Nostalgia – Splattered Brains

The Taste of Raw Onions (11/11/2008)

This is another oldie from the days when my work used to take me to Los Angeles regularly. The last time I posted something like this was earlier this year.
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“This is K-EARTH 101.1” said the voice of the announcer on the radio. I was in the process of turning my super-efficient Toyota Prius Hybrid car from Century Boulevard on to Aviation Boulevard, just before Century went under the railroad bridge on its way to LAX airport. It was around 7:00 am on a nice sunny Thursday morning, and I was joining the other Angelenos heading off to work. George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” started playing on the radio as I drove out towards the end of the airport runways on Aviation Boulevard. All of a sudden it hit me! This felt like a scene from some movie made in the 70s. I must be dreaming. This cannot be real! What am I doing here?

I worked somewhat late that day in the office in El Segundo and finished around 6:00pm. I decided to treat myself to a good dinner in a decent restaurant, but also decided to order a salad along with my beer so that I would be eating something healthy. My destination was Cozymels Restaurant that evening. The black and white Ahi Tuna salad that was shown on the menu sounded just right. When the food arrived I was in for a shock. The sliced pieces of tuna were all pink. It was basically a lot of raw fish with some kind of decoration of white and black spots on the surface of the tuna – with lettuce, mango pieces, raw pink onions and a few other things. I could not finish the food. The mango pieces were tasteless and I still had the taste of onions in my mouth the next morning. Yuk! This was my great treat during my last night in LA last week.

I also traveled to LA the week before. That was a longer trip that lasted the whole week, and I spent the days in Hollywood at a conference. The area around Hollywood Boulevard is a very strange place. The conference that I went to was in an upscale hotel next to the famous Chinese Theater and the Kodak Auditorium. From an open verandah on the fifth floor just next to the conference rooms one could see the famous Hollywood sign up on the hill, and if you looked down you saw all the high-end stores and restaurants located beside the hotel. But things were different away from the hotel. I took a walk along the street at lunchtime one day and noticed that, outside of where the conference was being held, it was a very rough and tough place. It looked really run down and the buildings looked their age. There were lots of cheap stores around – T-shirts for tourists, cheap electronics, smoke shops, cheap luggage, cheap food, etc.. There was the smell of urine in the air, there were people loitering around on the street that it seemed wise to avoid, and you came across the occasional homeless person sitting on the side-walk talking to himself. One person was looking into all the garbage cans trying to find stuff. It occurred to me that although I was a little uncomfortable during my walk this was home for a lot of people. Would I still have been uncomfortable if circumstances had been different, and I had to spend more time in that place. We develop our comfort zones, and our own limited sense of reality that we can deal with. That may not be the real world.

The trips back from LA the last two times have worn me out. It is not the flights that have done me in, but it is the drive back home from the airport. I leave LA early in the morning, and by the time I get on the highway at Dulles airport to go back home, it is already dark. I join the long lines of red tail-lights of barely moving traffic on the Washington Beltway and one wants to get stop the car, get out, and scream. It is then that one actually feels the complete sense of futility. You know, I have been in a situation for many years where I have wished that I could stop what I was doing, take an extended break, and try to do something more interesting and fulfilling. It looks like I am not going to get there for a number of reasons. But I still persist with what I am doing, and I wonder if there is a choice. Is this a trap? It is only when you are stuck on the highway of life behind the red tail-lights, with little sign of progress, that it all hits you like a ton of bricks.

Well, the trip back from Hollywood ended in a bad way. I was not in a good mood when I arrived at home and I declined to go for the Halloween party at a friend’s place. I stayed at home by myself and went to sleep, and promptly woke up the next day feeling sick. My throat felt like sandpaper and it was on fire. I recovered after a sleepless Saturday night, and a Sunday of high temperatures, only to have to head back to LA once again last Wednesday. Fortunately, this last trip ended in a better manner. I did not fall sick, and I was able to head out to the towpath on Sunday morning to recover.

