Happy 🍁 Fall!
(to all who celebrate...)
And stoical equinox greetings for the rest of us sighing sunlight-lovers.
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At least in spirit I can gladly share my midweek birthday.
This year’s gift getaway-trip is a couple of days’ visit in historic Charleston, its centerpiece a first tour of the new International African American Museum (IAAM) at Gadsden’s Wharf.
My first return visit in decades to long-familiar Charleston, it’s next among much-anticipated Black history-immersion trips for re-visiting and re-visioning. Already well-researched and underway, several of these funded studies, education- and project-efforts are toward more accurate, inclusive and expanded racial and socioeconomic history of our country. In today’s political environment that seems more critically important than ever for all Americans.
Re-examining Southern sites can carry profound personal meaning and impacts both geographic and more broadly historic. As a native Southerner (family roots in SC, VA and NC) it seems somehow essential. It’s also something more related to hope, a kind of calling… maybe by some of our collective ancestral ghosts.
This emerging passion also happens to mesh with some personal priorities these days. My mom’s in stable physical health, but with her advanced age and fragility my travel is limited to a couple of days’ stay and short car- or plane-ride distances away.
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Meanwhile, beyond noting a few signs of the season, this newShrink became a quickly compiled postcard-preview of works and topics in progress for coming editions — plus a call for your input on some of them.
My Mac laptop’s return from the repair-shop was during prep for birthday-getaway departure. For what it’s worth I’ll share here a tech caution you may know, but it was $-pricey news to me:
Plain old humidity or steam can fry your laptop screen. On Apple MacBooks, and presumably others, the element connecting a lot of the electronics is along the hinged crease between screen and keyboard. And the damage often is not from debris, spilled beverages or corrosive chemicals. This can just be condensation from a nearby steamy dishwasher, sink, coffeemaker, bathroom shower… or in a Southern lakeside summer, just a session of writing outdoors. It took my great tech-guy Vinnie, and the second screen-replacement in a year and a half, to trouble-shoot the likely cause. My periodic writing-while-standing (breaks from too much sitting) at a high bar countertop are very near dishwasher, coffee-maker and hot water faucet. Avoiding that workspace when they’re in use should prevent a third mishap. Though not cheap, replacing a screen of course beats buying a new laptop. With the relatively lucky break this time, the previous investment in much bigger memory-capacity continues to pay off.
Hope this tip is useful, or that you never need it!
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Now the current trip centerpiece…
#1. Touring the IAAM… “I AM!”
The wharf-side official opening events and some background, with illustrations, are discussed in newShrink 6.25.23, “So What’s News?,”and excerpted here.
Speaking to the new museum’s significance far beyond Charleston tourism:
Former slave trade capital of North America reckons with its past as cultural sites set the record straight. (National Geographic).
“Slavers confined those who survived the passage to various warehouses and slave markets until selling them to the highest bidder. Historians estimate that more than 90 percent of all African Americans can trace at least one ancestor to the Charleston area and Gadsden Wharf point-of-entry.”
Next week’s edition will begin exploring the Charleston and IAAM history visit directly. That may be a full single edition or a brief first installment, depending on volume of content and time demands after my Wednesday return.
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Some signs of the season, pictured across the top row above…
#2. Facts & Folklore About the Autumnal Equinox .
(From Old Farmer’s Almanac. Top center photo by Shairaa, Shutterstock
Fall’s official arrival was 2:50 a.m. Saturday, in case it found you snoozing!
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#3. “Captain of her fate, master of her soul?”
Lest anyone doubt who’s at the helm, at top left is 7-year-old Grand Miz E. She was squeezing one more boat- and tubing day from the summer. (Please don’t gasp. This captain’s apparent adult-free ship is largely a fun photo-op illusion. It was also a cloud-gathering afternoon, though with weeks of warm weather still ahead.)
Immediately after Labor Day, this often jammed 500-mile-shoreline lake is suddenly, eerily devoid of most any kind of boat traffic. For now many are off to pumpkin-spiced joys of football season. A lot of ‘em will be back shortly. Some sturdy sorts will fish straight-through until spring. But overall the still season is recovery time, for lake and its many kinds of residents, too.
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#4. Stonemarker at “the golden-light-hours”
The Stonemarker monument photo at top right commemorates regional events and a late-19th/early 20th Century historical figure. It also marks the historic location of “Meck Neck.” That’s a quirky example of changing geography and topography, with twists and entanglements that arise over land and jurisdictional boundaries — and over the very existence and uses of monuments themselves. In coming editions around these topics I’ll revisit, explain and and say more about the Stonemarker.
For now and more personally, the monument marks the dog-walking route’s roughly 3-mile turnaround. That’s the route with more people, dogs and unattended 10-year-olds driving golf carts… but also sidewalks, up-lights after dusk… and, blessedly, poop dispensers, lots of them!
