Today’s Gag

Copyright © 2018 Jim Sizemore

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Today’s Gag

Copyright © 2018 Jim Sizemore

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Hip Shots

Abstractions 2

By Jim Sizemore

The “Hip Shots” series of photographs feature images that were grabbed “on the fly” with little regard for framing or focus. The object of the exercise is to create dynamic images, not perfect ones.

Copyright © 2017 Jim Sizemore.

Flag Day 2017

 Photos by Jim Sizemore

Today’s Gag

Copyright © 2017 Jim Sizemore.

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Hip Shots

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By Catherine Bruce

Copyright © 2017 Catherine Bruce

Three-Minute Memoir

Making Memories

By Susan Middaugh

Our trip to California in July of 2016 began many months before that with some friendly negotiating.

“Where would you like to go?” I asked Jasmine.

“Los Angeles,” my granddaughter replied.

“No,” I said. “There’s very little to see and I’d have to rent a car. How about an inter-generational trip with Road Scholar or Sierra Club? I’m open as to the destination. “

“I’d rather it was just the two of us,” Jasmine said. “How about San Francisco?”

“Great, “ I said. In retrospect, this exchange – setting limits, honest communication — was to become a harbinger for our trip.

While I made our travel reservations, Jasmine agreed to draw up a list of places she wanted to visit. At the top of her must-see’s were Alcatraz, Chinatown, and a local burger chain called the In and Out.

Based on advice from travel editors at the Washington Post, we stayed at a B&B near Chinatown that was around the corner from the Powell Street cable car line. Among its attractions were a continental breakfast, afternoon tea, and Pip, the resident cat. Pip also proved to be a catalyst for our connecting with other people. Over tea and cookies that first day, we met an Asian woman who lived in Nob Hill and visited Pip regularly. Could she recommend a Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood? The Golden Dragon, she said. With directions from a helpful nail salon, we finally found the place. And when we did, Jasmine liked the fried rice and I the stir fry beef and cashews.

The B&B’s small dining room and its policy for shared tables also made it easy for us to talk with other tourists (many of them from overseas), a highlight of our trip. Among them was a young woman from Japan, on a four-day excursion to the city by the bay, who planned to do yoga in Golden Gate Park and a British couple who expressed regret about the Brexit vote and were appalled by the content, divisiveness and tone of our national election.

The manager of the B&B, originally from France, was also full of information about what buses to take, about Thai, Italian and Indonesian restaurants within walking distance (we liked the Italian one best) and which neighborhoods to avoid for reasons of personal safety.

Typical tourists in our choice of destinations, we walked across the Golden Gate Bridge on a cool windy day, visited a fortune cookie factory, bought chocolate in Ghirardelli Square and enjoyed a one-man band who fished for donations from the crowd that gathered to listen to him play on Fisherman’s Wharf.

There were also some unexpected (aren’t they always?) surprises: a church with an outdoor labyrinth, a post office in Chinatown where all of the clerks spoke Chinese and three commercial ships docked at a finger pier near the Embarcadero that were open for boarding. My Golden Eagle pass from the National Park Service enabled us to explore the three vessels for free and to learn their history.

Of course, we walked everywhere – down the crookedest street, up to Coit Tower, in search of cable cars and the ferry to Alcatraz. I’m not good at reading maps. Fortunately, Jasmine – with the help of her phone – is. We only got lost once and it was she who found our way. “The Rock” was her favorite destination. She had learned about the former prison at school and knew more about it than I – about the attempted escapes and the infamous inmates. We enjoyed touring the gardens that the prisoners had maintained and learning about the warden and corrections officer’s children who long ago had traveled to the mainland every day by ferry to attend school.

My favorite? The botanical garden which featured 12 grand pianos that anyone could play for up to 15 minutes. After listening to one impromptu concert by an Asian woman, we asked the pianist what had inspired her. She explained that her father had written the piece in 1981. She was playing his composition in tribute to his memory.

Downtime was also part of our trip. We waited – to ride the cable cars (at least 45 minutes each trip), for the ferryboat to Alcatraz and for the planetarium show to begin at the California Academy of Sciences. We waited for our food at the burger joint and at other restaurants that seemed to attract every parent and child within 50 miles. San Francisco in July was definitely fun, the weather was pleasantly cool (50s and 60s), but it was also an exercise in patience.

At one point, though, my usual calm crumbled. It wasn’t the city. It was Jasmine’s ever present phone which she tapped and clicked everywhere we went. At first I hesitated about saying anything. After all, we were on vacation. The problem, I told myself, was generational. I have a very basic cell phone, which I use infrequently. Jasmine was doing what other kids her age do every day of their lives. Still I felt excluded. Finally I told her that. Jasmine was very apologetic. She wasn’t texting, she said, she was taking pictures. Then how about sharing them with me? I said. We can talk about them. So we reached a compromise. Jasmine agreed to keep her phone in her pocket during meals. From then on, we got along fine, the occasional silence included.

