I receive some very nice comments and invite you to add yours and to enjoy the remarks of others. Thank you.
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All photographs are copyrighted by me unless otherwise noted. Please contact me (vcwald at yahoo dot com) if you would like to use one or more of them.
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Really, it's because of the crud that saps your imagination in very hot, very humid weather and from having to sleep with the air conditioner running day after day after day.
It's been very good for the bugs though. Photos taken in the botanical garden that is the joint effort of the University of Chicago and the City of Chicago Park District along the Midway Plaissance, just across the street from my office building.
Mud dauber wasp
Honey bee
Red Admiral (with bumble bee,right foreground) on purple cone flowers
Ailanthus Web Worm moth & unidentified bee (with a spike do on its butt)
The following is from a letter to park superintendents from Dan Puskar, Director, Partnerships and Government Relations, National Park Foundation, that was passed on to me my a friend who is an NPS ranger in Yellowstone National Park:
"I’d like to tell you about an opportunity for your park to receive a $100,000 grant from Coca-Cola through the National Park Foundation.
The National Park Foundation and Coca-Cola are encouraging Americans to be active outdoors in their national and state parks with the launch of the “America Is Your Park” campaign. Through this campaign, an online voting center has been created to let individuals cast a vote for their favorite park. The national or state park that receives the most votes by August 31 st wins a $100,000 grant made possible by Coca-Cola’s Live Positively initiative. No sign-up or registration is necessary to participate and individuals can vote as many times as they want until the voting closes on August 31 st .
1) Click the “Vote for your park!” button.2) Type the name of the park you’d like to vote for in the “Search” box in the upper left corner, and hit the Enter key. (You may also search for parks by state or zip code.) 3) Click on the red “Vote” button next to the name of the park you support.
In addition, for every vote cast, Coca-Cola will also donate $1 to the National Park Foundation up to a total donation of $200,000."
Take care that Yellowstone (or whatever your favorite park is) comes up into the voting field. Great Smoky Mountains is the default, and it has already received tens of thousands of votes, where as of this writing, very surprisingly, Yellowstone, a favorite of many people world wide, is still to reach 10,000. These grants are extremely meaningful to the parks that receive them. Please vote early and often, as we say in Chicago.
Thank you!!
Meandering sloughs of the Firehole River
Yellowstone National Park, Early morning, May 2009
For many, many years I would look at myself in the mirror and see the same person I’d seen the month, the year, even the decade before. Conscious nonetheless that people do not look the same at 40, 50, 60, as they did at 10, 20 and 30, I told myself this sameness was an illusion, that I must be changing and, since I felt as I always had inside, I must be fooling myself about my exterior—except for my gray hair, which has been noticeably transitioning from dark brown to salt-and-pepper to something approaching steely, for 30 years. Then suddenly one day, not long ago, I saw someone looking back at me who was familiar, but not exactly the same, as the “long-time” me. I’ve completed my fifth decade but am still not feeling any declines interiorly, still no arthritis or other signs of the inevitable (except for the fact that I just can’t wear high heels like I used to!) maybe a little more ready to seek opportunities to rest, certainly heavier than I was in the prime of life, but that’s about it.
There is plenty of interest in the exterior manifestations of aging in the profession of cosmetic surgery, the beauty products industry, and among forensic artists. It turns out I have plenty of material of my own with which to examine the phenomenon. Below is a series of photos of those close to me by blood, history, or happenstance. I tried to pair images from young adulthood with ones as close to the present, or, in several cases, as close to the end of life, as I could. The shortest span is Winston the cat's 21 year life; the longest span is 66 years, my mother's (the first pair). Most are between 30 and 40 year spans. What do you see in them?
Yellowstone's newest Web cam is run by the USGS Volcano Hazards Program's Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, hosted at the University of Utah and mounted on Lake Butte Overlook above Yellowstone Lake. It refreshes only once every hour - geologic time, after all - but in spite of the cage bars of burned snags between it and the considerable scenery beyond, yields wonderful information to the non-geologist. Picture # 1, a small elk herd, including a spotted calf front and center very early in the morning; picture #2, just a nice sunny view; and picture #3, what lies beyond.
