The craft room was one of the reasons for moving off the raw desert into Hidden Shores. Normally, the craft room is a female preserve, filled with women who mostly do quilting. I know little of quilting, per se, but it seems to be three things at once --aesthetic, exacting, and social. There are women who have an eye for it, and one can see their quilts come together with a blend of color and pattern that is quite lovely, while others are just patch works. Lora would excel at the aesthetics of quilting, but I'm not sure she would excel at the exacting aspect, the sort of tedious patience it takes to cut all those little pieces of cloth and then to get all their "points" or corners to align. She has trouble, self-confessedly, doing the same thing over and over again, which quilting would not only require, but would also demand precision in the repetition. Then too, I'm not sure how she would do with the social aspect. We discussed "friendships" on the way into town yesterday. Neither one of us is gregarious, and we find that "friends" often demand more than they give in return. This may be just a matter of perspective, and others may likewise feel we demand more than we give in return, but we do feel the imbalance. At any rate, the craft room is filled with female voices travelling back and forth, and when they are not discussing the finer points of quilting, they are gossiping, usually about the one who for whatever reason isn't present. Though this would seem an opportunity for malicious commentary, I have to admit I haven't heard it, and the gossip revolves mostly about kids, grandkids, plans for the summer, and health -- how quickly the maladies of aging can up-end plans and become the sole focus of living.
We had gone into town for quick stop at Walmart, but mostly to check mail. I was expecting a book of guitar exercises. I have been trying to learn the alternating bass method, pioneered by the likes of Merle Travis and Chet Atkins, but extended with great virtuosity by the likes of Tommy Emanuel. There's something counter intuitive about it, at least for me, and I'm hoping that the exercises would help me develop some muscle memory around the alternating bass line. When we returned, I played around with some of the exercises, while Lora walked down to the craft room, leaving me with one instruction. She has been preparing things for a craft sale coming up this Saturday, and she wanted to price some of her jewelry and needle-felting. The last two days have been rainy, and she left me with two instructions, one (close the blinds on the camper) I forgot, but the other I remembered. The last few days have been overcast and rainy, and it was misting when she left. She wanted me to drive down to the craft room and retrieve her if it actually started raining. Not long after she left, it actually started raining, so I did drive down to the craft room so she wouldn't have to walk back in the rain. I remembered, no doubt, because I had an ulterior motive.
A corner alcove of the craft room has been relegated to us males. The other occupant does painting. He won't set the gallery world of NY aflame, mostly because he attempts to replicate photographs of picturesque landscapes in a painting. His current painting is of a river near his home in Colorado. The aspen are just beginning to show the gold of fall, and it appeals to me because I can imagine myself standing there with a fly rod, the air crisp and cool, scoping out the pocket water. Fishing for me is fly fishing, and fly fishing is a small cold river winding through the mountains, and he was capturing the look of a small mountain river.
I had been out fishing the day before. While the fishing here isn't what it is in the Rockies, it nevertheless has its own beauties, and the shores of Hidden Shores are the reservoir waters of the Colorado River where it collects behind Imperial Dam. It isn't quite what one would normally associate with a reservoir -- no big wide open lake -- but a series of back waters and channels winding through tall reeds and the occasional palm. It's a warm water fishery, and the predominant fish are blue gill, small mouth bass, and stripers. Lora caught a striper the other day, and she's still marveling at it -- the solidity of its muscle mass and its sleek, silvery, almost machine like beauty. I haven't caught one. When I was out last, I did catch several small bass. I was using a particular fly trailing behind a dark olive wooley bugger. I made a mistake on the last fish I had on my line --a good one, probably a striper -- and tried to horse it in too quickly. It broke the tippet between the bugger and fly, which, as it turned out -- crap! crap! crap! -- was my last one. I did catch one more fish, on an articulated streamer, but the fishing slowed down considerably after I lost that particular fly.
After admiring my neighbor's progress on his painting, I began breaking out my tying gear. I'm sure the fly has a name, and I'm not the first to tie it, but I might as well be because I tied it up without a pattern. For the aficionado, however, I tie it with red thread like an all purpose nymph on a size 10 to 14 1XL hook with a fluorescent pink bead head. It's tail is gold flashabou, its body is composed of touching wraps of dark olive polar chenille, and its thorax is pearl ice dub. It was a "what the hell" fly, tied, as one outdoor writer put it, to resemble a Vegas showgirl -- flashy with a lot of movement. I'm not sure what it resembles in the bass food chain, probably nothing, but it certainly touches off a response.
