Spring Day

Tony playing the guitar...classical Spanish pieces...




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Sunlight streams through the windows...striking objects in the room, hanging on the walls, breezing through the chandeliers...









But the action is outside....you can almost hear the plants pushing up through the dark, moist soil...reaching for that solstice sun...







We got for a walk to the docks. Past crews putting down a asphalt driveway for a house whose owners had gotten "stuck" in the winter snow...a loud operation in contrast to the still, bare forests that cover the shore line.



Then water...we have so little of it in Colorado...amazing to see it just lying about...not even being "used" as it must be in the West in order to be "owned." Here "access" is owned...land along the myriad inlets is owned...not the liquid itself.







And on the inlets, we extend out over this water: docks with Adirondack chairs from which one can consider the watery world....perhaps of ducks.



And ways, then, of moving out over it....



So on this day it seems the world is full of possibilities...new growth, new inlets to explore, new music...well actually old music new to me...to fill this brief space of life.

Location:Annapolis, Md

Mud Woman

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So I was on the elevator, descending from the 5th floor galleries for a drawing exercise, and the door opened and there was this mud sculpture. I was so surprised by the scale and the concept. Which I guess is one of the purposes of a museum...to surprise and, sometimes, delight us.

Location:Denver art Museum

Winter day

One winter day came up to Leadville...passing the bowls that lay on the backside of Breckenridge...glad they have not been converted into ski resorts. I took instead to the Mineral trail on cross country skis. Got on the trail just up the road from the hostel...it winds 12.5 miles through old mining camps and the woods which have grown over them.


















I have always been struck by the association of Leadville with the Guggenheim family...its great wealth and its association with some of the world's great art museums in New York, Bilboa, Abu Dhabi.

Only words on a marker along the trail...but interesting to think the abandoned mines are now one of the country's largest superfund sites. I don't think the museums were asked to contribute to the cleanup.

















"In 1880 Meyer Guggenheim, a siccessful lace merchant, bought part interest in the AY and Minerva Mines for $5,000. After buying out his partners, he spent several thousand dollars to pump out the mines, increasing their value to $15,000,000."
He went on to form smelting companies....which blackened the skies over Leadville for decades...but now all is quiet. As quiet as the museums after closing hours.

After doing the whole trail circuit...whew...the contrast between the warmth of the hostel and the ice sickles hanging off the dragging gutters is fine to contemplate. The beauty of inside as opposed to outside.

Don't need to go to a museum for beauty.



















Of course it is always good to know where you are in space as well as in time.




And then the kitchen in the hostel...lots to remind one that the warmth allows us to indulge in all kinds of silliness without concern for the freeze of a dark winter night.

Location:Leadville February 14

On the road west

Am heading for the Grand Canyon...never have been there before.  And am reading de Booton's book, The Art of Travel, along the way.  But my first stop has been the hot springs at the Orient Land Trust...a place about which I have blogged before.  Coming here always feels like home, a kind of spiritual home, like Ghost Ranch in New Mexico or the vast temple complexes in Tamil Nadu.    

Staying at the Pod

Pingpong, anyone? so the last few times in New York City, I've stayed at the Pod Hotel. Tiny room...but great design...and public places to hang out...which I guess is the point...who wants to stay in their room...it's time to get out and around...









in the library books are organized by color...broad stripes in black and white alongside one of the bars...there are three bars...generally full...and then there are the elevators which have glass walls...three shafts in a row....so you can see who is going up while you are going down and vice versa...



But often you're going up to the bar on the terrace of the 17th floor...overlooking the rest of the city...by day or by night....







A good place for a drink before turning in....

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Location:Manhattan

A walk

Got up early to head west on foot along 39th street...the morning sun not quite yet hitting directly on the streets...


passing the taxis heading for Grand Central Station to search for the morning's first fares... Further west coming to the Hudson, new apartment complexes catch the early rays...




As does the river itself and the ferries coming to their Manhattan port from Jersey City, Weehawken, Edgewater...Jersey towns providing part of the workforce that fills the city's streets...







Only five passengers, including myself, heading west...to the towns along the Palisades, the cliffs that range along the Hudson's shores.... When I was a kid growing up on those cliffs, the apartments along the boulevard were just beginning to be built...and those now further south in Jersey City were not even a gleam in someone's eye...and those in lower Manhattan had yet to be built and destroyed and built again.









Getting up and around the cliffs was always child's play...swinging on the ropes strung on the girders underneath "suicide bridge," for example, was part of that play....but now there are fresh stairs and, even, yes a light rail that connects to Bergenline Avenue.








Bergenline...one of my first jobs working as a bus boy at Tedesco's, a restaurant with "great mussels"...shopping for "good" clothes at Schlesinger's with my Mom...for a long time has moved to a Latin beat...you get a bit more English above 60th Street but generally it speaks Spanish with all of its flavors.




I walk from 51st Street where the elevators lift passengers from the light rail's deep tunnel to the sidewalk, wander past my elementary school on 74th street, its students filing under the portals that still proclaim "Girls" and "Boys." But the boys and girls line up together now.



But why the walk? Ahhh...meeting friends at a restaurant at 79th and Bergenline. Tapas de Espana. Friends from the same elementary school...class of 1958.


After lunch...walk back through North Hudson Park...along the boulevard that runs atop the Palisades...stopping off to see the Mom of a friend who still lives in her apartment...



Take that long stairway back to the ferry...crossing with the late afternoon sun against the high walls of the skyscrapers...



And then back along 39th street...now heading east...to the hotel...a late afternoon drink...that stretches into the evening.




I love hiking in the mountains of Colorado...but this, this was a great hike.

Location:manhattan--new jersey

Family

Official portrait...the Werge-Whitehead family celebrates the fifth anniversary of the wedding of Ingrid and Geoff. After five years, there are four members of this combo...a doubling of the population.



Ingrid....





and Geoff...





and Freya...not feeling so well here after a round of vaccinations for two year olds....





and finally the new Ms. Addie....




This does not include the cats. Anyway, Happy Anniversary.

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Location:Cranston, Rhode Island

East Coast

So when I say I am going to the east coast, I mean just that...going to various points along the coast that stretches from (for me) southern Maryland to Boston...all points between.




At Ingrid and Geoff's house, we are just two blocks from the east coast...the point at which this continents slips beneath the waves of the Atlantic or, in this case, Long Island Sound. From the old Norse, "sund," meaning strait...via old English and, then, English.
But, yes, it is having to do with water....and the lives that people living on the coast lead. A humid life...given the moisture in the air...such a contrast to Colorado...but one that now participates in the sea as if it were just a form of recreation...












or of physical beauty...providing a backdrop for daily life...viewing the water from the windows of our houses...or viewing our houses from the vantage of the water...




Either way the east coast is this geologic line where the sea meets the land...once it was the life-blood, the highway, the font of commerce, the passage to this continent from other continents...still it defines a cultural and economic paradigm...all along the perimeter between walking on solid, if soggy at times, ground and swimming in, or under, the waters.

Location:Cranston, Rhode Island