Monthly Archive

This project I posted about three weeks ago has morphed into something very much resembling an actual job, as in ‘employment’.  This has been quite a shock for someone who for the past thirteen years of retirement has been — as our friend Michael J puts it — ‘sitting around the house all day, touching myself’.

Earlier this week, after about five minutes of watching the Congressional grilling of Former CIA Director John Brennan on the Trump-Russia matter, I wrote a piece about South Carolina U. S. Representative Trey Gowdy entitled:

“Dave: ‘Insensate’ or merely ‘Wantonly Vicious’?”.

I very wisely canned it, but here is the thumbnail: Gowdy is a hideous to look at, embarrassingly vile redneck.

I am very tired.  An op-ed piece I read a month or so ago places — with regard to the damage to our collective psyche — the election of Donald Trump alongside the Kennedy assassination and the 9/11 attacks.  I concur and need relief.

My late friend Dee was a voracious reader, and though I do not know how she came upon Ernest Howard Crosby (1856—1907) ‘American reformer, georgist, and author’ in her reading journey, during her moments of frustration with this, that, and the other, she would say with just a hint of wry:

‘I am here by some sad cosmic mistake, and I am homesick’.

Here is Crosby’s line in its context:

I am homesick / Homesick for the land I never have seen / For the land where men rise only to lift / Where there is nothing over a man between him and the sky / That land is my true country / I am here by some sad, cosmic mistake / And I am homesick

Ernest Howard Crosby

My own approximation of Dee’s ‘mantra’ comes from a far less idealistic author, Dame Truman Capote.  Here are the words of Miss Lily Jane Bobbit, one of Capote’s couple of prototypes for Holly Golightly, in this case a precocious little girl in his short story ‘Children on their Birthdays’:

‘The Devil … will do you a good turn if he knows you trust him …  Now, as a matter of fact, I have called in the Devil just recently.  He is the only one who can help me get out of this town.  Not that I live here, not exactly.  I think always about somewhere else, somewhere else where everything is dancing, like people dancing in the streets, and everything is pretty, like children on their birthdays.’

I don’t require ‘pretty’ just now, I just need so much less ‘ugly’.  Seems unlikely, but I wonder if the Devil can help me out.

Here’s a bit of wisdom I’d like to pass along: If you don’t want to do something, you have to say ‘no’.

A couple of months ago, I found myself added to a committee for a local ‘attraction’ which is attached (so to speak) to the municipal fine art museum.

Here is a partial description:

The Ware-Lyndon House is a circa 1840s late Greek Revival home with Italianate influence. It is the last remaining house in its once fashionable 19th century in-town neighborhood. The interior has been restored and arranged with decorative art and furnishings of the period.

This committee I’ve mentioned took on as a project the creation of an online database of a wide swath of those period furnishings and objets in the house.

Here’s where I enter the picture.  Since for a sustained 22 years of my 30-year ‘association’ with the local university my business card included the descriptor ‘photographer’, assumptions were made.

I did not say ‘no’.

I’ve set up a small studio in the house and am currently spending hour upon hour photographing the length and breadth of the contents, from chifforobes to dainty porcelain.  I’m killer at dainty porcelain, chifforobes not so much.

Truth is, I’m not suffering as much as implied.  My only paranoid ‘dismay’ is that in this iPhone world, people think photographs just happen: I sense a phantom bit of impatience from the other committee members.

Well, f*ck ‘em.  Oh, I don’t mean that.  Actually, yes, I do.