My humble harvest

   Tomatoes, two kinds.  Peppers, two kinds.  Sweet basil, Texas tarragon, and thyme.  

Shoe Shine

   My in-laws moved out of their condo in Wellesley, shipping out to California the things they wanted most, or at least the things their new place would hold.  What they left behind:  dishes, pots and pans, enough wine glasses to host a good-sized reception, several bottles of vodka from Russia – gifts from visiting physicists, a fishing rod that breaks down into several pieces and fits inside a metal tube with a sturdy screw-cap and shoulder strap, sheets and blankets, clothes, cleaning supplies, extra light bulbs, an old vacuum cleaner, sake dispensers, a cane my father-in-law should be using but won’t, glass coffee tables, wooden end tables, two sofas, a dining room table and chairs, more dishes, more cleaning supplies, more glasses, a frozen pepperoni pizza, two frozen dinners of macaroni and cheese, a bottle of Budweiser, several bottles of Boylan’s root beer, many plastic bottles of water long past their use-by dates, a wooden box with my father-in-law’s shoe polish supplies, and so on, and so on.

We are keeping some of these things, which will come in handy.  Like the sofas and dining room set, which are an upgrade for the basement/poker room.  And the root beer.  And the dishes and pots and pans, which the girls can use when they get those first apartments.  And, I decided on a whim, the box of shoe polish supplies.  

My father used to shine his shoes.  Like a lot of things, he taught his boys how to do it.  I can’t recall the last time I shined my shoes.  The style of black loafers I wore for years seemed to hold a shine good enough until the shoes wore out.  Now I’ve got some lace-up shoes that seemed scuffed within days after I bought them.  And so, this past Sunday afternoon, I pulled out my father-in-law’s wooden box of supplies, popped open an old tin of black shoe polish, and went at it – pulling one of the old socks over my hand, working my fingertips into the dried polish until it started to feel like firm butter, rubbing it onto my shoes, then letting them sit for a little while before buffing them with a clean rag.  A quick little satisfying job.    

I’ll keep the box of shoe polish.  I’m making my way through the vodka.  Maybe one day I’ll even catch a fish with that old pole.  These things are meant to be used.   

The day after I polished my shoes -- not coincidentally -- I left on a quick business trip to southern California, including meetings in Gardena and Anaheim.  Gardena is where my wife’s grandparents lived.  I met the grandmother once -- still living in Gardena, I think -- after we got engaged.  She was old, very old, and had reverted to speaking very little English by that time.  She pressed my hand and kept saying, “I’m so glad.  I’m so glad.”  Happy that her little granddaughter had found a husband. 

   That was twenty-five years ago.  My wife’s grandmother is long gone.  My wife’s father is eighty-eight now and will, we think, be gone before too long.  It seems like a good thing that on my brief return to Gardena, I had a little of his polish on my shoes.

Time Machine

   I love the fact that my girls enjoy going to Vermont.  They are happy to visit their cousins or, if they’re just with me, to ramble this way and that among the small towns and back roads.  The like hearing some – but not too much – about what it was like to grow up there. 

   These days, when we visit, we like to stop in Bellows Falls for a hot dog at Fat Frank’s or a cone at the Dairy Joy.  Or both. 

   I’ve shown them the old train station in Bellows Falls, where I used to catch the train to and from college.  But I can’t really say what that was like:  standing in the old station at midnight with my father, waiting for the train to come at 12:15 in the morning, feeling badly that he would have a short night before a hard day’s work.  Watching the simple old man who manned the station grab for his cap and holler out that the train was a-comin’ when he saw the headlight appear up by the dam. 

   Coming home was worse.  I got the train home at 30th Street Station in Philly, watching out the window as we rolled past the boat-houses on the Schuylkill, adorned with strings of white lights.  I would wait and look for the big letters on the bridge that say “Trenton Makes - The World Takes” and wonder how long they have been there.  Then, after Trenton, I would settle in, flipping on the overhead light and rummaging in my knapsack for whatever I was reading at the time and one of the candy bars I had bought at 30th Street.  Reading until New York.  Then resting while they changed engines at Penn Station.

  If the train was quiet, and I wasn't stuck sitting near the café car, I usually could be asleep soon after midnight and New Haven, stirring every once in a while to lift a gritty eyelid and check our progress north.  Sliding through the change at Springfield, where it seemed we always hit the cold, then following the Connecticut River north like a ragged string of wild geese.

  If you rode that train back in the day you know about the moonlight on the snowy hills and the forests in the night; about the cigarette smoke that lingered in the air about the car; about the good feeling you had about the conductors, knowing they would keep track of your stop and make sure you didn’t sleep through it.

   And then, finally, the train pulled slowly in to Bellows Falls and it was time to get off.