At the end of the trip, when I asked her what she had learned about herself, Jasmine said, “I don’t like walking.” I laughed.

And what did she learn about me? “You have more energy than I do.”

Jasmine is 14. I am 69. That will change of course, but I hope we will always enjoy one another’s company.

Copyright © 2016 Susan Middaugh.

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Susan Middaugh’s work has appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, the Baltimore Sun and on the website New-Works.org. Susan is also a playwright with short and full length works produced in the United States, Canada and England. The One Act Play Depot in Canada has published her short play, Such Good Neighbors. Several of her personal essays have appeared on this blog.

Doodlemeister is looking for first-person observations up to 1,000 words, on any subject, in any style. Note that we tend to favor light humor. If need be, we’ll help you to edit and/or cut your piece. If you’d like to submit a story about something interesting you saw, experienced—or simply thought about—please contact us by e-mail at jimscartoons@aol.com

Three-Minute Memoir

Birdwatching

By Florence Newman

My twenty-five-year-old nephew James, who lives in Olympia, Washington, had never been to nearby Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge, so while I was visiting him in August, we drove out to walk the Estuary Trail and see what there was to see. Part of the refuge had previously been a farm: Farmer Brown (yes, really) had drained the land for cultivation by building dikes to keep out the waters of Puget Sound. In 2009, the dikes were torn down, allowing the brackish water to seep back in and creating a variety of natural habitats.

As we walked the out-and-back trail, we passed through grassland, marsh, and finally a barren waste of mud and shallow pools, punctuated by dead trees, their branches bone white and stretched sideways and skyward, like half-sunk skeletons imploring aid. James said the scene reminded him of a World War I battlefield. I had been thinking of Tolkien’s Mordor or the Dead Marshes, which were said to have been inspired by the author’s experience in the Great War, so we were on the same page, sort of. The last, long portion of the trail was a boardwalk supported by pilings out over the muck, and along it were interpretive placards, picturing and describing the different bird species we’d be likely to spot around us. With my aging vision, I wasn’t seeing much of anything, except for some distant grey blots that could have been geese.

At lunch earlier, James and I had been talking about Pokémon Go, the online game that is all the rage, where players use their smartphones to view and “capture” virtual creatures that pop up in assorted locations chosen by the game’s programmers, often local landmarks or public buildings. On a whim, I said, “I wonder if there are any Pokémon out here.” “I’ll check,” said James, pulling out his phone. After a few seconds, he smiled. “You know that placard back there, the one about the ducks? Well, there was a Flibbertigibbet sitting on it” (he didn’t say Flibbertigibbet, of course, but one of those equally silly made-up names given to the range of Pokémon characters). Maybe the Pokémon Go phenomenon is a good thing, if it gets people—especially young people—off their duffs and into the great outdoors. Still, the game makes unreal beings appear in places they don’t actually exist. That’s assuming one has the right equipment—a smartphone—to see them. Why hunt for something that isn’t there?

Towards the end of the boardwalk, little rivulets of tidewater from the Sound began to meander among the muddy plateaus, and the boardwalk itself curved closer to a spruce-covered shore, before ending in an octagonal pavilion looking out toward Puget Sound. Our surroundings started to seem less of a dead zone and more of a living realm, with ducks that paddled amid the moving glitter of sunlit streams and with a Great Blue Heron (finally a bird I could identify!) stalking minnows in the shoals, its shoulders hunched about its head in that way that always reminds me of Richard Nixon.

The pavilion had more interpretive placards explaining what could be seen in each direction and a big metal telescope affixed to the floor and meant to rotate, although it did so grudgingly and only within a limited range. For me, the device merely made blurry images blurrier. I was embarrassed to admit to James how few kinds of birds I could see, here in the beating heart of the wildlife sanctuary: with his keen young eyes he was no doubt taking in all those terns and teals that the placards told us were out there.

We were still at the gazebo, me squinting hopelessly first one way and then the other, when a group of guys approached down the boardwalk. There were four of them, middle-age men dressed in greens and browns—one of them in a khaki kilt, of all things, showing his hairy legs—and they were strapped and belted with gear, satchels and leather sheaths and binoculars. Best of all, however, they were carrying tripods that, when unfolded, turned out to be telescopes. Birdwatchers! They were truly Serious Birders, as became obvious as they immediately began ticking off the names of species as they sighted them—“Caspian terns on the left,” “A pair of dunlins,” “Sandpipers, mostly Western, but a few Leasts”—all in a casual, matter-of-fact tone (Serious Birders apparently don’t squeal and and jump up and down when they identify a specimen, at least not in the presence of other Serious Birders). I still wasn’t seeing much, but now I had a better idea of where to look.

