Daily Blues & Views

Sometimes time seems frozen.  I'll see a picture of a friend or acquaintance that I've not seen in person for decades and their image from days past is fresh in my mind.  It hardly seems like years since we last hung out or saw one another. If the person means more than just a passing friendship, the effect of stopping time seems more vivid.   Perhaps a defense mechanism, or another manifestation of holding on to something ephemeral. The technology we now have incorporated into our daily lives adds to this phenomena as well as creates additional twists of reality. Scroll through a host of Facebook posts or even a lengthy list of Facebook friend pictures and experience most of the people in your current and past life all flashed before your eyes in a mass of slideshow moving parts.  Most likely most of these people know a limited few of the other faces they are on this moving billboard with.  Yet the juxtaposition of their smiles and grimaces makes for a fasci...

I think it's the Woody Allen movie, "Play It Again Sam," that features a scene where Tony Roberts character is telling Woody Allen's about how he can feel better about the loss of a relationship.  No matter that the relationship in question is the wife of Robert's character.  Allen is having trouble with accepting loss (what else is new?) and Roberts reminds him that there are certain things in this life that will always be with you.  In fact, he goes on to say that when you feel particularly depressed about the human condition for any reason, these things will always be there.  A Louis Armstrong trumpet solo, a dynamic sunset, great works of art, or even just places you like to visit, foods you enjoy, or the sound of wind, guitars with harmonicas, or a child laughing.  Simple as it is, just knowing these things will always be there makes it possible to endure some of the dark times we all must experience. I can't remember how this impacts the ...

“The bonus word is paraphernalia,” Mrs. McCarthy said.   “Para..what,” someone yelled back. “Par a fen al ia”   Mrs. McCarthy stood her ground.   All five feet 11inches of her Irish school teacher self.   Her mother of the brood, warm, stern, no nonsense self.   We loved her 7 th grade English class and especially the bonus word on spelling tests.   If you got the bonus word right, it counted in place of a missed word somewhere else on the test.   The bonus word came with all the anticipation of a mystery.   Even a word like paraphernalia was fair game.   The trick, of course was that it was para …pher…nalia, not para… fa… nalia.   We knew this because paraphernalia had been the bonus word a few times already.       So, most of us at Sun Valley Junior High could spell paraphernalia, but we never used the word.   It wouldn’t come into heavy usage until the word drug preceded it a decade or two late...

  The back to school commercials start in late July now.   I don’t feel the pull until the second week of August.   This is the exhilaration time for teachers, and even after retiring from the full-time routine the pull is always just as strong.   I begin to think about stationery stores and then quickly lament that they don’t exist any more.   Or if they do, they hide in plain sight.   We have the big and getting bigger box stores and that seems to be about it.   Now the two giants, Depot and Max or Club, or whatever it’s called today, have merged.   Then there is Staples but they don’t even have decent staples.   I miss a good stationary store.   Once upon a time I found things like file folders in unusual colors or wood grain.   Many choices of pens, pencils and the thing I love most, college-ruled, easy on the eyes, light green writing paper.   I remember how just putting 5 sets of essays to grade in crisp new fold...

Last night I lost a post I'd written due to a poor internet signal in Central Oregon where I am currently spending a few days.  The irony of this jumps high in my face like the huge rainbow trout I also lost,  That fish was the subject of the post. My thought was to get a written description down somewhere because it just might have been the fish of a lifetime.  Of course, for a fly fisherman who dutifully practices catch and release, I will always have the memory.  That's all we ever have anyway, isn't it.  I'll go out there today but it wont be like yesterday because no two days are alike.  Perhaps a few hours on the water will help sharpen my description skills.  More to come... The second day arrived a bit cooler with very few clouds and fewer people.  I took my camera along mostly to tempt the fates, but was rewarded with a nice pic of the landscape, a surprise selfie, mostly from boredom, and a nice rainbow who pounced on my fly as I was f...