The Episcopal Church Welcomes You!

Something had moved into our garage. We were keeping the back door of it open so Scooter could come and go at will, by day. Not a good decision. His food, his water, The Lifestyle To Which He Had Become Accustomed, looked fine to what we thought was a raccoon. Much knocking over of shelves full of our stuff. Several smelly messes.

Use of the Havaheart trap revealed that it was a little possum. We have relocated him to the perfect new home - After all, the Episcopal Church Welcomes You! We resisted the urge to name him Dumbledore. I mean, no point in putting up red flags.

The church sits next to a big undeveloped tract of forest.

A trip to the church parking lot.

In the trunk.

Naturally this would be a Sunday. We waited till past noon, but there were still people around. A group of kids enjoyed meeting our possum.

We walked him pretty far back into the woods, opened the cage and persuaded him to make his exit, which took a few minutes, while he got it through his head that he was not about to become our dinner.

GO, already!

OK, it's not real gem mining

I've probably spent too much time and money trying to replace things I lost in Hurricane Hugo, but i was determined to replace one more thing on this NC trip. I wanted to go mining.


When I was 14, my uncle brought my cousin and me to the mountains and, among other things, we went emerald-mining. The area is studded with old mines, whose main product was feldspar used for BonAmi cleanser and Fels Naptha soap. But they also yield various precious and semi-precious stones. On that occasion nearly 40 years ago (OMG) I though I'd hit the jackpot when I found a chunk of granite with a cloudy, rudimentary emerald (worth about 2 bucks) embedded in it. It's now out in the SC marsh, along with most of my childhood artifacts, where it can baffle some future geologist.

So Larry, good sport that he is, took me along a winding, winding road deep into the mountain, as we followed signs toward Little Switzerland and the Emerald Village mine. I'm happy to say he ended up having a fun day too.

Safety and insurance concerns have ended real do-it-yourself mining in most of these tourist tra- I mean, places. So what you actually do is buy a bucket of rubble and sort through it for any valuables. They seed each bucket with enough poor-to-medium quality gems to make it worth your while, and the rest of the rubble sometimes contains a surprise.






The price varies by bucket size. We got the $35 buckets, and each received a bucket full of rocks, a trowel, and a plastic cup to sort the good stuff into.









You trowel out some of it. Sluice it through the water. Examine each big rock on all sides.








Once the big pieces are sorted out, then I pick through the tiny ones. I pull out every item of any color at all, since even the worthless stuff can be pretty.

Trowel, rinse, repeat. It didn't occur to me to bring my reading glasses, so I examined each piece with a Mr. Magoo squint, for about 3 hours of sorting.

Then we bagged it to take home. The mine will also appraise it for you, but somehow we thought we'd get a better deal elsewhere, so now we've got two plastic bags of pretty varicolored rocks.

This was done in the lower mine. The upper mine is set up to tour and we did that, too, after a nice deli lunch which they also offer. Gift shop, displays, the whole tourist tr- I mean, nine yards.


As we walked to the the upper mine I found one of my favorite rocks-of-the-day for free, lying alongside the road. I've taken umpteen pix, but suffice it to say no photo really gets the multicolored and layered, textured, 3D -ness of it.










UPPER MINE SELF-GUIDED TOUR
(3 PHOTOS HERE BY LARRY)


According to the guidebook, the third photo shows a 12-horsepower steam engine, model name the "Eclipse," made by the Frick Company of Waynesboro, PA, "probably in the early 1890's." And it still runs.

This mine closed in the 1950's, as did many, though feldspar is still an economic force of some merit in those hills. The mine exhibit shows various miserable aspects of the job, including child labor, and a lot of original equipment, most from the 1920's and 30's.












And here's my take. (above)







A select array of colorful items from it is in the photo on the right -- and note the clear purple-tinted crystal at the very bottom of the picture. This may be the coolest thing I got, because that back speck in the end is a tiny fossilized ... something. Bit of seed or leaf. Maybe a tiny feather? This thing, I will definitely need an expert to identify, but whatever it is, it's neat!