Fly tying is a repetitive business. After the first couple, I'm going through the motions, concentrating enough to maintain consistency while half listening to the ladies gossip. It's background noise, like a television on low volume, and I really wasn't paying attention. I was just tying my fly, grateful that I did not have the assistance of our camper kitty, Jade. One piece of gossip did, however, catch my attention. I hadn't watched the news, or read the papers that morning, so when one of them brought up the latest school shooting, I had heard or read nothing about it. They didn't discuss it much, and even so I only caught half their conversation, but I do remember one woman expressing sympathy for the parents of the kids killed, along with the siblings and grandparents, all of whom would have their lives changed forever in a muzzle flash. Another woman began an odd digression about having eaten not only venison and elk, but also bear and bobcat -- with an extended story about how they had once served bear without telling the kids on the assumption that they wouldn't eat if they had known it was bear. She did come back to the point that she knew a lot of people who do a lot of hunting, and they would be upset if they "took away the guns." Lora did not contribute to the conversation, and that was it, or at least all I had heard, and for those two ladies at least, the news cycle had ended.
I finished up my flies, and Lora finished up a bracelet. She showed it to me, and I commented (yes, with honesty) that I thought it was "very nice" or something of the sort. It's the same sort of response she gives me when I show her one of my flies, the most typical being "oh, that's pretty." The response was appropriate for the particular fly I was tying -- it had no natural materials in it, no bobcat or bear fur, no chicken or partridge feathers, nothing but manufactured synthetics, so it was rather sparkly and pretty, not the normal "buggy." I suppose its one of the perineal disconnects between genders, but I'm never quite sure what she wants as a response. If I were to say, "oh! that's beautiful! a stunning achievement!" she would know it was over-the-top sarcasm, so "very nice" will have to suffice, and I'll take the "is that all you have to say?" with a grain of salt.
On the ride back, Lora expressed interest in watching the news, but there was nothing unusual in that. She likes the evening news with that "sweetie" David Muir. For me, the evening news is about like reading the headlines on USA Today, the topics without discussion or depth, but for Lora it's enough. I'll grant her that. Trolling the news for more discussion and depth usually drives me half mad, in both senses of the word, and my usual comment on hearing the evening news, or at least the political news -- my god, what a clown show -- is about all that's possible at the moment. We'd no more returned to the trailer, however, when the phone rang. It was our son calling to reassure us that the shooting had not taken place at Bella's school, but a neighboring school and so we weren't to worry. The phone call had its intended effect. When we watched the news, she knew immediately that the "Florida school" wasn't our grand daughter's school, and that she was "safe." It had another effect, however, on Lora. She would quibble with my metaphor (she always does) but I believe she felt the way one feels when a horrible crash is averted, swerving panic, then nothing. It could have happened, it almost happened, but didn't. Jay's phone call made the possibility more real, along with the anguish of those for whom it did happen. The effect lingered through the remainder of the evening and through the next day.
The chief clown offered, as is usual, prayers and condolences, and went on to emphasize the insanity of the shooter. Of course, normal people don't shoot up high schools, and so the shooter is, by definition, abnormal, insane. The tautology explains nothing, certainly not the shooter's felt need to wreck havoc on a school, and to offer only prayers and condolences, as one victim's frantic parent made abundantly clear, is to offer next to nothing. There is one thing we can do, and it seems fairly obvious, and reasonably easy -- limit access to the guns that do so much to facilitate high body counts. Beyond that, I'm not sure what to feel. It seems the shooter went about the business as a craftsman might go about planning his next project, studying past shootings, planning his own shooting with the intent of "improving" on the body count, purchasing the right tools, and choosing the day, Valentine's Day, so it would, be forever known as the Valentine's Day Massacre. He was characterized as isolated, a loner, a young man who had trouble connecting with others, particularly girls, a characterization which makes every introvert "suspect." Still, though, it seems clear that he hoped the shooing would bring him notoriety, and affirmation, and one can altogether too easily imagine other potential shooters enviously studying his stunning achievements as they plan their own path to fame. The shooter might be abnormal, insane, but he is not terribly unusual. Mass shootings are happening with numbing frequency, and the shooters are choosing venues where, as the saying goes, it's like shooting fish in a barrel.