   The train was like a time machine that had brought me back to the cold night air of Vermont.  My father, standing by the Volkswagen, its little motor running, under a street light in the lot across the tracks.  The whistle blowing as the train pulls through the crossing up by the dam as I stand there for a moment with my bags, looking into the only past I’ll ever have.

Great Eastern

      This is what learning to ski looked like, circa 1970.  We started in the back yard, before progressing to the sloping edges of our neighbor’s field, and then the so-called Pinnacle – a hill on the edge of town with a rope tow that the town maintained.  Long gone, I’m sad to say. 

   When we were ready for a real mountain, my father would wake us before daylight and strap our skis and poles to the top of the car while we ate a hurried breakfast and stuffed ourselves into our warmest clothes.  We piled into one of our old Volkswagen beetles and drove all the way north to Killington East – over an hour away – to be standing first in line for the gondola when it whirred into motion a few minutes before eight o'clock.  Back then there was free skiing from eight until nine, which made the mountain briefly accessible for Vermonters like us who lived in the back yard of the fine ski areas but could not afford the lift tickets.

   We rode the gondola up over endless evergreens and exposed boulders, the trees at the top thick and white with frozen frost.  We strapped on our skis and trudged to the head of the Great Eastern, a single, five-mile trail that wound all the down to the bottom of the valley.

   There is much to remember about those runs.  The swell of anticipation as we struggled into our bindings in the frigid air at the top.  The nervous turns through tight, icy corners.  The elation of bombing down the straight-aways.  The itch of your forehead inside the wool cap.  The sigh of reaching the last pitch at the bottom, knowing it was a few minutes past nine, and time already for the long ride home.  Except for that one, impossible morning when we reached the lift line again at eight fifty-five and went around again, clambering into the gondola for a second run, as happy as bank robbers who have made the state line.

   The ride home is as memorable to me as the skiing.  Pulling our thick-socked feet out of our old lace-up boots, slowly squeezing the prickly burn of mild frostbite from our toes.  Stopping at a corner store for candy bars.  A Charleston Chew for me, because they lasted the longest.

   Although I remember them now as happy mornings, I felt bad, for a time, in recalling them.  I felt bad for myself, and for my father, that he didn’t have the money to buy us lift tickets.  It seemed pitiful, in hindsight, driving for hours to snatch an hour of free skiing, when others drove in leisurely at nine-thirty to spend the day, taking our parking spot as we left. 

   But then I got old enough now to know better, and to look back on those mornings with an unequivocal smile.  The gondola ride and the skiing – however brief – were pure joy.  And I had a father who was willing to get up in the cold dark of a Vermont winter morning to take us there.

Definitively speaking

   "Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity, said Alfred Einstein, maybe, but Rita Mae Brown for sure.   

   Doing the same thing over and over again and merely hoping for a different result is not the definition of insanity, but of fishing.

   I said that.  

   I bought a package of black, plastic worms, with which the professionals on television regularly catch largemouth bass.  I carried them in my tackle box for years, dutifully trying them each trip we made to Lake Bomoseen, and various other places.  Once or twice a bite, but nary a bass did I catch.  Until I did.  It's a fine line, I think, between insanity and perseverance.

I  

The Volcano House

   The clerk who has the early morning shift at the Volcano House comes in to poke the fire in the great fireplace of volcanic stone.  On the wall a framed page from Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, circa 1935, reports that this fire has been kept burning continuously since 1874.  One likes to think the same fire still burns today.  And what a journey it must have been to get here in 1874, to the lodge that stands in this place, when some man laid his kindling in the hearth and set the fire that crackles gently here, adding just a touch of smoke to my morning coffee.

   After breakfast we head out onto the trail behind the lodge, through the tropical forest, down into the Kilauea Iki Crater.  We walk across the broken, black surface of the crater, picking our way up and down jagged ridges, bathing our faces in the warm steam that rises from the crevasses and broken mounds of cooled lava, snapping photos of the ferns and the flowering, berried plants and small trees the grow, impossibly, from the smallest cracks in the lava crust.  The morning fog and a light mist give way to pleasing sun and, on the higher ridges in the crater, a perfectly cooling wind.  The crater is a mile or more across.  Less a portion of our hike than some fantastic, outsized playground.

   Someone in our little band of four wonders aloud what time it is.  For the first time in a very long time, no one knows.  Or cares.

Summer night in Williamstown

    A warm, hazy summer evening in Williamstown.  I roam the roads that wind around the village proper, windows down, camera on the passenger seat, inhaling the countryside.  It feels, not surprisingly, like Vermont, which is just up one of these roads.  As the light finally fades in the summer sky, I roll back in to The Orchards, have a cold pint of Berkshire Brewing Company IPA in the bar, before strolling across the lightly creaking boards of the lobby and the lounge to my room. The plain girl sitting behind the reception desk says "Have a good night" as she rubs lotion into her hands.  I wonder if she and the maids make use of the little bottles that the guests leave behind, the ones that have been opened.  I wonder if she wonders who will hold these soft, soft hands.

