This little toy car is inside the kitchen window
It CAN be pretty
Chingachgook...or just some silly boy hunting pigeons in the storm?
Photo by Alan
Photo by mom
Photo by mom
There are no flies
It is not muddy
Snow is pretty
Say it again
There are no flies
It is not muddy
Snow is…..
***Most politicians understand that if you tell a lie often enough people will begin to repeat it as if it were the truth...so I am chanting the mantra above in hopes that I will somehow start to like winter...
I might add:
People pay for dermabrasion to make themselves look younger. I am hoping wind blown snow has the same effect for a much lower price. (Although so far all it has made me look is redder.)
When I let the dogs out for a constitutional convention I do not have to stand on the porch shivering and calling, and calling, and calling before they come in. As soon as I open the door I find them huddled on the back porch in a trembling black mass and they fall all over themselves trying to get in.
There are no flies
It is not muddy......
Sitting there today I reflected on how many hours, how many years, how many decades even, I have spent watching his fingers fly over the fret board and copying as best I could the chords he made. It has never been more than a poor facsimile, my part of the music, but it sure has been fun doing it.
Making music together began perhaps in my aunt’s yellow convertible out by the curb at 14 Bloomingdale Avenue, listening to fifties rock and roll and singing along. We were small then, and that car was the epitome of glamour and adventure.
Doing dishes together, him washing, me drying, and belting out Beach Boys and the Dave Clark Five. Even then his high, pure voice put my rumble to shame, but we had fun anyhow.
Then the “band” came along, that first one we started, with him playing on an antique wooden drum set that came into the shop and me wishing my short, untutored fingers would somehow learn to bend into a chord on his wonderful black guitar. Neighbor kids who couldn’t play anything either jammed into my bedroom with primitive instruments and an astonishing lack of talent. We made a lot of noise anyhow.
A couple years later we got a bit more serious. We learned to more or less really play our instruments. By then I knew enough chords to actually play a few songs…as long as they weren’t too hard. A better sort of musicians joined the gang, a lead guitar player, a pianist and a bass player. We began to practice in cellars and garages and to play at school dances and even actually got paid… usually about enough for gas money and solder to fix the always broken wires on the PA speakers.
Long before that time his talent was evident. He wrote music, played drums amazingly, learned guitar and other instruments.
After a few years of playing bars and local resorts the band broke up. We grew up, moved away, got married and grew apart, but always a couple of times a year we got together to play. He still took his music seriously and took it places, singing and playing in church, taking lessons, always getting better and still better.
I took cows seriously and never really had any talent to begin with…tone deaf as a dog howling at the moon. I still play the same second-hand imitation Gibson I have had for over thirty years…on the rare occasions that I play at all.
Still when we sat down in living rooms, on porches, at camp, at his house, at my house, at someone else’s house, I could always follow his fingers though songs that I didn’t know. Even though I had often never even heard them before, I could always read the chords he made like a sort of musical mirror and follow somehow. He would drag me along on his tuneful coattails and for a while I could fly on borrowed wings.
As we celebrated a late Christmas with his family, mine, and that of my younger brother today, he played John Pryne’s Paradise and I followed his hands. We played LA Freeway and soared a little…( at least it seemed that way to me, I am not sure how the people listening felt about it). He rattled off a Guy Clark song and I missed a few chords, but his lead was solid and by the end it fell together nicely. We did Danny’s Song and he let me sing the lead on the chorus in my scanty little voice and held me up with his rich harmony. It gave me cold chills.
He’s a pretty good brother, my next younger one. I think Ill keep him.
***I am going to keep the other one too, the baby of the family. He is such a lovely guy. He brought me diamonds today, great, gleaming chunks of them like ice glittering in the headlights on the highway.
*** Herkimer diamonds that is, but I love them anyhow.
Here is a quote from a story that A Coyote at the Dog Show linked to the other day.
"Giegengack may have a personal 50-year perspective on global warming, but the time range he prefers to consult is more on the geologists’ scale. The Earth has been warming, he says, for about 20,000 years. We’ve only been collecting data on that trend for about 200 years. “For most of Earth history,” he says, “the globe has been warmer than it has been for the last 200 years. It has only rarely been cooler.” Those cooler periods have meant things like two miles of ice piled over much of what is now North America. Nothing to be nostalgic for."
Here is more:
“Sea level is rising,” Giegengack agrees, switching off the sound. But, he explains, it’s been rising ever since warming set in 18,000 years ago. The rate of rise has been pretty slow — only about 400 feet so far. And recently — meaning in the thousands of years — the rate has slowed even more. The Earth’s global ocean level is only going up 1.8 millimeters per year. That’s less than the thickness of one nickel. For the catastrophe of flooded cities and millions of refugees that Gore envisions, sea levels would have to rise about 20 feet."
Too bad the world listens to Oprah first and scientists second.
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