Singing chef

Over the usual restaurant din, a single voice rises.

“How many times must I prove my love to you?” Joseph sings in his soulful baritone. “How many ways must I show you?”

His nightly stage is the hot food bar at the buffet restaurant, where Joseph serenades his customers with gospel ballads while he serves up their roast beef or turkey, cooked up and cut just right.

“The songs just come out,” said Joseph between verses and servings of macaroni and cheese. “Singing, it keeps me. There’s no fear in me now.”

Joseph used to sing the blues before he came the the antique and restaurant district neighboring the city of Ashland, the birthplace of more noted entertainers such as Ashley Judd and her mother and sister, Naomi and Wynona, as well as a slew of other famed country crooners along this stretch of U.S. 23 known as the Country Music Highway.

Joseph didn’t know anything about the history of the place before he hitched a ride down Interstate 75. He just wanted to get away from the streets of Detroit.

“That’s where fear is, on the street,” Joseph said.

(More)

Pigskin stitches

(Note: I met this lady by chance, and couldn't resist telling a snippet of her story.)

Margery doesn't know much about football--and as a semi-retired seamstress, she doesn't care to learn about it now. Yet, heaped on the floor in Margery's otherwise fastidiously clean living room is a pile of football jerseys.

Margery has been stitching the names and numbers on the jerseys since the NFL team first brought their annual training camp to her town in 1997. She's meticulous about every stitch.

"It's not the sort of thing you do while you're watching tv at night," she told me. "It's a lot harder than it looks."

But despite all the attention Margery gives the black-and-orange jerseys--as important as it is to her that they look just right--she has never seen the jerseys on the playing field.

She readily admits that she has never watched the team on tv--or in person. She says that the team has never offered her a ticket--but that's fine by her.

"It wouldn't matter if they gave me a pile of tickets this high," she said, indicating something about waist-high. "I still wouldn't go. I don't like football."

She says her granddaughters would like to go see a game sometime, though--along with their dad. As for Margery, she's content seeing those numbers up close every summer--on her sewing machine.

Venturing into the eye of the hurricane

This is the photo we should send at Christmas. Instead, we send the PR version: combed hair, neatly dressed, sitting still. I think I like this one better. :-)

Found these in my archives: Some shots from my parents' house last Thanksgiving. 

The table Dad made. 

Grandpa combing out the tangles.

 

So that's where all the birdseed goes... 

Around the house

From the 3-corner chair that's so odd, it's a work of art.

Sadly, not the real thing. Hint, hint.

Another look at the mystery.

It's a vase!

A break in the weather?

Aaah...a breeze.
Chris Bailey's weather blog:
http://www.wkyt.com/Global/story.asp?S=2672921

Hunter's gone, but 'Gonzo journalism' remains

Thompson's send-off
Thompson's obit

As a journalism student, I had a professor who adored Hunter Thompson. I had three more who despised him.

Learning he was a fellow Kentuckian ("I haven't had a milkman since I was 10 years old. I used to ride the route with him, back in Louisville."--Fear and Loathing in the Bunker), I was interested in how this fellow's break-all-the-rules style of journalism helped shape--and was shaped by--the cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s. He even found a place in the 1980s and beyond, though I think he resonated differently with my generation--the kids who grew up with Reagan's jelly beans and Rocky vs. the big cold-war Soviet guy. We're the flag-waving generation (sandwiched between bell-bottoms and grunge), and darn proud of it.

I suppose what unsettled those journalism profs and journalism purists--and me, too-- most about Thompson, was his seamless mingling of opinion and fact. As a journalist, I strove to be impartial. It was a lesson I learned in particular from one of those college professors who warned us against the evils of the Gonzo journalist. If your personal feelings lean to the right, try to write as if you agree with the folks on the left, and your story should come out somewhere in the middle. Not exactly a carefully measured, scientific way to balance a story, but over the years, I found it worked. It forced me to pick up the phone and call or go visit people I ordinarily would prefer to avoid, people whose points of view made me cringe. But I tried to be fair and balanced, long before Fox News or Al Franken. I avoided the ad hominem attack, Thompson's favorite method of arguing a case (i.e., Thompson's main argument against Nixon seemed to boil down to this: Nixon was evil, so everything he said or did was wrong, and anyone who defended him was evil, too.)

What I learned from Hunter Thompson, though, was storytelling. The man knew how to take you there, though the journey was often difficult, sometimes distasteful. I learned to look for those subtle elements and weave them into the fabric of the story in descriptive detail. (I avoided some of Thompson's favorite adjectives, however.)

