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| Patricia Jones | profile | all galleries >> An Ordinary Day | tree view | thumbnails | slideshow |
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Three different times I’ve wished that a certain Republican were a Democrat. It usually happens when the person represents a view or displays some characteristic I hold dear. The people include Condoleeza Rice (The Early Years), Andrew Sullivan (recently), and David Brooks (when I watch him on PBS). In the case of Andrew Sullivan, I admire his writing and the apparent ease with which he produces spot-on commentary day after day. His essay for Time (May 15) entitled “My Problem with Christianism” at http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,1191826,00.html was a real hey-that’s-what-I’ve-been-thinking revelation, and to see an avowed Conservative laying out the case so clearly and unassailably gave me hope. To know that values and the family have been appropriated by conservative religious folks, with the help of the shorthand media, and then politicized annoys me no end. Sullivan hit a nerve with many folks, judging from the volume of responses in his online current events blog, The Daily Dish ( http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/ ). Check it out.
As long as we’ve lived in Rochester, we’ve trekked through Highland Park at least once during the last few weeks in May. If we’re early, the highlights may be the magnolias, the pansies, and the Poet’s Garden. Closer to Memorial Day, azaleas, rhododendron, and tree peonies play the starring roles. But the big attraction is the collection of about 1,200 lilac shrubs comprised of 500 varieties, some hybridized here by our parks department, arrayed throughout the Frederick Law Olmstead-designed park. Perhaps we should acknowledge that the lilacs themselves used to be the main event; however, now the hundreds of thousands of visitors must run the gauntlet of vendors, carnival food booths, and local and imported entertainment between the main parking areas and the gardens. I bet some people never make it to the slopes to breathe in the fragrance and examine the differences among the varieties of our signature flower. We just time our visits to bypass all this hoopla and enjoy the real Highland Park.
If you want the ultimate Savannah experience, you have to stay at the historic Stephen Williams House bed-and-breakfast on West Liberty Street. Check out the website at http://www.thestephenwilliamshouse.com/ for details about the various accommodations and common rooms. It’s within pleasant walking distance of anything you’ll want to see, the breakfast is unmatched, the garden is more charming than any we saw on the annual garden tour, and the innkeeper keeps you entertained with the inside story on everything about the town. Mark your calendar for the end of March next year when the squares will be swathed in azaleas and the homes and churches will be looking their best. Although March is the time of their famous music festival and a series of home and garden tours, it does not feel crowded as you walk the streets. And if you haven’t read John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, I recommend doing so after your visit when you’ll really be able to appreciate it.
The routine begins on Monday evening around 7:30 when Ralph dials the Cinema Theater in downtown Rochester to listen to the recorded information about the coming weekend’s new double feature. This puts in play an automatic list of steps, including…
1. I check the Internet Movie Data Base ( http://www.imdb.com ) for a quick review of the story line and starring roles. I report the user ratings (10-point scale) and Roger Ebert’s take (1-4 stars) but do not read Ebert’s review unless it’s a totally unfamiliar and borderline-rated film.
2. On Thursday night, our friend Linda calls to check our intentions and/or exchange plans for meeting up on Friday. We have been going to the Cinema on Friday nights together for many years. There is no need to remember the starting time; it has always been 7:00. In Thursday’s newspaper, we have already checked the movie schedule and local critic Jack Garner’s ratings (1-10) to ensure that the two movies add up to at least 11 points. Occasionally the playbill is just not worthy.
3. No later than 6:50 p.m. we pay our $3.00 each (or less if we’ve bought a 10-ticket booklet), pick up a free copy of City Newspaper, buy a 2-pack of Brad’s Walnut Brownie cookies and a box of Junior Mints ($2.25 total), take our self-assigned seats on the aisle of row O, and greet the Cinema Cat. Once or twice a year, said cat will sit on my lap for the whole first movie, but usually it can at least be observed padding languidly up and down the aisles.
4. Between movies, I go to the back of the theater and stretch. Ralph buys a large Diet Coke and a large popcorn, $1.25 each with the right to a $.75 refill on each.
