City Views, Country Dreams

Good evening from New York on the first evening of September.

September starts our city's fall cultural calendar. There will be many, many events to attend, exhibits to see, concerts to hear. The nights will begin to cool. Even though now we still see green lawns and roses in bloom, soon we will see leaves turning yellow, rust, red, burnished brown. The leaves will fall.

I have posted some photos of some old paintings. One is from a series that I once busied myself with, interested in the textures of rocks and the beauty of vistas. The other combined another exploring of rocks, or rather pebbles and leaves. The summer during which I painted those leaves had been a very hot and dry summer, very unlike 2007. Green leaves were dropping and lying in crispy ripples all over the Park.

It is always a challenge to come upon changes that we do not anticipate, or welcome. I have seen many of these changes in my life, and am not too sure that experience has made me wiser.

When I was a young adult, freshly in New York, there were many changes to the accepted culture of the prior decade (the 50's) that were eagerly, maybe even greedily embraced. I felt that having moved to this city from where I grew up in the south meant that I had sort of jumped across more than a mere decade.

Ah, but at that same time, my generation as R. Daltrey might say, faced some not so great bits too. The Vietnam War, and the draft affected every family that I knew. It certainly affected how we viewed pursuit of happiness, govenmental responsibility and truthfulness, even our sense of time. Music, theatre, art, film bounced off of this dynamic.

In a way, perhaps that decade was a bit of an extended autumn. Before a winter.

It is swell to be able to trade ideas, and information, and experiences with you all on the site. Sometimes I think that my country has really lost the plot. People are very plugged into various electronic devices for hours each day, and this allows them the luxury to not communicate with each other. Many people ride in cars all by themselves, listening to some electronic device. Cell phones may provide some emergency access that is great, but back when, we just had pay phones on street corners. Many people listen only only to those whose opinions they share.

This has been a tough week on the political front over here. The current adminstration is reaping what it sowed, but we have to reap with it. The many candidates have campaigns that do not promise much in the way of improvement. Another poor harvest this fall.

But, today was a day off and I did get to the local farmers greenmarket and did find some more gloriously ripe tomatoes. I did go to a bank and got some euros and then bought a card. I will put the euros and the card into an envelope and give it to one of my staff members who will make her very first trip to Europe this week. She can use those euros to have a glass of something, in a cafe somewhere, as she realizes that the world is wider.

This afternoon, I treated myself to a view, on television, of the excellent Roger Federer in action at the U.S. Open. It is quite wonderful to see his grace, skill and good manners.

We had a very busy selling week at the shop, and our efforts also included organizing after-closing-hour evening moves of heavy fixtures off the sales floor on two nights, and returning the same heavies back to the floor the next morning. Overnight the cleared maple wood floor was beautifully refinished. It looks like a new floor was laid.

Before I began writing this, I had some sort of plan about what I wanted to express, and it did include praising the generous spirits who have made our site such a pleasure to visit.

I think that I have gone off the path, having not scribbled down any notes to guide me. Since I always think of the blog as a diary, I usually do not want to make preparatory notes, but rather just start typing. So, that is what I have done tonight, the first night of September.

Remember, officially it is still summer!

Pleasant dreams to all.