Night Drawing Nigh

We went up to the park just before nightfall.

The cool air smelled of rain.  We heard high-pitched spring peepers again - the first of the year.  Cattails showed the barest bits of green, dark against the straw-colored winter stalks.  A flock of Canada geese muttered to each other. As we approached they quietly slid into the pond.  

Ox thought he saw the wake of  a muskrat or beaver.  He went onto the dam to see.  I stood by the cattails and felt the soft clean air, smelled the murky scent of the pond, saw the dusk of the cloudy sky.  I felt that I was, in every molecule, a part of the sky, the pond, the animals and the plants,  I felt a passionate and serene joy that lasted for minutes, for an eternity, before we left for home in the dark.

The Junkyard Car

Jim's eyes gleamed when he said, I’m going to the auto show in Raleigh.”

A passing friend asked him, “What are you going there to see?”

Jim said “I want to see it all”.

I said “When I was a girl, every high school boy scrimped to buy an old junk car; they spent the remaining years of high school fixing it up, making it run, and keeping it running.”

Both men nodded.  The passing friend said, “I got a car from the junkyard; it didn’t even have a body.”

Every boy then wanted a car for some freedom from parental control, some social esteem and something to obsess about.  They also wanted to go places

Nowadays the car’s computer makes life easier for the dealer.  It tells the dealer’s computer what is wrong with the car.  It doesn’t tell the high school boy how to find out what is wrong with the car. 
 

The junker was a great educational tool.  It taught the boy problem solving.  It taught the boy mechanics.  It taught the boy aesthetics.  It taught the boy thrift; he was always saving to buy a wanted or needed part, if only from the junkyard.  It taught the boy how to cooperate; friends were needed to help get the motor back in the car.  It taught the boy how to talk to girls (in those days canny girls knew to be interested in cars).  Today's youth are deprived.

For a little while the computer supplanted the junker.  In the early 90s, when I wanted a computer, I bought two at a UVA property auction; they were very cheap.  Neither one had a hard drive.  I bought two hard drives over the internet and learned how to put hard drives in the computers with internet instructions.  When you’ve got two very cheap computers, you don’t worry about frying one of them.  I kept one computer and gave the other to a friend.  In those days computers were much easier to fix up than junk cars.  You could see where everything plugged in.  My success in putting in hard drives made me fearless.  Plugging odd cards into the motherboard followed hard on the heels of the hard drives.

Computers are now too skinny for anyone's fat fingers to work with anymore. They control everything.  The phone is a computer, The vacuum cleaner is a robot, for goodness sake!  Home systems are run by computers; some houses won’t go without their computers.  The map is computerized.  Computers aren’t for amateurs anymore.

The only thing left for the young person is programming.  Programming teaches logic and It’s loads of fun to make a machine do something that you want it to do.  The problem is that programming is just verbal.  It doesn’t teach a person how to do anything real, anything physical.

It is time to save our youth!  It is time to educate our youth!  It is time to bring back the computerless car.  It is time to open the junkyards to scavengers again.  It is time for popular mechanics to advertise do-it-yourself automobile kits, if popular mechanics still exists.  Bring back the automobile that has no computer!

The Painting

I was 10 when we moved to Redlands.  A few years after the second war my parents built a house on property my father had bought before the war.  Our house in San Bernardino had grown too snug for four growing children.

I first remember the painting over the mantelpiece in the new house.  Our family took a trip to Wyoming; I think the painter gave it to my father then.   The painter was a friend of my father’s – another early skier and Sierra Club member.

The painting had nice enough colors, but the Sierra Nevada mountain was young, rough and jagged.  The San Bernardino mountains viewed from large north living room window were as young, and almost as high, but had more graceful curves and ever changing light and shadows that gave them mystery and mood.  For me there was no contest.  I spent hours of my life in the front yard and in the living room looking at our mountains.  The painting was just another piece of furniture, seen but not perceived.

My father died of a heart attack while walking with friends in his beloved San Bernardino Mountains.  Mother stayed in the Redlands house for a few years, then sold the house and moved to a small condominium in the town below.

I was approaching 40 and nine months pregnant with our second daughter.  My siblings traveled to the old house and helped mother sort things-to-keep from things-to-disperse.  I just gave telephonic support from Washington State.

Eventually large packages came from the old house with a number of things I didn’t really need, including the painting.  In the Surr family siblings who don’t help get big surprises.  I had resumed oil painting at the time and one more painting was low on my list of wants.

Ox and I  moved our family from Washington State to Korea and put almost everything we owned into storage, including the mountain painting.  When we came to Crozet, near Charlottesville, we rented a furnished house for a year while we decided where to settle.  When we bought the house we live in now, we got our things from storage.  While without our lares and penates we had accumulated more stuff; we had to have a large sale to be able to move around in the new house.

The painting, far from having the place of honor it deserved, got hung in the dusty basement.  My own paintings, of lesser merit perhaps, hung everywhere that pictures from Ox’s family didn’t. but were mostly stacked three deep against the walls of the pig room.