Yesterday, the fourth of July, Independence Day, was gloriously beautiful and aptly hot in the Chicago area. KLK and I made a big suburban* shopping excursion during which he replaced his entire blue jeans wardrobe (not so much the black jeans, I guess that will be another trip) and his "between-running-and-dress" shoes - the kind you wear with khakis on Fridays at work. The latter acquisition was an emergency, given that his old pair spontaneously up and disintegrated as he walked along a banking district street in Zurich last week.What else was nice about it, besides the hunting and gathering successes, was that apparently either a lot of people were at bar-b-ques, or they thought the stores would be closed (however unAmerican that would have been).
We came home in time for dinner, with the thought that we might go out to Promontory Point, a wonderful park that juts well out into Lake Michigan, along with 99% of the rest of the neighborhood, to watch the tiny little official city fireworks shot out over the lake from Navy Pier some 5 or 6 miles away. As it got truly dark out, we suddenly realized there were major fireworks being rocketed from very close by. Hoorah! Unbeknown to us, the City has provincialized the fireworks display, presumably to mitigate huge congestion downtown. Yes, the main fireworks, which we could see on TV, proceeded as usual (well, not quite, they lasted 15 minutes, not the traditional 20, so hey, it's only a 25% cut) , but they also miraculously selected our neighborhood to put on a secondary show. What extraordinary luck! I took a few photos through the window, and given that and that the camera was hand-held, I was very pleased with the results. Next year, when we know this is coming (unless the economy tanks even more between now and then) we'll go to our building roof deck with the tripod at the ready. How fun, what a treat, whatever we did to deserve this, let's do it again!
* Land of the Free parking and where gas is cheaper and the sales tax a couple of points lower
Like all children growing up in the Midwest, I spent untold outdoor summer hours watching lightning bugs (otherwise known as fireflies, species photinus). Just after dark, in any grassy or brushy area, especially mid-June to mid-July, the males of these little beetles fly a few feet over the ground, flashing a bright yellow-green light in their abdomens to attract females in the grass below. The sight of the little blinking lights in the late darkness of a hot summer night is beyond entrancing.
For the last 22 years I have lived in a high rise, 11 stories off the ground, too far to see the little flashes going on below. Most often when I go out on a summer evening I drive my car out of the garage and head off to someplace covered with cement, and so, these days, I have to make a point of seeking out the lightning bugs. Last night presented such an opportunity, and sure enough, there, in the grassy baseball field next to a local elementary school, the males were doing their part to ensure perpetuation of one of Nature’s most pleasurable little wonders.
Life’s been very stressful lately, both at home (more about that later) and the office (nothing I’m not paid to deal with, but a lot, nonetheless). Watching the slow-mo scintillations of the lightning bugs last evening heartened me, lifted me, the Earth is not being completely destroyed by acid rain or greenhouse emissions or gargantuan oil spills after all.
Whether or not this is the very same bear (it sure looks like it), four cubs is an extraordinary production. Quadramom Bear is truly the Park Celebrity of the Year. May she have all the luck raising them to maturity and independence. If all goes well, she will liberate them in the late spring of 2012. God speed, lovely bears!
For the last 62 years, the second weekend in June has been reserved for the 57th Street Art Fair here in Hyde Park, where I've lived for the last 42 years. I always go if I'm in town. It's never been the greatest, and in recent years has had trouble attracting high quality artists or high quality buyers (not clear which comes first). Hyde Park's a hard sell: No place to park for visitors from other parts of the city (though there are a couple of inexpensive express buses and the Metra commuter rail to bring you here if you can get yourself to downtown), we're mostly upper middle class but don't part so readily with our money (some of us may be well educated and full of SES potential but don't have much to part with, since a good fraction of the community is made up of students in the college and graduate schools of the University of Chicago and numerous institutions of religious higher learning), and the weather is perfectly capable of being awful at the beginning of summer. I've also often wondered at the selection jury's sanity. For instance, this year there were at least two exhibitors selling beautifully crafted, boringly similar, wood pens. There was a new vendor this year selling laser-cut iron silhouettes, just like the kind made in China and sold in the gift shops in Grand Teton National Park. And there was a lot of work for sale expensive out of proportion to the creativity, materials, and maker's time requirement. However, happily, this morning the weather was spectacular, and the people-watching was good. Here are a few snaps just for fun.
A sunscreen day
Not all the art is fine art
Abs, and everything else, of steel
Art fair health fare. Not.
