Something to do

This is a monster big weekend around these parts. 

First it's graduation which means a lot of people coming & going which is good for local businesses (& hard on local-locals).  But unless you re a graduate or related to a graduate or otherwise student involved, you are not going to make a special trip for that.

Well, this is also my favorite weekend of the month:  the weekend the antique rose place is open.  They only do this once a month because they have other pay-the-bills jobs but once a month it is like a little rose festival.  This is where I got I got my Reve D'Or.  They are out of stock today, but keep checking they are worth it. 

& finally it is the Tree City Quilt Guild's every other year quilt show.  It is not a huge show, but it is still interesting.  There are a lot of outstanding local quilters & what with snow birds, there are a few outstanding not-always local quilters.  Also that snow bird thing means techniques from other parts of the country seem to make there way here & sort of mix together.  Whatever the reason, despite being a local guild show, there is usually something new to me every other year.

Big doings week-end

There is A LOT going on in our little corner of earth over the next few days.  Let me start be describing the one thing we will not be doing & yet benefits us greatly.  Wait, let me back up.

How do you feel about football?  College football? Gator college football?  Well, we have a love hate relationship.  More like a like, don't really care relationship, but whatever.  The short version is when there is a home game we do everything we can to get the hell out of Dodge.  It is not just what the people attending the game do.  I don't mean drunk & disorderly, although that is a factor, I mean thing like the university reselling ALL THE PARKING SPACES to alumni & other fans, so if you have not done something about your car before the end of business Friday, you can count on getting towed & fined.  When you consider how much it costs to park near A's building (I will give you a hint: it is more than $500), you can see how it might get old.  Fast.  But added to that are all the people not attending the game, who just want to hang out & bask in the drunken halo outside of the stadium.  & that is before we get into any real rivalry games.

Well, this weekend is the most famous college football rivalry of all time:  The World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.  & the good news is it is so damned big (& the rival is so damned close), they have all agreed to move it to Jacksonville & we get our town back.  Which means we will be able to move about freely & do everything else going on this week-end.

Today is the first day you can vote in the election here in Florida.  I am told that this is the second busiest day (the first being the actual 2nd Tuesday in November), but I probably won't get there until Monday myself.

Today is the first day of the Friends of the Library Book Sale.  We actually have a FOL booksale twice a year (we do love our library) but the October sale is usually the BIG one.  We will not be there this first day, but we do plan to go Sunday (the book sale runs Saturday to Wednesday).  We are arriving late because

Saturday is the only day of the Bat Festival at the Lubee Bat Conservancy.    We have never been, but I am determined to go this year. 

Yesterday I was on campus, for the first time in a long time I might add, & was talking with the most recent set of undergrads work-studying in the Herbarium when one of them bemoaned the "home game" being "so far away" & how he was just going to have to watch it on tv because without football there is "nothing to do in this town".

"Can you show me/Can you show me/The shine of your Japan/The sparkle of your China"

While my mom was visiting, we went one place I have been longing to go:  the new Cofrin Asian Art Wing at The Harn Museum of Art.  This wing, or rather one of the pieces to be housed there, actually made international news earlier this year: the Korean Bodhisatvah.

The short version is X-rays had shown this 17th century bodhi had a mass in his head.  In the interest of finding out what that mass was, they put him in the CAT scan & soon enough had a diagnosis.  I will let the link go into the details.  Or even better, you can visit himself at the Harn.

While you are there, you can also see other objects glorifying other gods, other lives, even other trades.  But there really is nothing else so eye-catching&fixing as the seated bodhi.   I kept leaving him & going to see the ceramics, & then the garden, the other gods.  & then back to the room with his x-rays & scans & documents & of course, him.

If you had asked me, I would have said that I was most partial to Ganesha & indeed I still think I am, but the bodhi was indeed a thing of great beauty.  I can understand being tempted to sell my house in town.  Instead, my mom bought me the t-shirt.

Tree Kangaroo Awareness Day

I know, right?  But there it is.  May 26th is Tree Kangaroo Awareness Day.  We actually observed this high holy day on Thursday when we went to the teaching zoo (where you go to learn to be a zookeeper).

We have been to the teaching zoo before (I have even blogged it before), but my mom is visiting & she hasn't been so of course I brought her there, even before I knew about the baby born not-sure-when (no one is) who is still keeping a low profile.  It is easier to go these days.  They have more public-friendly hours, but they used to have mandatory guided tours which were kind of nice & now they don't, unless you call in advance, which I didn't.  On the other hand, the trail was crawling with zookeeping students who were hapopy to flip through their books & answer any question they didn't know the answer to.

