BACK ON THE BICYCLE this afternoon… along the San Diego River in Mission Valley out to the Pacific Ocean.  San Diego by the river is a quiet place if you find a spot away from traffic.  I found such a place today.  The shoes: there is surely a story that I will never know.  Not knowing is sometimes better than knowing.  This was one of those times.  

Out at the entrance to Mission Bay some boats were resting and others were coming or going.  There are stories there, too.  Bicycling in the late afternoon is a good break from work that has to be done, and it gave me a chance to think over what I heard in the meeting last evening.

Florence Foster Jenkins is a movie worth seeing.  I’ve been reading essays and books on art lately, and I feel that there is something that I’m missing in the work of some artists. Some don't make sense sometimes. It’s interesting that Florence Foster Jenkins, the real person not Meryl Streep who played her in the movie, but the real Madam Florence thought she could sing correctly.  The experience of the movie is worth the time especially when it can be fitted in between other duties that are tiring. I hadn’t found my photograph for today before the movie, but driving home from the movie theater I remembered a single orchid, the only one on a stalk from last year that bloomed again this year, and I thought it would make an appropriate picture for today.  There is only one like it.  It’s beautiful.

Jerral and Jeremy, nineteen years ago, on the Davids' Boat, off San Diego.  Today's picture, which I took today of a picture that someone else took long ago warms my heart.  Jeremy and I spent the today sorting through some books.  He is the same person in the picture... only now he's a fine young man getting ready to go back to a job at NASA at the end of this month.  

Dahlia, Insect, Anniversary flowers at Church...  

I confess to an attraction to melaleuca trees.  I became aware today that most of the pictures I have taken of melaleucas are of dry, papery bark covering the lower area of the trees.  There is much to these trees than the loose flapping sheets of desiccated bark and interesting slits in the bark a few weeks or months before the flapping stage.  Today I got a picture of a melaleuca coming to life.  At a place where a big limb had been cut away, new green shoots had emerged. The tree is very much alive.  I'll try not to forget this stage.  The other two pictures are from other days.  The Japanese garden lantern is from Balboa Park's Japanese Tea Garden.  The vagabond standing in front of graffiti
is the beginning of something, not the end.  I came across the picture when I was downloading a set of pictures from a disc that I had thought was empty.   I took this one of myself last year in Lisbon.

August 12, 1955... a special day.  Sixty one years ago Margaret and I were married.  The years have been very, very good.  We celebrated the day with lunch at the DeRisi Home.  Everything was good, but Ruth's special cheesecake desert was the best cheesecake I've ever had...

Today’s photographs are actually part of an ongoing record of what was happening in my part of the world for the past couple of days.  The epiphyllum blossoms that are wilted are the end of those vibrant red blossoms I posted on the seventh of this month.  This is only the eleventh, and the final bulb on the mother plant opened yesterday.  I took the picture just this morning.   I went to the bank for Margaret a couple of days ago and got the picture of the hill above Mission Valley at the north end of Plaza Boulevard.  I think the area is called University Heights because SDSU ( I think this information is valid) was once a school either planned for the area or was actually located in the area for a time.  The first picture is from yesterday.  I was going into Linder Hall at First United methodist Church first to have supper and then to attend a discussion (called something with the word “holy” in it) about human sexuality, particularly whether or not the Methodist Church should end it’s homophobia and accept that LGBTQ persons, as well as all the other people who are human beings.  The church will leave the belief that people do not at some time in their youth choose their sexual orientation.  Science and psychological and social science have all determined through research and careful study that sexual orientation is built into the person from birth.  Of course, the church will eventually accept LGBTQ persons as legitimate persons, acceptable to God and to congregations for any employment the church has open to people.  The day will come soon when everybody who learned as children that the Bible is a historical text will have forgotten that there ever was a problem.  Some of them will learn that the Bible is a faith text, others will go on believing that the Bible is historically accurate in every respect, but that there is some other reason for the church’s change of heart and mind.  The church will change.  Some other Christian groups and other religious organizations will hold onto the “magic” elements in religion for a longer time; but they will be fewer and less powerful, and LGBTQ people will join the rest of the human community in lobbying for equality for all people. 

