes you run wildly. Throw it in the air and it explodes in geysers when it hits the ground. Man we know how to have a good time!
He's getting his adult markings now in his fifth month. He was almost entirely off-white when we brought him home at seven weeks. Now, the back of his hind legs, the tip of his tail and ears and center of his back is turning "brown-paper-bag", the color of barley, of my morning coffee with cream. Over his shoulder-blades he wears epaulets of his original color-- odd markings he inherited from his mother.
George Ella Lyons is an Appalachian author with a long list of children's books to her credit. Her poem, Where I'm From, begins in this way:
I'd like to make a suggestion-- not just to the 'writers' who read this, but to everyone. Actually, putting on my teacher hat: this is your assignment --
Read Where I From, all of the poem is here.
Then, write your own version-- where you're from. Here's the format, the remainder of the form is in the "continue reading" section if you want to try this worthwhile exercise. Cut and paste it into a word processor to work on later.
I am from the _______ (home description... adjective, adjective, sensory detail).
I think it would be a joy to read this personalized poem for each in a group of bloggers who "sort of" know each other. This could extend the depth of bond between us. The same thing applies within a family. Consider you and your spouse both doing one, from your own unique perspective. If you don't want to post it or send a link to it to Fragments, maybe this would make a cherished gift to your children. I'm willing to bet they will learn something about 'where you're from' that they did not know.
I will post "Where I'm From" (the Fred version) here tomorrow. Maybe as the week rolls along, you'll post links to yours that you've posted at your websites. If you don't have a website, I'll post yours on Fragments if you'd like.
This may be a silly idea, but that hasn't stopped me before, why raise my standards now!?
I am from _______ (specific ordinary item), from _______ (product name) and _______.
I am from the _______ (home description... adjective, adjective, sensory detail).
I am from the _______ (plant, flower, natural item), the _______ (plant, flower, natural detail)
I am from _______ (family tradition) and _______ (family trait), from _______ (name of family member) and _______ (another family name) and _______ (family name).
I am from the _______ (description of family tendency) and _______ (another one).
From _______ (something you were told as a child) and _______ (another).
I am from (representation of religion, or lack of it). Further description.
I'm from _______ (place of birth and family ancestry), _______ (two food items representing your family).
From the _______ (specific family story about a specific person and detail), the _______ (another detail, and the _______ (another detail about another family member).
I am from _______ (location of family pictures, mementos, archives and several more lines indicating their worth).
The title caught my attention. You won't see words and pictures together in quite this way at Fragments, although the possibilities are interesting. This one was pleasant. Also don't miss
"I Can't Read Borges". Spooky. A nice use of text and images and sound. As for the others, your mileage may vary. (Requires Macromedia Flash Player)
I say that I went to the Joseph C. Campbell Folk School (JCCFS) without expectations. That is a half truth. Some of my unspoken high hopes didn't come to pass; some low expectations were exceeded. Next time I go, I'll be able to fine-tune my anticipation with the benefit of experience. Indulge me as I record a few thoughts and recollections.
The drive between Franklin and Brasstown traverses some spectacular no-name country, part of the Nantahalla Forest that misses the brunt of the tourist onslaught taken by Joyce Kilmer, Nantahalla and Ocoee Rivers and the Smokies. As I drove back across this high country between two and three o'clock on Saturday morning, these peaks and deep valleys were flooded with moonlight. A valley fog had poured like heavy cream into folds between blue mountains. Here and there a ridgetop floated to the surface, dark and bristling with branches.
When the brochure says that the Folk School is near Brasstown, what it means is that it is within a few stone-throws of the intersection that is the community of Brasstown-- population 147. Not much there, really. But because of the school's proximity to this nexus of roads with a busy two-lane bisecting the campus itself, I will not think of JCCFS as a retreat. At least not for writers. For blacksmithing students, noise was not an issue. Nor for woodturners, quilt makers or calligraphers. For those of us for whom quiet is a necessary ingredient to our craft, Campbell was a disappointment-- this more for me than others perhaps, since I had traveled from the immense quiet of Goose Creek. Likewise, the property on which the school sits is not virgin forest traversed by pristine streams. We visited a pristine stream a few miles north; I'll have some images soon.
