Hands In The Dirt

Beautiful Day

2009-07-05T08:29:00.003-04:00

Perfect weather in New York in July. Who knew? After a month and a half of almost daily rain, cool breezes brought a blue sky into town. People abandoned Manhattan in droves over Thursday and Friday, and the city was eerily quiet and peaceful.

Partner and I joined our friends Tex and Cheryl to see a documentary called Afghan Star about an American Idol like television show on a fledgling network in Afghanistan. From 1996 until they were overthrown, the Taliban made illegal music and singing in that country.

Even now, there is some concern about the program which had over 2,000 contestants from all over the country. Two of the finalists were women, and one of them allowed her hair to be uncovered, and when she lost and sang her goodbye song she swayed and skipped a bit, shocking everyone. Dancing, women dancing, is considered obscene. She should not have done that, said the other contestants.

I recently read this description in Colin Wells' Sailing From Byzantium about the conflict between the religious Hesychasts and the scholarly humanists in the fading days of the Byzantine Empire:

As their empire edged closer to extinction, the Hesychasts and the humanists became often bitter ideological enemies, in a spectacular clash of values and beliefs that frequently spilled over into politics. It was not a simple situation, and much of the time there was no clearly marked lines of separation between the factions. There was much common ground. Both were patriots who wished to save Byzantium and its heritage. The question, inevitably, became which heritage, classical or Christian, and at what price? With tragic inexorability, the antagonists came to act as if the price of survival for one tradition must be the death of the other. -- p. 45

The rest of our day was spent browsing books at Barnes and Noble at Union Square and then enjoying a lovely cookout on the Close at General Seminary. Quite a mix, seminarians and their families, some from out of town, people staying at the seminary during the summer, renters, bringing something to grill and something to share.

We watched the fireworks over the Hudson River, two blocks away, from the roof of our building. Across the early evening sky, rooftops and balconies were full of people cheering and watching the glorious fireworks, celebrating the country's birthday, the beautiful day and the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson sailing up the river that bears his name.

The High Line

2009-07-03T18:40:00.015-04:00

Partner and I took an early morning walk to checkout this great new park in our neighborhood.

On the edge of West Chelsea, an elevated rail track runs alongside and through several buildings. The tracks were built in 1929 to service the small factories and businesses along this formerly industrial area of the city close to what had been a series of working docks.

Last month, the High Line opened to the public, a public-private collaboration to turn the elevated tracks into a public garden, a large scale installation that along with the nearby Hudson River Park brings more green space to a part of the city lacking in parks.

In the beauty salon in "Steel Magnolias" there is a needlepoint that states "There is no such thing as natural beauty." The High Line preserves many of the original tracks as well as the weediness/wildness of the plantings that existed there before it was turned into a park. The architects also played off of the original wildness through plantings and hardscape features.

With all new plantings, the look as if these variety of plants just happened to sprout up on the old tracks.

A peak at the Hudson River and Chelsea Piers.

Walking above traffic, this is a much quieter passage for pedestrians. This spur shows how hard the designers worked to keep everything looking natural.

This amphitheater is where the highline crosses 10th Avenue. Glass plates were installed to allow pedestrians to sit and look up 10th Avenue. It sounds odd, but most New Yorkers do not look around when they are walking at street level. They are mostly moving while trying to avoid other pedestrians, bicyclists, automobile traffic, skateboarders and other potential dangers.

This is looking south. towards the Meat Packing District where the park starts.

Open areas on the highline looking north.

This is at the W. 20th St. Exit looking east on W. 20th. General Seminary is on the left side of the block.

This is where the park ends. Work will continue north between W. 20th St. and W. 30th St. There is some possibility that the extension between W. 30th and W. 34th will be included, but it is caught between the MTA and private developers who are planning a major development over the westside railroad yards.

Transitions...

2009-07-02T16:27:00.003-04:00

So I quit writing. I got tired of reading what I was writing. Partner was in Seminary for three years. We moved to New York for that, and I started a new job here. We left our home in Wynnedale (in Indy) for basically a two room apartment with a small kitchen, bathroom and one clothes closet in NYC.

I am not sure I ever realized it was ok to enjoy living here. Everything was so temporary at the time, so different. Now we are entering a new period ... partner will be starting a new job soon, my job responsibilities may be changing, and we may be moving within the City.

The preacher at his ordination preached on being a deacon -- we are all called by our baptismal vow to diaconal service to others -- and transitional -- we would like to think that life is about arriving and settling, but it really is about movement and change, and he encouraged us to embrace the unsettling, boring and uncomfortable.

I've thought about that as we start the next period of our lives, and realize more and more that life itself is not something that is infinite but very finite.

While the year 2000 didn't really feel that much different than the year 1999,I think it is becoming quite clear that by July 2009 we are leaving the 20th Century behind in the sense that everything is subject to being quite different than it used to be.

The 20th Century was full of change (cars, cell phones, man on the moon). But even as we drag all our 20th century experiences into this new period, feeling oh so not hip or cool or cutting edge, we have some obligation to note what it is like to live here and now. Not the royal we here, but rather the folk who write and think about our lives.

I feel a little like the voices in the Monty Python skit who make up outrageous stories about what they did when they were children (when I was a child we were so poor we lived in a shoe box in the middle of the road and licked peoples boots as they walked by followed up by the line, try telling that to people now days, they don't believe you).

It has been raining this afternoon in New York City. The holiday weekend started in early afternoon. Two friends on Facebook refer to the loss of their long-time pets. Another friend is getting a marriage license in CT and will soon legally marry his partner. I am going to General Convention in Anaheim next week. I doubt if I will ever be a twitterer or a tweeterer.

Still the best...

2009-04-30T11:09:00.001-04:00

Shelley continues to illuminate the beauty of the world, particularly the Missouri Botanical Garden, at her Missouri Green site.

After the sunshine...

2009-04-20T17:45:00.003-04:00

If we are only alloted ten perfect days each year, then we had three in a row this past week. Temps have dropped again, it has been raining outside since morning, and this is probably right for spring. Too warm or too cold and we will lose the lovely spring blooms.

Spring day...

2009-04-14T11:29:00.003-04:00

The window in my office is cracked open and I can hear the voices of small children playing on the nearby daycare playground. There is a plane above somewhere. It is cloudy today, a perfect day to watch the daffodils already open, to appreciate the splashes of white and pink blooming ornamental cherry and pear trees alongside row houses.

we interupt this season for a reminder what spring feels like...

2008-01-09T11:35:00.001-05:00

Today is the second day of spring season in New York. Yesterday and today have been completely perfect days after a week of bitter cold, and it is hard to think of life as anything but pleasant with such weather.

Winter will return, but today I have my windows open and the fan on low. A cool breeze is blowing through, and I hear the voices of children playing outside. Franklin the dog and I had a long walk this morning ... he chased a squirrel ... life is good.

tests are over

2008-01-05T18:49:00.000-05:00

The chimes rang out this afternoon at about 5:15 to signal the end of this year's General Ordination Exams (GOEs). The senior ordination track students have been taking three hour tests twice a day since Wednesday (They only had one test on Friday). These tests are administered by the national Episcopal church.

We heard a round of Handel's Hallelujah Chorus and then Beethoven's Ode to Joy. Those of us who live on campus have been quietly slipping down halls and walkways, with signs plastered on the hallways asking for quiet during the testing periods.

cold

2008-01-04T09:28:00.001-05:00

The winds started a few days ago. Franklin the dog and I began our morning walk towards the Chelsea Piers, but the wind was too cold as it came rushing across the Hudson. We turned around.

Now the winds have died down and the forecast is for warmer weather.

It is often colder in Indianapolis than in New York, but I didn't spend as much time outside on really cold days. So I am quickly relearning wrapping up skills.

new day, new year, same old blogger

2008-01-01T14:50:00.000-05:00

I feel like I have been riding a rocket since moving to NYC and starting work at the Seminary.

Having been off for more than a week, I have had an opportunity to reflect on last year.

I am mostly without dirt on my hands these days ... there are some volunteer opportunities at the seminary that I hope to take advantage of this next year.

Living where one works means that I can go a couple of weeks at a time without leaving a 3 block area of Chelsea. This is not healthy. I am committed to having non-seminary experiences, going to the movies once a week with a friend, and finally starting to do some museum visits, something I haven't had much time to do until now.

Now that the holiday season is over, I think there will be a period when getting around Manhattan will be a bit easier.

against the dark lord

2007-07-25T14:49:00.000-04:00

I.
Partner and I walked to the Barnes and Noble on Sixth Avenue on Saturday morning and bought our copies of the last Harry Potter book. This is not nearly as thrilling as Shelley's experience getting her copy.

The weather Saturday was much cooler than the humid week preceding it, and I ended up reading the entire book, finally ending at 12:30 am.

The best way to experience these novels is on a long car drive listening to the voices of Jim Dale reading the book. His creative interpretive reading is far superior to the actors in the movie versions. The Harry Potter books were great fun to read, but I will not be reflecting about passages that I read through the series.

II.
On Sunday I started reading Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Woman, and was surprised at similarity in tone (emerging adolescent, in hiding). Except her book was not a fantasy or an entertainment, and the people she wrote about were real. The epilogue at the end lets us know that it did not turn out well. The dark lord of her book, Adolph Hitler, is not toppled in time to save Anne, and instead we learn that only one person from the hidden Annex survived the war, her father. The rest suffered brutal deaths in the camps.

lady bird, gardener

2007-07-17T10:23:00.000-04:00

I.

It was in late Spring, 1971, and I won a high school speech contest in Waco that was sponsored by the Garden Clubs. The theme was the environment, and I remember that I had read some of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring in preparing for it. The world felt scary in 1971 -- we were in an extended war in Vietnam, and there had been several riots in major cities in the preceding summers, my head was full of the apocalyptic warnings of my Baptist faith, and the Cold War was still on. I am sure that I was adamant that we must do something right away. But I cannot remember what it is that I wanted us to do, nearly 40 years later.

Somerset Maughn once wrote in his memoirs that politicians off prove that the gift of speech is often not followed by the gift of thought.

But as a result of winning, I was invited to speak at a regional luncheon of the Garden Clubs that was held at the Austin Country Club. It was a well-lit room, full of ladies with hats and soft pastel dresses, mostly older. I was a factory worker's son from South Waco, and felt quite out of place. The main speak was Lady Bird Johnson, the former First Lady. She wore a simple blouse and skirt, no hat. "Lyndon and I just got back from Acapulco," I heard her say to the woman who was in charge of the event. We all sat at a head table.

She asked me about Waco, always speaking in a soft quiet voice. After I gave my speech, she reached over and whispered to me that it was a real barn burner.

II.

Years later, when I lived in Austin, a friend and I started walking each day around Town Lake, the small lake in the middle of the downtown. There were a series of crushed granite paths that went along each side of the lake shore past landscaped hills, grasses, flowering trees and wildflower patches. Everybody said that Lady Bird Johnson was responsible for these beautiful pathways along the lake.

My first spring living in DC, I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the city, bulbs blooming on almost every corner, flowering trees and shrubs, making spring one very long production of wave after wave of color. In Lady Bird's White House Diary, she wrote about going out with the garden club ladies and planting 500,000 daffodils along Rock Creek Parkway. She inspired, pushed and prodded people to help beautify Washington, DC.

Hidden on the South Lawn of the White House is a secret children's garden, completely surrounded by trees and shrubs. Mrs. Johnson developed that garden with its rock paths. Inside it, one cannot see or be seen from the gaze of official Washington.

III.

The campaign in the early 1960s to beautify America was an easy thing to mock. For most people it meant picking up litter, and ok, that was something we should do. But it also means taking the opportunity to tend living things, especially in public places. To take care of living plants, to garden, requires time, and slowing down, paying attention to weather conditions, stopping and looking and touching plants.

The effect, the beauty of gardens, is the opposite from what one gets from living and walking and driving by shabby buildings and vacant lots. We respond to the beauty of a river, to the sunlight and breezes alongside it, to the coolness of green shrubs and trees, to the delight of blooming plants, to the mystery of a path that turns and bids us to walk further on, to see and experience place.

Of course, gardens are designed, artificial, high maintenance. But I do not think it is an accident that paradise was described as a Garden.

IV.

Sometime later, Partner and I flew in to Austin to visit with family and friends. Mrs. Johnson was sitting on a bench to one side. A few feet away were, I suppose, her security people. She was waiting for someone who was flying into town. I wanted to go up to her and say thanks for what she had done, how I had enjoyed the beauty in two cities that she had a direct hand in making happen, but she seemed so quiet and in her thoughts, so I walked on by.

sunday morning

2007-07-10T07:00:00.000-04:00

I.
The dog and I begin our early morning walk. People must be away on holiday. The streets, usually quiet, are even more so today. We walk toward the center of the island, and all the five story structures, boarding houses in the 19th century but apartments and homes now that are incredibly expensive, give way to much taller buildings, warehouses and offices and other kinds of commercial activity, intermixed with new condo projects.

The streets are littered with the stuff of late night party goers, empty bottles, brochures, cigarette butts. Everywhere we hear the hum of airconditioners and air systems. There are fewer trees in the middle of the city, and I hear no birds chirping.

We walk past the avenues, finally reaching again the private Gramercy Park. It was a marsh in the early 19th century, drained by Samuel Ruggles, a developer who gave a key to each property owner around it. The park is beautifully manicured, with formal walks, planters and planting beds, sculptures and trees. We see a woman walking along the edge, a gray gravel path. We saw her last week, too.

The park is lined with a tall iron railing fence, but even that separation allows the beauty of the park on this square to spill out to us, softening the hard surfaces of dirty concrete.

II.

Edward Hopper has a fairly well-known painting called Early Sunday Morning. It's in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum, and is a prime example of the loneliness he portrayed in almost all his paintings. In Hopper's world, a person is always an island. Light is more interesting than people.

In this painting, Hopper, notoriously introverted, celebrated solitude and aloneness. There is no sound, no people, no wind, only light on a row of shops. As if all life had been eliminated, all movement, all sound, all messy, noisy movement.

III.
The dog and I walk past the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace Museum, a recreation of the townhouse in which he was born and grew up. I have not seen it before. Partner told me that it was shrouded in scaffolding recently, so I must have missed it before. The scaffolding is gone. The whole block is in deep shadow and the air is almost stifling.

It takes a strong imagination to think of this block as once lined in brownstone townhouses like this one. Someone told me that we should never think of these large family dwellings as "single family." In addition to grandparents, aunts and uncles, these houses also were home to servants, sometimes constituting their own family.

transition

2007-07-07T09:38:00.000-04:00

Finally catching my breath, I am starting to get the ordinary details of life arranged, finding a doctor, a vet, a dentist, getting all the citizen work one does after moving to a new location.

In denial as a choice, or merely stunned by the rapidity of the move and immediately starting a new job, or both?

Painting the apartment will be soon.

Meanwhile, the world goes on. I am reading the large volume Gotham, the history of New York City from its founding through the end of the 19th Century. In its entire history, this particular city has faced the tensions and explosions and the value of immigrants.