I looked at that last sentence and was about to change it to say that perhaps the rest of the human community will join LGBTQ persons in lobbying for equality for all people; and I changed my mind because I know some LGBTQ people who treat other people as inferiors, and I know of many people who are not LGBTQ who have soldiered on in favor of inclusion of all people without regard to sexual orientation.  So I’ll just say the world seems to be getting better… and I’ll wonder at least for the remainder of today if the world is indeed getting better.  

Stepping outside my front door into the world I asked myself today if I felt safe.  The reasonable answer to the question is that I don’t feel unsafe.  The election is raising questions that are unsettling, but the unsettled state of the nation doesn’t make me feel unsafe.  Our wedding anniversary comes every August 12th, and this year I have a particularly good feeling about the marriage that has endured for more than 60 year.  I am never bothered with feelings that the marriage was in any way a mistake.  I wouldn’t change anything about my family.  I have been retired for more than a decade, even from that teaching job I did for seven years after retirement from the the main job of my lifetime.  There isn’t anything about any of that which I would change if I had some kind of magic that could make such changes possible.  Twenty years seems a very short period of time, and I am aware that if I live twenty years more I will endure past the age of 100.  Wow!  I still am not feeling unsafe in this world, the only world I know.  The election is bringing up questions that don’t have easy answers, but I’ve decided to stop saying that if that certain candidate should happen to be elected to the office of President, I would move to another country.  I’ve asked myself if I should stop saying it because I now believe he won’t win the election or if saying it is a political statement too elementary to be meaningful or that saying it means I would abandon my country under certain circumstances.  I have decided that I have always liked leaving the United States, but I like even more coming back to it.  NO… I am here for the long haul—for the long run.  

Whoever wins the election, the people who are ridiculous enough to elect a totally wrong person to serve as President are going to be here after the election  My first responsibility as a citizen of this good country is to celebrate my own citizenship by refusing to give it up. Instead of knuckling under a yoke of ignorance that threatens our democracy, I shall stand against ignorance, and I shall try to make my stand with grace and kindness.  I shall try very hard not to fall into the trap of becoming mean like some whose political ideas are different from mine.  I am determined to give enough thought to my own political responses so my responses won’t hurt even the demagogues. 

I can’t allow myself to spend the months and weeks and days between now and election day in November looking for things Mr. Trump says to see if he actually means the awful possibility he has suggested.  It’s not unusual to hear someone on that other side of the political continuum use the Second Amendment as a reason to allow anyone to own any kind of weapon.  I’m going to step out on a political limb today and say the candidate can’t possibly mean to suggest that if he loses the election, a response may be to resort to violence.  I can't believe he is suggesting taking up arms to make political points.

Today Donald Trump tried to recover his failing campaign.  His attempt didn’t work.  I listened to his speech after a day of reading about changes that Americans can expect by 2025 and a day after Margaret and I took a ride in the new Tesla automobile that our friends Larry and Mary Beth Dirksen drove to church yesterday.   That car is a confirmation of the opinions about how fast things are changing.  Larry drove out onto Interstate 8, headed toward El Cajon, and let the car drive itself until we got to the place on the highway where we turned and returned to San Diego.  Wow!  I’m still in shock.  I’d read that the car “knows” to stay in the lane, “knows” not to get too close to the car in front of it, and “knows” all kinds of information about the road and about itself and about other cars on the road.  I don't doubt what I read about how fast the world is changing.  I have only to look back at the decade behind us to know the world Donald Trump describes in his “Make America Great Again” has gone by already.  Today when I heard his speech, I realized the America he wants to take us back to doesn’t exist anymore. 

What I am going to do before voting against The Trump in November, and what I am going to do as I move into the future is to continue to look at the natural world and to take pictures of what is beautiful in it.  For a camera to take today’s BLOG pictures I used my phone.  It wasn’t more than a decade ago that phones, which practically everybody above the age of ten owns and carries around, were first available in stores.  If the next president serves an eight-year term of office, what will the world be like at the time the next person goes to serve us in the White House? It certainly isn’t the world described in the speeches of Donald Trump.

