going for a run and singing a song

How it got from May 15 to July 3, I haven't a clue. All of my promises about being a better blogger have rung hollow and empty. What to do but try to begin again?

I suppose the big news of the previous weeks is that, as of the beginning of June, I am officially in training for the 2008 Richmond Marathon in November. I've been running consistently over the past year, and I was surprised at how much I loved running the Monument Avenue 10K a couple of months ago. Still, 26.2 miles is a LOT farther than the 6.2 miles that make up the 10K. I admit that I'm already a little nervous about it. The funny thing is that running a marathon isn't that big a deal these days. It used to be fairly rare to meet someone who'd run a marathon. These days I feel like half the people I know have run one. The farthest I've ever run at one time is about 6 miles, and while I've done it four or five times, I'm worried about tomorrow's 8-mile jaunt.

In other news, I've been playing some music with my friends Jonathan and Antonia under the name Jonathan Vassar and The Speckled Bird. Definitely a folky, lo-fi Americana feel, very low key. We're playing a bunch of Jonathan's original tunes (he's a prolific and excellent songwriter), so the lineup has Jonathan on guitar and lead vocals, Antonia on accordion, glockenspiel, and vocals, and I'm covering mandolin, banjo, electric guitar, and vocals. It's been a really fun project so far - if you're interested in hearing some rough live recordings, we've posted a bunch on Reverb Nation...and for those of you on MySpace, you can find us there, too: http://www.myspace.com/thespeckledbird.

Hope everyone has a happy and safe 4th of July. Maybe I'll post again before the next major holiday...Labor Day, perhaps? Anyone want to take bets?

shameless family plug

If you have five free minutes (and obviously you do because you're reading this), I strongly encourage you to check out my sister Leslie's newly established blog. Only a few posts on there so far, so it doesn't take long to read the whole thing. But I'd be willing to bet the $3.52 in my pocket that it will be the best five minutes of your day. When we were little kids, I used to torture Les by telling her she was adopted...of course I was kidding, but now I'm not so sure - no one else in my family comes close to being as clever and funny as she is (and she's likely to post a lot more frequently, too).

hi. i used to play your songs in high school.

Way back in the early 1990's, rock music was just beginning to transition out of its big-haired, glam-rock, 1980's childhood into a funkier, groovier, sometimes-angstier adolescence. (Actually, come to think of it - maybe that was ME and not the music. Or maybe both.) One musical era was definitively ending, a new one beginning. The new scope was pretty broad: the heavy grunge of Seattle (Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Nirvana) to the light, clean "jam band" style of Blues Traveler and Dave Matthews. Nestled in the latter camp, the Spin Doctors released their album Pocket Full Of Kryptonite in August of 1991. I was about to start 9th grade.

People just three or four years younger than I don't remember this album or its creators. But for those who do, you may recall the easily digestible candy-sweet bounce of tunes like "Jimmy Olsen's Blues," "Little Miss Can't Be Wrong," and "Two Princes." I even remember playing some of these songs with high school friends back in the day.

This is all a long way of saying that Chris Barron, lead singer for the Spin Doctors, performed for the Children's Center here at the church a couple of weeks ago. He was in town for a gig and somehow ended up playing this middle-of-the-day thing for the 25 or 30 kids in attendance (all 5 or 6 years old or younger). Really nice guy, very laid back. But I have to admit it was surreal to sit there and watch this now-over-40 front man sing to a group of kids that had no idea who he was. It was interesting to hear the new songs Barron has written - like catching up with a friend you haven't seen in years (maybe decades) and finding out all that they've been up to. But I have to confess: as much as I like the new songs, I couldn't help but get a kick out of hearing live acoustic versions of "Little Miss Can't Be Wrong" and "Two Princes" while sitting in a church building with a couple of dozen little kids at lunchtime. Not an experience I would have anticipated when I was playing these songs at the age of 15.

the long and winding road

In a euphemistic rendition of the old saying that suggests one should take action or move on, my mother cleverly quipped via email that I should "blog or get off the spot." Loud and clear, mother. You may be the last person still checking to see if I've managed to overcome the narcissism of my Edible Estates moment long enough to post something - ANYTHING - new. (A mother's duties are neverending.)