What a beautiful day it was last Sunday! The colorful leaves of Autumn have almost all fallen by this time, but some of the sections of the park were still really quite pretty. The woods in the area near Carderock were a strange combination of yellow and orange. Dried leaves covered the towpath in most parts and lay on the waters of the canal like a carpet. Where most of the leaves have fallen off the taller trees, there were still some short trees left behind that were a very bright shade of yellow. Looked great! When the wind blew, you could see the leaves that were left of the trees come loose and fly away over the canal. There was this one large dried leaf that kept floating over the canal and refused to come down. There were beautiful reflections of some of the colorful trees in the waters of the canal. In a certain section, there was a deer that was running along beside me in the woods next to the river, behind the thinned out foliage. It looked like it was keeping me company. It was sunny out there and the temperature was just right. There were many folks enjoying a Sunday morning outing. Kids were on bikes. Kids were in little carriages that were being pushed along by the jogging adults. There was this young couple who were just thrilled about seeing a great blue heron for the first time. The guy had to tell me about it. I just smiled. I am now a veteran. I just kept going, in no hurry to get to the end of this outing. It was the perfect day. But I did tire out at the end….

By the next weekend there will be nothing left to see on the trees. Another cycle of life would have completed. One will have to await the rebirth in Spring.
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About Black Ice And Other Things

This was how it looked on our driveway when we awoke this morning.The temperatures were below freezing the whole of yesterday, and we also had precipitation in the form sleet the whole day. So, even though the conditions did not feel too bad outside this morning, I had to be extra careful going down the driveway to pick up the morning paper. There are enough bones that have already been broken in our home over time!

Black ice can be deadly, especially when it makes its appearance where people are not used to it. The scene at the site of a multi-vehicle crash on a highway in Texas a couple of days ago was horrifying. The video that was taken as the crash was happening was difficult to watch. You can see the fast moving vehicles, both large and small, approaching – speeding towards the already existing pile-up, not able to slow down because of the conditions on the road, not expecting a pileup to materialize right in front of them on a highway that is completely clear until this point. Then there are the individual crashes themselves. You anticipate them – one at a time. A loud thump from the other side of the road followed by the crunch of metal and the sight of debris flying into the air. It is especially horrifying to see this happen to 18-wheelers that, I assume, are moving at the speed limit.

The bad weather is moving through the midsection of the country. This is another Sunday without a visit to the park. There is no precipitation today, but we do not want to take a risk of falling because of the conditions on the ground. (Does one really want to hurt oneself on Valentines Day?!) Suffice to say that this has been an unusual winter so far. I cannot remember the last time we were prevented from going to the park three weekends in a row because of the weather.

Onto a different topic…

We watched a couple of notable movies this weekend. You will have to decide for yourselves if they are good ones. The first one was from the early 1980s. It is called My Favorite Year. The main reason that we ended up seeing this movie was because it brought back a memory from my graduate school days at StonyBrook. They used to have regular movie shows on campus during the weekends, mainly for the students living in the dorms. I watched the first showing of this movie and found it hilarious. I laughed out loud through the whole showing. When I returned to the dorm, I immediately told my friend, Ravi Korlipara, about it. The two of us went to see the next showing of the movie the same evening! Seeing the movie for the third time a couple of days back was a little bit anticlimactic for me. It took me back to a more innocent time. It was a time when one was less judgemental about the nature of, and the craftsmanship in, movies in general. Slapstick still made me laugh out loud then. (I think it is called a belly laugh.) And, perhaps, the topic of drinking and drunkenness – or at least how these were portrayed in movies – was looked at through a different lens by society at that time. Maybe it is only that I have changed since then. Nevertheless, I still enjoyed the movie this time.

The other movie that we watched was called Mango Dreams. It is a more recent release. The story-line is a simple one, but it is effective. It deals with human relationships. It addresses particular aspects of the story of India, and the impacts of historical events on ordinary people. At the end of the day, I found it to be an uplifting story. I do have to note that I sometimes felt like I was watching a play being performed on a stage, but that does not take away from my positive review!

And so it goes. I miss not being able to go to the park and spend time in the outdoors as usual, but I do appreciate the diversions.

The last time I saw my friend from StonyBrook was in the 1980s. I have lost touch with him since then. Perhaps I will try to contact him once again the next time the opportunity presents itself.

The Man Who Sold The World

This is an album I used to listen to when growing up in Chennai.