ENLARGEMENT PHOTO BY LARRY









Overlook view in Little Switzerland











Last but definitely not least, a non-mine-related addition to the general documentation of the trip -- I just got back prints from my one role of conventional film, wherein can be found the Motel Cat. She seems to drift from room to room, visiting all who are amenable.

A week in the mountains

(Pictures should come up in a higher resolution if you click them -- be forewarned, the quilt photos come up extra-large to show detail to anyone who's interested!)



Yancey County, NC, week of Oct 1 2007.

This area is a little to the north of Asheville, NC. We didn't visit Asheville, or much touristy stuff (with one exception, to be covered in a followup post). What we were looking for was to sample everyday life, as a potential place to land. For the rest of our lives, maybe.

A place away from hurricanes,
with a mild climate but real seasons.
A place where our vote might actually count.

So you might as well know, I picked this county by pulling up an election 2004 political map, then looking into amenities and accommodations.



The local coffee shop, where we had tea, bagels with cream cheese, and delightful conversation with locals, each morning. We miss this place! We're now scouring local shops for approximations of the tea flavors we got there.


My best picture - a winding road between Burnsville and Little Switzerland. This one's going to be my desktop wallpaper for awhile. Not much fall color yet, just a hint.




SPRUCE PINE, NC

We were staying in nearby Burnsville, a nice little town that straddles a major highway. It's the county seat, has the chain restaurants and big grocery stores Spruce Pine enchanted us more. This is a view of the "lower town." Just over my right shoulder, the road splits and takes you into upper Spruce Pine, a similar, slightly busier street one step up the mountainside.



Close encounter with a freight train coming through Spruce Pine. According to the local newspaper guy --we stopped in the office and received giveaway maps and tourist info-- the Barnum & Bailey Circus Train also comes through each year, on its way to the circus's overwintering in Florida.




Spruce Pine has nice shops selling exquisite local arts and crafts. The glasswork in the art gallery was fantastic.

I was particularly blown away by this piece (right), about 10-12 inches tall, with what looks like a baobob tree inside it!

Closed! Will reopen at 10:00AM!

Well, darn!

PHOTO BY LARRY

The Mountain Piecemakers Quilt Show

Can't we put this one on the Amex card??

Back in Burnsville, a small but superb quilt show was on. All from local crafters. From the traditional to the very artsy. We were asked to vote for our favorites, and the one to the right got my vote.














On our last evening we had dinner at the Nu-Wray Inn. Built 1908, and pretty famous - Elvis stayed there! Its recipes show up in southern cookbooks. Delicious country-style dinner, which reminded me of Scarlett O'Hara's reminiscences, during the hardship years at Tara, about the opulent meals they used to have in the prewar days. The dishes just kept coming, and I gave in, fell off my sugar-free wagon and sampled the peach cobbler.






Mist in the mountains, as we drove out.



Sunset on our last evening

Since this post is unwieldy enough, I saved our Wednesday excursion for a post of its own!

I tried to resist

I place all blame on bad influences. You know who you are.

AN INTERESTING CONSERVATIVE I HAD AROUND FOR SOME TIME

I dated a Republican for 4 years. In fact, a Republican politician, local level, though his term of office had just ended and he'd decided not to run again, by the time we had our first date. He's definitely one of the good guys, and, while we were ill-suited as a couple, we got past it and he was a truly good friend during my life implosion of 1994.

When we first went out, the Bork nomination had just been rejected, and was still a hot topic. My take on politics was still pretty simpleminded and I was furious with Reagan, but my friend asked me to consider the possibility that Reagan was a shrewd politician who nominated Bork both to play to the anti-abortion voters, and, quite intentionally, to fail the approval process. Equally shrewd liberals, he claimed, would know that it was a political maneuver designed to keep the anti-abortion people placated and the Court centrist.

I still watch the process with his words in mind and wonder how often either party is really trying to get something done, in a system where failure can sometimes score you more points with voters.

AN INTERESTING CONSERVATIVE I ATE

Forget whatever you're thinking. I'm counting the alligator I sampled at the Gator Cookoff. I mean, alligators are the quintessential conservatives. Firm believers in private property, absolute freedom within that property, local control. Surely they believe in Intelligent Design. They consider their design so intelligent that they haven't seen any need to change it in 60 million years. Strong opponents of redistribution of wordly goods. Traditional values.

