Travels in the Web of Life

A while back I commented on how we're all part of the web of life, with wispy threads of memory and strong connections to friends and family. I renewed some of my friendships during the past ten days. As promised, here are some photos from those recent travels. No profound musings accompany them, just a few random thoughts.

   First, I went "shunpiking" through northeast Georgia to Brevard, North Carolina where I tracked down and surprised former Orlando neighbor Pete Hurt. It was he who painted the violin picture we displayed at Dad's memorial service and which hangs proudly in my home office. (See post of August 16.) These were some views along the way:

Pawn shops, gun shops, pickup trucks, and winding mountain roads are among my most vivid impressions. I kept imagining I that I was hearing "Dueling Banjos." And some of the scenery along the Blue Ridge Parkway in NC was beautiful:

   In Winchester, KY I saw friends Ron and Bart (also erstwhile Orlando residents) and in Louisville joined in the 40th birthday festivities of former student Brian Doheny. He and his wife and small son (who is now in college) were neighbors in St. Louis 15 years ago. Thank goodness I was only 32 at the time or I would have felt really old at the party.

   As nice as the weather was in NC and TN, it was stunning in the Bluegrass state. This shot of the Hillerich & Bradsby (baseball bat) factory in downtown Louisville and the view of the Ohio River attest to that fact. Where I was standing to take the river picture is as close to the Hoosier State as I've been in a long time. It seemed kinda strange not to cross the bridge and sing, "Back home again, in Indiana..."

   As I compose this I'm struck by how few pictures I take of people, misanthrope that I am. 

This is the only decent one of Brian--he's lighting one of the scores of candles they had burning that night. I got none of Pete (forgot and left the camera in the car) and due to lighting issues none of the ones with Ron and Bart turned out at all. Sorry...  

...here's Ron and Bart's house, though. It's more than 100 years old, sturdy and charming.

After getting home last Sunday (9/26), I turned around Thursday and went to Warm Springs, GA to see FDR's "Little White House" and reconnect with Fla. Hosp. Assn. friends who come up every year to stay in a nearby cabin and "count cows" (their metaphor for doing nothing). They wouldn't let me take their pics, but here's my friend's cabin, followed by FDR's place. The unfinished portrait is the one that was being painted of him in the Little White House when he had his fatal stroke. It remains as it was in at the moment of his death.

    These trips and the friendships they refreshed prompted me to dig out and re-read one of Emerson's essays, the one in which he wrote "the only way to have a friend is to be one." I thank the folks I visited on these sojourns; I thank them for their hospitality; I thank them for their kindnesses; I thank them for letting me be their friend.

    At the start of that same essay Emerson also wrote: "Maugre [notwithstanding] all the selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether."

    Would that the whole world, bathed in that fine ether, could remember those words more often.

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    Oh, one more thing that I almost forgot....

... somewhere along the way there was this guy. He wants to take his country back. (To where I'm not sure.) When I told him what kind of work I do, he said he wants no part of Obama's socialized medicine, then added, "And he'd better keep his hands off my Medicare too!"

(Spoken like a true, informed patriot.)

:-)