Cold Coffee
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Opening Day
I wrote a short post for the image and words site Physical Grain about my rituals and baseball. Have a look...
[Physical Grain seems to be no more, the essay follows below- eg, opening day 2026]
Opening Day
There was a time in my younger days, in my view camera days, when I imagined my photographic season aligning with the baseball season. Although that has passed (I wrote about that here.) I still try to honor my commitment to my photography on two particular days: New Year's Day, when I go to the darkroom, and on the opening day of the baseball season, when I get out there with a camera. One might imagine from this that I’m a huge baseball fan. I’m not. This year’s opening day fell on April 2nd, and I was barely aware. This was a typical Sunday filled with tasks and family time. We have an Easter Egg hunt and a formal tea on the ticket for the afternoon, but I have a brief window in the morning, and so I set out.
The day before, I had spotted a couple of promising locations from the car. At the first location, I realize right away that the sun is exactly on the wrong side of the street, so I take a pic or two for reference, and on to the second. This is just a scruffy bunch of trees at a curve in the road, with a steep slope falling away, houses visible through a screen of winter bare branches and trunks.
I walk along, recalling what I thought I had noticed the day before, considering what might possibly make a picture. The spring sun is warm, and the wind that had been tormenting us seems at last exhausted. It is good to be out, with nothing to do but look. On this day that is almost literally true, I had grabbed my camera bag from a previous outing, cameras still loaded, but I find myself at this moment with one frame remaining. Determined to make it count, I carefully considered my options. Finally, my eyes land upon a cluster of trees with the curve of a concrete water tower beyond, a glimpse of a house puncturing the space on the left. A quick check with the meter, a double-check that the reading has been transferred to the camera, a deep breath, and ca-chack. Throw my pitch, and I’m off the mound.
Ampersand
A Christmas Eve post for all my friends at the FP-4+ Party & to good people everywhere.
Providence, RI December 2016
&
Erudite Vulcan, quondam forger of alliances, uniter of distant lands, close confidant to power brokers and the crafters of contract, acquisition and merger. No boardroom portrait was complete with out you, shoulder to shoulder you stood with the principals, yet discreet, name never mentioned. There was a time when no wheel could turn on the nation’s rails without you, but that was long ago.
Now you find yourself struck from the masthead, unwelcome in the corridors of power, banished from the corporate style guide. You’ve been done in by the manufactured word, the brittle acronym, the awkward portmanteau. Reduced to sleeping rough on a park bench and to endure the worst indignity of all: spelling your name out in full.
How the mighty doth fall.
Canal of Ghosts
Walking with ghosts along the Blackstone Canal.
Walking with ghosts along the Blackstone Canal.
The wind is sharp as I scurry across busy Branch Avenue, sending the clouds scudding and keeping the rain at bay. The tops of the trees have been stripped bare, limbs black bony against the sky. I’m entering theNorth Burial Ground and I’m looking for the place where the Moshassuck River emerges from it’s subterranean crossing of Interstate 95. I walk for ways with the highway to my left and rows of stones and statuary to my right. There’s much room to grow on this side of the burial grounds and I cross large lawns of brown grass. A concrete retaining wall announces it’s arrival. A pair of rectangular openings angling back toward the highway. Two echoing chambers cast free of any date or ornament, bearing only a modest “716”. These are entrance and exit to fields set aside for the collection of dates, names and bones.
The river immediately finds it’s Blackstone Canal days maintained, the bed running as straight as ever between walls of cut stone. The tow path is clogged with Catalpa and Oak and masses of twisting vines. That’s no problem as I have only myself in tow and I happily clamber around, glad to be free of the droning interstate.
Some trees have succumbed to the pull of the water and have laid down for a rest, momentarily holding and releasing the stream. It’s a reasonable approximation of a babbling brook and I stop to consider an earlier traveller on an earlier journey.
The canal bounds a potter’s field, and likey displaced some remains when it was dug. That certainly was the case much later when the highway claimed a portion of the burial grounds, nipping a piece of the potter’s field. No matter. Despite the appearance of order among the numbered plots above ground it is chaos down below. Decades of poor record keeping has made this area a de facto mass grave. If someone has to move for the convenience of the traveling living they can just move in with someone else, the more the merrier. Perhaps then, this accounts for the observations of my distant voyager, a passenger on a Providence bound canal boat who reported seeing (while passing through the burial grounds) ”a strange blue tinged orb that seemed to hover just at the level of the trees, then dart quickly forth and back…”.
Current employees of the cemetery have described a what they called a "spirit in the trees”, a human shape moving around and above the trees which sometimes "seems dark and sometimes glows with light”. A number of people who have seen this phenomenon say they have seen it not only in the trees here along the canal but around the pond and on the ridge of the esker, which lies just east of the river.