Reflecting on the Fourth of July this year, I fear we Americans are losing the important elements of this country that make us exceptional in a postive way, commitment to constitutional law, rejection of torture, and understanding that in a democracy we fair better when no one group dictates to the exclusion of all the rest. For years, we have heard about the danger of compromise, but looking at the six or seven years of the Bush presidency, where dividing is almost always preferable to uniting, where playing to the base almost always supercedes seeking national consensus, where our differences are heightened to lessen our common goals, then I wonder, like most folk, how much longer till the clock runs out, and we have the opportunity to elect someone who will be president of the entire country.

Normally, I hate the long and early campaigns. But this time I am terribly impatient, as are, I assume, many Americans.

after holiday

2007-07-05T13:21:00.000-04:00

Partner worked yesterday, and I finally finished the cabinet of drawers I started last week.

There were fireworks in the city last night, but with rain falling off and on, I stayed inside and read and watched television.

blooms

2007-07-03T09:36:00.001-04:00

The hydrangeas here are blooming. With enough acidity in the soil, there are lots of blue ones, although some are blue with a little pink. I have not seen blue hydrangeas since I lived in DC.

I still have to pause when I see a laced cap hydrangea. What an thing of beauty and simple elegance.

a weekend

2007-07-02T11:30:00.000-04:00

The weather today is perfect, a high of 75 degrees (F), with blue skies and a gentle breeze. I almost do not know what to do with such weather. I suppose if I were king, we would stop working and go to a park or garden and spend the day reading or working in a garden, something that would not appeal to most people and it would have a negative effect on the economy. So good that I am not king.

I spent the weekend assembling a large chest of drawers, part of our effort to make our tiny apartment livable. I am still not finished -- almost, but not quite. We saw 110 in the Shade, a revival starring Audre McDonald and John Cullum. It was an austere production with a minimal set, but the acting and singing was excellent.

The dog and I walked all the way east to Grammercy Park and back for our morning walk. In the afternoon I walked Partner to the Port Authority -- he was off to Jersey for his internship.

They're filming on our street for Law and Order SVU today. The trucks are lined up along one side of the street. People with headsets and walkie talkies roam the sidewalk.

my dog's voice

2007-06-29T03:57:00.000-04:00

It is three in the morning, and I have enough things on my mind to convince me that it is a moot point to think that I will fall back to sleep. There is no culprit here, no major things, only mundane work related deadlines and such that form a loop in my thoughts that replay over and over.

Franklin the dog lies in a perfect line between partner and me, perfect in the sense that in the past his inclination is always to sleep across the bed. In this smaller space he adapts to the human pattern of sleeping north-south rather than east-west. Maybe he will stay in bed, I think to myself as I decide to get up.

I grab a couple of books to take with me to the living room and find my glasses. By the time I am ready to get up, he is standing on the edge of the bed, prepared to make his leap down to the ground. I grab him under my arm and set him down on the floor.

We quietly walk down the hall, and he stands next to me, waiting. I look up, and he is patiently standing there looking at me. This is all done in silence, but it is as if we had a conversation that went something like:

Me: I thought you might be sleepy enough to go right back to sleep.

Him: I need to go outside.

Me: Five minutes ago, you were in a deepl sleep.

Him: I need to go outside.

Me: Ok, ok.

Him: Thank you.

This is only in my imagination, of course, but I wonder if his Thank you is sarcastic, as in What took you so long to understand that if you're up, I'm up, and if you go to the bathroom, then it is only right that I get a shot at doing so as well. Afterall, my bladder is smaller than yours...

I get his leash and we go downstairs.

the good

2007-06-22T10:55:00.000-04:00

Cook weather blew in this week. Most of our rain has been like Camelot, at night. What's to complain about that?

Meanwhile I fight a back pain that makes me grumpy.

imagining new jersey

2007-06-18T09:00:00.000-04:00

I.

Across the river is New Jersey. I can see it as I walk along the trail next to the Hudson River. Most New York City maps omit New Jersey. Traveling into the city by car or train, one moves along on a freeway or through a tunnel, never seeing the actual streets and buildings of the towns and cities on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River. It is as if there is no knowledge, no naming for the folk who live there.

What is that city, I ask, pestering a friend as we walk along the Hudson Park trail. New Jersey, she says. I know, but what city? Hoboken, she says with a hint of a question in her voice.

I learn that a line where the Holland tunnel crosses the river from Manhattan to New Jersey actually goes on to divide Hoboken from Jersey City. Jersey City is across from the Statue of Liberty, Manhattan and Staten Island (the hill in the distance beyond the statue). There is a giant Pepsi clock at the edge of JC's new downtown.

Tallest building in New Jersey, someone at work tells me about the clipped office tower by the sign. Another says that Merrill Lynch built its headquarters there. Everybody said, why Jersey City? Now it is booming. Almost another burough of the city.

Partner is working at a hospital in Jersey City this summer, in the not so booming part. This is the poorest county in New Jersey, he tells me.

II.
The water taxis cross the Hudson (or the North River) or move up and down it every morning, some moving faster than others, much like the rythym of commuters walking on land. Between me and the Westside Highway is a dedicated two lane path for bicyclers, serious joggers, and roller bladers. To get to the park path, I must cross the Highway, a six lane road as well as the fast path. The cars stop by light, but the fast path folk are in a zone of speed priveledge, which means that they ignore the yield to pedestrians sign, cursing us if we are too slow crossing while they are riding along.

Once past the noise of the highway and the rush of the joggers and bicyclers, I am walking alongside the Chelsea Piers. I must walk south past another pier and past the ruins of the early Cunard line pier, and then a garbage or sanitation transfer area, before I finally get to the park.

III.
At that point, the river view opens up, and if the morning sun is out, the buildings on the Jersey side reflect the golden, sandy aura of sunshine splashing on their sides. At those moments, I could be looking at the New York version of scenes from 18th century paintings of the Grand Canal in Venice.

This morning, there is a gray overcast, with heavy, humid air. The Statue of Liberty is a dark spot in the mist, an asymetrical steeple. Floating through the middle of this is a large cruise ship. I look up river, and the tug boat is waiting at the spot where it will escort the ship to its pier.

A few people are standing on the deck, small spots of folk looking at cloudy Manhattan. On the other side, there must be last minute packing, someone looking into New Jersey.

IV.
Further south, the isle of m bends back, and as I look down toward the tip, I see the tall buildings of Wall Street and Battery Park. In the movie Sabrina, Humphrey Bogard looked down from one of those buildings, looking up river to the piers north of here, where the ocean liners docked. The Chelsea piers are where the movie On the Waterfront were set. These were all imaginary works.

da bomb

2007-06-12T09:53:00.000-04:00

There have been news reports today that the U.S. Air Force laboratory in Dayton, Ohio seriously considered a proposal to create a non-lethal bomb that would make enemy soldiers homosexual, thereby creating division among the ranks and making them incapable of fighting. First proposed in 1994, the Air Force took this very seriously and may have re-looked at it a few times before rejecting the proposal.

This is another reason why gay people should be allowed to be open in the military. Think of the millions of dollars that would have been saved by a gay general telling the researchers that they are nuts.

It must have been an interesting proposal. One splash and they're singing ...

I feel pretty,
oh, so pretty.
I feel pretty and witty
and gay...

Because stuff like this is so EASY. Meanwhile, the magic wand research project continues.

movie

2007-06-06T08:59:00.000-04:00

I work across the street from our apartment, and my office building includes a private park, a rarity for the isle of m. It evidentally is also used for a lot of television, film and magazine shoots.

There have been a few since I started, but the big one is later this week. They're filming Revolutionary Road, based on Richard Yate's novel. It was supposed to happen earlier in the week, but a big rain storm made them cancel it.

The city has posted a sign that all cars must be moved by a certain time and date or they will be towed. Since the movie is set in the 1950s, and since our apartment is directly across from where they are filming, our air conditioners (all window units) will be removed. Such units weren't prevalent until the early to mid 60s.

So if it is hot, I will have to take Franklin the dog to work, because he cannot stay in a hot apartment.

isle of m

2007-06-05T13:36:00.000-04:00

The other evening I heard the distinct sound of an ocean liner blowing its horn, reminding me that I happen to live on an island. Much of life within this place is focused inward, on its wide avenues, or on Central Park. Like most American cities, waterfronts up until recently were places of work and function, not beauty or leisure.

We happen to live in Chelsea, originally the home of working class dock workers and related industries. At the beginning of the 19th Century, the Hudson River's high mark cut all the way into our block between 9th and 10th Avenues. The city and landowners filled in the river path, creating the block between 10th Avenue and 11th Avenue, and what is now the West Side Highway.

In the 1870s, the city began condemning shorelinie for the creation of piers for shipping. In the early 20th Century, this area became the home of large passenger liners and included berths for the Cunard and White Star lines. By the 1940s, the large liners had up moved further north.

Today, the piers are mostly relics, many of them stripped back to their wooden stumps sticking out of the water, others made into parkland or the vast sport and recreation area called Chelsea Piers.

Franklin the dog and I walked over to the new trail/walkways/parkland along the river front, and strolled down to about Pier 43. There are two trails, the bike, blader and runner trail, and then the strolling trail. The city has recently created parkland along these trails, filled with roses and other perennials along with odd patches of lawn. But like most NYC grass, there is a sign indicating that the grass is "dog-free."

From the trail, one clearly sees New Jersey, and from a distance, I saw the Statue of Liberty.

We finally turned back in front of the three Richard Meier designed glass apartment towers, and walked back trough the West Village toward home.

it has been a long time, this gap

2007-05-31T09:08:00.000-04:00

Sometime shortly after the last blog entry, I quit thinking in written words, or written passages. Part of this was related to my taking the time to acclimate to the city, and a new job.

And I suppose part of it is well-intentioned laziness, assuming that I would get to blogging again soon.

The cool spring is over, roses are spilling out, and along the streets and avenues, the temps are getting mildly uncomfortable.

Our house in Indy is still on the market, and I miss whatever is happening in my garden. A dear neighbor who lived across the street from us passed away. I watched most of the Indy 500 on television -- I am still amazed that it would keep my attention, but seven years in the racing capital has made it so. I still have no desire to go to the race, but in Indy, one cannot watch it on television, so this was a bit of luxury.

Our neighbors here have a community cookout each week -- it's cook your own meat on one of four grills, and bring something to share with everybody else. For a few moments, as I hear the meat grilling, and here the relaxed sounds of people chatting about their lives, I am brought back to the townlet, where such activities happen without much scheduling, a matter of course on our backyard patios and decks.

Franklin the dog and I have access to a private dog run, and when we go in the morning and evening on our walk, we stop by and I spend 15-20 minutes throwing the ball and letting him retrieve it. If a dog's joy is expressed through energetic stances, with erect tail and ears, and increased breathing, then he is a very happy dog during those moments.

So I'm back, a bit older, and yet still a Texas born waif in a fast and big city.

beauty

2007-04-23T08:02:00.000-04:00

Spring arrived in New York City three days ago. The cherry trees and ornamental pear trees are blooming along my street, and in the small areas where there is grass, there is the sheen of new, dark emarald blades. The earth opens up. The harsh cold breezes on the avenues have warmed, and the city is alive in the calm of cool, warm temps. Last night, sitting next to an open window, I could hear the voices of people chatting in the park-like campus across the street, their friendly patter a comfort as the sounds rolled into the apartment along with the slight breath of spring wind.

This was the weekend that I felt like I lived here. I went to a physical therapist appointment early Friday evening and had a doctor's appointment and got a prescription filled on Saturday. Odd that this would make me feel more like I live here, but banal chores means I must get on with living here, and that it is not hard, just different than the easy life of Indianapolis.

I suppose that it is not cool, but I look up at tall buildings. Not the tall shining glass towers, but the mid and early 20th century buildings. I like to look at architectural details, and particularly I like to look at the light and shadows of the edges of building and sky.

Someone reminded me that it has been a month since I moved here. We are cramped in our tiny apartment -- knocking things over is part of the routine -- but we have a place to sleep in a city that has made it almost impossible for people who are not extraodinary wealthy to find places to live.

Franklin the dog has settled in. He still hates the trucks and buses on the short stretch of 10th Avenue that we must endure before we are back on a tree-lined side street, and I must concentrate on keeping him from responding to big dogs who come too close == we do the "tsk,tsk" routine suggested by the dog-whisperer -- but he enjoys the increased social interaction of people oohing and awing over him.

His favorite spot in the apartment appears to be his crate, where he retreats for his naps.

Holy Saturday

2007-04-07T11:47:00.000-04:00

It is cold in NYC today, but not too cold. The dog and I did our walk this morning amid a fairly quiet neighborhood.

Last night, we heard a woman's voice singing, and eventually a group from a local Catholic parish walked down the middle of the street, led by a priest and acolytes, and people bearing a large wooden cross. I assume they were praying the stations of the Cross. The woman had a beautiful voice, and she was singing a folk song.

On Palm Sunday evening, an Episcopal parish came down the street, led by a priest. They sang All Gory, Laud and Honor. It was mostly young families, and there were a couple of people playing guitar.

The church across the street shut its outer bronze doors on Good Friday, the only time they do so year round. I commented to someone that I had never seen them closed and got the explanation. The church looks sealed up, and what is often an inviting place is closed. They will open again at the Great Vigil tonight, with the church lit with candles held by worshipers with fire from the Pascal Candle.

Forsythia and daffodils are blooming in the city, and a few magnolias. All else, plants and trees are bare, waiting for spring and warmer air.

dog

2007-03-28T06:12:00.000-04:00

Franklin the dog had a bit of adjustment. (So did I now that I think about it). He got a little clingy at first, understandably so. If one of us left the apartment, he cried a tiny bit, then sat by the door at the end of the hall until partner or I returned.

As the ice receded, he began to realize that pooping was going to have to happen on the sidewalk. Somebody told me it took their dog five days to figure that one out.

He and I had to figure out a routine where he felt comfortable around other dogs on leashes coming down the sidewalk -- I make an instand judgment whether to talk him through the moment or just pick him up till they/we pass.

People quickly learned his name -- it's a very dog-friendly building and neighborhood, and he enjoys the increased social interaction. He is a shameless ham.

He gets to see his dads a lot during the day. Since I work across the street, I get to take him out at lunch.

There is a spot of grass where I can talk him to run and smell with the leash extended, but he is not supposed to do anything on this spot, so it is a visit timed after walking the block once or twice.

Being a climber, he likes to hop on the bottom step of stoops as we walk by and then hop back down.

And occassionally, when we get to an avenue and a loud truck roars by, and we see lots of other dogs around us, he will let out a few loud barks to nothing in particular, a bit over stimulated by sound and smell and movement all at once. While I talk him back down, I can sympathize.

here

2007-03-28T05:47:00.000-04:00

Moving is sort of like high school. It's an experience that one doesn't want to repeat.

It forces a person to examine what one quits seeing on a day-to-day basis, the stuff piled in a closet or under a bed. And then there is the stuff not seen that horrifies once it become apparent, the dust behind a picture that has gathered for seven years, the spot on a carpet left by a certain dog who had a special bathroom break area not noticed before.

