True Colors

The clouds broke late in the afternoon on the day of the winter solstice. I was reading and became aware of a cast of light, not yellow, not pink, not orange exactly, but so different that I went out back to see what the sky was doing. So spectacular that a neighbor and his father were already standing outside, taking in the show.

For the next 15 minutes or so, the sky—I have trotted out spectacular but onward—offered a display so fantastical, so extraordinary, so awe-provoking, that were I of the weeping stuff, I would have wept. And wept even more for painters.

With sunsets, the orangey-pinkish-yellowy stuff wows us. Most of us, I think. For me, it’s the blues. Varying shades of blue created as backdrop to the light and shadows, the vivid colors, the dimming sun. And in those blues, I think of the painters I know should they take on such skies. Good luck, my friends.

Over the years, family and friends have given me prints of various sorts—a Wyeth, European posters, sailboats, bridges, trees, more sailboats. I rarely buy a print for myself.

I did add one piece (also a gift) to my wall of student art—former students, former—this year.

When I am at my desk as I am now, the viewing angle is acute, about 15 degrees. The effect is to give more depth to the terrain, the clouds, a dimensionality that fools and charms my eye. The rock that dominates the lower part of the frame seems ready to burst through the glass.

What I originally responded to when I saw this piece was several-fold. One, bold strokes, and two, the smallness of the fisherman measured against the scale of the world. Seems about right to me.

And, the blues. How many times I have seen lakes or the sea, and the sky, show me a range of blues that justs, justs—shuts me up.

This painting with its blues shut me up, too. But less now about color, more about buying via auction.

David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)…. Sold! For $80 million, a record for a living artist.

Eighty million. Of course, I know it’s an original, the only one ever in 1972 and still the only one in 2018. The painting sold for $18-grand back in the day, and adjusted for inflation, of course would be sold at a higher price today—around $108,000. But, the piece went for $80 million, and another $10 million in fees.

By the way, Hockney realized not a penny. Heck, after he sold it the first time (minus fees), someone bought it again within 6 months for $50,000.

At this point, I need to step lightly along the path of moral self-righteousness. Certainly, I could share more with family and friends and those with needs much more essential than I ever experience. Clearly, I have put my price tag on a particular kind of pleasure in choosing The Fisherman.

For all I know, the new owner of the Hockney donates a billion dollars in charity every year. Besides, no statutes compel generosity. And free markets, don’t you know.

But.

Eighty million.

Weather-Wise

Unless tied to a specific event in your life or the date of some weather catastrophe, you most likely don’t remember the weather for the day on the 20^th of last month, or the 20^th 6 months ago, or the 20^th of December 5 years ago. The local weather is part of the daily forgetting as we march forward time-wise.

Which is why I forgot that this snowfall happened December 8^th of last year—Facebook was mindful enough to remind me.

Which I jokingly referenced as saving me the need to post photos of this year’s December 8^th snowfall. Of course, I did anyway.

I moved to this area the last day of August in ’16. The historical record for Greenville-Spartanburg snow-wise is an average between 4 and 5 inches. The number of snowfalls, 1-2 annually.

January 7, the first snow of that first season. I remember the event, but wouldn’t have come up with the date.

Ten days later, another snow. Remembered another one, but not that it was only 10 days later.

Now, we have seen our average amount of snow, and we have been significantly over for total inches seasonally since I have been here. A trend? Historically significant? Not one of these snows is in the record book for heaviest single accumulation (15"), nor have I seen the highest seasonal total (21.4"). Historically speaking, I have witnessed non-events except as they contribute to averages going back to 1892.

I might say more perhaps, but in today’s climate—and let this be a word to the wise—I am reluctant to reach for much of any kind of conclusion other than to say we might see more snow around here or might not.

Reading Matters

Perhaps you have seen it as well, the online pieces that in the vicinity of the title suggest the time it will take to read. Helpful, I suppose. Hey, you can read this one while the oven counts down the final five minutes on the pecan pie. Or, during an oil change. Or as you idle in the car line, waiting on a child’s school day to end.

My blog entries run nearly always between 300 and 500 words. Not sure why that is except these are blog posts spit out in half an hour to 45 minutes. If I have to do any research, well that slows me down a bit. And there is the issue of my attention span, shortening by each passing half-decade.

