Sidetracked Charley

Palisades in the morning light   While waiting for the "new normal" to reveal itself, it occurred to me that the new normal may be within me. And enough people who have changes within themselves after our year of isolation and that will create the new normal in our society. As I wrote that I immediately thought: If we can get rid of enough old farts. No not those that died from Covid but those that allowed us to die of covid. But I digress. The subject was to be changes in me. In the year of my sojourn or isolation I granted myself permission to make changes or to give myself permission to embrace changes which have been dancing around the edges of my existence. The big one was doing away with my long term rental. This has been taking up room in my mind for twenty years. But it was part of my "retirement" plan. When occupied it paid the mortgage. When vacant it ate up all my spare cash to get it ready for the next tenant. I came to resent that. My first tenants stay...

Once we stood tall I had to stop and ask myself what I believed this week. And I found that very hard to answer. I cannot do it without tears. I cannot look at a tree or two coyotes playing in a field and not immediately feel their loss. I am a photographer who once recorded the beautiful world around me and now I feel I am preparing an obituary for that world. At the beginning of 1970's I was in Washington, DC working for a Republican Senator trying to end our involvement in the illegal war in Vietnam. Those were the days when we expected our presidents, then Richard Nixon, to go to congress and ask for their approval. He had not.  Republicans and Democrats had ethics then. They fought for things they believed. And individual members of both parties crossed the aisle to cooperate on bills they believed in. You bantered around terms like liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. Now both parties seem to cookie cutter their droids. And to me that is the really scary p...