Andrew's View of the Week

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Posted on 09/29/2019 by Andrew Reynolds

Last Sunday Heather and I returned from a vacation and family visit to England. We were there twelve days and mostly it was a relaxing trip. There were a few issues like the day we needed to wash clothes and the only laundrette (English for laundromat) in town was closed for “technical reasons.” The guy with a box of tools and spools of wire doing something to the machines seemed to be the biggest problem.

But it wasn’t so bad, the next day family was able to wash our clothes for us – in a machine that does both wash and dry. I’ll describe the process as slow – five hours per load – that’s a lot of sitting around drinking tea and eating biscuits (cookies to you Americans). Of course that also gave us time to have dinner, check into our hotel, catch up on email, a few solitaire games, and talk about family – I think we were up to great-great-great grandfather when the buzzer finally went.

The only other real problem was when we arrived at the train station in Bath and started walking towards our hotel. As we followed the instructions on our Google maps app, Heather noticed that the walking time kept getting longer, not shorter. That was our first clue we’d gone the wrong way out of the station. It only took fifteen minutes to walk the nine minutes to our hotel.

I was thinking of writing a detailed travel log and posting a bunch of pictures, but I’ve got to put the pizza in the oven in a few minutes, so this will be short.

Normally when we go to England, we just go to visit family and often stay in their homes. This time we decided to do more traveling on our own and see a bit more of the country. I’ve never driven in the UK and don’t feel like starting so we traveled by train, bus and tube. Well, and once or twice family gave us a lift.

Since we were going by train, we traveled light. One small case each and just a few days of clothes since there was a laundrette right next to the place we were staying at in St Ives (as noted above this didn’t go as planned). As we went through what to take and not take, we decided not to take our bulky camera equipment and just take pictures with our phones. Great space saver. That would have been alright if my phone’s battery didn’t die after three photos. Note: There are no vacation snaps in this post.

Guess I need to buy my second cell phone this decade. Our current phones we bought in 2013 and I was hoping they’d last until at least 2020. Last month I did discover another problem with our cell phones – they are so old that the Starbucks’ app no longer works and we can’t do mobile orders anymore. Yeah, crisis.

I’m thinking of getting iPhone 11s, but the three camera arrangement kind of reminds of the Martians from War of the Worlds, so I’m investigating other options.

The first stop on our trip was in Bath where we met with friends to pass on the car parts we smuggled in to the country and I drank more beer in one night than I’ve had in five years. Yup, I had two – watch when you get me into a bar, I’m a party animal …

The next day I went to visit the Roman Baths while Heather went to the Jane Austin Center. Heather’s already seen the Baths and correctly gauged my interest in Jane Austin. That evening we met with family and saw an energetic production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, produced by the HandleBards – a touring group who travels between gigs on bicycles. The performance was fun and the four member troupe managed to play all the parts with a little help from the audience. On occasion they even quoted from Shakespeare’s play.

Then it was off on the train to St Ives on the Cornish Coast for a few days at the seaside. Turns out we got there just in time for the start of their September Festival. St Ives has a large artist community and part of the festival was that the local artists had open studio days. We had the joy of visiting a lot of artists and galleries. There were a number of musical events too and we got tickets to two of them. Both were fun.

After our seaside fun it was off to visit Heather’s family, over eat and get our laundry done.

Last stop was in London where we visited Kew Gardens. I wanted to spell it Que Gardens, but the English have weird ideas on spelling. There were these wonderful glass sculptures and of course all the gardens. Likely better if you just go to their website for the pictures as the three I took on my phone were … well maybe I need the Martian camera.

We had a great time and the oven timer just went so it’s officially pizza time which will conclude the post for this week.

Tune in next week when I’ll either revel the new phones I bought or will explain why it can take 5 hours for a load of laundry.

Posted in Travel | Tagged England, travel, UK | 24 Comments

There not Here

Posted on 09/15/2019 by Andrew Reynolds

I’m there, not here. Just on one more trip for the year.

Wednesday I was here:

Not my home

Today I got this nice picture:

By the Sea

If you can figure out where I am, I’ll be impressed.

I’d like to say I’m out on a research trip for a poem I’m writing, but mother told me not to lie – I’m just out traveling with Heather and enjoying life. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks with a new essay or other writing like thing.

Andrew

Posted in General | Tagged vacation | 26 Comments

The Bottlebrush Didn’t Have a Poem at the Writing Conference

Posted on 09/08/2019 by Andrew Reynolds

Between the dining hall and the classroom was a bottlebrush shrub. It was precisely machine trimmed with square edges, flat top and plumb sides. Conformed to a box, the nature within had lost its wildness. Only two red brushes survived the application of technology while the leaves shriveled and fell under the weight of fog lifting in the midmorning of thought.

The bushes reminded me of a happier time. A time when I ran through my grandmother’s garden. Down the concrete path and past the row of corn. Then turn and run past the rose. With feet flying and wind rushing around my yellow hair I ran beside the tall bottlebrushes. They reached to the sky! Red brushes, green leaves waving wildly in the air as bees dive past the running five year-old. The garden gave way to grass and I gave into rolling and laughing on the lawn. Then grandma appeared at the backdoor with a glass of milk and a package of cookies.

I thought the sad dinning hall bottlebrush might remember those times, so I sat down to talk to it. It’s thin branches barely smiled when I reminded them of the fun we had so many decades ago. Silence was answer I got when I asked if it had a story to tell.

So we sat, listening to the fog rise and the dishes clanking in the kitchen. The sky cleared to cloud as I smelled the hint of a poem. Someplace between my grandmother’s garden and here there was something …

My mother’s mother. Old when I was young. Once in her kitchen I announced, “I’m thirsty!”

“Well, I’m Leona, nice to meet you thirsty,” she replied with a big smile and bent over to shake my hand.

I remember she had a box of toys that she’d bring out when I visited. There was a boat, some blocks, some other things, but the boat I always took out. Grandfather was named Andy too. We were twins with the same name.

There was play money in an old coffee can in the box. Mother said that grandma was once a bank teller. I told grandma that I wanted to cash a check, so she took out a piece of paper and showed me how to write a check. She help me spell, “Five dollars.” When I’d signed my name, she counted out five one dollar bills from the can of play money. Then she started a savings account and I deposited two of my dollars in grandma’s bank.

Then I ran around the garden and rolled on the grass.

When I was 11, mother and father were having a fight and mother told me to ride my bike to grandma’s house. It was a refugee and grandma and I played Monopoly until mother called saying it was safe to come home.

Then when I was 12 my brother came to the boy scout summer camp I was at and took me home early so I could be at grandmother’s funeral – ending my days running through gardens, cashing play checks, and having a safe place to ride out a storm.

Sitting on the bench just outside the dining hall while waiting for class, I reminded the machine groomed shrub of those days and said that there must be a poem in there that needs to come out. The shrub just asked to hear more stories so I told it about Thanksgiving dinner, and Christmas presents and the socks I got for my birthday.

Asked shrub if it had a poem to share. I asked if it would help me write a poem. It said little only giving a hint or two and then it fell into grey silence.

I stopped a few more times to talk to the bottlebrush on the slope between the dinning hall and the classroom. I said I wished I knew how to make it wild and tall.

It just closed its eyes and pulled a coat of misty fog around its two red brushes.