So here I am. Since my last post, the thematic arc of March was one of travel. In the span of just over four weeks, I had the opportunity to visit the Society of St. John the Evangelist (an Episcopal monastery in Cambridge, Mass.) for a weekend retreat, join a mission trip to help repair homes in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans during the week of my 31st birthday, and backpack across the breathtaking Galiuro Mountains of southeastern Arizona. All incredible experiences, each vastly different from the others.

I owe details about each of these trips - especially the story that unfolded in New Orleans - but the details will have to wait. In the meantime, I did manage to snap a shot of the monastery at SSJE during a morning snowstorm. It really was as beautiful as it appears.

"edible estates" piece

Here is the piece that I wrote for the "Edible Estates" book that I mentioned in my last post.

February 2007. The piece of paper in front of me looked something like this:

Pros - Two flat 14’ x 20’ plots of land; south-facing; full sun all day; I’ll see the garden every day as I walk out my front door.
Cons - Everyone else will see the garden every day as they walk past my front door.

It wasn’t so much a “con” as an uncertainty. An edible front yard would be good stewardship of the little piece of land that I have. Could the “con” of high visibility actually be a “pro”? I swallowed my doubt.

March arrived. I borrowed my neighbor’s tiller, turned my yard into a plot of dirt, and panicked momentarily as I passed the “point of no return.” I laid out a walking path, cultivated beds, put in herb borders, and planted seeds.

At the very least, the resulting garden is a talking point. It piques curiosity. I’ve met more folks in the neighborhood in the last four months than I have in five years. Some ask questions. “What’s that plant?” “Are squash and zucchini hard to grow?” Most offer words of encouragement. “I love walking by every day and seeing the progress.” “I really believe in what you’re doing.” “Looks fantastic - keep up the good work!”

In truth, I’m an amateur. Last year was my first attempt at growing vegetables. It started as a pastime, a fun novelty: vegetables to which I could lay claim from my own ground. In short time, it has raised my awareness of the origins of what I eat, made me more intentional about choosing food. More than that, though, I feel intimately connected with the Earth. Watching a seed emerge from its burial to grow into a plant larger than my arms’ reach - and being an active participant in this natural cycle - has evolved into a tangible expression of faith in the natural order of things. That it produces the same fruitful results over and over again, year after year, is nothing short of miraculous. That I can share this with others in my own front yard is icing on the cake.

a few words in writing

Throughout 2007, one of the more frequent topics of discussion on this blog was the transition of my front lawn from a perennial weed-scape to a more productive edible landscape, inspired largely by architect and designer Fritz Haeg. My March 3 post from last year provides a more robust explanation of the philosophy behind the movement to use one's yard in a more environmentally friendly, less destructive manner. After an article about my yard and my friend Antonia's yard ran in the Richmond Times-Dispatch last summer, I got an email from Fritz Haeg himself (!) telling me that the author of the newspaper article had emailed the story to him. He asked if I would be willing to submit "before and after" photos of my yard and a 300-word essay for inclusion in an upcoming book about his Edible Estates project. Shortly after the Fourth of July, I sent my essay and photos. I had almost forgotten about it until a couple of weeks ago. The book, called "Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn", was released earlier this month, and I was fortunate enough to have my essay and photos included in the book. So...I'm published! And while it's not a huge deal (it is, after all, only a one-page essay in a garden book), I'm pretty proud of it and excited about it. I hope to post the essay in its entirety later this week.

"to whom much has been given..."

OK, this might be a little heavy to start the new year, but so be it. Below is an article I've just finished writing for the newsletter at the church. I say that to provide some context for the piece, though I think the moral obligation for the responsible use of wealth need not be confined to discussions within religious circles. Anyway, I hope you'll take the time to read it and let me know if you have any thoughts in response:

I'm really no good at New Year's resolutions. Inevitably, I begin the year with a vow to make some definitive changes in my habits: eating better, exercising more, praying with more intention and regularity. And inevitably, I'm right back to where I started by February. So, I didn't make any concrete resolutions this January, but I did have a meaningful conversation in the first hours of the year that has continued to nag at me and cause me to take spiritual inventory of my own place in
God's world.

