… I see on my morning walks through the neighborhood.
According to my plant-identifier app it’s called a Man of The Earth. Ipomoea pandurate.
This is what the rest of it looks like around my neighbor’s mailbox:
Author - Paul Schatzkin
This country is an idea, and one that’s lit the world for two centuries…
––Rob Lowe as Sam Seaborn in The West Wing – S2 E16
I am writing this post mostly because it’s the ‘4th of July Weekend’ and I want to encourage anybody who is reading this to listen to this:
The Thomas Jefferson Hour
Episode 1501 – 4th of July 2022
Anybody who has known me very long knows I’m a huge fan of this podcast. I have listened to almost every episode since I first learned of it more than 20 years ago.
In a typical episode, the creator of the show, Clay Jenkinson, is interviewed as Thomas Jefferson, speaking from a 21st century perspective on both historical and contemporary events and issues; at the end of each hour Clay returns as himself to speak about what he has just said as Jefferson.
This episode is a departure from that format. To discuss Independence Day, Clay speaks with three people. The first is a listener, Brad Crisler – from Nashville, no less; second is Lindsay Chervinsky, an accomplished young historian; third is the venerable Joseph Ellis, one of the country’s most renowned authorities on the Early National Period (side note: it was Ellis’s American Sphinx that sparked my interest in Jefferson to begin with).
With Clay and his ‘semi-permanent guest host’ David Swenson, these three individuals offer a useful perspective on why, despite the challenges of any given moment, we shouldn’t give up on the idea that took shape in Philadelphia two-and-half-centuries ago: that all men (and women!) are created equal, are entitled to equal justice under the law, and can effectively govern themselves through compromise and majority rule.
Murica! It really is the best idea anybody’s ever come up with for a country – even if its origins are steeped in contradictions, and even as the institutions that were formed to implement those ideas have outlived the compromises that were necessary accommodate those contradictions.
I keep a baseball by my desk. I’m not sure where it came from. Beneath the Rawlings logo there’s a stamp that says it’s an “Official Ball” from the Pacific Coast league, so I must have picked up at one of the many Nashville Sounds games I go to.
I keep it by my desk and when I’m proofreading something I’ve written, I pick it up to give my fingers something to do when they’re not flapping away at the keys.
My ‘fidget spinner’
I like the way a baseball feels in my hand. I like the smooth texture of the leather surface, the tight precision of the laces, the hardness of the thing.
Mind you, I could never do much with an actual baseball. I never could judge the flight of a fly ball off the bat; I’d set myself where I thought it was gonna come down and … it always went over my head. And it scared the living daylights out of me when Donnie Cohn pitched hardball in summer camp.
They say the the hardest thing in all of sports is “swing the round bat at the round ball – and hit it squarely.” The doesn’t even take into account that the ball is coming at your head at 90 miles an hour. Before you can even think about swinging, the first thing you have to do is not duck.
Still, I just like the way a baseball feels in my hand. It’s much more organic than one of those ‘fidget spinner” gizmos.
*
Have I mentioned yet that I’ve got a ‘part time summer job’ at the ballpark?
I suppose by now most who read this know that I got fired from my job at the Apple store in Green Hills back in January. Don’t cry for me, Argentina. If they hadn’t pushed me I never would have jumped, and it was well past time to fly.
That job got me through several life-changing years, starting with Ann’s decision to move to Oregon back in 2016. I think I can safely say now I’ve survived that transition and everything that came with and after it.
Time to ‘face the front of the bus’ (as my friend Philo Farnsworth III liked to say).
I’m still sorting out exactly how I will sustain my new-found freedom. I got that ‘part time summer job’ working at the ball park (more on that here).
And I figured, hell, let’s see if I can collect some unemployment insurance.
Well, umm…. no. Not so fast.
Under the Neon Bluebird: On the left, Don Henry;
hiding under hats L-R: Tom Kimmel, Dana Cooper and Michael Lille
The Bluebird Cafe figured pretty prominently in my early days/years in Nashville. I went there a lot. I don’t go there as much as I used to. Since the venue was a featured location in the TeeVee show Nashville for several seasons, it is near the top of most visitors’ ‘must see/do’ list when they come to Music City – which means reservations are very hard to come by unless you jump on the website within minutes of tickets going on sale.
It’s kinda like Yogi Berra once said of a popular club in New York,
Nobody goes there any more – it’s too crowded.
I don’t monitor the Bluebird schedule like I used to, and if Dana Cooper hadn’t called me and let me know this show was happening, I would have been kicking myself if I heard about it after the fact.
Because all of these guys – especially Michael Lille and Tom Kimmel – played a pivotal role in those early years.
