We went to dinner last night at a local restaurant called The Red Onion. “E” ate sweet potato french fries. This is high culinary adventure. There was live music and the duo played Beatles, Jimmy Buffet, the BeeGees and others. We talked music and TV shows. My older son and nephew had a spirited and intelligent discussion about the concept of making an album. An album of music seems to have less artistic impact than it once had. Certainly, the pop single is still a cultural phenomenon. Now you download the 99cent single from iTunes. We bought the vinyl singles in their paper sleeves at the record store (and a box of the canary yellow plastic spacers that had to be clipped in the center of the wide mouth record to play on the stereo). We had boxes of 45’s. And we played them over and over again. But, maturity brought the purchase of albums by certain artists. And those albums were to be played from from beginning to end. Part of why I like individual Beatles’ songs and not necessarily “The Beatles” is because I did not have the experience of listening to their albums. For me it was U2’s The Joshua Tree, Prince’s Purple Rain, Peter Gabriel’s Us and others.
I listen to Digging in the Dirt as I write this morning. I think about the dirt on my land. My land. And I think about red onions and Vidalias and yams and figs and hydrangeas. I think of the sundial-like daylillies that will follow the sun’s arch across the sky. I close my eyes and hear the pileated woodpeckers tapping on the tall pines. I want to start my compost pile, bush hog the lot and dig a well. I want to dig in the dirt.
I can see the land, see the shoots pushing up through the soil, see the spring buds on the tree branches. I can hear the music. I can see the hawk’s circling on the updrafts for hours and the flitting, rapid flight of the bats at dusk. I think an artist sees a painting on the blank canvass before they ever set a brush upon the linen. A sculptor sees the statue in the block of stone before their hammer taps on the chisel. I see the home on this lot like a shimmering vision, just waiting to “be”. The faint, infantile sketches turn to careful drawings, then professional drawings and now to scaled images. I want to build a cardboard model, that I can lift the roof and peer into like the Giant spying on Jack at the bottom of the beanstalk. This dream in my head is materializing from the vapor, solidifying into a reality.
I sat and colored my drawings last night, using the school supply colored pencils. The colors are all wrong, but they give depth and perspective.