Welcome Nigel--Love, Jules

When my son Scott (Tall Penguin) took Spanish in high school, he had to make a language arts project. So we blew up a balloon, covered it with papier mache, painted it black, attached a short clothes line "fuse," and labeled it la bomba. That was long before 9/11, so it went over big and he got an A. Today we don't dare call things bombs so casually or we'd have the Homeland Security folks all over us.

Hypersensitive now to theft or political incorrectness when we travel, we try to call our laptops, camcorders, and digital cameras by nicknames so strangers don't know what we're referring to. I'm typing this on Nebs2, for example, and my wife, Barbara's, digital camera was originally called La Bomba. But when we flew to New York last September, we thought we'd better give it a different nickname. It just wouldn't do to shout across the boarding line, "Hey, do you have La Bomba?" or "Now where did I put that Bomb?" So La Bomba became, in a new bright orange foam case for easy visibility, "Orange Julius" or "Jules" for short. Everyone in my family keeps a watch out for Jules, and Barb uses it to take and load all those snappy photos for her blog, Iris Blue.

But Jules, alas, is getting older by digital standards, and has a tendency to blur unless held rock-steady. I messed up my pix of Grandpa Bingham whom we visited in Indiana this June, for example, when I couldn't hold it steady enough even sitting around a table. So my family all chipped in and bought me a fabulous, compact digital camera with excellent anti-shaking settings for my July birthday recently, already pre-nicknamed Nigel (Barb's idea). Nigel got a gray foam case with straps like Jules, and of course gets to be used by everyone who went in on it. I get to keep it, however, in my custody and care.

So welcome, Nigel, to this intrepid photojournalistic blogging family, and may you record and publish many an excellent image on all our posts. Live long and prosper!

Trip Day 12

 

Savannah: A Great Finish to a Fun Trip

When you reach a certain age, summer vacation means going to see the folks. And this goes on for many years, if you're lucky. Even if you're headed in the opposite direction for your wished-for destination, you have to make sure you include the hometown visit or your name will be Mud for the following year.

So we made the pilgrimage to Huntington, Indiana, where both Barb and I were born and raised, met and fell in love, married and had our firstborn and secondborn, saw the folks, joined up with the firstborn's family and did Cedar Point, the Sandusky, Ohio amusement park we've visited many times before, and were just about ready to call it a vacation and return to Florida.

But the two to three days it takes us to drive home from Indiana never seems quite fulfilling unless we cram in a little layover in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, another favorite hotspot for us. And we did. Barb got to shop at her Christmas Place store for a few hours before we headed on over the mountains and down to I-95.

Somewhere along the way I realized I really wanted to visit Savannah, Georgia as well, and I calculated that, even starting from Gatlinburg at 1:00 pm, I could make it there last night, the third of July, spend the fourth touring the city, and leave for Scott's new condo in Kissimmee on the fifth, then home to Coral Springs.

Neither Barb nor I had been to Savannah, the Belle of Georgia, with its rich history and vibrant old streets, mansions, and mossy shady squares and streets. We visited Charleston, North Carolina three years ago, but never seemed to make it to Savannah.

Well, we did it. Barb reserved us two nights, last night and this one, at a Hampton nearby, and today we toured on a trolley with on/off priveleges all day and had a ball. By late afternoon--we decided to skip the live fireworks display on the riverfront due to the crowds and watch nationally from our motel room--we felt like Savannahians (honest to goodness, that's what they call themselves here.) and that we'd seen and photographed and videoed plenty of memories.

To me, we beat the system again this year. We didn't get trapped in the obligatory pilgrimage again but launched out into new vistas, and to me that's what vacation means. Now I don't have to spend yet another year wondering what Savannah is like and if I like it as well as Charleston, which I really loved. Savannah isn't Charleston, though they share much in common historically and culturally. Savannah is unique in its layout and squares, its stately ironwrought mansions and beautiful shady live oaks Charleston doesn't have. But Charleston is a city of great mystery, history, and character with a bigger feel and area that I am still very intrigued by. These sister cities are like two beautiful but entirely unique southern belles, each lovely and fascinating but totally incomparable with the other.

The only thing I miscalculated and wished I'd brought along on the trip was my old laptop, so I wouldn't have had to compete with Barb for blogtime. She has done a great job of documenting our vacation day by day, with pix, here. Next trip I'll put it on my packing list.

June 12: Anniversary Edition

One year ago today I began this blog. This was my first post (and comments it got):


personal journal: nirvana or manuscript stifler?

