We drove today from Redding in the topmost part of the Sacramento Valley (103 degrees f.) to Crescent City in the northernmost corner of California( 64 degrees f.). 

Whiskey Town Reservoir on Highway 299 in the region known as The Trinity Alps...

Your tax dollars at work.

Everybody who has been to this corner of California will remember Paul Bunyan and Babe, the Blue Ox, at the Trees of Mystery.

The gigantic redwood trees are indeed overwhelmingly mysterious.  They are some of the oldest living things on the planet... certainly some of the biggest.

...and tallest.

Some of you will recognize the T-Shirt with Clyde Yoshida's logo. That's the Crescent City lighthouse in the background.

Same lighthouse... from the other side.

I couldn't stop myself...  yet another picture of the Crescent City Lighthouse with the fog rolling in.

 The California coast looking north from Crescent City to the beginning of Oregon.

You cannot say you have thoroughly seen anything until you have got a photograph of it. 

                                                                                                                                                  --Emil Zola

Today I got a photograph of Santiago Calatrava’s Sundial Bridge.  The Spanish architect, sculptor, and structural engineer designed the footbridge to span the Sacramento  River in Redding, California. It was opened in 2004 and in my thinking ranks right up near the top of major outdoor art works in the United States.

And below the bridge on the River...

And out to the west of Redding... a grass and brush fire.

Two crows seem to be trying to figure out what to do about it.

Maybe you can go home again...

if you don't expect everything there to make sense.

Maybe it's my age.

The experience of church isn't the same as it once was for me.

Years ago it was the mystery that kept my interest.

Mystery has mostly been replaced by logic...

which can be useful

if you're trying to figure out what's wrong with your car 

but doesn't satisfy

the way the symbol of the stained glass lamb does.

  

Satisfaction is important.

This morning the gray-haired fellow who sat in a pew in front of me

got up to read, and the voice had a familiar, satisfying ring to it.

"THE WORD that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: "Come, go down to the potter's house,

and there I will let you hear my words." So I went down to the potter's house, and there he was

working at his wheel.  The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter's hand,

and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him.

The reader was once a student of mine.

He was once young Vincent Hamilton.

He's a surgeon now in the town where he was a boy.

I remember his mother and his father... good people.

The morning in church had something to do with the way I watched

in the afternoon a bumble bee working a hedge of blue flowers.

I wondered how something with small wings and a big body could fly.

It's a mystery.

Brunch with family and friends was satisfying, too,

not because the food was good, and it was... very good...

but because of the mystery that binds us together.

Fundraiser in Yuba City:  With all the things wrong in the world, I prefer to believe the good outweighs the bad stuff.  Tonight a community effort raised a hell of a lot of money to finance the operation of REST (Regional Emergency Shelter Team) for another year. Two very talented, tireless singers who call themselves "Prairie Moon" and a technical genius provided the entertainment for the event. A whole army of other volunteers created a wonderful evening. It was easy to see their radiance, their happiness, their obvious feelings of satisfaction at being of service to the homeless and to others in the community who have fallen on hard times.  Life is good.

Sacramento Valley

The Sacramento Valley is one of the hottest places in the country this first week of September; and that's the way I remember it... perhaps that's the way it's supposed to be.  I remember the September of my first year as a full-fledged, fully credentialed teacher at Yuba City High School.  The year was 1957.  The school wasn't air conditioned.  In fact, I don't think there were schools anywhere on earth that were air conditioned.  If there were, I hadn't heard of them, and I doubt that anybody in my part of the world had considered that it was important for high school students and their teachers to be cool.  I'm trying to remember what being cool meant in 1957... and it's somehow slipped my mind.  I do remember what it felt like to have a job and a salary.  I had worked since I was thirteen, but the word salary had special meaning. It was different from just "getting paid."  I think I probably made more picking  peaches in a week than I made teaching high school English for a week, but I got "paid" for picking peaches, and they gave me a contract and a salary for teaching school.  It wasn't much, but it was wonderful.  I thought I was the luckiest guy in the world, and I wanted the students I had that first year and all the subsequent years to believe that they were lucky to have me as teacher. 

I didn't mind the heat of the Sacramento Valley then, and I'm determined not to mind it now that I'm back in it again for a few days... even while I'm driving through The Valley on the way back to Yuba City and I glance at the temperature reading on the dashboard of my car, a car I wouldn't have dreamed of ever owning when I was a first year teacher, and the reading is 104 degrees f. outside and I'm gliding along in absolute air-conditioned comfort.  The pictures today are from a Highway 99 "rest area" a few miles south of Fresno.  Life is good.