It must have been in high school, or during my early days of college, that Dad bought a stereo system for the house. Installed in a central area of the house for all to enjoy, it included a record player, a combined AM/FM receiver and amplifier, and a couple of good sized speakers that were attached to the wall at ear level. I remember the delivery of the system to the house, and one of the people accompanying the equipment telling me about how The Beatles were experimenting with the use of stereo sounds in those days. Soon enough, I was keeping an ear open to try to discern the differing sounds coming from the two speakers for albums like Abbey Road and Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band.

There was a HMV record store on Mount Road that I used to go to regularly to check out the new music albums coming in from the west. Good quality recorded music for the home was only available on vinyl at that time. Consumer cassette decks were just coming into vogue, and they did not deliver the same musical quality as a vinyl record. They had a music room within the music store where you could listen to music, to help you decide whether or not to buy a particular album. A lot of the music I bought from the store was unfamiliar to me. I was listening to it for the first time. I really loved spending time looking at the record jackets. I would buy different genres of music. I think I even bought an album of country music once. I think the cost of a LP record was less than Rs. 50 at that time. I was given a certain amount of money that could be spent on music.

While Dad had indulged us (and especially me) by getting us the stereo system, it seemed like he was not particularly fond of its impact. He especially did not like come home from work to the sound of loud music playing on the speakers. You could see it on his face. We did not need to hear a verbal complaint. The volume of the stereo system would be reduced right away. It was not a time for rebellion.

I remember the fact that vinyl records and the temperatures of Chennai did not go well together. Some of the records would warp because of the heat, and you could easily see what was going on while the records were playing. The needle on the record player is supposed to stay in its place while the record is moving, but this would not be the case with a warped record. I devised a means to try to flatten the records. It involved the use of a big and supposedly flat drawing board from one of my Engineering Drawing courses and a pile of heavy books. I would go to the terrace where the sun could beat directly on the surface of the board, and place the vinyl record on the drawing board under the pile of books. The whole apparatus stayed on the terrace through the heat of the day, exposed directly to the sun. The hope was that the vinyl would become more pliant and straighten out in the heat.

I am not sure that this technique actually worked, but I did detect a certain sense of skepticism in my Dad’s response to my efforts, and a mention that perhaps I did not understand the value of money. Anyway, its all good..

I did not know anything about David Bowie before this time. I do not think his music even made it to the mainstream in the common rooms of the hostels that I visited in college. I am not sure what provoked me to buy this particular album. It seemed to have all the musicality of a mainstream album, but it also had an edge to it that one was not used to hearing. There was a sense that the artist was exploring his craft, and trying different things in his music. The songs were all very different from each other. There was no single overall groove to them. If you were listening to the album for the first time, you could be taken by surprise when you moved from one song to another. Even the musical shifts in the middle of a song could catch you by surprise. It felt unconventional for someone like me whose exposure to contemporary western music was limited to what was broadcast on the radio waves in that part of the world. That stuff tended to be “smoother”. Anyway, the music drew me in and stuck in my head (like spiders from Mars😉). Once I got the album, I must have listened to the music endlessly, and I know that even my younger brother was drawn to some of the songs. Later in his career, David Bowie went on to make music that was more in the mainstream, and therefore more “popular”, but this is the album that I will always remember him for.

For some reason or the other, the song The Man Who Sold the World has been playing in my head very recently. Thanks to the Internet, I was able to indulge myself and listen to the album in its entirety on YouTube. Boy, it really took me back! Hope the album can grow on you too! (Hope the album does not get moved from its current Internet location any time soon.)

The Man Who Sold The World

Where Have All the Hippies Gone

The motivation to write this particular blog arose after I saw a particular episode of the PBS series American Experience. This one was titled Woodstock – Three Days That Defined A Generation. The movie was remarkable!

For some reason or the other, even though I did not live in the United States at that time, I have been drawn to the US of the 60s and the 70s. Part of it was the music. I do not know if others of my generation who lived in India at that time remember this, but we used to be easily able to get comic books from the US in India during those days. I used to read any that I could get my hands on. Many of these comic books would include pages where they advertised certain music clubs in the US that you could join to get the few albums for almost no cost. Even though we were not able to join these clubs, I used to read about the music. I could even listen to some of this music on shortwave radio.