An Eastern Comma butterfly

... visiting the little herb garden I put in behind the house a few days ago.

You are here

   People who are more serious and thoughtful than I am debate whether a photograph can truly be true.  Some say a photo is true if it just depicts what was there when it was made, if it is just a "light drawing" -- the literal translation of the Japanese word for photograph) of what exist?.  Others say that a photograph by its very nature does not depict any singular truth, but instead is unavoidably a version, a story about the truth, which is dependent on the angle, the aperture, the shutter speed, and all the other choices, conscious or not, that the photographer (or editor) has made.  

   I don't know whether a photograph can be the truth.  But I do know that a photograph can say something that is true.    This one, which I took in a playful spirit, now seems to me to say the most important true thing of all.   

A dog and his man

   On a fine Saturday at the end of May, when the whether finally is warm enough, and you finally have enough gumption to get up and do it, this is what you do:  you get your human to take you out in the kayak.

Motif Number 5 - Nubble Light

Postcards from the Acela - No. 3

    One wonders what they make at this little plant, somewhere along the train line in Connecticut.  No doubt this place looks defeated in the middle of the day, in the winter, in the rain.  But early in the morning on a clear, dry day, photographed in good light, it looks ready to soldier on, proud to be still standing.  

Postcards from the Acela - No. 2

     A photograph of a rowboat in the early morning fog.  A cliché to be sure.  But like most clichés it is harmless enough.  

Postcards from the Acela - No. 1

   If you have ridden the train between Boston and New York even once, you know to nab a seat on the East side of the train (that's the left side heading south, in case you are directionally impaired).  It is on this side, during the middle of the trip, as you roll along the Connecticut coast, that you get priceless views, of marshes and bays, little beaches and boats, tidal creeks and the Long Island Sound.  Some are long views, but some are just glimpses between the trees.  Mind the view, and not just your laptop computer.

  This last trip down, early on a Friday morning in June, was a revelation.  The train was nearly empty.  Instead of these furtive shots with my Blackberry, I could have brought a proper camera and fired away without embarrassment.  I actually had it in my bag the night before, but took it out.  Who takes real pictures on the train?  I do.  Next time.  

  

    

Hitchhike

   Thoughts ripped away unfinished in the draft of speeding trucks.  They mingle with the flying dust that settles in the corners of his eyes.  Makes him blink.  

   He stands on the shoulder of the road, shifting his feet in the coarse sand.  Waiting for a chance to sit down facing the other way, the way he wants to go.  

   He shifts his weight to the other foot, the other leg, the other side of his back.  

   A slow dance. 

Postcards from New Orleans

   Nawlins.  Nola.  The Big Easy.  We've been saying for a long time that we should go there, and we were right.  The French Quarter - aside from the ridiculous Bourbon Street - is fantastic.  The countless unspoiled old buildings with ironwork railings and brick and stucco facades and hidden courtyards, the shops and galleries along Royal Street, the Cigar Factory on Decatur, the old school jazz at Preservation Hall, the fried chicken and gumbo at Eat, the crazy old bar that is Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop, and the street musicians who put every other city's to shame.  The old green streetcars that rattle along St. Charles Street.  The outstanding fare at Herbsaint, especially the mussels with frites and a creamy sauce of sun-dried tomatoes and fresh thyme, while sipping a not-too-sweet Sazerac cocktail on the side, and then some terrific sauteed flounder with a glass of dry white burgundy.  The barbecued oysters and gumbo at Acme Oyster House, with a glass of the local Abita amber.  The stupendously huge raw oysters (but not so much else) at Redfish Grill.  The best fried catfish sandwich ever and old diner vibe at Camellia's on New Carrolton.  The beignets at Cafe Du Mond.  The quiet old neighborhood across the river in Algiers.  The refreshing breeze that always moves along the levee.  A great take for four days in April.

Angry birds

  It's April, so robins bounce around the back yard, doing what robins do.  Swoop, stand, jog for a bit, nab a small worm in the grass.  Repeat.

   But then, distracted from my work, I see one standing in the yard with what looks like a big clump of mud in its beak.  Odd.  

   And then he (it must be a he) flies straightaway into the kitchen window with a loud thunk.  He bounces off and goes right back to the spot in the yard where he was standing before, looking none the worse.  The clump of mud is stuck on the window.

   I don't often say this to robins, but what the fuck?  Is this about the cookies you can see on the counter, which you want left out for you?  You want the bird-feeder back, the one we had years ago?  If you want to talk, then let's talk.  But vandalism will get you nowhere.

This bud's for you.

Postcard from Central Park

   ... early on a Friday morning, without too many joggers and bikers about.  A cool morning, sun climbing, birds in song.  At the right spots on the rolling paths, where the birds are most active, it sounds like a true walk in the woods.  Refreshing, restorative.  But for the occasional odor of urine.