Author: Robert (Page 2 of 21)
From today’s Writer’s Almanac:
“I am very grateful to the electronic world for making my life easier, but there is something about holding a book — the smell and the world of association. Even when e-books are perfected, as they surely will be, it will be like being in bed with a very well-made robot rather than a warm, soft, human being whom you love.”
The quote is from Anne Fadiman, to The Guardian. I could hardly agree more.
Finally, after 11 years, Edith and I attended the Alison Krauss and Union Station performance last night at the State Theatre in New Brunswick. We’d last saw her in May, 2000 at the Community Theatre in Morristown in support of her Forget About It album; we had planned to see AKUS in November of 2005 at the NJ Performing Arts Center, but had to forego our tickets due to an intense work schedule that precluded me from taking the time to attend the show. Alison has been a favorite of mine for a long time, and since the last time we’d seen her AKUS was featured on the soundtrack to O Brother Where Art Thou? (Record of the Year Grammy winner) as well as Alison’s album Raising Sand with Robert Plant (another Grammy for Record of the Year.) Last night’s show was a long time overdue.
We bought our tickets back in April, when they first went on sale, and were seated in the third “official” row (3 rows of temporary VIP seats were added in place of the orchestra pit, so in essence we were 6 rows removed.) The show was good – from Dan Tyminski on guitar and mandolin as well as vocals to the very tight performance of an incredibly gifted group of musicians; you could not ask for more from the world’s premier dobro player in Jerry Douglas, nor the outstanding playing of Barry Bales on upright bass or Ron Block on banjo and guitar. Of course, I love Alison’s fiddle playing, but it is her angelic voice that gets me every time. Incredibly sweet yet strong at the same time, I am taken in from the very first note until the very last.
I did manage to take some photos with my Droid (but would never consider actually recording the audio or video) and some are better than others. They don’t do justice to the performance nor capture exactly just how good our seats were. I just hope it’s not another 11 years before we get to hear Alison perform live for us again.
Finished up three days of camping with Will at the Webelos Resident Camp at Camp Winnebago Scout Reserve in Rockaway. We drove up on Sunday afternoon for 1:00 PM check-in and orientation, set up our campsite later in the afternoon and ate dinner in the dining hall before meeting up for a campwide evening campfire. We’ve camped before, Will and I, but this was our first time in the canvas Boy Scout tents. We should have been more prepared. Unlike the tent we usually bring from home, the canvas tents basically offer overhead protection from rain, but not much else; the are not enclosed at the bottom nor the sides, and evidently a large contingent of Daddy Long Leg spiders decided to camp there at the same time we did. Will and I were a bit skeeved, to say the least. Our first night of sleep was fitful, but got better on the second and third nights.
Spiders aside, Will had fun. The purpose of the resident camp is to prepare the Webelos for entry into Boy Scouts, and the differences between Cub Scout adult leadership and Boy Scout scout leadership. The week before, Will had attended the Scout Day Camp at Camp Allamuchy, so he’d been doing Scout activities for 1 1/2 weeks.
Monday and Tuesday started off with 6:45 AM Polar Bear swims in Durham Pond, followed by 8:00 AM breakfast in the dining hall. From there, Will and his fellow Webelos skateboarded, raced cubmobiles, played field games, built raingutter regatta boats and leathercrafts, learned about geology, snakes, frogs, newts as well as fishing, practiced their shooting skill first on the BB range, then archery, then back to the pond for more swimming and boating. Back to the dining hall for dinner at 6:00 PM, evening campfires, and finally everyone crawled back into their tents around 10:30 PM. The Webelos took turns waiting their tables, and were responsible for setting the tables, bringing out the food, and clean-up afterward. On Monday evening, they took a 1 1/2 mile hike and prepared their own dinners over a campfire, satisfying several of the requirements for the Outdoorsman achievement.
We woke early on Wednesday, readied our site to pack out, had our final breakfast in the dining hall and a final lowering of the flag out on the parade field, and headed home, tired but happy for our experiences at camp.
Forgot to mention that William got his first set of braces on Monday afternoon. He sure seems happy about it!
Got home a little over an hour ago; William is day-camping with Scouts next week, and I had to take him up to the camp for orientation and swim-check. Round trip, it was 92 miles from our house. The camp is near Stanhope, way out in Sussex County and not too far from the Delaware Water Gap. It is not exactly in our backyard. Total trip duration: about 3 1/2 hours.