I did a quick review of reading speed estimates via the web. Generally, average adult readers are pushing along at 250-300 words per minute. Friends, if so, that rate would go a long way toward explaining how it is the average American reads around a book a year.

Of course, either one book or two, unless one finished and the second one tossed out several pages in. Averages, don’t you know.

Consider the following titles: A Game of Thrones, 298,000 words; Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, 76,944; Of Mice and Men, 29,160; Macbeth, 17,084; and, Pride and Prejudice, 122,685.

Doing some basic arithmetic, 300 wpm is 18,000 an hour. So a little under 100 minutes for Steinbeck, closing in on 7 hours for Austen. A Game of Thrones? Around 16 and a half hours. And you have to figure in some water breaks, and so some water works, too, then.

Begs a question or three, in my mind at least, illiteracy being one. UNESCO currently projects the US at a 99% literacy rate.

USA, USA, USA!

Wait. That’s still well over 3 million of us illiterate.

According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, 21% of our fellow citizens score at the very lowest level for prose reading, 23% the lowest level for document reading, and for good measure, 22% landed in the lowest proficiency level for quantitative work—math.

But now we’re talking comprehension, not just speed. One out of five readers between 15 and 64 are going to struggle. Seems reasonable to think wpm rates are slowed.

Maybe 5 or 6 hours for Of Mice and Men. Think of it. I say this having a pretty good sense who my readers are. Then consider some of the following landing places for your charitable donations.

Reading is Fundamental https://www.rif.org/about-rif

Room to Read https://www.roomtoread.org/

Reading Rockets http://www.readingrockets.org/resources_new/c604

Local public and school libraries.

And Donors Choose—teachers often ask for book sets. https://www.donorschoose.org/

Here’s reading with you, Kid.

Trigger Finger (F)

My older brother Wayne clapped his hands together once. Our eyes met. “Get the gun,” he said.

I dashed to the barn and grabbed Grandad’s Winchester. As I came around the corner my brother made signs for me to slow down and be quiet. I eased up and took measured steps until I reached him.

“Coyotes” he whispered.

We scouted the slough that ran between the back of our farm and our new neighbors’ property. The pair were meandering along the low spots, stopping to lap up water as they moved away from us.

Wayne raised the rifle. The coyotes disappeared behind some small volunteer pine. Then, pace quickening, they were back in view, starting up the slope toward the neighbors’ pasture fence.

The first shot was aimed at the lead animal. The pair bolted. As they reached the top of the rise, Wayne fired again. The coyotes disappeared into the woods.

What we heard next made us both gasp. It was a scream. It was a crying out. It was a long wailing sound of disbelief and heartbreak.

In the pasture near the fence we could see Janet Berry running. Janet was in Wayne’s Algebra I class at school. We saw her fall to the ground. Her mother called out, “You shot her horse, you shot her horse!” Again and again she cried, “You shot her horse!”

Wayne’s mouth hung open. He looked at the scene as if it were a thousand miles away.

“You shot her horse.”

He finally let out his breath, a sort of grunt, a sort of groan. I took the rifle from him.

“I shot Janet’s horse.”

We heard the girl’s wail again. And again. Later, our mother would name the wrenching sound for us, “She was keening.”

Wayne turned and broke into a trot toward the house. I took the gun back to the barn and set it inside the door.

Wayne was already on the porch steps.

“Call Mama, Thad. Call Mama.”

When I got to Wayne he was on the floor, leaning against the stove, knees pulled up, hands tight to his chest. Next to him was Mama’s prized chef’s knife she bought for a cooking class at the tech school.

I could not misunderstand the scene before me, the blood on the floor, Wayne sobbing, and on the counter, the cutting board, and his trigger finger.

An Index (4)

Experiencing nostalgia for city-states? Some cities, some states under a million in population. Sparrrrrrtaaa!