There were the piles for the POD, the fiberglass storage structure with the retractable door on one end. There were piles for the dumpster (smartest advice given to us -- put the dumpster next to the POD and get rid of stuff). There was a pile for the church rummage sale. There was a pile for the rental truck heading to New York. We sold our cars. We listed our house with the realtor.

We finally left our little neighborhood of Wynnedale at 3:00 pm in the big yellow rental truck, winding through Indy to: get a certificate of good health from the Vet for Franklin (they forgot to give it to partner when he picked him up from grooming), stop at Lowes for a replacement lock for the back of the truck (our original lock was too short), grab a bite of food.

The weather was spring balmy, with a big blue sky, the perfect day to work in the garden. Instead, we made our way to the interstate heading east, finally stopping for the night between Columbus and Akron, Ohio, where the temps were very cold. Repeating the route of our August trip, we spent the next day driving across Ohio and Pennsylvania, and pulled up to our apartment building in the city a day after a major ice and snow storm.

Partner's friends appeared at once and helped us unload the truck. Somebody had cut a gap out of the iceberg like piles of ice pushed between street, car and curb by the snow plow. In a short time, we got it into the apartment. After making a small pathway through the boxes, partner ordered Chinese food delivered, we ate and then fell into bed at 8:00 pm.

almost gone...

2007-03-15T08:52:00.000-04:00

We had two days in a row with temps in the high 40s (F). Last night, as we walked home from a neighbor's home, gentle rain began falling. And then all night it rained, and now we are back to the 30s and 40s (F). Three weeks ago we were locked in sub-freezing temps and snow up to my waist where it was plowed out. Then dry warm temps more suitable for late spring or early summer. This morning water is standing all over the townlet, along the small ditches and on the main esplanade on the north end our loop.

Much of the earth's color is dry and brown, the leftovers from winter. The utility company's tree people have been out hacking away along the powerlines, and there are lots of dead branches spread out along side the road for later grinding and mulching. The heat (after what we've been having, 76 degrees can feel awful warm), while much appreciated, had a great oddness about it, the out-of-sync feeling of nature's forces not all matching up appropriately. Yet already, bulbs are pushing out, and buds are forming on lilacs and forsythia. Spring is coming. The promise of resurrection, new life coming out of the earth where all is dead.

Yesterday Franklin the dog got his last check-up at the vet, and grooming. He follows us from room to room. We've finished most errands, delivered most things that needed to be delivered, have packed all but a little which we finish today. I am mentally and physically tired, as is partner.

One more day and then we are on the road.

lenten work

2007-03-11T16:12:00.000-04:00

I cannot think of a more appropriate season to move than in Lent. Partner got here at the end of last week, and we are almost to the end of our prep work for moving. We have mostly been throwing things out and sorting. The trash is ending up in bags in one bay of the garage. On Monday, the dumpster arrives, and then all this stuff that has gathered over time will be gone. There are few things we can take to New York, but we all pulling them aside. The rest will either go into storage or for the church's rummage sale (there is a space in the garage for that as well).

At times, it is has been rewarding, reviewing old files, letters, stuff gathered from Austin or DC or here. Even as we threw things away, we enjoyed the memories. Other things had been packed away and we had forgotten them or had quit seeing them. It is freeing to lighten our lives of all this stuff.

We have at least two or three days of packing ahead of us, but this has been greatly simplified by all the sorting and throwing away. And when the last box is sealed, I am hopeful that there won't be much left except an empty house in a swell neighborhood, and our memories.

gifts

2007-03-04T15:20:00.000-05:00

On this second Sunday of Lent, my fellow choir members had a lunch for me at the Parish's corner house, and then they gave me recordings of:

Finzi, Lo, the Full, Final Sacrifice, St. John's College, Cambridge
Various, The English Anthem, Vols 1, 4, 5, 7, St. Paul's Cathedral, London
Various, English Choral Music 1514-1682, Christ Church Cathedral, London

This includes a lot of music that we sang during the past seven years. I am listening to the Finzi as I start my afternoon chore of washing all clothes and getting them ready for packing.

What lovely gifts from such very good friends. I am overwhelmed.

lists

2007-03-03T19:52:00.000-05:00

I am not a good multi-tasker. I tend to do one task very well at a time.

Friday was my last day at work, and it was a good day. I rushed through last assignments, we had a little party, and I drove home grateful for my colleagues and our work together over the past five years, and also happy to get to the next step: starting to close down the house and prepare for moving.

I have a little window before Partner comes home for his spring break, and then we will drive to NYC. Soon our family will be in one city again.

The dog and I walked in the snow this morning and chatted with a neighbor we often see in the morning - he throws the frisbee for his black and white collie. I think Franklin is jealous. He would love to chase after the frisbee and bring it back, but he is not equipped to jump up and catch the thing with the beauty and grace of the collie.

We talk about New York and about our own townlet. We say goodbye and walk on. Job finished. Check. Time to start the packing/throwing things out/list of chores leading to moving day. Check.

snows and wind

2007-03-03T19:29:00.000-05:00

As if on cue, the winds started on the first day of March. This morning, there was a lot of snow (about a quarter of an inch in one hour) and then as the day warmed up, a lot of it melted away.

A member of our parish choir lost her husband unexpectedly last week, and the funeral was this morning, so I re-joined the choir for a day to help sing in the service. My cassack and cotta were still hanging in the locker, and most of the music was familiar, including Webster's "The Dawning," Rutter's "God Be in My Head" and Durufle's "Ubi Caritas." A soloist sang Copeland's setting of "Shall We Gather At the River" and another sang Duruffle's "Pie Jesus." The church was full, and the service was quite moving. I am not sure what it is like for the priests, but singing at a funeral is one of the most difficult roles for a choir. We are human, we grieve, but in singing on behalf of the family and the parish we must put aside emotion.

Funerals, like baptisms, are not just about the families involved, although they are certainly about those grieving over the loss of their loved one. Funerals are opportunities for the parish to comfort and surround the family, to honor the dead, and together to pray through some of the most comforting words in the Book of Common Prayer, words of faith expressing our prayers for the dead, our relationship to God and our hope for the world to come.

But funerals are also about remembering others whom we have lost as well as facing our own mortality. They are part of living out our faith here and now, not coasting on previous generation's faith, but dealing with our lives and losses here and now. And so we all share together in both grieving and the celebration of life among us. We are not on our own -- God is with us, and we are also a part of the Communion of Saints, the long line of folk before us, fellow strugglers, fellow believers.

passing

2007-02-26T08:18:00.000-05:00

I found out this morning that Murphy, a neighborhood dog, died over the weekend. Nobody knows for sure how old he was, but he one day selected a family a few doors down and became their dog. He was a big tall dog, with lots of black hair. He refused all efforts at being locked up.

Franklin liked Murphy a lot, and when we went for walks around the townlet, he used to often accompany us. As Murphy got older, his arthritus became more painful, and when I saw him last week, struggling to walk, I wandered if maybe he was reaching the end.

A sweet, tough dog who roamed our part of the townlet as if he owned it, and I'm sure in his dog sense of the world, he did.

Murphy, the Airedales - Fred and Penny, are all gone now, Franklin's old pack. His cats are gone, too. I am hoping he will make new friends in NY.

Farewell, sweet Murphy.

heart of america

2007-02-26T04:56:00.000-05:00

Saturday morning, I packed up all my cats' things, their litter box, their food, their toys. I cleaned out their carriers, and I put all this in the car. With cats and Franklin the dog, we drove out of town, southeast on I-70 to Effingham, Illinois, turned left at the giant white cross, and began the drive through the middle of the country, essentially down the MIssissippi River valley on I-57 and I-55.

Somewhere close to Effingham, it began raining, and it rained hard all the way through the rest of Illinois, Missouri and Arkansas, all the way to Memphis, with wind blowing, and lightning overhead. My cats rode in their carriers in the backseat, with towels covering them. They cried for a while and then became quiet. Franklin spent the first part of the trip looking out the window -- he has a seatbelt harness to keep him from becoming a canine missle in case we had to stop quickly == and then he settled down and slept on his rug that I had placed on his seat. Partner kept me company by cell phone, checking in as we made our way down the flat riverland. This is the middle of America, a very quiet center, a series of small towns and fields.

I drove through the rain without listening to the radio or music. We finally got to Memphis, and I unloaded the car in the hard falling rain. I met Partner's niece and her fiance, wonderful people who had said for some time that they would take care of our cats in Texas. They had gotten to Memphis a day earlier, so we stayed at a hotel close to Graceland. There were pictures of Elvis everywhere, something I hardly recognized at first.

All night, the cats nuzzled and cuddled with me. I didn't get much sleep. The next morning, we packed all their things in the truck going to Texas. The dog and I drove north, but this time there was little rain. I missed the I-57 exit and ended up taking a detour from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, across the Mississippi, taking a two-lane Illinois highway through Jonesboro and Anna, before finally getting back on I-57.

I didn't feel much like watching the Academy Awards. The dog and I turned in early to bed. Today begins my last week at work.

I miss my sweet cats, but am grateful that they have a safe, good home. Franklin will miss Jake -- they lay down next to each other, and sometimes Franklin convinces Jake to chase him. Chloe won't miss Franklin at all. It was hard saying goodbye to them, and it was hard when we got home and they weren't there. The work of moving to NYC picks up.

a holy lent

2007-02-21T20:33:00.000-05:00

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, which in the Christian faith is a time of introspection, prayer and quiet, commemorating Jesus' time of temptation and prayer before his Passion. The Book of Common Prayer bids us to a holy Lent, and it as that moment that I quickly admit my inadequacy, thinking how unholy I am, and of course, I rationally understand that to be a human is to be unholy, to miss the mark. In this service, we confront our humanity fairly head-on with the dry, chalky mark on our foreheads as the priest reminds us that we came from ashes and we will return to ashes. We're going to die, a sobering but often useful reminder. And in the order of the service, we list numerable ways how we miss the mark through our actions or lack of them.

Anglican Primates (mostly the Archbishops of each national Anglican Church -- Americans created the less royal Presiding Bishop in the 18th Century after the break with Great Britain) gathered in Tanzania this past week to talk about how the Episcopal Church has harmed communion with the other Churches over the consecration of Gene Robinson as the Bishop of New Hampshire and over not coming out strongly against authorizing rites for the blessing of the union of same sex couples. (A skimpy summation of what they said in their statement at the end of the meeting).

The primates gave our Church a deadline of responding by September of this year, and there has been a lot of posting in the blogosphere about what all this means. It looks like a religious civil war, something that happened in Europe during the Reformation when many people lost their lives. This particular civil war may not kill as many people -- although frankly gay and lesbian folk in certain African countries are in fear of their lives -- but the battlelines among Anglicans have been drawn for sometime.

Not a holy moment, this tearing between one side of the Church and the other.

And I have no great wisdom, no insight on what all this means. A priest once told me that the argument over gay people in the church in some sense does not involve gay people. It the larger straight community coming to terms with what to do with us. It is their struggle, he said. Not ours. But their struggle does have an impact on our lives. And hateful words have a cutting effect.

So I went to church tonight and sat in the nave, and prayed and sang, and listened to the words of Joel, the Old Testament prophet who warned of the dark day of the Lord coming, but who then reminded his audience that God was merciful and slow to punish. Repent. Seek God's forgiveness.

Not us humans. We all want to punish the other, sooner rather than later. It's not hard, getting caught up in the angry words, to want to rumble, like a gang, against those who disagree so disagreeably with us. During the Eucharist tonight, we prayed, as we always do, the Lord's Prayer, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. A pretty hard thing, which is why it is in this model prayer. Forgive. Let it go. Don't use up all our energy on our hatreds and our angers. Because we're so good, so holy? No, because we have been forgiven, too.

I am not a very good forgiver. I would much rather give myself the benefit of the doubt, while holding others to a higher standard, assuming the very worst from those with whom I disagree.

Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, have mercy on us, and grant us thy peace.

I am in my 50s. This past week, I had a phone conversation with my mom. Here's what she wants. We're going to talk again, and its going to be about my being gay. We've skirted this conversation for many years. I have tried never to lie. In some ways, I think we have had tacit understandings -- and yet, she went much further than she had ever had in wanting to talk with me about being gay and being in the Church, something she tells me is wrong and with which she cannot understand. She wants us to talk about it.

As a young man in a fundamentalist family, I was terrified to have that conversation. During the many years of my father's invalidness, it did not seem right. Now he is dead, and my mother is elderly. We will talk. Lotta fears and anxiety, much of which are reflexes from previous anxiety created many years ago. And also some calm, knowing that I love my mother and that she loves me. I cannot convince her of anything else other than I love her.

One response to our not dealing with this is that I have lived much more of my life away from her. It is hard to share what is despised. It has probably also had an effect on me in other ways, too. I have no idea how this will turn out.

shrouded air

2007-02-21T11:28:00.000-05:00

When temps went to the 20s (F) last night, they froze the clear moisture that had been seeping out from melting snow for the past two days, making a clear sheen on walks and streets in Indianapolis.

I've pulled a muscle in my back trying to negotiate such a patch at the same moment that Franklin the dog jerked on the leash at something he needed to smell immediately. I did not fall, but the sudden jerk, my tenseness at potentially falling, all led to straining the muscle.

Driving this morning, I was surprised at how slippery the roads were. But it was when I got to the northern suburb where I work that the weather changed the most. Fog from the melting snow and cold air had made vision almost impossible. I am unsure what gene is missing from drivers who do not turn on their car lights in such conditions, but this morning they were out on the road everywhere. The further north I went, the more dense the fog. Even after parking my car and getting out at work, I could not see the building until I was within a few yards of it.

There is more light outside now, but the ghostliness over the world is still present, shrouded between white ground and gray-black trees covered in hoarfrost, a cold foggy haze.

almost ...

2007-02-20T12:38:00.000-05:00

I felt the warmer air yesterday as I walked across the parking lot at work. There is a big difference between temps in the 40s (F) and temps that are sub-freezing, and after three weeks, we have finally felt some warmth return to Indiana.

This morning, I awoke to 41 degress (F). The snow is melting fast, and we may get rain later today, all worrisome because we could have some serious flooding.

But my heart flutters a bit, as if it were spring, this return to warmth, to a world less locked in by ice, snow and zero degree nights.

la blizzard

2007-02-14T14:52:00.000-05:00

I could feel myself get anxious on Monday as the weather folk on tv started warning us of impending doom and slaughter, or to be more specific, the onset of a winter storm.

They cried, There will be heavy snow, there will be ice and sleet, and there will be heavy winds.

At some point in the hysteria, I remind myself that weather rarely exceeds their worry. While it is to everyone's benefit to listen when they warn us, I sometimes reactly poorly to that tinge of excitement as they stress how bad it is going to be. I try to hear what they have to say but not overreact myself. Still, I cancelled my appointments for the next day and stopped by the grocery store on the way home.

And yesterday we had a lot of snow, lots of sleet and heavy winds. And because we all listened, almost nobody was out driving through the mess and almost everything in Indianpolis was closed, and we all sat in our homes and watched unrelentless sleet falling for most of the day that had followed a night of snowfall, and on local television, we watched a million reporters scattered on more corners than ones with Starbucks telling us that this was a really bad storm. One young weatherman said as he stood out in the freezing, falling sleet, that we will always remember the really bad storm of 2007. Ok. Maybe. He certainly will.