INTERESTING THING I DID WITH A CONSERVATIVE

With the Republican boyfriend, I attended a Barry McGuire concert. Barry, famous for Eve of Destruction, became a Born Again Christian in the early 70's. This concert, in around 1990, involved a lot of talk about his beliefs and experiences and a few songs. McGuire is skilled with an audience, animated and jocular, but his jokes veer into obnoxious insults of people with different beliefs. It was one of the rare occasions on which we agreed about the whole evening. It was interesting, disturbing, and musically dull.

A CONSERVATIVE IN A MUSEUM

A CONSERVATIVE IN ITS NATURAL HABITAT

Michigan??

All I can tell you is that I have three online conservative friends. They are all in Michigan. And the Republican boyfriend mentioned above? Born and raised in Michigan.

First things first

Chris Clarke, who writes a very nifty natural history blog, started passing around this animeme, and tagged people I know. Next thing I know I get roped in by both Sherwood and Dann. So I'd better get on the job here. I will however, tag no one else, since most of the people I know who blog are already victimi- I mean tagged. Actually, my biologist brother might have some fun tales. I'll have to email him, though he's often on the road doing field work.

AN INTERESTING ANIMAL I HAD

SPARKY, circa 1972
Sparky, like many of my animals, adopted us instead of the other way around. This was around my 7th grade year, 1966-67 or so. He lived several streets away but had a devoted relationship with a girlfriend, Spooky, who lived 2 doors down from us, and he simply bunked at our house so much that his family called up. The kids are grown, they said, he's always at your house, shall we just bring his stuff down? He became our dog. Mine most of all.

He and Spooky were a lifelong couple. When he was injured in a fight with a Saint Bernard (Yeah, really. Brave or stupid. We could never decide), Spooky came down to our house and stayed next to him, while he lay in his basket on the porch fighting a nasty infection from a really big bite.

He looked like a beagle, but his original family said he was actually a dachshund/basset mix. He was kind of an Eeyore dog, looked gloomy most of the time. My mom recalled a kitchen incident in which a mouse sauntered along the wall and disappeared behind the fridge, while she said to Sparky "Catch it!" and he looked at it, then at her like, "Oh please. Must I?"

He vanished a week before Christmas 1973. A week stretched into two. Surely he was gone for good.

New Year's Day, 1973, I went mountain climbing with friends. Sort of. OK, really just a big hill there in the Carolina Piedmont. Came home to find ...

Sparky, thin and exhausted!! He'd staggered back onto the yard and pretty much collapsed against the brick wall. He mostly slept for the next week. And we can never know what happened or where he was. But we've always joked that somebody, as my grandfather had suggested, had make the mistake of catching him to hunt rabbits. And had discovered, as with the mouse, that he looked at the kidnapers as though they were insane, and they either let him go or he escaped.

He was mine. I was his. I spent a lot of time with his head resting on my knee. He was getting quite old by the time I finished college, and had one last burst of energy Dec 23 1977, when he chased and was hit by a delivery truck. We buried him in the damn snow. That Christmas sucked.

I want to see all my animals again in whatever the next life is, but he's the one I want to see run out and meet me first. He appears in my dreams often to this day.

AN INTERESTING ANIMAL I ATE

This would be marinated alligator, at a Gator Cookoff. Chewy.

AN ANIMAL IN A MUSEUM (OR ZOO)

One fun day during our NJ years, Larry and I took the kids to the Philadelphia Zoo and went into the Lorikeet Aviary. These little birds are hilarious. Here's a picture from another aviary, showing someone feeding one. You get a cup of some kind of nectar-y stuff they love and they land all over you and battle each other to get to it. Hard little claws. Pushy, funny little guys.

AN INTERESTING THING I DID WITH AN ANIMAL

Our neighbors had a daughter with birth defects, and built a backyard swimming pool for her. It was a homemade pool, rough concrete walls. She grew up and got married, they sold the house to us. We'd drain the pool for the winter. In spring we'd clean and paint it and try to seal out the water leaks.