What else is there to say?  It is a pleasant walk, mostly shady.  The animals you see can be seen at many zoos; the first purpose is to teach undergraduate zookeepers their craft/trade. Animals with large territorial requirements just don't fit.  Many of the breeds that could be found in the wild locally have actually been injured & cannot rejoin their fellows.  Many of the others are endangered & are part of breeding programs.

Which brings us to Tree Kangaroo Awareness Day. & the events they have planned around it at the zoo.  When we were there we didn't see the baby Matschies Tree Kangaroo (although maybe you would today), but we did see the baby monkey/capuchin/I don't quite recall & even better, in my opinion, the peachicks following their mamas around the trails as you go from exhibit to exhibit. 

Spring is over, long live spring

In mid-February, when my mom was visiting, we took a walk around the local botanical garden.  I used to spend a lot more time there than I do now; I had not been since the last time we took my mom.

When we went our own backyard camellias were peaking & slipping down the other side, theirs were as good as over; their azaleas were in full bloom, ours opened later in March; the bulb garden was in full swing, ours were also in full swing, mostly because I force them indoors BUT the amaryllis someone planted outside the back door, when the house ended at the kitchen & now that garden is in the corner behind the Trane were not blooming yet, then.  They are just opening now.

These seasonal pockets can be quirky: my yard lags behind a neighbors by about a day & of course on the grand scale, what is already waiting for next spring here is just this spring springing where my mom actually lives, so she is kind of having two springs.  I wonder if that is why she always tries to visit in February?

Whatever the reason, that day spring was everything it should be & we were in a garden.

Seeing red

Once my block lotto blocks were posted, I went cherching the next month's assignment & it was Oh Dear all in red.  There is no good way to put this:  I am not a big fan of red.  Whenever I have a red white & blue assignment I somehow squeak by with blue & white & the littlest bit of red around the edges.

This is not a new aversion; it has nothing to do with Sarah Palin or even Nancy Reagan before her.  I just do not much care for red. Way back, before there was a Useless Ranch blog, way back in ?2006?, Fons & Porters published a Bingo Block that required five different red fabrics in any of several categories.  Most people went to their scrap bags (they only needed 2.5" squares);  I had to buy four fat quarters.  I owned one novelty fabric that could be fussy cut to mostly red in such a small square & nothing else.  No red.

Since that time I tried to expand my world to include red, but it did not take.  I own some red fabric & I never seem to cut into it.  I pushed myself to deal with red in one of our FB swap blocks this year (another 2.5"square commitment) & I am dragging my feet making more than I needed for the instruction-pictures.  Starting with that small red block (it's a log cabin so you know, red in the center) is a hurdle I cannot seem to get over.

Rereading what I have just typed, I recognize I sound like a crazy person.  I am thinking an all-red block would probably be good for me because this aversion is...uhmmmm...extreme.  Emotionally unwell extreme.  So of course I will make at least one.  After all, if I cannot bear even the remote chance of winning, I can always donate it.

// this particular lotto was inspired by the upcoming exhibit at the American Folk Art Museum.  It is not often I am sorry I no longer leave in that NYC-Boston corridor, but this is one I would have liked to see despite the color.  & my sneak-peak arrived earlier today & I kinda like it, red & all.

If it's Wednesday, this must be the Farmer's Market

Alachua County has a farmer's market six days a week, but the crown jewel, in my opinion, is the Union Street Farmers Market on Wednesday 4-7.

I know, the Saturday market has its fans, but this business of closing when the produce runs out means you have to get there no later than 9am on a Saturday & what with dogs & horses & so forth I have trouble getting anywhere by 9am any day of the week.  Therefore I have never made it before half the vendors have packed it in so it just didn't look like much.  The Monday market at Tioga also seems to be growing (& it is closer to me), but my Monday's are already crammed.  As for the markets in High Springs & Alachua township. you can see how I might not have made it to them more than once, more than a few years ago.