Her cello case was open and people were dropping in bucks. At least she'll always be able to make a living playing in the subway station.
I hope you’ve been curious enough to click on John Maclean: FISHING, under “Check out these sites!” and within his richly interesting Web site, lucky enough to have come across his paean to his grandfather, the Reverend John Norman Maclean. The occasion of his memorial was the 100th anniversary of the Reverend’s pastorship of the First Presbyterian Church in Missoula, Montana. If you’ve read Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, then you will understand at least a part of the significance of the elder Maclean’s arrival in Missoula.
The Reverend Maclean assumed his duties in 1909, just one year after my maternal grandfather undertook his own pivotal adventure that was to shape his life and that of his family.
Charles Edwin Lawton was born in 1882 to Lewis and Ella Foley Lawton. He was one among seven boys and two girls raised in Chester, Pennsylvania. In the 1880s, his father worked as a weaver in a cotton mill, and his father, born in England, as a watchman. I am unable to reconstruct anything of my grandad’s education, though quite apparently he was bright, sociable, and a team player. As a side note, it is interesting that in this undated clipping, the younger men, apparently without careers of their own yet, are identified by their closest notable relative, in this case, my great uncle Harold Lawton, who worked for Sun Oil his entire career. And he was a member of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church of Chester.
I catch the first official glimpse of Grandad in the 1900 U.S. census (most 1890 census records, including my family’s, were destroyed in a 1921 fire), just before the basketball team was featured in the paper. At the age of 18 he was still living with his natal family, and his occupation was already listed, propitiously, as “bank clerk.”
The next sighting was the crucial one: a photograph, marked in my mother’s handwriting, “Charles E. Lawton - left - on board ship to Puerto Rico 1908.” He was by now employed by the American Colonial Bank and this could well have been his first journey to his important new assignment. I do not know if he was yet married to my grandmother, Mary Cullin, although he was 26 years old. I often wonder what he, and even more so, my young grandmother, felt about their exportation to such an exotic place, with its ruinous climate, foreign tongue, strange diseases, dark-skinned citizens, and alien foods and customs. These children of such plain upbringings are worthy of admiration for having the gumption to leave their families and raise their own 1,600 miles by slow boat away.
Charlie, as he was known, was first stationed in Arecibo, since 1963 the world-renowned home of the Arecibo Observatory. In those days, however, Arecibo was famous for its pineapple plantations. My mother, born in 1912, spoke often of her young life in rural Puerto Rico. The American Colonial Bank was heavily invested in the agricultural economy of Puerto Rico, which besides pineapple, thrived on sugar, coffee, tobacco, cocoanut, bananas, and other fruits of the earth.
It is clear from numerous family photos that my grandfather loved life in Puerto Rico. Here he is on his favorite horse Colonel (from Arecibo days); there he is, with his wife and daughter and the extended family of friends and compatriots at a traditional Puerto Rican pig roast. Well, maybe not entirely traditional. I don’t know if Puerto Rican men typically wore suits and ties to the bar-b-ques, nor if the women all wore white. He fished and sailed Puerto Rico’s beautiful waters, and, it seems, was an admirer of Charlie Chaplin.
In a February 28, 1968 the (probably Chester) “Daily Times” retold in the felicitous style of 1918…
“Do you remember when? 50 YEARS AGO – It will be pleasing to local friends and business associates to learn that Charles Lawton, son of Mr. and Mrs. Lewis C. Lawton of 206 East Twenty-third street, has been elected cashier and director of the American Colonial Bank of Peurto Rico [sic]. Mr. Lawton was formerly connected with the Delaware County Trust Company.
News announcing the advancement of the former Chester young man was received in this city yesterday in a letter written to his parents. In receiving the appointment of cashier, Mr. Lawton was advanced over the heads of five fellow employees which is evidence of his keen ability in the banking world
Herman L. Cochran [left in photo], formerly of this city, is now vice president in charge of the Peurto Rico [sic] interests of the banking company, Mr. Lawton has been associated with Mr. Cochran for the past several years. The new appointment makes Mr. Lawton second chief of the institution.
As testimonial to his ability and excellent citizenship an elaborate farewell banquet was tendered Mr. Lawton by the representative residents of Arecibo.