One spring a mole got trapped in it. I don't care how destructive moles supposedly are. I'm a bleeding heart. He was adorable. He scrabbled blindly around the concrete walls, lost and helpless outside his environment. I followed him with a bucket trying to catch him. Finally he bumped against the arch of my foot and just ... stopped, too tired and discouraged to move. I remember his hard, weirdly human little hand and the fine velvety texture of his fur. Scooped him into the bucket and tipped him out next to the fence, which he scurried under, and presumably dug his way to happiness.

AN ANIMAL IN ITS NATURAL HABITAT

Meet Betty.

PHOTO BY LARRY, 2007

Our tidal marsh is rather brackish, not an alligator's favorite thing, but once or twice a year, Betty hangs out for a few days to check out the local edibles. She solved the nutria-invasion problem in short order. This picture is from January -- she was around a couple weeks ago, but we couldn't get a picture. And since we fear for both Scooter and our feral cats, it's just as well that she didn't come in too close or stay too long.

My heart's in the highlands

Little Switzerland, NC, October 4, 2007

[date corrected!]

There's something about a vacation.

We didn't need to leave home to see natural beauty. We're surrounded by coastal tidal-marsh beauty. We didn't need to leave home to take a break from work. Leaving home didn't really put any of the stresses we've got on hold. They were all just a cell phone call away, and always are.

But it was delightful. Cooler, drier air. Not much fall color, just a hint, but beautiful mornings with mist cloaking the mountains. Lots of so-so pictures taken by me with my inexpensive camera and my not-real-steady hand, and great ones taken by Larry, but with few exceptions you're gonna get mine, so try to bear up!

More later, as I get my picture act together.

It's the perfect week

...to read a banned book!

Have a good one, everybody!

A poem

I oughta save this for Mother's Day but
A. Mother's Day is a dumb Hallmark holiday anyway, and
B. it's a long ways off.

To say I know the poet would be kind of an exaggeration. We were co-staff members of a poetry magazine in college, only 6 of us, but she and I were not paired on a project. She's brilliant and shy and I never got to know her there. But I've watched with interest as her award-winning work has given me a glimpse into a talented mind and heart. Her books have a strong autobiographical thread through them and tell, among other things, about her deep desire to have a child. At the end of the last collection I felt so sorry that she was still waiting for her dream, and so happy when this new book arrived and I saw she finally, at age 45, had a son!

This poem, from that new book, made me smile.

CHERRIES

Rocked in my mother's pregnant amble,
and born into forty-five years in the dark,
the egg this child was also swayed in the arts
of lovers I took before you, fed with me

in the public markets of Baltimore and Denpasar
on oysters and rambutan, woke with me each year
to new waves of wander, fish and flower,
liqueur of each region, and bread of each village,

each cup of moonlight in the long sward
between my window and the Wannsee.
The egg he was heard the voices
of everyone I desired and held itself

in some deep hormonal bloom,
taking whatever was remarkable
in my life into its possibility.
We learned not to hurry in Balinese rain,

to listen for the rumble of wild boar
in the Malvan woods. We climbed
into planes bound for cities we'd never
visit again and skin we'd summon

with sobbing. And so, my husband,
as you dream of owning this child,
remember that he has ridden in my fire,
bathed in my blood, and sipped

at the breath I drew the first
time I saw what Rodin had clawed
from stone before he turned from Claudel
and went home for dinner and a clean shirt.

Remember that this child is collage
of everything before you, frangipani
and escargot, five-for-a-dollar boxes
of macaroni, and French cherries

from an old woman in Auvergne
who insisted on the gift
because it was so marvelous
to see a woman travelling alone.

-- Leslie Adrienne Miller

from The Resurrection Trade. Graywolf Press, 2007.

You can get the book at Books-a-Million, B&N, or Amazon.

Bottlecap philosophy of the day

.
From a bottle of Honest Tea [TM ] "Green Dragon" tea with Passionfruit, part of yesterday's nutritious lunch at the health food cafe.