So I shoveled my walk and drive twice yesterday, once in the morning when it was fluffy light snow, and once again last night when it was hardened packed ice covered snow. And then again this morning, a mere two inches or so from late snowing and from drifting. And I helped cut-out the driveways of a few neighbors -- the snow plow pushes the snow from the street into the driveways, and with frigid temps for the rest of the week, I assumed that to leave the packed snow there was an invitation for sealing off driveways.

So the snow is all here, and only a few came into work today. The week will really start up again tomorrow.

cleaning out the locker

2007-02-14T14:05:00.003-05:00

Sunday afternoon, after choral evensong, I turned in all my music, and hung up my cassock and cotta for the last time as a member of the choir. Surely there cannot be a better choral experience than choral evensong, that severe and gentle Anglican rite that brings us to to the end of daylight with a gentle severity of music and prayers from the Book of Common Prayer.

This particular evensong was spare -- instead of a particular composed preces and response, we chanted the simple setting in the Hymnal, the Psalm setting was plain chant, for the Magnificat, we chanted Buxtehude's setting in plain chant with organ interspersed, and for the Nunc Dimittis, we sang with the congregation a setting from the the hymnal.

Then we sang Gerald Finzi's festive anthem, Lo, the full, final Sacrifice. We've been working on parts of this piece for about a month, but had rarely sang through the entire work together until the last week. It is a lovely, mystical work, not easy to pick up in one or two read-throughs. But in hearing it all together, the words, (from Richard Crashaw’s translations of the Hymns of St. Thomas Aquinas, Adoro Te and Lauda Sion Salvatorem) really emerged in the singing -- it's that moment after the notes and phrasing are learned when the choir begins to interpret the music, including its text.

Lo, the full, final, Sacrifice
On which all figures fix’t their eyes.
The ransomed Isaac, and his ram;
The Manna, and the Paschal Lamb.

Jesu Master, just and true!
Our Food, and faithful Shepherd too!

O let that love which thus makes thee
Mix with our low Mortality,
Lift our lean Souls, and set us up
Convictors of thine own full cup,
Coheirs of Saints. That so all may
Drink the same wine; and the same way.
Nor change the Pasture, but the Place
To feed of Thee in thine own Face.

O dear Memorial of that Death
Which lives still, and allows us breath!
Rich, Royal food! Bountiful Bread!
Whose use denies us to the dead!

Live ever Bread of loves, and be
My life, my soul, my surer self to me.

Help Lord, my Faith, my Hope increase;
And fill my portion in thy peace.
Give love for life; nor let my days
Grow, but in new powers to thy name and praise.

Rise, Royal Sion! rise and sing
Thy soul’s kind shepherd, thy heart’s King.
Stretch all thy powers; call if you can
Harps of heaven to hands of man.
This sovereign subject sits above
The best ambition of thy love.

Lo the Bread of Life, this day’s
Triumphant Text provokes thy praise.
The living and life-giving bread,
To the great twelve distributed
When Life, himself, at point to die
Of love, was his own Legacy.

O soft self-wounding Pelican!
Whose breast weeps Balm for wounded man.
All this way bend thy benign flood
To’a bleeding Heart that gasps for blood.
That blood, whose least drops sovereign be
To wash my worlds of sins from me.
Come love! Come Lord! and that long day
For which I languish, come away.
When this dry soul those eyes shall see,
And drink the unseal’d source of thee.
When Glory’s sun faith’s shades shall chase,
And for thy veil give me thy Face.
Amen.

O soft self-wounding Pelican ... not a metaphor for Christ that I heard before.

And then we recessed down the aisle as the organist played more Buxtehude. Most of us sat down in the black pews in the rear and listed to the organ music.

Also this weekend, for the ordination on Saturday and again for the Sunday morning service, we sang essentially back-up on one of our anthems, Vaughn Williams' Love Bade Me Welcome, from his Five Mystical Songs, a setting of George Herbert's poem:

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack'd anything.

A guest, I answer'd, worthy to be here:
Love said, you shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful: Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marr'd them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat.
So I did sit and eat.

Again, not usual images. The choir will begin preparation for the Two Choir Festival with St. Paul, for Lent and Holy Week, and for a newly commissioned setting of the Magnifcat and Nunc Dimittis by Richard Webster in memory of two choir colleagues who died much too early -- the choir commissioned the work to honor them. That will happen in May, long after I have moved. How thrilling for me to have participated with such a group of singers. Amen.

our white earth and singing

2007-02-07T16:07:00.000-05:00

We got about a half-foot of snow yesterday. We had a day full of sunshine, reflecting intensely off our white landscape. I shoveled out my walk and drive this morning -- forecasts call for Indy temps rising above freezing by a week from Friday, and what looks nice and fluffy today will quickly turn to solid ice under these conditions.

The high today has been around 5 degrees (F), but the sunshine helps me cope.

Tonight is my last rehearsal with the choir -- we have an ordination on Saturday afternoon -- our Deacon Jeff Brewer will be ordained as priest, the Bishop returns on Sunday morning for her annual visit, and we have a choral evensong service on Sunday afternoon at 3:00 pm. We're singing Gerald Finzi's Lo, the full, final sacrifice at evensong. Finzi wrote this piece for the parish in Northhampton where the Rev. Walter Hussey was the rector. Hussey commissioned several works of art at the parish (Britten's Rejoice In The Lamb was composed for Hussey's parish). And of course, Chichester Psalms by Bernstein was written for Chichester Cathedral when Hussey was its Dean.

tuesday

2007-02-06T11:57:00.000-05:00

The snow is falling heavily now. Outside my office window, the sheep move across their pasture in a row. They walk quite slowly, oblivious to the snow and the cold.

I heard this morning that the two goats who shared their pasture this winter were recently killed by coyotes. I've never worked at a place like this, where a staff meeting includes reports on chicken and goat safety.

I will miss the view from my window, a living Currier and Ives scene with old barn, split rail fencing and the sheep.

The snow is falling earlier than predicted, and I am happy about that. Last January, we had a big snowstorm in late afternoon, and it took me nearly 3 hours to drive home.

exceptionally cold

2007-02-05T14:57:00.000-05:00

There are reasons the midwest gets a bad rap, and for me, it's the weather that we are currently experiencing.

It -4 degrees (F) this morning, and according to the Indianapolis Star 5-day forecast this morning, the lows for the next five days will be 0 degrees (F). We may get 2-4 inches of snow tomorrow, which is good, given that it will help insulate plants and houses, and bad, in that walks and roads will need shoveling and plowing.

It is at this point that I start thinking about the artificiality required to keep one's house running under stressful weather -- the furnace probably will be running alot (zero degree temps always mean a higher heating bill). I must check crawl space vents on the outside for air leaks so that my water pipes will remain safe and cold air will not sneak into the house. In dressing for work, I need to remember to have enough stuff to stay warm on the outside chance that the car breaks down and I have to walk for help.

This is survival time (says the wimp from Texas). And as much as I am happy for the Colts victory last night, I cannot imagine braving traffic downtown and then stand ona sidewalk in order to wish them well. I appreciate those who will wave to them as they drive by in their buses. But I am hunkering down inside till further notice.

bravo colts

2007-02-05T14:42:00.000-05:00

Go Colts! I reluctantly watched the game at a neighbors home. My reluctance stemmed from the pain and sorrow of watching the Colts in past play-off games, assuming victory and then watching some horrible disaster occur. Nothing like sitting with a group of friends and feeling pain together.

Two weeks ago, I watched the game with New England in the privacy of my home, just me and the cats and the dog. When it looked like a near shut-out, we decided to keep watching. It was an amazing come-frome-behind effort. And the Colts won. Not that I am superstitious, but I did at least think about the effects my being with other people or being alone had on the outcome of the game. That's the point where I remind myself that games played by athletic millionaires are neither won nor lost by how or with whom I watch them play.

So I went to the party anyway, and appreciated the generosity of my neighbors in the townlet who offered delicious food and drink. And nothing, not rain, not an exceptional Bears return on the opening kick-off, not a vaunted defense, prevented the Colts from winning the game.

There were several ironies last night. It was supposed to be the Bears' strong defense and controlled running game that would upset the Colts, and yet it was the Colts controlled running (and short gain passes) and defense that helped win the game.

All week, as it got colder and colder in Indianapolis, I kept thinking that the most doomed effort was the city's bid to get the Super Bowl in Indianapolis in 2011. And yet, if this year's game had been played in Indianapolis, fans and the team would have been playing in ideal weather conditions under a dome. And then I remembered how Chicago fans kept hoping it would rain in Miami because they knew how to play outside in bad weather.

Life will return to normal in Indy, but as cold as it is, there are a lot of blue smiles today.

not miami

2007-02-01T11:09:00.000-05:00

This morning, the air felt much warmer, and when I checked the thermometer, it read 23 degrees (F). Yes, it's a little warmer. Which means that we may get snow today. The clouds are thick and gauzy, sure signs of at least a little snow.

Meanwhile, our city is flooded with reports from Miami, spotlighting its beaches and sun along with stories on the Colts. The longer I live in Indiana the more I understand the whole Florida in the winter attraction common among Hoosiers. It's paradise like attraction is similar to how I felt dreaming about Maine in the summer when I lived in Central Texas.

I heard on the radio that next week will be colder with perhaps one night at ten degrees below zero (F).

outside

2007-01-30T09:59:00.000-05:00

It snowed last night about an inch at most in the townlet, enough to cover the walks and the road, yards and roofs, but not enough to line the branches of the evergreen pines, junipers and yews. More than a dusting, but not much more.

This morning, the sky was clear for an hour or so, and the morning sun bounced orange and bright upon the new snow. The winter sky has been constantly changing, and from hour to hour it shines clear blue and then becomes clogged with gray. It may snow again today.

I have a meeting this morning, and on the drive to work, I should be thinking about it, but instead I meditate on the silence of the white earth. Once outside the townlet, the streets are completely clear, covered in the white chalkiness of the molasses salt mixture used for days like this.

We all move slowly in our cars, and then once we have arrived, we hurry to get back into the calm of shelter.

cold

2007-01-29T17:44:00.000-05:00

Bitter, hard, humorless air has settled over Indianapolis. Yesterday, a hard, tiny snow fell all day, dusting but not covering the frozen ground. For a week, it will be this way.

Since tendering my resignation at work, I have woken up twice at about 2:30 am or so, my mind full of free-floating anxiety about finishing up everything at work and home in order to move to NYC.

So I work at talking myself down, making and annotating lists -- partner made me a detailed list of items at the house that can be done in short segments, a real gift.

And somewhere over the weekend, at a neighbor's birthday party, the abstract idea of moving seemed much more real as I told dear friends that I am leaving.

I delighted that this has happened even if it is so quick, and I am working at being more clear-eyed about what I must let go of in order to make the move.

news

2007-01-26T10:53:00.000-05:00

It started snowing here early on Sunday morning, and by the time I got out to go to church, there was at least four inches on the ground -- not a lot of snow, but enough to say that we were actually going to have some winter this year.

The Colts played on Sunday evening. It was an exciting game -- I watched it with the cats and the dog, and we almost turned it off when they were down by 18 points, as one could easily imagine the ribbing and disappointment. Instead, they ended up ahead in the last minute, making it a quite thrilling game and the town has been glowing blue ever since.

As far as I can tell, nobody died from any rioting or other exuberant celebrations. This is a midwestern city, and we are politely thrilled -- everybody except the woman whose foot was run over by an angry fellow who wanted the parking space where she stood. This was before the game and she was saving it for somebody else who was circling the block. At least that's her side of the story. Whether she was in the right or not, I always think it best in these situations to defer to the nautical law of tonnage, particularly when it comes to a person standing in front of a SUV. Points may be proven later in a court of law, but the human foot has such little protection from a Ford Explorer or whatever the man was driving. And I always think drivers should recognize that driving over any part of a person or animal intentionally is not acceptable in a civilized society. Alas.

Another neighbor had to put down their cat this past weekend, and at the museum where I work, we laid to rest one of our beloved ox, a fellow named Broad who had weighed in at 2400 pounds but probably died much heavier. Broad and his teammate Rusty came from Maine, where the New England region keeps alive oxen training. They are massive animals, bulked up for strength, and with each step demonstrate their rippling muscles. Oxen are whales of the land. Broad was carried by a tractor and backhoe to his resting place on our grounds.

Because this is our first snow of the year, I am having to make some kind of adjustment -- when gentle breezes float across snow, they tend to be colder breezes, bone-chilling gusts. I am grateful that I shoveled the drive and walk on Sunday -- now that what is left is frozen hard, it would be harder to do so. The Colonel, my next door neighbor, is the person on the townlet council who decides whether or not to call out the contracted snow plower. Four inches is the threshold, and it was a judgment call. On Sunday, he said yes, and so Franklin the dog and I have been able to make walks all week without resorting to sliding and my fear of falling on a patch of ice.

Last week, I ended up in New York City on a job interview -- and as fate would have it, partner was out of town on a long planned trip. So I had the odd experience of staying in his apartment without his being there. Yesterday, I got a call offering me the job, so I will be moving soon to New York. I can't wait to be a same city household again.

And so we will be leaving the townlet. It has been an adventure, our Hoosier adventure. Another chapter looms ahead. Maybe I will have to change this blog to Hands Missing the Dirt.

glenda, RIP

2007-01-13T11:12:00.000-05:00

We had to put down our old cat this morning. She was 18 years old. Glenda and her brother Ziggy were 8 weeks old when Partner adopted them from the Austin pound. A year later, I met Partner and we started our family together.

The number of paws have changed in our household, but Glenda has been a constant with her orange-beige and white markings. She was a psychological terrorist to others, including a vetenary resident at the Friendship Animal hospital in DC. Our Austin vet asked us to never board her there again -- they had to cover up the cage with a towel. In her younger days, we've had cat sitters who were totally scared of her although she never bit anyone. She knew how to dish out disdain and anger -- our neighbor told me this morning that he always admired her honesty when she slapped at him after he fed her. He called her Joan Crawford.

A vet friend came over and administered a sedative and then the drug that killed her. She hated vet trips, and I was glad that her last experience was quiet and at home. It was time, probably past time, and yet we felt guilt and sadness along with relief that she is not suffering. And in the end, it was peaceful.

Earlier this morning, I dug a deep hole. With all the rain, the ground was soft, but actually not too muddy. I then dug up a redbud that was growing in the front yard too close to the house and the drive. We wrapped Glenda in a sheet, and I buried her deep down, and then planted the small redbud over her.

Rest in peace, dear girl, and may light perpetual shine upon you.

restrictions

2006-12-27T10:26:00.000-05:00

This morning Franklin the dog and I began our morning walk by encountering the rabbit who lives along side the driveway. I saw it, the rabbit saw us and then Franklin saw it. The usual pattern ensued. The rabbit ran into the shrubs, I pulled in Franklin's leash and before he could start his pacing and indignant circling, we started out on our walk.

