Sentinel
“Beg to report sir, the good ship California is taking on water and is listing to port.”
***
“It’s raining, it’s pouring,
The old man is snoring …”
It’s been raining and pouring but this old man hasn’t been snoring. He’s a light sleeper, even lighter when anything that isn’t tied down is blowing around the backyard and up and down the block, while sheets of water are slapping the pool cover.
It takes a dark and quiet night for this old man to snore, while the trite old, “dark and stormy night,” has me staring sleeplessly up at the ceiling, hoping it won’t leak.
My phobias don’t include snakes or great white sharks. My phobia is over the need to contact the State Farm adjuster because Mother Nature decided to pee in the living room.
Any man, woman or child, young or old who’s been able to snore through California’s atmospheric rivers and bomb cyclones of the past two weeks has got to have been on intravenous melatonin.
I have to wonder how the people just to our east, over on Carson Street are faring. Years ago three homes on that street were condemned when part of the hill looming above, oozed into yards, kitchens and family rooms. The hill still looms. If this old man was living in one of the still standing houses he’d be spending the night downing shots of bourbon while staring out the back window.
Wading room only at the city park
“Out with the old and in with the new,” goes the old New Year’s saying. The year 2022 decided that it would not go gracefully. I watched 2022’s final stormy afternoon from inside Peet’s Coffee at the local supermarket mall.
The Bay Area was shooting the rapids, metaphorically speaking, of an atmospheric river. Atmospheric river. It’s the weatherperson’s currently in vogue term for what used to be called a gully washer, or a rainstorm, or raining cats and dogs. At the risk of sounding old and out of vogue, I think I prefer the latter terms.
“Out with the old and in with the new.”
Out with torrent and in with atmospheric river.
The vernacular goes through constant change. Words and terms are out and replacements are in. Sometimes the changes are necessary and other times change just guts our language of creativity, color and verve. It turns rich dialectical brioche into sterile, insipid, stale white bread.
Well meaning people make it their job, sometimes with unmitigated presumption, to legislate changes. They sit around a conference room table and sap the energy out of communication. Maybe they aren’t well meaning at all. Maybe they just figure they need something to justify being on the payroll.
“We’ve run out of things to do,” said Stewart.
Miles thought for a moment. “I’ve got it! Let’s sterilize the English language.”
To whatever end, some folks at Stanford University figured they would begin the New Year on a forward-thinking note by unveiling its brand new language guide which aims to “eliminate many forms of harmful language, including racist, violent, and biased … language in Stanford websites and code.”
That’s not an ignoble goal but the end result had Stanford, as the old saying goes, “throwing out the baby with the bathwater.” Given Stanford’s new guidelines, tossing babies is not a good look, linguistically speaking.
As a writer, or someone who just occasionally plays at writing, I peeked at portions of the guide and was aghast. At some point one has to decide if a change is appropriate correction or ham handed mutilation.
The changes outlined in the new guide include replacing the term “Karen” with “demanding or entitled White woman,” and prisoner with “person who is/was incarcerated.” A homeless person should be referred to as “a person without housing,” as if that’s going to bestow some measure of creature comforts on someone who is, like, you know, without housing.
“I appreciate the new moniker — I guess,” said the person without housing. “But a dry place in which to lay my head would be more helpful.”
The old saying “beating a dead horse” is, according Stanford’s language police, now verboten, as it “normalizes violence against animals.” My dad often used that term and I can’t recall a single moment when it triggered in me some deep seated urge to grab a stick and hunt down a deceased equine in the suburbs of the Bay Area. Oh, and by the way, trigger is also a no-no.
I get it, some words and terms have rightly been put to rest and there are certainly others that should be on the chopping block (Chopping block is probably on Stanford’s taboo term list as it might normalize violence against vegetables. One doesn’t chop an onion. The recipe calls for one cup of an onion converted into smaller pieces).
It seems to me that the Stanford folks went a smidge too far. It’s just another of those instances that has other Americans (American is another forbidden word by the way) looking at the Bay Area as a haven for “fornicating people who lack substantial education,” known in the old lingo as “fucking idiots.”
Cora posed the question sometime during Thanksgiving weekend. It was the never before posed query that put normalcy into doubt.
“Are we getting a tree this year?”
She might just as well have asked if we planned on breathing.
I’d actually been asking myself the same question since the holiday season began, sometime back in October. That’s when it starts you know – October.
In commerce anyway.
If commerce demands that Christmas season starts in October then Christmas starts in October, damn it. Commerce drives everything, even the seasons. Nature may determine whether or not Christmas will be white but the chase for money dictates when the celebration begins and ends.