The bad news:

there is no key to the universe.

The good news:

it was never locked.

Turns out that Swami Beyondananda is a comedian: click here for his website!

My, um, exciting week

MONDAY: We repaired the screen door (which a raccoon had torn right through to raid the bird seed) and cleaned the porch. At last, it's porch weather again! In SC, spring and fall are the seasons for it. In between, the heat is usually too much. Now we're getting slightly cooler days.

Time to eject a cat from a lounge chair and get comfortable to...

ALL WEEK: ...proofread and edit a manuscript for Larry. I'm not the greatest copy editor. I can't maintain my ability to focus very well, so I miss typos, have to do a lot of backtracking. But I do make some good suggestions and weed out a fair number of typos, and I work cheap! The plan is to finish this project before we head for the mountains for a week, so I can take my own work, and some fun reading with me. Most of Larry's writing is fun to read but nothing is fun to edit - I was not built for detail work.

FRIDAY: My mom turned 80, and that gives us four parents in their 80's.

SATURDAY: As we're loading our car in the grocery store parking lot, a guy comes running out, with 3 store employees after him. He crosses the 4-lane highway, disappears through the trees into the neighborhood beyond and they lose him. We've got the car running by now, so we leave the store, cross the highway, cut through a parking lot, and there he is, strolling across in front of us and letting himself into a house. Back at the store--where they had not only devoted the 3 employees to the chase, but had called the sheriff --we gave them his address.

Later on Saturday, a friend of my brother's came to visit my parents. He had kind of a troubled family and spent a lot of time with us as a teenager, grew quite close to our parents. Hadn't seen him since my brother's 1994 wedding, so it was a cool visit.

SUNDAY: Today was Larry's birthday. The gods smiled - we had no accidents, auto or otherwise!

This date has been inordinately accident-prone. In 2000, our neighbor locked herself out, came to our place to use the phone and tripped on the sidewalk, breaking a wrist and a cheekbone. That was a rental complex, so we had plenty of sympathy and no liability. She and her husband took us to dinner afterwards. Then in 2004, and again in 2005, SUV's backed into us. On his birthday. Who the bleep uses a drive-through ATM, and then backs up?! That was the 2005 incident. Only someone sent by Satan to crunch our front bumper, though one reason we let it go is that the decorative front plate took the damage. The guy offered me $20. I said, "It's a custom plate." "Will you take $40?" I agreed.

By last year we were scared to leave the house.

But 2 years in a row have been incident-free. We finished the day at what used to be our favorite restaurant. We still like it but they had dropped prime rib from their regular menu about a year ago, breaking Larry's heart. They do have it as a special on occasion, and derned if tonight wasn't one of those occasions. Which means this blog has entered the darkling plain of my telling you what we had for dinner!

Woulda coulda shoulda

This is a picture of pretty much nothing. The eaves of our porch. Well, pine trees. Trees are nice. But yesterday, and for a couple months, we've had a big beautiful garden spider living there. Now she's gone.

We may be too emotionally involved with our wildlife around here, but aside from the fact that, thanks to her, no annoying flying insects have come in our front door to divebomb us--not one all summer--we just loved her. We watched her and her downstairs "sister" build their webs. Larry took care when weeding around the downstairs lady not to disturb a line of weeds that anchored the bottom of her web. We enjoyed the drama as a collection of small males sidled over to each web, hinting around for the privilege of being her lover and her next meal. (Actually in the wild, the female only lunches on the guy sometimes. But if I'd gotten a good photo of the suitors, I still had an "eatHarmony" post all planned out.)

In the AA program I learned the dangers of "woulda coulda shoulda." All the things we wish we could go back and do over. They can drive you crazy. Some of them seep through anyway.

We got back from the grocery store yesterday and there was the Termite Guy.

This isn't our house. My parents own it as a guest house and we live here gratis which makes it possible to meet a lot of our obligations, especially medical ones. It's wonderful. But it's their house and we do things their way. My dad loves lawns. Larry and I both hate 'em. Someday in our mountain acreage we'll have woods and gardens. No bleepin grass. But we keep up the lawn here. OK, Larry does it. 8~)

In our own place, we'll avoid chemical pest control as much as possible. But the folks send the Termite Guy around periodically and it's OK. We did stop the inside spraying long ago. We figured that termite damage affects the house, but inside, chemical sensitivities take precedence. We've got cats for that anyway. Somehow we both thought that ended everything but the termite service itself.

