I Got Crabs!

   I don't even know how to begin this story, creatures died, that is for sure, and I saw hundreds of islands carved out so effortlessly during the glacier age eons ago.

   Puget Sound is not the Ocean but a vast fingering of the Pacific Ocean carved and gouged, created from the ice a millenia ago as the sea engulfed icebergs miles deep.  It must have been quite some battle.  A battle of giants leaving behind only the scars, the hundreds of islands and deep channels that is now Puget Sound.

 The table where I had my morning coffee.

   The is Indian Territory, every island named for Indian Tribes, Indian words for each small town clustered on the banks of these forested islands.  It is a place of abundance thick with berries and oysters along the shoreline.  Deer are everywhere.

   It is difficult to feel this place without thinking of Mitchner's book, "Chesapeake Bay".  There is a long History here and Centuries would only be chapters.

  Yes, I had a great time, lots of stories to tell.  It will be the beginning that will be the difficult part and I understand how a story can weave.  Back and forth stitching to make a whole cloth.

   TomTom was amazing.  Tells me where I am going, how to get there, the time of arrival and flashes red when I go over the speed limit.  I never got lost!

 Chinook Salmon on the bar-b-que

   The fishing, it was great!  I won a bottle of wine for the first fish caught!  I also caught a huge sea aneminme, bright orange and thick but there was a discussion about its being a vegetable, maybe, and it didn't count as the "biggest fish caught".

   I'll save the fishing stories for another post, suffice it to say we were not issued shotguns like Hemmingway did for his friends while shark hunting off the Florida Coast.

   Indian Casinoes are everywhere and I both won and lost and that should be a post unto itself also.

   I am back now, safe and sound, bigger and with more visions.  Like any good travelling adventure, I will never remain the same.

Gone Fishing!

You would think, being self-employed all of my life, that I would have hung (people are hanged, everything else is hung) this sign up many times: GONE FISHING!

   I never worked a full year until I was 28 years old and have never taken a day off since!  Well, almost never, it is a rarity for me.  There is always "the chance" that I will miss something, some job out of nowhere will materialize while I am gone and I might miss it.

   Being self-employed is not all it is cracked up to be.  Never have I had a paid day off!  I can't even imagine it.  Someone would pay me to go fishing?  hahaha!  sure, in my dreams!

   Well, I am retired now and one day mixes into the next, a Tuesday is about the same as a Saturday, sometimes work comes in and sometimes it doesn't.  It is a bad economy and I don't hunt for work like I used to.

   So I am off on my adventure starting early tomorrow morning.  I am packed, have my TOMTOM, turned to a sexy voice for companionship and directions for when I get lost.  A five and one half hour drive, the longest road trip since I was 27 and crossed this whole country in a 1965 VW Van!  Now that would be a blog!

   And this upcoming adventure will be something to Blog about too; I know it will.  I'll keep mental notes and I am taking my camera so I can report all of the highlights to you!  Well, the ones I am willing to talk about anyway!

   And there will be fishing stories!  Big ones!  Giant ones!  and The One That Got Away! Except I have every intention of catching it!

  That's it!  See ya Wednesday.  I have GONE FISHING!

Artists Without Opinion

I am noticing the same thing on blog after blog: Shouldn't we get tired of "nice painting, love the colors, beautiful texture"? That is so easy to do these days and with computer editing

we can make six paintings out of one! If the goal of art is color coordination to the matching furniture there are a lot of us indeed! I confess I like art with an opinion, an artist's interpretation of this world we live in. That is the reason I really look at other's work, look at the comments made and even look at who is commenting. I want to understand the artist behind

the canvas, dig as deep as I can, I want to know what they are trying to tell me. To me that is understanding art. I have seen really, really well executed works, landscapes for instance, that are almost flawless in their presentation and I know they will never "become famous" because they are too pretty, without a single proud tree in a dieing forest, no pollution, no clear-cut logging areas, not a single curious thing to wonder about. Pretty picture, nice job, good work!

The few of us that dare to create a discussion either in our blogs or comments to others are met by silence. If artists, people with energy, emotion, and insightfulness are silent there is little hope for this world. Artists who "hide their light under the bushell" will never be found.

My current laugh in our absurd world is the cruize ship that went adrift off of California, stranding almost 4,000 passengers, requiring them to eat cold food and fresh salads for almost three whole days! In a world where half its population goes to bed hungry every night these passengers have acquired an adventure of a lifetime, and a return of their ticket price and another offer of a free cruize! Is life Grand or what?

Mrs. Clark!