In August, before kids are even back in school, the water guns, bright tropical colored plastic dinnerware, pool toys and beach towels that didn’t sell in June and July are all headed back to a distribution center near Reno or some little town in the Central Valley. The lazy days of summer displays have been replaced by rubber masks, plastic Jack-o-lanterns and overpriced, undersized bags of mini Snickers bars. Make sure you grab your candy corn before the September rush or you might be shit out of luck on October 1st. Before the first Jack o lantern has been lit, the nasty lattes that taste of eggnog turned bad are being served up at Starbucks.
***
“Are we getting a tree?”
***
When have I ever questioned getting a tree?
Well, there was that time when I was sharing a house with my friend Scott. Two guys in our mid-twenties and far too cool to sanction Christmas, we scorned any notion of putting up a tree. We were bound to be curmudgeons to the core, until Abra and Danielle, the two sisters who were sharing the house with us, put up a tree and saved us from our own macho cantankerousness.
When I think about it now, I realize what a pair of damn fools we were.
***
I guess that deep down Cora and I knew as long ago as June that Christmas would be different this year. For six years our daughter Jessica and her two children, Jackson and Luciana, had been living with us. We celebrated the holidays with lights; with candies and frosted cookies and eggnog and peppermint stick ice cream; with carols; with a tree; with stockings hung by the chimney with care, or even haphazardly. Who cares? Just put up the damned stockings. Oh, and did we leave a snickerdoodle out for Santa? Can’t leave anything to chance.
Last summer, Jessica had finally saved up enough money to buy a home of her own. I was heartbroken when they got into that overloaded SUV and drove away.
The kids are gone.
Jessica and the kids would do Christmas morning at her house.
So why do Christmas?
It didn’t matter that they’re just 30 minutes away in Suisun City. The crazy, day to day excitement of kids in the house is gone.
***
A chapter in an occasional series of posts documenting an autumn 2021 road trip through the Midwest. A continuation of the post, Highway 52 – Southbound To ‘Heaven’
“The people who come here will be drawn…” He stops, searching for words. “Have you ever been walking down the street and stopped in mid-stride and turned in at a bookstore or a gallery you never knew existed?” People will decide to holiday in the Midwest for reasons they can’t fathom or express. ~ J.D. Salinger in the book Shoeless Joe.
Isn’t that how it goes sometimes? You find yourself drawn to a small town that you wouldn’t have known existed if not for some haphazard, disjointed string of events that happened over the course of nearly half your lifetime. Okay, maybe that’s how it rarely goes.
In the autumn of 2021, I found myself in Dyersville, a small town in eastern Iowa. A few months prior I didn’t know there was such a place. And yet my visit wasn’t a random event, one of those, ‘Oh look, Dyersville. I think I’ll jump off the highway and look around,’ sort of things.
Dyersville could have been just another one of the thousands upon thousands of small towns, dots on a map all over America that most of us have never considered visiting, never even heard of. We might, on occasion, take a second’s note of some random, tiny burgs. Maybe the name catches the eye and we wonder how there came to be an Accident in Maryland. What’s so cheery about Cheer, Iowa? Would I want to live in Boring, Oregon? Why is there Hell in Michigan and from what seed did Weed sprout in California? Maybe they’re little places we breeze past, on the way to somewhere more important. Mostly though, those small towns, those little black flecks on the map are the ciphers we ignore – cartographical white noise.
Dyersville could be one of those places but it’s not. Dyersville sucks people in because Dyersville is an example of life imitating art. Like most of the Dyersville pilgrims I wouldn’t have visited had it not been for a movie and a book.
A chapter in an occasional series of posts documenting an autumn 2021 road trip through the Midwest. A continuation of the post, “The Road to Lansing and the Divine Revelation”
“I just feel like the most important conversations I’ve had in my life have been at a diner counter.” ~ Ramy Youssef
October 23rd, Lansing, Iowa.
It was a sparse crowd in NutMegs when I walked in for breakfast and to figure out what to do with my day.
NutMegs. It’s a proper coffee shop. When you walk into a proper coffee shop you see stools in front of a counter; you hear chatter; you likely hear an argument or two, local gossip, local politics and naturally, sports; you hear the clink of a spoon on a sturdy white coffee mug; the sizzle of a flattop hard at work. And the smells; breakfast meats and strong coffee. On weekdays, old timers finish a light breakfast and then hang around chatting with other old timers seated nearby or, hell, even across the room. Weekends bring the families, before a sporting event or after church. The moment you walk into a proper coffee shop, even on a chilly Midwest morning, you feel its singular warmth.