So yesterday we waved Hi at the Termite Guy, said hello to our pretty spider, went inside and put the stuff away. After awhile the bell rang. Termite Guy said "OK, your termite inspection and pest control are done," presented me with the orders to sign, we bantered about the weather as per usual and he went cheerfully on his way. I didn't think to look over at our lady on her web. Though it would have been too late then.

We didn't notice till this morning that our girl and her whole structure were gone. Pest control had done its work. Her sister downstairs was cleaned away too. The words suddenly came back to me: "Your inspection and pest control are done."

Woulda, coulda, shoulda. "Hey we like the spiders so don't bother them, OK?" If I'd thought of saying it when we saw him in the driveway, they'd still be there, munching happily and making eggs. He didn't attend to them till after we got back. Upstairs Girl was still there when we went up with the groceries.

You wouldn't believe how much we care. Larry called the pest people up and told their Saturday answering machine never to bother our spiders again. I went out, looked around hoping she'd escaped, but knew that Termite Guy wouldn't have been doing his job if he just said "Shoo." Our 2 spiders are dead. No rewind.

I sat on the steps and had a good cry, helped some by the cat pragmatism of Scooter who mewed irritably and headbutted me: "This isn't about me so it can't possibly be important. Scratch right here." Then I walked around and visited the three who had not built on the house itself and thank God, they were well and happy.

There's one:

But the two on the house -- they shouldn't have died, damn it.

A nice break from errand-day

Just had a couple of days too boring to go into -- cat-loosened computer wires ("What the bleep is the matter with this thing?!"), Vista-incompatible programs, errands, lost orders (though we found the stuff eventually). What a great day to run into a fun timewaster website over at Nellie Blog.

I decided to Simpsonize myself over to my favorite mini-mart for my drug o'choice, a fountain Diet Coke fix. 32 oz., only a little ice, and a shot of Full Throttle [TM] energy drink mixed in. Good, stuff, man! Now i'm ready to put my achy head to bed early.

Unringing a bell

You can't.

There's plenty on the too-early death of Centennial Park bombing hero Richard Jewell, who apparently succumbed to diabetes and renal failure this morning at 44. Why add to it?

Just to rant. The injustice done to Jewell has burned me for years.

Don't get me wrong. The FBI had to look into every potential suspect. It's irresponsible not to. It was their leak to the media of their suspicions that led to Jewell's villification. This article in Vanity Fair blames the media, which certainly lived to regret what it had done to Jewell. But what can a network or paper do with a leak? Ignore it? Say "We'll wait for confirmation"? I'd guess that such a decision rests on the authority wielded by the source. This was the FBI. If they say it and if they give it to the media, they must be pretty damn sure.

So if the FBI has to investigate this suspect, and the media has to be able to judge a leak worthy of publication, based on the quality of the source, then what's wrong with the picture?

I can't even pick which soapbox to get on, here. The media is trapped in profit-making, and profit comes from keeping the hot story alive even when it's in preliminary process. Even when an investigation is in the hypothesis, evidence-gathering stage. And the viewers/readers don't see it as prelimnary, but as The Truth unfolding before their zombified eyes.

Then again, a better education system could train our minds to see a process as being a process, and not a final answer. You could illustrate this in a classrrom with a simple damn coin toss -- toss it a hundred times and show that it will turn up heads or tails about 50-50. But that if you tried to decide which would turn up more often based only on the first ten tosses, you'd get a skewed result. Gather all the evidence before you judge, kids! The early evidence might just tell the opposite of the truth.

And politics. Damnable politics that pressures a federal agency to make it look like they know something we don't. Your government wants you to know that you're in good hands, folks. You silly masses might be fooled by this guy's heroics, but we know, like, psychology stuff, so he won't fool us. We'll protect you from his kind.

