= 20

 

Here are two of my favorite photographs. They were taken a couple of decades ago in black & white with a 35mm Nikon F3 for print publication as well as for memory purposes. The upper one was shot during an "island hopping" excursion in a canoe along the length of the south shore of Lake Superior. I am on a cliff on an island. It was (still is, I suppose) about fifty feet to the water below. A few minutes after the photo was taken, I jumped off the ledge .... into about fifty feet of pristine, icy cold water. It was a cold day, too, but the sun was wonderfully warm and the brandy was delightfully delicious. The lower one was taken at an overnight camp while canoeing the length of the Minnesota River. It was nearly sunset on a wretchedly hot day, and I was contemplating whether to eat or to swim. I swam. I am nostalgic for many places and many people these days -- but, also eager to find a few new memories. I used both of these photos to accompany posts in 2009 and, when I noticed someone had visited the posts a few days ago, I decided to publish them one more time in case a few "purists" still exist. The reason they are so technically dismal, by the way, is because they are photos of framed photos behind glass .... but, you do not mind my laziness, right ??

A verse from the poem

"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"
by Robert Frost 1916

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Still walking away .... how about you, Renee ??

So many aspects of life are interpretations which may or may not be reality. We see a smile from across the proverbial room, and wonder what it means. We hear / see three bands play the same song, each giving it a sound of its own. We walk down a street, confident and immortal, until the street disappears -- and we, along with it.

Under those circumstances and such a scenario, here we have a third version of, "Walk Away Renee," this one by Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes. Really, really cool, baby .... it reminds me of singing a few bars closed as late night became early morning. I frequently get hooked on a song and cannot break away from it without listening to it for a thousand times or more, to include every variation of it I can find ....

Time and again: I am having a hard time with this .... this being the blog. I had planned on closing it on Tuesday, the sixteenth, but here it lingers beyond that date. Remember, I am superstitious. Some steps in life take deliberation. One thought which frequently rolls through my mind is to wonder why, what if, how come? These thoughts are common to many, and often they involve questions which can never be answered satisfactorily.

My "wonderments" go so far as to question why, once upon a time, I stepped to the right instead of to the left and, simply because of that, remain alive today .... events like that have happened to me on at least five occasions which immediately come to mind .... but, now I am ranging into six-drink talk.

A young lady .... actually, she was quite a woman -- age twenty-five, three daughters, married twice, divorced one and one-half times -- once told me that I fell in love too easily. I probably have mentioned this before. She was right, I guess, and it sends me back to the half-thought / half-belief that I never have experienced actual love. Oooouuuuffff .... dialectic thought can ruin a guy. Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders and their patron saint, Karl Marx, are living proof of that.

Still more bits of repetition: I have mentioned before -- again, more than once -- that I believe I had experienced everything there was to experience in life -- in one form or another, to one degree or another -- by the time I was age twenty-five. Since then, life has been repetition. My blog often is repetitious, which is another reason it is necessary to slip away and allow it to either fade away or find a new form in which to exist. I do not think people are meant to spend a lifetime in the same place doing the same thing -- yet, so many do just that.

Incidentally, I have used Robert Frost's poem before, too, and probably will again in various places at various times. I am beginning to realize that the number of things I think truly are wonderful and absolutely incredible, like Frost's poem, are growing fewer rather than becoming greater.

Just one more time: It has been assumed that Neanderthal (homo sapiens) and modern man (homo sapiens sapiens) began interbreeding about 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. Based on "material" found in Siberia, it appears that number will be pushed back to just over 100,000 years ago.

It simply crushes me, smashes me, overpowers me utterly when I try to comprehend the enormity of the lives and the lives and the lives that have been lived during that span of time and to capture it all within the confines of some manner of conceptual reality, much less quantify it against the conceit each of us has when we believe we actually are .... well .... you fill in the blanks .... and, this is not even to attempt to include the countless lives during millions of years when there existed those long-ago-vanished hominid "creatures" which came before us. As I am fond of saying, the anonymous writer of Ecclesiastes had it right, no doubt ....

By the way, the twenty-second is the target cutoff date now. And, to close this post on a note of common sense, indisputable wisdom and irrefutable logic:

Words spoken by Alice
in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"
by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) 1865

"Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is .... oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate!"