This is all in contrast to otherwise far-preferable, closer to house, 3- or 5-mile running route shared with the occasional friendly people, deer and other wildlife. It’s more open road, on asphalt that’s better for running… and, for exercise (which, nice as it is, walking these dogs simply isn’t!)
I describe both here by way of launching a new “seize-the-daylight… at both ends” ritual/habit I hope will make the next 12 darkening weeks more bearable. Equinox is a sweet-spot for noticing those hours of golden light treasured by photographers and other artists — roughly the hour after sunrise and the one before sunset. To my usual pre-sunset runs most days, with cooler weather I aim to add a meandering dog-walk at the front end, soon after sunrise as possible. (At least the dogs will enjoy it, and I may then be too tired to notice how early it’s getting dark and for how long!)
All of which has increasingly brought attention back to a dimension that becomes easily overlooked when we’re passionately devoted both to regular, more rigorous physical exercise and a range of other worthy endeavors and responsibilities. There’s something I had long known, and cherished, then forgot.
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#5. “Keep walking…”
Setting aside for a moment the exercise/health and getting us from one place to the other factors, there’s a magic-lightning bolt something in the process of walking, itself (illustration at bottom right.)
Walking is a profoundly psychological, intellectual, creative, and sometimes spiritual process. Thinkers and writers across millennia have studied and described its beneficial effects such as: thinking for problem-solving, writing, the most emotionally intimate of conversation, alignment of our neurological functions in the brain through bilateral motion, the normalizing re-regulation of reactivity following trauma… to name just a few.
All of this speaks to recent and ongoing newShrink focus on interiority, how we come to know and navigate our own felt-experience, inner life. Along these lines in an edition coming soon, I’ll share and comment on a long-favorite article. It leads off with a weigh-in by Nabokov in fine curmudgeonly form, among an array of other observant perambulating literary giants.
On this I’d greatly value hearing from you in the meantime. I know many of you are long and devoted walkers with a wide variety of routines, reasons and benefits you experience. Here I’d love some of your thoughts and reflections about whatever your walking routine is and whatever kinds of things it means to you. (And if any walking song titles, lyrics or themes in TV, movies, drama and literature come to mind, please do send those, too.)
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Editions coming soon also continue exploring themes of individual biography and revealed quality or gaps in interior psychological life. I have enjoyed and appreciate many of your comments and thoughts on this in response to recent months’ editions and subjects.
This brings me to one where I’d especially value thoughts and comment, from any of you who are already, or who plan to read this new one from master biographer Walter Isaacson.
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#6. Elon Musk
(Promotional photos at bottom left.)
The subject is an important figure in our time. I haven’t read — and have for many reasons, some of them as yet unclear to me, I have not, at least not yet, been moved to hang out with Musk at the depth and time commitment such a comprehensive biographical dive merits. (I don’t have to love, admire, be temporarily enthralled or clinically fascinated with a subject for this — although it helps!) I do need to not have an unconscious somatic aversion I sometimes get to a subject, similar to vertigo. This may or may not be a factor repelling me about the inside-out take on Musk here.
The more journalistic, outside-in approaches are still fully operational meanwhile. I am reading and viewing much of what Isaacson is saying about the work and about Musk, along with thoughts from a few others. To that I’ll be adding psychological perspective and context. I would like to include thoughts from any of you who read the full-monty biography, whether or not I’m among you.
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For a needed shift in topic and tone!
#7. Some comic relief
Starting at left below the classic Calvin & Hobbs comic was shared by the Rev. Steve Shoemaker in a post early this week, which some of you may have already enjoyed. (With apt timing an elaborate, gold-embellished Broadway-style stage had been a dream snippet that same morning.)
The pure-silliness Far Side at center is a nod to the many I know and love in Asheville and similar mountain areas — for whom humans and bears in intimate proximity are a perfectly normal fact of everyday life.
At right, the dark vampire-cocktail joke might be funnier if you’ve gone through life with my birth-name Stoker, as in Bram, author of Dracula. (Yes, at least in family lore a distant relative… but that may have been lore of the old-Southern more-interesting-tale variety.) It’s a fun possibility, and I’ve neither loved nor hated the whole vampire genre. Overall the stoking-of-sparks imagery has a bit more appeal!
Once again friend and reader Ann Ahern Allen posted her well-curated seasonal touches of humor, with the Peanuts cartoon at bottom center here, and warm beauty, in the heart-patterned autumn leaf below.
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I’ll leave you now, with some of those imagined golden-light-hour walks…
As pictured at right, perhaps your walking routes turn up some of these periodic stones-with-a-message.
(On this particular day’s walk Churchill seems to have been strolling just ahead…)
And, that is all I have! Talk to you next week, at least briefly.
🦋💙 tish
•🌀🔵🔷🦋💙
… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”