Approximately 60 people representing the different business establishments gathered about the festive board. The principal speaker was Attorney Palmer of Arecibo, who after telling of the accomplishments attained by the young banker of his home life and of his citizenship, presented him with a handsome gold watch inscribed with “Homage to Mr. Lawton, Arecibo, P.R, February 1918.”
This was the occasion of the family’s move to San Juan, by which time my mother was old enough to form many more clear memories. The family prospered there; in 1922 they built the house on Carrion’s Court that was my mother’s favorite home throughout her long life; a second daughter, Louise Edwina, had been born.
But things were to change; then, as now, economics were global. In September of 1931, my 19 year old mother was on a ship that would take her to New York, and from there, she went on to Massachusetts to attend Wellesley College. She treasured her year at Wellesley, participating as an alumna until she died nearly 75 years later. But she was not to graduate from Wellesley; the family fortunes had begun to waver, Mother finished, well-educated nonetheless, at the far less costly University of Puerto Rico. In 1939, my grandfather made explicit in a letter to the New York Times the U.S. trade policies that adversely, and perversely, affected Puerto Rican commerce.
Through these years, details of my grandfather’s life are hard to nail down. The bank changed hands in 1930, his and the family’s ride became rougher. All I can document is that by 1942, he was working as a U.S. postal censor. My grandmother was apparently still in Puerto Rico, as was my 22 year old mother, also working as a censor.
By 1947, my mother was married to my father and living stateside. Around that time, my grandmother also moved back to the United States, where it seems she was awaiting Grandad. In 1948, she received this letter, dated January 8:
Dear Mother [as he called her],
This will not be very long but so you will know how things are going. I have not been able to go to the SS Comp [?] this week, since Sunday I have had what the doctors call “undulating fever” it is like the “intermittent” we used to have but it seems something new in P.R. I have holed up in this case but hope by tomorrow to be able to get out at least to get some soup. I had to get something last night to put on the sweater sent me. ate 3 soft boiled eggs, toast and coffee got back here about 7:30 & in a short time proceeded to heave and heave the food in the toilet.
Today have not left the room. This damned fever taken the strength out of the legs & I have stuck here I don’t know if I will try and get out tonight to at least get a little something.
Answering the question of suits & overcoat. I was able to pick up a very good suit and overcoat this [illegible] when shock our passage morning. If your idea was for you to buy these & have them in the office of the S.S. Comp in [illegible] I know, due to my condition, I will need something heavy on the ship and that is why I got them so if you want to send down the cash it will expedite my trip. I have to get [back to] the cold before I will be right again. This damn fever and the cold sweating chills have about knocked me for a loop. I am still losing weight. am down to about 156 lbs from 190 to 195.
Had a beautiful letter from Eleanor [my mother]. A sarcastic one from you, and a damned unpleasant one signed by my father but written by Stan. Lovely holiday what can a fellow do.
Can’t finish this now will try a little later when the fever abates a little
Well another plane went down in Georgia with a bunch of P.R. people on it dead and wounded. Last night a two passenger plane dropped near the mouth of the bay but both people were saved and plane lost.
I received the packages from [illegible] and 18th Street [an apparent reference to the house where Granny was living, with her sister Catharine, at the time]. Please thank them for me. I will try and do it when I get North if I am not taken up in a box.
Love
Charles
Please answer at once so I can make plans.
A matter of days later, he was “taken up in a box.” The maid in San Juan’s Hotel Central, where he had been living until he could repatriate, found his body the morning of
the 11th of January, 1948, just short of his 66th birthday.
"Dear Folks, After 37 years in the tropics the camera has caught all the wrinkles & a few more. Taken during censorship in 1945 by my English liaison officer. Charlie."
Snapped while in line at the grocery today: Woman's Day} THE MAN ISSUE. I sure hope that man-pleasin' burger is an extra-lean, no mayo turkey burger, with a nice, low-glycemic index, high fiber bun...
What if BP channeled all the money it is now going to have to spend to clean up the Gulf coast - whether half-way successfully or not remains to be seen - toward developing clean, sustainable energy sources?
Mr. Obama, if we ban or rigidly restrict off-shore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, BP and other petroleum energy companies would be forced to invest in the rapid development of alternative, more desirable and acceptable energy sources. Please think about it!