Anyway, it was not until the 1980s that I was able listen to more of this music, and to even obtain the complete official live recording of the music of Woodstock. We still have the VHS tape of this recording in our basement. I will be honest in admitting I did not really completely understand the spirit of those times since I did not live in the country, but, as I said before, I was still drawn to it. Maybe it reflected something that I felt in my inner self.

Which brings me to today. The movie from PBS which I saw last week tells the entire story of the Woodstock concert. It is not a music video. It is a remarkable documentary. First of all, the event itself would be considered a complete disaster from the point of view of the staging of any kind of event. Almost everything that could go wrong in the organization of the event went wrong. Our sense of organizational structure these days would not allow a concert like this to happen in the United States today. The organizers of Woodstock completely miscalculated. They did not have enough time to set up for the concert, and the crowds that came were many more than they anticipated. They did not set up enough resources for the concert-goers, including food and sanitation. The place was a disaster zone by the end of the four-day event.

But a remarkable thing also happened during those days of Woodstock. Hundreds of thousands of young people gathered in an open field, under very, very, crowded, and appalling and dangerous conditions, to listen to music, to get high, and to basically have a good time. During the almost four days, they slept where ever they could. They managed in spite of the lack of toilets. They took to skinny dipping in the local pond to clean themselves and have some fun in the process. When a dangerous thunderstorm passed through they sheltered in place, and then they started playing in the mud like little kids. And they managed to have their fun in spite of the chaos and the terrible conditions around them. They did not riot. They behaved as a giant human family – taking care of each other, and managing with whatever they had. The kids were completely peaceful in spite of the worst that others were expecting of them.

There are too many things worth noting about the concert. (If you are interested, it is worth watching the movie to get a better insight.) The organizers had to make it a free concert because people arrived well before the fences around the field had been set up. An activist commune from California called the Hog Farm provided “security”, and whatever organization and community service that was needed – even feeding the people after the concessions ran out of food, and also taking care of the people who had overdosed on drugs. The members of the Hog Farm were hippies who did all of this for the benefit of the community just because they wanted to, and not because of any monetary incentive. The community of Bethel, NY, where the concert took place, was a deeply conservative one. They were generally Republican folks who supported the war in Vietnam, something that the young people were against. They did not want the concert in their backyard, and opposed Max Yasgur, the farmer who provided his land for the purpose. In spite of their opposition, the locals banded together to provide food for the kids when the situation grew desperate on the concert grounds. The military even flew in doctors and medical supplies to take care of the kids. (The Huey choppers that flew in for this purpose were similar to those being used in the Vietnam war at that time.) The musicians had to be flown in to the concert grounds in helicopters because the roads were all blocked. Each group that was performing had their own unique story line and attitude that they brought with them to the stage. It was a remarkable set of circumstances.

And I should probably say something about the music itself. The organizers tried to keep the music going all 24 hours of the day, hoping to keep the kids entertained and in a good mood. They did not want trouble to break out. The music was of the times – starting with folk music on the first day, and moving on to more mainstream pop music and rock and roll. There was a general anti-establishment theme to a lot of the music. The kids were rebelling against the voice of authority, they were against the Vietnam war. Richie Havens was the first performer. He improvised the song Freedom on the spot at the end of his set. The organizers had him performing well beyond his initially allotted time because the next band was not ready. Santana apparently took the excitement in the crowd to a higher level on the second day with Soul Sacrifice (listen to the mother of all drum solos in this rendition!). Sly and Family Stone took the crowd higher with their final rendition of I want to take you Higher in what was apparently one of the most energizing sets of the concert. Who would have thought that Funk would work well in the middle of a series of rock and roll music sets? On the last morning, after many of the concertgoers had already left for home, Jimi Hendrix woke up the remaining crowd with the now classic rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner. The sounds and the violence of the Vietnam war (“The bombs bursting in air!”) come alive in the song through his guitar. It was electrifying! If you do a search on the “Best Performances at Woodstock”, you will find a few articles that tell you a little more about some of the songs that were performed at the concert. Here is one such article. There were apparently a few duds at the concert, including the Grateful Dead. They were too stoned for their own good.

