Artistic License Forms At Home

 it would be my best guess that my granddaughter thought she was only being helpful and perhaps being decorative  when she labeled my piano room with Post-it notes.   She  would surely never consider it insulting to my intelligence. She knows I know what a piano is and she also knows I know what a  room is. 

I just think she thought it was something pretty and also something fun to do.  I happen to agree with her and so I think I’ll leave it up for a while. Maybe a good long while.  I happen to like  her style.  Thanks, Sophia.

Dedicated to Carl Aukschun as of Late

Thanks to Greg Olsen

Someday, When I Figure Things Out . . .

Most pictures you find are kinda good.  Maybe really good.  Lotsa talent.  But they don't evoke much from your heart beyond just a wish to be able to paint or draw just as competently.  They're just good.  But this one above I like.  It makes me happy.  It makes me feel something.  It's not just talent or good art or pretty.  It's focus and feeling.  It matters.  It's about caring.  It makes me like.  It makes me really want to like more.

I want to like something so much that I want to go outside in the cold and let my nose run and not care.

Today I was sitting in the sixty-something weather in a cloth chair freezing my behind off and Sophia was sitting beside me waiting to be sent back into her soccer game.  Her mother had put a blanket over her and had gone over to talk to friends.  Soph got up and placed the blanket back on the chair and said "I'm going over and stand by the line."

I asked "Why?"

She said with a big smile, "In case the coach wants me back in the game."  Of course he did within minutes.

All I wanted to do was get warm.

I want a magnificent obsession.  Something that makes my heart just want to do more.  Something to make me want to stand right at the line.  Something that would make me smile when my mother would shout "Enough is enough!"  Something that would never be enough.  Someday I'm going to run so hard again that my side will just ache.  Just you wait.

Park City - A Beautiful Place With A Questionable Birth

We went to the Park City Art Festival over the weekend.  

Friday was a perfect day.  Not too hot, not at all crowded and Park City was charming as ever.  I even bought myself a beautiful porcelain vase.  Carl even let me stay four hours which was the capper to the whole perfect time enjoying artist after artist after artist.  

Lunch?  A delicious steak with a side of sweet potato fries with fry sauce at Bandits’ Bar and Grill.  My kind of day.

But it was bittersweet.  I know what Park City was.

When I taught at Brighton High School Seminary, one of the custodians up there was raised in Park City and had lived in one of the charming little houses that line the main streets in the original city.  

He would tell me great stories of when he was a kid, of when everyone’s dad was a miner, when everyone’s mother stayed at home and everyone had lots and lots of brothers and sisters.  He told of how things were when they, having a blast, lived the life they did in a remote little village, where everyone knew everyone else, where life was simple, fun and personal.  He’d regale me with anecdotes of him, his friends, his family.  He’d talk of his, school days, church, daily life, places, people, seasons.

But one day things turned differently.  He literally cried as he told me how people came in from California, I believe, and deceived the people as to what their property values were and bought their homes out from under them, leaving them with no place to go and with nothing real to fall back on.  It was like breaking up a family that had no place to go, with nothing to fall back on.  They had no real education, no land and nothing but mining in their blood.  It was awful.

What a beautiful place Park City is.  But I think there is also something ugly about it too.  I don’t suppose the beauty of what it was could ever be restored and those children are now grown and probably those miners are very old or dead.  But it does hurt a little to look at it still.