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Say…
I hope you’ve had the chance to have a friend that makes everything an adventure, who is keen to get off the beaten path to see what’s out there, who still laughs at every ridiculous thing that ever happened.
My friend Carlos is that kind of friend. We’ve known each other forever, approximately, and have had more than our share of good times. We’ve laughed together until we had tears in our eyes, and we’ve shared hard times, too, that also brought tears.
And, so this day: we were driving around outside of Austin, pretty much lost, taking skinnier and skinnier roads just to see what we could find. And we found an abandoned house. An abandoned house, without a No Trespassing sign, which was even better. And, there beside what used to be a window was this hulk that used to be a chair.
Later, that same afternoon, we stopped in at a roadside beer hall, where a chatty man struck up a conversation with us. “Say, where are you folks from?” he asked us. Over and over, he asked us. I played it straight (I know: that wasn’t like me at all. It must have been the heat.) but Carlos gave him a different answer every time. Old guy never seemed to notice. Later, a couple of beers (for us; way more than a couple for him), he tried to sell us the bar and the town it was located in. We declined. Then, even later, he confided that it was a nice enough place to drink, until night when the “cockroaches” showed up. Once we realized that was a racial slur and not an observation from the field of entomology, it seemed like a good time to leave.
Hays County, Texas
photographed 8.8.2009
PS – If you want to see Carlos almost pass out from laughing, ask him about the time I rented a van….
Vocabulary day
Water drops clinging to the flower emphasized the intense colors.
It had started raining before dinner the night before, a heavy tropical rain that fell straight down. Later, back in our bure, we opened the shutters and fell asleep to the sound of rain.
By morning, the heavy rain had gone. Instead we had the very light, almost imperceptible kind of rain that I once, in Mexico, heard referred to as “chipichipi.” And, as the sun rose over the volcanoes, there was a rainbow hanging over the clear Pacific water.
See how easy it is: just by reading today’s blog, you added two words to your vocabulary! And this concludes the Useful Foreign Words edition of One Day | One Image.
Taveuni Island, Fiji
Photographed 7.1.2013
Communications beyond
We went to the Venice Beach Boardwalk, mostly because it was there. But also because it’s Famous! It’s Not To Be Missed! It’s the Number One Tourist Attraction! (I know all these things because their very own website told me.)
But, for better entertainment, you could read the reviews on Yelp. If you don’t have time, here are some convenient highlights:
* I still love visiting this mecca of strangeness and chaos.
* Crowded and funky, filled with tourists, transients hanging out/sleeping, people smoking “medical” marijuana, and people enjoying the beach.
* Stand near a hippie drum circle and try to catch a contact high.
* Just don’t equate the people you see there to everyone in this part of the state because we’re not all freaks. Some of us just like to go and watch them from time to time.
* Never again will I be coming back to the Sodom and Gomorrah of LA County.
* If you want a carnival-on-acid experience with all sorts of weirdness, come on down to Venice Beach.
Venice Beach, California
photographed 6.26.2013
How odd that this would have caught my attention
Well, look at what I found: rectangles.
In case you wondered – Charles von der Ahe was the founder of the Southern California grocery store chain, Vons, which was among the first stores to offer pre-packaged, self-service meat and deli items. (Vons was also the Official Grocery Store for the 1984 Summer Olympics, for whatever that’s worth.)
This building is on the campus of Loyola Marymount University; when you walk over to it from the visitor parking, a crossing guard will stop traffic for you. Which is sort of entertaining, since compared to the rest of Los Angeles, the campus has practically no traffic. But, still, we made it there and back without any car-pedestrian accidents to mess up the trip.
Los Angeles, California
photographed 6.27.2013
To be sold eventually to strangers: 1
My dad’s dresser, top drawer on the left. Camera body, a couple of watches, several lens filters, his Tau Beta Pi key from 1947, batteries, instruction manuals. And a tiny white envelope with, in his engineer’s printing, the words GOLD CROWN, that contains a gold crown.
This house was new when we moved in, over Christmas 1964. And now it’s time to clean it out, to let it – and all the stuff – find new owners. The state of that drawer is indicative of every drawer, cabinet, shelf in the house. All full, all a jumble of crap and stuff that may not be crap, things I ought to be sentimental about and things I’m not.
How am I going to decide what to keep? What to throw out? What to leave for the estate sale?
But before that, how will I even know where to start?
And how can I dispose of everything my dad accumulated for his whole life, and still look him in the eye when I visit him at the assisted living center?
Lubbock, Texas
photographed 8.13.2013