After seeing the movie, I decided that I wanted to find out more about Max Yasgur, the farmer who had provided his land for the concert. I found a great video – a talk given by Max’s son Sam Yasgur to a legal group. The video is supposed to be about the First Amendment and free speech. I found the entire video interesting, but you can skip directly to the 40th minute of the video to go directly to the part where Sam starts talking more about the circumstances of Woodstock, and about Max himself. Sam Yasgur is an amazing speaker, and quite entertaining. And Max Yasgur was a remarkable human being. (I hope that this video does not get removed by Youtube!)

I did a little more of searching on the Internet regarding Woodstock. This is a video of an interview given to the The Guardian more recently by one of the organizers of the original concert. You can find interviews with a few people who were at Woodstock, including this video. There were attempts to have concerts at the original location (or close to it) for the 40th and 50 anniversaries. I do not think they were very successful. I am sure there were a few people who went back for these concerts to try to relive some of the days of their youth. There is apparently an art center near the original site of the concert.

Although, I was not here in the US during the time of Woodstock, I somewhat identify with the sense of idealism of the kids. They were the hippies, the flower children. They were questioning the ways of their society. They were not into materialism. They were looking a simpler way to live. They wanted a peaceful way of life. They were against the war that was going on. I get the impression that at least a few of the young people of the 1960s and 70s remained true to their original spirit as they went on through life. I am guessing that there must be others who went on to become conservative Republicans. I wish we could feel and see more of a positive impact of these youth of the 60s and 70s in the culture of the current times, but it is difficult to influence the world in the major way when your life is based simply on peace, love, and understanding.

The world has changed a lot since the days of Woodstock. It seems to have become tougher, and life has become more regulated and seemingly more systematized. Society is less inclined to allow you to take risks. But, I would like to believe that the young people today are still idealistic, although it must be more difficult than ever to confront The Man in today’s world. Life ought to be about looking out for your brothers and sisters. I wonder how many people think that way today. For heaven’s sake, we cannot even come together in our country to confront the corona virus!

An event like Woodstock would not be allowed to happen today – even if there were enough interest. There would be too many rules. There are new causes for the day, but it is a different crowd – a less mellow one than before, I think.

Passages of Time – Let the Music Play on (8/1/2014)

This is a letter I sent to my former high school classmates in 2014. I studied at a school called Central School, or Kendriya Vidyalaya (KV), in Chennai (formerly Madras) in India.

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“On and on the rain will fall
Like tears from a star like tears from a star
On and on the rain will say
How fragile we are how fragile we are”

It feels like life in recent times has been particularly eventful for me, especially in the context of deaths of people that I have known one way or the other. Starting with my sister’s father-in-law’s death towards the end of last year, and continuing with my own father-in-law’s death while we were in India, including a good friend’s mother’s death around the time of my FIL’s passing away , and continuing with the recent news of the passing of PN Sreeniwas, and the latest – the death of a parishioner in our church a few days ago. (She had been very a very active person in social outreach programs and was actually younger than me – a tragic loss.) We did also lose a member of our acapella chorus to cancer earlier this year. He was also younger than me. There have been others. I will mention Suma’s dad in particular even though I did not know him. Ramu also lost his dad not too long ago. We have lost a few other former teachers from KV recently. We are at that age where our elders who are still in this world are in the end-game of their lives, and we ourselves happen to be vulnerable to the ravages of middle-age. Cancer appears to be a common scourge. While we mourn all the good people that we have lost, we perhaps also cannot help wondering how vulnerable we ourselves are, perhaps even feeling that we have become more vulnerable with the passage of time.

But we also know that death is simply an unavoidable component of the pattern of life. It is the nature of life that there is death at the end of it. One does not make sense without the other. The body does deteriorate with time even if the spirit may not. We might find ways to extend our lives, but the end is inevitable. Is there a reason to get depressed about all of this? Can we afford to be afraid of our destinies? If it is inevitable, what is the point in worrying? Should we not simply focus on taking care of things today? Should we not straighten out our relationships with the world today? We should not postpone things – because the tomorrow that you are waiting for may never come. We could celebrate each day as if it might be our last, and find a way to ignore what is irrelevant in this regard. For me to try to keep this kind of a perspective is difficult, but I must try.

