Love this song. Been trying to learn it for the last several months. Took about a zillion takes to get a decent video, but finally one came out alright!
Shoes
This is a painting that hangs in my home. My maternal grandmother painted this in 1983, from a photograph that was taken on a trip to the beach when I was a teenager. She was an artist, an art teacher, a sculptor, a porcelain doll maker, a writer, a poet and an all-around, prolific talent. I credit her and my mother with instilling in me the importance of being creative. If you are interested, you can read more about her (and my equally unique grandfather) in these two posts.
An Empty Well and You’re So Handsome I Hope You Never Die
My family lived on Long Island and we would frequently drive to a beach in South Hampton, about an hour from our home and spend the day swimming in the waves, playing in the sand, cooking and eating and getting burned to a crisp. My father would pack every square inch of our station wagon with the vital supplies; a large canopy to block the sun, beach chairs, umbrellas, coolers full of food and drinks, beer and wine, a small charcoal grill to cook on, and plenty of sports balls and Frisbees and water and sand toys.
I don’t specifically remember this particular trip but over the years I have tried to identify who the shoes belonged to. I’m pretty sure the pair third from the right with the red stripes were mine and I think the pair third from the left with the blue stripes were my fathers. I’m guessing the white pair on the left belonged to my mother but I can’t be sure. The rest, I believe belonged to aunts and uncles, a cousin and my two grandmothers, all of whom would have been visiting from New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The small pair of pink flip-flops belonged to my cousin who is about ten years younger than me. There has been some debate, over the years, that perhaps one of the pairs of shoes belonged to a girlfriend of mine at the time, but in counting them up, I now believe it was all family on this particular trip. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
We have several of my grandmother’s paintings in our house and on most days, this painting is just another backdrop in our home. But in retrospect, when I really consider it’s meaning, it brings back a flood of memories. Even more so than many photographs. It suggests a time when I filled my shoes with much different hopes and dreams and goals than I do now. Not necessarily better or worse, just different, younger, freer and with much less responsibility to be concerned with. It’s also reminds me that three of these people, my mother and my two grandmother’s are no longer with us.
But new shoes have filled those spots in my life. These days if you painted a picture of my family’s shoes at a trip to Lake Michigan it would likely look very similar to my grandmother’s painting from 1983, filled with sneakers and flip-flops and sandals. On other days that painting might include cleats or dress shoes or barn boots or running shoes. In just over six years from now when my two kids have gone away to college, the painting will be just of my wife’s and my shoes. If we are lucky though, someday after that, we can add some grand-kid’s shoes.
There is always a large pile of shoes gracing the entry way to our house, a pile which varies in size and variety depending on the season. It’s an easy thing to gripe about.
But there’s also a comfort in tripping over it every day.
Because it tells me, that even though life is never easy, there is still plenty of walking and perhaps even running to do and so far, we seem to be headed in the right direction.
Oh… and by the way, this was my 200th post! Thanks for reading!
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Ten Reasons You Shouldn’t SPAM Follow Me
Sorry I had to jump on the bandwagon. With the recent hyper-activity of SPAM followers going around WordPress and with no noticeable solution on the horizon, I figured I would take the situation into my own hands. So, here’s a post that hopefully will deter some of the Spammer’s out there from clicking my subscribe button.
Ten Reasons You Shouldn’t SPAM Follow Me:
10. I don’t have Irritable Bowel Syndrome. I will admit to having suffered with hemorrhoids occasionally but definitely not Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Sometimes the morning after drinking too much I feel like I might have it, but that usually goes away in a few hours.
9. I don’t need any more credit cards. I have enough of those and I typically pay them off every month. I appreciate your concern with my financial well-being but so far I am in good shape with only moderate amounts of debt. I’m sort of old-fashioned too. You would have had better luck if you had sent me an envelope with one of those cool, fake credit cards in it. That would have piqued my interest a little more than you following a blog about goats and such.
8. I don’t speak any languages that fall in the categories of Asian or Arabic or even European. I especially don’t speak Indonesian-ese. See, I don’t really know what language they even speak in Indonesia, but seems I have become a popular blog in that region. In fact, I’ll admit that I really don’t even know where Indonesia is and if it’s a country or just a region, or perhaps just an area. I only speak English and even that I struggle with sometimes.
7. I’m not a believer in God or really anything religious. If you were subscribing to my blog so that I might join your legion of brainwashed followers, well sorry, you’re definitely wasting your time. Why I haven’t been struck down by lightning yet, in the 45 years I’ve been around is a popular question.
6. I don’t buy much clothing and I’ve never, ever bought myself a women’s purse or women’s jewelry. That’s not really my thing. In my younger days, I did used to be a little bit metro-sexual, but the whole country life has kind of kicked that in the ass. In fact I haven’t even purchased new underwear in several years. I’m not really the best candidate for your retail operations.
5. In a similar vein, other than my wedding band, I don’t wear any Men’s jewelry either, especially a watch. I understand that there are a lot of really cool, imitation watches out there, that would perhaps make me look like I am very important and wealthy. But I just find that I don’t really need a watch anymore. See, I have my phone and it tells me the time all day long. In fact I think it pulls the time from somewhere up in outer space, where I guess there’s some kind of super clock that is always right. I don’t really know how it works but it’s very smart and it even knows when to change to daylight savings time, which is pretty cool. So, that’s working out pretty well for me.
4. I’m not much of a dieter. Especially healthy diets. If your diet plan consists of pasta, hot dogs, wine and other food that comes from a box, including the wine, then perhaps I might be more interested.
3. I’m not in a position right now to be buying any new appliances. I will share with you that our dishwasher broke down about five years ago and we’ve never replaced it. We just do our dishes the old-fashioned way, in the sink with a brush and a sponge. Our Microwave just recently started acting up, not turning on and other strange behaviors. But we discovered that if you hit the side of it pretty hard, that seems to usually get it back on track. I think I’ll just keep doing that for a while.
2. This blog is not that popular. I know I like to toot my own horn and pretend that it’s very popular, but I still haven’t even reached the 500 subscriber mark. Now, I will admit that number is increasing exponentially with the recent influx of followers, but of those that are actually subscribed I think there are probably only about 30 that are reading actively. There’s probably other blogs that might be more lucrative for you. Perhaps you could find a good blog written by an Indonesian Credit Card Salesman who suffers from Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
1. Frankly its CREEPING ME THE FUCK OUT! This is a personal blog, GO THE FUCK AWAY!
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The Brown Road Chronicles 