Category Archives: miscellaneous

family, holidays, memories, miscellaneous

An Odd Delivery

4 Comments
Grandfather Todd’s trunk. Came from Yorkshire to NYC in 1910, to Providence in 1912, to East Providence around 1914, back to Providence around 1945, to Cranston in 1950, to NW Arkansas in 1997, and to Myrtle Beach in 2023.

One of the consequences of being in West Texas on a long-ish (more than two weeks) grandparent duty is that I wasn’t home to handle one very important item, scheduled since January. This relates to decluttering and dis-accumulation in advance of a downsizing some day, specifically to the Stars and Stripes that I’ve written about before.

For decades it held wartime copies of the “Stars and Stripes”, but they are now gone.

Not really about the newspapers, but the trunk they were stored in. This is an old steamer trunk that was one of three trunks that sat in the basement of my parents’ house for decades. As a kid growing up, I never knew the origin of those trunks nor what they were storing.

Someone who knows trunks could probably figure out more about it, such as year of manufacture and value.

On one trip back to Rhode Island, in 1990, Dad and I talked about his war service setting type for the S&S. We went to the basement and Dad showed me all those newspapers he’d sent home from Europe, which his parents kept and put in the trunk.

When Dad died in 1997, I took the trunk back to Arkansas and there it sat, either in my garage or basement, until a few days ago. Last year I removed the contents and shipped them to the University of Rhode Island Library as a donation, keeping a handful of copies as keepsakes.

That left the empty trunk. It was a steamer trunk, nothing fancy. On one end “OT” was painted. I assume, therefore, that this belonged to my grandfather, my dad’s dad, Oscar Todd. He emigrated from Yorkshire, England, to the USA in 1910 at the age of 20. He was in New York City for a couple of years, then made his way to Rhode Island. There he worked, married, and raised a family.

The “OT” painted on the outside is the only real clue I have about the origin, and the reason I believe it belonged to my grandfather, Oscar Todd, and was probably the trunk he brought with him from England to the USA.

I assume that this trunk was the one he brought from England in 1910. I’m sure there’s a way to research it and determine its age and origin. But I’m convinced that’s what it is: my grandfather’s trunk. He kept it, and when those newspapers came in wartime mail, it became a good place to store them.

From 1910 to around 1950, the trunk was wherever Oscar was, in NYC, the Riverside district of East Providence, and Providence. From 1950 to 1997, it was in the basement of Dad’s house in Cranston. From 1997 to 2023, it was with me in two different houses. While not overly large, it just doesn’t fit in with the concept of dis-accumulation. So when I decided to donate the S&S, I decided to get rid of the trunk.

Neither of my children wanted it. I don’t fault them for that. The trunk would take a fair amount of restoration to be a display item. The heirloom value would only be to someone who knew Oscar, and he died before they were born. I thought of others in the family who might want it, and decided on a cousin’s son, Frank Reed. He and his wife have six children, Frank knew Oscar, his great-grandfather, briefly and remembers him, so that seemed the next logical place for it to go.

The problem is, Frank recently removed from New Jersey to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. How to get the trunk to him? Shipping was a possibility, though expensive. So in January I put out a call on Facebook for anyone making a road trip there who would be willing to take the trunk. Amazingly, a woman responded saying she would be going to the North Carolina Outer Banks and could drive the trunk as far as Raliegh-Durham Airport. Could my cousin meet her there? He said yes, and arrangements were made for the trunk transfer at a certain time on May 9.

But then, grandparent duties took me away from home at the time we would have to get the trunk to the woman who was driving it east. She contacted me; I was in Texas, not planning to be home before May 7, when the trunk needed to go to her.

Our neighbors had a key to our house to water the plants. I contacted them and they were happy to help out. The first transfer, from our house to our neighbors, happened on the 6th. The second transfer, from our neighbor’s to Kimberly’s van, happened on the 7th. The third transfer, from Kimberly to Frank’s son’s car (he went to pick it up), happened in the cell phone lot at Raleigh-Durham Airport on the 9th, and the drive to Myrtle Beach the day.

So much work to get a simple trunk halfway across country. But it happened. Now Frank and his family can decide how best to display and enjoy this family heirloom, either as-is or with restoration.