Other than the cycle of life and death, I have found other ways of marking the passage of time in my life. In my own case, I am very aware of how quickly the world is changing around me. Because of my overall background, it is the rapid development and use of new technologies for communication and entertainment that I particularly think about. The rate of change is amazing even to me. But the experiences in life that I identify with most, as far as marking the passage of time is concerned, have to do with the popular music of the times. When a piece of music plays, my brain automatically tends to identify it with a period of time in my life. Getting back to childhood, I have some very faint memory of my mom noting some music from the Beatles even when I was very very young (we must have just returned from our stay in the US). During the period of life that includes my teenage years, I usually listened to contemporary music. It was the music of Hindi movies that my mom played and sang to on the radio. And it was the English music that was locally broadcast, and which also came from far off countries and continents over the shortwave frequencies. I was a child of the music of the 60s and 70s, and it will always remain that way.

My dad bought us a stereo system at home at some point, and I ended up buying music on vinyl from a store on Mount Road regularly. (Anyone remember The Bay City Rollers? In hindsight, their music was not very good. (sample)) The 80s came by, and I was a graduate student at Stony Brook before I started working in New Jersey. I ended up collecting older music in the CD format that was becoming popular at that time, while still continuing to listen to contemporary 80s music, both pop and rock, mostly on the radio. In general, there is less music from this era that brings that feeling of warmth, but there is still good music to be found and even bought (sample). The 90’s rolled by, and by this time, I begin to feel like I was becoming dated. There was less music that I could identify with, but, as a part of a continuing process that had started earlier on, I was getting more into the older music of a time before I was born. I was getting more exposure to the original music of America – mostly jazz and the blues. Our kids are born during this period of time, and they spend their life listening to daddy’s music.

While I do get to listen to the music of the 21st century on occasion these days (when the kids turn on the radio and I am not in control), I do not go looking for it, and I do not quite identify with it.

But I am getting older, and nostalgia is only a matter of time. The music that was once rejected has now become more familiar, and is capable of putting me in that unique frame of mind that comes with listening to some of my other older pieces of music. I am not prepared yet to admit that the pop music of the 80s was anything more than atrocious, but I am enjoying it (perhaps in the same manner that I enjoy some of the atrocious music of the 70s). It certainly makes me happy when I am exercising on the treadmill or cooking in the kitchen, and it also reminds me of a period of time in my life. Time has passed, and I have changed.

I don’t know if I will live long enough to enjoy the music of the 90s. If and when that happens, it will be another milestone, another marker, for the passage of time in my life. But it does not matter whether that happens or not. I have to enjoy the music today. Let the music play on.

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Riding with Dan Q (1/30/3005)

It is not that I have run out of ideas, but I find myself recently unable to find some quiet time for the mind. I have become quite distracted in recent days. So, I am resorting to posting an old email that I had sent to family and friends a long time ago when I used to volunteer in the furniture program at our church. We used to pick up furniture that people wanted to give away and deliver it to the homes of needy people. I wrote the following.
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I am sorry folks, but I have gotten the bug! I cannot stop writing, even if there is not much to say. I wake up on the weekends with the neurons clicking in my brain, with phrases forming in the head that I want to put down. What is one supposed to do? The good thing is that you can always trash my e-mails, electronically speaking that is, if they are full of junk.

Woke up today, Sunday morning, to the white of winter and the sight of snow gently falling all around the house. Truth be told, my first instinct was that this whole winter business was getting old, it was getting to be a big pain in the rear rend – this was getting me down, making me sick (middle of last week), and also getting in the way of things that one wanted to do. I have not been able to run for three weekends already (but then again, what is three weekends in a year, or a year in a lifetime). Although one is missing the quietening and balancing effects of the outdoors, one will definitely survive, although in a crabbier mood than usual, with the crabbiness factor increasing exponentially as time passes. I was also supposed to go out to perform at a music show this afternoon – that’s right, innocent people were going to pay to hear me sing, and I was thinking of the pain of driving in these conditions. (That show has since been cancelled because of the weather.)