The Union Street Farmers Market is not on Union Street, they outgrew that location quite some time ago, & are now at the Bo Diddley Plaza.  About a yer ago there was a campaign to bring people to the downtown area & the idea was floated that the unused Bo Diddley Plaza (unused per the organizer except for the handful of times of year there is an outdoor concert or on Fridays in the summer when they show free movies or the three different annual street festivals...) should perhaps be taken down & sold/rented to something that might make the town some money.  This was shouted down pretty quick by the farmer's market people & it was quickly understood that the people/person suggesting this did not actually spend all that much time downtown.  It probably also helped that they crunched the numbers & it turns out that short-term leases on very small lots (say the size of a metered parking space in time slots of 20-40 minutes) already net the town about as much as they could expect to see in the early years of any proposed development project & probably quite a bit more, once you factored in the kinds of costs other such proposals actually cost (as opposed to proposed cost).  Then the economy tanked & enough other projects stalled/spaces opened up that it has not come up since.  On the other hand, when all the students are gone, when & basketball are out of season on the rainiest coldest Wednesday there ever was in this part of the country, the plaza is always hopping.

Public Lands Day

Another worthwhile holiday you have never heard of has rolled on by; yesterday was National Public Lands Day.   I don't know what happened where you were are, but here the state parks were looking for help cleaning up Washington Oaks Gardens State Park.  The link from the Florida State Parks twitter account originally went to eco-jobs work site in Europe...& in German, but they resolved that & now it goes here.

It is also possible to find out what went on closer to you, though, if you are interested.  The good/bad news is chances are they will be happy to see your smiling face even now that National Public Lands Day has come to an end.  That is also the bad/good news.  Even if you are not prepared to break out the work gloves, etc. you might discover something close by you didn't know you owned.

You shouldn't need me to tell you, but

You don't need me to tell you it has been bitter cold here for about a week.  & yes, I know it is colder elsewhere.  But bitter cold here is like a heatwave in Maine, the locals just are not prepared.

In addition to the standard Florida fare of snowbirds in trailers  & migrant workers in shacks (this is where both of them spend their winters), we also have the standard home construction here:  the cracker cottage.  Where I am from, you would not call a building a cracker cottage anymore than you would call it a honky house, but it is an actual kind of architecture.

A cracker house is a simple wooden frame house, often with a tin roof & among other distinct features, it is raised off of the ground.  This makes it easier to keep termite & other bug free.  There is usually almost as much outside room (porch) as there is inside & the front door generally opens into a room or hallway that runs straight through to the back of the house, often the long way if it is a rectangular building.  Even our house, which is not a cracker house in any other respect, has such a dog run.  Interior walls often have windows,so that the whole house can be truly opened up to catch a cooling breeze.

Anyone who has spent any amount of time in a cold climate can probably spot several design flaws.  The most treacherous is that business of being off the ground.  Yes, it is good for keeping down bugs.  It is also nice to have a shady spot to put things (dogs come to mind) when the summer gets hot-Hot-HOT.  It is also the reason half the houses on this road do not have water:  there is nothing to keep those pipes from freezing so around dusk, you turn off your pump & drain the water out of the system.  You can turn it back on when it warms up in the morning.  If it doesn't warm up in the morning...well, you cans see why 29F at noon is a problem here.

Someday, when this winter is over, let me suggest you pay a visit to some of the local cracker houses open to the public.  The closest to me right now is the Dudley Family Farm, although there is every possibility the legislature will be closing that as well as several other State Parks over the next few months.  You might instead go to see that most famous cracker house:  Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings home &, well lets say studio.  Get out of your air conditioned car & let the temperature catch-you-up.

Then walk into the grove of trees surrounding every cracker house I have seen & feel it get cool again.  Walk through the front door; it will get cooler still.

What I meant to do while in CT

I grew up, went to university & had my first jobs in the greater Hartford area & I assure you, it really is not the most boring place on earth. In fact, I always run out of time to do the things I want to do. What I should have done but did not:

- Seen the Chihuly. We actually tried to on a previous winter holiday visit. After dinner we were four adults just staring at each other & it was a beautiful night so I asked if we could walk around Constitution Plaza & see the lights. No one could come up with a better idea, so we went. I know it does not compare to even lawn displays in some parts of the country but it is still the first big light display I ever saw & I am fond of it. We swung by the Bushnell to see the Chihuly; it is inside but it is massive & well lit BUT they had the shades pulled on the 2+story high windows. If you do not buy a ticket, you cannot see the Chihuly.

- Visited Horace Wells. Back in the days when I worked around Bushnell Park, I used to seek out the space near the Horace Wells Statue. Sure, I was drawn to the flashy carousel horses in warmer weather, but even when he was dusted with snow I enjoyed a brown bag lunch with Horace. How many other capitol parks have statues of famous dentists, hmmmm? It turns out that the answer to this is Paris; in the Place des Etats-Unis there is a statue of........Horace Wells.

