The following are pictures from a cross-section of my recent life.
The first one below was from my last long motorcycle ride of the 2015 season. The 410-mile roundtrip took me to Mason City, Iowa, and then west a few miles to Clear Lake, where I spent some time at the Surf Club, the site of the final concert of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and J.P. Richardson, known as The Big Bopper. The area around the club is as tacky as tacky can get, but the club itself was almost transformative. The owners have apparently left it as it was over fifty years ago and I truly felt like I had stepped back into time, as the ballroom and stage were something out of The Buddy Holly Story or American Graffiti. And there are signed photos and autographed walls of all the famous rock-n-rollers who have performed at the Surf Club over the past several decades. I recommend this to anyone with an interest in pop culture or, of course, music from that era.
In the spring of 2016 I spent five and a half weeks on a start-up in the St. Louis for work, helping an animal pharmaceutical company get machinery they bought from Bühler to produce their desired product. Two of the weekends I did not come home, staying in the area as part of the service contract with the customer. I'm happy I did. St. Louis and its western suburbs are genuinely nice, with plenty of things for a visitor to do to keep busy. Their art museum, for instance, was world-class. An area within the city called The Hill, also known as Little Italy, was filled with color and personality and at least one good pizza place. But for me the highlight was the couple of hours I spent at and in the immediate area of the new Busch Stadium. No game the Saturday I was there, but I walked around the stadium and especially loved the time I spent in the Cardinals Hall of Fame Museum, which was remodeled two years ago. It's a small-scale Cooperstown.
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On my annual pilgrimage to Albuquerque over the Fourth of July 2016 weekend I yielded to temptation and bought two statues by a New Mexican artist named Adrian Wall. The picture below shows me with the artist and his work, now adorning my living room.
To Walk Visible
I spent from 4–29 September 2017 and then again 10–20 October in Wrexham, Wales, on a start-up for one of my company’s customers. I had to work a couple of weekends, but I did have a couple of others off. On the Saturday of one of the free weekends I drove two hours into England, to Haworth, in West Yorkshire, to visit the Brontë Parsonage Museum. I’ve been there four times previously, first in 1985, but have not been back since a visit in 1998. I’ve been an admirer—worshipper—of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë for over thirty years, and though I’ve long finished reading everything they’ve written and many things written about them I still get excited whenever I read or hear some new Brontë tidbit, either on the news or in social media. Most recently the release of the Sally Wainwright’s two-hour film on public television, To Walk Invisible, generated quite the stir among people like me—and for good reason. The film, depicting the three-year period when Charlotte was trying to get her and her sisters’ work published, was a dream come true for Brontë-philes, with its perfect casting, acting, and historical accuracy. Not that I needed it, but the movie, which I’ve watched twice now, reignited my smoldering infatuation for these three most amazing sisters in history.
A combination of my not having been to Haworth for nineteen years—and the changes that naturally take place in any location over that number of years—plus my aging memory, but it seemed like the shops on the village's main street had changed no small amount, with new restaurants and specialty gift stores lining both sides of the brick road. And as throughout England, there were many friendly dogs out for a stroll, lapping up the attention I bestowed upon them.
The following pictures are from my too-short stay in Haworth on 23 September. The captions describe the photos.
A combination of my not having been to Haworth for nineteen years—and the changes that naturally take place in any location over that number of years—plus my aging memory, but it seemed like the shops on the village's main street had changed no small amount, with new restaurants and specialty gift stores lining both sides of the brick road. And as throughout England, there were many friendly dogs out for a stroll, lapping up the attention I bestowed upon them.
The following pictures are from my too-short stay in Haworth on 23 September. The captions describe the photos.
Main Street, Haworth, facing the Tourist Information Building
St. Michael's
St. Michael's, again
Branwell's favorite haunt
One of the views from the Parsonage
The Parsonage
Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, for all eternity
I bought this statue at a shop called Hawksby's, just down the road from the Parsonage.
Yuma, Arizona
For two reasons did I want to visit Yuma in my new home state: I'd never been there before and there are some cinematic connections in it and in its surrounding area. This would be just an overnighter, leave on Saturday, return on Sunday, and because of its short duration this trip was as much about the journey as it was about the destination. My sources suggested that for history and topography Yuma wasn't all that exciting, and I found that to be true. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the area, but nothing all that noteworthy, either. The city itself reminded of locations in central and northern California, which shouldn't be too surprising as Yuma is just a few miles east of the California border. I snapped no photos because I didn't see anything remarkable enough to take a picture of. So this section has just two images, shown below, and that the reader can understand easily.
