A new venture

Please visit me at Wissahickon Diary.

A good cause

In a little more than two weeks, on September 29 and 30, Donna and I will be participating in the MS Bike Tour, cycling from the New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia to the boardwalk in Ocean City. This will be Donna's second time, my third. The cause is a good one -- to raise money to find a cure for multiple sclerosis, and to provide treatment for people currently suffering from the disease.

To find out more about this venture, or to sponsor your's truly (Every little bit helps!), please follow this link...

Butterflies of Blue Bell Hill

Thunderstorms are coming. Taking a mid afternoon feed of nectar before all hell breaks loose.

Heading south

I'll be away from the computer for a week or two, so danspages.com will not be updated until early July.

All is well. Thanks for stopping by. Talk to you again soon.

Bird on a wire

It's the time of year -- mid to late June -- when the hummingbirds are out in profusion. A week or two ago they seemed to have disappeared. One might have seen a single male at dusk, a blurry shadow in the near darkness, taking a last drink before sundown, but that would have been it. The females were away, building nests and raising their first brood of the season. Insects and nectar-laden flowers were in great supply, so there was little need for my little plastic tubes of sugar water.

Now all that has changed. With the next generation out of the nest, and flowers and insects less abundant than before, the feeders have become centers of activity. Very little actual feeding takes place, however. More energy is spent making sure that other hummers don't get a share. The idea is to perch on a nearby branch or wire and keep watch. If someone else approaches, swoop down and chase him off. It will be this way from now until they head south again in September. Such is the nature of hummingbirds.

Dublin, 1985

Written on the back: Taken from the window of my apartment. Overlooking a few back streets toward the sea. The distinctive steeple belongs to St. Stephens, a Church of Ireland (one of few Protestant churches). Because of its unique shape, the steeple is locally referred to as the "pepper canister."

Written on the back: Grand Canal from in front of Herbert Place, looking toward Percy Street bridge and locks. Note the ducks.

I recently found these old photographs taken by me during my stay in Dublin in 1984-1985. I'd sent them to my mother and my uncle Bernard to give them an idea of where I was living.

Report from the backyard: 6/1/07

My uncle Bernard, who was a farmer and a keen observer of the natural world, always said that summer began on June 1. He did not hold with the calendar designation of the 21st; rather, he went by empirical evidence. By the beginning of June the days are noticeably longer, the first swelter of 90-degree weather pushes down, and everything green, from trees to grass to hedgerows, is swelled to its fullest, not yet withered back by the relentless nature of the season.

This morning I am taking my coffee in the backyard. I am enjoying a small break from the heat of the last few days, courtesy of a couple of thunderstorms that rumbled through around two a.m. As I sit here the occasional tap of a drop of residual rain falling from the roof gutters and tree branches punctuates the immediate sound of bird song, and further off, my neighbors on Johnson Street leaving for work. The catbird flies in to the oriole feeder, slurps down a bit of orange and takes a drink of water. Then he flies off. Two weeks ago when I spent days in the backyard clearing out weeds and trimming back the trees and bushes, the catbirds were my constant companions, hopping around on the ground a few feet in front of me, and scolding and singing from the branches. They have no time for such antics now. They are too busy tending their nests and feeding their young.

Like the catbirds, I now need to turn my attention to other matters. I have been mostly unemployed since early February. I have enjoyed my time off, gotten things done. But now I have to engage the future. My hope is that the work I have been doing the past few months will come to something.

Summer is not my favorite time of year. But it does force us to appreciate the small respite. It is also the season of fruition.

Memorial Day

From Verlyn Klinkenborg's The Rural Life:

...to anyone who has ever marched in an old-fashioned, small-town Memorial Day parade, there's no forgetting the peculiar stir of feelings that this day brings. It's a morning parade, and it makes its way to the cemetery on the edge of town, a place where cypress grows against the backdrop of clean-shaven lawn and fields of new-sprung corn. An odd moment occurs when the parade arrives at the cemetery. The Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts and the members of the high school marching band look on while their elders, plainly moved though the day is bright and it's not yet noon, honor men -- mostly men -- who barely figure in the minds of the young people trying to stand at attention. It's always this way, the old honoring those who died while the young wait impatiently nearby, disbelieving in death.

To enter summer with an act of solemnity, however slight, however quickly dispelled by the long afternoon that follows the parade, has a certain emotional fitness. It's almost an apology for the thoughtless variety of this season, a time when the naked exuberance of nature bears the living away into June and July and forgetfulness. Our job now is to live out all those summers that were lost to the men and women who died in wars past, as well as our own summers too. It's no burden to do so.

Cool city

I live in a very cool city.

Parsons

I know where and when I bought Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds because for some reason I inscribed the first blank page in the book:

Purchased from the old ladies at Parsons bookstore, where the bridge crosses the canal at Baggot Street, Dublin, 15 April 1983.

I have no idea what inspired me to write those words. To my recollection, I have not inscribed a book before or since.

When I read it now, the phrase "old ladies" strikes me as demeaning. I'm sure I didn't mean to be callous at the time. I probably thought that the white-haired and soft-spoken women who ran the shop were quaint. At twenty-one, I tended to view people and situations, especially in Ireland, as subjects for my amusement. What I didn't know then was that these remarkable women -- Mary King, May O’Flaherty, and their assistants -- had actually know Flan O'Brien (real name Brian O'Nolan), and that he and one of my other literary heroes, Patrick Kavanagh, had been regular visitors to the shop during the heights of their careers in the 1950s and 60s.

I certainly did know of the significance of Parsons bookstore, and the role that its proprietors played in Irish literary history, when I returned to Dublin in late 1984. I had a small flat on Herbert Place, just down the canal from the shop, and I would drop by every morning. I liked the idea that I was walking the same ground as O'Nolan, Kavanagh, and other famous writers like Brendan Behan, and exchanging pleasantries with their old friends. But if the women ever thought of me at all, it would only have been as the shy American who came in every morning and bought a copy of the Irish Times and a Cadbury bar. In the six months that I visited their shop, I never engaged them in any meaningful conversation. “Good morning,” “Thank you,” and comments about the weather were as far as I got.

I don't why I didn't ask them about the old days, or divulge my passion for the work of Kavanagh and O'Nolan. I suppose that I had some silly notion that my dignity would be compromised, that I would appear to them like a typical American tourist. What a shame. They were gracious and kind, and likely would have given me anecdotes that don't exist in any of the biographies. I might have learned something interesting or important I could share here. But that opportunity is long gone. So is Parsons, and so are those venerable women.

I learned of Mary King's death on June 25, 1995 -- ten years later and three thousand miles away from Parsons. I was in another bookstore, the Borders in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of Philadelphia, near where I now live. I must have been feeling nostalgic for my time in Dublin, and purchased a copy of the Irish Times. Her death notice was the first thing I saw when I turned the front page. It read in part:

Queen of books dies aged 83
A landmark of Dublin's literary world has passed away with the sudden death of Mary King.

Aged 83 she ran Parsons book shop in the city for 38 years and her knowledge of books was unsurpassed.

I clipped the notice out of the paper and it has been stuck inside my copy of At Swim-Two-Birds ever since.