However, the camp provides busing, and a stop is conveniently located not too far from Edith’s work. The camp is still a thirty minute drive from the bus-stop, but it offers a lot of fun activities for the Cubs and Webelos – all the cool stuff that typical 10-year olds want to do but never get to do at home, like shoot arrows, BB guns, slingshots, climb up rock walls and ride down zip lines, etc. Will also gets to work on some of his final achievements for his Arrow of Light badge.
Traffic on Route 80 slowed us down a bit, but we arrived in plenty of time to get done what we needed to. On the way home, I decided to take a more scenic route, down 206 through Morris and Somerset counties. Northwestern New Jersey is pretty rural, as well as fairly mountainous, and I have to admit I love driving on the back roads and admiring the scenic views of forested land, great big fields, and farms. In Summer, it is all quite beautiful, and makes me appreciated how blessed that we are surrounded by it all. Despite the many miles, it was worth the trip.
I wake up slowly. I am not a morning person. On most Saturday mornings, I like to sit with a cup of coffee on the wicker couch on the screen porch, and just listen as the neighborhood comes to life. I woke this morning at 8:30 (or I should say that I got out of bed at 8:30 – I woke much earlier to Katie poking my side, begging to climb into our bed) at sat in the Summer warmth, shaded by the neighbor’s maple tree, and watched the sunlight from the rising run play on rhododendrons. I am fortunate that Edith is an early riser – she is always up before me (not as a rule, simply as a fact) and I am spoiled in that the coffee is perked and waiting for me when I shuffle into the kitchen. From there it is a short walk to the porch.
In the morning, I appreciate peace and quiet. On a Summer morning on my porch, I listen to the birds as they flutter their wings at the feeders, to the familiar chirp of the cardinals, and the melody of the mockingbirds. I listen as the squirrels clamber on the dogwood tree; at this point in mid-July, I am also greeted by the drone of this year’s cycle of cicadas. Now and then I hear the footfall of morning joggers, or the rattle of a leash as a dog walker ambles down the street for their pet’s business trip.
This past week, Katie and I were discussing our favorite seasons. She asked me what I liked about each of them, and which was my favorite. I told her I like Summer a lot, for the usual reasons: extended daylight, warmer weather, more time spent doing things outdoors like taking care of our gardens, and vacations down the shore. This morning I realized another reason: the sounds we only hear at this time of the year. On a Summer day I will hear lawnmowers, water sprinklers, neighbor kids playing basketball in their driveways, or squealing as they splash in their backyard pools. On some evenings there will be a party, with certain Summer music playing loud enough to hear several houses away. There’s the ice cream truck, and the sounds of fireworks from a neighboring town.
I like the Fall for the colors and the crispness of the air; I like the Spring for the promise it brings of new life after a cold and harsh Winter, but all things considered I guess I just like Summer the best.
The 4th of July was not so big a deal when I was a kid growing up. You might think that living in Philadelphia, and then the Philly suburbs, that every year would be a cradle of independence fest, but for some odd reason it wasn’t like that at all, at least not in my town. I honestly don’t remember any 4th of July parades – maybe because we didn’t really have a Main Street culture growing up in the late 60’s and 70’s. Oh, I guess there were parades somewhere, I just don’t remember ever attending one.
So it wasn’t until 20 years ago, when I moved to New Jersey, that I discovered, in the home rule of the many small towns, that 4th of July parades really do exist. In this part of Somerset County where we live, we are surrounded by small towns with Main Streets, local businesses, separate school systems, and of course, individual 4th of July parades and/or fireworks. Our town’s parade normally marches along a route on a street directly behind our house, so each year we got up early, throw Will (and in later years Kate) in the wagon and pulled them up the street and around the corner to watch the parade. There would be our neighbors, sitting in their lawn chairs lined up along the curb, and we would cheer and wave as the Mayor and Town Council marched and distributed little flags. We would watch the local civic organizations: the Elks, the Optimists, with more beads, fans, candy and trinkets to hand out; the Cub Scouts and the Girl Scouts; the winning boys and girls Little League baseball teams. The high school marching band, the color guard, and the cheerleaders all performed. Rescue squads and firetrucks from not only our town, but three surrounding towns, came screaming down the street with their sirens and airhorns at full blast, to signal the end of the parade and give the cue to all the spectators to pick up their chairs, take the kids and go on home, get the backyard ready, fire up the grill and turn up the music, for the Independence Day celebration had now begun! Later in the evening, just around dusk, we would grab our chairs and wagons once more to walk down the street to watch the launching of the town’s fireworks from a field behind the elementary school.
