Holy crap what a day – and it’s still not over. The Indianapolis to Dallas flight was delayed by two hours. Once we finally landed in Dallas, we ran to the connecting flight gate but missed it by less than five minutes. Then we spent two solid hours in the American Airlines customer service line. But the good news is that there is a flight going to San Francisco at 10:45pm.
In response to Jean, sharing my favorite picture of the Oregon coastline from our (best) vacation (ever) last year
Gray, beautiful Oregon coast evening. I’m on a short visit until Wednesday, but still popping into my microblog to post photos.
Waiting for An Evening with Neil Gaiman
Pretty excited to get confirmation of our tour of Tor House, the home of poet Robinson Jeffers, during our upcoming trip to California.
I've kept a very inconsistent journal since 2006, beginning with my first Father's Day. I wish I had written more consistently, but I still managed to get a lot down.
After reading this post by Patrick Rhone (others have also talked about this but I can’t find it right now), I decided that I needed to print whatever I really wanted to keep. So I collected my journals, a few social media posts, and some other miscellaneous writing into roughly equal documents. Then I printed them and created four saddle-stitched books. I’ve left them in a pretty rough-and-ready state because I like the DIY look.
After a couple of intentionally uneventful days midweek, we hit some of our favorites local spots on Friday. On Saturday, we went to the Van Gogh digital projection exhibit at Newfield’s. It’s impressive technology and definitely a unique museum experience. Worth doing once, anyway. We also walked around much of the rest of the museum. As with the digital projection, you can tell they’re trying to do something different by mixing together eras and geographical regions and leaving places for people to write down their reactions.
This week has been Spring Break, which is why I haven’t posted much. We front-loaded the week with travel because the weather was predicted to be (and has turned out to be) pretty dismal. On Sunday we visited Madison, Indiana and, briefly, Clifty Falls State Park. Madison is a great little town with plenty of historic homes (like the Lanier Mansion), cool shops, and a riverfront park. Here I am along with two other guys with strollers waiting outside the shops.
When Rachel gave me a record player for Christmas, she included with it an album of Big Band recordings because she knew that what I primarily wanted out of a record player was the romance of playing this music on it.
There’s a reason for that. When we were first married, our Sunday night after-church ritual was to eat fast food with friends. (The iron-clad digestive system of youth…) But we had to keep an eye on the time because we needed to leave in time to catch “Big Band Jump,” a syndicated radio show on our local AM station which we would listen to on the drive home and while we got ready for bed. Then once we were in bed we would listen to an old-time radio show performing all sorts of mystery and thriller stories. (I can’t remember its name - maybe it was rebroadcasts of CBS Radio Mystery Theater?)
While that story makes it sound like we were married in 1948 instead of 1998, it’s one of my fondest memories of those early days of our marriage. Big Band music already has a certain romance to it, but add to that two newlyweds in a small apartment listening to music and stories from their grandparent’s time and you have a sonic impression that lasts.
Stopped in at the Gus Grissom Memorial at Spring Mill State Park today. He was the second American in space and died tragically in a fire aboard Apollo 1 during pre-flight testing.
Yesterday a friend and I visited the Warren G. Harding Presidential Sites in Marion, OH - mainly because it was about halfway between the two of us. Harding is not one of our most illustrious presidents. Although he was popular during his time in office (he died in 1923 before finishing his first term), corruption and multiple extra-marital affairs were later revealed that tarnished his reputation. The historical information at the site is clearly trying to rehabilitate him: there is more information in the exhibits about the family pets than the scandals.
What was most interesting to me was that Harding’s home was in a regular neighborhood with nearby houses. It was nice but not particularly large or grand. The ten members of our tour group had to squeeze around each other upstairs. It looked like it could be any of the houses in my own small-town midwestern neighborhood.
This struck me, I believe, for two reasons. First, because in modern times we associate wealth with US presidents. The Hardings were not poor, to be sure. They were, according to the tour guide, upper middle class. They traveled around the world. To give you a sense of comparison, he ranks 37 of 46 on this listing of US presidents by wealth. All of the presidents in my lifetime have been multimillionaires. The last time we had a president who was not a millionaire (adjusted for inflation) was Harry Truman. Whatever they may say, US presidents have not been, by and large, “just like us.”
The second reason I was struck by the size and location of his home was that he, like three Ohioan presidents before him, ran a “front-porch campaign” for president, that is, voters and delegations of voters came to him and he gave speeches from the front porch of his house. Crowds of up to five or even ten thousand people would gather in his (not large!) front yard. The Republican National Committee headquarters moved into the house next door to him. One of the reasons we have such good records of those front door speeches is that his next door neighbor sat on her front porch and made notes at all of the events. She published them as a newspaper column called “The Girl Next Door.”
Harding doesn’t deserve to be held up as a model for … well, anything really, but visiting the site did remind me of how much the United States presidency has changed over the past century.
