Many years ago, thirty-five or so, my father somehow or other obtained a little banana tree, which he planted in a wooden tub maybe two feet in diameter. This was in north Alabama, where the winter temperatures drop below freezing quite often, so he couldn't leave it outside or plant it permanently. So every fall he would drag the tub, which was quite heavy, into the basement, and in the spring drag it out again. It never grew more than a few feet tall, but it survived.
About twenty years ago my wife brought a shoot from that plant down to our home 350 miles further south, where freezing temperatures are much less frequent. She planted it (maybe I helped, but I hesitate to claim that.) It has survived and to some degree thrived; it's now a clump of half a dozen or so trunks which by the end of the summer are ten feet tall. Most winters have at least one hard freeze that kills them back to the ground, but they always come back. Last year we really didn't have a serious freeze. Now for the first time it's bearing real fruit. We've had a few little ones before but they never got this big.
Sometimes I forget that the group of people who read this blog and the group who see what I put on Facebook overlap but are not identical. I posted this on Facebook one day last week, so some of you have seen it. Here it is for those who have not.
I was sitting in my portable chair working by the bay one day a couple of weeks ago when this heron landed nearby. That's a bit unusual, so I took out my phone and started recording, mainly for the benefit of my local grandsons, who have seen these birds but not so close. I wish I had zoomed in before the bird caught the first fish. Probably someone who knows something about video could bring out more detail in the bird, which is mostly in shadow. But I decided not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
As I've often lamented, the little town where I live has gotten all uppity and is overrun with rich people, many of whom are artsy, which is sometimes almost as bad as uppity. But there are benefits, too, and one of them is that there is now a Fairhope Film Festival.
It ran Friday through Sunday of this past weekend. My wife and I considered trying to catch several of the films, but there was really too much else going on. So we picked one that looked particularly interesting: The Jewish Cardinal, a French movie about Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, whom you may remember as something of a protege of John Paul II. Born Jewish, he became a Catholic in 1940 at the age of 14, a priest in 1928, and archbishop of Orleans in 1979, quite early in the papacy of John Paul II.
The film covers almost exclusively a period of a bit less than ten years, from his consecration at Orleans until sometime toward the end of the 1980s. It focuses on his relationship with the pope, and on his role in the controversy surrounding the establishment of a Carmelite convent at Auschwitz. As you no doubt remember if you're old enough, that was quite a bitter controversy. I didn't follow it very closely, but I know that Jews objected very strongly to it, and Christians objected to their objection.
If the film is accurate, Lustiger was very involved, was deeply affected, and found himself at odds with John Paul. I don't know enough to say whether it is accurate, but I can say that taken on its own terms it's an excellent piece of work, very well produced and acted. See it if you get a chance.
Here's the trailer:
As we left the auditorium in the library where the movie was shown, I told my wife that next year we'll take Friday off work and spend the whole weekend going to movies.
Alas for me! For I have beheld the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep, which dwelt in the red cooler in the kitchen. Full many and many a dark aeon, even since the Fourth of July, had it brooded in darkness, forgotten of men and nurturing the impious vengeance merited by that forgetting, and gathered unto itself certain unhallowed vermin of the lower air, which whispered foully to it of what it might become. And in the end it was that blasphemous thing of which the sly and ill-favoured merchants who embarked from the black galleons in the port of Dylath-Leen to trade in rubies of doubtful origin would speak only in whispers. And when it had been carried into the uttermost reaches of Y'ard, and, emerging from the cooler, slid loathsomely over the withered and unwholesome vegetation, none there was who could say what that thing once had been but I, who cast it out, and am the same who beheld it and knew it for what it was. And I fear that the shadow of that unholy vision will never depart from me, nor the stench ever fade entirely from the red cooler.
--from "The Forgotten Watermelon of Ga-Yfer", by Dunwich Arkham
On my commute to work on the western side of Mobile, I have a choice of going through the older part of town or taking I-10 and I-65 around it. My extensive research shows that the route through town, though shorter in distance, takes an average of five minutes longer. So since I'm usually late, I usually take the interstate. But I prefer to go through town, and this church sign is always one of the nice things about that route. Right now this is what it says on the east-facing on-the-way-to-work side:
And on the west-facing going-home side it says this:
Which is a good after-work message.
The sign seems to be associated with the church you can see in the first picture, Providence Baptist, but is actually in the yard of a little house next door to the church itself. I've always supposed that must be the "parsonage"--the pastor's residence; the term seems rather quaint. A year or so the sign said, for a few weeks, "FIFTY YEARS OF PREACHING THE GOSPEL ON DAUPHIN ST." But the house doesn't look inhabited, though the church seems to be still active. I guess the pastor lives in a larger house in a subdivision.
A month or two back the sign went blank, and I wondered if perhaps the old pastor had died, and the church was going to close. Or if neighbors who thought the sign unsightly (which one must admit it is) had managed to get the city to force its removal. But after a few weeks the messages reappeared. I wonder about that chain-link fence surrounding it: did they have a vandalism problem? If so that fence wouldn't stop any but the very casual attacker.
I think of this as a southern thing but I suppose it's fairly common elsewhere.
07/31/2013
But nobody calls for a knowledge worker when the woods are on fire.
The Bankhead Tunnel is one of the two tunnels under the Mobile River in Mobile. It was built in the late 1930s and the entrance is not high enough to accomodate today's big trucks. There is an elaborate warning system telling truck drivers not to attempt the entrance. Yet they regularly try it, and the truck gets stuck, and the tunnel is blocked for hours. This one happened last week:
Click here to read the news story. I'd guess these incidents happen on average once a year or so ("a lot more often than it should," sighs someone from the Alabama Department of Transportation). But there was another one last night, though I can't find a good picture of it online yet. And last August there was this one:
I suppose each one of these represents an out-of-work truck driver. A pretty incompetent one, anyway. One driver said his GPS told him it was okay, so he ignored the warnings.
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