Hoarded Ordinaries

Earlier this month when I was downtown photographing the Christmas be-bulbed trees along Main Street, I snapped this photo of a vintage fire truck, part of a passing procession I later learned was headed toward the funeral of a retired firefighter. When I composed the shot, the truck was perfectly centered in my viewscreen; by the time my digicam captured the image, though, the truck had moved off center.

Reviewing the photo when I got home, I considered cropping it, but something in me liked the off-center composition. At first, I thought it was the diagonal balance of truck and branching tree, but ultimately I decided that it was the sign for Earth Treasures, a downtown store selling beads, polished stones, and science-themed gifts and toys, that I found aesthetically pleasing. If I cropped the photo with the truck as its focus, I’d lose the sign. If I kept the photo as-is, I’d retain the visual trinity of truck, tree, and background facade.

Last night at the brink of sleep, I realized what I’d liked about that sign: Earth Treasures. The name of Keene’s local bead and trinket shop contains within it the English name of Ji Jang Bosal, also known as Jizo or Ksitigarbha, the “Earth Treasure” Bodhisattva whose name Buddhist mourners chant when a loved one dies. How fitting that my shutter-snapping eye instinctively knew to capture the accidental sight of a funeral-bound firetruck rolling past the Earth Treasure’s eye.

This is the “November” image in my 2007 photo-calendar: an appropriate picture, perhaps, for the month of All Saints and All Souls. You can see the featured photos here, and you can order a copy here. Enjoy!

This past Friday’s Photo Friday theme was Immature, so here’s an image of an immature penguin I shot before darkness fell at the Columbus Zoo, where my eldest sister and I went to see this year’s Wildlights display on Friday, my last night in Ohio.

In an attempt to avoid the usual Sunday surge of post-Thanksgiving traffic, Reggie and I made the 13-hour drive from Columbus to Keene on Saturday, Reggie’s role being to sleep and necessitate occasional stretch breaks while my role was that of sole driver and navigator. Yesterday was dedicated to unpacking, re-acclimating, and otherwise settling in, and today is my usual grading day, a chance to catch-up (still) on the papers I took to Ohio but didn’t get around to reading.

Although it’s always good to see my family in Ohio and even better to return to my quiet life here in New Hampshire, it’s also a bit disorienting to move so quickly from one life to another. In the past, I’ve driven home to New Hampshire on Monday, barely unpacking my bags and settling my head on my home pillow before rising to teach Tuesday’s 8 am class, a pattern I knew I didn’t want to repeat this year. Having Sunday for leisurely re-entry and today for grading catch-up seemed a saner approach than milking a few extra days in Ohio.

Another choice made in the interest in sanity is the no-brainer decision to call it quits on this year’s attempt at NaNoWriMo. Although this is the first time in three years of taking the novel-in-a-month challenge that I happened upon a book idea I’d truly like to pursue–a spiritual memoir describing how a good little Catholic girl went from being a born-again Christian to being a Zen Buddhist–this is also the first year I’d decided to do NaNoWriMo at the last minute, having decided that I didn’t have time to write a So-Called Novel during a month when I was teaching six classes.

As it turns out, that initial instinct was correct. Although I theoretically could have written 50,000 words toward that spiritual memoir had I stuck to a daily discipline of about 1,667 words per day, I quickly fell behind with that goal and never caught up. At a certain point, I decided it wasn’t worth consuming too much caffeine and getting too little sleep to write a crappy first draft of a project I want to spend more (and more quality) time on.

And so yesterday, my first morning back in Keene, I woke, walked the dog, and then settled in after breakfast to write by hand in my Moleskine, as I was wont to do back in October, before NaNoWriMo made it desireable for me to write via laptop so each and every word could be counted toward the 50,000-word goal. Given that I started NaNoWriMo this year as a way to jump-start my writing, I’d say the attempt was successful even though I didn’t “win” the challenge: somewhere short of 20,000 words, I figured out what I really want to be writing, and how. And that, in my book, is the exact opposite of Immaturity.

I’ve been largely offline this week, losing patience with the dismally slow dial-up Internet access at my parents’ house and checking on my online classes during trips to Panera that are limited by the staying-power of my laptop battery. Even if I had a lightning-fast Internet connection at my unlimited disposal, though, I probably wouldn’t be blogging much, feeling singularly uninspired. Columbus, Ohio is the place I grew up, but it’s also the place I left when I went to college in Toledo, moved to Boston for grad school, and then settled “for good or the time being” in New Hampshire. Columbus is the place I’ll always call home, telling folks who ask me where I’m from that I hail from Ohio, not New Hampshire…but it’s a place that no longer feels like home, life here in the quietly monotonous flatlands feeling exceptionally far removed from the hubbub of stimulus that is my life in the hilly Northeast.