I had tossed and turned all night. My thoughts were a twisting turning knot of turmoil.
Before dawn, I left the house and drove to the lake.
Water soothes me.
If I lived near the ocean, I’m sure I would have been at the beach, digging my toes into the sand. Instead, I was at Lakefront Park in Cooperstown, walking in dew-laden grass, looking out into the heavy fog that rested on the lake.
As the invisible sun rose and lent a little light, I took a few pictures. The lush green of summer was accentuated by the grayness of the fog.
The fog obscured the distance, but it helped me appreciate what was closest to me.
Warning: This is probably one of the most boring posts ever. I walk around town and take pictures of the sidewalks.
“Now this is a sidewalk,” Bud said to me as we started our walk the other day.
We parked at the Clark Sports Center and headed out on the route I usually go around the perimeter of Cooperstown.
Susquehanna Ave
The sidewalk on Susquehanna is wide and new. Little kids ride their bikes on it, with plenty of room for mom or dad to walk beside them. The fellow in the distance was on his skateboard. It’s not unusual to see friends walking 3 or 4 abreast on it.
This sidewalk used to look like this:
The other side of Susquehanna
On the east side of the street, this sidewalk reminds me of what we used to walk on.
I always turn up Walnut Street. There are shorter ways to get downtown, but when I’m going for a walk, I’m not looking for shortcuts. I’m looking for the long-cuts, to prolong the experience.
Walnut Street
From Walnut, I turn onto Delaware Street. One of the joys of living in a small town is that so many of the houses also contain memories — friends I went to high school with, kids I’ve coached on swim team. The house represents a person or a family, and I treasure them as I walk past.
Delaware Street
Delaware to Beaver. Beaver Street is a direct shot between Rte 28 (aka Chestnut) and the hospital. At the juncture of those two roads, it’s really hopping with two gas stations, Price Chopper (the only grocery store in the village) and the new location for a giant CVS.
Beaver Street
I take a little jig-jag on Chestnut, quickly turning off it onto West Beaver.
West Beaver Street
West Beaver kind of turns into Maple Street.
Maple Street
At the end of Maple Street, I cross Route 28 again — except now it’s Glen Ave. Oh, the joy of small older villages! Streets take twists and turns and change names — just because they can.
I have to cut through a parking lot here. In the summer, it’s busy, but the rest of the year only a handful of cars park there.
Credit Union parking lot
On the other side of the parking lot is the top of Main Street. It’s a nice walk down, but tourists don’t know that. They shell out their $2 per person to ride the trolley, which actually is pretty cheap entertainment. The trolley makes a circuit around Cooperstown, and some trolley drivers give spiels about the village which are often full of alternative facts.
Upper Main
Just past the ugliest office building in the history of beautiful small villages, I turn onto Nelson Ave, a street of beautiful homes. It’s another stretch of homes that I identify with people I know or knew.
Nelson Ave
From Nelson, I turn onto Lake Street.
Lake Street
Oh, look! There’s the Otesaga! That’s where the Hall-of-Famers stay for induction weekend.
I walk a long stretch of Lake Street, all the way to where it ends at the Susquehanna River and River Street.
River Street
One block on River, and I reach Main Street again — but this is lower Main.
Main Street (going east from River Street)
The sidewalk ends just after crossing the bridge, but that’s okay. I’m heading to “The Path” — no sidewalk at all, but one of my favorite places to walk.
“The Path”
The Path goes along the river, past where Cooperstown’s hanging tree was in the early 1800s (or so I’m told), past the stone bridge (gosh, it’s lovely), past the Sugar Shack (where I suppose someone used to make maple syrup), past a colorful pile of kayaks and canoes, all the way to Mill Street/Brooklyn Ave.
I choose Brooklyn Ave. We used to live here. It is a wonderful street.
Brooklyn Ave
The sidewalk doesn’t go all the way down Brooklyn Ave. It ends as I leave the village. The condition of the road changes, too. It’s easy to tell where the demarcation between Village of Cooperstown and Town of Middlefield falls.
