I do not have a camera at the moment – I will buy one – but I need to take pictures right now as the old buildings, woods and waterways in my area disappear. If I wait until I can afford a decent camera, there may be nothing left to photograph but strip malls and townhouse developments.
When I was driving home late last Monday the old tin barn on my corner was still there. By two o’clock the next day it was gone. The trees and brush around it had been leveled, cut into pieces and piled in heaps for a truck to cart away.
So I went and got a disposable camera to take pictures of disposable history. First I took pictures of the black family cemetery on the hill overlooking the Chickahominy, just off Route 1. Then the ravine going down to the river. Then the stripped hilltop where the barn used to be. Old Telegraph Road. The creek behind where I live. These may all be gone soon.
Mark Your Calendars
I managed to get through most of yesterday without realizing that it was Columbus Day, or as it has been renamed in South Dakota, Native American Day. So another benefit of not having a regular job is not caring a fig about so-called national holidays, what is open or closed, who’s having a long weekend and who is not. I may just declare my own holidays: National Family Pie Day, National Hopeful Baptist Day, National Bipedal Sinner Day, National When the Fuck is Bush Going to Stop Being President Day…
Marsh
I’ve hidden it in a place where it will be found, but not for some time. A few years, perhaps longer.
The landscape is being stripped and leveled all around where I live. Soon, the woods on the other side of the road will be replaced by houses. The corner and two other sites near me on Route 1 have been cleared for retail development. This is the way it is and has always been. I have no illusions about the purity of the land. This road was once a major artery between north and south; it has been bordered by farms and inns since the 17th century, more recently by barbeque stands and motels. But things wear down, are abandoned and removed, and the land returns for a while to its dissolute ways.
Still, some places are harder to tame, even with concrete and steel. They’ll figure out how to do this eventually, when it pays enough to try. In the meantime, I have hidden the doll for the little girl who knows where to find it.
The landscape is being stripped and leveled all around where I live. Soon, the woods on the other side of the road will be replaced by houses. The corner and two other sites near me on Route 1 have been cleared for retail development. This is the way it is and has always been. I have no illusions about the purity of the land. This road was once a major artery between north and south; it has been bordered by farms and inns since the 17th century, more recently by barbeque stands and motels. But things wear down, are abandoned and removed, and the land returns for a while to its dissolute ways.
Still, some places are harder to tame, even with concrete and steel. They’ll figure out how to do this eventually, when it pays enough to try. In the meantime, I have hidden the doll for the little girl who knows where to find it.
Logophilia
People think I know words, but it’s just that I went to Catholic school and lived with a classicist for many years. And, oh yeah, I read a lot.
In Catholic school you learned enough Latin to understand the mass (before it was in English, of course) and on Sundays you stared at your missal with Latin on one side and English on the other and saw over and over again how the words were connected. Plus, you had the nuns saying “Break it down, break it down” whenever you were confronted with a new word in class. We learned our roots and prefixes; no problem.
The classicist expanded the base, with some Greek thrown in, so that I could be pretentious about words in three languages, two of them dead. I would be teaching an anthropology class and put a technical term on the blackboard – ambilateral, or matrifocal -- and say, Come on, you know this. Just break it down. No breakdown ensued, just blank stares.
I gave up on that ploy and started putting random words on the board that I loved, telling students that they’d never need to know this but it would enrich their lives immeasurably if they ever saw the word “prelapsarian” in a book and understood what it meant. Yeah, right. That went over well.
A while back a little girl I know told me that there were cumulonimbus clouds in the sky and that this meant it would rain. “Nimbus” means rain, she said. I said no, that kind of cloud does mean that it will probably rain, but nimbus itself means cloud, or aura, the special quality that some people and things have surrounding them. Her mother took issue with me: the handout from the teacher said that nimbus means rain. I gave up on what “mean” means and went home to my OED, the middle-aged Catholic schoolgirl’s best friend.
In Catholic school you learned enough Latin to understand the mass (before it was in English, of course) and on Sundays you stared at your missal with Latin on one side and English on the other and saw over and over again how the words were connected. Plus, you had the nuns saying “Break it down, break it down” whenever you were confronted with a new word in class. We learned our roots and prefixes; no problem.
The classicist expanded the base, with some Greek thrown in, so that I could be pretentious about words in three languages, two of them dead. I would be teaching an anthropology class and put a technical term on the blackboard – ambilateral, or matrifocal -- and say, Come on, you know this. Just break it down. No breakdown ensued, just blank stares.
I gave up on that ploy and started putting random words on the board that I loved, telling students that they’d never need to know this but it would enrich their lives immeasurably if they ever saw the word “prelapsarian” in a book and understood what it meant. Yeah, right. That went over well.
A while back a little girl I know told me that there were cumulonimbus clouds in the sky and that this meant it would rain. “Nimbus” means rain, she said. I said no, that kind of cloud does mean that it will probably rain, but nimbus itself means cloud, or aura, the special quality that some people and things have surrounding them. Her mother took issue with me: the handout from the teacher said that nimbus means rain. I gave up on what “mean” means and went home to my OED, the middle-aged Catholic schoolgirl’s best friend.
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