Dis-accumulation continues. Next, Uncle Dave’s 1900 Encyclopedia Brittanica.

 

family, miscellaneous

Too Busy To Write

Leave a comment
Not going to review this one. I read it, a thin volume, over five or six busy days.

That’s the problem right now, I have too much to do to do any writing. I think it was Tuesday that I put the finishing touches on the first draft of A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 7. Since then, I’ve done no writing. Well, I spent a little time in The Key To Time Travel, taking care of a few loose ends, especially in the dates that Eddie travels to. But I did nothing to get ready for this blog, wrote no letters, nothing.

I did finish a writing book, titled The Writer’s Notebook. I won’t review it here. It was marginally beneficial. I gave it to my granddaughter Elise, who has also read it and said she got a lot out of it. Maybe she’ll be a writer someday.

The busyness comes from our daughter’s family’s upcoming move, currently scheduled for late this month. I’ve been pushing everyone to sort and pack the small stuff. Sort into keep, donate, discard. And the keeping stuff has to be marked for storage or temporary house.

They had done a lot before we got here twelve days ago, but there is much to do. Everyone has pitched in. Saturday was a major effort. Lots of books gone through, Legos boxed, messy piles gone through in bedrooms. Even yesterday saw some work done. Saturday #2 grandson, Ezra, and I took a modest load of stuff to a thrift store. Hopefully today I’ll be able to take a load of books to a Christian school.

Of course, everything is a mess at the moment. Boxes everywhere, some sealed, some not; some assembled, some waiting for assembly. Many more in the garage, though not even close to what will be needed.

Many Wal-Mart runs later, with many meals cooked and eaten, rides to and from school, and errands run, and we are down to the last few days of this trip. We’ll head home for some appointments, then be back here to help with the final move. That will be about a ten-day trip, shorter than this 16-day one. That will include helping them into the new place.

Writing tasks will begin again later this week, probably on Friday. I’ll report in then.

miscellaneous

Thinking About Friendship

2 Comments

The concept of friendship has been on my mind recently. One of the books I brought with me to read on our current trip is a C.S. Lewis book titled The Four Loves. One of the loves Lewis talks about is friendship. So far I’ve only skimmed this book.

Another reason I’m thinking about that is because of my currently reading the letters of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, along with an older bio of him. My current reading is in the time less than three years after he moved from Scotland to London and was still forming friendships. Reading about how that was going is an interesting read.

Friendship has been on my mind because I wonder if people really experience it these days. We are more connected than ever thanks to the internet, yet we are, perhaps, more isolated. Posts and reactions take the place of real interactions.

Building friendships takes time. Both parties to a friendship must want the friendship and show the want by investing the time needed to, first, get to know the other person, and second, to know them well, well enough to say, “We are friends,” and to consider it a loss if you didn’t hear from or engage with the other for some time. Of course, to get to know someone well probably means you share interests.

We don’t have much friendship today. I’m convinced of that. I’m thinking at the adult level. Children at all ages, linked by school classes, do a better job of making friends.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this topic and whether I’ll have more posts on it as I get into the Lewis book. If I do have more, they won’t be consecutive.

letters, miscellaneous

Learning a Word: Ontological

Leave a comment

Unlike the last word I took note of on this blog, today’s word is not archaic. I came across it in a magazine article I’m reading on-line. Here’s the quote.

Annabel Patterson, [her section], in her [article], explores the “peculiar ontological status of letters as texts, as generic modifiers, or as members of a distinct and in some ways unique genre,” arguing that the correspondences of [three old Englishmen] a natural Ciceronianism.”

The article I’m reading has to do with collections of letters. Having just done my talk on collections of letters to the Northwest Arkansas Letter Writers Society, my urge to read more about the topic has not yet run its course. Hence, I did a search for “letter collections” on JStor, and this is one that popped up.

The definition I find for ontological is:

  1. relating to the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being: “ontological arguments”
  2. showing the relations between the concepts and categories in a subject area or domain:
    “an ontological database” · “an ontological framework for integrating and conceptualizing diverse forms of information”

I gotta tell you, that doesn’t help a lot. The study of “being”? I don’t really know what that is. I looked up ontology and got this for a definition:

In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality.

Which wasn’t any help.

All of which suggests to me that I’m reading the wrong things.

