Photos Recovered

Some time early in this decade my dad gave me a box of old photos that had belonged to his father. Grandpa Grund was a distant figure to me. We never saw much of him. He was built like an ox and had a big, raspy voice. He had moved his family to Ohio from Des Moines, Iowa, to be part of the scrap business. Armco steel was a mighty venture then, headquartered in Middletown. Grandma Grund died when I was very young.

Armco, like my grandfather, is no more. Similarly the relatives and their friends who populate these magnificent photographs are no longer around. The era of American manufacturing might is mostly gone as is the world made visible in these faded images. I am struck by how well everyone is dressed, even in casual situations. Other than my grandparents I don’t know who anyone is. I have asked my dad to sit with me soon and identify as many of them as he can.

A few years ago I put many of the photos in the box into an album. I took the album to my studio and later it disappeared. For over two years I could not find this album of photos. Just last week I uncovered it at the bottom of a stack, like an archeological find. There is an elegance, a restraint, an innocence, perhaps, that I see in these people that is largely unseen today. We are too used to the camera, too filled with information and experiences to be as uncalculating as these folks. Too much can be made of this I know - people haven’t changed all that much throughout history. But there is something memorable and a touch wistful in looking through this album.

I see my grandparents looking very young and in love. Grandma Grund wears my favorite hair style. In another photo I see two women sitting on a man’s lap and I develop an instant crush on the beautiful young woman at the right. They are all strangers. All passed away. Gone from present time but able to stir emotions through aging images that gather new mystery and meaning by virtue of their survival into the future.

JAN & JOE

Joe: Hey, I’ve got a great title for a country song.

Jan: What is it?

Joe: I Broke Her Heart So She Broke My Arm”.

Jan: That’s so dumb. Truly stupid.

Joe: I think it’s great! I’ve got another one, too.

Jan: Forget it.

Joe: “Love Kills and Yours is Murder”.

Jan: Have you seen the Times?

Joe: Who reads newspapers anymore?

Jan: I do. I thought you still did.

Joe: How’d you like that second one?

Jan: Forget the Times...where’s the wine opener?

JAN & JOE

Jan: Do you ever imagine what we must look like to ants?
Think about a knat that’s perched on your hair and looking down at the ground.

Joe: I have better things to think about.

Jan: Like what?

Joe: Like, what if an asteroid slammed into our planet right as I was about
to be awarded the Nobel Prize. That would be just my luck.

Jan: That’s ridiculous.

Joe: Why? It could happen!

Jan: You could win the friggin’ Nobel Prize? Hah! That’s good!

Joe: Just before the moment when that prestigious prize is about to be turned over to me, everything is swept away in a
gargantuan firestorm.

Jan: Oh, that’s a happy thought. But back to what I started out saying. The relative scale of things in the universe is freaky. And
without gravity none of this could exist. Yet we can't even see it or define it exactly.

Joe: “...the force that attracts a body towards the center of the earth, or toward
any other physical body having mass.”. Defined in the Oxford Dictionary.

Jan: Aren’t you clever... looking that up. Still, they can only call it a force. They don’t know what it is.

Joe: It’s what makes it possible to drink beer.

Jan: I often look down around my feet and imagine that my eyes are hundreds of feet up. It reminds me of when I was little,
playing with tiny toys outside in the grass and dirt. That small little patch of earth became an enormous world to me, so
much larger in my imagination than it was in real life.

Joe: I’m going into the kitchen to play with gravity.

Conundrum

Do we all reach a point in our lives where the fragility of life, the temporal evanescence of it, the delicate way in which the whole of living becomes a tenuous rather than an ongoing affair....is there a point where all of our searching resembles a quandary?

It wasn’t that long ago that life expectancy was half of what it is today. That we live much longer these days is something I find comforting. We are endlessly worried about the various diseases and environmental poisons that surround us yet somehow most of us manage to make it well beyond the average life span of recent human history.

Getting older is a conundrum.

We relax in the face of the familiar but we know all too well that any day might be our last. We have no more idea of what lies beyond death than we do of the concepts of our religions that tell us that life continues on. It is all a matter of faith. In the scheme of things, we are neither tiny nor enormous. Size seems more and more relative. We are unique. Each and every one of us. This idea comforts me in a way that the silly storybook notion of Heaven never has. Even as a child I found this Heaven concept a bit of a stretch.

Old age brings so many wonderful surprises but also the diminishment of the body, the thing by which we have defined ourselves to the world since birth.
We know that people look at us and see an older person but inside us this doesn’t square with our looking outwards through our eyes. Our looking upon the world remains essentially the same as it has always been. This discrepancy - between the essential continuity of perception and the way in which we are perceived at this point in time - creates a new frontier for us, a new world that we slowly stumble into. It would be easy to be saddened by this, to seek the Fountain of Youth and whatever stuff gives us the appearance of continued youth. So many fall into this trap. But there is something richer, more profound, more rewarding, that seems to be around for those of us who want to be who we are - not who we think we should be.

