Different Views

We are on vacation on Grand Island at the north end of Lake Champlain. The lake is between Vermont and New York; the Island is part of Vermont. This is the view from the porch of the house we have been in; we arrived on a windy day but went for a nice swim anyway.


It would be wrong if I gave you the impression that we have been sitting around. We have been biking, paddling kayaks, swimming, cooking, eating, watching movies, even reading a little(!). But I have been fascinated by the changes in our view as the weather and time of day change.


For a day and a half, the wind was blowing so hard that biking on a flat road we felt as if we were biking uphill. We didn't dare go out in the kayaks.


But then the weather calmed, and we could watch the sun set and then watch the stars. The view from the porch has been different every hour of every day. It has been a great reminder that no matter how much we are in motion, our actions are dwarfed by the movement of weather patterns, by the turning of the earth, and by the motion of the earth through space.

Europe, 1980

(Eiffel tower at Night)

In June of 1980 I had just graduated from college, and had the summer free before I started law school. My parents were kind enough to agree that I didn't need to work that summer, giving me the chance to travel, with the understanding that I would pay for my own trip. I had never been away from North America. I decided to spend the summer travelling around Europe. I flew to England, then traveled through Belgium, Germany, Austria, Italy, France, and then back to England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland before flying home. I brought my Canon AE-1 camera and rolls of film.

(view of Florence from the Duomo)

It was an incredible, eye-opening trip. I learned enough in each language to find the youth hostel and buy bread, cheese, fruit, milk or ale. I met up with friends, sometimes on purpose and sometimes by chance. (A former girlfriend and I had a date to meet in England my first week, but she never showed up. Four weeks later we met on a subway platform in Paris, and I learned that her flight the month before had been delayed.) I made new acquaintances everywhere I went. I took long walks by myself, shooting photos everywhere. I set myself a budget of $15 per day, including the youth hostel and my food (but not including transport, which was mostly by rail pass).

(Gondoliers racing in Venice)

I must have shot 20 or more rolls of slide film (36 or 37 shots each); when I got home identified about 400 photos that I liked the best, and they became my "slide show," which no one but my doting parents and grandparents would ever see.

I dug some of these slides out recently when I acquired a new photo scanner that is equipped to scan slides. I found my old slide viewer, flipped through 100 of my slides, scanned a handful that I liked the best. I still liked a lot of the pictures. I was amazed to see the picture of the Eiffel Tower at night, taken with a guess of a long exposure on film, not knowing until the slide was developed 8 weeks later whether the shot would come out.

Some of my photography is the same as what I did with that great old film machine. I look through the viewfinder, and have a gut feel for what I am looking for. It makes a huge difference, though, to be able immediately to see the photo reduced to a captured image, and be able to shoot most shots again, from a different angle, at a different exposure, closer up or further away. Digital photography with a good camera gives me more control over the picture, more ability to show others what I am seeing. And the internet gives me the ability to show just a few pictures at a time to so many friends!

But I sure like some of those old pictures, taken when I was very young ...

(me, in Interlaken)

What grows wild

We live in a really beautiful place. North Guilford, Connecticut still has woods and farms, and lots of things that grow wild. Today while biking to work I saw a deer with a full set of antlers.


Wild snapdragons make me very happy. When I was a child, my mother grew hybrid (cultivated? tame?) snapdragons, and I would pinch a flower with fingers on each side of the "hinge" and make the snapdragon open and close its mouth. You can do the same thing with the wild flowers, they're just littler.


But my favorite thing that grows wild is the berries. We are usually away when the wonderful wild blackberries ripen, but this year our timing has been perfect. I spend 45 minutes or an hour getting scratches all over my arms and legs to get a pint of delicious, seedy blackberries. My mother used to make jars and jars of blackberry jam; we three boys would be sheathed in lined bluejeans and rubberized raincoats to pick the berries, so we wouldn't get scratched or be exposed to poison ivy. As an adult I still love the berries but am willing to be more scratched up and not quite so boiled.


We also have wineberries growing wild. They're a slightly sticky, sweet berry with a mild flavor. The have the great virtues of growing in abundance, being far less prickly, and providing wonderful color contrast in our berry bowls!

Artisans

Last week we went to the Guilford Handcrafts Fair. I use the title "Artisans" for this post because "Handcrafts" does not do justice to the beauty and originality of the work we saw. The work above was created by an artist who has invented wall hangings that combine beautiful woodworking with fabric creations. She saw me taking pictures, and let me know that while she did not mind, I had better ask people before taking photographs of their original work.