I am concerned about his legacy, however, and how it has been misapplied within the ranks of journalism. I see this across the Bluegrass as well as the national news outlets. It seems that increasingly, reporters are no longer separate from commentators, which is what Thompson was. He never claimed to be an impartial news source. One never questioned where he stood on an issue.

It is dangerous when those lines are not clearly drawn. One of the roles of a journalist is to be a watchdog--not an attack dog. In the rush to shed light on the dark corners, or, in some cases, merely to be first with the story, or present some new angle, journalists should stop to consider whether they are casting a particular tone on the issue. In the effort to stand out, to write with flair, to compete in the marketplace, it's easy to slip a little "Gonzo" into "journalism."

Granted, a journalist isn't a robot or a scribe. He or she is a person with a set of values and experiences. It is not the job of a journalist to simply regurgitate the facts as spoonfed to him or her. That's where you have to be smart. Use your head. Know how to balance a story--and to be fair. The two aren't always the same.

It makes me extremely uncomfortable when reporters write editorials about the subject they are assigned to cover. Makes me wonder how many impartial facts I'm getting. Leave the pontificating to the editorial board (and the countless bloggers and talking heads) and the authors.

And what's the point of my little speck on the floor of the court of public opinion? I suppose it is this: There's a place for the Hunter Thompsons of the world, and it isn't the front page.

Even if I don't like what he had to say, by gosh, I'm glad he could say it. We should all be so bold as to fearlessly ask questions of the world (though one might argue that Thompson's interrogations were more fearsome than fearless). Let's just make sure we are able to clearly define where "journalism" ends and "Gonzo" begins.

A taste of Thompson

Scenes from the Kentucky Horse Park

What would a Bluegrass blog be without horses? Especially this one--Secretariat. Not the real one, obviously, as he is expired.

Wow!

I believe these are pre-Renaissance sculptures. Beautiful detail.

If you thing the horse's armor looks fierce, check out the spurs at the bottom. Those things were meant to do more than prick the skin. Ouch.

A stagecoach scene--a bit chaotic, but oh-so-interesting. Too bad I couldn't pipe in the old-West background music.

A riding trophy from the mid-1800s.

Vibrant colors.

A scene from the Crusades. Oh, the irony.

One amazing sight after another.

Imagine the weight of the armor...and that's just the horse's. Consider the knight and his gear, and that's gotta be one strong horse.

Part of an early Royal Canadian Mounted Police uniform.


First pony ride. The pony survived.

Coffee house culture

I'm not used to having nothing to do. Even when I left a job I loved in order to stay home with my daughter, there was always something I should have been doing while I was doing something else: cleaning, working on a newsletter or web site, meeting with freelance clients, shopping (groceries, not clothes--ever tried taking a preschooler into a dressing room?), all while balancing motherly duties (bathing, feeding, playing, teaching, organizing field trips and plotting the location of each McDonald's between Lexington, Cincinnati and Ashland).

Monday, something strange happened. I took my daughter to preschool in another town about 30 minutes away (I'll be working there soon, so it only makes sense to have her in the same town). As she's only there about three hours, I reasoned that it didn't make a lot of sense, given the price of gasoline these days, to spend an hour driving home and back again. So, for a handful of hours, I had nothing to do.

I took a stack of projects and a copy of The Rainmaker and decided to spend the morning at a cute little coffee shop my friends had pointed out to me last summer. This was my first trip to a coffee shop alone, which meant I had no conversation to distract me from the goings-on in the aromatic little store.

Before I go any further, I feel I must take a moment to confess here.

I do not like coffee. It's much like my love affair with the aroma of pipe tobacco and smokeless tobacco, old leather, and the scent of hardwood smoldering in the fireplace. I love to smell fresh coffee brewing, or even simply walk through the coffee aisle at the grocery store. There is something deep and rich and comforting about these age-old aromas. I don't smoke, and certainly never tried stuffing a pouch of tobacco in my cheek, but I could quite happily settle in with a book, surrounded by those smells. I think it reminds me of my childhood; winter evenings by the fire, coffee percolating in the kitchen, my dad occasionally getting out his pipe, though my mother didn't like for him to smoke in the house. I'd get it out and breathe in the aroma of it whenever I got a chance.