The literature about the school says that meals are "boarding house style". I imagined a kitchen where the cooks glopped two-gallon cans of industrial grade vegetables into large pale green Melmac bowls. Sure enough, some of the old-timers who came to the school years ago say that ten years ago, it was rumored that the CC in JCCFS stood for Constant Casserole. Not anymore. I would say the meals were slightly sub-gourmet. The seventeen meals alone, if purchased in a restaurant, would have probably averaged $10 a piece, minimum. Fresh everything, some from the gardens that border the eastern edge of campus. Lots of fresh pecans, walnuts, hazelnuts in the salads and desserts. Excellent balance of nutrients, not a lot of heavy meat, and ample of everything but not too much so you left feeling uncomfortable. I actually lost weight because I was more prone to talk at meals than eat. Of the 115 participants, I probably sat with most of them at least once, none of them more than 2-3 times. People came from all over the country. Everyone wears a name tag that bears their name, where they are from and what class they are taking. I talk very little at home in a typical day. I made up for any deficit at meals and between. Lots of talk, good food, interesting people.
In one week, there were 30 hours of scheduled class time. This is approximately a semester's worth of learning in one week. Before and after class are maybe 15 hours of scheduled activities: Morning Walk; MorningSong; demonstrations; evening programs. Of course, some students-- including some writers-- missed some activities for working on their projects. There was very little "down time". No pick-up music that I ran across, or spontaneous wide ranging discussion either in or out of class as I had envisioned. There simply was not enough time outside of everybody's projects. I'll have more to say specifically about the writing class later. Didn't mean to run on so long. If you've stuck with me til now, you, kind friend, are a trooper!
After my week away from home, Tsuga and I had to re-establish the chain of command. For the first half hour after I walked in the door, he had me believing that I should be rolling over on my back bearing my underbelly to him, groveling and licking and submissive. Ann, alone to mind the store, was barely able to keep her head above water while I was gone. The consistent rewards program I had been working on with the dog had fallen apart. She never took up the position of dominant member. Tsuga quickly rose to become leader of the pack but he did not handle leadership at all well. Like a child of permissive parents, he acted out, risking pain, in order to know his boundaries. I was more than happy to show them to him. He and I had a few bouts in which I firmly reminded him how much bigger and ostensibly smarter I am. So now we have the rules straight again, and today he has been a joy to be with. And there is so much more of him to enjoy. He has started filling in his gawky teenage frame with muscle. He walks now with the swagger of a young lion.
I will love looking back at this picture. It will remind us of a fleeting phase of his training in which we first physically had to prevent Tsuga's coming down into the carpeted room where I spend most of my time. We pulled the chest across the doorway as you see here-- not very convenient for getting wood to the stove. A few weeks ago, we opened up a gap in the barricade and have chased him back through the small opening with a rolled up newspaper (that I hit against my leg, and not the dog). He keeps his place, mostly, but spends much of his day on the very brink of the Mason Dixon, and needs to keep an eye on me. He's grown so large now that, as you see in this picture, he can barely squeeze into the gap to lie and forlornly watch me at the computer. I had to help extricate him after this picture was taken.
This afternoon, I moved the trunk out of the doorway leaving the access open, the barrier to forbidden land implied by history. He will be on the honor system from now on. This ought to be interesting.
Oh joy! BlueRidgeBlog is a new discovery and swells the slender ranks of southern mountain photo-oriented weblogs, adding to SmokyBlog and Fragments. Go take a look! NO! I didn't mean it! What am I doing sending readers away! You won't like either of these weblogs at all. Not a bit. Never mind.
... Freds!
Us guys have to stick together. You cannot imagine the stress of waking up each day of your life and knowing all day long til your last one, you will be a Fred. I thought it was sort of neat that apparently most of us are Fragmented.