This hare is either a long time survivor or the offspring of the original rabbit first seen in the yard about three years ago -- it hangs out in the base of the tall juniper hedge that separates my side yard from the neighbor's backyard. One afternoon a few years ago the dog and I were startled when a hawk came swooping down and chased the rabbit into the shrubs right in front of us. Franklin didn't know which to chase, the hawk or the rabbit.

When I pull the dog in on his leash -- basically making it a regular leash as opposed to a long leash that gives him freedom to make his indigant circles and paces in the face of a live rodent -- he calms down, and so this morning we walked that way around the entire townlet. I am suprised at how quickly he adapts to this, and he walks next to me without too much tugging. That he did so right after seeing the rabbit was even more amazing.

I hate to walk this way because this is a dog bred to be out by himself sniffing around, chasing and barking (and killing) things. But if I move this next year to NYC, he will have even more restrictions, and it is time to start easing him into that routine.

I will try to balance this discipline with more play. Franklin turns seven next month and the vet tells me that means he is becoming a senior citizen. Last week, I pulled out one of the tennis balls he has stolen over the years and bounced it around. He loves chasing after it and bringing it back to me, dropping it in front of me so that I will throw it again. Eventually I have to put it away so that we can go to sleep.

in christmastide

2006-12-26T14:08:00.000-05:00

For Christians, I think that the last thing called for in this Christmas season is phony magic, the wishful making upright of all that is turned over, either personal or in the larger world. Or the cloying fake holiday spirit of Coke ads (you know that the polar bears probably ate the penguins after the bottle was shared with the young cub) and all the other commercial holiday music/decorations/sales aimed at putting us all in greater debt or making us much heavier in weight.

An aside -- a local Indianapolis carwash merchant has a billboard that tells us to put Christ back in Christmas and other billboards telling us that carwash gift cards are great seasonal gifts. I say put car back in carwash.

What is needed is what is always needed, an honest reflection of who we are and the mess we humans are in. In other words, a time for humility and quiet.

Which is what speaks to me so strongly in the Advent Sundays leading up to Christmas Eve night when at last we finally sing the ancient hymns and reflect on the awe of a baby in a cattle trough, the image none of us would conjure up for such an occasion.

Hope, as someone pointed out in a fine sermon I heard, is what Mary, Joseph and the Shepherds had as they gathered around the babe in circumstances bleak and poor. Despite the angels and the star, on that night they still found themselves in a cattle shed. Hope is not easy magic, glossing over reality, but prayer in facing reality, I think. Hope is not us as God, making God-like judgments and decisions for everybody else, fixing everything, ourselves included. Hope is the work of being Christian, praying, confessing, worshiping, opening our lives to change, to challenge conventional values and wisdom, and in the practical words of Jesus, to feed and clothe the poor, tend to the sick, and visit those imprisoned.

That's what I've been thinking about this season. Because Sunday was the fourth Sunday of Advent as well as Christmas Eve, it was only at the evening Christ Mass that we sang Once In Royal David's City, the first verse sung a capella by a young girl, and then in parts by the choir, and then with organ and congregation as we processed slowly amid the lit candles and pine greens.

temps

2006-12-11T15:41:00.000-05:00

I am sure that curiousity about Indianapolis day-to-day weather is very limited, but it is the world I inhabit, and I react strongly to what is happening outside, the curse, I suppose of a passion for gardening which is often about tracking daily weather -- even though such tracking is fairly useless right now, in terms of the garden. My weather compulsion doesn't stop because I cannot garden.

Several weeks ago, it rained days on end, and we lost sky and sun. I was in great despair. In the last week, we experienced great cold, about 8 degrees (F)on Friday morning rising to a high in the very low 20s. But the sun shined throughout, and even with bitter cold, I am ok when I get to see and feel sunshine.

Now it is 52 degrees (F). Almost paradise.

killing the beast

2006-12-11T08:07:00.000-05:00

I discovered something about my cats, a minor discovery actually, when I found a small dead mouse this morning on the floor of the room where I feed them.

Of course, cats are supposed to kill mice, but I had no evidence that any of my cats would actually do it. Two of them are middle-aged, the other is elderly, all have no front claws, and they have lived their lives inside the house looking out. Deprived of the outside world, they have formed their lives within the confines of human rooms.

The dead mouse was intact -- in college, a roommate's cat left a beheaded rat at our doorstep one night and nearly stepping on it, I was quite startled. But this little mouse lay in one piece. I assume its neck was broken but didn't look too closely. Franklin the dog could kill a mouse, but he is kept out of this room by a children's gate. I assume the elderly cat didn't do this since she is too lost in her sleep to notice anything else. That leaves the two younger cats, a fat tabby and a sleek tortoise. Our twins, we call them, since we got them at age one, their third owners. They are not littermates.

Both of them came into the room while I cleaned the litter boxes. The torty's little cries, which I usually interpret asam I pretty, won't you pet me, am I pretty? now sounded like I'm the one who killed the beast. The tabby just purred and made a look as if he was responsible.

I scooped the mouse up and cleaned the litter boxes. I have a mouser.

oops

2006-12-08T14:44:00.000-05:00

This morning, Blogger said, try the new beta-blogger. I said yes, and before you know it, I lost my blogroll. It's gone. Forever.

And now all these weird colors which I must blame on impulsive me and not necessarily the Google corporation.

UPDATE: I found the old blogroll and have patched it back in. I'll tinker again this weekend to clean it up. Sorry for the mess.

old movies

2006-12-04T10:45:00.000-05:00

Ever since partner went away to school, I've been taping old movies. It started with "Topper" with Cary Grant, and some of the ones I've seen before, and others I haven't. It is like programming one's own film festival, which of course is what Netflix is like, but this is cheaper and once I record something I don't have the pressure of seeing it immediately. I've mostly been recording films from the 30s to the early 60s, with their massive sets, moistened and highlighted close-ups on the female star, gowns designed by Adrian, and mostly comedies.

These are our American dreams in a true since of the word. In some ways, we are like Mia Farrow in The Purple Rose of Cairo finding the movies as an escape toward what is missing in our ordinary lives.

But this past week, I finally saw Nashville, Robert Altman's multi-character movie from the mid-1970s, a period I remember well. I once rented a video of it, but the sound quality was so bad that I didn't finish watching the movie. One of the benefits of the films on Turner Classic Movies, AMC, and IFC, is they often show newly-restored versions.

What a wonderful mess of a movie Nashville is, mesmerizing the way one may feel overhearing a particularly eloquent crazy person on the street or a talkative peson in public retelling a personal story with way too many intimate details for public airing.

messiah

2006-12-04T10:26:00.000-05:00

Four years ago, a group of local singers formed a professional choir to accompany the Indianapolis Baroque Orchestra's performances of Handel's Messiah as a baroque chamber piece rather than the 19th century re-tooled 300 voice/symphonic version.

Those 16 singers were amazingly good, many the product of graduate training at IU and other conservatories, and they enjoyed singing together so much that they formed the Meridian Vocal Consort. Twice a year they have put together wonderful concert performances.

This past weekend, they rejoined the Indianapolis Baroque Orchestra for two nights of Messiah at Trinity. It was again an amazing thing to witness. Local artists Steven Stolens and Steven Rickards sang the tenor and counter-tenor songs. I don't have the program with me so I don't remember the names of the bass and soprano -- he is from Virginia and the soprano is from Illinois. But they were all amazing, too.

This time there were only 15 voices in the choir, but their uniform sound was amazing strong and clear and yet so perfectly matched to provide meaningful shaping to Handel's passages, clear enunciation, and tremendous and agile singing in the numerous trills and passages that move so quickly.

It is nearly three hours of singing and instrumental accompaniment.

When Handel wrote the piece, the Bishop of London banned its presentation in London parishes and in St. Paul's Cathedral. He thought it smacked too much of the theater, and he did not want his churches tainted by such an entertainment. Handel ended up presenting the Messiah in Dublin as a benefit for a charity hospital.

I left into the cold night, my head alive with his musical meditations based on passages from the King James Version of the Bible.

a cold december

2006-12-01T15:15:00.000-05:00

I read recently that December was going to be fairly cold this year, perhaps colder than even January and February.

When I woke up this morning, the outside temp was around 44 degrees (F). It's about 28 degrees (F) in late afternoon.

The wind this morning was gusting up to 40 miles per hour, creating a roar that I could hear inside the house. Even in the sheltered, wooded townlet, you could feel the wind ripping through the air.

It has already rained for almost two days. Snow or ice is next.

Looks like December is going to be cold.

after thanksgiving

2006-11-29T13:20:00.000-05:00

I.
I went to Dallas to spend the holiday with my family -- actually I flew into an airport that had the name Dallas on it, but spent the whole time in the north of the city, former fields now covered with asymmetrical roofed homes, ringed by freeways, malls and big box stores, all some 30 miles or so from downtown Dallas. This region is the American need for re-invention gone amuck, leaving behind the disorder of the city for neat, well-ordered caves in faceless communities, a car and shopping culture without soul. But then I don't live there, and one's version of civic hell is another's calm and ordered heaven.

II.
My family members who live in this region appear to be doing fine, and I know that they sometimes wonder why I am not excited about living there. I am the odd man out. I used to be anxious about our holiday gatherings, and at some point I figured out that they were a little anxious, too. One of the benefits of aging is that we all mellow a little over stuff that is insignificant.

We had a great time looking at old photographs. I saw a picture taken when I was in the first or second grade -- my late father was younger than I am now. I remember when we took the picture, but had not ever seen it. Or forgot about it. Nearly 50 years later, it was startling to see us all posed for the picture, yet each in our thoughts. It was taken on a short vacation trip.

III.
James Joyce wrote a short story called "The Dead" in Dubliners collection about a couple at a family party. The man takes himself and life too seriously. The wife is flushed in thoughts, and unknown to her husband, she is remembering a lost young love.

I thought about that story when I heard my mother tell us all a story about her first love, a young man she met in high school who she last saw at a train station, waving goodbye to him as he left for Europe in World War II. They had married right before he left, and in the War he had been killed in Germany. These facts were known to all of us although she never much talked about it. Years later she met my dad and they married, raised us children, and had a long and good marriage.

But sitting around talking about our stories from our past, she began to tell us more details about this early relationship, how much they loved each other, how she forced her mother to let her marry while still in high school. She described the day she heard he had died -- she was called to the office of the factory where she worked -- all the women knew that a call to the office was bad news. The news hit her hard.

Three days later, she got a letter from her husband. He wrote about his love for her, and how he longed to return home. He told her that they would buy a small house and start a family. She said she still has the letter.

We listened quietly and asked questions. Here were are, her children who associate our mother with our father, and the years we shared together as a family, and our mother tells us a story, a flush of memories, that she has carried all these years, about a man none of us knew other than as a fact, a sentence about her first husband.

I am not sure why we had been incurious. She probably never encouraged us to talk about it, and certainly while my father was alive it was not the kind of thing one talks about, a deep love.

I have no doubt my mother loved my father. But their relationship was reality. The young man who was buried in Europe was a dream, a possibility unfulfilled.

sky returns

2006-11-17T10:07:00.000-05:00

It's Friday and we started the day with a blue sky and only the wisp of white clouds. More clouds are moving in, but it is not raining and the increased sunlight is a welcome tonic.

For this, I am thankful.

lotta rain

2006-11-17T10:00:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, the poor dog and I made all our outdoor visits in the rain. He's a terrier, so I shouldn't feel too sorry for him. His coarse outer coat dries quickly, and since his breed comes from the British Isles, I suppose he is set up for rainy days.

In his younger days, he would absolutely refuse to go out into the rain, but now he does so without much prompting, as long as it is not heavy rain. I trail him in my black topcoat and black umbrella, looking like the disinterested undertaker at the cemetary, waiting for the event to happen.

Scotties, by the way, are not very good swimmers. If fact, I am not sure if they can swim at all. Their body, perfect for digging and tunneling in search of vermin, are too top heavy for swimming, particularly with their short legs. The breed book warns against letting them fall into a swimming pool or any depth of water.

Being a clumsy sort, I've wondered what it would feel like to be dancer or an agile athlete. I suppose dogs are not envious about things like swimming.

missing

2006-11-16T11:38:00.000-05:00

We lost our sky. Indy is shrouded with low clouds, the kind that shows no color or definition, clouds that blot out light, making the landscape dreary.

If this were spring, all the colors of blooming bulbs, shrubs and trees would benefit from this muted light, but we are in the days past fall, when almost all color is gone except for the grass and the litter of leaves and dead plants on the ground.

It started raining yesterday in the afternoon, and the rain continued throughout the night, making the ground spongy to walk on it.

The White River is up, way up.

On the way to work this morning, I heard on the radio a recording of Bethoveen's Triple Concerto for Violin, Cello and Piano. If I've heard this before, I didn't recognize it. It was good medicine for such weather.

rue

2006-11-13T08:31:00.000-05:00

I assume that regret is reserved for humans and is not an emotion found in dogs. This morning, Franklin the Dog slipped his collar and ran off into the morning dark. How quickly he changed from indoor dog to outdoor animal, fast, moving across the lawns of my neighbors in wide arcs. He went to the groomers last week, and was still wearing his red scarf -- this gave me some small ability to him, and then he ran in between houses, going into unfenced backyards, and I stayed on the road, hoping that no car would come when he reappeared.

Because I am familiar with the walking habits of other dog owners and their dogs in the townlet, I knew that a certain doberman and Jack Russell Terrier would be coming by shortly. Franklin is always compeled to bark at the doberman, and the doberman always pulls its owner along in response. We have a system of hiding our dogs behind a shrub when we see each other out.

After about 20 minutes, the doberman and Jack Russell and owner came up the street, and very quickly Franklin appeared, running around them barking and lunging at the doberman. I finally caught my dog, and together we all walked up the street, Franklin under my arm and the doberman and Jack Russell between me and the other dog owner. The dogs quickly quieted down, and I apologized several times and we talked about the weaknesses of all our dogs.

The weakness is arbitrary, the payoff of having a dog in a neighborhood, of living with people and their cars. Franklin has these moments of freedom and I hardly recognize him.

Back in the house, I am relieved that he is safe. Our slow moving cats stir, and I imagine that the dog must surely sense the difference between his act of independence and his life inside our home. The patterns of the morning begin again, and soon we are all playing our rituals -- I get dressed & he follows me up the stairs to wait through this, getting a nap on the bed before we both go downstairs.

blue sky

2006-11-09T09:50:00.000-05:00

The clouds have gone, and the sky is a brilliant blue this morning. Temps are supposed to get to the 60s (F).

Partner is here for a long weekend, the dog is back from the groomer, and I won't have to work this weekend -- I've only had one full day off in three weeks.

I feel pretty good today.

day after

2006-11-08T11:33:00.000-05:00

Shame on me. Much better results than I had thought possible from yesterday's elections. I stayed up too late to follow the returns.

election day

2006-11-07T10:06:00.000-05:00

I was the 106th voter at my precinct this morning. I waited about 45 seconds to get access to one of four booths where voters mark their ballot.

It is drizzling today, most of the leaves have fallen, and the ground is matted with the organic matter that has gathered in waves across lawns, draping shrubs and covering flower beds.

