09.06.08
Riding the Bus with My Wife
Vicki and I rode the city bus into Wilmington yesterday (Friday). We went with Nicole to DelTech to see if the bus might be a viable alternative to driving her back and forth to classes in downtown Wilmington. We had gotten copies of the schedule for the route that runs between Pike Creek and Rodney Square, but we managed to get the information wrong and found ourselves waiting at the wrong stop 2 minutes before the bus would stop 250 yards away. We ran like crazy and just made it, and that was the last snag we experienced in a great day.
I enjoy public spaces and events, and I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe because they make me aware of how connected we are – or that we can be connected in the human community, beyond the walls we live behind so often. The bus is a great public space, where just about anyone can come along for the ride. For $2.40, we got a ticket to go anywhere in Wilmington we wanted to make the time for until midnight.
People on the bus were happy to give us all kinds of helpful tips and advice when we asked for it. At the stop in Rodney Square, a student introduced herself to us, having overheard us talking to another “stranger” about waiting for the #10. She told us where the nearest stop to our destination (the DE Art Museum). She had just started the UD’s Parallel program at DelTech as well. The guy we had been talking with had on an Applebee’s tag. The older woman who had offered help to Nicole worked at the Grand. The first guy who helped us was from New Jersey originally and knew about the 24/7 bus system there. When he got off the bus at Price’s Corner, he took his bike off the front and rode away.
We met Nicole after her class and bought a lunch that we ate on the ride home. The day was beautiful. I took a bunch of pictures. And wondered why this was my first ride on a DART bus in our 11 years here.
09.03.08
Family Shot at Smith Mountain Lake, Summer of 2008
It’s funny (not, “ha ha” funny, as Ellen would say) being the family photoman. It took a bit of dragooning the gang to settle into their places on the steps while I raced the couple of miles back and forth to camp to retrieve the tripod for this shot. But wasn’t it worth it?
Or I should say, weren’t they worth it, because this picture is brought to you by the magic of Photoshop CS3! (Joy’s head got imported from the other shot). I probably shouldn’t have confessed, but I can’t stand your not knowing (and now that you do, I feel a lot better).
So here we are, sans Jack and Chelsea. Perhaps we’ll do it again, and I’ll be ruthless in my drive to get everyone to sit for a moment and say “cheese!”.
09.02.08
Two Days… Two Books
Just finished “Under Enemy Colors” by S. Thomas Russell. And yesterday saw the end of “Murder at the Vicarage” by Agatha Christie (my second Agatha Christie mystery – it won’t be the last). I have been wading through the beginning of Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past”, a 6-volume tome of over 4000 pages, and I needed a break. Christie and Russell provided it.
I call it reading for plot, which means I don’t much care for niceties of form or structure – let the pace bear me irresistably onward! Nearly any contemporary author provides it, because we won’t stand for anything less than a screenplay in 2008. No point in naming them. These novels provided the break I needed, but like cookies and brownies, they were not nearly as filling or as satisfying as Proust… or Tolstoy, or Dickens, or Elliot… et cetera.
Not nearly as daunting, either.
Russell took me aboard a ship of the line in the British navy, and I sailed the Atlantic in search of French merchants and frigates. Christie acquainted me with any number of suspects in the murder of a cantankerous church deacon in a little inconsequential hamlet of England. And though it was not memorable, it was fun. And reading for fun is nothing to be ashamed of.
Tomorrow, back to Proust, I’m afraid… and lines like “the faith to create”. Read that, and plot seems to fade into oblivion while a vast vista opens and takes your breath away.