Delaware          971 (000)

Austin                950

Jacksonville        892

San Francisco     884

Columbus           879

South Dakota    878

Ft. Worth            874

Indianapolis        863

Charlotte            859

North Dakota    755

Alaska               738

Seattle               725

Denver               705

Boston               685

El Paso               684

Detroit               673

Nashville            668

Memphis            652

Portland             647

Oklahoma City    644

Las Vegas           642

Vermont           624

Louisville            621

Baltimore           612

Milwaukee          595

Wyoming          574

Guilt

On the chore list for outside the backyard fence is the digging up of rogue Bradford pear saplings. More than two dozen are growing on the slope I stopped mowing when I moved in two years ago.

First, a mea culpa. I planted a Bradford in the West Ashley area of Charleston around ’97. In ’99, I planted a Cleveland pear in Summerville.

Plenty of pears were planted in this subdivision, but mowing keeps the sprouts controlled. Like most places, however, in overgrown fields, and along roadsides and creeks, and on riverbanks, the spiky intruder is having its way.

But my story here is about taking down the 15-year-old Bradford out front. A typical fast and dirty contractor’s decision, planted it kind of in the center of the yard. And for good measure, only 3’ to the house side of the underground utility lines.

The central trunk stood about 4’ with around a 10” diameter. From there, the typical tall spires of a Bradford, reaching about 20’ or so.

The first thing was to cut away all the branches and cull out the slenderest of the limbs. The ones with some size to them would be cut up along with the trunk for firewood. While working on this part of the operation, a mocking bird landed in a nearby maple and fussed at me.

I was well aware that the tree was a nesting site, but I easily rationalized that plenty of other safe spaces were in my yard—the big butterfly bush out by the shed was used by mockingbirds this past season. And since there are hundreds of trees on the property, I didn’t think too much of the bird’s complaint.

With one tall spire left, I came inside for water. When I went back out, the mockingbird was sitting at the very top. Okay, I thought, a little overly dramatic.

Down came that piece, and time to load the truck with the debris I didn’t want to salvage. As I drove to my dumping site, I saw the mockingbird—had to be the same one—fly to the top of the shed and watch me roll by.

Farther down the hill, I dragged good handfuls of slender tops to the final spot, and when I turned back, the mockingbird was perched on the large pile still in truck.

Now, I don’t know what you may think, but I was pretty sure that bird knew its tree, and I was destroying it. I hated doing it, but I was going to cut it to the ground.

Hey, I’ve planted about 60 trees here. So, you know, it’s just one tree, just one nest. It’s a Bradford. It’s got to go.

Dang bird.

Pathetic, right?

In the Manner of Speaking

An observation regarding my little volume of poems by two former students—one late 20s, one early 30s by my counting—has come to me by way of Facebook messaging: “This doesn’t sound like you”. Now that made me laugh. No, no, I reckon it doesn’t.

Since they didn’t elaborate, didn’t specify tone or subject matter, I’ll go with tone. I chuckled a bit thinking of what they knew as my tone of voice during their time in my classroom. My clear-the-halls voice, my call-to-attention in the room, one-on-one discussions about their writing, informative chatter regarding school news or regulations, oh, and those random meetings out in the world—yes, teachers buy fresh produce. “Mr. Kaple bought a bag of garlic!” Why, yes, yes I did.

Of course—and this point is obvious—I am referring to a spoken voice in the previous examples, and so too shifting tones by way of pitch and volume, etc. I am conflating voice with tone to suggest what they heard in my poems is indeed a voice not quite the same as what they heard during our time together.

Besides, I’m not sure what would be the poetic version of my bellowing at tardy students my favorite borrowed phrase, “Run like a freshman”.

I know their reading is plenty nuanced enough to hear a difference in tone between my poems “The Gnat” and “Emmanuel”. So let them consider hearing me read poems out loud, say Molly Holden’s “Some Men Create” and Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young”. Neither readings were in my voice, and if I got after it for the better those days, the voices were decidedly different from one another.

But I do own that I am the voice behind my written words, each and every one, from the serious to the absurd. Perhaps, then, the word voicings clarifies.

Now I wonder about friends from long ago, or the current crop—scratching their heads?  “I don’t know, could be him, I guess.” And then I think of particular high school friends from way, way, way back in the day were they to sit in the back of my classroom when I was holding forth as Mr. Kaple—gales of laughter, no doubt, and down, down, down my ship would sink.