One of the birdwatchers, the bearded one, mentioned an abandoned eagles’ nest on the forested shore. I must have blurted out, “Oh! Where?,” because the next minute he was pointing out which spruce and which side and which branch. When I remained oblivious, he trained his telescope on the nest and had me look through the scope at the ragged platform of interlaced sticks and tree limbs balanced high up in the spruce. The birder informed me sagely that the young eagles had fledged and flown some weeks earlier, and ( just to prove I wasn’t a complete idiot) I ventured a comment about the two bald eagles (George and Martha) that frequent our property on the Chesapeake Bay. Soon another of the men was showing James through his telescope an osprey perched on a stump at the edge of the Sound. Afterwards, I got my chance, standing on my tippy-toes so that he wouldn’t have to lower the scope to my child-like height. As I did so, I noticed a cell phone attached over the telescope’s lens, allowing him to take digital photos of what appeared, capturing proof that he’d really seen a bird when he added its name to his Serious Birder’s Life List.

Another party was making its way out the boardwalk toward the pavilion, this one including some actual children, so I suggested to James that it was probably time for us to be heading home. As we put the broad expanse of the estuary behind us—terns, teals, dunlins, osprey and all—I considered how lucky we were that those knowledgeable and generous birdwatchers had come along when they did. Another thought struck me: There could be real beings—in this case, real birds—existing in a particular place but not immediately apparent unless one has the right equipment—a functional telescope—to see them. What to call this phenomenon? Reverse Pokémon Go, maybe.

Florence Newman is professor emerita at Towson University, where she taught in the English Department for 27 years.  A specialist in Middle English literature, she has published and delivered conference papers on Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet, and medieval women writers.  She grew up in Blacksburg, Va., reading books in her parents’ library and eating strawberries from her grandfather’s garden.  She currently lives with her husband in Towson, Md., escapes occasionally to their farm on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, and travels farther afield when time, energy, and finances permit.

Copyright © 2016, Florence Newman

Hip Shots

Street Design

By Catherine Bruce

The “Hip Shots” series of photographs will feature images that were grabbed “on the fly,” with little or no regard for framing and focus. The object of the exercise is to create dynamic pictures, not perfect ones. With this ” shoot-from-the-hip” method, the more frames exposed the better the chances are that you’ll come up with something interesting — a related series that may be arranged as a post. If you’d like additional tips for using the technique, or to submit your own images, drop a question or note in the “Leave a Comment” section, below.

Copyright © 2016 Catherine Bruce.

Shepherdstown, RFD

Betty’s Restaurant, February 5, 2012

I left the Potomoc River home of my still-sleeping hosts before seven in the morning and drove all the way through Shepherdstown, West Virginia, to the Food Lion on the other side of town. They were open but had only Sunday Washington Posts, stacks of them; no Sunday New York Times. Still searching for the Times, I stopped at the Sheetz gas station on the way back to the river house. Same deal, not a N.Y.T. logo in sight. Continuing on German Street, back toward Rt. 230 and my hosts’ home, I noticed a clean well-lighted place, the only business open on the town’s main drag. It was a restaurant called Betty’s, a down-home old-style main street-type diner; extreme chintz and hand-lettered everything. (Click attached picture to enlarge.)  Inside, there was a sign up front that said “Please Wait to be Seated.” Two older men and a single woman about the same age were seated all the way in back, each in individual booths.

The waitress, a very pleasant young woman, on the chubby side, called out to me “You can sit anyplace, sir.” I took a booth just in front of the other three residents—so close I could overhear the conservation between the two men and the waitress. They were discussing their various health issues, weight, high blood pressure, and their mutual love of chocolate. Two more men in our collective age group came in and selected individual booths just in front of me. The waitress greeted each one by name. I said, smiling up at the waitress, “Gee, I wish I was a regular!” “You can be one,” she said, laughing, “I’ll treat you right.” She took my order—two eggs over medium with sausage gravy and one biscuit. As she walked away, I noticed a newspaper rack up front and went to check it out. Bingo—a huge stack of Sunday New York Times off to one side!

As I settled back in my booth with my treasured newspaper, several more male customers came in and they, too, took individual booths. Again, the waitress greeted them by their first names and brought them coffee without waiting to be told to do so. Then she placed a cup of steaming black coffee exactly halfway down the empty counter and left it there. A minute or two later another older man came in, picked up a local paper from one of the racks and sat down at the coffee cup waiting for him on the counter. He and the waitress exchanged greetings and a bit of banter.

Shortly after that, she topped-off the coffee cup of the man in the booth directly in front of me, then scratched his back. Then she topped-off my cup and said, “Plus one for you, too,” and scratched my back. I laughed and said, “Now I really do feel at home!”

So, of course, on the way out, as I paid the waitress for my breakfast, I told her, “I will be back,” and gave her a very generous tip. She said, “Now you do that, hon—and soon, too, OK? You’re my new best buddy.”

“Mutual,” I said. “Very, very mutual.”