Doggone, Part Deux
Chewy (aka Chewbacca) will not be finding a new home. The spousal unit, the friendly half of the household, the one who never met an animal she couldn’t love or adopt, admits she can’t really stand to part with the rambunctious mutt, even with the bruises. So Chewy gets a reprieve, and an enrollment in obedience school.
Thanks to all who offered to take her in. The response was overwhelming. If we could have parted with her, we would not have had any trouble finding her a good home.
Doggone
We’re looking for a new home for Chewy (aka Chewbacca), our part-Chow, part God-knows-what-else dog. It breaks both our hearts to do so but she just isn’t fitting into a household where cats rule and we can’t be around enough to keep her company.
McMansions
I often joke with fellow blogger Fred First that “size does matter” when it comes to digital cameras, megapixels and lenses. My Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II is still king of the digital SLR wars at 16.7 megapixels but I’ve resisted the urge to venture into 22 and 40 megapixel-land with medium format. The Canon does just fine thank you.
Thanksgiving
The wind howls outside, an interesting anomaly as the temperature climbs towards the 50s on this Thanksgiving morning.
Yet the rising temperatures are just one of Mother Nature’s cruel jokes. The thermometer will plunge this afternoon, diving into single digits to remind us that this is, after all, November in the mountains.
Wedding
I don’t, as a general rule, do wedding photography. But Dr. Joe Baum, founder of the Tri-Area Health Clinic, asked me to shoot his wedding to Debbie Sickey this past weekend and I can’t turn down a friend. Besides, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see Fragmented Fred First in a suit Joe said he didn’t want traditional wedding photos and asked me shoot the event as a photojournalist. Don’t know if I succeeded but it provided an interesting exercise in trying to find new ways to shoot something that others do a lot better than me. So I tried different angles and multiple locations during the ceremony. Thankfully, nobody seemed to mind. Afterwords, everyone headed over to Winter Sun for a reception catered by Oddfellas and an evening of dancing. Nearby, in Cafe del Sol, writers and poets offered up tribues to Elliott Dabinsky, the poet who died this week. Two celebrations. One for a life just ended, the other for a couple whose life together is just beginning. I’ll put the photos in a book and present it to them as a wedding present and then retire as a wedding photographer. Just aint’ my thing. 
Friendships
When we left the city to move back to the mountains last year, I donated most of my dress clothes to charity, choosing to keep one grey suit for weddings and one black suit for funerals, along with two white shirts, a couple of ties and a pair of wing tips.
Elliott
I didn’t know Elliott Dabinsky that well. I imagine few did. He was a bitter, angry man, tormented by physical infirmities. He lashed out at those he felt pitied him because of his appearance.
Yet the same anger that drove his abrasiveness also fueled his poetry – a mixture of raw passion and sensitivity that made you stop, think and learn. He could be funny and touching in rare moments when he chose to be but usually hid those traits behind a gruff, angry exterior that shut out the world.
Those who can, do. Those who can’t, talk
David St. Lawrence, our friend in Charlottesville who, with wife Gretchen, soon will become Floyd Countians, is an escapee from the corporate wars who found new life in woodworking, blogging and self-publishing. His essays on self-renewal and lifestyle changes are must reading for anyone contemplating giving up the daily grind and pursuing a dream. His book, Danger, Quicksand: Have a Nice Day, is the ultimate guide to survival in a post-corporate world.
Downtown
Roanoke, Virginia: My first home away from home. The first stop in a journey beyond what I then saw as the restrictive borders of Floyd County.
I arrived in the summer of 1965: 17 years old, fresh out of high school and ready to conquer the world. I had a plan: Attend college at the University of Virginia’s Roanoke facility on Grandin Road and work nights at The Roanoke Times. I moved into the YMCA on Church Street ($30 a month).
At the Times, entry level for someone fresh from the mountains of Southwestern Virginia meant the copy boy’s job – 6 p.m. till midnight five nights a week at $1.25 an hour – enough to pay the rent at the “Y,†junk food, gas and repairs for my 1957 Ford and college expenses.
The copy boy’s job turned into an internship by the summer of 1966 and, along with it, a chance to write about the city. I loved exploring Roanoke’s downtown – the hustle and bustle of banks and businesses along Jefferson Street, the winos and hookers of the Market area and the characters who hung out at Texas Tavern on Church Street. I learned the city and wrote about it. When the internship ended, the Times offered me a fulltime job as a reporter.
Rising Out of the Muck
Back when I ventured into the Dark Side (otherwise known as politics), the rule of thumb for elections was that “if you go negative, go positive in the closing days.†That meant no matter how much mud you threw during the campaign, you always closed on a positive note, running feelgood ads during the last 72 hours.
Here in Virginia, Republican gubernatorial candidate Jerry Kilgore forgot that old adage and I’m inclined to think we won’t be Governor Kilgore because of it.