5. On the way out, around 11:00, we check the revised list of upcoming movies, noting with satisfaction what we can look forward to. We understand that this is a non-binding list, but it reflects the taste of the owner and reminds us that we don’t have to run out to see anything at the multiplex.
6. In the car, we rate each movie without prior discussion. Our ratings may be, but rarely are, revised based on the other person’s persuasive rationale.
7. Back at home, Ralph records the titles and ratings in his Spreadsheet of Life, and I write them in my journal. If there has been a wide discrepancy in our ratings, I now check Ebert’s review ( http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/ ) to see who was “right.”
8. We congratulate ourselves once again for our wise and frugal Date Night regime and calmly await Monday evening’s exciting revelation.
Thus pass the days of our lives.
Evidence uncovered at a Peck Road dig site indicates the presence at one time of a tiny race of highly-evolved mechanically-advanced humans. Over time, this location was used as a sand/dirt pile, a leaf pile, and a humusy compost heap. The truck and crane, first of this civilization’s artifacts to be excavated, are rusted but still serviceable. Further research has produced a photograph of children playing at this spot, and a present-day image of a descendent of the original family attests to the continuing popularity of this type of vehicle.
No matter what age we are, we’ve all probably done it: in conversations with our friends, we all have “funny” stories about our upbringing and specifically the quirks of our parents. I imagine that Christy said, “You think that’s bad…my parents used to save the jars that dried beef comes in, to use for juice glasses. They were plain, straight-sided, with a row of stars encircling the rim.” Naturally, none of the stores she visited in New York City seemed to stock this Jones sandwich-making staple, so when she brought a friend home for the weekend they immediately made a beeline for the basement to find the cache of jars and confirm her vivid memory. It turns out that the stars we all remembered are no longer part of the jar design, and there are only five “real” starry glasses in our collection. Christy will preserve those, her friend will take a set of plain ones for manly-man wine glasses, and the rest will continue to serve their homely functions: holding such diverse items as fresh-picked flowers awaiting arrangement, bacon grease solidifying, or tempera paints for little artists at the kitchen table. In the meantime, Internet cooking sites will continue to gamely assemble appetizing recipes using the salty, chewy dried beef, old soldiers will recall a famous and humorously-named military menu item, and Ralph will enjoy his sandwiches. I will persist in my compulsive recycling just in case another fabulous use for the glasses comes to mind.
Their blooms don’t last for long, and the foliage hangs around too long—yellowing, then browning--while the gardener tries to camouflage it with later plantings. Deer and mice find them quite tasty (the buds and leaves for the big guys and the bulbs for the burrowers). In spite of all this, almost everyone enjoys seeing drifts of tulips in early spring, in colors ranging from white to black-purple and everything in between except blue. Some of the most beautiful are the Rembrandt class of tulips (for examples and botanical information see http://www.theplantexpert.com/springbulbs/Tulip9Rembrandt.html ) with their flames and stripes. Although Rembrandt himself is not known for flower paintings, many artists of the same time and place often included at least one tulip in their composite still life works, along with exotic insects, shellfish, and other flowers. Check out this gallery for examples of the work of one such painter, Jan Davidsz. De Heem, including Flower Still-life with Crucifix and Skull, 1630’s: http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/h/heem/jan/ . Tulip Fever, a novel by Deborah Moggach, illuminates the period in which fortunes were made and lost by tulip bulb speculators; bulbs that would yield virus-affected or “broken” blooms like the one pictured here were particularly sought after. Every year in early spring, the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York has a spectacular display of forced bulbs in the solarium, where this picture was taken.
I’m not proud of the fact that I sometimes understand an event or era only after reading a work of fiction set in the particular time or place. Of course, I knew in broad outline about recent decades in Haiti, Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier, and the Tonton Macoutes. The interwoven stories in Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker take us back and forth in time and from New York City to Haiti, and the slow accretion of detail finally communicates the effect felt by the ones who stayed and the ones who left. What is the ideal intersection on a life map of horror and relief, of resistance and accommodation, of forgetting and forgiveness? Are there some sins that cannot be redeemed, and if so, who ought to be the judge? This novel is not overtly political and Danticat doesn’t even tell us who the good guys are; the bad guys need no explicit identification, of course. If we didn’t already understand the complexity of the lives of modern Haitians (and by extension, that of people from every hotspot on the map), this novel helps.
