We are near waking when we dream that we dream.
Novalis
Month: January 2025
29JAN2025 – Photo of the Day
Guest Contributor – War Pig – 28JAN2025 – You Can’t Go Home
You really can’t go home again. The memories remain but the scene has changed.
Virginia Beach in the late 60s and early 70s was fun. A boardwalk, a pally where they had rollerskating one night and a dance another night. On the boardwalk were carnival games. I was banned from the rifle arcade shoot for winning too many prizes. South of town along the coast were beaches and especially dunes. We’d go down at night, dig a pit in the sand, gather driftwood and cook hot dogs and brats over the fire, followed by roasting marshmallows and some made s’mores. We drank beer and wine and watched the lights of the ships out on Chesapeake Bay. We’d skinny dip in the surf and make love among the dunes. A few were in committed relationships but most were lovers of convenience. The gals chose their partners for the night. Sort of like Kid Rock’s song “All Summer Long”. There was one girl who favored me but after she went back to college I never saw her again.
Now the dunes are replaced by cookie cutter condos. There had to be a law passed to mandate public access to the beach and now there are bar steel armored tunnels every so many buildings to allow the public to use the beach. Where there once was the boardwalk, arcade and pally, are hotels so tall that you have to look between them to see the beach from the strip.
The memories are still alive in my mind, but the X, Y, and Z are gone. Just the T remains.
Tom’s World – 28JAN2025 – The Ravages of Time
The place where I grew up, at least from age 5, doesn’t exist any more. The name, Sandy Springs, exists as does the geographical location, north Atlanta metro, both exist. But the reality is long gone, torn down and the replacement torn down and the replacement of the replacement—- You get the idea.
Nothing, absolutely nothing physical from my childhood survives. Dust and dead. The neighborhood BBQ parties where everyone’s Dad was a WWII vet. The neighborhood gone, the street gone. Highrise buildings where the woods with the abandoned POW camp were. An 8 lane road where the old rock quarry was where we used to shoot snakes in the lake at the bottom.
I’m the only one left and I’m not going to be around that much longer either.
And the replacements are far from what I imagined as I read my Sci-Fi. Nobody then wrote anything sufficiently dystopian to include this reality.
The Human Element
Einstein is said to have made the imaginative leap when he based his Theory of General Relativity on the notion that time (t) is just another dimension to go along with the three spatial dimensions (x, y, z). Space-time. When we talk about the where of a particle (or a person) we must also specify the when.
So yesterday when I travelled back to the place where I was born, I would have to travel back in time to reach my place of origin (x, y, z, t = 0, 0, 0, 0). But Einstein also said that for matter time can only travel forward. But maybe the mind (or the soul) isn’t composed of protons and electrons; leptons and hadrons. Because I had an uncanny feeling I had stepped back into an earlier era.
After battling New York City traffic that defied belief, to attend a family funeral, I walked into the little Roman Catholic Church that I attended as a child and was transported into my past. Sure, a few little things had changed. They had freshened up the paint on the ceiling over the altar and on the bas relief stations of the cross but the stained-glass windows, the icons around the altar and the pews we sat in triggered memories that perfectly mirrored my surroundings. And then there were my cousins and their children and their children’s children surrounding me with proof that the world I left behind decades ago still existed in a very human, very tenacious way. God said be fruitful and multiply. And we have. From a tiny family that set foot on this continent less than 150 years ago there are now a whole town’s worth of descendants.
And some of the latest additions were unknown to me by name. But just looking at their faces I could see the kinship. And in the middle of the Mass one of the youngest made such a noisy nuisance of himself that he forced his mother to retreat to the annex to return the ceremony to dignified order. But this outburst was of the very nature of the family. We are noisy, somewhat spoiled, sometimes rude but genuinely good natured and extremely funny people. And we do enjoy each other’s company. Being surrounded by this small army of family felt so right.
One of my cousins remarked that it was a pity that only such occasions rounded us all up together again. He spoke nostalgically about when we were all living within blocks of each other within the Italian ghetto that we all were now flocking to for this solemn occasion. He reminisced about the parties and get togethers we used to have on a regular basis; holidays, birthdays, weddings, graduations, births. But I reminded him that no one’s grandchildren could hope to afford the multi-million-dollar price tags that now attached to the buildings in this once humble neighborhood. What young people could afford to buy houses here now? I kidded that we would have to buy a whole town somewhere in the middle of nowhere if we wanted to live together in this modern and expensive age. He ruefully nodded his head in agreement.
