It comes to me and it comes again … like leaves circling in the wind, higher and higher away from the mud and blood upon my hands
A blank face, a lost bet, and let us consider the dead, let them awaken upon the river rocks, let them lift you upward
Look where the green blade sprouts through the eye socket and how there is advantage to everything if one can read the invisible signs
Take my hand little one and let us traverse in reverse to where you have come from, let us cut our bodies and go two by two into the genes of your blood, sit astride the lightning of who you are
Let me show you how it comes to me and then comes again and you can do it too
It comes to me in the blindness of shadows when the sun goes down and…
For me, one of the bright spots of this year has been Thursday Doors, a challenge by blogger Norm Frampton that encourages photographers (and those of us who point and click) to share entrances, arches, doors, and even sometimes windows from around the world, both the grand and the not so grand. Sometimes those entrances have a backstory and sometimes they’re just whatever catches the eye.
My favorite doors from this year were actually garage doors. I found them in a neighborhood of San Francisco known for its extremely diverse culture: The Mission District. Before the 1970s this area was heavily hispanic and not on any tourist’s map. Then artists and hipsters, attracted by the low rents, began to move in. They convinced home owners, restaurants and shop keepers to let them brighten otherwise dark and suspicious alleyways with their artwork.
Many of the murals (like the above) have political messages. Others are whimsical.
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A few had cultural overtones. I don’t know what Che is doing in the above mural but there he is. Because the Mission District is named after 1776 Mission Dolores, it’s not uncommon to see religious murals. Some are inexplicable.
To see other Mission doors click on any of these links
It’s dark and rainy here and will be for the foreseeable future.Jesus and Guillermo are in the basement removing asbestos (our furnace was condemned) and the cost of removing all of those sixty year old ducts and hopefully getting warm again has dulled the excitement of Santa Claus’ arrival.And so instead of filling the airwaves with uplifting stories and holiday cheer I’ve been on a grim mission to track down and label dead ancestors.
On the back of this picture is written: In the park where we had breakfast one Sunday morning.
I’m guessing the woman wearing a head scarf and the man pouring the coffee are my great aunt Millie and her husband Ben.I met them at least a couple of times when I was quite young and vividly recall thinking Ben was too handsome to be sentenced to life in a wheelchair. Shallow, I know but I was in the Disney princess stage.As to how Ben came to be in a wheelchair, time has dulled my mother’s memory.Was it WWI or polio?Who knows.
This picture, and several others of a similar ilk, have nothing written on the back.Nothing.The bespectacled young woman in the front row, with the “you gotta be kidding me” look on her face, is my grandmother.She was probably only sixteen but that look never changed.I believe one of the two elderly women is my great-grandmother but mother can’t tell which one.
Mother:“I was dead before my grandmother was born.”
Me: “No mother.I think you meant to say she was dead before you were born.You’re still alive.”
“One of them could be Mrs. Pease,” she suggests, a neighbor lady who looked after her grandfather after his wife’s death.
“Which lady is Mrs. Pease? You must remember her.”
“I only remember their cow.We used to bring it down to the barn so that Mr. Pease could milk him.”
“Her, could milk her.”
“I remember the cow.”
I don’t know if you’ve ever played “identify the ancestor” with someone who can’t remember what day it is … but five minutes is my limit.Of course, to a five year old all old ladies look alike but a cow – who could possibly forget their first crush, even if it was on a cow?
Unlike his daughter, my great grandfather seemed only too happy to have his picture taken.In this gathering he’s the fella sitting on the right with a little girl on his lap.The couple behind him are my grandparents and thus the little girl must be my mother. So who is the elderly lady sitting next to great gramps?She can’t be his wife because we’ve already established that she died before my mother was born.She must be that friendly neighbor lady, Mrs. Pease.
After comparing the two photographsI believe Mrs. Pease is the lady on the right (below) which means the lady standing behind my grandmother could be my great grandmother.
What do you think?
This assumption gained new legs when I compared photos of my great aunt Millie (from the Sunday picnic breakfast scene) through the years.
Here she is with my mother and uncle, aged 2 1/2 and 18 months respectively.
And years later at my mother’s wedding (on the left).
Yup, I’m reasonably sure I’m right although I’ll never really know. All I know for sure is that one Sunday morning long ago three people had breakfast in a park somewhere and apparently that’s how they wanted to be remembered.
I’ve known Duke since 2014 and this is the first time I’ve understood the dog and pony shows that people would rather see than the greed that will destroy us.
I’m a name dropper. We’re all name droppers … barking on all fours at the feet of the well-know, people just like us except they’re better looking, luckier, richer, probably more fucked up.
Cheryl Tiegs, the model, you remember her, right? I asked her if she’d mind if I took my pants off in order to get a shot of penicillin. I told her to just sit there, but she said, no I’ll wait in the hall. That was a real missed opportunity.
Just back from the genocide and the phone rings. I don’t answer. Later I find out it’s Julia Roberts calling, she wants to come over to discuss what I saw. A few days went by and a friend told me she had called, but by then she and Lyle had already left town.
Tipper Gore will be there and you have to show her around. I said…
What do you do with pictures of people you’ve never met but who were special to someone you loved? It’s a icky, sticky, wicket to those of us who inherit our grandparent’s photos and memorabilia and guess what folks? As the eldest grandchild on my mother’s side of the family all those boxes and albums are in my possession and my siblings and cousins couldn’t be happier!
