Tuesday, December 21, 2021

Grow where you're planted



     I have 47,485 photos up in the Cloud.
     Quite a lot really.
     I try to weed them down, occasionally cutting blurry or redundant shots. It's a good mindless task for when I don't feel like doing anything else. But still I snap 'em faster than I can delete them, obviously.
    And you never know when one might be useful.
     Take this wall. I was rooting aimlessly through the photos Monday night, looking for, well, something, when I came upon the above, a shingled storefront in the town of Castro, Chile. I took it in 2019 while my buddy Michael and I were wandering around that Patagonian coast. Which sounds so good about now, when there is no prospect of going anywhere. 
     I've written about the town before; a nearby cheese shop. I liked these shingles because they were unusual, and a lovely faded red, and decorative. There was a style to their spacing. And I suppose a little composition to the shot: the window with the baskets almost seems like the canton of a flag.
    I took a second photo, of a restaurant nearby. I'll tuck it below. It isn't as good, as a photo. All those windows. But I wasn't trying to be arty, just show the interesting edging to the shingles. 
   Is there a lesson to pull out of this? Beyond "Cool shingles." I mean, I could leave it at that. But that would be, oh, a failure of some kind.     
   You have to wonder how the practice started. Maybe at one point there was a sort of unspoken competition, between shop owners, trying to outdo each other with their fancy cheap wooden shingles. It was luxury they could afford. It wasn't much, but it was what they could do.
    Hence the lesson. Embroider your world how you can, if you can, even in your modest little hamlet at the far end of the world. Because someone might come by and appreciate it, and if nobody ever does, then you can appreciate it. And that's something too. 



16 comments:

  1. I always heard it as "blossom where you're planted"--it means a person should take advantage of the opportunities they have in their life, and be grateful for their present situation.

    I originally heard that saying from my first wife's grandmother, who was almost eighty when I met her. She was still a feisty old lady then, but she had also been that way in her youth. Married young, in the early 1920s, while her husband was still going to the U.of I. to become a phys ed instructor (and later a principal) in the Chicago school system.

    To supplement her husband's coaching income, and to keep them both housed and fed, she played piano in the Champaign speakeasies. Wore flapper styles. Carried her hip flask to football games. I still have it.

    My ex-wife's grandmother lived well into her nineties. Not only did she grow, and blossom, she thrived. Whenever I hear or see that expression, I can't help thinking of her.

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    1. Now you're making us all envious, particularly us "almost 80."

      john


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    2. I'm only six years away myself.

      Met my first wife's grandmother in 1979.
      She was 77, and I was 32.

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    3. There's something precious in memories of old people you've met. The oldest man I met was born in 1876.

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    4. May I ask what year your met him?

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    5. In the mid-1960s, which made him about 90. Mr. Beswick. He owned a music store in Berea, where my mother would buy sheet music for our piano (talk about antique images). There was a rack of comic books for the kids. The place made a deep impression on me.

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    6. My mother lost her father to cancer when she was fifteen, so I never knew him. My grandmother remarried several times over the next fifty years of her life, but the guy I knew best was born in 1886. Max was a Socialist and a union organizer in the needle trades. Participated in a number of bitter and violent strikes while in his twenties...circa 1910. Out of all that came the ILGWU, the garment workers' union.

      During junior high, I really got into American history, and did a lot of reading, especially about labor history. Max undoubtedly had many stories to tell, about sweatshops, and blood and death on the picket lines, and left-wing politics. Oral history is the best kind.

      But Max was also a very gruff, taciturn, unapproachable guy. Came home from his hardware store to sip his glass of tea and read his Yiddish newspaper. I never did get up the nerve to ask him to tell me his union stories. On a hot summer day, when I was fourteen, Max died suddenly, at 75. Sixty years, and I still regret not talking to him. You snooze, you lose.

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    7. Your mention of ILGWU brought back this ad from my youth: https://youtu.be/7Lg4gGk53iY

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    8. A heads-up...there's a video of a 1978 "Union Label" TV spot at the "History of American Television" page on Facebook. Don't know which ad it is. There were quite a few.

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    9. Same ad as I linked, coincidentally! Or is it coincidence at all? ;)

      Some fun old pics and videos on that page. Thanks for the referral, Grizz.

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  2. Digital photography spawned many new hobbyists as there was no longer any reason to be concerned about wasting film.
    Now that smart phones have such sophisticated cameras, even more people have the opportunity to share their views and feel gratified.
    I do like the pics you post for your columns. Makes them even more tangible.

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    1. Thanks. They were actually controversial at one point (there's a post from 2013 called "About the photography" or something similar). I made the mistake of saying that taking pictures was "fun," and a professional photographer lit into me.

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  3. I always wondered where you got the posted photos. Love them and look forward to your column.

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    1. Sometimes they're provided, like regarding theatrical performances. Some are from the Metropolitan Museum online collection, but I always tag those.

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  4. I've lived within 10 miles of where I was born my entire life.

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