It was one of those overcast winter days when the landscape seems colorless. The sky, the trees, the hills all wore the same sheen of a muted, dull gray or a washed-out green. The trees looked black against the sky and as we walked away from the house to the edge of the hill at Kentuck Knob, it was only then that color came back into the world when we looked down the hill at the farmhouse in the distance.
Winter really hit us last week. We'd had a few snowfalls here and there, two or three days where I had to get out the shovel and clear the sidewalks, but our first storm of the season came on Friday. Four or five inches covered the ground by the time we left for work at 8 a.m. and we walked down the middle of our street because the inch or two that had fallen since the plow came through made it easier to walk than trudging along the untouched sidewalks. Trains were running a little behind schedule, but we settled into a seat and watched the blanketed landscape as we passed through the towns and crossed the Meadowlands. On the bridge over the marshes, the clouds obscured everything to the north, so that looking out over the water we saw nothing beyond a few hundred feet -- no sports complex, no Harmon Meadow office complex and condo tower, no highways. It could have been the open ocean out there in the mist.
Moments after I took this photo, I was informed by security at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh that photography was not allowed in this part of the exhibition, so I put it away. But I loved the fact that I got this shot of a woman looking at one particular work of art. I wish I'd taken note of what piece it was, exactly, but I don't think I have that anywhere. I was drawn by the colors and the chaotic lines, but the otherwise calm woman gazing upon the canvas gave it scope and made this picture for me.
Nebraska Route 71 seems infinite, a straight line to the horizon, disappearing over the slightest bulge in the landscape, no doubt continuing straight on the other side.
Is this not iconic or what? The Golden Gate Bridge belongs in the mist.
On one side of the door you had the rec yard with its high concrete walls, the ballfield and the open sky above. The brisk San Francisco Bay wind brought the scent of the salt air high above their heads, a promise of what lay beyond.
On the other side of the door in the wall, a view. The Golden Gate Bridge in the distance, straight ahead. The city of San Francisco to the left, Sausalito, Berkeley and Oakland around to the right. The cool, blue, churning waters down the steps and the rocks below. Tempting, for sure.
When I took this shot, I did so because of the crystal-clear afternoon, the strong light on the buildings and tree, the blue sky, the illumination of the window and the colors coming through the transparent lettering in the name. The post in the center of the frame was an imperfection I'd have to live with. I didn't look at this photo as anything outstanding; it was just a moment of an afternoon.
And then I noticed the jagged top of the photo, the roof of the corner entry to the restaurant, and the M.C. Escher-like effect it has on the scene, particularly the building on the left, and I love it a little more.
Even after I'd moved out of my parents house, whenever I returned, I tended to look into the windows of the room closest to the driveway as I walked across the patio to the kitchen door. I was looking to see if the cat, Oreo, was surveying the landscape. If I was stopping by when no one else was home, I'd search him out as soon as I got inside. Even after he was gone, for months I still found myself looking in the windows on my way to the door or waiting for him to come trotting up when I was inside. It took quite some time to shake that feeling of his presence in the house.
Now, finally, my wife and I have reason again to sense another presence around the house, even if one of us isn't home at the time. Lenny and Harry have made themselves at home, and though we lived there for four months -- and together for five years -- without the two cats, I've found that after just two months with them that I can't imagine the house (and life) without them now.
Lenny, five months old when we got him, is an affectionate, playful tiny ball of terror. He'll be fast asleep at any hour of the day or night -- and I often come home in the wee small hours -- yet as soon as he hears a door, he's up and investigating in little more than a minute. And you can't sit on the couch for too long before he's in your lap.
Harry, at three years old a wise and more stoic cat, certainly marches to his own beat, but he'll put his 14 pounds of heft onto your lap when the mood strikes him. He'll also throw his weight around to open most doors in the house that aren't latched or otherwise securely closed. And should Lenny start antagonizing him and wrestling, Harry simply pins the little guy to show him who's boss.