Yeah, NutMegs is a proper coffee shop. At least it seemed so to this stranger from the Pacific Coast.
Plain, straightforward, knotty pine walls, maybe fake knotty pine walls. I can never tell the difference. Walk in, and to your right is a display case overloaded with empty but still delicious calories; donuts, fritters, bars and assorted pastries. To the left, a set of shelves holds some prepackaged cookies and porcelain likenesses of milk cows – Midwest kitsch.
I took a seat at a counter that was worn and shiny, the erosion of scores of satisfied elbows.
A few stools over a burly man, an empty plate before him, sat nursing a few final sips of coffee. He wore the vestments I’d become used to seeing in small town middle America; faded denim work pants (preferably overalls) a flannel or denim shirt and work boots.
This attire was always topped off with a faded, sweat stained well worn cap, sometimes pulled low, other times, like in a proper coffee shop, worn back on the head, the better to look people in the eye when chatting. Never though, is the cap worn backwards (a good friend of mine holds the firm belief that only baseball catchers and submarine commanders should wear a cap backwards. Being a photographer, admittedly one of no repute, I firmly disagree. Try aiming a camera with a brim fighting your hands for space).
Worn back or pulled low, these caps are usually emblazoned with some farm equipment logo; John Deere, Case, or Tractor Supply.
It’s a raiment I came to call, Midwest business casual. I’d yet to see a suit but I hadn’t yet visited a church and didn’t figure to. I imagined that even attorneys, accountants, bankers and the undertaker must wear some form of this Midwest business casual. Continue reading
This week John, author of the site, Journeys with Johnbo, leads the Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, choosing the topic flights of fancy. I was stumped and ready to bow out of this one until I realized how easy this one could be for me.
My flight of fancy has been the road. The road; cobbled roads; dirt roads; highways; country roads; farm roads; busy roads; lonely roads. Roads have led me to places that I’ve dreamed of seeing and places that I never dreamed existed.
“The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,” ~ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
Roads have carried me to interesting and beautiful places, but the road itself possesses its own singular beauty and character.
A road less travelled. Saxeville, Wisconsin
It’s the road that’s allowed me to experience places of matchless grandeur and beauty and to share them with my wife. If not for roads I would have never experienced the twin pleasures of viewing nature’s handiworks and Cora’s joy and awe.
I don’t know which was more beautiful, the Black Hills or Cora’s awe in seeing them.
Being October, and being that Halloween is less than two weeks away, it’s only appropriate to add another graveyard episode to the Monthly Monochrome series (for the previous charnel chapter click this link).
As I indicated in my previous graveyard post, a graveyard can be a cemetery, but a cemetery can’t be a graveyard until time, nature and lack of attention have weathered the old charnel.
Tonopah Cemetery
Located in the high desert of Nevada, 211 desolate miles from the glitter of Las Vegas, sits Tonopah, Nevada.
Nevada is appropriately named the Silver State because many of its cities, towns, ghost towns and ruins were birthed by silver. In 1900, Jim Butler discovered silver at a site that would produce one of the biggest booms in the west and with it, the high desert town of Tonopah.
Old cemeteries are repositories of history. They speak, as silently as a grave, of lives and times long past.
Among the epitaphs of the residents of Tonopah’s old graveyard:
In 1909, Leonard Black fell from a freight wagon loaded with three tons of grain and was run over. Leonard was eleven years old.
In 1906, Alfred Anderson succumbed to a gunshot wound after having assaulted a woman in, as the epitaph describes, her bagnio.
Kentuckian William Allen Montgomery was a pioneer, stockman, and teamster. Born in 1838, he died at age 62.
In 1916, Peter Mandich was careless while riding in a mining skip (car). According to the Reno Evening Gazette, “Peter Mandich, a Servian, 25 years of age, was instantly killed in the underground incline shaft of the Tonopah Extension Mine, Saturday morning about 10:30 o’clock. He stood up in the skip and his head coming in contact with the timbers, his neck was broken and his head badly crushed.” All the way from Serbia to seek his fortune only to perish at a too young age.
Unmarked gravestones cast long shadows in late afternoon.
This week Tina of Travels and Trifles has challenged us to a Treasure Hunt. She’s proposed a list of treasure items which includes:
A pet or pets (yours or someone else’s)
The moon or the sun (extra credit for both in one image)
Clouds (extra credit if you also include rain or snow)
A reflection
A child (extra credit if with other family members)
An umbrella (extra credit if you include a person using it)
A truck (extra credit if you include the driver or what the truck is hauling)
Autumn foliage (extra credit if it’s something that only blooms in the fall)
Something fun you found on a walk
I can’t manage the extra credits above but there’s plenty of double dipping.