However, life is change, and nothing ever stays the same – we can’t expect it to. This year, the town changed the parade route, to instead start at the high school and march a different course through town. Instead of our old familiar wagon, we had to pack our chairs in the back and climb in the car to drive over to the high school lot. We got there early and found a good spot to set up, under a shady tree. The parade was good but since we had to drive, our annual collection of neighbors was broken up and scattered across new viewing spots. There was a juggler this year (on stilts) and marching bagpipers, and the car enthusiasts presented a very nice display of vintage automobiles, but some of the civic groups and local businesses were missing – times are tough, for sure, but Will and Kate didn’t seem to notice. They had a good time, as they always do, year after year. How many more years will they get excited about the parade, about celebrating the 4th of July? Kate has plenty of time, and I figure at least another 5 for Will, but then again he continues to surprise me with his sensitivity and the things he is passionate about. I can only hope that they both look back, many years from now, and appreciate the time spent watching their town put on a public display to celebrate all that is good in what it has to offer, on the anniversary of our country’s independence.
My family likes to read. There is no shortage of reading material in our house. It occurred to me sometime last week that the only room in the entire house without any reading material is, ahem, the reading room. Every other room has not just a book or two, but at least one bookshelf or bookcase.
I’m not one to simply serve up stories from other sources and to republish them here, but this article on our National Park system caught my attention. I love our National Parks. I really, really agree that they are our best idea – I only wish I had more time to visit more of them, more often.
Twenty years ago today, I took a Friday night flight from Newark to Las Vegas for the start of a week-long vacation – rafting on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. The time spent that week ranks as my most favorite trip; it was an opportunity of a lifetime, and I wish I could do it again. The photos we took that week capture the memories not only of a vacation, but of a time in my life when I was much less unencumbered and bound by work and family. The group of friends with whom I shared the trip have been long gone from my life for nearly 17 years, but I wonder if they reminisce about that trip and the time we spent camping along the banks of the river, the arrival at Phantom Ranch, sleeping in the bunkhouses and the long trek up the Bright Angel Trail to the Canyon’s South Rim.
Many years after the Grand Canyon, Edith and I vacationed at Acadia and the Outer Banks; we honeymooned in Hawaii and witnessed the sunrise over Haleakala, but there are so many more National Parks I long to discover: Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, Glacier, the Badlands, the Great Smoky Mountains. Someday, I will get to them all; someday.
Sad news of the passing Saturday night of The Big Man, Clarence Clemons, saxophonist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. Jungleland will never be performed the same again.
I am sitting here in my kitchen – laptop on the table, working from home. Alongside the table is a window, looking out onto the side of the house, where I have two bird feeders set up. It is a beautiful day, full of warmth and sunshine, and I’ve been lucky to watch as the birds have been visiting the feeders non-stop. Plenty of finches, both gold and purple, cardinals, a downy woodpecker, several catbirds, a tufted titmouse. Pesty mourning doves, sparrows, and grackles; a Downy woodpecker and either a white breasted nuthatch or black capped chickadee, I’m not sure since it flew away too quickly for me to get a good look. A red squirrel leaped nearly 5 feet from the ground to get to the finch feeder, which prompted me to go outside and raise it higher. I was even treated to the neighbor’s cat climbing into the dogwood tree to try and catch said squirrel
The kids are home – Will’s last day of school was yesterday, and Katie graduates tomorrow from pre-school. I don’t understand how, on such a gorgeous day, they are not in the backyard – or at least out on the porch – but they’ve been inside more than out.
Days like this truly are a gift, and we need to thankful for them. Days like this allow for meditation, to slow down, to examine, and reflect. I worked all morning on a note to send to Susan, from last night’s exchange, but the process of writing, of crafting forces me to carefully consider what it is I mean to say, to try and transcend the words into feeling and emotion; it also forces me to find my own answers to my questions. In the end, I discarded my original note. She was right – she has told me the truth. She is perplexing, but sometimes I am too dense to recognize, other times I need more time to figure things out. I’m sorry for being such a jerk lately. I’m an analyst, I figure things out, I break them down into understandable components, and I get caught up in details. No excuse – she is free to slap me next time, I deserve it.
