… abounds along UD‘s early morning Garrett Park walks. She’s been following one planting in particular (see photograph a few posts below this one) as “the fist of a bud / sprung into petals” begins to do its petaling thing. So here’s a picture of the same peonies twenty-four hours after that first picture.
Garrett Park wakes up, and UD watches it happen on today’s walk.
As UD walked along Strathmore Avenue, a big red fox slowly crossed in front of her, gazing at your blogeuse the entire time. Two families in town keep chickens, and a neighbor told me the other day that a fox got into one of the henhouses and went to town.
Two images from this morning’s walk through Garrett Park.
UD‘s dinky but massively over-educated town (UD has often thought the town should take its motto from The Importance of Being Earnest — a slightly revised version of Algernon’s If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated… Here it would be If I am geographically a little under-sized, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.) has a mayor and a town council, and there’s a real race for the council this year. Garrett Park’s YouTube channel features the candidates’ forum, which you might not find as engrossing as I do (I know almost all of the people featured in the video, and I’ve known some of them for fifty years), but I think it’s a pretty interesting slice of a certain sort of American life.
Civil discourse dominates, along with a really striking love of the town – its amazing trees and gardens, but also all the stuff it manages to pack into its tiny size – a post office, a popular restaurant, a train station, a town hall, three swimming pools, a farmer’s market, basketball courts, tennis courts, quite a few parks (another park’s on the way, because Laetitia Yeandle, who spent a long distinguished career at the Shakespeare Folger Library, has given the town her house and land) (and speaking of Laetitias and Earnest, my talented cousin Karen will be performing Miss Laetitia Prism in an upcoming production of Earnest, and if you’re local you should try to go because I KNOW this woman, and I know she was born to play Prism), an elementary school, a church… It’s quite a jewel, Garrett Park, and some residents really don’t take to making any changes.
References throughout the forum to sidewalks refer to the anger some townspeople have expressed over GP having scored a big grant to add sidewalks to some of its streets. Although most people agree they improve safety (with very little traffic and a beautiful setting, GP is jammed with pedestrians, cyclists, etc.), some think sidewalks are out of keeping with GP’s natural, lightly-paved, character… And I can understand this, though I don’t agree – I can understand because I grew up across the street from Wells Park (I now live down the street from it) and I recall being upset years ago when Park and Planning paved a path into the park. I sort of knew I was overreacting and being irrational, but that park had always been open land with swing sets and now…
Fact is ol’ UD has responded with some alarm to virtually all changes in town, and yet she now loves and appreciates the changes. They were made by the sort of people running for council (although all the candidates at the forum are men, another member of the council is a woman, and the mayor is a woman) – judicious, intelligent, hard-working. Most of these volunteers have full-time jobs as … well, lawyers… I mean, some are engineers or architects (those, along with the odd CPA, are the best sort of council members, because they actually know how certain things work), but I guess traditionally most have been lawyers. One of the people running this year owns Founding Farmers restaurants plus other enterprises and must be insanely busy; but his heart seems to be in his work on the council.
I liked in particular one thing this guy – Dan Simons – said at the forum. A citizen asked a question about citizen participation in the workings of the town – she acknowledged that by any standard our little town boasts huge numbers of serious volunteers (UD for years, as you know, attended and reported on town council meetings for the GP paper, The Bugle; and Mr UD was a town council member himself), but she still found bothersome the fact that plenty of other citizens don’t volunteer. “They don’t even know we have a mayor and a town council!”
Simons said that the town does a lot and might do even more to draw people in to the business of running it, but: “When I first moved here I had two little kids, start-up businesses, and other responsibilities, and I had no time for any of that. It happens when the time is right; and for some people it’s never right, and I think that’s okay. Some people just want to live here.”
Chris Keller is the “last officer standing” in the Men’s Garden Club.
When almost thirty years ago she decided she’d had enough of driving cars, people would gaze at her and say things like My grandmother had that problem. Now
If teenagers are any guide, Americans’ love affair with the automobile may no longer be something car makers can bank on.
The percentage of teens with a driver’s license has tumbled in the last few decades and more young people are delaying purchasing their first car—if buying one at all…
UD, as veteran readers know, thinks it likely she’s a happier, calmer person not only because she stopped driving, but because she stopped driving in the DC area’s notoriously bad conditions.
Joe’s brother Nathan owned various Ocean City properties and concessions as far back at 1912, and the one you see in the picture – now a Dumser’s ice cream parlor – has remained in the Rapoport family all this time. The city has been trying to evict them, claiming it’s been owned by OC all this time.
The state’s highest court on Friday denied a petition by the Town of Ocean City to hear an appeal in the battle over ownership of a Boardwalk property, essentially bringing closure to the longstanding case.
The state’s Court of Appeals on Friday denied a petition for writ of certiorari filed in February by the town against Nathans Associates, the heir and owners of the century-old-plus building the east side of the Boardwalk at South Division Street, which, for decades, has been home to the iconic Dumser’s Dairyland. The petition asked the Court of Appeals to hear the case after the lower Court of Special Appeals ruled twice against the town.
Featured takoyaki. Karyna, my companion, spends every summer in Japan, and was thrilled. La Kid joined us, at the end of her workday.
… for today’s trip to the Enchanted Forest (see post below this one for details), but it was certainly a hoot sober. The feeble faded fragments of Mother Goose and Grimm tales UD remembers from her trips to the EF 58 years ago remain fully un-intact, their aura of the random malsain surreal even more powerful than before. It was all there – the chipping paint, the dusty magic potions, the sordid three-bear beds. Criminal neglect and magical mystery mingled to create a sense of desperate shabby enduring escapism… and ain’t dat life? Ain’t it da truth?
…our parents often took us to nearby Enchanted Forest, basically a bunch of cheap, chipped structures placed in a small suburban wood, representing fairy tales (here’s a vintage picture of the Hansel and Gretel house). UD doesn’t remember much of her madly happy childhood, but, for all its kitsch, Enchanted Forest made a big impression on her. She vaguely recalls having been thrillingly frightened by some of the darker-themed sculptures…
Anyway, UD and her sister are going there today – she will of course blog the experience.
After an evening rainfall, a misty Saturday morning in UD‘s woods.
The effects of nature’s qualities on health are not only spiritual and emotional but physical and neurological. I have no doubt that they reflect deep changes in the brain’s physiology, and perhaps even its structure.
Oliver Sacks
… (the wedding took place under somewhat strained circumstances), seems to have the inside track for Maryland House Speaker.