The New York City Marathon is coming up again on Sunday, so what better image to depict strength? (OK, one that has the principal subjects in focus.) But even with that minor flaw, I like the contrast in this shot -- the two runners on the left, relaxed, chatting; the one on the right pushing, straining through the final miles through Central Park, the finish line only a few minutes away.
January 4, 2007: The Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans remained chillingly silent. Help is still slow to come to the city's poorer -- and minority -- neighborhoods, with local and religious groups doing more to help than the government -- which was pretty silent from the beginning. Instead, Brad Pitt has had to come in to help rebuild those parts of the city.
I took a plane, I took a train
(Ah, who cares, you always end up in the city)
-- "Myriad Harbour," The New Pornographers
Around here, "The City" only means one thing, one place, one city. New York.
New Jersey has its own cities and its own highlights, but if you say you're going to "the city" or were in "the city" over the weekend, you mean New York. Most of the time, we're only talking about Manhattan. The other boroughs are referred to by name, but the big island gets the singular title.
The City.
What else do you call a 301-square-mile metropolis with eight million people? Taking Manhattan alone, it's 23 square miles -- 13.4 by 2.3, at its widest -- with 1.6 million people on it. Who knows what the average number of people in New York at any one time is when you consider the commuters and the tourists.
One thing's for sure, though -- if there are one million people in Times Square, 999,832 of them are tourists.
On a brutally hot day, the Crown Fountain brought relief. Not for us, of course, because I wasn't aware of the opportunity to soak myself, so I was in shorts and a shirt and socks and sneakers. No bathing suit or flip-flops for me. So I got close enough for the mist off the water to feel good and trained my camera on the scores of families taking full advantage of the cascading -- and spouting -- water coming from the two towers at either end of the plaza.
The public refreshment is an updated -- and architectually noteworthy -- take on the mid-century summer cool-down ritual based around the fire hydrant on the block. The kids come out to play together, to have good, wholesome summer fun in the middle of the city, their parents happy to let them run around and burn off energy, the children thrilled to cool off on a blistering afternoon. To be honest, I was a little disappointed that I wasn't better prepared, and I even contemplated various scenarios in my mind in which we could go back to the hotel, change, enjoy the fountain and still knock off the rest of our agenda that afternoon. But we'd gotten too late a start and the Garfield Park Conservatory was only open so late, so it didn't happen. Next time, though.
"On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing. But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dusk -- times neither day nor night -- the old roads return to the sky some of its color. Then, in truth, they carry a mysterious cast of blue, and it's that time when the pull of the blue highway is strongest, when the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself."
-- William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways
Officially, it's called Cloud Gate, but everyone knows it as The Bean. It's Anish Kapoor's installation in Millennium Park in downtown Chicago, and on an extremely hot day in early August, it drew people to the shade it provided. Standing underneath it, looking up at your distorted reflection, you're cooled by the breeze that glides through the arched opening.
I'm a sucker for distorted reflections, shooting any and all angles to ensure I don't miss a view I'd wish I had later. The sun didn't fully cooperate since we happened to visit the park near midday, and with the heat, I was too lazy to make the extra movements necessary to pull the graduated neutral density filter out of my bag. So with this shot, I pushed the saturation up to the max to exaggerate the sun's white-out and give it a bit of a painted look while creating a sharp demarcation of The Bean's edges. Other shots from the plaza show the installation in truer colors, but considering how heavy the air felt that afternoon, I like how the enhanced colors add some weight to the image.
Oh, man, the beer selection at Hopleaf was amazing. I can still taste this one now, and not in a bad way.
Our trip had two main purposes: to see the Mets and Cubs upon our arrival and to eat and drink our way around Chicago. The city's got some great restaurants and bars, so in between museums and baseball and sleeping, we hit what we could.
But this one. Woah. It was our destination on this afternoon, a bit out of the way from anywhere else we were that day. And it's not like we went there for a liquid lunch -- it was strictly for the comfort of beer. If it wasn't for our dinner reservations that night, we might have stayed and used the menu as a checklist.