In even the briefest conversations about illegal immigration, someone is sure to point out that this alien population performs the jobs that no Americans are willing to do. Such work is assumed to include long hours of low-paying manual labor that doesn’t require special skills or education. However, periodically there is a headline-grabbing incident that reminds us of a different, home-grown pool of labor performing a job no one in their right mind could really want—coal mining. Although changing technologies have certainly improved conditions since my grandfather, Martin Melker, went down in the anthracite mines of eastern Pennsylvania in his teens, it is still a dangerous, intense, and physically arduous way of earning a living. For about 40 years, interrupted only by a stint in France during World War I or by periods when the mines were closed or out on strike, Granddaddy left the house before the rest of the family was up, came home about noon absolutely black from head to foot except for his lips and eyes, showered in the basement, ate lunch, and then began his real life. He dug into the side of the mountain, this time from the surface, to build a four-story house and then a grand modern additional kitchen. He converted the rocky, steeply sloped yard into gardens with orderly rows of iris, dahlias, gladiolus, pink petunias, marigolds, and forget-me-nots as well as peas, beans, and beets. In life and at work, he was independent, tireless, and solitary, always willing to help but never asking for any. Until he died in the aptly named Coaldale Hospital, of Black Lung or silicosis complications, he loved and protected us and provided our vacation entertainment—consisting mostly of watching him work, his large hands and thin, strong body rarely at rest. His daughter and grandchildren, who prize education and have all held jobs requiring a lot of brain work and a minimum of lifting a finger, all happily remember him as a man who did honorable work nobly.
All of a sudden the seedlings under lights in the basement are evolving into plantlets. Their new leaves are miniatures of their true selves, and if it weren’t for the multiple varieties, for example of tomatoes, they would no longer need their labels. The tomatoes are hairy and give off their singular fragrance when stroked gently. Because their stems are not solid walls of tissue, they can be planted in garden soil right up to the first set of leaves and extra roots will grow out of the stem. This process will keep the plant as short and stocky as possible with a large root system to support the huge number of leaves and fruits it will produce in the coming months.
The marigolds already have their multi-pronged, shiny, symmetrical leaves. The Black Dragon coleus are getting their deep magenta coloration, still blotchy at this stage. The kale leaves have the characteristic saw-toothed edge and the milky blue-green color that the mature outer leaves will have. All this is happening to plants that are still, in most cases, less than an inch tall.
What is pictured in this image? Does the brain wave activity required to identify it or make sense of it interfere with our ability to evaluate it as beautiful or not? If we think it is a landscape seen from an airplane, do we appreciate it more or less than if we think it is sand on a beach? It is the latter, a tiny topographical map only a few inches wide, formed by successive waves leaving their deposit. Would I have found it so arresting if I had never seen a map or looked out the window of an airplane? Would I have even noticed it if I hadn’t been on the lookout for things to photograph? Does being a photographer eventually change the way we see the world? Does the world change because a photographer preserves an image?
Whenever I feel proud of a series of flower postcards or a mini-travelogue or informal portraits of my grandchildren, I’m jolted into reality by the galleries of some of my fellow image-makers. While my goal is to make some pleasing pictures, theirs seems to be to make every ordinary thing beautiful.
One such compilation of photographs is contained in the pBase galleries of Marisa D. L. found at http://www.pbase.com/mardoli . Where to start, to explain what the attraction is? It may be the slightly exotic-fairytale setting of many of photographs (she lives in Switzerland and appears to travel a lot), as in http://www.pbase.com/mardoli/yvoire . Or is it the concept-based collections, several in A-Z format, such as http://www.pbase.com/mardoli/choco_and_chips and http://www.pbase.com/mardoli/postcards_ ? Every gallery exudes inspiration and I vow once again to just go out and look closely at what’s around me. At first I may try to imitate artists like Marisa, not trusting myself to be original enough. Someday, I’ll have a breakthrough, producing images others will seek out and admire.
Oh, and she has the flowers under control, too ( http://www.pbase.com/mardoli/flora )!
Image from Marisa D.L.'s gallery The Other Side of Paradise
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