- Walked through the Mark Twain House. Even before we moved south, it had been too long since I had done this. If you can, go on a day it is snowing so you can watch the snow flakes in the window over the fireplace. It really is pretty cool. You can also visit his neighbor, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Unbeknownst to many (well, me) she wrote one of her books just a few miles from where I live now.

- Dined at Kashmir. I was once dumped over dinner at Kashmir. Immediately after, anyhow. I had never been to the restaurant before that evening & it was worth it. Good-bye man, hello cuisine!

Then there are all the places outside the city limits that I missed:

- Crazy Bruce's Liquors. This is another place I have never actually been, but on a past xmass eve my husband & my brother rushed in moments before closing & bought all the ingredients for chocolate martinis, including the glasses (most women want jewelery but we are not most women). The clerk was very helpful & figured out what they were making from their purchases. What does not ever seem to have occurred to them is that she thought they were a couple. Crazy Bruce stocked the bar at A's graduation party, our wedding reception & every event we ever had at my parents on these visits home. Yes, even those whatever night of Chanukah/G***'s Birthday/Open Houses we used to have when we came north in Decembers past.

- Talcott Mountain. Roughly between the house I grew up in & the house my parents live in now is Talcott Mountain. It is not a big mountain; it is a perfect mountain. You can get up & down in an afternoon & enjoy an uninterrupted view from the top.

- Rock Cats game. I actually have a hard time leaving Florida in the summer: I like it HOT but we are trying to swing a winter-holidays-in-July so maybe....

- SONE rehearsal. We have been on previous visits to watch my sister sing & they treat you like an honored guest! Really, they make an announcement & thank you for coming. No talking though, you can only smile & wave like the Queen of England. If you go in winter, take a step back & enjoy the Congregational Church architecture conveniently located diagonally across from the Prosser Public Library. If you go in summer, bring your anorak; I do not know what the deal is at Emanuel Synagogue, but it is the best air-conditioned place I have ever been & I live in Florida.

& finally there are those places I will never visit again:

- Mount Southington. I can x-country ski, but I rarely do. I do not downhill ski. I do not even like the ski lift. The sensation of air moving quickly across my face makes me feel ill. I have a lot of great pictures of everyone else coming down the slope though.

- Cinema City. I have been told there is a theater there again but is it really Cinema City? I remember when they put real butter on the popcorn, popcorn popped right in front of you. The movies were good, bad & off-beat. This is where I saw Dogs from Space, Sid & Nancy, Round Midnight, & the list goes on. Maybe I am wrong & it is everything it could be, but I will never know.

- The Elm, another theater, but this one really is gone. The last film I saw there was Walt Disney's Cinderella. N*** & I tried to sneak up to the balcony, but it was already closed & then we sat through the unpublicized opening film which caught us by surprise: Nestor the Long Eared Donkey. I don't even think it was xmass-time, but that is part of what made The Elm The Elm. Actually, N*** & I have a twisted history with strange movie theaters across Hartford County. Remember the one in Avon with all the sinks in the stalls so a person could not just wash the salty-popcorn-y smell off her hands without feeling obligated to try & pee....?

I know this sounds like a tag-you-are-it kind of list, random-beyond-random but these were what made my every day for decades. Or at least they are what was part of what made my every day for decades & then fell away has become. You can follow that, right? Even if they are gone, even if they are back & better than ever, they are not every day anymore. Not for me. I think this might be why people make small shrines in their kitchens & collect scrapbooks & plant trees.

//one place I had thought I would miss was Shady Glen. These are the only cheeseburgers I ever eat. Which means I have a cheeseburger roughly every eight to fifteen years. I have been enjoying the mural on the back wall & the doilies under the little metal bowls of ice cream for as long as I can remember. So has the rest of my family, except maybe my cousin C**** who has been working there since he was sixteen & just might be sick of it all. We managed to squeeze in a visit on Monday along with one wonderful quilt shop & Penzeys. & yes, I had a cheeseburger, so I will eat beef again in ?2015-2025?, give or take.

Musta been muscadine

A week ago Sunday it was cooler at 1ish than it had been in a long time & A suggested we go pick grapes. There are a slew of U-Pik-Em farms around here, but we went to Loftus Family Farms. It took about 15 minutes (less really) to pick 2 buckets worth (one for us & one for W*****; she mowed our big pasture again later that same day).

