Summers coming

This turned out to be a interesting day, starting out with a deer jumping from the yard in front of the house where my offic is located and slamming its body into the driver's side windshield of a passig car. Then there was dealing with the dog when I got home for lunch, who acted passively and decided to urinate on the floor in front of the back door, rather than waiting to be out in the grass. This is a common occurrence and thrills me no end. Then got to talk to my old friend, Scott Gosnell, who went from a short term tenant in our home when Kate was young to a lawyer in Montgomery. Now,I am waiting for the afternoon to end. It is getting closer. It is a pretty day, and I have to debate over whether I mow the yard when I get home or go to choir.

We are planning on going to Knoxtown on Friday for the weekend. We haven't been since around Christmas. Everybody seems to be infirm at the Sicard house, other tnan Megan. I am hopeful that the farmer's market south of Concord is open and heirloom tomatoes are available. I've got four plants at home, but they are still in the works.

We were talking about peaches at Dickey's in Musella. I can't wait. It won't be too long now. Sitting under the roof in the peach packing facility, eating peach ice cream and feeling the breeze from the ceiling fans. What a way to enjoy an afternoon in June or July.

Showers

I awoke to the sound of thunder this morning and it was very dark outside. I got out of bed and went to the living room and lay down on the couch to fall asleep again. When the rain shower and the thunder and lightening ended it was nearly 8:00 o'clock a.m. and it was way past the time to get up and take a shower and dress for the day. I believe I could have slept until 10:00 o'clock this morning. Apparently, my cousin Gayle could have slept that late as well. And she has little children to deal with.

I hope for a few more showers this evening. I think the tomatoes need the rain. I wish I had mowed the lawn in front and back before now. I should have taken care of that on Tuesday or Wednesday. Just part of the fun of being an adult.

There is always something.

Of peaches and tomatoes

We are on the very edge of Summer and it already feels hot and humid like the season is already here. We seem to get rain showers regularly through the evening hours, which keeps our patio covered with green water and a thin layer of scum. All the trees are full-blown with leaves and as long as we keep the pots watered, the leaves and blossoms of late May seem to cover the plants on the patio.

I am watching our tomato plants for blossoms. We have already had two tomato fruit on the cherry tomato plant. There are already green fruit on that particular plant. I can't wait for the three plants in the trick planter to come to fruition. I hope we get ripe fruit all Summer.

I could use a cold drink. I just had a thought of driving down to Musella in the bright sunshine of July, to buy peaches and fresh peach ice cream and sit under the overhanging roofing at Dickey's Peach Orchard. The ceiling fans blowing the breeze from the orchards. Watching people linger out in front of the general store across the street. Delightful.

Who says the old South is dead? I might take off early one afternoon, drive down to Musella, sit under the overhang and eat peach ice cream, then drive over to Lake Tobesofkee and eat boiled peanuts and fried shrimp for supper. All washed down with sweat tea. Wow.

Music and vision

I have been really caught up in nostalgia for music groups and bands I have really liked over the years. I have a predilection for pop rock from the late 60's and 70's. You can go on line and hit the Amazon website and listen to a smidgen of anything that hits your fancy. The beauty of it is that they will direct to artists that are similiar so if you think of a song by Player "Baby, come back" and listen to a bit of it, they will direct you to Ace and Ambrosia and Firefall and England Dan and John Ford Coley and Paul Davis. If you hit Chad and Jeremy, they will direct you to Peter and Gordon, The Fortunes, The Grass Roots, etc. It just becomes one long riff on similar music. Suddenly, you are listening to music you hadn't thought about since you were laying in your bunk at summer camp. Or sitting with your buddies on the curb in your neighborhood during summer break.

At one time every aspect of my life had a musical background. If I heard a song on the radio it would remind me of some place or some incident which was going on at the time I was listening to that particular piece of music. When I hear 'Born to be Wild' by Steppenwolf, I think of sleep overs with friends when I was in 8th grade. When I hear 'Let it Be' by the Beatles I think of the graduation dance at Dunwoody Elementary in 7th grade. When I hear 'You don't mess around with Jim' by Jim Croce I think about mornings spent at the pool in our neighborhood.

I think music videos in the 80's killed that for me. All of a sudden the image projected in my mind when I hear certain songs from the 80's coincides with the mini-drama played out on the music video. Of course, I don't watch music videos these days so I don't tend to have that going on in my head.

Fortunately, I can still play Miles Davis' 'Miles Ahead' and still see and feel the car travelling over the bridge between Tampa and St. Pete, with the windows down, and the sun glinting off the waters of Tampa Bay. Gold on blue. Nice.

Relatives in Williamsburg

I was reading some diary entries from a Colonial Virginian, who may have been one of my ancestors. He apparently didn't get along well in London, so they sent him back home where he was given a minor magistrate position and set loose on the young women of Williamsburg. This particular entry talked about rising early, saying his prayers, dressing, walking into main part of town to check on things, then spending the rest of the afternoon chasing a wench around his quarters in town. In his defense, he did appear to feel some remorse for his actions, because he appealed to Heaven for forgiveness for his trespasses. However, this level of repentance didn' last very long for he seemed to be back at it later in the day.

The short biography stated that this particular gentleman and his spouse loved to dispute with one another. Apparently, their way of punishing their respective spouse was to beat the servant of the other. I can see it now, to colonial gentle-folk, yelling at each other, beating the servant of the other in retribution for the sins of their spouse. Nice system.

