Bleak places and bossy people

Self portrait taken yesterday, which is not when I was born. Click twice!A couple of weeks ago TG and I were tooling around downtown Columbia, as we are sometimes wont to do.

On this occasion we were running an errand.

Cruising eastward on Gervais, we passed the South Carolina State House.

A few blocks later, TG turned north on a side street.

We ended up beside a large white Queen Anne-style house that for decades served as a funeral home.

It's been abandoned for several years now and reposes silently in a state of advanced dilapidation.

Creepy! Positively Stephen horror-genre King-ish.

I'd long wanted to take its picture.

Only problem was, for some reason I can't remember, on that day I hadn't brought along my camera.

I won't be making that mistake again!

TG wheeled into the weed-choked parking lot anyway, because lo and behold there were two other cars there and I wanted to ask some questions about the old house.

I hoped the two ladies standing near the three-dormered carriage-house wing of the structure were in possession of historically accurate information.

And would be generous with it.

I approached the pair, introduced myself, and expressed admiration for the old house.

The ladies were reasonably cordial. Turns out one of them was a member of the family that for the better part of a century owned the house and used it for their eponymous funeral home.

She told me that her family had many years ago sold the building to a corporation, which entity has since sold it to the University of South Carolina.

I listened politely and asked a few questions. She answered them just as politely.

Then I mentioned that I wished I hadn't forgotten my camera at home that day, because I was itching to take pictures of the house.

Nothing could have prepared me for what the lady said next.

"I'm going to have to ask you not to take pictures of it."

?????

I asked her if I'd heard correctly. Hadn't she said that her family sold the building many years ago, and that it had since been acquired by the university?

Meaning, it is now owned by USC and not by the previous owner, and certainly not by the lady's family and in no way owned or controlled by she herself?

Yes, she said, all of that was true. But she still preferred that I refrain from aiming my camera at the building.

She made some reference to its state of sorry disrepair. Which was patently obvious to anyone with eyesight.

With all due respect, I pointed out, any of the thousands of people who drive up and down Gervais Street on any given day can clearly see the old house with all of its peeling paint, gap-toothed awnings, boarded windows, and overgrown shrubbery.

She acknowledged that the building is visible to anyone who cares to turn their head on their neck and train their eyes on it.

"But I still don't want you to take pictures," she repeated.

You will be proud of me I hope, because for once I did not say what I was thinking: i.e., that I intended to come back at the first opportunity and take pictures, and does she often throw red meat at the feet of hungry dogs?

But before I could think of something appropriately neutral to say, the lady offered yet another directive: for further enlightenment in the matter, I should call her cousin.

?????

As it happens, I know who her cousin is. I accepted his number written on a piece of paper but I had (and have) no intention of using it.

How I wished I'd thought to pack my camera that day!

Believe me when I say, I would not have waited for her to leave before firing it up and snapping until my arm was tired.

And that's because I find it amusing when someone who has no right to tell me what to do or not to do, does.

Am I the only one who has experienced this phenomenon? People bossing you, who are not even remotely the boss of you?

Discuss amongst yourselves.

The only place I would even consider issuing anybody instructions or -- in extenuating circumstances -- orders, would be within the confines of my own house or property.

That is, unless they were taking liberties with my physical person, in which case I could be anywhere and I'm going to vehemently -- and probably loudly -- resist.

In any case, I would be careful what I said to an emancipated adult who was exercising their own free will and doing nothing either illegal, untoward, or unduly intrusive.

So yesterday? After church and following lunch at Harper's, TG took me and my camera back to the abandoned house that was once a funeral home and is now little more than a ruin.

He then watched over me while I took approximately seventy-five pictures.

I kept hoping that the lady who told me she wished I wouldn't go all digital on her family's old place of business, would show up. I would have liked to, between shots, smile and wave in her direction.

But alas, she wasn't haunting the old place that day.

Long live the blessed and marvelously liberating concepts of free speech, free will, and the freedom to take a picture. Or seventy-five. Or a hundred ninety-two.

Upset stomachs and stubbed toes to all those who would be so rude as to lord it over those over whom they have no authority.

That is all.

Happy Monday! Happy Week!

The plot chickens

As I mentioned last week, I planned to visit a Chick-fil-A restaurant near my house today, to see if homosexual couples would keep their promise to protest by showing up and hanging around outside, being unduly demonstrative.

(We doubted they'd venture inside the stores. It wouldn't, after all, be seemly to support the traditional marriage supporters by buying their chicken sandwiches.)

