I am in Florida. I originally came intending to help our mother, Sarah Jo Barron, in her recovery from vascular surgery last week. However, over the weekend, she apparently had a serious vascular episode, and it is now likely she will die, probably quite soon. She is resting comfortably sedated in hospice care, and is showing signs of of increasing vascular insufficiency.
I know you all wish us well. No need to comment. I’ll keep you updated.
Wil and Marline Fry came to Byng for dinner tonight. As many of you might remember, Wil and I encountered each other frequently at sporting events that both our newspapers sent us to cover, and we frequently comment on each other’s blogs. Marline recently got a job in a faraway city, and Abby and I thought we would be remiss in our duties if we didn’t have them for dinner. We also played with the goats, shot some pictures (of course) and stayed up until nearly 11 talking. It ended up being an excellent night, and since they won’t be leaving for their new digs until August, we would love to have them over again.
In the process of shopping around for a car loan this week, I had to break out my one and only loan officer joke.
A frog goes into a bank wanting a loan. He approaches a loan officer named Patty Whack, and explains to that he has a trinket in his possession that he wants to use as collateral. He also mentions that his father is none other than Mick Jagger. Patty hesitates, then takes the trinket to her manager. The manager gives it one look and exclaims, “That’s a nick-nack, Patty Whack! Give the frog a loan! His old man’s a Rolling Stone!”
I swear, they have all laughed at it.
I shot another gopher tonight. I shot it with our very old bolt-action .22. Two years ago I shot one in this same fashion, and not long after that I stabbed one to death in the closest thing to hand-to-hand combat I have experienced.
Tonight I was mowing the north pasture on the big John Deere when I saw this pest up out of its hole, scattering dirt. It’s rare that I get the chance to destroy these destructive pests, so I scampered into the house and grabbed the old .22 and about five shells. I snuck up behind the mower that I had parked not far from its hole and shot it through the neck. It died instantly. Despite the fact that they tear up the yard, ruin the garden and kill trees, I have no desire to see them suffer. After I killed it, I apologized for having to do so.
“Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”
We spent yesterday and today working like mules at Abby’s dad’s place in the country outside of Ryan, Oklahoma, trimming the yard with the weed whacker, cutting down dead branches from the trees, and hauling yard and other debris down to the brush pile. As I made one trip after another on the four-wheeler with a flat-bed trailer, in the scalding sun, to dump branches into a ravine, I kept noticing how much old stuff had accumulated on the property. Oddly, the same is true for our little patch of country two hours northwest. I imagine it’s like that throughout rural America; years and years and years of old tractors, old plows, old Chevy pickups, old washing machines, old tires, old things made out of steel or wood that are now unrecognizable. I suppose there is more accumulation of that kind of stuff now than when I was growing up simply because more time has passed since the benchmarks of American life; the industrial revolution, the automotive revolution, the availability of electricity, the use of mechanized farm equipment instead of livestock like oxen. As we rode past it again and again, I thought about how none of this old stuff would likely be moved in my lifetime.
A couple of entries ago, Tom commented that he liked this image of Abby. I shot it early in our dating, in the spring of 2003, with my Nikon/Kodak DCS 720x, which rendered her green wool blazer as blue. She “doesn’t do blue,” so I fixed it with the “replace color” function in Photoshop. For a while I had a hidden page on my web site with this picture of her and the lyrics to Coldplay’s “Green Eyes.”
Everything about her is beautiful to me in this photo.
When I was in college, I read a poem in the Oklahoma University English department’s literary journal Windmill called “The Five Faces of the Skeleton.” I thought it was a pretty cool poem, and some years later I did an homage to it by reading some of my lame, depressing poetry over some Brian Eno music. It was sufficiently embarrassing that I have since erased that tape. However, I was reminded of the title “The Five Faces of the Skeleton” last week when our editor, Talina Turner, was preparing to photograph a party, and needed my help coming up with some lighting. I let her use me as a model, and it turns out that unlike a lot of other photographers, I am not particularly shy in front of the camera. So now I present to you “The Five Faces of the Skelton, Phase III”…
For the several years that I have been gardening, I am always reminded of my father when I tend my tomato plants. He wasn’t a very good gardener, but in the first summer when I was raising tomatoes, 1996, he shared with me a tip: the little sprig of leaves that grows out of the center of a “Y” in the vines is a “sucker” because it doesn’t bear fruit and uses the plant’s valuable nutrients for nothing. He told me you can just pinch off these suckers at the crotch of the vines.
So I think of him all summer while I tend my tomatoes. He died in 2005. We think of him often. I was happy that he got to know Abby, and that she got to know him, before he died.
It looks like it’s going to be another year of a good garden. Now that it’s turned hot, the cantaloupe and cucumber vines are growing like kudzu.
