SUMMER

Thoughts

Hazel Alexander's laugh booms over radio waves and scares off the squirrels. His tongue is white and twisted and rolls between two bottom teeth. The first time meeting him might be close to the feeling of approaching a lion.

He doesn't laugh much or talk much or do much, really. Sometimes he'll ride his bike to the Stop sign or rearrange his room. Sometimes he only speaks in grunts. He's always made me slightly nervous until about a week ago.

When I gave him this photo he was sitting in the same spot, smoking his pipe. He looked at it, put down his pipe and laughed. Loudly.

"You know, you're all right," he told me. And for a while I felt it.

The Holy Land

Went to Jerusalem with some Canadians the other day.

Reconsidered

GAME POINT - A mother tells her son to stop running around the aisles just as the Gator baseball team beats South Carolina 8-3 at the Alfred A. McKethan stadium.


My dad tells a lot of dad-like narratives. There's the one about throwing rotten eggs at the neighbor's house on Halloween, the one about being tied up in the trunk of a car and driven through six counties during Pledge Week, the one about waking up in front of the Lincoln Memorial, etc.

Sometimes he throws in a life lesson. For the eggs, it's "bury your eggs two weeks before Halloween--no more, no less." For the car trunk, it's "stay cool, you'll get to where you're going somehow." Every time, my sisters and I roll our eyes. Usually it's something we've heard before.

So, it's a little funny and confusing when bits of his reflections come back to me and end up being useful. Like a saying from his fifth grade English teacher: Writing is like baking a cake. You have to let it cool, sit, cool some more. Eventually you can come back and add the frosting.

As lame as it sounds, maybe photography is similar. I never paid much attention to the photo above. The lighting was weird and their skin looked oily and it was just some people at a baseball game. It took me a year to forget that and see what's actually there.

Fight Night

"They call him 'Bananas' but not because he's crazy," his coach told me.

Commander

I watched him buy a teapot, about a dozen women's belts and some glue sticks a couple weeks ago. He gave me $10 and asked me to buy more styrofoam heads for his wigs. I asked him if he had more wigs to put on them and he said no, but he would. Then he got his head shaved.

Keep the country, country

Haircuts

The Happiest Boy in the World

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