We had moved at least every three years during our earlier married life.  Each move sifted out things we didn’t want to take to our next place.  We have lived in this house for almost 35 years with no sifting process.  I nag poor Ox to get rid of clutter; Ox’s mote is so much more obvious than my beam.  I have finally realized that I alone had so much junk that two places couldn’t contain it.

I never before considered finding a good home for the painting; my father had loved it.  I now realize that someone out there could love the painting and display it as it deserves.

An internet search on the painter’s name elicited some facts about him.  He was the official painter on Admiral Byrd’s Arctic expeditions.  He was, as I knew, a skier.  He was, as I didn’t know, a member of the Sierra Club.  I knew he had lived near Jackson Hole, Wyoming, but he had painted in the high Sierras, and lived in Los Angeles as well.  The search also showed that several galleries sought paintings by the artist.

I took a poor snapshot with a flash and sent it off to one of them.  They gave me a rough estimate of what they would give for the painting.

An even better fate is in store for the painting. I wrote this blog about the painting, and my brother John wrote me that he'd enjoyed the blog piece and he'd always loved the painting.  His birthday is this month.   He and his wife will gladly display the painting in a worthy place.  He told me that the mountain was painted in the High Sierras from a place called Plummer's meadow.  This birthday present makes me very happy.

Confessions of a Lounge Lizard

In the small orange-growing town where I grew up we had one freakish snow storm.  One-forth inch fell; the snow stayed around for the whole day.  The schools closed that day.  Children, with glee and effort made snow angels, snow balls, and snow men.  although we had winter nights when the temperature fell below 32° this was the only snow that fell in Redlands during my childhood.

My parents skied in the beautiful nearby San Bernardino Mountains.  They took their children with them.  In those days cold-proof fabrics weren’t available.  I remember trailing behind my parents on little skis at the age of five.  I fell farther and farther behind.  My skis slid into an ice saucer formed at the drip line of a fir tree.  I scrambled out, skis still attached, only to slide back to the bottom.  After a number of tries, I gave up.  I was freezing.  I thought that my parents would forget me until it was too late.  Eventually they discovered I wasn’t right behind them; they came back to fetch me.

After that, though I dutifully took the skiing lessons, and made the an obligatory run or two down the slopes, I spent all the time I could in the lounge.  The warmth of the fire was so welcome.  I easily entertained myself by writing or reading or drawing until the other members of the family had skied their fill.  My big brother called me the lounge lizard.

I am still a lounge lizard.  Our driveway is difficult to drive in icy snow.  It is made more difficult by the hill that VDOT leaves at the entrance to the driveway.  Once on the roads, driving is almost always easy.  Down the driveway, the first car slither is exciting.  I feel competent as I remember to turn into the slither.  Subsequent slithers, however recall the nightmare of my good car fallen head-first into the icy creek.

I often take counsel of my fears and of my love of heat, and just stay in the warm house.  Although I join with friends in decrying the awful weather, I really like hunkering in as long as the heating system works.

My life is interesting and not simple.  I need a vacation from it from time to time.  I love the snow, not only for its cold beauty, not only for its invigorating chill, but also for the excuse for sloth.

Bring on the snow!

Faithful Duck

When Betsy was great with Jackson, Tom and Betsy took a trip to North Carolina.  They were in baby-naming mode.  Betsy said, “if it’s a boy we could call him Raleigh.”

Tom replied “I like Duck or Chapel Hill better.”

For the rest of the pregnancy they referred to the baby as Duck; so did Ox and I.

Jackson/Duck turned nine in November.  In early October I remembered a favorite present from my childhood – a top-hatted glass duck on tin legs that dipped its beak, over and over, into a glass of water.  As long as it could reach its water the duck (really a heat engine) was a perpetual motion machine.  Its bottom glass bulb was half filled with colored liquid and it had a long neck that went up to a smaller self-contained glass bulb that had a hat, a beak and an absorbent felt coating. The duck was too wonderful to have gone out of production.

Sure enough, a Google search on “bobbing duck” revealed that these were still available, although their tin legs had become plastic in the 50 years since I had mine.  I ordered the cheapest duck on Amazon.  I discovered only after I had made the fatal buy click that the duck was to be shipped from China and would arrive five days after Jackson’s birthday.  I told Ox.

Ox went on-line and found two-for-the-price-of-one ducks that would arrive within the week of ordering.  He gave me them as an early Christmas present.

I gave one to Jackson for his birthday and set up the other at home on the mantle piece.  I don’t know if Jackson’s duck is bobbing yet, but mine is insatiable.  We moved the duck from the mantle-piece to the kitchen counter with concern for electronic devices under the mantle piece.  The duck sits on the kitchen counter and bobs.  I keep forgetting that he’s there until his motion hits the corner of my eye.

What a duck!   What a faithful duck!  What an indefatigable duck!  What an example of the virtue of persistence!  The duck bobs day and night.  All he needs is a little water to wet his whistle. Wow, what a duck!