Bible study, Christianity, Health, miscellaneous, Writing

I Guess I Was Tired

Leave a comment

Here it is, Monday morning, 7:42 a.m. at the new Central Daylight Time, and I’m just getting around to writing my blog post. I didn’t get up until 7:02 a.m. today. I guess I was tired.

I taught adult Sunday school yesterday. That usually takes a lot out of me, both the preparation work and the teaching. I was exhausted as I made my way from the classroom to the sanctuary, and then as I sat through the church service.

When we got home, I ate our Subway lunch then put a roast on for supper. And off to the sunroom I went for my normal reading and nap time. I don’t always nap during these sessions, but I did yesterday. I like to take a walk then, but I was much too tired to do so. I went to my reading chair in the living room, where Lynda had a UFO program on. Just the thing to have in the background when you’re too tired to do much. I decided to forego my afternoon walk.

The next couple of hours are a blur. I caught up on e-mails. At 3:45 p.m. I added the veggies to the roast. I sent an e-mail to our Life Group with the prayer requests from the morning and the scripture we studied. I really can’t remember what else took up those couple of hours. But I did learn that I had left the charging cord to my computer in the Sunday school classroom. Alas, I won’t be going anywhere near the church this week. Well, I have a second cord I keep in The Dungeon, and fetched it. I can carry it up and down the stairs this week.

When the roast was done a little after 6:00 p.m., we ate, putting on a Miss Marple TV show, one of the ones from the 1980s in which Joan Hickson plays Miss Marple. When that was over, I pulled up on my computer the Bible study I’m writing, the one that my co-teacher and I are also teaching. I started writing on that around 8:30 p.m. or so, and when I stopped at 9:50 p.m., I discovered I had added 1,800 words, and was a little ahead of schedule on where I hope to be at that point in the week.

After that writing session was reading, putting pills together for this week, cleaning a bit in the kitchen, and to bed around 11:00 p.m., my usual time. I slept okay. Up several times in the night, but was able to get back to sleep each time. I woke this morning around 6:10 a.m., and rather than get up I decided to stay in bed until my normal 6:30 a.m. rising time. The next thing I knew it was 7:02 a.m. I never sleep that late.

But, of course, we changed this weekend to Daylight Saving Time. I lost an hour of sleep. It’s no wonder I was tired. It’s going to take a couple of days to fully adjust. And Saturday, I spent a fair amount of time pulling together our partnership income tax form. We trade stocks as a partnership, and that tax return is due March 15. That actually came together pretty well. I was able to complete and print the forms on Saturday. Today I will proof them and, assuming they are correct, make my copy and take them to mail today, two days early.

I also did some writing on Saturday, in the evening, on the Bible study as I prepared the lesson for yesterday. In that session I produced around 1,200 words. I think they were good words, but I’ll know more when I re-read them today at the beginning of my writing session.

So maybe I earned that tiredness. My blood sugar readings were good, as were my blood pressure. My weight is up a little as I’ve lost motivation to eat properly. I hope to get that motivation back today.

I think also the weight of everything I have to do this week was pressing on me. Tomorrow I make a presentation to the Northwest Arkansas Letter Writers Society (one of my clubs) on Historical Letter Collections, and I’m not ready yet. With banks failing this weekend, I know stock trading today will be intense. Wednesday are our annual eye exams. Thursday is Scribblers & Scribes writing critique group, and I have to decide what to prepare.

Oh, and this morning, I discovered that I also forgot my wireless mouse at church. It’s very hard to do my stock trading without that, and of course it’s important to overall computer use, so I guess I’ll make the 13 mile drive to church this afternoon and retrieve the forgotten items.

Obviously, I was tired.

miscellaneous

Learning a Word: Animadvert

Leave a comment

My current main read is Great Voices Of The Reformation, Edited by Harry Emerson Fosdick and published in 1952, I think my copy, bought used some time ago for a long-forgotten price, was from 1954, I think. I bought it as a reference book. However, last November, I pulled it off my research shelf and decided to read it. I’ve been going at it slowly, normally 5 to 10 pages a day, but skipping days where I felt like it and reading fewer pages on days when I didn’t think I was reading for comprehension.