We pulled up, almost no other cars there, but the cows had been moved to the field in front of the shed they operate out of (it really is pink, you cannot miss it). The bugs were minimal, the vines easy to get to. Two other families were in there; we could here them talking but everything was pleasant.

Once we were done, we went to the very end & saw the elderly cow that had recently given birth to twin calves. She looked tired. Back at the pink shed, we paid for our grapes, made small talk & watched the goat-that-got-away, & was now staked at the back door, head-butt the fan.

They have buckets for you to use, one bucket is about $7 worth of grapes & even if you just lie around staring at the clouds it is worth the trip. I don't have any pictures because I was using both hands to cram all the grapes I could eat into my mou....bucket. I did pull this one from their on-line album & that really is how abundant they are. The farmer says they will be officially open until the end of the month & probably casually a few weeks after that.

"It's all happening at the zoo"

Yesterday, after 10+ years in this town, we went to the local zoo. I do not mean a zoo-zoo, I mean the local teaching zoo where they teach wanna-be zookeepers to be, well zookeepers.

Because it is a teaching zoo it is not staffed the way a public zoo is & you have to go with a group. Tours run every ???; we waited 20 minutes, which seemed reasonable. We were in a group of one other couple like us (grown-ups, no kids) & three couples with kids. Well kind of. Two couple with two kids each & one family of...

Maybe I should just tell the story.

So there we were those of us I have described & THEM. When we went in to buy our tickets ($4 for adults, such a bargain) the father asked me if I wanted one of his daughters. Then he asked if I wanted another. Then he asked if I wanted the third. I am from Connecticut & I know how to lower the temperature about 10F with body language alone(it is our super-power, how do you think we survive sandwiched between NYC & Boston) ; I said "no" the first time, never made eye contact & was ignoring him by the third. & HE KEPT TALKING. The guy was so obnoxious, A tuned out completely, missed crucial information (like we had to go with a group) & was agitated enough to leave an air-conditioned building with chairs to go stand in the parking lot.

Fast forward to actually entering the zoo. Ideal father was telling the story (not sure to who) of how each of his daughters had been a 'son' on the ultra-sound & how that was the only thing he really cared about & did anyone want a daughter. He entered the zoo with said daughters, his wife & his mother.

We all went to the first exhibit which was a building with snakes & lizards & such in the windows. We walked around the of the building, looking in at the windows while an inexperienced tour guide (a student, perhaps) read from her crib-notes what was what. His mother would not go near the building, she does not like snakes. Tour guide says something along the lines of "No one can be in the zoo unsupervised, I will get someone to stay with you" & Grandmother has a meltdown. No really, in two easy steps. The whole group waits while Grandmother has a hissy, tries to stalk off & is stopped from doing so because, well they cannot have anyone unsupervised in the zoo. Then she really ignites.

Soooooo, now there are multiple people joining us, including what is clearly a supervisor, that whole family unit gets pulled to one side & they decide that Grandmother will be escorted to the car. & apparently her son has to go with her....? They were given the option of a tour to themselves skipping the snake house but that was unacceptable. The rest of us are still waiting. Grandmother & Father leave.

The tour continues with all of us as above & Mother with three daughters, two of whom would rather be in the one stroller. The kids (all of them) were actually pretty good. Excellent when you consider they spent at least 10 minutes each at five 'groupings' of snakes et al. that should not have taken 15 minutes for the whole thing.

We move on & see some other animals: not the otters there was tree-work happening in their cage) & not the tree kangaroos (they just would not leave their air-conditioned bungalow), but others like the Galapagos tortoises. We get to the black swan (the swan bites) & our guide is radioed that someone will be rejoining our group. & we wait. & we wait. & we wait. On a boardwalk in the sun. Finally THEM father reappears & the tour resumes.

We go through the rest of the zoo, THEM father tries to give away his daughters a few more times. At one point he asks us (me & A) what something (either the crown cranes or the springbok; they share an exhibit) might be like grilled. We ignore him completely & he seems surprised, briefly & then asks the other people standing next to us if they want one of his daughters.

The tour continues, with this family dropping further & further behind. We occasionally overhear snippets of conversation. Apparently some of us are snobs (that would be me& A, or maybe the other couple a statistics professor at the same school as the zoo & a biologist, or maybe all four of us; none of us was very friendly) & then there are the family the THEM referred to as 'those people': a white father, a black mother & their two daughters.

SIDEBAR: at one point the younger of this couple's girls was trying to squeeze between A & the railing & the mother said very strongly "say excuse me!" A turned around, startled, & I thought he was going to say it; I do not think he had even noticed the little girl. I laughed, he laughed, mother laughed & the girl got a good view of whatever she was trying to see.

