Oh, California!

Hazel and my mom and I flew out to California back in late June. Summer feels like it's on the wane now -- the photos help me hang on.

Put that in your pipe, Mr. Burns

We're eating big American burgers at an oversized, lots-of-leather-and rough-wood-all-over sort of joint, and Hazel asks, "How many people won the Civil War?" Good question. That's the first art, right? Asking good questions.

Virgin forest, Ohio

Why do they have to call it that? I know, I know -- but come on. Here are a set of images from an outing the folks and Hazel and I took back on July 3 (anniversary of Taylor's death) -- down near Wooster where there's a tract of land (not so big, really) where, for one reason or another, no one ever has clear-cut or farmed or sliced into what is, by all accounts, a lone stand of trees that has been itself, untrammeled, since before the arrival of the white-skins (a word I'm borrowing from Herman Melville's Benito Cereno. I'm all poco lit these days, with that postcolonial-speak on the brain).

And then the clouds moved in and we ran like rabbits (though I had to pee like a racehorse!)

-- and dashed back to the car in time to watch the drops from inside --