I was proud of my packing. Each bin and box was filled with orderly stacks, rolled slacks and folded T-shirts, computer and writing tools, snack foods in opulent excess (Ann helped me pack and she has lifetime membership and a leadership position in Overpreparers Anonymous). As I drove along the hiway south toward Brasstown, I could find my slightest whim for music, munchies, what-ever, at my very fingertips without even looking, a fully actualized free spirit. A passerby would have seen me gyrating in my close confinement, seen my lips move and my fingers beating rhythm on the steering wheel:
"keep me searching for a heart of gold (beat beat beat)... and I'm growin' old"...
I'm was not sure what I was searching for by taking this week away from home. But it felt right. I pretty well had my shinola together going down to the Folk School exactly a week ago today. I was organized, energized, and oh-so-well equipped. I had a ream of blank paper, countless reams of RAM on my borrowed laptop, and was heading toward a week of... I wasn't sure what I'd have a week of, and I had made up my mind to avoid expectations. I was just going, travelling hopefully, wailing Neil Young wide open on the open road. Life was good!
My first hour traversed forty miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway where I owned the road. The Leaf Peepers have scurried back south for another year, and I could lolligag or zip along at 55 as I chose. At every bend, radians of autumn sun sprayed combed yellow light through forest ridges ahead of me. The sumac were spectacular in their calligraphic wisps of scarlet, mucronate leaflets like practice strokes, upturned so slightly at the tips. I should have stopped for a picture but this was a time of motion. There is some magic in being alone in a car going to or coming from a far place as the sun rises. More, perhaps, in going to. It was this sensation of sailing, of discovery, of vastness that held me, bore me along as I climbed down from BeanStalkLand into the Piedmont of Virginia and crossed the line into Carolina.
I may have more to say later about the trip down. I bring it up now only because of the contrast I see of my earlier togetherness of my shinola to the disarray I face this morning -- both in my jumbled stacks, rumpled slacks and crumbled snacks, and of my thoughts and memories of the week that now drift farther, farther into the deep space of memory like a skywalker untethered, moving with outstretched arms toward the vanishing point.
My natural tendency is to put it off for a few days. Unpacking is a melancholy chore, but I should do it this morning. But I'll be back. Did I mention that it's good to be home?
...jiddity jog.
Yip! I'm home. I left far, far western North Carolina at 2:00 this morning-- my Joseph C. Campbell Folk School official middle-of-the-night wakeup time, and moved along on cruise control from Franklin to Fancy Gap as the sun smeared through layered shades of cobalt and indigo and pewter. I love watching sunrise while traveling and seldom get to see this. So, here I am. I've had the first of several naps, avoided even glancing at the foot-tall pile of mail on my desk. I'm told (oh joy!) that I have 274 email messages waiting (99%) to be deleted from good ol' Postini.
The dog has grown visibly and lost all traces of discipline-- Ann has had time only to feed him and walk him briefly in the dark on either side of the day, and the boy done lost his raisin' in my absence. We'll have a brief reform schooling this week ahead.
So much to tell, and so much that will never find words. I look forward to sharing, to hearing from you stalwart readers that have hung on in here in my month away during the past week (seems like a past life, so 'other' has been my daily routine). I do feel a bit jet-lagged and culture-shocked, to be honest.
I should tell you that we may have some new visitors to Fragments, possibly. There may be a few new friends from the Folk School drop in on the webpage in the coming week. Not a single person I met maintained a weblog, a few had some faint acquaintance with the medium, more than a few seemed interested in stopping by. Treat them kindly, y'all. I'll be back in rhythm soon.
And man. There's no place like home.
I've been turned loose for part of the afternoon because our teacher has reached the conclusion I might not need any further instruction in getting in touch with my senses in the out of doors. However, the price of my freedom is a separate assignment between now and 4:30 tomorrow to write a totally new piece to read before the assembled student body (aboutt 115 attendees). So, I can't write much here.
Appreciate comments and emails and visits in my absence. The days are very full and are passing quickly. This truly is a remarkable place, and folks have come from very far away to get here; the majority of those here now have been at least once (many a half dozen times) -- it's that kind of special. Even so, it makes me appreciate the riches right out my back door and all the old friends (and blogging buddies certainly are classified so) that I have left behind. Looking forward to catching up on all your goings-on when I get back and I'll have to read weblogs for 24 hours straight! Gotta run, have an essay to write(right after my power nap). Ta ta--- Fred
... than to arrive.