(Because according to at least some members of the "gay" community comprising all of two-point-seven percent of the American population, Chick-fil-A fare Tastes Like Hate.)

I took along my camera and my MacBook Pro. I ordered a hand-spun vanilla milkshake and a cup of hot, fresh, black Colombian coffee.

The young ladies who waited on me were really nice and remarkably efficient.

It's always that way at Chick-fil-A: very classy. Everyone seems happy. No hate. No hate at all.

I dare you to find hate at Chick-fil-A. I double-dog dare you.

Anyway I sat down to nurse the milkshake and the coffee, and surf the Web.

I looked outside and I waited.

Nothing happened.

There were only nice people coming in and going back out, procuring hot, fresh sandwiches and the usual go-withs.

If they didn't carry the vittles away in red-and-white sacks, they sat down with chicken-laden trays.

They ate, they laughed, they talked.

Eventually they left and different nice people took their places and did the same thing.

I looked outside several more times and waited some more.

Nothing happened.

I took pictures of the flowers on my table.

I watched an endless stream of cars snake around the building in the drive-thru lane.

For ninety minutes or more I sat and sipped, anticipating a noteworthy (or at least blogworthy) instance of political and moral activism against the forces of poultry-fueled conservative hatred.

But it never materialized.

Sorry to disappoint you! There was no kissing by anybody of any gender directed at the person of anyone else of any gender.

No statement by the homosexual community on the day of their self-proclaimed "National Same-Sex Kiss-In."

No LGBTQ -- or R-S-T-U-V dubya ex wye zee -- anything at all.

I guess somebody chickened out.

But while I waited for developments to develop (which never did), I checked my emails.

Our eldest daughter Stephanie, mother of our three grandchildren, had sent me a YouTube.

She liked it because, one, in our family we are all fans of Michael Jordan.

(TG took me to lots of Bulls games in the early '80s. Michael and Scottie and the gang looked about one inch tall from our vantage point in the cheap seats, up near the rafters of Chicago Stadium, where they played until the United Center was built in 1994.)

She also liked it because in 2009, Melanie had a minor surgery at Presbyterian Hospital in Charlotte.

So in lieu of tastier news (complete with pictures) of homosexuals making out on the sidewalk in front of Chick-fil-A, I give you this.

Happy Weekend!

Girl of the timberlost

Some of my faithful readers since time out of mind may remember when, four years ago today, I posted this.

Have you ever heard the one about, if we do not learn from history we are doomed to repeat it?

Earlier this year our neighbors across the street moved away. For about a month their house sat empty.

The new homeowners eventually began coming around, but their presence was sporadic at best. They seemed in no rush to move in.

But sometime within the last several weeks, they did move in. I haven't had a chance to meet them yet, and that's my fault.

Especially since, right around the fourth of July, I noticed that there was a very large and clearly dead tree at the edge of their side yard.

The tree was positioned so that, if the hand of God or Nature gave it a wee nudge and it toppled, it was going to land in or around our driveway.

No doubt about it.

I considered branching out a bit, going over to meet the new kids, making nice.

After we'd dispensed with the amenities I planned to point out the stump in my own side yard and tell them about the day four years ago when our own dead tree fell.

Right onto our nephew's pickup truck.

But I was busy either having company or getting ready to go out of town, and I procrastinated.

As I drove away last Wednesday, through my car's moon roof I took one last apprehensive gander at the gray, lifeless, leafless limbs spindling high into the sky across the street from my house.

On Thursday evening TG called me in Georgia.

"You won't believe," he said.

"What? What? Don't tell me it's bad news!" I said.

I just didn't want any bad news.

TG chuckled. "Well, it's sort of bad. The neighbor's tree fell on my truck."

TG was at work when the big event occurred.

Upon arriving home, several hours after the fact, he saw lots of pieces of a tree littered about our yard. Plus considerable tree debris decorating the street.

Then he noticed his truck.

Various neighbors who'd been keeping a sharp eye in anticipation of TG's dismaying discovery began leaving their cool houses and walking across the hot street to offer moral support.

Our new next-door neighbor reported that she was outside in her pool when tree trunk met truck bed.

Whump!

"It was so loud, I thought my garage door had fallen down," she said.

Another neighbor -- an elderly lady who is the go-to source for all community scuttlebutt -- told how the new homeowner had cleared a bunch of ivy off the dead tree's trunk the day before.

"If he'd left the ivy on it'd probably still be standing," she observed wryly.

Ivy leave you! Now wood you all please leave us in peace.

Happy Wednesday!