The other day on the radio I heard a car dealer telling congress that his “constitutional rights” were being violated because the bankrupt car company whose cars he sold had terminated his franchise. Obviously this was another American hillbilly who has never read the constitution, but also consider this: every single time I have bought a car, I have felt like I was being ass raped. In fact, there is little I wouldn’t do before I would willingly buy a new car. I actually yelled at the radio when this poozer was whining about his stupid dealership going down the drain: “Shut up, you whining baby. This is your karma! Choke on it!”
I was out yesterday shooting some storm damage photos – mostly trees and limbs blown down – when I was oddly reminded of doing the same exact thing on the very first day of work at a newspaper, on May 17, 1982. I was a brand new intern at the Lawton Constitution, my hometown newspaper. There had been two severe thunderstorms the night before, and the damage was, like yesterday, mostly trees and limbs. The photos I made then and the photos I made yesterday are strikingly familiar.
I started that summer with a Nikon FM with a motor drive, a 28mm Series E Nikon, a 50mm Nikkor, and 105mm Nikkor. It was a pretty nice bag for a college kid.
That summer was punctuated by the tantrum-esque suicide of my college room mate on May 12. Over the years I have gotten less and less sympathetic about it, until now I believe he was a self-important baby and a totally selfish dick. I have touched on this subject a time or two, and one day I will expound. In the mean time, let me just add that there are a lot of things that define winners and losers, and a lot of ways to live well and live poorly, but nothing is dumber than suicide, which of course leaves you nothing at all. I sometimes think about everything that he missed in life.
I won’t bore you with the insanely detailed minutia of my dream last night, but I will bore you with the high points:
There, just the high points.
After getting up and making coffee for Abby and myself, I sat here at my computer and waited for inspiration. What was I wanting to look up? Hmm. Oh, I remember: what does philharmonic mean? Is it a guy named Phil with a harmonica? Not really; when I was 12, I actually wanted to be in a philharmonic orchestra. (Sidebar: when I told this to my dad, he said with a laugh, “You’ll starve!”)
As I looked it up, I guided my iTunes to some Leonard Bernstein pieces to which I listened when I was growing up, mostly from my dad’s collection of albums. (Side sidebar: I avoided the Ray Conniff Singers and the Percy Faith Orchestra [Side side sidebar: except for the one called “Bewitched” with the insanely hot barefoot woman on the cover, which I hid under my bed.])
As I played these often tender and intimate orchestral pieces that were my musical mainstay in the mid 1970s, I thought of how innocent and vulnerable I was as that teenager, and I wondered how I could have possibly survived the social killing ground that is junior high school. Particularly wounding for a sensitive teen like me was romance, and how unfair it seemed that one cute girl after another was with one idiotic douchebag after another. How could she like him and not me? I imagine it was a pretty universal sentiment for kids like me.
As my life went on and I became the growing adult I am today, I discovered that my feelings of those days were most certainly misgiven, since all the guys in junior high are douchebags, and all the cute girls are, essentially, bitches (I know the one for whom I pined was a dreadful bitch, and remains one to this day.) It is, I have discovered after many years of ponderance, the way of youth.
I didn’t talk to my parents much about these feelings.
If it’s any consolation, most of the douchebag guys who humiliated and threatened me back then have had pretty miserable lives as adults. Divorce and obesity, mostly. It seems that they peaked when they were about 14, and I am still peaking now, more than 30 years later. I don’t wish them pain, but I am amused observing their karma.
“Tonight’s top story: Mars invades the world. But first, a word from our sponsor.”
These words, spoken by me when I was 15, are at the start of one of the funniest tapes my friends, sister and I made as we grew up. It is the intro to “Invasion of the Polka-Dot People,” just one of dozens of tapes we made back then. Another was the Willie Do-It series, in which reporter Mack Wallace routinely asks, “Will Willie Do-It do it?” (Willie had a pair of brothers, I recall, named Woody and Canny.) Their adventures included digging around the world using a pair of chipmunks, leaping the English Channel, and going on trial for an unfortunate incident involving Dolly Parton. Also in the litany are tapes with my long-ago friend Keith Berry, and in college and my early 20s with Scott, Robert and their ilk. There are a lot of these tapes from through the years.
But why Polka-Dot people, and why chipmunks, you ask? Because for a long time I had my grandfather Batten’s two-speed reel-to-reel recorder, and by recording on the slow speed and playing it back at normal speed, our voices sounded like chipmunks, and we would use any segue we could find to allow us to do scenes “in chipmunk.” Sometimes we would just chatter and giggle “in chipmunk” for the fun of it. Our sponsor most of the time was Scudzo Mouthwash, which I pronounced “Scooo-zo” because I misread a B. C. comic when I was seven.
The reason I was thinking of them this week is that I have finished transferring all these relics to CD/MP3, and have finally purged my life of the archaic audio cassette tape.