The last couple of days I had progressed to the included writings of Cotton Mather. This 17th Century New England Puritan is a man whose name I have often heard but really knew little about. I’ve learned something of him from the brief bio provided by Fosdick and from the excerpt from Mather’s magnum opus, Magnalia Christi Americana. This was Mather’s defense of the Puritan method of colonization, intending to make Winthrop’s “shining city on a hill” into the reality it never was.

In Tuesday’s reading I came across the word “animadvert”. This is a word I’ve seen somewhat regularly in the old writings and have looked up to know what it was I was reading. Then, in Thursday’s reading it came up again, but in a different form. Here’s the quote:

…diverse persons professing themselves Quakers…arrived at Boston, whose persons were only secured to be sent aaway by the first opportunity, without censure or punishment, although their professed tenets, turbulent and contemptuous behavior to authority, would have justified a severer animadversion—A law was made and published, prohibiting all masters of ships to bring any Quakers into this jurisdiction….

This form of the word, as a noun rather than a verb, if what I see most of the time. Here’s what I learn from the dictionary about them.

Animadvert: verb; 1) to pay attention to; 2) pass criticism or censure on; speak out against.

Animadversion: noun: criticism or censure

This is an old work originally from Latin, adopted into English more or less directly from the Latin. Dictionaries give the etymology. They also show a severe decline in usage from the early 1800s unto our time. Here’s a graph that shows that for animadversion.

Animadversion has obviously fallen out of style.

 

I’m not surprised that the word has fallen out of use. Animadversion is so much more complicated than criticism or censure. It sounds so strange. I never see myself using it in a sentence, either in speech or in a book, whether or not it’s considered archaic.

What are the nuances of its usage, I wonder? When would it be more correct—if ever—to use than criticize or censure? Would I say, “Trump I criticize, but Biden I animadvert”? That would take a lot of study, consuming time I really don’t have.

This got me to thinking about words and what they mean. I have a tendency, which I think many people have, to use words without really thinking about what they mean. I’m trying to change that. We’ll see how it goes in the future.

Meanwhile, if you don’t like this post, keep your animadversions to yourself!

books, memories, miscellaneous

Library Memories – Part 5: Later Adult Years

Leave a comment

This post continues in the series of my memories of times in libraries Earlier posts are: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

After moving to northwest Arkansas, with our children a little older, with a house that had space to accumulate books, with the school libraries apparently adequate, we spent less family time at the Bentonville library. However, from 1991 to 2000, my office in downtown Bentonville was across the street from the Bentonville Public Library. I went there frequently during lunch hours, even sometimes on breaks. Once in a great while, I would go there with some of my company work and find peace and quiet, away from the telephone and people, and get some real work done.

I don’t have memories of particular books or discoveries from this library. One thing I did was look at investment publications, particularly Value Line. You couldn’t check that out, so I would sit and read it over several days. Was it time well spent? I’d like to think so. The things I learned about stocks, for investment and trading, provided a foundation for how I use the stock market now for supplemental income.

The Bentonville Library built a new building at the edges of downtown, and our company moved way away from downtown. I used the Bentonville library less. In the last ten years, it has been more of a meeting place. I used to meet with our pastor there for coffee and conversation. I donated a number of my books to this library for their local authors section.

Nowadays, my library forays are to the Bella Vista Public Library. While I sometimes browse and find a book to check out, it’s more a place for organizations I belong to to hold meetings. My critique group, Scribblers & Scribes, meets there one afternoon a month. Another group, Northwest Arkansas Letter Writers Society, meets there one afternoon a month. And another writers group, Village Lakes Writers and Poets, does the same. So I’m in this library typically three or four times a month. A recent expansion makes it much more functional.

If it weren’t for the 2000 or so books in our house, which I’m trying to sort through and read those I don’t think I will ever read, or read again, I would get more books from the library. I actually checked one out last week. But that was at the Big Spring, Texas, Public Library. It was a biography of C.S Lewis. I had only a few days to read it, and couldn’t get through all the 300 pages in that time, not with the babysitting and pet sitting duties to read a whole lot. I read a number of sections, determined it’s a book I’d like to read in full, and returned it to the library on the way out of town. I’ll see if they have it in Bella Vista, or if I can get it on interlibrary loan.

This will be the end of this series. I conclude by saying: Long live the public library!

books, miscellaneous, reading, research

Library Memories – Part 2: The Company

Leave a comment
These massive structures took computer programs to design optimally. A library helped me do it well.