Fly tying is a repetitive business. After the first couple, I'm going through the motions, concentrating enough to maintain consistency while half listening to the ladies gossip. It's background noise, like a television on low volume, and I really wasn't paying attention. I was just tying my fly, grateful that I did not have the assistance of our camper kitty, Jade. One piece of gossip did, however, catch my attention. I hadn't watched the news, or read the papers that morning, so when one of them brought up the latest school shooting, I had heard or read nothing about it. They didn't discuss it much, and even so I only caught half their conversation, but I do remember one woman expressing sympathy for the parents of the kids killed, along with the siblings and grandparents, all of whom would have their lives changed forever in a muzzle flash. Another woman began an odd digression about having eaten not only venison and elk, but also bear and bobcat -- with an extended story about how they had once served bear without telling the kids on the assumption that they wouldn't eat if they had known it was bear. She did come back to the point that she knew a lot of people who do a lot of hunting, and they would be upset if they "took away the guns." Lora did not contribute to the conversation, and that was it, or at least all I had heard, and for those two ladies at least, the news cycle had ended.
I finished up my flies, and Lora finished up a bracelet. She showed it to me, and I commented (yes, with honesty) that I thought it was "very nice" or something of the sort. It's the same sort of response she gives me when I show her one of my flies, the most typical being "oh, that's pretty." The response was appropriate for the particular fly I was tying -- it had no natural materials in it, no bobcat or bear fur, no chicken or partridge feathers, nothing but manufactured synthetics, so it was rather sparkly and pretty, not the normal "buggy." I suppose its one of the perineal disconnects between genders, but I'm never quite sure what she wants as a response. If I were to say, "oh! that's beautiful! a stunning achievement!" she would know it was over-the-top sarcasm, so "very nice" will have to suffice, and I'll take the "is that all you have to say?" with a grain of salt.
On the ride back, Lora expressed interest in watching the news, but there was nothing unusual in that. She likes the evening news with that "sweetie" David Muir. For me, the evening news is about like reading the headlines on USA Today, the topics without discussion or depth, but for Lora it's enough. I'll grant her that. Trolling the news for more discussion and depth usually drives me half mad, in both senses of the word, and my usual comment on hearing the evening news, or at least the political news -- my god, what a clown show -- is about all that's possible at the moment. We'd no more returned to the trailer, however, when the phone rang. It was our son calling to reassure us that the shooting had not taken place at Bella's school, but a neighboring school and so we weren't to worry. The phone call had its intended effect. When we watched the news, she knew immediately that the "Florida school" wasn't our grand daughter's school, and that she was "safe." It had another effect, however, on Lora. She would quibble with my metaphor (she always does) but I believe she felt the way one feels when a horrible crash is averted, swerving panic, then nothing. It could have happened, it almost happened, but didn't. Jay's phone call made the possibility more real, along with the anguish of those for whom it did happen. The effect lingered through the remainder of the evening and through the next day.
The chief clown offered, as is usual, prayers and condolences, and went on to emphasize the insanity of the shooter. Of course, normal people don't shoot up high schools, and so the shooter is, by definition, abnormal, insane. The tautology explains nothing, certainly not the shooter's felt need to wreck havoc on a school, and to offer only prayers and condolences, as one victim's frantic parent made abundantly clear, is to offer next to nothing. There is one thing we can do, and it seems fairly obvious, and reasonably easy -- limit access to the guns that do so much to facilitate high body counts. Beyond that, I'm not sure what to feel. It seems the shooter went about the business as a craftsman might go about planning his next project, studying past shootings, planning his own shooting with the intent of "improving" on the body count, purchasing the right tools, and choosing the day, Valentine's Day, so it would, be forever known as the Valentine's Day Massacre. He was characterized as isolated, a loner, a young man who had trouble connecting with others, particularly girls, a characterization which makes every introvert "suspect." Still, though, it seems clear that he hoped the shooing would bring him notoriety, and affirmation, and one can altogether too easily imagine other potential shooters enviously studying his stunning achievements as they plan their own path to fame. The shooter might be abnormal, insane, but he is not terribly unusual. Mass shootings are happening with numbing frequency, and the shooters are choosing venues where, as the saying goes, it's like shooting fish in a barrel.
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