I am skipping around a bit in remembering my grade school days. It is so strange how our minds work, well how my mind works. I have been thinking these past few days about Miss Westen, my third grade teacher, and her dreadful essay, "My Summer Vacation". The brain is a huge computer and all night long mine was downloading and every single detail came back to me! I remember everything!
Mrs. Powers was my first grade teacher and her daughter, the prettiest girl in the school by any standard, was my age, in her class, and sitting right next to me! Anne is a separate story
and deserves a whole chapter just for her.
Miss Westen taught second grade and third grade so I had to do the summer vacation story twice although not much was expected the first time around, block printing and a single page but even then she made us do it twice.
Mrs. Clark was my fat fourth grade teacher whose name had escaped me earlier. All I really remember about her class was eating. She always had apples and candy and raw oatmeal mixed with raisons that she would happily share with the whole class. I learned to read in her class, not just words on paper, but to sit down and read a book, to turn the pages in anticipation and develop a curiosity. She taught us to use the library and introduced to me a series on Mountian Men and the discovery of the West.
Fifth grade was the best. It was not only the last year in grade school, we had achieved senior status, not like wise village elders but more like rowdy know it alls. A huge growth spurt takes place during this time. We were no longer snakes and snails and puppy dog tails; we were entering a new phase and had no idea what was going on! The school knew and in the fifth grade we got our first man teacher! Mr. Thomas was a huge man, a football player turned educator and he kept a paddle near his desk and he made sure we could all see it although he never used it. I carry to this day two vivid memories of Mr. Thomas and my fifth grade class.
The first was "Prison Dodge Ball" a game since forbidden in the public school system as being unfair and a little dangerous. We all loved it and looked forward to the rainy days that would prevent us from playing outside and send us to the gym for "Dodge Ball"! It is a team sport but is very dependent on individual skills. You certainly wanted the big and quick on your side!
The cl;ass was divided into two opposing sides and it is this division that caused the game to be considered "unfair", often puttinmg the "cool" and popular kids against the others. Mr. Thomas never allowed that as much as we would always try to do the pairings this way. The division was always random, always different from day to day, sometime alphabetical, sometimes by team "captains" choosing players alternatively, and never, like we wanted to do, the boys against the girls!
I learned to write reports in Mr. Thomas's class and grew to love them. That too is a different story that maybe deserves a chapter on its own. In remembering these very young days of my education I have failed to catagorize them in a logical sequence, instead writing them down as they occur like flashfloods in the middle of the night. Funny I should be thinking about this at all and I don't even remember now what got me started!
Miss Westen taught me imagination. That "flat green box" on the school desk could have been her garbage headed out to trash but she encouraged us to think of it otherwise and instilled in us the ability to dream it to be. to describe it and make it real, to give it life. I knew that this essay on "My Summer Vacation" need not be the truth, didn't actually have to happen. I just had to make it seem that way and describe it as if you were there with me, or had a desire at least, to spend one summer day together!

Miss Westen

Miss Westen was a hard teacher. She seemed to be about six feet tall but, looking back on those days I would guess her to be five feet four inches or so. I remember occasions where she would be at the black board, probably teaching us cursive or more math tables which we did every single day, but mostly she would walk about the room and hover over our desks, this giant
of a teacher, strict and no nonsense! I dreaded this "Summer Vacation" essay. I knew she would make us write it a million times, changing words, looking them up in a dictionery, finding different words in the thesarus, and always, as was her want, "be descriptive", make the sentences longer! Writing something for her would be a job and we could never just sit down and get it done. She would go on and on about adjectives and metaphors, the "little helpers" that bring language alive. These assignments always began simple enough. She would bring something from her home and we would have to describe it. What was simply "a box" would become "a box on a table" and she would encourage our ideas as she wrote them on the blackboard. "Green box"! would enevitably become "the flat squarish box with tattered green wrapping paper, a gift always recycled and missing its ribbons, waiting to be the last present opened on this snowy Christmas Eve." That is really the way she did it, always a subject and a verb, those damned adjectives and metaphors can always tell a story in themselves. Make the reader want to know more, eagerly turning the page, alive.
Even at ten years old I knew this was going to happen. How could a teacher as old as the hills
really be curious about my summer vacation? It was going to be about writing and rewriting and making a big deal of something that happened during the summer. We had already been taught about "the audience", blogging had another fifty years before it would appear and only personal journals could start a topic with "I". This is almost before television, that media which destroyed reading, entertaining us with the delusion that an entire story could be told in thirty minutes. Television got the format right. Always set up the scene first, developing the questions
of where and when and who and why and how? I don't think Miss Westen owned a television set
but I knew she would be looking for these questions and their answers in our essays, and I knew
she had a penchant for making the reader curious! Now, how was I going to do that? I didn't remember exactly what happened that summer, not in every little detail that she would want to hear...