I first read this decades ago in Eden Express (Mark Vonnegut). I've found out since the phrase is originally attributed to RL Stephenson who certainly is merely restating what must be an ancient observation that the best part of an anticipated destination is the journey itself. Isn't this a truism? My family thinks when I say this (usually upon some large disappointment) that I am being a pessimist. I see it quite the opposite. The journey is certain. Find joy in each step, each mile, each word along the way with hope that the end may be the best part. The end is uncertain-- that you will get there at all, that by the time you arrive the party will be over and all the lights turned off. If the end is not what you had anticipated, as often is the case in this age of quaking earth, you still own the thrill of the getting there.
And so as I go through my long list of necessaries one more time, I try to imagine not the taking of each item but where I might be, who I might be with, what we might be discussing, seeing, imagining... when I use my binoculars there to see a fall warbler against cerulean sky; when I first use my camera to take a picture of a new friend, a beautiful sunrise in the mist. The coffee mug... what conversations will it hear?
All but the last few miles of the way to far western North Carolina, I can foresee. This journey is familiar territory. I will travel down mountains and up again-- many thousand feet of altitude all totalled, through forests bare down to the briefest vestige of covering, semi-nude in early November. Fancy Gap. Black Mountain. Balsam. Skirting south of the Smokies then south, over Cowee Mountain near Franklin, below the feet of Standing Indian, passing just north of Lake Chatuge. And I am there.
Travelling hopefully into a throng of strangers, the chances for friendship increased by our common journeys to this one place in all the world for this one slice of time's infinite days, our finite lives. We will be bonded by our common need for nutrients the culture and craft of these old mountains will give us; by our love for the goodness of Nature or God, by our joy in the senses and the words we're given to share them with those who could not come here, now, with us. We will be ants briefly touching antennae, sharing instinctual signals of who we are, could be if there were more time, and then will skittle back into our own isolations and busyness. I will meet a hundred, know the names of twenty by the end of the week, find friendship with three, and in one year, get an occasional email from one of them. The end is not the point. Even the brief conversations with names I forget can change the course of the rest of my life, and theirs.
So too what little writing comes from the workshop is not likely to be an opus, magnum or otherwise. It will be like these daily jottings in the weblog-- a writer's notebook about the journey, some things recorded along the way, shared joys and perplexities crudely noted as the miles go by. I wonder if I truly expect ever to arrive as a writer. Or if the end is very important. Could it be that the point is just to enjoy each passing phrase, each little post, the occasional flare of contact with a briefly-kindred spirit, the touching of antennae of recognition of the worth of each other and of the travelling? Should I expect more or be disappointed if I do not reach that place in the days I'm given?
I should be packing now. I may not be back for a few days. Maybe for a week. I'll write when I can, check emails and comments at the community college if I get a chance. Could be, if there's anything worth telling I'll be calling David at Ripples with a brief update from Campbell Folk School. He can let you know that I travelled both hopefully and safely, and have arrived. At least in the most concrete of senses. Talk amongst yourselves. Share good words. Come back and see me next week.
-- Fred
A million and a half downloads of the beta of SKYPE already. A hundred thousand simultaneous users one day this past week. Maybe this P2P telephone freeware really works! Some of you decide to download it, give me a ringydingy -- not next week but after the 8th. I need to test my microphone and/or headset and then get sonny boy to load this on his computer in Vancouver if it seems to work as advertized. The international phone rates between here and Canada are eating up our phone card minutes. And of course we can't use our "free" Verizon minutes because we get NO signal from here in the Goose Creek Gorge.
They state that this program works through all firewalls with quality better than phone. Could be an interesting piece of code here! (only for Win2000 and XP currently)
More in this Slate article that suggests the phone companies are watching Skype with concern.
My daughter Holli and son-in-law Mike have bought an older home in an established neighborhood of a medium-sized city. This is their first Halloween there, and they were told to expect a legion of trick-or-treaters. At 6:00 Friday night, no body had come. But By 7:00 almost all the candy was gone.
