"While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
for future years"
-- William Wordworth, Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey
This photo is of two of my horses, but I didn't shoot the picture. It was taken by my neighbor, Kat Sherby, whom we often ride by to visit. Kat's a horse lover too and enjoys having the horses come by.
South Austin: We're all here because we're not all there.
I rode all the way to Pleasant Valley today. The air was heavy with moisture blowing up from the Gulf of Mexico, typical weather for this time of year. When the clouds burn off this afternoon, it will just be hot. We broke down and turned on the air conditioner two nights ago--but only at night. I study kanji indoors during the heat of the day and only go outside to garden after the evening news.
Despite being a person who seeks closure, when it comes to home improvement projects and household chores, I'm a starter not a finisher. I rarely display the tenacity to get the job done. My mind wanders. I drift. I know that someday we are going to remodel the house. So I can't commit the effort to fixing things up now. I don't like stop-gap measures. I can fritter away my time with other things.
Like a pot coming to a boil, sometimes I'm moved suddenly to action. Yesterday I decided to roll up the winter rug. Then I was able to move the coach to clean behind it. Then I thought, "Hey, since I've pulled the couch away from the wall, I could go ahead and paint it." The drywall had buckled in three places around the doorway, so I'd been putting off this project for 11 years. But today I started.
I caught my reflection in the window at dawn this morning as I was writing. This picture captures my mood at the moment better than any words. I'm in a bit of a fog right now, a little beside myself, a little between selves.
After breakfast at The Driskill, M2 and I walked over to the Austin Museum of Art to see the Andy Goldsworthy exhibit and watch a screening of Rivers and Tides. We walked alongside a parade of boy scouts moving noisily up Congress Avenue. The Paramount Theater was changing its marquee.
I'm always fascinated with those timeline photographs like the one Ronni has at Time Goes By or the portraits taken over three decades of the Diego Golberg Family.
But I'm also interested tracing the family resemblance across generations. Of course it's easier to see ourselves in the younger generation than for the youngsters to imagine that we were once very much like them.
I don't get to see my family very often and so the images I have of them tend to be of how they looked 30 years ago. When I do visit, I'm so struck by how my niece, Natasha, looks like her mother at the same age, I tend to call her "Mary" by mistake. And when Mary sent me her own high school graduation photo years ago, I was astonished at how it looked like Mom's. The heart-shaped face, the same smile and chin, the same nose (we all have that!) and even the same eyebrows. Then last week I get this photograph of Natasha. And although she's a few years younger, I definitely see the family resemblance.
Alex (left) and his paternal grandfather, Gavin Alexander Moffat. (We get confused because, like the Romans, Alex's dad has almost the same name, Gavin Alexander Murray Moffat.)
By the way, I didn't apply any Photoshop filters to make the photo of Alex look more old-fashioned or to blur out the edges. Whoever When JAM MacDonald took it at university in high school, he did that.
Katie (24) and her Gran.
The nose isn't quite the same, but the expression is unmistakable. I think Alex has his Gran's mouth.
2005-02-06. Skyline: Austin, Texas.
After an early morning rain, AJM and I took a Sunday walk around Town Lake and he asked me to snap this gloomy photo of the Austin skyline. It reminds me of a scene from a science fiction movie where the city is emptied of people.
Sunday, inspired by my friends who were in the Ride for the Roses, I dusted off my bike and rode around my neighborhood. My efforts didn't attain the status of exercise. I spent most of the time taking photographs. Our neighborhood is undergoing a transformation and new house are springing up everywhere.
I braked to a halt when I saw this house which seems to be a California mirage complete with a car with California tags, palm tree, and blue skies.
What makes the picture, though, is that this new house is across the street from a more typical brightly-colored Bouldin cottage with its attendant flock of chickens.
I like many of the new houses (although we do get the rare McMansion). I like this one. Many of my neighbors don't. They fear for the character of our neighborhood. We've got lots of lovely cottages. We've got lots of old shacks, too. I would hate for some sort of standardization, though, because what I love most about our neighborhood is the juxtaposition of our wacky differences.
The danger I see in these ultra-modern houses is not architectural, but that the buyers of such houses might not understand that they've moved into a neighborhood that likes its chickens. Someone's already got our goat.