The first company I worked for had several libraries, one for each of the major divisions. But the main library was in the main building, Building A, on Meadowlake Parkway in Kansas City. I discovered this when I was working in Building N (or was it Q?) in Roeland Park, Kansas.

I had to go the 10 miles to Building A a couple of times a week to deliver a deck of punch cards to the main computer room, where they fed it into a modem to have the program run at McDonald Douglas in St. Louis. Don’t laugh, folks. This was 1975-76. Sometimes I would go, drop the cards off, and get the results the next day in the interoffice mail. Sometimes I was supposed to wait for the results. On those times, with nothing to do, I found the library and browsed in it.

This led to what I call two of my “career moments”, those times when you do something so spectacular that you remember it for the rest of your career and even after. At the time, I was with a group that was doing the structural design of 230 kV lattice steel transmission towers for the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. A few years later, I would be in Saudi and get to see those towers on the ground.

We were designing the towners using what we thought was a very good computer program, and none of us knew a whole lot about it. In the library, I found shelves full of journals of the American Society of Civil Engineers. One of those was the Power journal—many years of it—dealing with all things a civil engineer does for the electrical system. I found several articles about transmission towers. Needless to say, this was interesting reading.

In one issue, I found an article comparing the six or eight major transmission tower design computer programs (the analysis done by an unbiased party). The one we were using, the BPA program, was ranked second. The one that was first was proprietary, available only to the company that created it. My boss was about ready to head to Japan to a meeting about the Eastern Province project. I showed him the issue and article, and he took it with him and read it on the plane. In his meetings, someone criticized our program, saying it was not the best. My boss, fortified by the article and with the issue in hand, said, “Well, the ASCE Journal of Power Engineering says it’s the best program available. Look at this.” He won the argument and I was a hero. Career moment #1.

In another of those issues was an article on the general methodology of structural design of those towers. That led me to check out the manual on the BPA program and I learned it was a whole suite of programs. We were using the Design program, but after that we were supposed to go another step and do a more detailed analysis with the Analysis program. Based on what I learned, we started using it.

I learned this while a full-scale model of one of our towers was being tested in Japan, and we had a man there watching it. We worked late into the night and discovered that tower was 3% overstressed in one structural member. We quickly made a change, reran the analysis program, and had our fix, and waited for our man to make a pre-arranged call (no cell phones back then).

That morning, our man in Japan called and said that the tower being tested had failed at 97% of full load. We gave him the fix and were able waive the re-test, saving thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. Career moment #2 was in the books.

My next corporate library experience: While in Saudi Arabia, I discovered an Aramco library in Dhahran, where I frequently had to go for meetings. Perhaps it was more of a privately run public-type of library, but I’m calling it a corporate library. Whenever I had a half hour to kill between meetings, I would go there and browse. My main find was an atlas of the universe. I don’ remember the exact name. This had more than star charts. It talked about all things stellar and galactic. I learned about stars and galaxies near and far, and clusters of galaxies. I learned what a parsec was and how it was used to measure distances in the galaxies.

This gave me a fascination with space travel. I have several books queued up about that. Not sure when, if ever, I’ll get to write them.

Alas, my last couple of memories about corporate libraries aren’t good. When CEI moved into our new building in 2000, we had a great library. The then-director of training and his assistant did a wonderful job of organizing and labeling everything. And we even had a digital card catalog. This worked great from move-in day to around early 2005. A re-organization caused the library to move to less prominent quarters in our building. Things didn’t get put on the shelf the digital card catalog said they were on. This was not a downsizing but rather a reduction in usefulness at the start of the search engine era.

The downsizing came in 2009. After three or four layoffs, we were giving up our beautiful building and moving into rented offices. The library would move, but would be reduced in size. I was assigned the task of deciding what to keep, what to throw away. First, I had to organize it, which resulted in finding many duplicates of manufacturer’s catalogs and many we didn’t need. Things such as old phone books, old municipal standards, etc. all had to go. It was hard, but I made the cuts, and the truncated library barely fit in its new shelves.