I think I first heard Michael Lille at the Commodore Club on West End in 1994. The first thing I noticed about Michael was his approach to the guitar, it had a very ‘Michael Hedges/New Age’ quality to it – very unlike the shredding metal sound I heard from most plugged-in acoustic guitars (I still hate that sound). Then he performed a song called ‘Life On the Run’. The song describes a trip Michael took to Indonesia, and waking up to the sound of “laughing children at the edge of the sea” – and contrasts that to his (our) lives in Western what–we–call ‘Civilization.’ I’ll put the only recording of the song in a playlist below, here’s the chorus:
They kneel on the ground
And raise their heads up to the sky
And thank the lord for another day begun
The wheel goes around
Far away on the other side
You and I live life on the run
To this day I cite that as the moment I realized that there was more to Nashville than the popular perception (think Hee Haw) that most people outside the 440 beltway have of the city – that there is a deep well of talent that flourishes just beneath the thin crust of mainstream country music business. That was one of the two primary motivations at work when I started to ask the people I was meeting ‘what would you think if I tried to sell some of your CDs on the Internet?’ This was 1995, so a common answer was ‘what’s the Internet?’
Thanks to Dave Delaney for this one.
…as neatly crystalized in the title of a podcast that showed up in my RSS feed last week.
Commentary Magazine is a tolerable source of conservative perspective on current affairs – which is to say, a useful alternative to the MAGA/QAnon/Tucker Looney Tunes that passes for ‘conservative’ in some circles these days. This episode offered a recap of the recent primary elections in Ohio and Nebraska and a preview of the primary in Pennsylvania.
F. Scott Fitzgerald said:
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
I keep sources like ‘Commentary’ and Andrew Sullivan in my daily infostream – along with the usual left-leaning sources like the NYTimes and Wonkette – just to keep the Fitzgerald Quadrant of my cerebral cortex in reasonable working order.
In the 1980s, when I was living in Hawaii, Ted Turner’s WTBS cable superstation was our only live TeeVee and I started watching Atlanta Braves games My new-found fandom was eventually rewarded with tickets to the first World Series game ever played in the former Confederacy, Game 3 of the 1991 Series between Atlanta and the Minnesota Twins.
Sometime during those years I went to San Diego to see the Braves play the Padres. I was rooting for the visiting team. What surprised me was the derision and verbal abuse directed at me (and my then first future ex-wife Georja) just because we had come to San Diego to root for the Braves.
How absurd, I thought. Show some respect for the opposition: If there was no opposing team there would be no game for fucksake*.
I think that’s why I found this story so heartwarming:
Watch Blue Jays fan’s gesture after Aaron Judge
home run bring young Yankees fan to tears
(I originally saw this story in an online publication called The Athletic, but that site is behind paywall so I found another source with similar footage)
I hope to read in tomorrow’s sportsball news that Aaron Judge found Derek Rodriquez before today’s game and signed that ball for him.
Baseball: possible evidence that there is a loving God. Even in San Diego.
–––
*This rule does not apply in Boston. If you go to a Yankees/Red Sox game at Fenway Park, you root for the Red Sox, I don’t care what team you grew up with.
Back in May of 2020 – during the pandemic – I got a kitten.
The woman who gave me the kitten told it was a male, and for some reason now lost to posterity I started calling him “Buster.”
When I took Buster to the vet, they informed me that the kitten was actually female. I was relieved because snuggling a male cat seemed oddly gay to me (yeah, I know, #homophobic).
However, In the interest of gender neutrality I kept the name (does that mean I have to declare her pronouns?).
Buster is now a full grown cat, but for the sake of those who are new to the list or missed the original posts, I think I’ll go back and use photos from the first year in the banner for the weekly(ish) ‘Buster Sez Hey!’ emails.
The one that I’m using this month (May, 2022) is from the first weekend I had her. She’s pretty much ‘fresh outta the box’ I brought her home with in this one.
Fall is my favorite season, but the middle of April is my favorite time of the year.
That’s when the foliage begins to return, when the grey landscape of winter takes on a fringe of green.
I see it everywhere – on my morning walks, when I’m driving around and see a hill in the distance that has begun to show hints of the green to come.
It’s the fringe, and its suggestion of renewal (another winter survived!) that appeals to me.
But, boy, is that fringe hard to capture in a photo.
Here are a few attempts.
Not my best work ever, but, well… you get the idea.
In another week or two, the foliage will be filled in, summer will near, and the scene won’t change much util October.
These photos were shot with an iPhone 13 Pro and edited in Adobe Lightroom and Luminar Neo.
And if you have any doubt as to the fleeting quality of the weeks just past, well, this is what my neighborhood looks like now (May 2, 2022):