At the north end of the potter’s field the river once again takes cover below a busy off ramp. A little further to the north, on the rail line that put the canal out of business there once was a terrible accident. Two trains collided at the Valley Falls station. Thirteen people were killed. One of the victims is buried in this cemetery under a headstone adored with the image of locomotive. This accident is notable beyond the loss of life for another reason. It is considered to be the first train wreck ever photographed. A Pawtucket man (not unlike myself) made a daguerreotype at the scene, from which an engraving was made that was reproduced in newspapers only weeks later.
Are there ghosts here beyond the ghosts of engravings in old newspapers? As it is nearly Halloween it seems fair to think perhaps. I consider then the lost thirteen, never to arrive at Worcester. There they are for eternity, some staring out a coach window anticipating a less eventful departure, the others rattling along aboard the second train oblivious to the oblivion so soon before them. Or perhaps I prefer to imagine a fourteenth ghost, the ghost of the proto-photographer from Pawtucket preparing his plate and hefting his kit down to the station, focusing his brass lens upon the same horrific pile of splintered wood and twisted iron, year after year, trapped by the shade of the plate he is continually making. I snap my own picture. The rain arrives at last and I squeeze my way past a fence and on to the road home.
How to Tell the Birds
...that you’re sorry for shooting them, stuffing them, freeze drying them, mounting them and sticking them up for display...
[ These writings first appeared in booklet form in 2010. Inspired by a visit to the Natural History Museum in Roger Williams Park I share them here now for no other reason than spring, although snow is in the air.]
How to tell the birds that you’re sorry for shooting them, stuffing them, freeze drying them, mounting them and sticking them up for display in a natural history museum. You are also sorry that nobody looks at them anymore because people are more interested in a dinosaur bone and in the tire that came off the space shuttle that’s propped up next to the elevator. You are sorry about the planes that suck you birds into their jet engines and you are sorry for Chicken McNuggets. Very sorry.
You are sorry for all of it but it’s just not working out. We are just in different places. You are all great birds really, the best and you'll be a great catch for someone, but I've got my work and you birds have got your bird thing and the timing just isn’t good. It's complicated. It’s not you, it’s me. Take care birds.
How to tell the birds that the little house they have been living in, the little house nailed to a tree, the very house that they have fixed up so nicely with twigs and bits of plastic from around the yard, well that house has been repossessed by the bank and some men will be coming to board up the little hole in the front that you use for a doorway and you won't be able to get inside anymore. So you see you will have to go. Please keep the bits of plastic and that red bottle cap, we won’t need them. Take anything you can carry really, but you better get going. If you need any help we will leave you a card with a website on it. Sorry.
How to tell the birds that well the thing is the Company is downsizing and just doesn't need so many birds around anymore. In fact they don't need any except a couple of jays who can put on a show and the crows, who have negotiated a separate contract. Remember when the crows used to live in the country? Scarecrows, they were for them. Well they moved to the city and now they run everything. Whatever bird stuff needs doing, pretty much they are doing it. Anything left will be outsourced, so to speak to a few plywood bird cutouts. They don’t cost much and need just a little touch up from time to time.The chirping and singing and such have been converted to digital files available for download on the Company website. Straight to your phone, amazing. Anyway it's just there hasn't been the demand like there used to be and with the economy and all it was decided that the Company had to move in a different direction. You understand. Good luck.
How to tell the birds that you are just not interested in hearing their excuses any more, coming around with all those little chirps and tweets, the cackles and caws, the fussy little twitterings that they pass off as "song", you've had enough. It's always the same tune, there was this or that bit of food someplace, or they needed one more to make up the formation, and of course you can't tell them no, no matter that they don't know where they're going and the next thing you know you're in Canada or who knows where. Well no more. There's never a bird around when you need one, sure they’re happy to sing when the sun is shining, who isn't? But as soon as there is a little bit of weather... Take a listen... See? Nothing, nada, not a peep. Squirrels are more dependable.
How to tell the birds that you don’t really mean it, you take it all back. Robin and Jay, Martin, Swallow and Finch. Bittern, Waxwing and Nightjar, Whip-poor-will, Wren and lesser Nighthawk, Plover, Killdeer and Oystercatcher, Dove, Fish Crow and Oriental Cuckoo, Shy Albatross, Reed Bunting and Prairie Warbler, Shiny Cowbird and Oriole and Bobolink. You are sorry, you want them all back. You have some seed and there’s a nice bit of suet back at the house. Birds, what do you say?