Profit, politics, and public emotion-based unthinking stupidity all came together to prevent the truth from getting heard. In a nice blog entry, ronnie recounts "a miscarriage of justice" of a whole different kind, yet not so much. It demonstrates the essential wrongness of the death penalty. You gotta wonder why there is a death penalty, and the only possible answer, to me, is emotion. The desire for a "justice" that really cannot bring justice about, that couches rage, fury, desire for revenge in the too-polite term "justice." If somebody killed my loved one wouldn't I want to see him fry? Sure. Your point? My point is that justice, for Stephen Truscott, Richard Jewell, or anyone else, can never be achieved while we have an emotion-based society that devalues thought and reason. It will insist on hot sensational news stories. It will insist on premature closure. It will insist on white-hot revenge instead of coolheaded reason. And while the job of the justice system is to detach from victim emotion and stay evidence-based and cold (Yes. Cold.), that system is selected and pressured to respond to emotion, and gradually becomes emotion-based.

The Jewell case shows how that bell is never unrung. Once cleared he never got back what he'd lost. That's how it works. He got money. He sued all over the place. Michael Moore gave him a cameo, Saturday Night Live gave him a walk-on. He had a little fun. But his hero status never returned.

Jewell had dreamed of a law enforcement career. He'd been turned down by the local police department, but you could say that some kind of Plan put him where he was needed. Because in his role as a private security guard at Olympic Park, he saved 50-100 lives that day in 1996 when Eric Rudolph set off a bomb. So the good news is that we can't unring that bell either. A lot of people are alive because of Richard Jewell.

So it's a life well-lived. Rest in peace.

Oh well.

I wasn't using my foot stool anyway.

It's been a long time comin'

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

..

..

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.

.

And it's gonna be a long time gone.

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Lunar eclipse 8/28/07

Spiritual paths - with a shopping mall detour

I'm surrounded by people with a wide spectrum of religion, or lack of it. It pretty much keeps me from spending any significant time inside any religious comfort zone. And this is good. It's important, I think, to step into other peoples' worlds.

My friend Leila has kind of a zen view. I like her philosophy of charitable giving: "Give where you are spiritually fed," she suggests. We have interesting talks in which she tries to explain to me the state of existence above the plane of duality where there's no good or bad, things just "are." I'm more backward than she is: I keep saying "But if something isn't bad how can it not be good?? And if that plane exists, then there's the plane of duality and the plane of non-duality, which is a duality." It's OK. If it's a spiritual direction in which I need to go, then I'll evolve to it at my own pace. Then there's my ardently anti-religion husband -- he bought a "Born Again Pagan" t-shirt for amusement, but even paganism is too religious for him -- and my conservative Baptist brother.

It was with my brother's family that I just saw my first full-immersion baptism. My niece, who's 11, was baptized this past weekend. I got to be there for something that means the world to people I love, but that's a foreign experience for me, and to see it through their eyes.

My bro and I were raised in the Episcopal church. He was an acolyte. I, 7 years older, wanted to be but this was a closed door to girls in the 60's, in the south anyway. It was for the best though. My interest was a whole lot of desire to be on stage, and no conviction.

Anyway, I'm used to much formality, and to infant baptism. Confirmation for us was at age 12-ish, in 6th grade. We underwent lots of preparation, lots of ceremony. I had a new white dress made out of that 1966 Fortrel (R) stuff that resembled foam rubber, and my first "heels," only an inch and a half tall. All followed by a back yard cookout with gifts -- religious gifts, but gifts nonetheless.

Sunday school "confirmation class" was a year-long thing we took seriously as our key to an important rite of passage. Though once we'd been confirmed and they still expected us to attend confirmation class, my same-age cousin and I decided that was ridiculous. You don't have to keep submitting applications when you're in the club, fer cripes sake. So we would get our bottled Nehi's out of the fellowship hall vending machine, but instead of moseying over to class, we'd go back out to the parking lot, hide on the floor of our parked car till classes started and the lot cleared, then sneak across the street to play in the park.

Circa 20 years ago my brother became a Baptist. Such decisions are highly personal. I've never talked to him about whatever experience moved him to do this.