When I was a child, my mother and father voted in the Kendrick Elementary School cafeterium (lunchroom) in South Waco. The ballots were paper, and quite large. There were no booths or isolated places to mark ballots. Voters went to the low lunchroom tables, and sat and voted in full view of their neighbors. I usually went with them when they voted in the afternoon. A woman who moved to Waco from Ohio once told me how uncomfortable it made her feel to vote without a booth on ballots as big as a paper table cloth.

My precinct polling place is located in a room in a municipal golf course clubhouse, a short drive from the townlet.

This is democracy's day, I usually say to myself, on election day. The time when fellow citizens go to the polls and determine who will represent them in government. That is a romantic view, I suppose, but one I've held for most of my adult life.

I don't feel that today. We know how much we are divided in this country, we understand the issues that split us apart. But we have little interest or passion in confronting the real problems of this country, not the emotional causes of the cultural wars, but the basic problems of education, and economic health, security and above all, hope for the future.

The war in Iraq has little to do with how liberal or conservative one is. We have no clue what we are doing there, and no plan for how to proceed now that we are there.

Gay Americans and their families continue to be vulnerable, and in this election there are again efforts across America once more to squeeze out political gain at our expense.

Today feels instead like the temporary end of the nasty, uninformative, distorted television ads, full of fake outrage and one-upmanship on who can make the most outrageous accusations, all activity designed to make us feel so repugnant about the process that we will say to hell with it and stay at home.

I voted. It took only a moment. I usally try to thank my fellow citizens who work at the polling place. I did again on my way out the door.

here

2006-10-25T11:13:00.000-04:00

It is now full autumn -- I have to wear a coat outside, particularly in the evening. The colors here are not spectacular -- some of the maples are particularly less vivid than in other years -- but still there is a lot of color in the landscape. Burning bushes, with their red leaves, are particularly vibrant this year.

Because we are on the western edge of the Eastern Daylight Savings time zone, it is dark until about 7:30 - 7:45 each morning. Odd to notice the effect, but this is Indiana's first fall with EDT. But at least it is lighter in the evening. Franklin and I enjoyed a great walk yesterday afternoon looking at trees and chatting with neighbors and their dogs.

I hope I can make it to election day. A neighbor invited me to a party on election night. I fret about the outcome, buoyed by the possibility of changing the Congress. George F. Will wrote what is one of the few things I've ever agreed with him: if the Democrats cannot do well in this mid-term election, they should go into another line of work.

yesterday

2006-10-23T07:28:00.000-04:00

The gray clouds rolled in and stopped overhead, cutting out much of the sunlight. The dog and I made our walk around the townlet, and his preoccupations and mine divided further, his toward the smell of leaves and whatever scents they carried, and I noticing the much cooler air and the changed soundscape from only a few weeks ago when the bugs sang their nighttime tunes -- now it is the rustle of the leaves crunching underfoot.

I fell asleep on the couch after lunch with a big gray tabby cat spread across my stomach, a rare experience since naps do not come easily for me. Leaves continue falling even as their colors are only halfway to autumnal hues. The maple in the front yard, always the last to lose its leaves, have edges of a deep dark red. The giant sweetgum next to it hardly waited for any color before it began dumping is many star-shaped leaves.

One of the viburnums has started turning colors while the others are still mostly green -- these shrubs are usually the last to loose their leaves and the first to leaf out in the spring. I wonder if the one with its reds and yellows is diseased or stressed. I cut it back last year. Perhaps I am at fault.

I picked up my large order of grape hycinth or muscari at church yesterday. The newer varieties are much larger, with their blooms lasting longer. I planted a few of these last spring. I didn't have the heart to try more tulips, but I did get a small order of oriental lilies. At some point, I may get a few more daffodils -- there can never be too many in the spring.

and then...

2006-10-19T10:39:00.000-04:00

Yesterday marked the third anniversary of this blog. I hesitate to write that because I write so little these days. Part of it is life events around me -- part of it is my current state of mind -- part of it is tiredness -- I find that I may have written all I need to write in this format and I am repeating myself a lot.

How silly it seems to act as if writing this blog is anything more than for my amusement -- or practice -- at putting sentences together, at sharing a written picture of the world from my corner. But I do benefit from meeting and writing with other people that I would have never talked with or written to if I had not started blogging. I enjoy the people who post here or who write me emails as a result of the blog.

At least through blogging, many of us are communicating in ways that folk did in other centuries through the mail. Relationships sustained by letterwriting is no longer possible. I don't know anybody who wants to have a letterwriting relationship. And my organizational skills are such that I don't carry through on trying to find or build such a relationship.

So I mark this as an anniversary of a simple pleasure. Thanks to all have read or commented here.

the way we were

2006-10-13T07:07:00.000-04:00

I came to New York to visit partner this weekend, and while fall -- without the accompanying temperatures -- had already started in Indianapolis, the ginko trees on the streets here show no color. All is green and waiting, a suspended end of summer.

When I got off the plane at LaGuardia, I heard continued phrases such as "I just heard about it" as people talked in their cell phones -- about an hour earlier, the small plane had crashed into a residential building. It was raining hard outside, and the cab driver told me that the north side of Manhattan was virtually impossible to drive through. People looked grim, and then relieved that it was merely a horrific accident rather than an act of terror.

Partner and I went to Madison Square Garden to see Barbra Streisand's concert, something he had arranged months earlier. She sang her classic songs from "Funny Girl," including "People" and "My Man, I Love Him So."

Yesterday was a clear, blue sky afternoon. I walked to the Strand bookstore and found a book I was interested in. It's an amazing used bookstore, but terribly overwhelming, with narrow aisles and shelves that require the use of small metal step ladders placed throughout the store. And I have such a hard time reading small print these days. So I find it best to be looking for something specific rather than just browse through the stacks of books.

Someone told me it had snowed in Indy on Thursday.

in mid-air

2006-10-10T12:11:00.000-04:00

I.
Our weather is calm and slightly warm, but they say it will drop in a day or two with a high of only 43 degrees. This waiting for change is unsettling. I've noticed the sparse but beautiful appearance of roses peeking out of my garden amid the japanese anemones.

This milder weather is what makes roses thrive, and here in this cursed place for roses this small production of blooms is a temptation for gardeners, reminding us that under the right circumstances we can grow roses in Indianapolis.

And in the spring, we may for a short time ... before the blackspot and the j. beetles, and the heavy humid airs of summer.

II.
Leaves falling in warm weather is not right. Pleasant to the skin, but not to the order of things.

finding one

2006-10-09T13:18:00.000-04:00

A real musician could explain this better (and I encourage you to do so), but here is my attempt. In most western music, there is often a beginning and ending chord centered on the dominant note in the piece's scale sometimes identified in American teaching methods as "one."

The notes may go up through the seven notes of the scale transcending even to the next set of notes or octave, or go below to a lower set of notes or octave. But for our western ears, we expect to start and conclude our music with a return to the home base of the one note of the scale -- which can be in any octave. To not return to one is to leave us in mid-air, expecting some conclusion, awaiting a resolution, a landing. Later composers challenged this logic, played with its tensions, but for much of western music, this is what we know -- it appears -- intuitively.

If only life had the logic of musical notes, the reasonableness of tolerating ups and downs and counter themes and runs, sparse or baroque, before returning to a conclusion that we expected from the very beginning, even if we had forgotten it momentarily, the intuitive responses in what one does next.

Perhaps our one note is our mortality, but recognition of that doesn't bring much satisfaction.

The days of fall are quite beautiful right now, the cutting off of chloroform's green in the leaves is allowing fall colors to emerge. A cool, brisk air should make anyone smile. Is it in weather, in the ritual and pattern of season, that we find satisfaction despite evidence that the world is fairly messed up, unlinked as it is to the blue sky, red and yellow leaves, and cooler air?

not yet...

2006-09-29T11:02:00.000-04:00

Temperatures fell last night, down to the low 40s (F). I finally turned the heat on the house. The weather has changed almost hourly over the past couple of days, from blue clear skies to dark, billowing clouds, with off and on stormy rains.

Enough of this has caused fall to start a little early -- a tree outside my office window is almost all yellow, with a little brown and faint limony green mixed in.

Yesterday on our walk around the townlet, the dog sniffed out a rabbit and two cats. Which made him more eager for this morning's walk. We only encountered another neighbor and his Shelty.

I am looking forward to gardening tomorrow. Hope we get the blue skies instead of storms. I am not ready to read Rilke's poem, "Autumn Day," yet.

mornings

2006-09-27T10:29:00.000-04:00

Franklin the dog and I are walking in the dark most mornings. The morning air is brisker than it was even a few weeks ago -- I think it was 56 degrees (F) this morning.

In the evening, the sounds of summer are starting to fade, with bugs that make their nighttime songs moving on as the seasons make their transition.

But for the two of us, it is the silence of the morning that we share as we make our morning loop around the townlet.

My garden is a mess, but I've had little time to deal with it, and on my one day to do so -- last Saturday -- it rained. A little cooler temp and I will not only weed and cut back, but do some major thinning. And move the redbud sappling by my garage entrance that really needs to go somewhere else.

There are extravagent periods in our lives, when good fortune and health and weather combine to make us feel as if we have stepped out of time. And there are times of loss, and work, and pushing on. This feels like one of those times, with partner in NYC and work becoming increasingly busy. Not sadness, just adjustments of pace and rhythm.

Franklin the dog and I do not talk about this -- we just walk and he cheers me up. A vet told me that on his next birthday in a few months, he becomes a mature (senior) dog. As senior as me at least. He held his puppiness for a long time, the result of terrier genes, I guess, and a playfulness and energy that is still evident.

We walk in the grace of the morning quiet.

austin and back

2006-09-20T13:40:00.000-04:00

I ended up flying to Austin on Saturday. Sunday, I visited with old friends, and on Monday, I attended the burial and the memorial service for Governor Richards.

The night before the burial, the skies were loud with thunder and lightening, and in the morning there was gentle drizzle, appropriate for the bittersweet day of saying goodbye.

I got back yesterday to a definitely colder Indianapolis. It was 43 degrees (F) outside this morning.

Governor Ann Richards, 1933 - 2006

2006-09-14T09:20:00.000-04:00

I.
She breezed into the slightly run-down ballroom of the Menger Hotel in San Antonio. It was the Young Democrats' state convention in the spring of 1982,toward the end of the gathering.

She was running for State Treasurer, and one of her primary opponents, a fellow from Waco, had made comments about her alcoholism -- she had been in recovery for a few years.

"Whatever you do in politics," she told us, "live your life with responsibility and accountability." She talked about public service being a calling -- that we enter politics not for the fun or the game, but for the impact it has on making the world a better place. I don't remember much else from that convention; I have long forgotten the names of the other folk who were there.

But I remember her. It was the introductory lecture in the Ann Richards School of Public Service.

We met at political events in Waco when she came through on the campaign. She was elected Treasurer. Two years later, during a campaign stop in Waco during the 1984 campaign, she asked me to sit down and talk to her in the storefront building we were using as the county's Democratic campaign headquarters. She sat down in a brown metal folding chair, took her shoes off and put her feet up on another chair.

"Sit down," she said, as she pulled out a Virginia Slims cigarette and lit it. "What are you going to do when you grow up?" she asked.

"Get out of Waco," I said. I had ended up back in my hometown after graduate school, and I was afraid I was going to get stuck there.

"I may have a job for you," she said. I thought she was just being nice to me. Somebody interrupted, and I got up and left them as they talked.

Two days later I got a call from Austin asking me to come to the State Treasurer's Office for a job interview. I started working at the State Treasury on January 2, 1985 in the midst of an unusual snow storm.

II.
Gail, Ann's hairdresser, once said that, in setting and styling Ann's hair, they defied gravity. The hair was a trademark: white; tall; not as big as some Texas hair, but in a time when big hair was over, it was noticeable. In 1992, when she chaired the National Democratic Convention, I often sat in the highest balcony, just below the skyboxes next to the cable TV folk (like Al Franken and Dr. Ruth). Looking down onto an arena floor filled with people, the light caught her hair and I could find her easily. It was true in most crowds. She was easy to spot.

But her most beautiful feature were her eyes, a deep blue color. As she sat at her desk with a pair of reading glasses on, those piercing eyes appeared even larger -- and actually a bit unsettling. When she talked to you, her eyes focused on you intensely. And her eyes always mirrored her moods, showing either curiosity about some detail, delight at some odd or ironic detail, or the dark clouds of anger and impatience.

When it came to government, Ann was, for the most part, impatient. I think some of this must have derived from her ability to grasp issues quickly. One of our staff attorneys told me that almost always she immediately asked them the one hard question they didn't want to answer. Details mattered -- we always took the extra step in everything we did, because sloppy didn't count.

And there were certain excuses you knew would upset her, "Could someone tell me why this is being done this way," she would ask, and only the dumb and unsuspecting tried to defend with the bureaucratic response that, "it's always been done that way."

III.
She believed in her higher power. AA was a weekly part of her life -- all four years she was in office as Governor she attended a closed session. Accountability is a big part of AA, and on that front I think she was harder on herself than anybody else. People thought she was sympathetic to folk struggling with their addictions, but she was often tougher with them than others. "They have to make the decision to move on with their lives. I can't make it for them," she would say. Yet every now and then a new employee would be added to the staff, and only later you would discover that they were in AA, too. Knowing that 95% or so of all Texas inmate's had substance addictions, she wanted to introduce AA into the prison system, and she set up a pilot program. Governor Bush dismantled it when he got in office.

If she had an incredible sense of humor, she also had anger -- the low-grade ire of many women of her generation, who went to college and then were expected to be good wives. Women who left things like politics to the men and were called on only to stuff and lick envelopes.

For years, it was traditional for the Texas Governor to personally greet the Miss Bluebonnet Queen (or some other beauty pageant winner) at the Governor's Mansion. I think Ann did it once -- her first year in office. She didn't participate after that.

One regular feature of life in the Governor's Officer was the photo-op reception, where groups of people came through and had their picture made with the Governor in the ornate Governor's reception room. This was something Ann didn't enjoy, but had to do. At one of these session early in her term, the Apache Belles, the drill team from Tyler Junior College, came for their annual picture with the governor. They came into the room wearing their standard issue 1950s costumes, complete with tilted cowboy hats, tight green bloomers, and short-short skirts, breasts and butts squeezing out vulgarly top and bottom.

They lined up across the room, beaming their bigtrademark painted-on smiles. The Governor looked at them and said, "Girls, I hope that you are all studying hard and taking classes that will help you when you leave college, because..." She paused for a moment as they continued to smile at her. "...because someday gravity will do to you what it did to me, and you'll have to live on something other than your looks."

I think the trademark smiles sagged a bit at this comment. They hadn't expected this from a woman who had such a wrinkled face.

When little girls were afraid to ask Ann a question, deferring to their moms to ask for them, she would look at the child and say, "you need to ask me. Don't be afraid to ask questions."

For years, she attended Girls' State, an American Legion program created to teach high school girls about the political process. She always told them that they had to learn to be responsible for themselves because "these days Prince Charming is riding a motorcycle and he expects you to make the payment." She didn't want them to think someone else would take care of them.

