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Category : Photo Stories

02 May 2021

A FAMILIAR FACE?

I feel like I’ ve seen this guy before. I don’t know where. He just looks so familiar. I saw him at the Quickie Mart buying Red Bull and Red Man. He didn’t say anything when I took his picture. He just kind of looked at me. He was driving an old F-250 and carrying the Sunday NY Times.

01 May 2021

MAY DAY

Just throw your head back and let go.…

30 Apr 2021

MASKING UP AND QUEUING

Masking started slowly. Very early in the pandemic I saw someone in the city wearing one. At a certain point I decided I should wear one, too.

I’d never worn mask to go food shopping. The first time I did, I felt conspicuous. Very few other people were wearing one. Within a couple of weeks it became mandatory. No mask, no food shopping.

These photos are from April 30, 2020. Happy anniversary.

The number of people in the store was limited and shoppers queued up outside the store, leaning on their carts and checking their cell phones. Flashback to the gas lines of the seventies (except for the cell phones).

April 2020

Masks became a political hot button issue, which is absurd. Ridiculously absurd, but they work. If someone starts to cough or sneeze next to me they better be wearing a mask. I don’t want their virus laden snots. (Actually, I don’t want their unladen snots either.)

We are recovering. Many of us have been vaccinated and are unlikely to transit the virus. But we still need masks in public places because of the brain-muddled, misinformed, self-aggrandizing, conceited and Kool-Aid drunk percentage who are happy to be hosts and reproduction factories for the virus. Welcome to America, land of the proudly stupid.…

29 Apr 2021

PAY PHONE

I didn’t try it but it says it works.

I remember the last time I made a call with a pay phone. It was a while ago. I called home which was only about 5 miles away. I didn’t have a pocket of change so I called collect and talked for less than a minute.

It cost $14. I am glad I did not talk for an hour.…

28 Apr 2021

STREET FLUTE

Musicians love good acoustics. Paul Winter is famous for playing his sax in locations that enhance his music like canyons and St Paul the Divine in New York City.

Philadelphia offers some great locations for haunting music too. There is a traffic tunnel between the Convention Center and Reading Market, where I heard the theme from Stars Wars echoing. I followed the music and came upon a flute player, playing for tips.

Buskers are usually pretty open to being photographed so I asked permission and then fired away. We chatted and got to know each other. It was fun

About a year later was in Philly again and heard the wafting sound of a flute in the hallways under City Hall, another great place in the City to play music.

It was my old friend who I’d photographed earlier. It was a mini reunion.

27 Apr 2021

Q TIP

You can’t do this in a grocery store.

Carts there are reserved for food, dry goods and kids. Kids don’t shed and most of them don’t bite (unless provoked) so they are deemed safer to bring into a foodstore.

Aptly named Q Tip, loves his shopping excursions. He’s got his bed, bones and blanket and I bet he’d be wearing pajamas if he had a set he liked. Not only does he get to browse hardware (always a fun time) he gets to visit with his fans who adore him.

26 Apr 2021

TOTS IN TOW

They are a little like cats. You can’t herd them.

When you take them out, you need to strap them together so you can tow them where you want to go.

They do it differently in Australia where they have really smart dogs.

25 Apr 2021

BETTER COFFEE

I have a collection of small, instant coffee jars filled with obsolete nuts and bolts. The jars and hardware were my grandfather’s. I inherited them a few decades ago.

Grandma and grandpa must have drunk a lot of instant coffee. It was pretty big back in the sixties and seventies. Pretty awful, too.

Maybe it’s gotten better. I don’t know. I never touch the stuff. I drink better coffee as instructed.…

24 Apr 2021

BUGLEWEED

I love this color of blue. It’s a treat to see patches of it in some lawns here and there and along the road. It’s bugleweed (genus Ajuga). Around here it is a perennial, blooming for a month or so in the spring and then going incognito.

Sometimes it goes native, growing out in the wild on its own. It is known to lower certain hormones in the body and is used by some people to treat mildly overactive thyroids.…

23 Apr 2021

MIGHTY ACORNS

An acorn is an oak tree waiting to grow.

Oak trees can be very productive some years, raining down abundant amounts of acorns with the potential to create entire forests. A healthy oak can produce up to a billion acorns (1,000,000,000) over the course of its life. That’s productive.

Not all billion acorns will end up as full grown trees, though. If they did, we’d be a happy, tree-filled planet. Acorns are a feast for a wide range of beings from tiny bugs that bore into the shells to our familiar woodland creatures. If you know how to prepare them you can make acorn flour and maybe acorn pancakes.

If it avoids being a meal, an acorn sets about becoming a tree by sending out a radical that wants to bore into the ground and become a tap root. The odds of making it this far and then growing into a sapling aren’t good and it is fun to help them along by sprouting them and giving them a nice bed of soil to grow in (and fending off hungry critters).

On good acorn years I can be found stuffing my pockets with the little brown nuggets and then squirrelling them away for the winter. In the spring we give them a nice bed to grow in and then nurture the little trees into slight bigger little trees before finding somewhere to plant them. If we can protect them from deer for about 10-20 years they may grow into healthy trees. It’s worth the effort.…