I spent the New Year's holiday in Dallas visiting with four of my college friends and their spouses. We try to make it a point to get together each year around this time to catch up with one another. In the wee hours of January 1, after the midnight celebrations had died down and most of the group had gone to sleep, I found myself sitting at the kitchen table deep in conversation with two of my friends. Both of these men are incredibly successful by society's standards. They are well-educated and well-spoken, have excelled through the ranks of their respective businesses, and have achieved financial status that few our age enjoy. And, to be frank, most of our conversational topics over the course of the weekend reflected the comfort of this lifestyle: business dealings, finances, new houses, investments, etc. But in this late-night conversation that shifted first to politics and then to issues of faith and social justice, all of the pretense of those prior conversations fell away. One of my friends confessed that he lies awake many nights wondering if he does enough with all the blessings he has received. We talked about the difficulty of knowing where to draw the line between providing for the needs of ourselves and our families and the slippery temptation to indulge extravagantly in our wants. We debated what it is, exactly, that we are called to do in the passage from Luke's Gospel that reads, “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded” (Luke 12:48).

It is a conversation that has stuck with me over the past few weeks, raising as many questions as it answers. There's no way around it: much has been given to each of us. For the most part, we are blessed with good homes, good families, good educations, good jobs...and it is clear that God is calling us to use these blessings responsively and responsibly. We just have to figure out how best to do that.

So I have only one resolution this year. It comes in the form of a question, and I'm certain it will require continuous reassessment and attention in the months ahead: am I giving of myself all that God is asking me to give, and if not, where is there room for me to improve? I realize that it is a very basic question, one that should be obvious and ever-present for us as Christians. But the truth -- at least, for me -- is that often my day-to-day activity is not rooted in answering that question. I lose sight of it in the busyness around me and the relative comfort that I enjoy. Regardless of the form in which the answer comes, I am reminded of our stewardship prayer that begins, "Disturb us, O Lord, when we are too well pleased with ourselves," as I pray that each of us will be given the grace and wisdom to seek (and find) the ways in which God is calling us to be his heart and hands in the world around us in 2008.

putting it out there

For a while now, I've entertained this vision of finishing and recording at least a few of the dozen or so song fragments that I've begun writing since the demise of RingsEnd in May of 2003. Four and a half years later, I haven't made all that much progress. The number of fragments increases faster than the completed songs. Still, I have managed enough discipline to birth four or five fully-formed tunes with another half-dozen nearing the end of their creative gestation (talk about a long labor).

Anyway, in my original grand master plan, I envisioned myself finishing all of these songs, recording them with exquisitely eclectic arrangements (professional sound quality, of course), and releasing them as a solo album all at once. Needless to say, that hasn't happened. And since I have no idea when that will happen, I've decided to quit being so picky about it. I can polish them later with some studio time: for now, I just want to complete what I've started and get some ideas out there.

To that end, I've uploaded four songs to a site called virb.com. Of the four songs, two are new-ish (written within the past year) and two are a little older. Two are recorded with a little more polish and two are very rough guitar/vocal demos. For a slightly better description, here is the paragraph that I included on my virb page:

The songs on this page are like a bunch of teenagers, all in various stages of development: some of them are young, brand new, a little rough around the edges, barely conscious; others are a little more mature, been around a while...slightly more polished, with just a glimmer of what they potentially (God willing) might become. But none of them have reached "adulthood" yet. I don't like to share parts of songs while I'm writing them - a verse here, a chorus there - but each of these is finished to the degree that it is complete. (N.B. - Don't equate "complete" with any assessment of quality.) And while I suspect there may still be musical or lyrical changes to each at some point in the future, I feel as if maybe it's time to throw them out there while they're still coming of age.

If you want to give it a listen - and I hope you will - here's the site:
http://www.virb.com/chrisedwards

P.S. - As a total aside, I just want to state publicly that this blog is lame. I know. It used to sit untouched for days, and now it often goes weeks at a time without a single new word. And I know you're tired of my empty promises to do better...but...maybe in 2008??

outta the way, here comes W.