I used to write lots of short stories and poems till I began a private journal. The stories and poems never got published. The journal, which I began as a notebook to help my writing, became instead a freewheeling, uncensored, unrevised forum for whatever I wanted to say: ideas, feelings, gripes, interests--anything that came to mind.At first the freedom from editing or rejection was liberating. And I loved the easy fluency I found, the flow and unselfconscious style I developed. But I found that the more I wrote in my journal, the less I wrote for submission. In time I lost interest in writing for publication completely. The journal became my only writing outlet, a substitute for any stories, poems, or essays I had written so easily before.I wondered if others had a similar experience. Is personal journaling always a good idea for a writer? Or can it stifle creativity and become a too-easy-to-please listener, insulating its author from challenges he may need more, like feedback from others, disciplined structure, focus and development of ideas, fleshing out of detail because it's needed for others to visualize, even though I might not, since I'm writing it? I honestly don't know.Online, it seems everyone promotes journaling as therapeutic and stimulating for ideas and creativity, great for hatching great writing to share. Privately, I'm not so sure. For me, it seemed to erect a writer's block like the Great Wall of China to anything I tried to write outside it.In any case, that's why I started this blog. I'm tired of just "talking to myself" in my journal and looking for ways to be read--not necessarily published or paid. At least I'm ready to listen.
posted by nbk @ 9:37 PM 2 comments

Since that first post was published I've received about 1,100 visits from all over the world that I know about and published 75 other posts. It's been very rewarding. I especially appreciate my regular visitor from Arizona (oops, sorry, New Mexico), Carol Anne, whose own It's five o'clock somewhere is always a delight to read and whose encouragement and insightful comments have sometimes kept me going when I got lazy. And I'm grateful to have had the chance to interact with a fascinating, very intelligent young museum researcher from Queens, Jill Pazereckas, who began commenting here nearly a year ago and whose own blog, Jill's Room, is a model to me of provocative social and historical issues.

But I feel most proud of the blogs my family have started this year and quickly diverged from this one, in both content and style. They all comment here frequently and really keep me busy trying to keep up with them, and they're bookmarked in my right column: Too Tall to Be a Penguin, by middle son Scott, the elementary school media specialist and part-time Disney ride operator--oops, cast; Iris Blue, my incredible wife, gifted photojournalist blogger, and love of my life; Underwear Ninja Comes With Space Suit, by youngest son and new york sound designer, whose photographs are amazing; and Lazo Land, by my gifted favorite daughter-in-law, Rhonda.

Thanks for a great ride, everyone!

Fight or flight and the river rocks

There aren't many things that really get to me, but having work done by others on my property ranks right up there. From the time they clamber out of their pickup trucks to the time they leave for the day, I'm in full vigilante mode, peering between closed blinds and hiding in the shadows.

But after a while of watching the work clandestinely, I can't stand it anymore. All the clanging and banging makes me too nervous to just sit. I have to do something physical. So I jump into my yard clothes and spend time busying myself around the lot weed-whipping everything to death even if it doesn't need it, or mowing, or my latest exercise machine: hauling rock.

See, when we got the house seventeen years ago, the screened patio had a pool surrounded by chattahoochee and river rocks around the pool edge, with a big river rock fountain at the far end. This might have looked quite exotic if we had an outdoor pool surrounded by lush vegetation, but inside, with nothing but ferns and leafy big philodendrons, it looked out of place. So when we decided to resurface the badly eroded pool and pitted chattahoochee patio all at once, and the contractor offered to tear out the fountain for an extra $300, as well as the river rocks around the pool we had contracted for, we said yes.

Perhaps I should have asked for more detail. It turns out the price didn't include hauling them away, just removing them. They all got "removed" into a big heap against my outside bedroom wall, and it was up to me to do something with them.

Well, there was my excercise machine. Every day I'd go in and teach in the morning while the workers jabbered and clunked and banged around on my pool and patio, then when I came home I'd jump into my yard clothes and start in hauling that rock pile around the property with my lawn tractor and yard cart. And I placed a couple of hundred river rocks weighing from about fifteen or twenty to over sixty pounds each around every tree, hedge row, walk and cranny all over my property.

This was my stress response. Selye said years ago that nature's response to danger or fright or stress is to "fight or flight," but when one is stressed and does nothing to either fight or run away, bad things happen. I can't sit in my fortress while the huns batter the gates and hurl flaming projectiles over the ramparts. I've found hauling fifty-pound river rocks till I'm dog-tired to be just about right.