What then has changed my mood? I was looking out into the backyard through the patio doors, just watching the white stuff come down – it was a steady fall, not the big thick flakes that float around and make people go “Ooooh” and “Aaaah”! The snow was heavy and wet – it made the work of shoveling the driveway later more difficult. A white layer had formed on the branches of the trees and the nets that I have around the plants, and you could see that some of the smaller branches were bending over with the weight of the water. I caught sight of a squirrel scurrying across the snow – a black figure bouncing about on a pure white background. It was hopping along, occasionally stopping to look around, and then heading off in a new direction. Soon after, I saw another squirrel. It did not seem to mind the snow either. Then, there was the red breasted bird sitting on one of the leafless trees behind our property. Even though it was small, the bright red on the grey and white background could not be missed. As I became more aware, I noticed that there was another small bird with a head of black (black capped Chickadee???) on the tree just next to the house. Looking up into the sky I could sight a couple of birds headed southwest, gliding through the sky and through the falling snow (how does that feel, I wonder?). Life is still going on as usual all around us….

The next part of this e-mail is not meant for the faint of heart, or for the children who may be misled by the misdeeds of supposedly mature adults. Sometimes a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. This was one of these occasions!

I helped with the furniture program yesterday. Pat Byrnes sent me out with Dan Q., in Dan’s pickup truck. The mission was to pick up a sofa and a love seat. This was the first time I was meeting Dan Q. – a young white man, clean shaven and thin lipped, hair on the head completely shaved off, wearing wraparound sunglasses, and speaking with a strange accent that I could not place – looked tough! We arrive at this home and pick up a really nice sofa and love-seat set. These are loaded into the back of the open pickup truck, and we pull ropes over from one side to the other over the furniture to make sure everything is securely in place. The cushions are stuffed into crevices to make sure that they do not fly off, and the throws (smaller cushions that you throw over the sofa) have been secured in garbage bags which have been shoved under the ropes. Dan says that he will drive carefully. I did not realize then that “carefully” was a relative term. About half a mile into the trip back to the storage area, Dan informs me that one of the garbage bags has fallen off. Luckily there is no traffic since we have not hit the main road yet. I pop out of the passenger seat, run back, grab the bag, and stuff it back more securely into the back (or so I thought). Off we go once again. We are now on a busier road, Route 118, and Dan is driving “carefully” once again. As we pull up to the traffic light just after the Interstate 270 overpass, we hear desperate honking behind us. A van pulls up beside us – you lost one of your bags, we are informed by the driver. So Dan makes a U-turn (carefully!) at the light and we head back. There, in the middle of the busy road, on one of the lanes carrying traffic in the opposite direction, is our garbage bag. As we prepare to make the next U-turn to pick up the bag, I notice that our second bag is also on the road, further along the way. We have lost all our throws! It was just amazing that nobody had yet driven over the garbage bags. Further defensive (or perhaps, in the opinion of some people, offensive) moves are made. Dan pulls up in the middle of the road, and Mr. Joseph has to get out of the truck to pick up the bags. Timing was critical in these maneuvers, and Mr. Joseph performed admirably. The passenger door of the truck had to be pulled open with perfect timing to make sure that it was not taken apart by traffic in the next lane. Mr. Joseph proceeded quickly, and with surprising dexterity, to carry out his mission and make sure that both he and the garbage bags returned to the truck in one piece. The throws made it back to the storage center in the cab of the truck and on my lap – I would not have needed an air bag if Dan Q. had gotten us into a pickle (which would not have been surprising considering the way he was driving). That was my adventure for the day – risking life and limb for a noble cause!! Actually, I have spiced this write up a bit – the traffic was rather light and it was not really that dangerous. Do not worry…..

It turns out that Dan Q is an armed security guard. It is a job he was forced to take after he lost his original job with Verizon many years ago. He is trying to get top secret clearance so that he can get a better job in the government. He intends to complete his master’s degree along the way. He has ambitions. Meanwhile he is also investing in real estate and selling mortgages. He has formed a Limited Liability Company with his wife (now, where have I heard a similar story?). His father was a Chemical Engineer who worked for the government. Dan is from Eastern Maryland – hence his accent. He thinks that the war in Iraq is a big mistake. (There is still hope for America!) That is one more memorable person/character I have met through the furniture program. I do not know if I will get to ride with him again.

