We’ve entered the time of year when things are different from how they look. As the skies and the woods and the yards turn to gray and brown, the things that stimulate our other senses grow stronger.
That’s especially so out here in the country.
It was five years ago, riding back on the West Virginia side of the Ohio River from Ashland, Kentucky, that I noticed it. We had been at the dedication of a memorial to Jack Kerouac at the Paramount Theatre there. What was stunning about the trip home was the festoonery. Every house, it seemed, had some elaborate Halloween decoration. Even fairly woebegone trailers could be counted on to have out front a 20-foot-high Frankenstein’s monster, well lit and kept inflated by a powerful fan.
Shortly after I moved here I received one of those documents that make the e-mail rounds. It was based on the then-popular “you might be a redneck” comedy act, only each stanza of this one ended with “you might live in Ohio.”
It’s election year, which means that the national media are dusting off their maps and trying once again to figure out exactly where Ohio is. You will note that I said “media are,” not “media is.” That’s because I’m a member of a secret organization dedicated to the preservation of endangered portions of the language. “Media” is plural — the singular is “medium” (as in “The Athens News is an unparalleled advertising medium.”) Likewise the word “data.” If someone says “that data is not available,” he or she may know whether or not those data are available, but he or she is illiterate.
The project finally got far enough along that I could do something with it.
For years I’ve carried around tens of thousands of negatives and transparencies, the result of a career of writing stories and making photographs. But the digital world has so taken over photography that the real, silver-based stuff is all but dead. Soon it will be so far in the margins that any work of chemical photography will be proceeded by the ubiquitous and annoying word “artisan.” So if all those many thousands of images were to have any further life, they would need to be digitized.
When did I turn into my grandfather? No, I haven’t gotten short and bald-headed, nor do I have a desire to come out of retirement and practice dentistry using a foot-pedal drill on relatives in a dimly lit basement, though this may be due to my never having been a dentist.
Help me out here, because if it makes any sense I cannot see it. Last week I took a friend to the airport, and saw her pulled aside by three giggling — really — representatives of the “Transportation Security Administration” for secondary screening.
When I heard didgeridoos, and people saying “G’day, mate,” I realized I’d dug deep enough but in the wrong place.
Some of you may remember when it was a very big deal to make a long-distance telephone call. I have actual photographs of my grandparents, on the occasion of their golden wedding anniversary in 1956, at the telephone, the notes on the backs of the pictures saying that they were receiving calls from Dallas and Nebraska. This was thought remarkable at the time.
Despite the warmth of the day, swinging the maul down on the hunks of black locust wood was satisfying. In every case, the pieces of log had blown apart with that satisfying sound good wood makes when it’s split.
Then came the hidden knot.