Time Machine

I spent way too much time mining the Internet for postcards of Lincoln. Sadly, it affirmed everything I found out writing my dissertation: this damn city used to be pretty cool. I especially love the castle-like state penn and Tudor-looking insane hospital. A nice row around Epsworth Park Lake or a restful night's sleep at the Topper would be wonderful things to do. The Lincoln below looks like a place I could visit and enjoy--where did it go?

Click on images for a better view...enjoy.

A Tree Doesn't Grow on 30th Street

It was a windy day in Lincoln today. I was grading at Barnes & Noble with Jeanine for most of the afternoon and didn't realize how windy it really was until I got home and saw one of the massive trees in our yard was blocking 30th street. After last summer's strong thunder storms, I'm surprised the tree lasted as long as it did given the rotting trunk that was exposed after it broke in half. Luckily, it fell into the street and only did very minor damage to the house across the street.

I'd write more to eulogize the tree, but a) I'm renting and b) it honestly wasn't the prettiest tree I've ever seen but I do wonder:

• how old was it?
• who lived in this house when it was a mere sapling?
• who planted it?
• how lovely was my neighborhood at one time?

This all reminds me of my favorite Robert Frost poem, although the trees in Lincoln are only now beginning to drop their leaves.

A Leaf-Treader

I have been treading on leaves all day until I am autumn-tired.
God knows all the color and form of leaves I have trodden on and mired.
Perhaps I have put forth too much strength and been too fierce from fear.
I have safely trodden underfoot the dead leaves of another year.

All summer long they were overhead, more lifted up than I.
To come to their final place in earth they had to pass me by.
All summer long I thought I heard them threatening under their breath.
And when they came it seemed with a will to carry me with them to death.

They spoke to the fugitive in my heart as if it were leaf to leaf.
They tapped at my eyelids and touched my lips with an invitation to grief.
But it was no reason I had to go because they had to go.
Now up, my knee, to keep on top of another year of snow.

(I was playing around with iMovie here, sorry if it's a bit dull.)

If I was a better iMovie director, I would give the tree a nice--if heavily recreated--montage of memories from across the years: it's first winter, its first thunder storm, its first spring...its 21st birthday bash with the trees on 30th street.

Tiger, tiger, burning bright / In the forests of the night

Dave took me to homecoming last Saturday for what has become my annual Husker game. This year it was a night game (v. Missouri's Tigers), which I was glad for--my first game last year resulted in a nasty sun burn that took weeks of gross peeling to endure.

This year, unlike last, I didn't make it without having to use the restroom, which proved to be both loud and smelly. The men's room was like a sauna if saunas were cement and smelled like pee. Screaming fans, drunk men who could barely walk, and the pee smell are, I suppose, part of the experience. So I experienced it. Here are some highlight pictures.

I am personally glad they make band people do this and not orchestra people. I could not stroll in line if my life depended on it.

When I start paying attention to just how many people are around me in the stadium I get a wee bit sick. It's just too much like a koi fish pond where they thrash over one another to get the food. Gross.

I didn't get pictures of them, but sitting behind us were some tried and true old timers. I have always had a fondness for old timers, but I really loved lines like, "Quit clown'n around!" I wish that they only let in old timers into the stadium.

This part--when Nebraska scored--was fun. The kid below us was high-fiving us a ton--even accidentally when Missouri scored. He high-fived hard. My hand hurt. He began to mope when we were losing and he never ended up returning after half time. I suppose he was too sober by that point.

The guy below, however, ruined the spirit of the game by totally stealing the flying hot dog that hit Dave's shoulder. Ever since Czech Fest, I strongly believe that Dave and I have an affinity for attracting flying hot dogs and what better place to prove it than at a Husker game where Der Weinerschlinger hurls dogs into the air via a small air canon? The flying wiener was ours, I say, ours!

It was very, very quiet as we left the Stadium in the third quarter. Everyone was sober by this point. So much for Husker power and all that. There's always next year, folks.

Did I mention that my building on campus is falling apart and that Dave and I saw the luxurious new sports training complex? I'm glad we Huskers have things in perspective, especially when I show up to work.

And yet, I'm still mad about the wiener.

Photographs

Recently after my great Uncle Lyle passed away, relatives going through his belongings have been sending pictures to my mother and other family that "belong" to our side of the family. This has me feeling and thinking all kinds of things--none of which are particularly surprising given the circumstances--but it is strange to come into contact with these pictures that Lyle surrounded himself with.

The ties that bind us together are brought into focus: images that document lives lived, time spent growing and changing, and what all of this suggests and covers up is equally lovely and so sad. I have a feeling that the gap in photographs during my grandfather's early teens revels a hellish time. After my grandmother died he told me some of that story: living in barns, being used in a slave-like state by friends of his father's after his mother died in child birth--a family dissolved by an emotionally distant father. After he ran away, he worked harder than I can imagine a twelve year-old working to afford food and shelter and who found time to study at night with a kind school teacher who personally took him on as her student and saw him to the 8th grade. These things, I know, are not a part of what I see. He's a small boy in the images, carefree and not yet aware of the hard fate in front of him.

Likewise, my grandmother's scrapbook was buried in a dresser drawer in the room I often slept in growing up--so close and yet so out of reach. It is full of the ephemera of a high school girl in the 1920s who went to dances, posed for pictures, and collected dance cards. When I first saw the book after she died it was like opening up a new world of her life--so strange to have it open up after she died, but it did. I was captivated by these photographs from the scrapbook because the woman I knew is so evident in them. Yet who was this girl then? What did she want out of her life?

(Click to see larger version, very cool if you do!)

Through all of these things, the stuff left over, my grandmother's life took on new dimension for me. As cliched as it sounds, she took shape as a person--I could see beyond the gray hair and curlers that she must have adopted in her early 50s, judging by the pictures I've seen. Old before her time.

These recent pictures have added to my understanding of her life, as well as my grandfather's life. These pictures are endlessly fascinating to me, and I'm so grateful that for the split second of the pose, the shutter click, and the amazing alchemical process that produces the images. But most of all, I am grateful to--and you can see this in the last picture below--to the shadowy figures who snapped the pictures, the picture takers who wanted to capture the moment.


Later, after the birth of my mother and her siblings, after the tragic death of their first-born daughter, the series of images gets to me. The story plays out. The pictures tell the story--and yet they miss something. I'm lonesome as I look at these pictures for the conversations I could have had, for the smell of a soapy smelling kitchen in Aberdeen, South Dakota, and for the voices of a generation now gone.