I should stop here. This has gotten longer than I wished it to be.

later
kuria

Harpers Ferry Over The Years

My regular exposure to Harpers Ferry over the years has primarily been because of my weekend runs along the C&O Canal towpath. It has been mainly about the connection between the town, the Potomac river, and the railroad line that crosses the river and passes through the town. I run past the town on the other side of the river, under the railroad tracks that cross over the Potomac into Harpers Ferry in West Virginia after emerging from the Harpers Ferry tunnel on the Maryland side of the river. Often I even experience the rush of the trains while running in this area – trains that are crossing the river with their horns blaring, or those on the tracks on my side of the river south of Harpers Ferry, and those on the tracks on the far shore of the Potomac north of Harpers Ferry.

Winter view of Harpers Ferry from the C&O canal (January 2008)

Sunrise behind the hills at the bridges of Harpers Ferry (October 2007)

January 2008 2 — Early morning freight traffic moves through Harpers Ferry (January 2008)

Blasting out of the tunnel on to the bridge across the Potomac (January 2009)

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA — Racing across the river on a winter morning (December 2013)

There are the pictures taken from the tip of Harpers Ferry where the Potomac and the Shenandoah meet.

Then there are the pictures taken from across the Potomac river, from Maryland Heights.

Panorama - September 2018 — The town of Harpers Ferry nestled between the two rivers (September 2008)

Harpers Ferry from Maryland Heights (April 2010)

April 2010 2 — The Amtrak Capitol Limited stopped at Harpers Ferry (April 2010)

When we have guests visiting, a view of the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac is a must.Here is picture of the river flowing in the direction of Washington, DC, taken from high up on a hill in the Harpers Ferry cemetery .This picture was taken in 2005.

It has been a while since I ran on the C&O canal across from Harpers Ferry, and this is primarily because the weekend exercise routine has changed in recent times. But I do miss the experience, and the connection still remains. I still hold a hope that I will be able to return to the activities of my past years.

Old Friends

Scan-10 Scan-9 100_1521 100_1957 OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA Celebrating a 30th wedding anniversary!

Also submitted for the weekly photo challenge.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Nostalgia

I believe nostalgia has to do with memories that evoke warm feelings. For me, the trigger for nostalgia lies in many things that are simple and familiar – a song, a picture, a season, a smell, an type of encounter, a type of situation, etc.. In my opinion nostalgia can sometimes be misleading and not a true representation of the past, and can perhaps even be dangerous if one wallows in it too much. You may start yearning for a past that can never be duplicated. Nostalgia also ignores the negative things that happened in your past. Perhaps it is a good thing for your sanity, but if those negative experiences still remain unresolved, particularly in the sense of its impact on people around you, you end up with a false sense of reality.

Anyway, I went looking for pictures that could capture the sense of nostalgia for me. It was a dangerous quest, and I got my head buried in old photo albums, a process that would have never ended had I allowed myself to succumb to my overwhelming feelings of nostalgia that the pictures evoked. It was difficult. So I resolved to quickly pick a small and random number of pictures from the many that I encountered. Since nostalgia is a personal thing, I am not sure if any of this will resonate with others who have not been a part of my experiences. Suffice to say, that I have a lot of things that I feel nostalgic about, and that I consider myself quite fortunate in this regard.

The following picture is from my youth. My remember my uncle, a great man, very well. My siblings and I lived a very nice life on a beautiful college campus. We had a lot of friends and were sheltered in so many different ways. I still remember the weekend movies at the Open Air Theater on campus. It was a great place to be!
021-6x8-1-copy I used to play field hockey with my friends in school. This is a picture of the school team. We used to compete with other Central Schools.
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I do not have pictures from life as an undergraduate student. When I went to graduate school in the US, I lived at a place we called “The Establishment”. I made some new friends.
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Life changed after I graduated and started working. We got married and had kids. Those days are also now part the memories.
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The following pictures are from a family road-trip that we made about ten years ago.
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And this is from another occasion the same year. I still had black hair at that time.

These pictures bring back good memories and fill me with nostalgia. The kids are all grown up these days and are off doing their own stuff. Let the good times continue to roll!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Partners, Then and Now

Perhaps I am guilty of hijacking this week’s theme. But I do consider the cousins to have been partners through the years. So here is my submission about long-term partnerships.

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And the team continues continues to grow.

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One cannot be sure of where the future will take us, but I sure hope the partnerships continue going forward, and that I will be able to continue to chronicle these with pictures through the years.