I walk all the way to the end, back to Susquehanna Ave, but now I’m at the end of Susquehanna that doesn’t have wide new sidewalks. In fact, it has no sidewalk at all, but that doesn’t stop me from walking along the shoulder, back to the gym, and back to my car.
The road taken by me is usually a sidewalk. I love walking.
I was clicking through all my pictures and almost clicked past it.
Another blurry picture, I thought.
I’m an expert at the blurry snapshot. In the days of film cameras, that talent was especially frustrating. I’d get back a whole roll of nothing but blur — and have to pay for it.
These are the kind of pictures I often take. I think this was supposed to be the reflection of the moon in a puddle. It was sandwiched in with a whole bunch of other moon pictures. I remember that evening walk, seeing the moon’s reflection in a roadside puddle, taking the picture, knowing that I didn’t have enough light.
Karl is playing tennis somewhere in this photo. In the days of film cameras, I would have thought that I somehow double-exposed, but I don’t think I can do that with my phone. I don’t know how it happened.
At least in this blurry shot, there’s a sense of what the picture was all about. We were setting up the family photo at Christmas, arranging people on the stairs, and I snapped this. I love to catch my children laughing, and they were laughing at something here. Something blurry.
This is the one I almost clicked past, but I paused and looked at it. It was a little ironic, because that’s what I did the day I saw it.
I remembered the day I had taken a walk in town. I parked in front of the library and before I started out, I prayed a little prayer Andrew Peterson had talked about once at Hutchmoot — Lord, show me something cool.
Because I walk the same route over and over, even though it’s Cooperstown and beautiful, I start missing the beauty and wonder of it.
Lord, show me something cool — and half a block later, there was this decapitated, one-legged Lego man, half on the curb, half in the street.
I stepped over it, barely noticing, and took about three more steps. Did I just miss something cool?
I walked back, took the not-blurry picture, and continued my walk, turning that little dead Lego man over and over in my mind. Should I have scooped him up and thrown him away? Should I have scooped him up and found a head for him? Should I have left him there for the street cleaner or another passerby, maybe even a child?
I did leave him there — but he didn’t leave me.
He reminded me of the hurting world we live in — a world of poverty, not just of material goods, but of the soul.
Where we fail to think of the other person.
Where we hoard all the things with which we should be generous.
Where we forget whence we came.
Lord, show me something cool.
Cool things come in unexpected shapes and sizes and places. A broken toy in the gutter can become a whole sermon.
Karl (dark 14) and opposing 14 running for the ball
This is probably one of my favorite pictures of Karl playing soccer because he and the other player are right at the same place in their stride.
I loved watching Karl play soccer.
Karl and Michael — high school doubles
Tennis was fun, too.
Karl and Michael made a good doubles team. In the picture, they’re sort of synchronized — weight on the left foot, backhand ready.
They did pretty well at tennis — for a couple of soccer players. Against the odds.
I heard their tennis coach give them the same advice over and over that year. “Just play your game,” he told them.
“Their game” was a fairly simple one. Return the ball.
While their opponents were trying to put spin and speed on the ball, not always very successfully, Karl and Michael simply returned the ball. Over. And over. And over.
Sometimes it aggravated their opponents. You could see them thinking, What the heck?! These yahoos don’t know squat about real tennis.
But Michael and Karl knew how to return the ball.
When one of them tried to get fancy, it inevitably failed. Coach would call them over. “Just play your game,” he reminded them.
It worked until they encountered a team whose skill was so superior that neither of them could return the ball. (See “Laughter“)
She only had one sitting per day — which made me a little nervous.
How long would I have to be there? What would we do?
Lady Ostapeck lived out in Fly Creek, in a run-downish sort of house, with an English sort of garden in front.
I knew her from auctions. She often bought the $1 or $2 lots of junk that the auctioneers threw together toward the end. I had heard that she got her camera that way, but it turns out she bought it at the Utica Salvation Army store.