I am currently sitting in the Richmond airport waiting to board a plane that should have left twenty minutes ago. Travel delays typical of Thanksgiving week, perhaps? Nope. The airport is on lockdown. Looking out the window as I typed the last sentence, I watched Air Force One cruise by on the tarmac with El Presidente aboard. He apparently has decided that Thanksgiving week would be an excellent time to make a quick little jaunt down to Charles City County to visit Berkeley Plantation. Thank the good Lord W. will be on hand to "talk about what we as a nation can be thankful for during Thanksgiving," as one White House spokesman put it. I'll tell you what I WAS thankful for an hour ago, Dubbs: flying on Monday of Thanksgiving week in an attempt to get home in a timely fashion and avoid delays later in the week. Instead, I'm now sitting in a crowd of people who are thrilled - no, really, just THRILLED - that your arrival has meant the delay of thousands of passengers during the busiest travel week of the year, since no one in the airport can move a muscle or look sideways or sneeze while your plane is on the ground.

And now, there goes the Presidential motorcade. Tax dollars hard at work. Anyway, don't mind us - you go enjoy Berkeley Plantation. Take your time. We'll just wait here.

now hear this...

Resting on my blogging laurels again...for a whole month (plus) this time. Whoops.

I seem to remember expressing an intention to post thoughts on a variety of topics a while back. Obviously I have some catching up to do. To begin, a few bits of compelling music that have been using using up my mental bandwidth lately. It’s worth noting that memorable songs tend to pop up with some frequency. But in last few months I’ve come across several albums - both intentionally and by chance - that have lodged themselves in my psyche. I don’t intend for the thoughts below to be comprehensive reviews, rather a collection of impressions about each of these particular albums and artists.

Surprise - Paul Simon
The title couldn’t be more apt. The conversational patter of lyrics and complex intrumental layering are quintessential Paul Simon, as are the unexpected rhythmical accents and shifts that have been keystone’s of his music since “Graceland” and “Rhythm of the Saints.” But this album is...different. First of all, it’s produced by Brian Eno, who is best known for his extensive production work with U2. Eno tends to use a lot of electronica and unexpected sounds to create sonic landscapes. It doesn’t sound like something that would work with Paul Simon’s style at all. But somehow, it does. It’s similar to the way the songs on David Gray’s “White Ladder” mesh perfectly with the electronic undercurrents on that record. But here, it’s more interesting, more in the forefront, more a defining piece of each of the songs without getting in the way of the musical textures and lyrics. For example: in “Everything About It Is a Love Song,” the first verse begins with a loping, syncopated feel. But halfway through the verse, the electronic rhythm pattern kicks in, and suddenly the song has a straight-ahead double-time feel. An unexpected "surprise." Good stuff. One of my favorite lyrical lines comes in that same tune:

A tear drop consists of
electrolytes and salt -
the chemistry of crying
is not concerned with blame or fault

Other album highlights: “How Can You Live in the Northeast?”; “Outrageous”; “Wartime Prayers”.

Emotionalism - The Avett Brothers
Each Avett Brothers album seems better than the one that preceeded it. Without a doubt, there are some real gems on Live Vol. 2, Mignonette, and Four Thieves Gone. But if one looks at the Avett Brothers’ work through the lens of their previous albums, Emotionalism represents a vision coming into focus. The sound is still raw and heart-felt (you never doubt that they mean every word they sing...or scream), but the playing here is just better, the singing is tighter, and the songs are well-crafted and downright catchy. Their melodic lines are the best they’ve ever been, and the album has a consistent feel throughout. I find myself picking through songs on the Avetts’ earlier albums. Definitely not the case here: I love this album as a coherent whole. I love it for its musical and lyrical honesty. I love its inherent melodrama (it IS called “Emotionalism,” after all) and the fact that it somehow manages to feel exposed and vulnerable rather than contrived. In short, I think it's pretty brilliant.
Album highlights: “Die, Die, Die”; “The Weight of Lies”; “Pretty Girl From San Diego”.

