Keeping Track

The track at Agnes Scott, in all its pristine glory, with only a couple souls following its course. I am amazed at how many different greens there are in the world. Jami runs and I mostly walk, but sometimes I heave my body with its 50 surplus pounds over part of the oval. It feels good, especially along the shady part.
For seven years I lived in New Mexico where this green leafyness is an alien occurrence (among other alien things). Whenever I see places this lush I enjoy them in a new way. Not that New Mexico doesn't have charm. It's very quiet there at night and you can see all the stars. Even after 100 degree days, the nights are very cool. I remember once in Athens 20 years ago, it was 85 degrees at night. The heat was trapped in the humid air.
Agnes Scott is where Jami and I saw Ross McElwee's Bright Leaves last Fall. McElwee is a documentary film maker who teaches film at MIT. The first film I saw of his was Sherman's March - a film about romance in the South during a time of thermonuclear threat. Bright Leaves is about his family's involvement in the tobacco business. His great grand father was a competitor of the Duke family. I think about this film more now that we're heading into tobacco country (or terbaccky as they say there).
This is our last week together here in Decatur. This Saturday we're driving to South Carolina and then to North Carolina. People will be here to see after the cats and the realtor will show the house. But Jami will stay up at Durham, beginning as Director of Development at Duke Divinity and I'll come back here to begin my chaplain residency at Atlanta Medical Center.

No Place like Heimat

Yes,I went on a bit of a rant (a rantlit) about the quorum and what an inconvenience it is; I was a bit sarcastic about members motivations for effecting this deficit; and I impugned their character: a full scale ad hominem attack. In the South we call that an add hominy attack.

Above is a photo of the house Lurilene was born in and lived in until recently. It replaced one of those houses with the columns, the moonlight and the magnolia, after it burned down ca 1917. This house is still there, on land that the family had lived on since 1867. Of course, now it's surrounded by a subdivision: hundreds of cookie cutter houses resembling monopoly pieces stacked on sidewalkless winding streets, each in yards with spindly trees that might produce shade in 15 years or so.

The house we're leaving now, here in Oakhurst, is not quite that storied, but for us, it is the house we were married in, the house we spent our first months together in, and the first house Jami bought. Now we say farewell to our modest 1100 sq ft domicile. Hopefully it will sell to a person or couple who wants to live here and fix it up further. We'd like to think it's not just another tear-down, like those that are already dotting Decatur and Atlanta.

Tonight we ate sushi at Nikemotos, and as we left, we looked up at the Atlanta skyline and remarked how this view won't occur in Durham. I said that 20 years ago this view wasn't here either. When I was a child, the blue domed Polaris restaurant was the most significant building on the Atlanta skyline. Now, when you're riding into town on MARTA you can see the Polaris, the Hyatt, and it's surrounded by other buildings. When I was a child, growing up in the country, I had classmates who would go into town. They would proudly recount their experiences: they rode the Pink Pig at Riches at Christmas and they ate at the Polaris. They is really a little girl named Tammy, God knows what happened to her - but I remember her as being the queen of elementary school. She had sung on an album with her church choir - now I am wondering, "what did happen to her?" By high school I think she was still around, but we never heard from her. I guess you've got to be careful not to peak in elementary school. You've also got to be careful not to peak in high school. It's also good if you can avoid peaking in college and grad school. Actually it's best if you can still be working toward your best years when you're in your 50s and 60s. I hope that I'm still swinging at 90. I believe that Neill Young's "better to burn out than to fade away" is a false dilemma and that we need neither burn out or fade away. Perhaps it's possible to be the best we can be at any given moment.

Now it's back to Durham. But first the Beach.