I also knew her from the photographs she had done of my oldest brother and sister, though I never heard much about their sittings.
And from her reputation as odd and artistic. The two go hand-in-hand, don’t you think?
She welcomed me into her home and we walked through a cluttered kitchen.
She paused in a doorway and looked up. “I need to find some spray paint,” she said, ” and paint that.” She was looking at a spider web in the corner of the door frame. “Gold or silver. I can’t decide.” We moved on.
In that moment, I knew I was in the presence of someone who was far more aware of the beauty of her surroundings than anyone I had met before. My mother would have grabbed her lambswool duster and whisked the web away, but Lady Ostapeck saw something lovely.
We sat on a couch and looked through books.
“What time period do you see yourself in?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I told her honestly. Nobody had every asked me that before.
We flipped through pictures in the books. She was watching me. I paused on a picture of a French woman circa 1600.
“I think this is where you belong,” she said finally, after showing me some other pictures from that time.
The next step was the costume. She led me into a room that seemed to be overflowing with clothes. In that small dimly-lit room, she seemed to know exactly what she was looking for. A blouse. A hat. A sash. A skirt. A petticoat.
I put them on and then she set to work creating the scene.
She wanted my sleeves to look puffy, so she slid some rubber bands up my arm and fluffed out the sleeve above and below them. She found a limp fabric rose that she pinned at my bosom.
She pulled the neck lower — “We need to show more,” she said, revealing a little cleavage. As soon as she turned her back to go to her camera, I pulled the dress up a little.
As she crouched beneath the black cloth behind the camera, I could hear her muttering to herself. She bustled back around and arranged my hands just so. “Just relax,” she said, “and let your fingers be long and languid.” Before she went back to the camera, she pulled the neck lower and rearranged the droopy rose.
Her back turned and I pulled it up again.
More muttering behind the camera and she came out again. She turned my head ever so slightly to look out the window. She lifted my chin. She pressed down slightly on my shoulders. “Relax,” she said again, and pulled the neckline down.
Of course I pulled it up as soon as she wasn’t looking.
“Part your lips,” she said.
“Breath out slowly,” she said.
“Think about the one you love,” she said.
The result was the picture you see above.
Lady Ostapeck died on February 2, 2017.
I felt intensely sad when I read it in the newspaper. She left her mark on me. I’m so thankful for the day I spent with her.
I rotated the ivy the other day. It was reaching for the window and had turned all its leaves to the sun.
Sometimes I think we’re like plants — craving light, seeking light, pursuing light.
The shadows are okay, though. I’m learning to lean in.
I looked through old pictures for shadow shots. This one caught my eye. The shadow tells us something the shot otherwise wouldn’t reveal.
These simply accentuate the beauty of the building, especially its columns.
Summer dayWinter evening
I liked the shadows from the old bridge.
And the long leg shadows in a late afternoon sun.
I was happily looking through lots of old pictures. Then, I stopped.
In the pictures below, you won’t see the shadows, but I do.
On New Year’s Eve 2004, we played a family game of Scattergories. My brother, Stewart, was there. I could hear his voice, his laugh. He always loved games.
Stewart
I felt a lump in my throat looking at Stewart’s picture. We’ll never play games with him again.
Then I saw this — my mother and father consulting on Scattergories.
I’ve been there to watch the sun rise, and I’ve been there to watch the sun set — and I’ve been there at all hours in between.
It is peaceful and strong and restful and restorative. Who knew that a piece of art could do all that?
I probably have hundreds of photographs of Threshold — from close-ups of insects climbing on the limestone to all-encompassing shots taken from a distance as I walked around it to shots taken with her walls.
In Threshold, I recognize Psalm 48. I have numbered her towers – one – and considered well her ramparts. It’s not Zion, but it points me in that direction.
Looking out from Thresholdlooking up from inside ThresholdOne of my favorite people soaking in Threshold’s goodness
Hot Dogs and Marmalade 