scribbles from the past

It might not qualify as hieroglyphics, but for my money, finding this date scratched in concrete 60 years ago motivated me to photograph it.  January, 1955.  I was in 5th grade.  My father was 45 years old.  We were celebrating the dedication of a new "indoor" outhouse with a real window and double walls and a septic tank style disposal area.  I found this date when we tidied up the shop a week ago.  I had seen it over the years.  As most of his peers, my father exited school after the 8th grade.  So he never "majored" in anything. Yet I knew him as attentive to history and having a kind of reverence for dating things, especially concrete he poured around our house as property improvements.  So, with Father's Day coming up:  thanks, Dad (Lester Lehman, 1910-1981).

Father's Day cards

Having children is a big thing. Even bigger when they're adults and also your friends. Both of mine came through on Father's Day with really fantastic cards that put in perspective one aspect of our friendship and long history together. Brutus, Sarah and Ryan's dachshund, kissed up with a tall card even though he's a short sausage dog likely to get lost underfoot. But he's cool.

office mail

I work half-time for Harmonies www.harmonies.org. Nearly every day some mail comes. Most of it looks commercial. This envelope which came last week reminded me that once upon a time stamps ruled. You just kept adding them until they added up to the required amount. It fostered mental arithmetic, something my father excelled at and liked in his one-room school close to today's Park City.

Canadian geese didn't fail

I've often noticed that in the first week of the calendar year Canada Geese get moving. The days, afterall, are getting longer.

I thought of this again towards the end of December. Sure enough, yesterday I heard and then saw a medium sized vee of geese. I tried to snitch a photo of one online, but gave up.

My father was not one to be afraid of animals. But he had an irrational fear of geese, left over from an experience of being attacked by one when he was a child.