Reminders of a very special introduction I had while living in Upstate New York. We’re still in touch all these years later.
Tag: Photos
Not-so-smiley faces
Violas.
Perhaps Peter Max captured the visual reality
My Binghamton sojourn reflections at my Thistle Finch editions free digital bookstore also include a Chronicles set of notes, Escapes to Cornell, and the photo lookbooks/storyboards Somewhere North of the Big Apple, reflecting my novel Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, and Dark Transit, for Subway Visions. In my life, these could have been the rings of Saturn.
Do take a look.
Welcome to another Rabbit Hole on the Internet.
Blue pride
Warm weather brings out old car buffs who love to show off their restoration efforts. Owners will sometimes drive hours just to show off their pride and joy, sometimes then just cruising up and down the Ave.
The bluest sky
The intense depth of color in a frigid winter sky stirs up memories of living in the interior Far West, where its usual lack of humidity produced similar firmaments through the hottest seasons. Consider this, then, from coastal Maine, a preview of some journal entries ahead.
Should you be interested in finding more …
As the Red Barn delves into my earliest journals, I’ve mentioned that we’re skipping over many of the entries that have already been distilled into my previously published poetry, fiction, and non-fiction prose. I do hope you find what’s turning up to be brilliant and, uh, let’s back up, somehow engaging. It was a unique time and journey.
Still, I’m coming across material that seems more suitable for a different typographic and visual presentation apart from a straight Red Barn post, and that’s led me to create a Chronicles category at my Thistle Finch editions free digital editions “bookstore.” Offerings at that site allow me more flexibility in formatting, especially for you to download or print. Quite simply, it often feels more “literary,” with its own satisfactions.
Initial posts there as an outcome of my journals review are now available as free PDF downloads. Among them are New Novelists Back Then, notes from a lively contemporary fiction course, meaning cutting-edge novelists back in the ‘60s; Hitching, drawing on thumbing-on-the-road encounters in the hippie era; and The Past Still Speaks, three literary quotes that still resonate.
Another presentation there is a photo album, Mulberry Row, with images of a dormitory quad that prompted much of the action in my novel Daffodil Uprising. Collecting those images, which become this “lookbook” or “storyboard” was helpful in re-envisioning the narrative. Perhaps it will help readers, too, in internalizing the scene.
Welcome to another Rabbit Hole on the Internet.
Clear wonder
In my moves across the northern U.S., I’ve always lived in places that would get icicles in winter – some places more impressively than others. I never planned it that way, but in some locales they could grow down past floor-length windows, creating a threat to anything below. When those fell, their crash would shake the house, sometimes waking us from deep sleep. These, on the second floor at the Cobscook Quaker meetinghouse in Whiting, Maine, are modest in comparison.
Of frozen and unfrozen waters
When I see this phenomenon where I’m now living, I’m reminded of an ice floe stampede one Sunday afternoon on the Susquehanna River back in the winter of ‘71. For two hours or so after an ice jam upstream had been dynamited, the river was a racetrack of large jagged white wedges three or four feet thick crashing down the riverway. Viewing it was terrifying, mystifying and unforgettable. Slabs of the ice that had been thrust into shrubs along the riverbanks remained visible until nearly May.
Hobart Stream at Cobscook Bay, Edmunds Township, Maine.
What is it about fresh snow?
A snowy winter like the one we’re having reminds me of Upstate New York and the Poconos back then. The season’s longer and more intense than what I had growing up in southern Ohio and later in college in southern Indiana.
Here, though, I also have the Atlantic, as Passamaquoddy Bay, and Canada beyond it in the mix.
Welcome to my world, now and back then.
How about your winter?
Situating the experiences and place
We can wonder how much of the history I could have captured if I had owned a camera. The images I’m digging up for this series help some, but skirt much of the grittier realities I faced.
The city itself was already well into Rust Belt decline and probably would have been intolerable apart from the hippie-era adventure of living in a college-town slum.
This was my introduction to the East Coast, and my first time of living in proximity to mountains, albeit the Allegany foothills of the Apalachin range (New York spellings). I was still spellbound. The region was called the Southern Tier, to the west of the Catskills and south of the Finger Lakes. The city,- or Tri-Cities when neighboring Johnson City and Endicott were included, was generally working-class and infused with a spectrum of ethnic minorities.
The city was nestled into the valley and once had water-powered mills along the riverbanks.
The Susquehanna itself was a fascinating river, as I present in my chapbook of poems carrying its name.
Jnana's Red Barn 