So the steaming mocha late at the next table was a welcome neighbor as I settled in to one of the comfy leather couches and laid my portfolio on the granite slab table. I soon realized I was the only person there without a laptop, except for the pair who wandered in a few minutes later. I soon learned that they were from the seminary next door, not the law school across the street. Most of the most influential people in my life are connected to seminary in some way--either graduated or attended or plan to attend--and I must preface these next few sentences by saying I thoroughly enjoy engaging in meaningful conversations with them as much as anything. But the female member of the pair in the coffee house was thoroughly annoying.

While the rest of us read or hunched over keyboards, this girl--who probably would hunt me down and beat me with her Birkenstocks for describing her as such--set about arguing with the poor young man accompanying her and with anyone who dared make eye contact with her that marriage was never meant to be a sacrament of the church, that she would never marry, and that no one should ever suggest otherwise. Somehow, I don't think she has much to worry about.

I buried my nose in the book.

A few minutes later, a couple of law students wandered in. This is where I felt some pangs of envy, as I was supposed to take the LSAT Oct. 1 until I opted to put law school on hold in favor of continuing my endeavors in public relations. Actually, an enticing job offer came along, preschool came calling Meghan, and so off I go back into the 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. crowd in a couple of weeks, ready to get to work, yet with a bit of remorse for the path not taken. My curiosity was aroused, then, when I heard the chatter that identified these latest coffee house patrons as law students. I watched with some amusement as the pair of blonde young women propped themselves up with their laptops and discussed their respective career aspirations while the young fellow behind the counter took great pains to clean the countertop over and over again while staring in their direction. After several attempts, the seminary student managed to lure the law students into her marriage diatribe. The thin young man with her had long since shrunk away from his feeble attempts to outline Biblical arguments against her position and simply slouched in silence. Not at all like the seminary folks I know, I thought. They'd silence her quickly, as these law students were attempting to do. It was amusing to listen to the three young women practice their apparently recently-acquired debating skills on each other.

You don't hear discussions like that in McDonald's, though I have heard a few heated political exchanges.

Sometime later, an older man came in and silenced them all with a withering look. By the time I got to the next chapter, the fellow behind the counter was the only other person in the shop.

Later in the week, I went to do a different shop--much smaller, less comfortable, and packed to the brim with people who were well past debating the course of their lives and were just trying to make the payments on their BMW's. Most of the exchanges in there were about real estate, insurance, and the front page of the local paper.

I quickly grew bored. I miss building forts in the living room.

Move over, George Costanza! Needed a photo depicting gentle hands, so Meghan and I posed. What you don't see are the eight other photos of my hand with a blur over it, behind it, beside it, as Hurricane Meghan found it difficult to sit still. I used Jerry Pennington's gausian blur technique, but I didn't change the opacity of the first layer. Might try that and then repost it. Okay, techie talk out of the way, I am moved to see how fragile her little hand seems next to mine.

Graceful place

It's amazing what you notice when you walk slowly for a change. I was woefully underprepared, but did have our little point-and-shoot digital in my purse when I stopped by Central Christian Wednesday. For once, I wasn't late for anything, had nothing pressing for another hour, and took a walk through the garth area. I'm hoping Rick and Jerry don't look at these, but for the amateur eye they might capture a bit of the grace of that place.

An historic moment

Whatever's one's perspective, framed by particular beliefs, philosophies and experiences, the events taking place in the Gaza strip illustrate how the size of a geographical area and its significance to the rest of the world are not necessarily proportionate.

In the BBC World photo at right, an Israeli child waves goodbye to her home as her family leaves the Gaza territory on the eve of the deadline for voluntary evacuation.

As a statement attributed to Abraham Lincoln goes, "It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt." And so I shall not attempt to shed any enlightenment on this issue.

I will say, however, that as a Christian with deep respect for the heritage of Israel, these events are riveting. What will be the next chapter in this ancient story?

As we continue to pray for peace, I am reminded of a Nichole Nordeman song, "Grant us peace...or maybe not, not today--peace might be another world away."

Why not...

I realize that by now this blog has lost any focus, other than to serve as a dumping ground for occasional musings and endless procrastination. On that note, I couldn't resist stealing a link from Rick Lee (the referred page has the appropriate copyrights and acknowledgements).
http://www.rickleephoto.com/rlalien.htm

Gaza--powerful images

Washington Post photo gallery

Lost at sea

We continue to pray for Mark and Laura Vockery and their families. Mark and Laura vanished in Costa Rica while celebrating their first anniversary in late July. We trust them to God's care.
(Photo by Rick Lee, copyright First Christian Church, Ashland--see links to the right.) http://www.herald-dispatch.com/2005/August/03/LNspot.htm