Clouds
Below is an alpine meadow near the summit of the Beartooth Highway a scenic 68 mile drive that begins in Red Lodge, Montana and ends at the northeast corner of Yellowstone National Park.
Below, Early morning at Port Clyde, Maine.
Reflections
Banner image is of a random lake I passed by while driving through Wisconsin.
Below I’ve reflected on the urban scene. The first image is a reflection of the grand Le Château Frontenac, located in Quebec City’s Upper Town. The window is in a building located on Rue du Petit-Champlain far below Upper Town.
The TransAmerica Pyramid in San Francisco is one of my favorite architectural subjects, with it’s unique shape and numerous beams and angles. The photo below is a reflection in one of the Pyramid’s windows of traffic on Columbus Avenue.
Parke County, Indiana. Looking for the Mill Creek Covered Bridge, I turned left when I should’ve turned right. The road winds through some cornfields until the cornfields end and the road dips into a dark, woody hollow. It’s a foreboding place. A twinge of anxiety in my gut. Just about to the bottom of the hollow, I look to my left and there’s a shack, an old single wide, scrap part of things and stuff on a sloping lot. A guy tending a leaf fire looks up and glares at me through the smoke. It’s a dead end at the bottom. I turn around and driving past the sloping lot I notice a Confederate flag flipping in the breeze. The man’s glare hasn’t left his angry visage. A chill runs through me and I can only imagine how a lone Black man would feel. Actually no – I couldn’t imagine it.
***
Wisconsin is dairy country and where there’s dairy there’s naturally milk, and where there’s milk it’s just a short hop to cheese. Wisconsin is passionate about its cheese. Chauvinistic. In Green Bay football fans don cheese head hats, gigantic yellow wedges of foam ‘cheese’, to games.
Cheese curds are ubiquitous here. Pubs, restaurants, supermarkets, mom and pop stores, the household fridge and even, as I came to learn, the car’s dashboard.
The Buffalo River meanders through the southern edge of Mondovi, Wisconsin. The town is named after the Battle of Mondovi, where Napoleon’s army defeated the army of the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont. How a town in Wisconsin came to be named after a Napoleonic tussle is a mystery to me.
In the Mondovi IGA grocery store, holding a package of cheese curds, studying it like one might puzzle over a Rubik’s cube.
A woman paused nearby.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m not from here.”
“Oh, welcome,” she said kindly.
“Thank you.” Holding up the package of curds I asked her, “What exactly do you do with these?”
“Well, they’re very good deep fried.”
I thought, well, no shit, everything, with the possible exception of liver, is good deep fried.
Since I didn’t bring a deep fryer along with me I asked, “Can they be microwaved?”
“Yes, but not for too long. They’re good as is. If you’re on a road trip you can set them on the dashboard and let the sun warm them up.”
In the end I bought them. During the course of a few days I had them microwaved and cold but they never saw the top of my dashboard. They were good I suppose. And then I was sick of them – and they weren’t good anymore. But I hadn’t had them deep fried yet.
***
Gumby’s Bar and Grill, in downtown Mondovi. Mostly square, plain. A brick structure with a log façade and a sign that sports Gumby, that guy with the bulging eyes who looks like a stick of green gum partially split lengthwise. Gumby’s got his usual smile. Of course he does. He’s hoisting a mug of beer. That’s not the Gumby I remember. A Schlitz Beer sign over the door. I remember Schlitz. Do they still make it? “Schlitz, the beer that made Milwaukee famous, simply because it tastes so good.” How could I forget that old slogan from the days of my childhood? Me, and three old boys on their lunch break seated in a row at a plain Formica bar. Pizza sounded good. A bacon cheeseburger pie; beef, bacon, mozzarella and cheddar, and dill pickles.
“I’ve never had pickles on pizza before.”
“Neither have, I” replied the bar keep. “It’s the only pizza on the menu I haven’t had.” Not exactly a testimonial.
He was a tall young man, bearded with glasses. A sort of preppy, grad school look about him. Working his way through college, drawing beer and making small talk with barflies?
In the appetizer section, something called a cheese bomb.
I asked the bartender what a cheese bomb was.
”It’s a big square cheese curd. Good but greasy.”
“Deep fried?”
“Oh, yeah. Not something you should eat every day.”
In the end, I ordered the bacon cheeseburger pie and went away happy with dill pickles on pizza, but wishing I’d had the cheese bomb for desert.
The Life in My Years 