Drunk (and nearly drunken):
1. 3 Floyds Gumballhead, Munster, Indiana
2. Dogfish Head Festina Peche, Lewes, Delaware
3. De Konick, Belgium
4. Lagunitas Sirius Ale, Petaluma, California
5. 3 Floyds Alphoa King Ale
The De Konick was described as an "ale with pilsner malts and Saaz hops brewed over direct flame" -- refreshing!
"Let's say you're in Chicago and you're rattling along on the El" -- Rhett Miller
We rattled along on the El all weekend. No need to rent a car in this city. This is the Randolph & Wabash station in the Loop, the stop where Sandra Bullock's Lucy worked in a token booth and saved Peter Gallagher's Peter when he fell onto the tracks. But that's not why we went there. We had been in Millennium Park and this was the closest station.
Anyway, our trip began with the hour-long rattling ride from O'Hare to downtown on a Friday morning, just as Lollapalooza was getting under way. Just after we passed a treatment plant of some kind -- probably water, but maybe I thought it was sewage at the time -- and two high school stoners got on the train, I remarked to Casey, "I think I smell the sewage plant." Two stops later, Casey corrected me: "I don't think it was the sewage plant you smelled." Stoner 1 and Stoner 2 didn't spend much time focusing on their feet, though they were sure to hydrate themselves before a day in the sun at Grant Park, stuffing bottled water into the pockets of their oversized shorts.
But the best part, and the reason I'm recalling them here, is their inability to learn from their mistakes. Seriously, kids, behavioral history is filled with accounts of even the simplest animals learning from unpleasant experiences so that they do not repeat the actions that illicit those painful reactions. Not these boys.
The car we were on had different doors from what you'd expect on a subway. Instead of two panels that slide to either side, they had four-paneled doors that opened in a bi-fold fashion, much like you might find on a closet in your house. They fold in, so that if you are standing within about a foot of the door, you're going to get hit by it.
Guess where Stoner 1 and Stoner 2 insisted on standing. They spent the whole trip within bi-fold distance, with one of the two in particular getting whacked repeatedly. Yet as exasperated as he got, he never made an attempt to stand closer to the interior of the train.
When we finally reached our stop at Clark and Lake, they were standing in front of the door that was about to open. With our suitcases -- and the ridiculously short time the doors stay open on the Chicago MTA system -- I wanted to ensure we got off the train quickly, so I asked them to move as we pulled into the station, saving him another bruise.
But I'm sure he got whacked again before getting out.
(I could basically chronicle our trip to Chicago last weekend in each of my three blogs -- my baseball blog, because we went to a Mets-Cubs game at Wrigley; my general blog, because that's where I tend to record everyday stuff; and this one, because my original plan with this was to post photos with some frequency and tell the stories behind them and whatnot. As I was browsing through them in my Flickr account, I decided to explain this one, then came up with the idea to post the photo and account here. Seems like a good idea to do with other pics from the trip, so we'll see how well I stick to that plan.)
[Photo by the wife.]
So we wake up slowly on Saturday morning after sleeping in and miss the free "breakfast" (Lender's bagels, yogurt and boxed cereal) offered by the Hampton Inn Downtown. "No problem," we say. "We'll just go straight to Lou Malnati's for deep dish on an empty stomach." (Which was a perfect plan, by the way.)
It's a warm day -- not terribly humid, like Sunday would be -- and when we sit down, we're given small glasses of water, as one usually is upon being seated at a restaurant. The waitress takes our order, and while Casey has an iced tea, I say I'm fine with the water for now. Yet when she returns with Casey's tea -- in a huge glass like this one -- she also brings me this water.
Casey and I just stare at each other, bewildered. My plan (and I stuck to it, too) was to order a beer upon the arrival of our pizza. Throughout the course of our lunch, I drank the beer and thwarted the bus boys' attempts to refill my tiny water glass, pointing each time (I think three different bus boys came by) to the bucket of water I had that hadn't been touched.
By the end of the pizza, I'd emptied my pint as well as the small water glass. Just before leaving, I wanted one last sip. It was a prolonged sip, and here it is.