SOUP

What to do here in the middle of the world when work is slow
and the rainy, cold, November weather has kicked in?



What to do when yer aging body holds you hostage in response to that
extra glass of red wine the night before?

What to do on a gloomy day when any number of humans would be perfectly
within their rights to despair and fret about things as they are?

Here’s what to do:
make some homemade soup.

Parent Camp

My daughter started Kindergarten about ten years ago.
We wanted to send her to a very good “magnet” school and at that time the procedure involved getting up early and waiting for an announcement specifying which location among several would be the place to sign up your child.
It was a bizarre game of musical chairs played out with anxious parents, one of them usually out roaming in a car waiting for the word from their partner that told them where to go.
Once the location was announced, parents would make a mad rush to get there in time to be among the limited number of accepted applicants.

If this sound like utter madness.....that may be because it is.

Now, the destination is made clear in advance. Some measure of sanity has triumphed, I suppose.

But now parents camp out - rain or shine or heat or cold - for days. These photos above were taken on a Saturday morning. Most of these people had been here since Thursday. The sign-up time? Monday night at 11PM.

As the rest of the advanced world passes the U.S. by in graduation rates, test scores, and overall measures of the quality of public education, this kind of nonsense - having to camp out for days to get your kid in a good school - stands out as yet another testament to a government that has turned its primary aspirations towards enriching the already wealthy among us.

nature walk

Ah.....a walk in the woods. I belong to a "nature center" that is one of my favorite places here in the middle of the world.
A quiet walk in the woods is a tonic for what ails ya.
Especially late in the day in the Fall - the very best of the best.

Re: Roosevelt

I mistakenly wrote that Roosevelt Junior High School had been demolished.
It seems that I jumped the gun: it is only in the process of being demolished.

This photo I stole from the Middletown Journal appears to show my ninth-grade science teacher. At least it appears to be him -
forty years on.
He was a tough guy. My friend Sam and I were whispering to each other during a test but Mr. Peters apparently only saw Sam's mouth moving. He strode slowly over, John Wayne style, and casually crinkled up Sam's test in his large hands, smashed it into a little ball - all without losing his stride.

I think Sam failed that test.

Roosevelt

Yesterday I saw someone’s posting on the internet that my old junior high school building - Roosevelt Jr. High - has been torn down. This was in Middletown, my childhood home in the middle of the world. The place I escaped from as soon as I graduated High School.

I was a bit sad when my elementary school - Wilson Elementary - was demolished some years ago to build a new school in its place. My elementary school memories are like a Hallmark Greeting Card, sweet and gauzy and laced with happy sentimentality.

Not so Roosevelt.
I went from a good elementary school in a relatively safe, unified environment, in the midst of a fairly safe middle-class neighborhood, to a large melting pot of kids from all over the place.
I befriended guys we called “hoods” in those days and some Saturdays in seventh grade - after morning basketball games at Roosevelt - we’d go shoplifting downtown. Small stuff like belts.
One of those guys is dead, one I know went to prison years ago for counterfeiting or some such thing.

Fights after school were a common occurrence.
My one and only school fight came after I defended my buddies at lunch from verbal assaults delivered by a ninth grader. We were seventh graders. He told me to meet him after school and, of course, I had no choice but to honor that.
He was much taller than me and his first punch knocked off my glasses. That was a major coup for him seeing as how I was terribly nearsighted. I landed a couple of punches that did little damage.
A parent of a friend stopped his car next to us on the street and yelled at us to stop.
He drove off and naturally we started brawling again.
The tall ninth grader threw a right punch that landed squarely on my mouth. Less than a week earlier my teeth had been branded with braces, the wires not yet attached.
This punch slammed my skin into the metal, shredding the skin. Blood poured forth.
I refused to give up, but the same father of a friend came by and stopped the fight.
I was a mess.

I won’t miss that damned school.

Political No show

What is the significance of the midterm election yesterday?
Not much.
No one who really reads in some detail about what the issues are and the solutions offered by various candidates - will find any solace or consternation in the ridiculous nonsense that passes for governance in the U.S. today. No, serious followers of politics might find themselves perplexed, disappointed, or downright depressed by the simplistic and skewed baloney, malarky, hypocrisy,
looniness, deception, stupidity.......that was the money-stuffed campaign season.

For me it has become a big shrug. I am delighted if anything comes out of Washington actually intended to assist ordinary Americans who struggle with a system ridiculously skewed in favor of the rich and powerful.

Here are my candidates for President, Vice-President and Treasury Secretary:
Bill Moyers, David Brooks and Paul Krugmann.

While I’m at it, I should add Curly Howard for Secretary of State.

Oh yeah, he’s dead.