An almost spooky story and view from the past

Retro--glass lenses, trifocals, and real ear pieces.

I broke my glasses the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, while getting ready for the arts festival and then a long road trip to Walsenburg, Col., to see my last uncle, Mike, in the Veterans Home.

Now I can see at a distance in daylight pretty well, which is why I have the nasty habit of taking my glasses off and putting them down where I can't find them, or in this case, step on them. But the eye strain is increasing in dim light or anytime, and I definitely need them--the cool ones with the gradual bifocals, to read anything smaller than 14 point type, without strain.

But you can't get anything done on a holiday weekend, so off I went, using sunglasses and reading glasses as needed, knowing I'd have to come back and get new glasses--and it was pass time for an annual exam anyway.

But when I got back, in the still cool weather of early June--which seems unreal now--I started cleaning out the garage of accumulated stuff. You know on Facebook of my getting rid of more than 200 books and National Geographics. Still there are other boxes there, including stuff you cant throw away but don't know what to do with. These include  a lot of my Dad's early drawings, family photographs, and mementos and memories of an earlier life.

I've written previously of "Momma's glasses," (Sept. 14, 2009 on this blog--read it if you haven't) so you know what I'm talking about. Anyway, as I repackaged and sorted "stuff"  from my Dad, I was going through this one cardboard box of things that belonged to him before he died in 1973.

When I got to the bottom of the box, I saw in one corner an old eyeglass case. When I picked it up to throw it in the trash, it felt too heavy. So I gingerly opened it, and inside....inside were a pair of old glasses--untouched for almost 40 years.

I gingerly pulled them out. they were glass lenses, and trifocals. So I naturally picked them up, unfolded them, and decided to try them on...out of curiosity, to look through lenses my Dad's eyes had once.

I couldn't believe my eyes...the prescription, all three levels, were perfect.

I knew putting them on made me look old and uncool, and the wrap-around ear pieces were difficult to get used to--as is the glint of light off the clear lines of the trifocals. But I'm really sort of cheap, and didn't want to buy new glasses, even with insurance, if I could help it.

Then my young and cool stepdaughter Alexx saw them and said they were "cool. Retro is in." Another cute young thing at a restaurant commented on them. My stepson Chad saw them and said, "I want those  glasses." A not-so-young guy (my age) at a bar/restaurant this week, saw them and couldn't stop talking about them, telling me stories about his dad, and so forth.

I occasionally think about what Dad saw, looking through these lenses--but I know, I have lots of his artwork to know. So I think I'll keep them...Even as I write this, they give me a whole new way of seeing.

Cabin of lost dreams, watercolor

9 by 12 d'Arches 140 pound paper

This cabin used to be about as far up a dirt road leading up to the Truchas Peaks that you could go,  from the remote town of Truchas on the high road to Taos. It has since crumbled into decay. Still, it is a symbol of lost dreams and memories, an icon to me, that I've used it as a subject many times.

By the way, this is watercolor 20 in the past 22 days, since I heard Norman Poet Nathan Brown talk about writing a poem a day. Yes, you won't see the bad ones, and this is the second attempt on this subject this weekend--taking two days. The previous Hoping for rain also took two days and two attempts.

Birthday thoughts of a firstborn

We headed into the rising sun on the rural highway toward the hospital 35 miles away.

Her labor had started in pre-dawn darkness, but we waited until the contractions were five minutes apart.  We’d been up late the night before, playing board games with good friends, and joking tomorrow would be a good day to have a baby.

In Iowa, the ripening corn fills the valleys between the rolling hills with mist, and the morning sun turns it golden. The highway dipped down into the mist and back up again as the little Volkswagen plugged along, pushed as fast as I could go. I don’t remember the conversation, but I’ll remember that morning forever.

Once my wife was in the delivery room at the hospital, the redheaded Irish doctor told me to put on a white nursing robe and mask: “Come in here, you’re responsible for this,” he said.

I went in and sat down on a chair as the birth neared. I don’t remember much about that either, except praying for my wife as her cries of pain increased, and for my first born, for her health and for his normalcy.

Then, in an instant, the cries of a new baby replaced the  mother’s cries of pain. I knew then that every birth is a miracle.

That was years before ultra sound and knowing what sex the baby was, and when they let fathers in the delivery room. The Catholic doctor ordering me in there said it was his method of birth control. In our case, it didn’t work, because that baby would have a sister and two brothers to join him later.

I remember a few days later, taking him and his mother home from the hospital, with  no car seats to strap him in, just a small portable bassinet in the back seat. We headed toward home, but I pulled over a few blocks from the hospital, and turned around and just stared at my son.

I remember details on the births of our other children, but not in as much detail and emotion as the first born. I know his mother has her own memories of each of them.

What do you remember about your first born’s birth?

I would have liked to ask my mom and dad their memories of the day I was born on cold January in Dallas long ago, but didn’t, and can’t. That’s lost forever. And I wonder, about 100 years ago in Comanche and in East Texas, what my grandmothers and grandfathers remembered of the births of their children. I’ll never know.

But at least my son, Master Sergeant Vance Conrad Clark, USAF, who has three children of his own, will know, on this the day we headed into the rising sun in Iowa 44 years ago.

Winter dreams--watercolor

9 by 12 140 pound d'Arches paper

Great Plains skyscraper--watercolor

10 by 22, 300 pound d'Arches paper

I'm fascinated by these boiling towers of cumulus in the afternoon heat--an infinity of shapes and shades and colors, changing second by second...they're alive, adding vertical texture to a horizontal world