Twelve little goblins came in a final surge. Mike handed out the last eight Jolly Ranchers and began apologizing that that was the end of the candy. Two-and-a-half-year old Abby disappeared for a minute into the other room.
Abby rushed back in carrying her trick-or-treat pumpkin. She offered a piece of her candy to each of the kids in that bunch that didn't get any.
You're a good girl to share, Abby. Your mother taught you well. Proud of both my girls.
They have fallen rather far from the tree, our kids. At least geographically. In other ways, we bear at least some of the guilt for the fruits bearing the marks of the source. None of us seem to be able to get very far away from a classroom. Daughter Holli this morning is at the end of a long road of preparation for a major elective professional exam. She has studied 'in her spare time'-- while relocating from NC to WY to SD; changing part-time jobs a half dozen times so as to manage to raise a two year old; and renovating two houses from stem to stern.
Today, she is in Denver taking the test to become a Certified Hand Therapist. About half pass. She has certainly given it a good effort, what with the huge stack of flash cards she made and her meticulous notes from texts she's studied on her own. Volunteering to attend and later asked to assist with carpel tunnel and other upper extremity surgeries couldn't have hurt, either.
She'll pass first time around, most likely. If so or if not, her education won't end here. I'm afraid she's prone to that wonderful malady called 'life-long-learning'. So many wonders. So little time. Proud of you, girlie.
There have been times I thought that oh perhaps my BS meter's threshold was tuned a bit too low for my own good. But to widen the gate is to suffer fools gladly and find myself whistling laundry detergent jingles and recognizing nubile pop singers on the covers of grocery checkout boob racks. I like people as individuals after a while, but confronting strangers in masse on their turf demands a smiling, insincere cheeriness I can barely abide. I'm not antisocial but I'll readily confess to being anti-stupid and eccentric. "Who" I used to asked my kids growing up "wants to be centric? Take a look at 'normal' -- don't go there." My little anti-establishment quirks have earned me the local reputation (within these walls) of being a bit of a curmudgeon. I can live with that.
And now I find I might serve some grudingly positive function in my disdain of pop-everything. Consider these snippets from "A Few Good Grumps" by Jon Winokur. Doesn't this make you want to go out and just enlist. Today?
"...the world needs curmudgeons. They refuse to see life through the filter of wishful thinking and are outspoken in their devotion to the harsh realities of life. They protect the rest of us, stumbling about blindly behind our rose-colored glasses, from ourselves."
The curmudgeon's sensibility is an oyster's pearl produced by the grit of existence. Curmudgeons maintain their balance in a universe gone mad.
"Slowly, almost imperceptibly, our nation is becoming curmudgeon intolerant. It's as though our American ears, like our American bellies, have gone soft. Look around and you'll see the triumph of the mindless happy."
"Curmudgeons aren't just funny or just mean. Part of what makes a curmudgeon is an almost allergic reaction to injustice. When confronted with it, he responds with two powerful weapons: disgust and sarcasm."
"Popular culture has always been moronic," says O'Rourke. "It has to be, by mathematics. I mean, one-half of the population is by definition below median intelligence."
"The curmudgeon's excruciating sensitivity to life's countless insults—even those that may not be intentional—is both a curse and sustenance for his muse."
"Curmudgeons are classic outsiders—they instinctively distrust conventional wisdom and challenge authority. They are proudly and aggressively out of touch with the pop culture. Curmudgeons don't read "relationship" books, they don't carry pagers, and they don't have TiVo. They don't do pilates, feng shui, or aromatherapy. Curmudgeons never watch "Must See TV"—and they know the very term is a contradiction."
Oh. And did I mention this article is published in the AARP magazine? Hmmmm. Hey you people! Stop sending me your damned enrollment forms. I'll never be old enough to join you buncha dried up beboppers! Now get outta here before I call the sheriff. And your little dog, too!
A Baker's Dozen
1. Avoid alliteration. Always.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. Avoid cliches like the plague.
4. Employ the vernacular.
5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
8. Contractions aren't necessary.
9. One should never generalize.
10. Foreign words and phrases are not a propos.
11. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
12. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
13. Don't be redundant; don't use more words than necessary. It's highly superfluous. ~~~ More