Hello people I don’t know. You seem fine and dandy and I do love your photos but I can only guess at who you are. Or were. Or are.
So what will I do with all these pictures of folks I don’t know? Invite them to some ghostly Thanksgiving seance so they can tell me their stories? What would you do?
And now – the truth about what really happened to Beauregard
I tried to think of a funny Thanksgiving story to tell but the only thing that came to mind was the year my father decided to confess at the dinner table. I believe his aunt Katherine was in attendance as well as his cousin Jim and recently widowed sister Helen Betty. And of course, his adult children. The table was set to perfection. The entrees ready to go. Everything … but the scalloped potatoes. They’d been delayed by Dad’s two inept and half-drunk divorcee daughters and we were in Deep Shit. The air was icy; the perfect dinner ruined and so Dad in some half baked attempt to save his daughters from eternal damnation rose and admitted he’d lied. On a recent hunting trip, Beauregard, his wife’s favorite basset hound, hadn’t been hit by a car and killed.
Dad had mistaken the dog for an elk and shot him dead. We tried not to laugh, we really did. Poor Dad. The things parents go through for their children.
Happy Thanksgiving – and please remember to turn on the oven before you start drinking the wine.
You sit on the porch of an old house in a college town and the stuffy air fills your lungs. The sound of cicadas drives the dream even hotter. Texas withdrawing into a July day. Distant shafts of sun cut low across the lawns and the threads of red and gold weave their way through the trees and you wonder as you look at the carpet of light and then you wonder still as the colors enrich themselves in the way of all things immortal. Summer school is in session and the students are in a state of perpetual picnicking, lying around on the grass underneath spreading oaks hoping to levitate with pot and wine, praying for a good breeze to carry them up into the evening. Some of…
Lawrence Standerwick Jameson, World War I. He fought in France and returned home … never to travel oversees again. Both of his sons also served in the military although neither directly saw combat.
Robert Bruce McKee, Jr. World War II, Air Force. Fortunately for his mother, the war ended before he was deployed. However Dad had been raring to go.
I’m sure both men would have volunteered despite warts or bone spurs or any number of ailments.
There is a story my grandmother liked to tell after a posse of vodkas had loosened her girdle to the point that her underpants dropped round her ankles if she tried to stand.She told it with a chuckle and she told it again and again. A comedian, Grandmother was not.
It involved a cross-country trip she took with a sister-in-law she inherited after her brother’s early death. A burden it was and frequently noted but the girl had no family of her own and some form of promise had been made and some form of promise would be kept because Grandmother was 100 % Norwegian and they are, as everyone knows, the most noble of the human species. And so “Aunt Mary” became Grandmother’s shadow on holidays and vacations. In fact, I can’t quite form an image of her in my head that doesn’t include my grandmother.Because she was still working when her husband died, she was allowed to maintain a small apartment near her place of employment.She did not need to be reminded … although she was … that she must save diligently for the time when she could not live on her own and the family ⏤ via obligation ⏤ would have to step in.
With this as a backdrop, here is Grandmother’s Hilarious Story about Aunt Mary:
“We’d had a smooth flight out to California and even though it was Mary’s first time on an airplane, I’d told her there was nothing to fret about and so she didn’t say a word until we landed and then she let out a whimper as the plane bounced to a stop. ‘Now Mary,’ I told her, ‘no need to make a scene.’ And she didn’t although I did have my eye upon her.
However, on the way back to Fargo the plane hit such turbulence that I felt it my duty, given the hard life she’d led, to assure her that it would be over quick. Like smashing into a brick wall.No sense spending your last moments getting hysterical.
‘But Myrtle,’ Little Mary said and she was almost whimpering ‘I’m so ashamed. I can’t die with such shame.’
‘Nonsense,’ I said to her, ‘you haven’t done a thing in the world to be ashamed of.’
‘I didn’t clean my kitchen before we left,’ she said in a whisper. ‘What are people going to think of me if I die with my kitchen floors such a fright?’”
I thought of Mary Ness last week as we were under threat of evacuation from wildfires.We had no electricity and cell service kept going in and out.The parks were closed; the libraries; the stores and even the gas stations.We had to keep our windows closed because of the smoke.We were advised not to use a lot of water because the pumps that move water hither and thither are electrical and if the power outage went on, eventually our taps would go dry.And so we were basically prisoners in our own homes. Waiting and waiting until our plane finally landed on solid ground. Or slammed into a mountain.
For one brief second I did consider washing the damn kitchen floor. As an activity … to keep my mind off things I couldn’t control.
And then I thought of Aunt Mary and reread a favorite novel.Damn the kitchen floors.
Here in Northern California we are just getting our electricity turned back on. Since we were warned that the outage could last for several days and my devices are all old and in need to new batteries, I have basically been off-line since Saturday night. I only turned on the EyePhone once every couple of hours for updates on the numerous fires in my area. So for this week’s ThursdayDoors, Norm’s Frampton’s photo challenge which I truly enjoy and hate to miss out on, here are some scary doors from over the years!
Renwick Ruin, Roosevelt Island, New York City. For many emigrants, their only home in America if they were unfortunate enough to have contracted small pox. This place really gave me the willies.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt Monument, Washington DC. Frightening because it could happen again.
Fort Sumter, South Carolina, where many soldiers were bombarded for days by their fellow countrymen.
Amtrak Tunnel. Just spooky is all. Happy Halloween everyone!
Saying nothing in particular 