Some of the artists said, "Sure, go ahead." The man who made these glass globes said, "Good luck -- they're pretty hard to capture in a photo because of the depth of the optical illusion!"


The shades on these lamps are made of wood veneer panels in a process invented by the artist.


The woman who made these pens asked what I was going to do with the photos. She gave her permission after I told her that I post my photos to a blog that circulates among my friends. She liked this picture of her pens, and told me that people making these unique handcrafts have good reason to be careful and suspicious. She said that more than one artist has seen their unique designs appear by the thousands, only slightly modified, on the shelves of Target or other big-box stores.


Throughout the crafts fair I was delighted and impressed not only by the quality and beauty of the work, but also by the sense of humor at play in so much of it.


I strongly urge you to see these creative fun collections for yourself. The Guilford Handcrafts Fair won't be held again until next July, but many of the same artists will be at the New Hampshire Craftsmen's Fair August 7 - 15 in Newbury, New Hampshire.

Morning Mist

The weather has been very hot and humid. As I ride my bike around North Guilford in the early morning, the air is heavy and thick. Everything looks a little less distinct; the shapes at the back end of my field of vision look a little more magical.


We do generally adjust to the scope of vision that we have. We never notice the physiological "blind spot" (scotoma) that is in the center of each eye's field of vision (it's a result of the fact that we have no rods or cones at the place in the back of the eye where the optic nerve attaches). And when we went to the movies to see Toy Story 3 in 3D earlier this week, our weird glasses made the screen look eye-popping for awhile, although by the end of the film we had grown used to the 3D effect and it seemed "normal." Sometimes during my misty bike ride, it's almost as if the mist isn't there any more; it has become the new normal.

And then the view draws my attention again. Sometimes I am trying to see through the mist, sometimes trying to see the sheep or trees that are transformed by partial obscurity. And sometimes I just see the mist itself. Maybe its not that any one point of view is most pleasurable, but rather the opportunity to have different points of view as I move along.

Art

Michelangelo's powerful statue of Moses, frustrated by the people's refusal to attend to the word of God, sits in a church a few hundred yards from the Roman Coliseum. (If you missed last week'a blog post, Sarah and I were on her choir's trip to Italy.) A few miles away from the Moses statue, people are lined up to stand for hours to get a ticket allowing them to wind hours more through the Vatican Museum, to get 15 minutes sardined with other tourists craning up to see the Sistine chapel. Because of the constraints of our trip, we did not have the opportunity to see the Sistine Chapel. No one was lined up to see the statute of Moses, which was one of the more beautiful pieces of art we saw.


On the other hand, as famous sites go, the tower of Pisa (and the church complex around it) fell into the category of "things I'd seen pictures of but until you get there, you have no idea." I had a visceral reaction to the tower of Pisa that reminded me of seeing the Grand Canyon. It is bigger and more beautiful than I could have imagined, and it is leaning further than seems possible.

But the strongest reaction I had to any art was hearing Confirma Hoc, a song in Latin, performed by Sarah's girls' choir in a 16th century church in Rome. The music was written with overlapping parts, and the perfect harmonies echoed and swirled in the cavernous marble space. I was not the only person with tears streaming down my face.

Some years ago, in a monologue performance, Lily Tomlin held up an (imaginary) can of Campbell's soup; then an (imaginary) Andy Warhol painting of a can of Campbell's soup. "Soup, Art," she said. "Art? Soup?"

I am prepared to live without knowing exactly what art is, or even what "great" art is. But certainly our lives are enriched by experiencing the work that moves us deeply.

Tuscany, with the girls' choir

Sarah's choir (the Elm City's Girl's Choir) is on tour in Tuscany, and I was fortunate to be selected as a chaperone. It is pure joy to spend these days in a beautiful place with an incredible group of 37 young women. They are brilliant musicians, and between rehearsals and performances I am surrounded by wonderful harmonies many hours each day. As to "seeing Italy," it is not the trip I expected. But as Rebecca Rosenbaum, the choir director, said to the group on the bus to the airport, "Expect the unexpected and find the opportunities in that."

I came expecting to see "the sights." But the Ponte Vecchio in the picture above was a quick glimpse out a window of the Uffizi, one of the great museums of the world, during what became a fast walk to "finish seeing" the paintings. To be clear: the issue was the guide, not the girls. Still, there is not enough expertise or group interest to take us in detail through the millenia of history embedded in the buildings and land of Tuscany.

Instead, I have the chance to see this:





What could be better?