That wasn’t the worst. As the Information Era came on full blast, and as we had a little growth, around 2012 the library lost much of its usefulness. It had to be shrunk even more, to maybe 125 linear feet of shelf space in a conference room. Again I had to make those hard decisions. Then, around 2016 the company decided to get rid of it all together. I took some of it into my office, got other people to take things, and got rid of everything else. Those were hard decisions to make, and hard to see valuable books and references overflowing in our dumpster.

I’ve wondered what my first company did with that library in Building A. The thought of all those journals being discarded isn’t a pleasant one. Maybe they found a way to keep it. I hope so.

books, memories, miscellaneous, Mom

Library Memories, Part 1: childhood and teen years

2 Comments
The Elmwood Ave. Branch of the Providence Public Library, in a recent picture on Google Earth. Just as I remember it.

Right now, say for the last three years, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in libraries. I met our pastor for coffee from time to time in the Bentonville Public Library. The writing groups I’m in meet in libraries, either the Rogers Public Library or the Bella Vista Public Library. So four times a month on average I’m in a library. That’s not a lot, but it got me to thinking about libraries I’ve been in and memories I have with them.

Growing up in Cranston, Rhode Island, you would expect me to have memories of libraries there, but I have none. I don’t think we ever went to public libraries in Cranston. They were a little too far to walk, there were no convenient bus routes, Mom didn’t drive much, and Dad didn’t take us, so for whatever reason we weren’t library patrons in our hometown. In my adult years, when visiting the hometown, we took our kids to Cranston Public Library—in a building that wasn’t there when I grew up—when we were home visiting Dad.

I don’t think our elementary school had a library, and I have almost no memories of a library at my junior high school. I know there was one there, and I used it, but don’t remember it. But I remember our high school library. I wasn’t in it too often, but was some. One main memory I have was a date in the library. I was talking with my sister’s best friend, two years older than me, about how I had never had matzoh (she’s Jewish). So she said she would bring some to school and share it with me. This was my sophomore, her senior year. We agreed to meet in the library a half hour before school on a certain day. We sat at one of the tables off in a corner, ate matzoh and shared pleasant conversation.

A recent photo of the main branch of Providence Public Library. Again, just as I remember it from the outside, though its neighborhood looks a little different.

You say that’s not much of a date, and you’re right. But, hey, went you had as few dates as I did (4 total in 9th through 12th grades, only 3 if you don’t count the matzoh date), you count everything you can as a date.

But, strangely enough, I have many more memories of public libraries in Providence, Rhode Island. I remember it was in 8th grade, after Mom had died. I had a history research and report assignment. Whatever library was in junior high didn’t have books that helped me. So I got Dad’s permission to hop on the bus and ride to the Elmwood Ave. Branch of PPL. We lived four house lots off of Reservoir Ave., right on a bus stop. The bus also stopped right in front of the Elmwood branch. You had to cross Reservoir twice on foot, but I think we had some traffic signals not far away.

So I did that. It must have been around wintertime, because I remember it was dark. I crossed Reservoir, caught the bus, rode it toward downtown Providence, got off at Elmwood branch, crossed Reservoir again, and entered a world of books. I still have some idea of the layout, of going to the history books and finding ten books that were suitable for the report. I spent an hour or more reading and taking notes (I didn’t have check-out privileges at PPL). I listed all ten books. Then I went home by bus. This probably happened from around 7 to 9 p.m. If memory serves me correctly, I did this a second time for this report.

As a side note, I listed all ten books in the bibliography of my report, even though I really only used two of them in writing the report. I remember I got an A on the report, and the teacher wrote, “Great bibliography!”

I may be unclear about one part of this. When Mom died in August 1965, Dad’s shift at ProJo ran from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m, usually with an hour or two of overtime. At some point they moved him to a 4 p.m. to 12 a.m. shift, usually with two hours of overtime. If his change of shift happened after my 8th grade year, it’s possible that Dad drove me to the library as he went to work, and I took the bus home. No matter.

When I got to high school, the Elmwood branch seemed inadequate, I guess, because I took the bus to the main PPL in downtown Providence and did research there. I remember it was closed stack when I first started doing this and open stack by the time I graduated high school. You wasted a lot of time waiting for someone to find the books you needed and bring them to you. The open stack shifted the searching function to you. It still took time, but at least you could look at other, nearby books once you found the one you wanted.

