rainy saturday

Weatherman was right. After the walk this morning, I started to mow the yard. It was my one shot this weekend to mulch this week's crop of leaves. I only got about a third of the yard done before it started raining.

Because of the rain, we changed our plan to spend with E. a day at Conner Prairie, the outdoor living history museum in Fishers.

E. asked if there were any good pancake breakfast places. Indy isn't much of a weekend breakfast kind of town. Austin is. Our house in South Austin was two blocks from the Magnolia Cafe on South Congress. In the 80s and 90s, Austin had numerous dive restaurants, inexpensive, that encouraged long lingering breakfasts on the weekend with friends.

So we had to call the Colonel, a fellow Texan and neighbor, who is our advisor on so many things including good food places. He recommended Joe's Shelby Street Diner southeast of downtown. It is a very unfancy place, but the service was good and the food was what we were looking for.

Then we went to a couple of antique malls, The Michigan Street Antiques, which is owned by a couple of guys who live in the townlet (they specialize in dealers with 50s era offerings) and then next door to the larger Midland Antiques, a large warehouse antique place. There is an outsider's art exhibit going on there, with dealer's booths.

The highlights:

works of hand painted signs by an artist from Kentucky, including a two foot door with the sign, Door to Hell. Above the door were painted flames. Written all over the door was scribbled words like taking other people's stuff, boosing, playing cards and dancing;

a painter who soaked his paper canvas in walnut oil, some kind of wax, and used chalky paints, giving his painting a lovely mix of washed colors, often set against a crude charcoal outline of a face;

small tableaus of African Americans at church, or at the barber shop, or in the backyard barbecuing. These were made by an artist from Michigan. As crude as the figures were (in the folk tradition of art), with bright colors and asymmetrical details, the sense of emotion and movement was very good.

Then we wandered past the antique dealers booths. I am afraid I am developing an almost phobia about looking at cases of the millions of little items one finds displayed, sort of like some folk get nervous around clowns. I guess it is just too much detail, too much that disinterest me so that I cannot focus on one or two things that would be interesting. I did see a great concrete birdbath, marked down quite low.

As snobbish as I am about gardening, I like some concrete art. In Austin, I had a three feet concrete cowboy with hat and chaps and drawn gun in the middle of an eight bed parterre herb garden. Our house was a stone ranch. The cowboy was more appropriate than Venus Descending. When we sold the house, the owners asked for the cowboy to stay. Last I checked, he was still there.