My default setting is that, in our varying concepts of God or of whatever drives the universe, we each have strictly a "radiant" relationship with it, meaning that each of us is like a wheel spoke. We radiate from the wheel's hub. The other spokes have their own direct connections to the hub, they don't go through me, and their perceptions of that hub's nature should not be challenged by me. I don't consider myself to have the authority or the right to try. This is why I'm pretty much anti-evangelical. Faith is something that can be shared, sure, but that does not need to be.

My bro and I remain close because we give each other full space and acceptance of the different paths we've taken. Anyway, I'd been to a couple services in this church, including my turn as their bridesmaid in 1994, but did not know exactly what to expect from a Baptist full-immersion baptism. I was invited to be there with them so I got ready for a road trip.

[FASHION STUFF ALERT - GUYS CAN IGNORE THIS NEXT PART]

The first thing guys would groan about is that I had time to either get the oil changed, or buy a dress. I bought a dress.

My problem is that I'm not fashion-oriented enough. All my dresses are 10 years old. Outdated style is not a problem in itself. But being age-inappropriate is.

Saturday morning I hauled out my dress options and had to accept that the lacy bibs and flouncy sleeves just do not work on a 53-year-old woman. I came out and said to Larry, "I have to go buy a dress." He said, "I'll come with you and we'll use the Magic Card." At J. C. Penney, I left him the shoe department, hit the sale rack, and, lo-and-behold! found something right away. Simple, nice, and reduced from $70, to $17.49! He got just as good a deal on some sneakers.

[OK, END OF FASHION STUFF]

Next was to gather up the music-to-drive-to CDs I'd spent Friday compiling and burning (instead of checking my wardrobe), and get on the road. It's about a 5 hour drive from here to my brother and sister-in-law's little NC town. When there's no tourist traffic jam, that is. My trip was closer to 7 hours. The CDs didn't play. Well, one did, but much as I love Billie Holiday, I was pretty sick of it by the time i got home.

Rolled into town, and this cool car, which does not resemble anything that occurs in automotive nature, was waiting at the town's one-light intersection. By the time I got the camera on I was too late to capture what Larry tells me is important identification information - the headlights and grill. He says it's a custom or a kit car.

My bro was away till late evening doing biology field work, so my sister-in-law took me and the kids to a local Italian restaurant. Here in this tiny town was this nice little place where they make everything fresh, have their own garden behind the restaurant for fresh herbs and salad veggies. Which I missed photographing because we were around the block before I got the camera out of my purse and turned on. My next camera will hold a charge for an extended time, blast it, and let me leave it on for unexpected shots.

Next morning was the service.

Superficially, the lack of long study and ceremony can make a Baptist baptism seem downright casual.

It's not. Not at all. It's a decision so important that it must be made by you, not for you. But it's also more emotional and less studied. No year-long class. No test on the Apostles' Creed or other doctrine. No set age, though about 7 -- the age of reason -- seems to be the minimum. Each child, or adult, undergoes baptism when he or she is moved to do so. My niece had announced her readiness and gone to the altar to profess her faith at the end of service a couple weeks before this, rather surprising her parents.


She and the pastor are standing in the baptismal pool here. The ceremony is brief. The pastor says a few words about the congregant, and asks her to state her "profession of faith." Then he lowers her into the water and lifts her back up.

Because my niece has all these weird Episcopal relatives, she had gifts to open. No other kids had gifts, they just towelled off their hair and proceeded with a normal Sunday. And I needed to get back on the road to get home before dark.

By the time I'd listened to my 2 listenable CD's (one homemade and one commercial) for the umpteenth time I was on the lookout for a place -- any place! -- to buy CD's. But on the tourist-avoidance route I took, there was not a single mall, WalMart, Kmart or Target.

Wonderful little rural towns dot the route.
But no music stores.

But the drive was smooth and easy. A sullen Graymatter shunned me for 5 hours after I got home, making me wonder what kinds of punishment she'll dole out when we take a week's vacation. I'll think about it later. This was a good weekend, a unique experience for me and very beautiful.