You Know What...

Sometimes the pictures don't have to seem as if they belong together.

Sometimes things that happen in a day 

seem not to belong together...

but they are there anyway.

Go with it...

One of my very favorite poems by one my favorite poets, Robert Frost, came to my mind this morning as friends Clyde, Dave, and I talked over our Wednesday morning ritual coffee. As happens sometimes, actually quite often, something happened midway into our conversation that knitted together important pieces of the day. We had been talking about age and the great value of friendships and concern over Syria and other troubles in the Middle East.  Somewhere midway in our congenial talk, a man, whom I thought to be quite old, came into the courtyard with his cup of tea and chose a small table behind ours.  He didn’t seem to be paying attention to us, but after a few minutes, he made a comment about Syria and about passing through Arkansas on the way from Chicago to San Diego by way of New Orleans.  Ours is a friendly table.  Clyde turned and started introductions, so from then on the  conversation included Del, our new friend. He told us how small San Diego was when he came when he was twenty-three. Clyde wanted to know where Del had worked... (downtown at Marston’s Department Store) and where he lived then (downtown in a small apartment, bathroom down the hall) and where he lives now... (Adams Avenue across from Trolley Park ... a place where there was once an ostrich farm). 

Dave asked, “If you don’t mind my asking, how old are you now?” 

“Eighty-six,” Del, the man whom had I thought to be quite old, said.

“Sobering,” I thought.

Later after Dave and Clyde left, I asked Del if I could take his picture.  I told him about my pattern of taking and keeping a photograph that I think of as “the picture of the day.”  I told him I will have my seventy-eighth birthday next week.  He laughed and said, “If we had been in the same school when I was in eighth grade, you would have been a first grader.  I’ll bet I would have teased you.”  I said I would have liked that.  We laughed a very good laugh, the way friends do.

PROVIDE, PROVIDE

--Robert Frost

The witch that came (the withered hag)
To wash the steps with pail and rag,
Was once the beauty Abishag,

The picture pride of Hollywood.
Too many fall from great and good
For you to doubt the likelihood.

Die early and avoid the fate.
Or if predestined to die late,
Make up your mind to die in state.

Make the whole stock exchange your own!
If need be occupy a throne,
Where nobody can call you crone.

Some have relied on what they knew;
Others on simply being true.
What worked for them might work for you.

No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard,
Or keeps the end from being hard.

Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide!

A cactus garden is an apt metaphor for a village.  You get a great many varieties of cactus together, and you'll begin to notice they are lot like people. Almost all of them, even the most prickly, can be tolerable, almost lovable sometimes.  A few are not... ever.  Nasty dispositions that repel every living thing.  Some are whimsical.  Others are treacherous. Even the most forbidding may have incredibly beautiful flowers; and sometimes that beauty, when it fades, wilts into repugnance.  The fruit, if you can get to it, can be delicious. Lately, I've felt a kinship with a wizened, gray-haired specimen.  Which are you?

SEPTEMBER 2

I sit watching television news

In the warm comfort of my house

Alarmed and ashamed

Of the depravity of my species:

A fog of fear and anguish

Circulates around the world

Like the sarin gas he used that

Settled on a Syrian neighborhood

Choking and killing children and

Parents and old people and cats...

And Assad the Terrible lives still

Safe in the luxury of his cozy palace

Surrounded by countrymen serving him

In conscripted servitude, the tyrant sleeps

And eats and pisses the same

In September as he did in July

Seeming unafraid the end may come

Rudely when he least expects it

And his pants are down:

Does he know the world watches 

And waits for the news he is dead

And his stockpiles of gas transferred?

Auden said Thucydides knew

About Democracy just enough

To make a speech but not enough

To teach dictators how to avoid

Becoming addicted to the special taste 

Of megalomania fed by obsequiousness

And ignorance of petty advisors

Informed mainly by military generals

Who drink the same sacerdotal kool-aid 

Peddled on bomb pocked roads 

Of a once-upon-a-time peaceful place.

You know how it is sometimes when you look at people you really love and appreciate, wishing you could get all such people in one place at the same time, and you are reminded again that it isn't ever going to happen, but you know that's all right, and probably even better that it can't happen, because you'd never really be able to take it all in... so what do you do... you look around and begin to notice how beautiful they all are and how everything in the space of the backyard is just right except for the people who aren't there but you'd like them to be, so you start to be glad that the things are there that are there, like some little zinnias and marigolds in the flower bed behind where I was sitting... and you know life is good.