Kismet - Jesca Hoop
I came across this album by accident, and now I can’t even remember how. Was it an Amazon.com recommendation? An iTunes highlight? Did I read about it while searching for info on another artist? I honestly can’t remember. But I’m glad I found it. Jesca Hoop grew up Mormon in Northern California, broke away from her family tradition, and lived in the Wyoming wilderness before coming back to California and working as a nanny for Tom Waits’ kids. Seriously, I couldn’t make this stuff up. Kismet is a quirky album. There are several different styles and genres going on here, all of which make sense when you read Jesca’s myriad musical influences. In the first few seconds of “Summertime” (the first track), one has the sense that this might be another cheesy pop album. And then, something happens. I’m not sure what. It builds. There’s a hint of opening and widening. She sings variations on the syllable “la” in a way that, for me at least, conjures images of running and African grasslands. I have no idea why. And just as I begin to get used to the feel, to come to terms with it, there’s a totally unexpected chordal shift. Abrupt without sounding ridiculous. The whole album is inexplicable like that. Songs morph from one genre to the next, but they’re all connected by an intricacy that is perpetually unexpected and refreshing. Interestingly, the best song on the album is the last. The first time I heard “Love and Love Again,” I said out loud (to no one) at the end of the song, “Oh my God, that’s really good.” And I went back to the beginning of the song. Three times. The melody line is so well written it sounds as if it would be right at home as a musical theater ballad. In fact, it conjures the same sensation that one gets when watching a play, the sensation that the too-perfect backdrop and too-convenient love story and too-perfect timing just might be real in some parallel universe. And this is the theme song for that parallel universe.
Album highlights: “Enemy”; “Love Is All We Have”; “Havoc In Heaven”; “Love and Love Again”

remembering eleanor, remembering the south

As promised, despite the maelstrom of activity swirling around eating up the hours of my days, one of the topics that currently warrants the most attention in this forum (albeit a bit belatedly) is the passing of my grandmother a few weeks ago at the ripe old age of 93. My August vacation didn't begin the way I'd planned after I cut my foot on the oyster beds and subsequently hobbled around for the next four or five days. Likewise, it ended differently than I'd anticipated as we made the five hour drive from St. George Island up to Selma, Alabama, for my grandmother's funeral.

I could provide a blow-by-blow description of the familial activities and the service itself, but I don't think it would do justice to the experience. I was more struck by the abstract facets of this visit than the concrete. To explain: I've been away from the Deep South for a long time now, longer than I'd realized. While the memory of it is familiar to my conscious mind, the experience of it is an entirely different being altogether. I sensed in myself a very definite internal response to being in that part of the country...largely because of its familiarity to me, but also because of some inherent, undefinable quality that belongs to the land and the people there. It would be only partially accurate to call it an emotional response, or a spiritual response. The word that comes to mind is from my high school Latin class: "animus." It is a word that means mind and spirit and consciousness and being, all in one. Finding yourself in Selma, Alabama, in late August (or any time of year, really...but especially summer) is not just a different experience or way of feeling or way of thinking. It is an entirely different mode of being altogether.

People tell stories about the past. They talk about people they knew and knew about, and the ways those people were interconnected. This practice obviously is not unique to the South, but I think the method of doing so may be. These stories are told with the same wide-eyed enthusiasm and charisma one would expect from a children's fairy tale or a campfire ghost story. It's a consequence of inflection, an unconscious rise and fall of the voice, a slowing or quickening of the words at just the right time. It isn't affected...it's just the way things are done. The brilliant thing about it is that it is unintentional, off-the-cuff, and universal - it seems as if everyone is capable of this feat, as if the ability to be a storyteller is just another genetically defined trait like green eyes or tan skin. (N.B. - I'm reluctant even to point this out. Much like the "observer effect" in physics, I fear that, in shining a light on this phenomenon, I will somehow change it in the process.) Even the stories themselves have a mythical quality to them. There is a sense that they don't even belong to the world in which we live, to this culture or this time period, but to some parallel universe that is often richer, darker, more mysterious. Is it any wonder that when I read Flannery O'Connor's short stories in college, they never seemed to be too bizarre, too gothic, too far afield?

