Category: Real Personal History
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Fathers and Coffee
One more cup of coffee before I go… –Bob Dylan [My photo] This gray, almost monochromatic morning, I lounged in bed reading yesterday’s New York Times. It’s something we did every weekend for years while we lived in Manhattan. The…
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At The Museum…For Decades
[I loved this Alaskan canoe when you could see the people in it.] The more things change, the more they stay they stay the same… -Anon. I never understood the above quote, except to say that I think it means that history repeats itself. I certainly can get that…considering the Trump Era. You can figure…
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Roadside Grief
You see them along the Interstate highways in Kansas, Arizona and nearly everywhere else in the country. Those haunting small white crosses and bouquets of flowers that are mostly plastic. That way, they survive the weather. These are the roadside memorials for those who lost their lives, while driving along major highways and lonely roads.…
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Confessions Of A Gravestone Photographer
[At work in St. Patrick’s Cemetery, Chateaugay, NY] I would strongly object to anyone who would dare call me morbid. It is not morbid, in any sense, to appreciate and love old (and new) cemeteries. It is not morbid to stand over a grave of a total stranger and contemplate his or her life. I…
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The Summer We Never Had Is Gone
“I see your true colors shining through…” -Cyndi Lauper Green is still the dominant color in the foliage around Rainbow Lake. Each day, however, brings out a few hundred more leaves that have lost their Chlorophyll and are showing their true colors. We’ve had our first frost warning on my weather app…and that was in…
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The Toboggan
When I enter our garage from the door that faces our house, I don’t often look up. What could be up there that I’m avoiding? Well, there is an old oak bed head-board and foot board that was mine when I grew up at 420 Front Street, Owego, NY. There are stickers of cowboys and…
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Dead Man’s Bone
[Source: Google search] This is not about a toothache as the photo suggests. It’s about me walking around with 0.5 cc of granules of a dead persons bone in my gums (ignore the gender reference in the title. It’s purely for dramatic effect. I thought it sounded spooky). For the next several months, my body…
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Two Candles
I’m sitting outside in our small garden. I’m trying to read a novel written by Hakan Nesser. He writes great nordic noir mysteries. It’s a warm night. I bought two new candles to illuminate the dusk in the garden. We had a friend over and ordered Chinese. I had my fried rice and dumplings. My little…
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May Day, 2017: Take the Long Way Home
[Photo source: Me] So, here I am looking at the new page of my really cool calendar. It’s May. Most people will think of flowers and perhaps rising waters. I used to think of crocus. That’s when my mother always said spring was here. “The crocus are up beneath the evergreens,” she would say….for so…
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The Count and I
So, I made a big deal on Facebook about the fact that I was undertaking the reading of The Count of Monte Cristo. The reason for that was that my edition was 1,462 pages long. The older I get, the more I think there better be something worth the investment of my precious time. My…