Passages...

Continuing with the theme of my last post...

My only brother, younger than me by 14 years is turning 62 today (I think), a great nephew is turning 7. My brother no doubt has quite a few more years left to enjoy living and teaching and learning, and my great nephew is just barely starting out in life. I cannot see that far into the likely future to realize that by the time he reaches 75, the 21st century will be close to ending. What will the world be like then?

Will there still be a Russia, a Ukraine, a France, a United States? Etc.? Will the world be more united? Less united and balkanized? Will global warming have destroyed the world sea coasts. Will Mississippi have a deeper gulf and will much land mass still exist?

I think of my father, who has been gone since September 2,000 and my mother since 1999 and my oldest sister since 1998—they didn't make it out of the 20th century. My father would be turning 106 years old, and his hundred year old fiddle which sits in my closet is already well over 200 years old. I still hear strains of his music on that fiddle, one that other relatives admired and played, back when Dad was alive and we were visiting our kin on a ranch in New Mexico. Ranchers would come from all over the valley and gather in the living room of my aunt and uncle's house and these mountain folk would play the music, the piano, the guitars, the fiddles. They've all been gone now for many years and that way of life, still carried on by my cousins and their children might also still have musicians in the family. But it is not the same world as when I was a kid and lay on the floor and fell asleep, listening to the music during those times.

In Mississippi (been here since I was 68 years old) I've met people who have told me of their lives when they were children or young marrieds with children, and there were strains of similarity to my own past in similar churches and rural backgrounds.

But these are all passages of time, represented in the older faces of the people I have come to know and love here in Mississippi. As I've already said, I've already attended three funerals of friends and fellow writers from the writer's group I belong to. Our short lives of 60 to almost a hundred years old seem long as we live them, but short in retrospect. My eldest sister who only lived to be just short of 53 has already been gone for almost half of the time she lived. I've already outlived my mother, who died just right at 72, and I'm coming up on living to be the same as my father, who died on his birthday of 83 years.

Passages...

My various avocations are also reflected in the passage of times in my life. Now that I'm in my 70s, I've been teaching myself to colorize black and white and grayscale art, as is indicated by the images I've included in this Postcards post. If 75 is a relatively "long" life, then I have tried to bring to bear what I have learned and observed in my writing and this colorist skill. I've been learning this to help me with clients' work who have children's books and other books that need interesting artwork. I am not, however, one who can draw such art, only color it.

But never stop learning, never allow anyone but especially yourself to put you in a box and tell you there is nothing more you can learn after you reach a certain age. 

Passing Through My Seventies

 I've lived in Mississippi now, for seven years...

Whoops...I just turned 75 this month (May 6) and realized that I'm passing through my entire seventies in Mississippi, in Columbus to be exact. I also realize that whatever I have said about the weather here, whatever the season, it can be said again year after year. 

And...Mississippi stays the same throughout the years, most beautiful, of course, in the middle of lush late spring and summer. Those are the best times for day trips and seeing picturesque places...

The image to the left is, of course, not a photograph but an ideal in some artist's mind, and yet like fiction speaks truth and inspiration more directly than a photo. It is the images I am getting in my mind's eye, now, from living here seven years and living out the entirety of my seventies. This is just one place I have never seen and yet I have seen a thousand such places, glimpsed from the driver's-side window, perhaps going past too fast to really see what I think I saw.

I've been a traveler by car all my life, from the time I got my drivers's license, or rode with my parents on family trips to visit relatives in Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico, to ranches and farms and winter RV parks.

I've seen bits and pieces of several states by car or bus, and it is always the backroad small towns and late night diners and early morning scenery that speaks to me. Mississippi has been ideal for all these activities, mostly during the day, sometimes at dusk, sometime on a foggy laden highway at dawn. 

In one of my posts in 2022, I introduced the upcoming anthology that my writer's group was working on, called Ferry Tales. It came to fruition and was published earlier this year (2023).  This has been in the works at least two years as members of the writer's guild worked on their own visions, mind's eye creations of tales of fiction, tales of eloquent truths; we based our initial stories on the idea of something like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, but not quite, not really in the end. It was a good starting point. The book has sold out at least once at the Columbus Arts center where it is stocked. You can purchase the anthology from this vendor, as well. Expect the stories in this anthology to reflect two things, the individual writer's visions as well as each writer's stage as a writer. 

As it turns out, I infrequently post to this site, not for lack of enthusiasm or even ideas but because even in my seventies, I'm actively engaged in living here in Mississippi, spending time with friends, working as an editor and pursuing a new line of endeavor, being a colorist of black and white and grayscale art. I've also been working with old b/w photographs with some success. I initially turned to this kind of work from helping writers with their illustrations for their children's books, but I also took a turn at tweaking a local artist with her collection of her paintings. When we went through the hundred or so paintings for the book, she had me tweak the photographs, which involved the software I use—a superior alternative to Photoshop, a British version, as it were...

And this is where I will leave you, today...and return to my work.