So, on a thick, muggy August afternoon, I found myself in suit pants and rolled shirt sleeves standing with my family in Selma's Live Oak Cemetery, shovel in hand, sweating through my clothes despite the shade of enormous two-hundred-year-old oak trees. We - my parents, my cousin, my uncles, my aunt...even my grandparents' housekeeper (as much a member of the family as any blood kin) - we turned shovels full of red-clay earth on top of the ashes of both my grandparents as we sang "I'll Fly Away" and "Amazing Grace." Acapella. In harmony.

The experience was so vastly different from day-to-day life in Richmond. Simultaneously (paradoxically?), there was a strange sense of it being more familiar, more directly linked to the essence of my animus. The line between the mythology of the Deep South and the mythology of my grandparents has always been blurry and shifting for me. It's like trying to define the point at which the ocean meets the land. It changes every second. Eventually you stop trying to pin it down and begin to regard that liminal space and the regions it separates as components of a single, unified landscape. Such was the case as the physicality of my grandparents was fused - quite literally - with the land that sustained sustained them and the culture that defined them.

it wouldn't be fall if there were no football

Just before the kickoff of the Auburn vs. Florida game in The Swamp, Lou Holtz had this to say (in his crazed, increasingly senile mode of shouting at the camera) about unranked Auburn's chances against #4 ranked Florida:

Lou Holtz: "[Florida] will be totally focused, the fans will be excited...and they will win BIG."

Scott Van Pelt: "Any chance that Auburn - I mean, we've seen that upsets happen - is there any chance in your mind that Auburn gets it together in this game?"

Lou Holtz: "I think about the same chance of me being senator of Florida....It isn't going to happen, it isn't going to be close."

I've got two words for you, Lou: EAT IT.

After a 14-0 lead at halftime (yes, that's right Lou - Florida DIDN'T SCORE in the first half), Auburn managed to hang tough the whole game, even after losing Quentin Groves to a foot injury. Tied at 17 with three seconds to go, Wes Byrum - a true freshman - knocks down a 43-yard field goal to win the game for Auburn. And he does it not once, but TWICE, after Urban Meyer calls a clever (but kind of cheap) timeout right before the snap of the first kick.


Yes, Wes - you can Gator-chomp at the Florida fans all you like. You earned it. War Eagle!

next topic, please

My nasty foot has been on the front page of my blog for long enough. Gross. It's much better now, having healed very cleanly from the mess that it was. Thank God it's been captured forever in digital format and paraded like some freakish spectacle for almost a month on this page - I'm certain you've all been enraptured by it for weeks.

There is, of course, far more to report than I have the energy to write at the moment. Hopefully, upcoming posts will include stories and pictures of the shed that my dad and I are building in my back yard (really more a small house - you'll see), my thoughts on Paul Simon's most recent album (released May 2006), and an homage to my recently deceased grandmother, who passed away at the ripe old age of 93 last month. Just a smattering of the happenings around here, but that's the way it goes in September. Never a dull (or spare) moment.

To be continued...

beware the oyster beds

OK, so...this is not exactly the way I'd planned to start my vacation.

I like to think of the Gulf coast of Florida as a second home. I've been coming down here in the summers since birth, and my parents live here full time now. I know the land, I know the waters, I know how to fish and how hot and humid the weather really gets. In short, I may be on vacation, but I'm no tourist: I know how to live in this place. That being said, I may as well have been wearing plaid shorts, long white socks, brown loafers and a big stripe of white zinc oxide across my nose yesterday while fishing with my dad. The afternoon went like this:

Dad and I are out in the bay in our 19-foot Mako, fishing our third spot in as many hours. This particular spot is called Dry Bar, a very shallow (1-3 feet deep) bit of water over oyster beds surrounding a narrow, dry strip of sand bar. It often serves as a feeding place for speckled trout (and the occasional shark, but that's neither here nor there). As we anchor, I come around to the back of the boat, where the sides are low. With my back to the side of the boat, I place my rod in the holder and reach up for a loose piece of fishing line that has spun off another reel and into the water behind the boat. A wave rocks the boat suddenly, causing the side of the boat to clip the backs of my knees and seat me quickly on the edge. I instictively pull the line in my hand, but it's not taut. There's nothing to grab onto. My sudden movement - along with the rock of the boat - sends me tumbling over the side into the water. It's less than two feet deep. As my feet splash down, my right foot lands on sandy bottom, a single oyster shell near my toe. My left foot is not so lucky. It crashes down at an angle onto a pile of oyster shells. Initially, I think I've scraped the top of my foot - annoying, but not serious. I float to the front of the boat and hoist myself up by the bar around the bow. I swing into the boat and look down as my feet hit the floor. Expecting to see the equivalent of a skinned knee, I am surprised by the flow of blood and water off of my foot that reveals a jagged line of splayed skin almost three inches long. It's deep. I see a tiny piece of something shiny, which I later learn is the tendon to my pinky toe (not cut, luckily).

Dad is calm about the whole ordeal, as he always is (as long as the blood is not his own). On the boat ride back to the house, I clutch a towel over the wound as we weigh our options. There's the possibility of having Dad sew it up in our living room using regular needle and thread, a thought to which we give considerable attention. But we eventually decide that ice cubes and tequila shots are probably not adequate for anesthesia in this case. Instead, we pick up my Mom at work and make the half-hour drive to the Weems Memorial Hospital Emergency Room across the bay in Apalachicola. It takes eleven creative stitches to close the wound tight. The doctor does a phenomenal job, an artistic masterpiece given the ragged edges I'd presented as his canvas.

I admit, I feel foolish about the whole thing. I'd just taken off my Crocs five minutes before I fell in. I'd had them on all day, and if I had kept them on, they would have shielded my feet against the shells. But beyond that, the heart of the issue is the fact that I've grown up in and around the water my whole life...who falls out of an anchored boat? Even the most land-locked turista can stand in a floating structure without falling into the water, right? I feel like the pale guy who falls asleep in the sun and becomes the object of muffled snickers by the tanned locals when he has to buy multiple bottles of aloe for his sun-blistered skin. Or the guy who treks off into the woods convinced that he knows how to rough it for a few days, only to slink sheepishly back into town hours later with frostbite, snake bite, or a searing poison ivy rash all over his body. I want to shout, "I know better! I know better! I promise! I'm no amateur!" But the fact is that I fell out of the boat onto an oyster bar when I was not wearing shoes, and I've got eleven stitches that suggest I'm not quite the pro that I think I am, after all.

On the upside (for what it's worth), I did catch one gray snapper.

view from the top

We got back from Alaska on August 1, and it's almost impossible to believe that that was two and half weeks ago - I can feel time beginning to accelerate as September approaches. This picture is from the ridgeline of Mt. Fellows in Alaska. After our week of work, we did a three-day, two-night rafting and camping trip on the Nenana River along the border of Denali National Park. We camped in the same spot that we did the two previous years, a river-side site that's only accessible by water. On the middle day of the rafting trip, we did an all-day hike up Mt. Fellows in an attempt to reach the summit. We didn't quite make it all the way (ran out of water near the top), but we did make it to the summit ridgeline. It was approximately 8 or 9 miles round trip over a vertical elevation of about 4,000 feet. By far the toughest hike I've ever done. But the view from the top was well worth it!



Meanwhile, lots of things happening over the past couple of weeks: Leslie moved up to Richmond and is preparing to start grad school at the VCU Ad Center, Mom and Dad came up for a visit, Dad (and the rest of the fam) helped me build a new shed/workshop in the backyard (or, at least, we got started), and I'm heading down to Florida tomorrow for a week of vacation at the beach before the program year at the church starts on September 9. It will be nice to have a little quiet time just to relax and read, do a little fishing, a little scalloping...basically a week just to enjoy existing.

the end begins

It is currently about 20 of 2:00 in the morning. The flight for our youth mission trip to Alaska leaves in less than 12 hours.