No wonder we fought a Civil War over that institution.

Ah, life in Colonial Virginia.

Laying words like a brick mason

I have been very profligate in my efforts to take on Samuel Pepys. I should do better and take the time to lay word to line like a good brickmason. Or word-mason. My father had Frank and me out laying brick in our back yard when we were in high school. That was a good profession. Jefferson, Washington and Churchill were all brick masons, I believe. Gardners. Tillers of the soil. I have done enough of that in the past few weekends.

I can't say we were very good brickmasons; however, the small walls and the walks are still there. More due to my father's efforts than ours. But I can say we laid trowel to brick and morter.

Lost images

This is Westover Plantation, which was restored and can be toured in Charles City County in Virginia, just south of Richmond. Westover is the ancestral home of the Byrd family, one of those first families of Virginia. Very distantly, I seem to be related to the Byrd family through my momma's family. About four generations back the name of Stubblefield crops up and if you follow that bunny trail back a couple of generations you find the Beverlys, who are related to a Robert Beverly, who was an early colonial historian, apparently, and who was related by marriage to the Byrds. This puts my momma in some high cotton, beyond her predominate Ulster Irish roots. As Kate says, we must have known how to 'marry up'. I suppose that is true. For every Byrd and Beverly, you've got some other family name re-leveling the playing field.

That's the melting pot of America. You can only hold your head so high.

The trials

There is a clear sky today, with some light fleecey clouds on the edge and it is quite warm today. Earlier, I picked Cindy up at Griffin Tech and tried to make my gasoline dollar stretch a little further, which was clearly impossible. Once upon a time, I could fill the tank of her 1998 Ford Explorer with about $25.00 worth of gas. Today I placed twenty dollars worth of gas in her tank and it came a little bit over 1/4 of a tank. We are still getting screwed by the major oil companies.

I spent about $40.00 on Tuesday in my Toyota driving around North Georgia. I drove up to Cumming, then over to Canton, up to Calhoun, over to Blairsville, down to Gainesville and Monroe, then finally back home to Griffin. The last forty or so miles between Monroe and Griffin, through McDonough, were the real pain. It wasn't until after I had passed through McDonough and past the congestion on Ga 155, just past I-75, when I could finally relax and enjoy the road into Griffin. It was past 5:30, almost to 6:00 before I made it home and I didn't feel like going in to the office for one more time to check messages.

That night, I talked Cindy out of take out from our favorite Mexican restaurant, and headed over to Buffalo's where I purchased the roughest, toughest chicken breast sandwich. I could have lost a tooth trying to masticate that bird. Fortunately, the following day saw me in the drive through at Chik-Filet, where I was served the polar opposite chicken breast sandwich. Thank God for Mr. Cathey.

Last night we were going to eat Mexican, but the parking lot at El Toro Loco was completely filled with May 5th celebrators. Nothing like the Battle of Pueblo to bring out the tequila and cerveza crowd. It is the South of the Border version of ST. Patrick's Day.

I am now tired and am looking forward to a pleasant supper out with Cindy, Momma, Frank and Maggie before the southern Baynhams head back to South Florida. I hope I hear from them soon.

Muffin-top, redux

Just in case anybody wondered, I think I fit into the muffin-top class of writers. I am not sure I fit into either the Eastern snob or Pugilist-Writer class. Perhaps somewhere in between.

Muffin tops and other things

Someone mentioned "muffin-tops" in something I was reading this morning and I really didn't remember the meaning of the term. It made me think of a few other such terms which I won't go into right now, but it did cause me to run to my normal source of information about all things cultural, Wikipedia. I thought I would cast the curse off the desire to define "muffin-tops" by reading about Norman Mailer, of whom I had been thinking when I saw a broadcast of a fight between Gore Vidal and himself on the Dick Cavett Show back in the late 60's. Both writers kind of represented two types of American Writer Archetypes: the effete Eastern snob and the overly-masculine pugilist-writer. Kind of like Fitzgerald v. Hemingway. That is not quite as good an analogy, since Fitzgerald was from Minnesota and Hemingway from Illinois; however, Fitgerald did attend Princeton and married a debutante and was a bit pretentious, when he wasn't drunk. Hemingway, on the other hand, seemed to be looking for some task to prove his manhood, whether boxing or hunting or fishing. And drinking.

But, anyway, after reading about Mailer and then Updike and then John Kennedy O'Toole, who each won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in consecutive years, I settled down to read about "muffin-tops" and even look at a picture of some young lady walking down the street, with her muffin tops hanging out over her pants, not too far, but enough to illustrate the term.

I guess neither Fitzgerald nor Updike had muffin-tops. They were both fairly slender. But the rest of these writers seemed to hang out over their belts. So perhaps I now have a new way to differentiate between American writers: muffin-top writers and non-muffin-top writers.

I am sure that is a helpful designation between the archetypes.

The voice of the turtle

For, lo, the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of the singing of birds is come,
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.

This is several verses from Song of Solomon. Oddly, Ernie Harwell, the late, great announcer for the Detroit Tigers used this as his opening lines for Spring Training every year. Everything about it seems tailor-made for the opening of baseball. The only part that is odd is the last line, "And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land."

Of course, when you think of what a home plate umpire looks like, with his chest protector and mask, perhaps, he does look a little like a turtle.

So, I can see that "turtle" taking off his mask and yelling to the assembled, "Play Ball!"

Perhaps that is the voice of the turtle that is heard in the land as Spring arrives. Otherwise, I am confused.