Epiphylum

After dinner at one of my favorite places to eat in San Diego, Tio Leo, I parked the car in the garage and when I got out of the garage, I saw as if for the first time, the tree that has always been there.  The first picture is of a leaf kept hostage by the seed pods of the tree.  The other two pictures are of the leaves of the tree.  They look droopy and sad tonight.

I decided to check on the Melaleuca Trees near our apartment, and just as I suspected, they have changed dramatically since the last time I looked.  I checked the Internet to find out as much as I can comfortably without the search turning into a thesis, and I learned that Melaleuca Trees are part of the Myrtle Tree family.  I also learned that they are called paperbark trees and that they go through life changing.  No wonder I like these trees so much.  Anything that goes through life changing can't be bad.

I have a new friend… someone whom I will never meet in person.  John helped me solve a problem with a new modem that makes possible a connection to the Internet which makes possible my posting my BLOG every day.  

Today’s BLOG picture is a bumble bee, or if that doesn’t connect with anything you happen to be considering today, how about the quick shot I got of a section of bookcase in our house.  If you’d like to borrow a book, or a whole shelf of books from our house, we’ll be glad to lend… or give away the books.  My intention has been to reread books that have meant something to me, but I’m not getting around to reading all of them; so if you borrow something and keep it away from the bookcase, I’ll forget or neglect to remember that I intended to reread it.  

I’m thinking the bumble bee is the picture for the day… perhaps because it’s free to go around to wherever it wants to go.   Well,that’s what I think.  I have to admit that I don’t know much about bumble bees.  Maybe they don’t go very far from where I got the pictures.  Maybe they’ve never been even as far away as Hillcrest, which is just across the valley from where I live.I’m going to go on thinking about bumble bees and other things pretty much what I’ve been thinking about them all along; and I prefer to think they wander far and wide.

This afternoon I went outside to wait for my friend Marcus Owens to come to our house with a stained glass hummingbird.  When I got to the top of the stairs, a hummingbird, probably one that I had seen before today came and made herself comfortable on a branch of a tree at the top of the stairs.  I dashed back downstairs to get my camera.  Before Marcus came I got pictures of two hummingbirds.  I'm guessing what I witnessed was a mating ritual.  I can't tell a male from a female, but I'm guessing the one with the fatter, crocked beak is the male...  I don't think I should go into why I think that.  The slim, prim bird is probably the female.  She looks more like the one that produced two baby hummingbirds in a nest outside my window this year.  I can tell the stained glass artist doesn't know anymore about humming birds than I do.  The beautiful bird dipping its beak into the red flower isn't giving any signs to a novice like me or the artist about the sex of the bird.

Yesterday I got a card in the old fashioned mail service some people call "snail mail," and I was delighted.  Bob and Judy Smith in Anchorage, Alaska, are enjoying a stretch of warm weather; and they decided to warm my heart.  It worked.  I've got the card out where I can see it while I'm seated at my computer.  It reminds me of some good days back in the past, and it reminds me that there is the potential for very good days ahead. The card won't be put away.  I've decided it belongs where I can see it always.

This morning I kept an appointment with Dr. Keefe who was to take out an offending mark on my neck… two marks actually… one is enough; so I’ve decided that today the BLOG will have just one photograph.  Yes.  I took the photograph myself, so it counts… it’s legitimate and can be used in the BLOG.  The good Doctor wanted to be sure the offending place on my neck was not something on its way to becoming a melanoma.  It wasn’t.  After the ugly sutures have disappeared and the scar on my neck is healed, I will go back to being…  I don’t know what, which is what the BLOG is all about.  I’m trying to discover what I’m all about.  I still don’t know, so tomorrow I’ll go back to taking photographs of hummingbirds and eucalyptus trees.  

What are those marks in the top left corner of the photograph?  Oh, yeah.  They're wrinkles.  I'm an old man... which doesn't answer the important question, so I'll keep searching.