black walnut reign...

Every Autumn it rains black walnuts, and this is what they look like after the squirrels have had their fill. (You can see the incisor marks if you look carefully at the shell.)  And every Autumn I take my chances walking out of the house. This season I have not had a black walnut land on my head. Last year, the tree got me twice. In its full paratrooper outfit, a black walnut resembles a green baseball...regulation size.

When the nutty artillery falls fifty feet, it does leave an impression. Every year I think of paying someone to cut down this huge tree, and then I change my mind. If the walnuts disappeared, our driveway would probably look much cleaner.

Every year, I somehow manage to let the tree have its fun. Maybe next year I will dust off my old baseball glove, and sit under the tree.

leafy detours...

Saturday morning the wind rustled much of the foliage in and around our neighborhood.  Some of the leaves coaxed from their trees landed in awkward places, their journeys to the ground unexpectedly interrupted by a moment of rest. The one above somehow managed to slide in between to well-worn fence posts. The one below seemed to mimic its surroundings, curling in symmetry with the wires as well as adopting rusty hues and speckles.

These two leaves were perpendicularly wedged on our wooden gate.

I have not returned to their temporary perches to monitor their downward progress.  But, I'm not worried.  They will eventually complete their migration.

so the kids want a dog...

I miss Sasha. This is a photograph I took approximately a year ago. I was just sitting on the deck having a beer at night and he decided to keep me company. He was a stubborn cat with a penchant for expressing his opinion. Most of the time he talked, sometimes he pounced at ankles. (He really had a thing for women's ankles...a freaky feline fetish of sorts.)

We adopted him. His previous owner was a French economist. She had rescued him from the streets of Cambodia as a kitten. He was a tough street cat, and had the scars to prove it. Sadly, he died this summer. I wasn't there to see it happen. Our neighbors called me at work, and said that he had been hit by a car. I rushed to meet them at the vet's. Thirty minutes after that phone call, they put him to sleep as I held him one last time. 

I don't know how he would have reacted to all this talk about a dog. The kids want a dog. They will walk it. Promises. They will train it. Promises. They will clean up after it. More promises. (I can already smell those empty promises.) Don't get me wrong, I really like dogs. It is their neediness that worries me. It is their lack of independence that complicates matters. Picking up after two kids is not fun. A third kid on a leash with a tail is my midlife nightmare.

The kids really want a dog. But how do I tell them that I really want another cat?

...the early stages of decline

The Fall is my favorite season. I eagerly anticipate the falling temperatures and the falling leaves, an odd proclivity I presume for anyone having grown up on a Caribbean island. I prefer to stare at individual leaves more than I do gazing at acres of colorful swatches in Vermont or New Hampshire. The very definition of autumn haunts me for a few weeks every year...the late stages of full maturity or, sometimes, the early stages of decline.  Ocher tinctures blush in defiance, a flush farewell.  I dwell too much on majestic endings and tinges of the finite.  The cure I have found is to digest the colors, literally.  Savoring a few pieces of corn candy, dissolving slowly, usually breaks the spell of colorful allusions.

 

the allure of the colorless image...

Black and white photographs aren't really black and white. They are rather a geography of grayscales, often more densely populated by moods and textures than their chromatic alter-egos.

Lately, I have been drawn to the colorless versions, perhaps because I still see them as a novelty. Color can impress, but it can also desensitize and distract.  Black and white photographs reveal a boundless landscape of derivative tones. 

Looking at them reminds me of that magical moment in elementary school when a math teacher points at a number line and tells the students that the space between two whole numbers is filled with an infinite number of fractions.

...de niña a mujer

This is a photograph of my cousin Eugenia's daughter, the latest addition to the family.  I took many photographs of her and passed them along to the proud mother. And with each blink of the shutter, I recalled parallel images of when my daughter first arrived, especially how she opened her eyes and stared at the world.

As a young boy, I recall reciting these lyrics to myself...al partir de mi lado ya sabía que la hiba perder y es que el alma le estaba cambiando de niña a mujer. Back then it was the melody that gripped me. Today it is the words, words that give shape to the helplessness a father feels when watching a daughter grow up and start to pull away. 

On another recent kayaking adventure, she complained how much her arms ached after an hour cruising the waters. This was her first solo outing. And what began as awkward strokes developed into a smooth glide in minutes. She complained, but she kept on paddling. She paddled ahead and didn't look back. Once in a while she would realize that she was too far ahead and would slow down and call out for us. I tried to avoid thinking about how those brief moments of hesitation would be fewer and fewer in the years to come.  I sat there in my kayak and decided that while I still had the chance, I would paddle and keep up...making sure she was still in sight.

U2 | 360

September 29, 2009 was the first time I saw them in concert, and it was a long time coming.  More than twenty years ago my friend Rob introduced me to vinyl versions of "Boy" and "October."  I remember him singing aloud, mouthing the words to "I Will Follow."  He raved about the Irish band.

 

It did take me a few years to match Rob's enthusiasm.  The Joshua Tree did it.  My college roommate Matt played the album over and over (and over).

 

A few nights ago when I stood there listening to the Edge's riffs, I felt a surge or memories...comforting ruptures in time.  I enjoyed them.  I savored them as indicia of aging, even though they made me feel awkwardly youthful.

 

And one last point, I actually enjoyed Bono's sermonizing.  Why shouldn't he shake us to the core, with his music, and his anecdotal images from other places?  Why shouldn't we be reminded that people in Iran want a more democratic society?  Why shouldn't we be reminded that an elected leader has been held under house arrest for twenty years in Burma?  It was an incredible display of artistry and emotion, and humanity.

BBC News|In Pictures|Your World|Speed

One of my favorite photographs of this Summer is the one of Ari and Gabriela in Sicily with their two Italian cousins running, arms locked, towards the sea at the end of the day.  The sunlight was sublime.  The kids were defiant and resisted our attempts to leave the beach.  Yesterday, that moment appeared once again on the BBC's website.  I smiled when I saw them.  They shrieked when I told them about their reappearance.

Click here to see the full gallery.  (The photograph is number six in the array.)