IV.
The superstar photographer Annie Liebovitz took pictures of Ann for Vanity Fair magazine. In one photo she is dressed in chaps, looking like a dignified and defiant Barbra Stanwyck. Another photo was a large profile of Ann's face, every wrinkle showing. Those pictures hung in our outer office. I don't know what Ann thought about her wrinkles, but I'm sure she was not afraid of them. They were a part of her beauty that she didn't hide by cosmetic surgery. It was who she was.

When she entered the Governor's office, almost every function of state government was under some court order at the federal or state level. The powers of the governor were limited (deliberately so by Texas' reconstruction-era constitution) and nobody else seemd to have the political will to regain state control of these services. The courts stepped in because the State had neglected its duties.

She was very proud of the progress we made to restore state control. I think this was rarely mentioned after she left office, but in a Washington Post story on Governor George Bush when he was running for president, it was noted that Governor Richards had left Bush an office where major problems, particularly ones related to criminal justice issues, had already been dealt with.

She said she wanted to open the doors of state government. Nearly half of all her appointments were of women and minorities. And she appointed five openly gay people to government positions. Bob Bullock, the Lieutenant Governor who always felt that Ann was not deserving of office, said that he thought that appointing gay people was her downfall. But she wanted government to represent the people it served. Ann thought that, if people had an investment, a voice in the system, they would see that they are part of government and would make it more responsive.

V.
When Ann ran for governor the first time, she had one of her last political rallies on the road in Waco, both our hometowns. When I saw her that afternoon in Austin she told me what she was thinking while they were introducing her. "I looked around that crowd and I thought to myself, 'thank God I got Don out of Waco!'"

Working for her was like having a front row seat to the world. Through the doors of the Governor's office walked Bill Clinton, ZZ Top, Erma Bombeck, Maya Angelou, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Jackson, Ernie Banks, Kevin Kostner, Gloria Steinem, and many more. I even I shook hands with Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip.

When Carlos Salinas, the President of Mexico, made a visit, Ann and Mr. Salinas rode the small private elevator up to our office. The entire entourage of aides were left behind, waiting for the elevator to return. So these two political giants stood next to my desk, waiting for the rest of the party. "Mr. President, let me introduce you to Bonnie (another office assistant) and Don." We shook hands.

She called herself a two headed cow -- a woman in a man's world, different enough to get people's attention. And she used that attention to get companies to move to Texas, to lobby on behalf of federal projects, and to pinpoint issues that normally weren't the focus of Texas governors.

VI.
She was afraid of ethics violations. About once a year or so, she would grill staff on how we were reporting gifts to her. Office staff didn't do political work in the Governor's Office. At the Treasurer's office, Barbara Jordan led day-long seminars on ethical behavior in public office.

The same went for emergency preparedness. If a hurricane or tornado hit, were we prepared? About every six months or so the state's emergency people came in and were grilled. What about this? What about that?

We didn't represent "the people," we worked for them. Our jobs were temporary. Our responsibilities were great. Being innovative, being efficient, running the race faster -- those were our goals to make Texas and its government a better place for its people.

Once, when she was thinking about running for Governor, she met with a group of labor leaders at the Capitol. She called me to give her a ride back to the office afterward. She was ablaze. "They told me they thought I was not tough enough to be governor."

I don't think anybody thought that once she was in office.

VII.
After we left office I received a small cowboy boot that had been part of the crystal collection on the credenza behind her desk. I also have pictures that she inscribed to me. I learned a lot from her, and I am deeply proud that I had the privilege of working for her and with so many other wonderful colleagues. We lost because, in fact, Texas was trending back to being a one-party state. The only reason we ever got into office was because the 1990 Republican candidate was so scary to women, and even Republican women of Dallas voted for Ann. And because Austin had an incredible turn-out. We barely slipped in.

She said on the night we lost that it was the end of a campaign, not the end of the world. And frankly, after we left office, we all felt a little relief at no longer being responsible to and for so many people. There was life after political office.

I saw a few times after we left office. The last time was at a reunion for old staffers, ten years after the 1990 election. She was always kind to me, encouraging. I never felt the need to be her best friend or to have a personal relationship with her, but I am grateful to have known her and to have worked with her.

And I am grateful for my colleagues, funny, hardworking, fellow students in an incredible experience. I miss them.

VIII.
When we were in the Treasurer's Office in the 1980s, Ann went to a behavior modification class to quit smoking. I rarely traveled with her, but was asked to fly with her on a Saturday morning to Dallas for the funeral of civil rights leader Juanita Craft. As a young housewife, Ann had worked with Juanita in protesting segregation in Dallas area businesses. After we got on the plane, Ann pulled out a cigarette and started talking to it.

"I hate you. You are dirty, nasty, and have done terrible things to my body."

And then she lit up. I kept looking at her, and she said "It's part of the process. I am on my last pack."

When we got to Texas State Fairgrounds for the memorial service, we listened to several dignitaries, and then she got up to speak. We were in the large art deco Hall of Heroes, with bigger than life murals of Texas legends.

Ann talked about her personal experiences with Juanita. And then she referred to the Depression-era paintings surrounding us. They were all men. All white. "When I think about the heroes of Texas," she said, "I see the Juanita Crafts and the other women throughout the state's history who are invisible in places like this hall, but who made a difference."

May you rest in peace, dear Governor Richards, and may light perpetual shine upon you this day.

days

2006-09-11T13:28:00.000-04:00

Days take on symbolic meaning,and today is one that is thick with media attention. This, of course, is arbitrary, making the 5th anniversary of anything more important than the 4th year, 364th day. It's obviously, like top lists, one of the ways we humans organize our lives.

I remind myself that the horrid scene of the towers falling only happened once -- and not repeatedly. Whether or not the media resort to showing us the scene repeatedly today, I know that towers falling once was reality, and the repeated viewing is also arbitrary, bits on tape or digital storage, responding to the "play" command in a logical and obedient sequence. I cannot respond to repeated showings, becoming numb with the impossiblity, horror and sadness shown without regard for what we are seeing or our ability to understand it.

The facts of 9/11, or the tragic event, or whatever we call it, will never make sense. Suffice it to say that evil exists, that imagination and even religious piety can be used in desparately dangerous and destructive ways, that the aftereffects continue on in dangerous and destructive ways.

gardeners blogging

2006-08-30T11:15:00.000-04:00

Kathy Purdy is a smart, kind and encouraging garden blogger. To celebrate her 4th anniversary of garden blogging, she has asked other garden bloggers who started before she did a series of questions about their blogging. You can find the responses at Cold Climate Gardening.

walking

2006-08-29T20:07:00.000-04:00

It was raining almost all day, and the electric company cut off the electricity for partner's building for most of the day.

So I went for a walk to see parts of Manhattan that I've never seen before.

I walked east to Madison Square and then to Gramercy Park and Stuyvesant Square. THere was a massive Episcopal church on the square, St. George, and the apartment buildings between the square and Gramercy Park were quite ornate and old. While I was walking, I heard a familiar voice behind me -- it was the actor Richard Kind. He was helping a little girl step across rain puddles.

After I left this area, I wandered down to 14th Street and First Avenue, and decided to head north. On one side were large housing developments, and on the other side were the numerous little stores of green grocers, lottery peddlers, and other small businesses.

I walked past Bellvue Hospital, a massive complex, and then the NYU Medical Center, and finally turned west and headed toward the Empire State Building on 34th Street, something else I've never seen up close. This part of lower midtown is old, full of buildings where people put up a sign and run some kind of business. And then it was up past Bryant Park -- they're putting up the big tent for Fashion Week -- and then I walked past the Diamond district and wandered into the backend of Rockefeller Center, on the small street next to the Today Show studio. The Studio is being re-built, and the program has moved across the street in front of the GE building. A page from NBC gave me a ticket to a new show they were about to tape, but after wandering through the concourse, I decided not to go. I then walked up past Carnegie Hall to the south end of Central Park and walked over to Columbus Circle. Ted Allen from Bravo's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was walking on the sidewalk. Two celebrity sightings on one rainy day.

I walked along the edge of Lincoln Center and went to Tower Records and the Barnes & Noble across the street. Finally, I walked back down Amsterdam Ave (turns into 10th Ave). and walked back south to partner's apartment on 20th Street.

i can do that

2006-08-24T18:57:00.000-04:00

I drove a 14 foot Uhaul Truck over the mountains in Pennsylvania into Manhattan. The last part of that sentence had caused me the most anxiety, but even the idea of driving a big long truck was also a bit unnerving. So we're here at last.

Partner's stuff is all mostly unloaded, things are assembled, and only a few boxes are left to unload.

Because the date we could get into his rooms kept changing, the tickets we had bought some time ago for a show happened to be on our first night here. We saw an incredible production of Sweeney Tood with Patti LaPone. It was directed by the fellow who directed the Company we saw earlier this year. All the singers played the instruments. It was an incredible production.

I am tired. Another day tomorrow of getting things in order then I hope we escape the bird cage and explore NYC.

treadmill

2006-08-21T07:15:00.000-04:00

Someone raised the speed on the treadmill of my life -- is there a Glen Campbell comeback in that sentence? And yet, the old line about showing up must be true, because things are getting done.

It's been over three weeks since I mowed the grass -- one of the advantages of having large beds of perennials and small negative space of grass is that you can get away with missing the mowing. So I mowed this weekend. It was a lot of work. Done.

The house needed a thorough cleaning, and partner and I got through most of it.

He has gotten all packed, and we've completed almost all of our tasks related to that move.

Soon, he'll be off to school. I am not sure what it is about moving (or trips) that are unnerving to me, but the topic is not my favorite in the index of life lessons. I am not so easily transplantable, I guess.

monardia revisited

2006-08-15T06:02:00.000-04:00

My red bee balm (monardia) is re-blooming ... not as prolific as the first round earlier in the season. And the leaves don't look great. But there it is, enough red to attract late summer hummingbirds thirsty for the pollen of red.

needing a miracle

2006-08-14T22:47:00.000-04:00

For the past year or so, I've been reading histories related to the English Reformation. As a diversion - related, but a diversion -- I've been reading Neil Hanson's The Confident Hope of a Miracle: the True History of the Spanish Armada.

The author tries to humanize the Spanish, including the cold King Philip II, and argues against the common picture of Elizabeth as valiant and a good administrator. The English, in fact, come across as quite corrupt in their pivateering as a way to feed royal and personal coffers.

But it's a good read about an important sea battle. If the outcome had been different, we might be communicating in Spanish rather than English, and the fights of the Anglican Communion would be moot, because it would not have existed.

Still, this quote from the book got my attention. Hanson tells of a report by the Pope's envoy back to the Vatican concerning the preparations for the Spanish Armada. The envoy reports on a conversation with a high-up in the Spanish navy in which he asked if he thought that Spain would be successful in its invasion of England.

The reply:

It's very simple. It is well known that we fight in God' s cause, so when we met the English, God will surely arrange matters so that we can grapple and board them... [and the officer then describes how they will overpower the English sailors once they get close to their ships] ... But unless God helps us by a miracle, the English, who have faster and handier ships than ours and many more long range guns ...will never close with us at all but stand aloof and know us to pieces with their [cannons] without our being able to do them any serious hurt. So we are sailing against England in the confident hope of a miracle.

P. 116, Hanson, Confident Hope of a Miracle

the season of spent

2006-08-13T20:12:00.000-04:00

My garden is spent. The coneflowers, phlox, daisies and black-eyed susans are still blooming. The Japanese Anemones are starting to open up. The white flowers of the big green hostas are opening.

But lots of stuff is tired, through blooming, ready to be cleaned up, cut back. There's weeding to be done. And I suppose this is the moment of garden malaise. Can we call it that? Call for a season change. It was 60 degrees this morning -- it got hot later in the day -- and for the moment, it felt like the beginnings of early fall. We must wait for that. It is still August.

This is the exact time one should divide bearded irises, by the way. All other plant moving around should wait till the temps are cooler and heat stress is not a possibility.

lazy

2006-07-25T15:03:00.000-04:00

We had a week break from the heat. In fact, a few nights this past week, we've had the air conditioner turned off.

This fact astounds me. It has been years since I've lived in Texas, but I am still of a mind that once the heat comes, there is no break till the fall.

Saturday, I did some editing in the garden: weeding, pulling out and cutting back plants that are now spent in their blooming or that have started to crowd out other plants. I didn't finish, but I got enough done to pull my garden back from that fine line between natural style and weedy vacant lot.

The forsythia keeps spiking up tall. I removed the longer canes without fine shaping the plants. I pulled out more of the obnoxious aster that is not worth the blooms. One thing in their credit, however, the j. beetles eat it. Same as a simple broad leaf weed that gets up to a foot or two. I still pull them out. The weeds, that is. I leave some of the asters.

I cut back lilacs and spirea. The monardia (bee balm) is almost over, the pink going first. The reds are almost at the end, and I began to deadhead them. My rose campion is in seed as is the purple columbine. I gather some of the seed and spread it in areas where I'd like to see them sprout. We'll see.

I am already starting to think about fall divisions of perennials. On Saturday, I cut back a lot of purple coneflower and white daisies and gave them to a neighbor as cut flowers. These plants need thinning.

I also cut back the nepita, or catmint, causing one townlet walker to comment on the fragrance, something the cats in the neighborhood also notice. Pruning them back gets rid of woody stems that have already bloomed, and will possibly allow for another crop of flowers toward the end of summer.

And I am cutting back the zagreb coreopsis, too. The blooms are prolific, but not endless.

My mind is still restless as I wander the garden, but less than it used to be. Perhaps it is my energy that has lessened. Or because it is summer and I need brisk cool air to really get my gardening gumption going.

Out in the vegetable garden, the tomatoes are finally staring to ripen, again way past sense of timing learned in a hotter place. It's late, yes, but I am delighted to again indulge in tomatoes.

and the heat came

2006-07-18T14:26:00.000-04:00

It finally hit here, like the rest of the lower 48 states, this week. Partner and I went to Springfield, IL for the weekend to meet a friend from Chicago and to explore the new Lincoln Museum, other related Lincoln sites, and the Dana-Thomas House (an amazing Frank Lloyd Wright house restored by the State of Illinois). We saw a lot of Lincoln stuff. Franklin the dog went with us, staying in his crate in the cool hotel room during the day excursions.

It was hotter in Springfield than here, if only slightly, and the town which doesn't have a lot of trees in the downtown area (and a amazing number of paved over lots) didn't look so great during the heat. What would?

Lincoln
The U.S. Park Service took over the Lincoln House in the 1970s, and they have done a good job of restoring the blocks around the Lincoln House, giving it some kind of context. The house itself is restored to the year 1860, when Lincoln ran and was elected to the presidency.

Close-by, was the First Presbyterian Church, built after Lincoln's death. The family attended this church in an earlier building, and the family pew is located in the narthex. Inside are some wonderful Tiffany stained glasses. It was in the current church that Mary Todd Lincoln's funeral was held in the early 1880s.

Downtown a few blocks away is the old State Capitol, an early 19th century building where Lincoln served in the Legislature, and on that square is the Lincoln-Herndon law office. The Capitol inside is recreated to its legislative days. The new State Capitol, opened in 1876, is being slowly restored, a floor or two at a time, while in use. It is incredibly ornate, part of that public architecture of a rich and proud young country. The legislative chambers are closed for restoration, but the central hallways and the upper hallways are worth seeing.

