Welcome back!

Well. I have been busy catching up to "la vie quotiedienne" while frenzying myself at work writing a main piece and sidebar for the paper's Sunday Magazine section about my trip to India. I wrote it, then rewrote it and somehow felt I was not capturing the essence of my adventure as well as I did here. After a last rewrite, I think it turned out well, but the process was exhausting. (Update: Published articles on May 2. Got good feedback and only a couple negative emails. Had a voicemail from a woman who called from India  to thank my for  capturing her country so well. Wow. Thank you! And I wish you had left a phone number or email). But only an OK job. I wrote what I saw, with benefit of tour book prep work, not good background.

Here is the link

Should I have the opportunity for such a trip again, (and I plan to) I would work harder at my photography. Kim and I talked about this a bit while I was there. Digital cameras make it almost too easy; you don't have to pay as much attention to lighting, framing, composition. Just snap, review and if you've got it wrong, delete and try again. About my old Canon SLR, which began acting up on the trip Mom and I took to Paris in 2006: I miss the solid chunk kind of sound it made when the shutter button is pressed. I could feel it, so solid and firm, like the sound of a door in a well-made car slamming shut. The sound of every tiny part fitting together solidly.

I still have the Canon. Carl bought it for me years ago as a present and I have enjoyed using it, if not lugging it around, for all that time. I took it to a repair shop on the North Side after the Paris trip and, at first, it appeared that the only remedy needed was new batteries. It worked fine after that for a while, but then the shutter button again began to refuse to engage.

I hate the thought of giving it up, but I will take it back for one more shot at repairs. It's a dying technology (no doubt to be resurrected in 20 years, just like vinyl records and turntables are being resurrected today) but I grew up with it, loved it, and for a while took some pretty good photographs with it. In the pantheon of great gifts, it has a nice high place.

I had thought I would miss so much of spring by being gone at the end of March and the beginning of April, but there were still daffodils to greet me when I came home and pretty tulips that came up a week later. The lilacs are in their full, fragrant glory, but I am going to have them taken down this year. They are in a prominent place in front of the house and, while they are lovely now, for the rest of the year they will look raggedy, with mildewy leaves and not much structural presence. For as many tear sheets in notebooks that I have, depicting beautiful, serene gardens, I haven't matched that look on my own property. I fall victim to instant enthusiasm in plants, buying shrubs and flowers that are beautiful, but that I have no place for. So my garden, such as it is, is a hodge-podge.

Am trying to change that this year. Fewer flowers, green shrubs for screens. We will buy an umbrella for our now exposed patio, the porch covering it having been removed in February. The garden redo will be a summer-long process, of course. I shall look at it this way: Excellent cardio opportunity!

My birthday, and remembering college

My birthday is coming up. Seems like only yesterday that I was celebrating my 50th birthday by watching the implosion of Three Rivers Stadium in Feb. 2001 from high above the North Side of Pittsburgh, at a friend's house in Fineview. It was such a fun party and breathtaking to watch the old stadium stand motionless for seconds after the charges were set, then collapse into a heap of concrete and rebar moments later. Considering that taxpayers spent a lot of money for its replacement, and that Three Rivers itself wasn't even paid off by the time it was taken down, perhaps it wasn't such a great day for celebration. But it was also my birthday. And any day you get a chance to drink champagne on a Sunday morning in February is a good day.
I've been feeling that I have not had much to say lately, but look, here I already have a whole paragraph and the start of another. College seems like a hundred years ago but one of the things I remember is that it was a time when calling long distance was a big deal (on my rotary dial phone) and that writing letters posted to the U.S. Postal Service was a weekly .. I don't think duty is exactly the right word but that's the one I'm going to use. I wrote weekly to my parents, my sister Elizabeth, friends I had met who had moved on to different schools, my Dad's mother. Quite frequently I looked at the sheet of paper thinking I had nothing to say and before I knew it, pages would be filled.
Looking back, it seems hard to believe that, as a young woman in college, I would have nothing to write about. It was one of the most interesting and exciting and best times of my life. Perhaps the best.
It didn't start out all that well, what with me in Morrill Tower at Ohio State in a pod with 11 other very young women. The two women who were my roomates in our pod (four bunkbeds but only three occupied) didn't make it past, respectively, the first quarter and the first year. Maybe that's part of what throwing a bunch of young strangers together in close quarters is all about. Weeding out the partiers and those who are destined to become pregnant.
Sophomore year I bunked with one new roommate, from Rumson, N.J. and two from freshman year. Our bathroom mirror on North Campus read "Free the Nosker Four." We never did find out what that meant. Nancy, the Rumson girl, and I became good friends but she moved on to art school in Philly after one year at OSU. The other two, Mary Jo and Donna, found an apartment together after our sophomore year. And I quit. For a year or so. Then went back and my last two years, after finally choosing a major and meeting someone who is still a friend today, were tremendous. I got a job, stayed on campus during the summer, had an apartment and desperately did not want to leave after graduation in March 1978 (yikes! 31 years ago).
Things I remember about those last two years. Donna and Mary Jo throw a party at their new apartment, somewhere near Chittenden, I drink too much at their housewarming party and a football player carries me upstairs to a bedroom, where I pass out. Seeing "Star Wars" at the theater on High Street, near Lane Avenue and being totally awed by the opening scene as the starship zooms into view. Sitting on a High Street curb on a summer evening with my friend Heidi, watching people go by, talking about everything and nothing. Reading the Citizen Journal, a failing afternoon Scripps Howard paper (perhaps that should have been my cue to choose a major other than journalism), at my secretarial job in the department of anthropology. Reading papers by professors in said department as I typed them and wondering why they had no grasp of the English language. Sitting by Mirror Lake, reading, and realizing that across the "lake" someone was taking my picture. Juggling at a Renaissance festival outside Ohio Union. Watching soap operas inside Ohio Union (whose cafeteria line, in retrospect, seemed a lot like the one in "Animal House". Working at Quisno's (not the chain) Sub Shop and taking salt pills when it was hot and chopping hot yellow peppers to put on the subs. Seeing an old boyfriend who always made my heart stop come in to same shop and smile at me and me not being able to even acknowledge him. Another boyfriend and I cocooned away in my apartment during a fierce January or February snowstorm (back when we had real winters!)
Look at me. Sentences and paragraphs later. And I remember it all like it was yesterday. Of course. We all do.
Present day. Its been cold and white for what now seems like forever and for what seems likely to continue to be forever. But the cold world is not devoid of beauty. The picture at the start of this entry is of the sunset from my neighborhood from the past weekend.