An Eagles hit in the early 70’s was titled ” Take it Easy. ”
“Standing on a Corner in Winslow, Arizona” was a lyric that became a real park at the Corner of Kinsley and East 2nd Street in the real town of Winslow.
Winslow isn’t big, just a small town on old Route 66 that is a place to gas up and walk the dog. It only takes ten minutes to pull off I- 40 and find the ” Easy ” corner. This ” place of interest ” has a bench, a few statues, a plaque to memorialize it, and, this early morning, a radiance, the calendar flipped back decades.
This morning, a street crew cleans up, using weed blowers to scoot leaves and papers onto a tarp that will be tossed into the back of a flatbed. They wear lime colored vests and hardhats and give me a quick nod as they go about their business. There are restaurants and curio shops nearby that sell Route 66 memorabilia but ” Closed” signs are up in most of the windows.
Standing on the corner, I watch a You Tube video of ” Taking it Easy. ”
The song and message still sound good.
It sounds like it should be our new National Anthem.
Long term residents, going back to the 1940’s and 50’s, who are still alive, talk in the hospital waiting room about California being a Garden of Eden.
” Down that street, ” one says, “: there were acres and acres of orange trees….. ”
” And grapefruits as big as your head, ” another chips in from his chair as he looks out a huge window on the third floor.
” When we were little, ” a gray haired matron with granny glasses says, almost so quiet you can’t hear her, “my little sister and I would walk to an orchard and buy a bag of lemons for home made lemonade. Our mother made it so sweet…..”
The Garden of Eden has been sold, divided into planned communities with covenants.
There are still berry farms scattered inside municipal Los Angeles though, operations that take up a few city blocks,not bulldozed by progress. This strawberry patch is on the street I follow to the University of Irvine Medical Center where Chris is on life support.
I imagine a little Japanese man as this farm’s owner and operator, who opens early and closes late, who uses a hoe to keep furrows clear of weeds, who carefully carries boxes of strawberries out to SUV’s for domestic Goddesses. His grandchildren help him, and,for lunch, he eats rice and fish at the small table back of his stand.
Some people are born to get dirt on their pants, hold soil in the palm of their hand, taste a fresh picked strawberry and let the juice run down their cheeks.
This strawberry patch is grounding me to the Earth today.
My Dad grew strawberries in New Mexico, not so long ago, and we all loved helping him, picking tomato worms off vines, dusting for squash bugs, weeding watering troughs on either side of his fast growing black eyed peas and cucumbers and okra.
It calms me to be in this strawberry field, praying Chris falls on the right side of life.
I don’t try one of the old man’s strawberries.
It is good enough for me just to know that our government still lets people grow their own food, and, especially, inside city limits.
Government’s wagging finger, saying ” No “, never seems to stop pointing at us these days.
When you see clouds turn this color, the sun obscured, visibility shrunk, the odds of it being the ” End of the World ” increase. I expect to witness armed Angels riding down out of the smoke on horses breathing fire, drawn swords ready to take off unrighteous heads and cut out un-repenting hearts.
On my way to California to see Chris in a trauma center,whisked close to death in a car accident, these clouds are brewing in the desert north of Phoenix. They are the color of burning rubbish and are caused by forest fires to the north of Flagstaff.
Ancient man must have seen these same clouds.
They would have said the Gods were angry.
We say a camper was careless with his matches.
Pulled off the road, taking pictures, I preview the end of our world.
We don’t all get out of this life the same way, but where we go next is a true travel mystery.
Paintings come in all sizes according to the shape of an artist’s vision.
Many artists begin painting using pre-stretched canvases you can buy at Hobby Lobby, then matriculate to larger sizes,then begin stretching their own canvas over manufactured frames, gesso the canvas, and paint up a storm with brushes, knives, sponges, cloths, and anything else that grabs their fancy.
When one makes big art, issues come knocking.
Are walls big enough to display the compositions?
Should you put an inexpensive frame on a work you have spent hundreds of hours to complete?
Do you have a vehicle big enough to move them?
Keeping these art works safe is a duty, finding homes for them is a calling, having them near is comforting.
Mom’s come with a myriad of tangibles and intangibles, and, right now, my mom’s tangible art works are safely stored.
Mom intangibles I also keep stored, in other places.
You can’t put a price on intangibles.
Crazy glued to the dashboard, these critters listen to talk radio.
They are also familiar with Top Fifty tunes, political lies, opinions, advertisements, trivia, propaganda, ” Fake News” and World News. Some of these critters seem like animals we should have as friends, others look like aliens come to take over Earth and send us to salt mines worse than the ones we are already working.
Hollywood cranks out critters each year, as fast as screenwriters and makeup crews can design them. Our television and movie oeuvre is full of ” out of this world ” characters invading Earth, demons terrorizing children from dark places, galactic battles, romantic meetings between vampires and humans.
These guys and gals seem approachable. They have little tails, pointed ears ,protruding snouts, cute penetrating eyes. They have red and white stripes and dots, camouflage that is useless in our drab urban world.
Glued in place, they have their best conversations when their driver has locked his car and and gone to pick up a pack of cigarettes , a six pack of beer, and lucky condoms.
They have a point of view that heats up as the temperature inside the car reaches 120 degrees F.
The thing interesting me the most is the mental stability of the human who glued them to his dash.
If sticking plastic critters on your dash was a sane idea you would see it more often.
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