What hath Web 2.0 wrought? I believe life was simpler before life on the web. As our lives become more and more wired, there are more and more complexities to consider, and for which we need to plan. Consider this: if something were to happen to me, my entire online presence would go with me into the Great Unknown. So much of what I do to manage my family household, from our basic internet access, to online banking, bill payments, email accounts, knowledge of which important files are stored in which folders across multiple directories on the home server, would be lost. What happens to this site? This is a one person operation, so it would sit, untouched, in perpetuity. What about the memberships at LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Blogger, Dreamwidth, Evernote, etc.? How about the less important things like my subscriptions at Consumer Reports, New York Times, APS, AAA, eFax, etc.?
I was viewing a video on YouTube the other day, on a channel to which I subscribe, and began to wonder about the “relationships” we form online. Some are completely one-sided, almost voyeuristic, while others operate in a group dynamic, but both can be with friends, family, people we kind of know, or people we don’t know at all. For example, the YouTube video was posted by Tara Lauren aka lilpixiedust33. I’d subscribed to her channel around three or so years ago while searching for Nichole Nordeman videos; she is very talented, and periodically posts videos playing guitar, piano and singing, sometimes solo and sometimes with a friend, and I check in every now and then. I’ve learned a little about some music to which I would not have otherwise listened such as Colbie Caillat and Sara Bareilles, but Tara is a college student, a young woman who will surely someday, maybe soon, grow and move on to another place in her life where she no longer uploads her home music videos, she will be gone forever, and truth is I will miss her presence. Similarly, there are blogs that I follow, such as Chris’ at serendipitous, but the joy I receive from reading her posts and viewing her photographs purely depends upon how much longer she wants to take the time and effort to write. I started following Megan at LiveJournal (maybe 8 years ago, before the Sox won the 2004 World Series, for sure) while looking for some Joe Jackson stuff, back when she and her then boyfriend now husband were looking at apartments in Brooklyn – she’s now the mother of a 3 year old, posts very infrequently (she Tweets and Facebooks, but I don’t go there.) I’ve certainly “known” her the longest, and thanks to her I use Dreamhost for my website hosting, but this “relationship” too is fleeting.
So, where do things go from here? As we become more connected through various web sites, and stay connected by a proliferation of web enabled devices, to friends, family, celebrities, merchants, and total strangers, how will our real life relationships be affected? Do we begin to mimic our online interactions in our day to day human relationships? Conversely, do we risk deeper emotional involvement with online contacts, potentially putting our human relationships at lower priority? I’m not sure that I like where this is all going, and what the future holds for my kids’ chances of maintaining meaningful relationships that are more than skin deep.
From The Writer’s Almanac:
Just after midnight on this day in 1968, Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles by Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a 24-year-old Pakistani immigrant. Kennedy had just won California’s Democratic presidential primary, and he was exiting through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel. Juan Romero, a 17-year-old busboy, was shaking his hand when Sirhan began firing. Several of the men with him tackled Sirhan, including writer George Plimpton, Olympic athlete Rafer Johnson, and football star Rosey Grier. Romero knelt by Kennedy, and put a rosary in his hand.
His brother Edward “Ted” Kennedy delivered the eulogy, his third for a dead brother:
“My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it. Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world. As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him: ‘Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.'”
I took the above picture in the summer of 1991 while visiting D.C. and Arlington. It is one of my favorite pictures, and it captures my memory of Bobby Kennedy. I remember sitting with my father on the living room couch in our Philadelphia row home, watching the news coverage of RFK’s funeral. I remember being confused: was he the President? My Dad told me no, his brother had been President, but he was shot too. Just a few months earlier, my kindergarten class had been swept into a classroom with dozens of other students to watch the TV news about another man, Martin Luther King, who had been shot that morning.
Nineteen sixty-eight is so far away from us now; I doubt the spirit of the sixties will ever return, but it still pains me to remember the promise and potential, to think about what could have been, to know that we were violated.
I’m for that – got my rubber sandals, got my straw hat…
Technically my flips are leather, but regardless I am glad that it’s here. Friday evening I cut the lawn (it was way overdue) so I did not need to take care of it over the weekend. Saturday morning I planted the vegetable garden (finally) with tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, as well as zucchini and cucumber seeds; Saturday evening we had dinner and beverages with friends at their house in Gillette; Sunday afternoon BBQ at my in-laws’ (more food and drinks) and a Monday morning march in the Long Hill Township Memorial Day Parade with the Cub Scouts, followed by a late afternoon BBQ at home (even more food and beverages!) and finally planting of broccoli and cauliflower in the garden.
The weather was hot and humid – not as bad as it gets in mid-Summer, but enough of a reminder of those dog days to come.
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