Quickly the ceremony ended and we said our goodbyes. I wasn’t headed out east to the Long Island cemetery. I was headed north toward New England through the grid-lock of the outer boroughs and onto the highways beyond. But we made one stop before we headed home. There was an old time Italian Bakery that specialized in Italian pastries. They had sfogliatella riccia (seashell), coda d’aragosta (lobster tail) and various other pastries stuffed with cream that we would eat on Sunday nights when we were kids. The only problem with this wonderful store was the old woman who had run the counter. She was a sharp-tongued shrew who carped at everyone who entered the store.
I entered the store today and found the shelves still lined with all those Italian delicacies. But now the store was run by a Chinese family that had bought the recipes for the pastries when they purchased the business. And thankfully the pastries were just the same! And even better, the young lady running the counter was entirely friendly and polite. A miracle!
After too many hours I returned home with my small cache of desserts and told Camera Girl of my epic journey. We’ll eat the cakes with our coffee this week. And that will remind me of what I learned. Einstein was wrong about not being able to go back in time. You can. What you can’t do is go back to the same place. It’s always different. But it can be worth the trip.
28JAN2025 – Photo of the Day
28JAN2025 – Quote of the Day
A few years ago a delusive optimism was creeping over the minds of men. There was a tendency to push the belief in the moral victories of civilisation to an excess which now seems incredible. It was esteemed heresy to distrust anybody, or to act as if any evil still remained in human nature. At home we were exhorted to show “our confidence in our countrymen,” by confiding the guidance of our policy to the ignorant, and the expenditure of our wealth to the needy. Abroad we were invited to believe that commerce had triumphed where Christianity had failed, and that exports and imports had banished war from the earth. And generally we were encouraged to congratulate ourselves that we were permanently lifted up from the mire of passion and prejudice in which our forefathers had wallowed. The last fifteen years have been one long disenchantment; and the American civil war is the culmination of the process.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil
Circling Back
The next couple of days will be different. I have to attend a funeral for a close relative. She was ninety-seven and so I’m travelling both closer to my geographical origin and back in time to my childhood. I’ll be going back to the Catholic church I attended as a child and seeing the neighborhood I lived in. And a lot of my cousins will be there and my siblings. I probably will also see some old acquaintances for the last time on this Earth. And that is a thought that gives me pause. This is the second death of that generation in the last few weeks. Those folks had a lot of vitality. All of them on that side of the family have reached their nineties. I’m not exactly sure how I feel about that legacy. It’s not an unmixed “blessing.”
I’ll look over the old neighborhood. Last time I was there it had become a Southeast Asian enclave of one sort or another. I’ll be interested to see if the homeless and the illegal aliens have shown up to any degree. I suspect things will look worse than even it looked a decade ago when I passed through. The only thing that seems to have endured since my childhood is an old-fashioned Italian bakery that somehow has endured. The family still runs it and from what I’ve been told they still make crumb cake and crème doughnuts that are worth buying. So, after the wake and the mass I intend to stop by that store and buy some pastries to bring home to Camera Girl. She’s partial to good crumb cake and I like it too.
When I get back, we’ll have some good coffee and enjoy some pastries while I tell her what the old neighborhood looks like. And I’ll tell her who showed up for the funeral and who didn’t. What everybody looked like and any family news for good or bad. And hopefully, there won’t be any new feuds breaking out to report. At this point in the cycle, I’m hoping everybody is looking to let bygones be bygones and go quietly into that good night. But you never know. I come from some pretty ornery stock. There are old feuds that go back well over a hundred years that I’ve heard about and as far as I know are still being honored. But hopefully those folks won’t be showing up for this family gathering.
And in fact, I know of at least one party who will attempt to spark a gathering of the clan for a summer party sometime in the summer. I used to have one every summer about a decade ago at the Compound but people got older and travelling became more difficult so it subsided. Maybe this will revive the custom.
So, I’ll see what I can do to keep this site active while I’m on the road. At the very least there will be pictures and quotes. I’ll see if I can get one more post scheduled after this one to fill in the gap. But we’ll see.
Well, back I go.
27JAN2025 – Quote of the Day
Representative Government answers admirably so long as all those who are represented desire much the same thing, and have interests tolerably analogous; but it is put to an intolerable strain when it rests upon a community divided into two sections, one of which is bitterly hostile to the other, and desirous of opposing it upon all occasions. We do not know how the Mahommedan and Hindoo populations if placed face to face with each other in elective representative Government would view each other; but we know, at all events, that one of the heaviest responsibilities and severest duties of the Government of India is to prevent the outbreak of hostilities caused by the profound differences between those two communities—differences in race, traditions, history, and creed.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil
27JAN2025 – Photo of the Day