The tour moves on, we see other animals. Our emus are more fun. The blind bald eagle was kind of spooky. The kookaburra was indeed in the old gum tree. At each exhibit we have to wait for THEM to catch up as all their girls are tired & have to be carried & or strollered & they keep changing places.

As we get to the gate to leave one of the THEM daughters (who really were well behaved when they were not lagging behind) turns to her mother & asks "which one is your favorite, Mommy?".

Mommy says "I think my favorite was the ocelot".

Her daughter says "no, mommy, which one of US is your favorite".

Mommy says " I love all my girls the same".

It was sad.

How is a used book sale like the stock market?

Our local library has two book sales a year & they are impressive. The next one begins tomorrow & I would not miss it for the world. A will be out of town but I still plan to face the crowds (& there are crowds, believe me). Typically, we will drive downtown just before lunchtime; the real hardcore booklovers will have been waiting for the doors to open & will be trickling away by then. Sure, it will be blisteringly hot, but we will be able to find a parking spot.

We go to at least one sale a year & may go more than once in the course of the sale, each day getting progressively better bargains. I have never once been & not run into at least one person I knew would be there at some point (either because they said so or because it was so patently clear they must go at some point) & at least one person I was not expecting to see (not because I think these people are idiots, but because they just have not passed thru my brain in quite some time).

Last year we ran into several good friends including C***** who had brought J***** with her. He was going through old VHS tapes; she was looking for old 33rpm records to use in art projects. I also ran into M*** L** who talked at length about the GED program she volunteers with at the county jail; she was at the sale buying books to loan to the prisoners to meet their GED requirements. I learned that haiku is very big in the prison (or was last Fall) & a number of her books dealt with the history & architecture of that style of poetry. S** & R***** had traveled from their new home in North Carolina to volunteer at the sale because they miss it so much but did not happen to be there on the day we went. I wonder who I will see this year.

ANSWER: The initial sale (of book or stock) is the only time the originators (the author, the publisher, the principal of the company) really benefit financially. After that, the buying & selling of used books/stocks profits the seller. There are exceptions. My favorite is when a company goes public & the principal stays on as an 'adviser'. If the stock does well, the shareholders might vote him a big fat bonus.

If you are asking yourself why then does a company care so much what its stock is worth you are asking the wrong question; the company does not care (sort of), but the guy who is hired or fired on shareholder say-so cares very much.

//On re-reading this I realize I inadvertently implied I think people who do not support their local libraries &/or go to library book sales are idiots. Let me clarify: I think they are willful idiots which is so much worse than just plain old born stoopid. Glad to have the chance to clear that up.

Way down 'pon da Swanee Ribber

I had lived here for several years before it finally registered that the Swanee Ribber in Old Folks at Home was the Suwannee River. What can I say, I had only ever seen Suwannee on a map & I did not know it was pronounced Swanee.

This weekend is the weekend of the annual quilt show at the Stephen Foster State Park & as this posts, I hope to be on my way. I am told, in the way of all things Southern, that it is not nearly the show it used to be; Faulkner was not kidding when he said the past is not dead it is not even past. I don't care that they never managed to secede, the American South is another country

Whatever: as the quilt show exists today, it is one of my favorites. There is nothing high-falutin' about it. They take anything & they get everything & it is all hung together in the buildings that house Stephen Fosters piano collection (yes, you read that right) & the oh-so-vintage diaramas of his songs (really, they are a favorite thing of mine).

A funny thing about the park & the pianos & the (current) Florida State song, Stephen Foster never spent any time here. I am always fascinated by the 'historical' or 'cultural' sites that are manufactured (have you ever been to Plymouth Rock? It is a rock. It is probably not even the right rock, for those of you who remain convinced there was a rock at all).

It is not as though there is not plenty of true history here that is interesting. I realize that it would be hard to build a major tourist attraction out of Rosewood, which I did not know it was just a few towns over until I was drove through on the way to Cedar Key & then I was happy to be distracted from the brain tumor I almost certainly do not have but I was kind of hoping I did (a diversion for another post). But the Zora Neale Hurston Festival should be getting more attention than those old pianos.

I suppose what we venerate says more about who we are at that moment than who anybody was (or was not) that we are building the monuments (or cultural centers) around. & I while am enjoying the quilts at the Stephen Foster Cultural Center, I will always be within a few yards of someone who is enjoying how much better the show used to be more.