A weakness for palm trees

  The Vermont photographer Richard Brown confessed a weakness for birch trees.  I seem to have one for palms.  Flipping through my pictures of Southern California, a good number of the better ones seem to have palm trees in them.

   On our last trip to Northridge, in the parking lot outside a mall, I get what seems to me a worthy shot of some tall palms in silhouette against the orange and blue sky of the rising sun.  An hour later, when my older brother sees it on Instagram, he notes that it looks like the album cover for the Eagles’ Hotel California.  And he is right.

   I wonder if I took the picture because it connected in some subliminal way with my memory of the album cover.  Something like the connection that I still have with 70s music – the music of my teens, the music that got stuck in my head before it got too full of adult things.  You leave your teens behind, but part of you is always stuck there, in the time where you first had music of your own, and learned to drive, and fell in love.  The time when you learned that you not only could, but you must, go your own way.

  

Turkey Trot - 2014

Hi Daryl,

Congrats on finishing the Wellesley Turkey Trot today! Your time of 26:56 gave you a pace of 8:40/M.

Please find a link to searchable results below:

http://racewire.com/live_results.php?id=4179&bibnumber=836

Thanks!

Team RaceWire

Postcards from Dickinson

Postcards from Carlisle

Such a place

   Bourdain travels in the best way - widely, frequently, and at someone else's expense.   Surprisingly, he has a decidedly favorite hotel - the Chateau Marmont in Beverly Hills.  

   The writer Andrew O’Hagan has a favorite hotel in the city where he lives, to which he retreats to recharge and refresh, to indulge and escape.  For him, it is Claridge’s in London, of which he says, "Claridge’s is a state of mind and everyone should have such a place, even if it’s just a café, a bench or a patch of grass, a vantage point from which one can clearly survey the possibility of improvement."

   Great stuff, that.  

   I don't have a favorite hotel, although maybe I can work on that.  The closest thing I have to "such a place" would be a stream in Vermont.  Not a particular one.  Any one which has in it my waders, my brothers, and some trout.

Clarendon Springs

The Clarendon Springs Hotel, also known as Clarendon House.  Built in 1834.  One of many hotels and “curative spas” that thrived in Vermont in the 1800s, capitalizing on the  purported benefits of the local spring waters and a thriving railroad industry, which brought Southerners and city dwellers north in great numbers.  An article in the August 29, 1867 edition of the New York Times describes the village of Clarendon Springs as “one of the pleasantest places to which [one] can resort during the summer, to avoid the heat, and dust, and noise, and other great annoyances of the Great City.”  The hotel is long closed, and gutted -- the Southerners and city dwellers, the picnics and music and dancing, long gone.  The springs remain, along with just the husk of this once fine hotel.

  

Horses, fences, barns and wires

   So, what do we like about this picture?  Horses are nice, as are barns and fences.  

   And what is not to like?  The angles, for sure; the slope these horses are on make the picture seem tilted when it's not (see the roof line of the barn).  Also, the overhead wires, which are prominent and disrupt the otherwise bucolic scene.  How much better might the picture be without the wires?

   But imagine not the picture but the actual scene, the actual place, without the wires.  Imagine the farmer going out to his barn in the morning, in the dark, to milk his cows with nothing but his own cold hands.  Before the power lines were put in.  Imagine how he felt the day the poles went in right in the middle of his field.  

   I imagine he likes the view just fine.