I probably went to PPL Main Branch between five and ten times per school year. I kind of remember the layout. In fact, I remembered where both the Main branch and Elmwood branch were and found them easily on Google Earth. They are still in the same buildings and look the same as I remember them. I suspect, of course, that the insides are much changed, as technology updates have surely been made. No more card catalogue. Yes, that’s how I found those history books at Elmwood: looking in the card catalogue, finding one book that sounded good, finding that shelf, and see a great treasure before me spread out left and right, up and down.

I hope my grandchildren will have equally fond memories of libraries. I try to take them our ours whenever they visit, and to theirs whenever I visit them. We have a sizable library of books in our own home—as they do in theirs—but it’s not quite the same.

And, before some of you express being aghast at a 13 or 14 year old boy taking the bus in Providence, Rhode Island unaccompanied by an adult, after dark, all I can say is it was a different world and a different city then. And greatly different family circumstances that required it.

miscellaneous, reading, Writing

Three White Ribbons

Leave a comment
It’s hard to see, but in this photo are three white ribbons (paths) and two houses, mostly unseen most of the year.

Monday morning, we woke up to a layer of frozen stuff that fell in the night. It was thin, almost more condensation than falling precipitation. This was forecast; no surprise. For the rest of Monday, the frozen precipitation did come. Sleet. Freezing rain. Ice. Maybe even some snow. By the end of Monday daylight, it had accumulated to perhaps an inch, maybe less.

Tuesday dawned cold, around 18° F and cloudy. Mid-morning brought some more frozen precip—again as predicted—though not as long as expected. Maybe a little more accumulation.

I didn’t leave the house for these two days, not even to check the mail. The farthest I went was one step onto the deck to strew birdseed. We stayed inside, did inside tasks, and, to some extent took it easy. Put away a few Christmas decorations. I was glad that I got some yardwork done on Saturday.

I spent my usual time in the chilly sunroom, including some looking out the window time. Behind our house is a valley, known in these parts as a hollow, or “holler”. The photo above is from the sunroom. If you click on the photo to get it full screen, then enlarge it as much as possible and pan around, a few features come out, features that are totally obscured by forest vegetation seven or eight months a year, and features that can’t be seen except when show highlights them.

One of the features is three white “ribbons”—strips of land that are significantly lighter than adjacent areas. At the bottom of the valley is the channel bottom, covered with light-colored gravel. Up just a little higher is part of the Tunnel Vision Trail. Built in 2019 to early 2020, this trail forms a 20 mile loop in western Bella Vista, popular with mountain bikers. That is also light-colored and visible in winter months even when there is no snow.

Then, up at the top of the photo, hard to see, is a strip that is a road going up the hill on the opposite side of the valley. I saw those clearly Monday night and Tuesday morning. Alas, by the time I snapped this photo, the City had run the plow up the road. If you look closely, you can see a black ribbon. That’s the road. It is totally not visible except when snow highlights it, in this case the absence of snow shows where it is.

Our house on the left; the 700 ft house at the line on the right; the other house above that. Note the density of the forest canopy in the valley.

Other features that can be seen near the top of the photo are two houses. You can see the white roof of one. It’s on the far side of the black ribbon road, just right of the vertical projection of the evergreen tree near the bottom. The other is harder to see. It appears as a dark rectangle, partly obscured by tree trunks. This is the house that is closest to us across the holler, on this side of the black ribbon road, 700 feet as the crow flies. These two houses are barely discernable during normal winter conditions. The tree trunks reduce visibility that much.

There’s a metaphor somewhere in all of this, but I can’t tell what it is. Remove the foliage of life to see more of the background. Add a little adversity to see things even more clearly. Enlarge the vignette to see more details. I suppose I ought to explore that some.

All of which is so many words that doesn’t get me anywhere down roads I want to travel. Oh, I suppose better usage and description of metaphors would help me. My main concern Tuesday evening, when I began writing this post, was would I be able to get out of my driveway on Thursday to be able to attend the afternoon meeting of the Scribblers & Scribes critique group? That’s the road I need to travel next. By then the roads should be good enough to drive, but will I be able to get up the 50 feet of driveway to the street?

All of this is hurting my head. Too much thinking for a Tuesday night after a full day of editing, reading, and disaccumulating. I’ll add an update just before posting this on Friday.