The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum are a few blocks north of the old State Capitol. This new Lincoln museum is Disneyesque, but very good Disneyesque. It's a big hit and I imagine that it will stay that way for a while. Lincoln's bicentennial is coming in a few years, and Springfield was his town.

It opened last year, and it has two theatrical presentations, one using a live actor who lip-syncs his narrative -- a clever look at museums, their artifacts, and the stories they tell. The other is a multi-media re-telling of Lincoln and his image in America using sound effects, strobe lights, and various film and video.

The central pavilion area re-creates rooms in the White House with scenes out of Lincoln's presidency. It probably helps if you know more than what you see. There is a very nifty projected video map of the U.S. outlined in the two colors of the Civil War. In four minutes, the entire war is telescoped, with changing colors showing who was winning and losing, the number killed, and the major battles at each point. At the end is a chamber that recreates the last showing of his casket in the House chamber at the old State Capitol building.

Another major exhibition area shows the pre-presidential Lincoln, his growing up in Kentucky and Indiana, and then in Springfield. There is also a First Ladies traveling exhibition that includes several gowns and dresses of former First Ladies.

We also made the trek to the cemetery a few miles from downtown Springfield where Lincoln, his wife and three of his sons are buried. It's a beautiful old cemetery, and in the base of the giant monument, one wanders around halls of ornate, inlaid marble to arrive at a simple apse area where he is buried.

Wright
And then there was the Dana-Thomas house. Built in 1902 by Sarah Lawrence Dana, a local wealthy lady who supposedly was one of Wright's first blank-check clients. She commissioned him to remodel her late father's small Italianate Victorian villa, but that was a ruse, perhaps to get through some probate problems she had over his will. Unlike any other Wright house I've been in, there is one room that has Victorian furniture and supposedly it is a parlor from the original house with a fireplace that has a mantel, another Wright no-no.

What he designed was 12,000 sq ft. home with two barrel-shaped ceilings (he used the same kind of roof for a room in his Oak Park home in Chicago). There is an incredible amount of Wright glasswork, sculptures by Bock, and furniture designed by Wright. There is a Japanese motif to the exterior eaves, with a plaster frieze that is painted turquoise.

Mrs. Dana lived in the house long enough to outlive her fortune, and had to close it down in the 1930s. As she was dying in a local hospital in the 1940s, her personal items were auctioned off to pay for debts. According to the guide, nobody wanted Wright's furniture or glassworks, and they returned them to the house.

The fellow who bought the house, Charles Thomas, was a local medical publisher who understood what he bought. Although he ran his company from the house, he kept the furniture and eventually he and his wife sold the house to the state for about a $1 million. The state put another $6-7 million in restoration and in returning even more items, and the house has the distinction of having the largest amount of Wright furniture and artwork still in one of his houses.

We are all lucky to get to see it. The neighborhood has changed some from 1902. One of the big windows opens up to a brick wall apartment building next door, and another opens onto a paved parking lot with a tawdry and declining wooden fence.

But that's ok.

One can understand how such a house might have existed in the 1920s or later. But in 1902? Lots of Wright magic, using narrow, tight spaces that open into large airy spaces that are revealed again from other corners not apparent -- think of his Unity Temple in Oak Park. Claustrophobia and then paradise.

rain

2006-07-12T11:17:00.000-04:00

The rain fell yesterday. I had noticed on the weekend that my hydrangeas were starting to droop, the first tell-tale sign of heat & drought stress in my garden. And I did a little weeding, but the ground was incredibly hard.

I think it had been less than a week since the last rain. But with slightly hotter temps, and afternoon breezes, the ground starts drying out.

So I was glad it rained yesterday. It is cloudy today, too, and perhaps we will get some more rain this afternoon.

As hard and long as it rained yesterday, the ground is still fairly hard. I poked my umbrella tip into the earth to test how much moisture had seeped down. Not much.

some surprises

2006-07-08T12:54:00.000-04:00

Here's a shot framed between two out of focused brazilian verbena of my just beginning to flower tobacco plant. I had a few of these in my first garden in Austin many years ago -- they reseeded each year. This plant will get up to four feet or so. I planted three this year and the other two are a little slow. Unlike most plants, they like it hot and sultry, but they also like a little shade. I push how much sun time these perennials get, so its nice to have a plant that can tolerate some shade.

You can see some of the red bee balm on the left. The brazilian verbena is all over the garden -- bees like it. It re-seeds.

(Above) A few years ago I started putting out lots of larkspur seed (another plant I usually have in my garden, one that self-seeds when well established). The first year was ok, but I really thought it was all gone by this year. Then I noticed one and then another coming up this spring -- I think I have 3 or 4 of them now. You can see it on the upper left corner. In the middle are the Starr Asters.

And (below) here's the morality tale -- the lenten experience in gardening. We live in a sinful world and are subject to evil and death. Those alien little bugs are j. beetles, chomping away on the hollyhock. I sacrifice my hollyhocks in July. Alas. (If you are brave, click on the picture for an up-close look.)

my garden today

2006-07-08T12:28:00.001-04:00

So about an hour ago, I took these pictures of the garden (midday). The daisies (Becky), zagreb coreopsis, pink and red bee balm (monardia), and little of the rose campions, and the purple cornflower are in full bloom. The summer phlox is tall but mostly not blooming yet. And the Japanese anemones on the right are getting taller. They'll bloom in September.

Here's ground level shots from each end (below). I must divide more this fall, and give away extras or plant them in the backyard (which is much less formal and more natural. Franklin the dog and I wander through this garden each morning and evening. What you don't see on the left is huge clumb of forsysthia (something else I didn't catch in full bloom) and the big sweetgum tree trunk, the separation of the sunny perennial garden and the shade garden.

This has been a great year to garden in Indianapolis in terms of weather conditions. The hydrangeas are doing well.

Meanwhile, over on the shade side of the garden:

How sedate, and quiet, and calming. The medium sized green hostas are blooming their purple flowers as are the blue angels with their white flowers. The big green hostas will bloom later in the summer with champagne glass fluted white blooms.

my garden thus far...

2006-07-08T11:57:00.000-04:00

If I were better organized, I would have pictures of the spring bulbs. This was a good year for them. But I don't. And I would have captured lots of plants whose beauty I looked at each day, separate and in the context of the garden, in the context of mostly excellent weather. But gardens are collections of living things, not artificial, but like us, plants have good days and not so good days. Watching a garden is like listening to live music. You are either in the moment are you are thinking what it would sound like on a recording. By in the moment, I mean in the time of the music, subject to its rhythym, timing, sound. In a second, those notes are gone. Same in the garden.

But from time to time, I have taken pictures this year:

APRIL 25 2006

This is a picture (above) I took in the morning. This is just past most of the bulbs although I see a couple of tulips still hanging in, and the lilac bushes, two lavendar and one white, are still in full bloom. Mostly, this a transition moment, where the flat, deadness of the winter beds are being replaced by perennials, here chives, the beginnings of coreopsis, lots of stachys byzantium (lamb's ear), and columbine. In the shade garden, ferns and hostas are starting to stir.

MAY 25, 2006

Exactly one month later. It had just quit raining. The hostas are now up. The chives are blooming. The Japanese Anemones are starting to make their presence known.

This is a ground level shot from the front porch. The irises are still blooming, and you see Gertrude Jekyl DAE roses blooming in the foreground. The purple columbine and chives are the main bloomers.

Here's an old fashioned columbine that I planted three or four years ago in a corner of the garden. It has done well in the past, and frankly, I had forgotten about it. This is towards the end of its blooming. Gosh, it was tall, almost as tall as me. You can see the cranesbill blooming on the left. The peonys behind it had not started blooming yet. I didn't get pictures of them or most of the roses.

Here's two closer looks at different angles of the shade garden which is quite different from the perennial borders.

sacred and civic spaces

2006-07-08T07:56:00.000-04:00

Shelley has great photographs of a visit to the basilica in St. Louis. So few American buildings survive their period. We eat our history quickly. Churches, bridges, monuments, courthouses all represent periods of civic and religious pride, an opportunity to adorn a community, to signify importance within the community. By the nature of their special importance, they sometimes survive when more modest structures don't.

When they survive, we are not only lucky to have what has become iconic (for better or worse) places, but an opportunity to connect to the period of its building, to think about the lives and work carried out in it, to see that life is bigger than our own experience of it. In Christianity, this is the communion of saints, the great cloud of witnesses.

So few public buildings and churches nowadays are built to last much longer than 30 years or so, and flimsy in design and ornament.

shared beauty

2006-07-07T15:13:00.000-04:00

Father Rob has a great description of his daylillies. Take advantage of his generosity and check it out.

friday afternoon

2006-07-07T15:09:00.000-04:00

The temps got up to 79 (F) degrees today, and with low humidity, it makes the outside a pleasant place to wander at a time when usually one avoids hot sun, humid airs, and mosquitoes.

We woke up this morning to chilled morning temps in the 50s (F). The weather chatter lady on tv said that we were about 5 degrees or so below the normal average.

I am taking a break from crunching numbers, something I am not good at. I'd rather be outside doing a little weeding. And maybe crunching a few j. beetles (as if that did any good).

as if war and global warming weren't bad, enough ...

2006-07-07T10:42:00.000-04:00

More not so good news about this year's crop of the j. beetle. Evidentally, it's a really bad year in terms of their numbers. That's scary.

today

2006-07-06T06:09:00.000-04:00

Temps fell into the upper 50s (F) last night. No air conditioning needed. Light is breaking through the trees and I can hear the birds talking, singing, whistling outside.

I feel as if these perfect days always occur on work days. I can think of numerous jobs I must do in my garden, but alas, they won't happen. Not today.

great news

2006-07-05T13:43:00.000-04:00

Shelley Powers has created a new website: Just Shelley.

I am delighted at the opportunity once more to read her writing and see her powerful photography.

because ... you know ... they messed with the time

2006-07-04T09:01:00.000-04:00

Hoosiers continue to discuss the effects of our joining the rest of the nation in observing daylight savings time. Much of the worry relates to fireworks.

The corporate sponsor for the big downtown fireworks show tonight has billboards around town with the time prominently marked: 9:47 p.m.

It used to be 9:00 p.m., and this precise time is probably the earliest moment one could fire off fireworks against a dark sky. Even then, there will be traces of reflected light from the western sky. I notice it when Franklin the dog and I go out for his last pit stop of the evening.

But then it may be raining. We got up this morning to gentle, but consistent sprinkles of water. Thunderstorms are in the forecast, coming in front of a cool front.

another race

2006-07-03T16:45:00.000-04:00

You could hear the cars yesterday morning, early, coming from the Speedway. It was the U.S. Gran Prix, the only Formula One race in the U.S. This was the seventh time it was held at the Brickyard (aka Indianapolis Motor Speedway), and perhaps it will be the last. Since the race didn't start till one pm, they must have been doing some last minute checking things out, or some kind of preliminary race to keep the crowds entertained.

Our neighbor, the Colonel, invited us for a barbecue on Saturday night in honor of his son who had come home to visit and to see the race. The Colonel borrowed our smoker to aid his considerable smoker in smoking pork, beef brisket, ribs and chicken. It was biblical -- the killing of the fatted calf, pigs and chickens. A real feast.

It is hot now in Indianapolis, around 90 degrees and no shade. According to the newspaper, we are up over the year-to-date rainfall average by five inches. And yet, with strong dry winds in the afternoon, another couple of days like this and I will have to start watering, something I have not done all year in the perennial garden.

Today, partner and I went with another neighbor friend to see The Devil Wears Prada. It was a delicious movie. As I watched the genius of Meryl Streep make this devil-like person actually somewhat likeable, and definitely one who fascinates all attention whenever she is on the screen, I kept thinking what Glenn Close would have done with the character. Sometimes over the top is too much. Streep, who was also excellent in Prairie Home Companion seems to know where the fine line is.

The movie about assistants reminded me of a young woman I knew in DC who got a call at 7:30 in the morning from her boss, letting her know that her hotel room in San Antonio had no hot water ... and what was she going to do about it?

what it is

2006-06-29T22:03:00.000-04:00

That is the current phrase, isn't it.... it is what it is. Maybe we are all taking the AA serenity prayer seriously.

But it is how I feel at this moment about all the Anglican wars taking place. I go to my parish and worship. My faith in God, my commitment to his church, my call to live a life of faith and love, none of these ultimately are affected by the wars going on. I certainly have no answers or even suggestions at this point.

Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy.

beauty

2006-06-29T22:00:00.000-04:00

My garden is full of flowers now, a mess of flowers. I need to start cleaning out what has become overgrown. The temps are quite mild, and the humidity - despite thunderstorms every other day -- is not as high as it could be.

I've never had a garden this long. I am delighted that I am getting to experience this one as it matures.

end of season

2006-06-28T11:56:00.000-04:00

Last night, our parish choir performed a concert for the Anglican Association of Musicians, an American organization for Episcopal music folk (probably music folk that are not too much into folk music?). AAM is having their 40th anniversary convention in Indianapolis this week -- the organization was started here. Dr. Messina, our director, was elected this week to a vice president slot that will eventually lead to being president of AAM in a year or two.

We sang Copeland's "In The Beginning," his long choral work setting to music the opening scriptures of Genesis that lays out creation by seven days. In between each day section, Cantor Janice Roger of the Indianapolis Hebrew Congregation chanted the text in Hebrew. Patricia Thompson, our Alto section leader and a graduate student at Indiana University, sang the solo part that lead each day section.

And the Meridian Vocal Consort -- a professional choir that includes some of our members and who performs two or three times a year for the parish concert series -- sang Monteverdi's Mass for Four Voices. I am always overwhelmed by the beauty of their voices and the power of their singing so clearly and with great expression.

The text for both pieces are quite moving,one dealing with God and the beginning of life, and the other in Latin revisiting the words of the Eucharist, in essence, the Christian liturgy for thousands of years.

Following the concert, we had a simple compline service, chanted. The church was packed with AAM members and they chanted with great passion (if not clarity). Now the season is over for us. We return to the nave for worship, mixed in with the congregation. It was a long year. We were in England last summer, and our friend Mary died in December. We sang three Mozart masses with instruments as part of the Sunday services. And the Requiem with Saint Paul's Church. As a small community within the greater community of the parish, we live our lives around musicmaking.

Partner is off to graduate study in the fall. The choir presented him with a Daily Office book (2800 pages) that includes the morning and evening prayer liturgies and all the office readings, years one and two. Another goodbye, one that is particularly close to me since we will be living between two cities for a year or more. He is a great musician and I enjoy singing next to him. The only reason I joined the choir was because he asked me to. In addition to missing being with him daily, I'll miss singing with him in the choir next year.

I have a recording of Sowerby's settings of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis. We've sang these several times over the years, but I cannot fully express the anticipation I feel when I hear the opening organ chords of the Mag or the fainting ending of the Nunc. Perhaps the theology is sloppy, but music is sacramental, not an end to itself, but a way to faith,prayer and community.