Exciting, to be sure. But so is the fact that the final Harry Potter book is now in-hand. Like true book-nerds, Nancy and I ventured to Barnes and Noble at 11:30 p.m. for the midnight sale. We joined a crowd of approximately 700 other people (no exaggeration) equally excited about the final installment of the series.

I have to give credit to Barnes and Noble: we were near the end of the line, and it took us less than an hour to wend our way through the entire store to the cashier's desk. Pretty efficient...and, truth be told, shorter than most of my browsing trips to B&N.

I'm off to read a few pages before bed. Looking forward to spending the better part of three long plane rides reading. Being the relatively slow reader that I am, I'm thankful that I'll be in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness for a week and a half where no one can spoil any of the book for me. If only I can make it through the airports tomorrow, I should be home free...

more africa photos

Weeks after the fact, I have finally managed to sort through the 1,296 photos that I took in Sudan and Kenya. I'm picking up prints (yes, actual photographs that one can hold in hand) this afternoon from Richmond Camera. I culled the mass of photos down to just under 200, and I have uploaded them to Kodak Gallery and arranged them chronologically to provide some semblance of a story line. If you're interested in seeing our little corner of Africa as we saw it, you can get to the online Kodak Gallery Album here.

Enjoy...

toothpaste epiphany

I had an epiphany while brushing my teeth a few minutes ago. It's so simple and obvious that it hardly seems worth the breath to say it. The thought (I swear I've been mulling this over like a Zen koan for the past 15 minutes) is this: You can only see what is right in front of your face. It's so obvious as to sound painful, idiotic. Reminds me of that line from the play Anything Goes: "It's always darkest just before they turn on the lights."

What I mean is that you can't really know something fully until you experience it for yourself. And we can choose, to some degree, what we see and don't see (and here I intend "seeing" to encompass all types of personal experience). For instance: we can know - rationally - that a sunset is considered beautiful...but we don't know it as a part of ourselves until we actually see one in all its grandeur. We can "know" that disease exists, but we don't know it until people close to us (or we ourselves) fall ill. We can conceptualize what it is like to be incredibly wealthy or unacceptably poor...but we don't feel those things fully until we see them firsthand.

I guess what I'm getting at is that most of us living as middle-to-upper class Americans are comfortable. Yes, there are things that we want and need that we don't have. But generally speaking, we have the comfort of being able to choose. There are any number of things and experiences that we can't control in our lives...but there are a vast number that we can. And if it's true that "we can only see what is right in front of our faces," it seems to me that we have a moral obligation to place in our field of vision ideas and experiences that benefit others as much as (or more than) they benefit us. This is a tough idea in a country that prides itself on "the individual" and the personal gain inherent in pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. But given our global position of relative wealth, choosing to put others' needs in front of our faces - voluntarily compromising our anesthetic blindness of unknowing, the comfort of our unwillingness to look closely - seems to be the only responsible course of action in order for us to evolve as humans.

(OK, I admit it: this post is an oblique reflection on the whole Africa experience. Still struggling with what to make of it and, more importantly, what to do with it...especially as I increasingly see it as a microcosm of the human condition. Feel free to call me out if you think this is all pseudo-philosophical overly-sentimental idealistic B.S....but be prepared to defend your position.)

garden in the paper

A follow-up on the May 30 post about my garden being in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. The article ran on Saturday, June 9 while I was in Africa. I was really happy with the way it turned out and the amount of space given to this edible front yard idea - the article about Antonia's garden covered the entire front page of the Home and Garden section. Very exciting - and affirming - for these projects to be displayed so publicly. Here are links to both articles (mine is the second, leading out of the first):

Times-Dispatch article on Antonia's garden
Times Dispatch article on my garden

Sorry the pictures seem to be unavailable at this point, but at least the articles are still there...

a thousand words (i hope)

A few more pictures from the Sudan trip. I fear that Africa may be the predominant blogging topic for a while - if that suits you, excellent; if not, bear with me.

I hope these images begin to capture the scope of activity, emotion, and atmosphere of our experience. I considered not including the rather graphic image of the slaughtered bull below, but I felt it would be dishonest not to attempt to show the full breadth of what we saw. Hope you find something you like within these images: