Photograph

Photograph                                                          1139

Tuesday, June 14, 2005-12:40 P.M.

Happy Flag Day, America!  It's Flag Day, and my father's retirement community is festooned with little American flags in front of each house.  It's already a nice (if somewhat sterile) looking place to live, just like an affluent suburban anywhere, and it's neat to see it all dressed up for the holiday.  Before I left for Florida, I put my new power drill to work and affixed a flagpole holder to our house at attic level and put out the flag that we've been storing in our back hallway for a year or so.  We wanted to put it out at ground level, but were sure that one of our nasty neighbors (and in our neighborhood, there's plenty to go around) would steal it.  If they want to steal this one, they got a nice climb ahead of them.

Ray and I part company today, but he'll be back in a week.  He's heading back to Rochester for his mom's birthday, which I think is sweet.  He'll be back next week for our tour of Georgia, which I think will be fun.  I start a four-day stretch tonight in Winter Haven, Florida, and I'm very excited.  Ray's taking some money back home to my lovely wife, which saves me the problem of mailing it back to her or directly to my bank (there's no branches of either of our banks down here in Florida), and then when Ray comes back, he'll have more merchandise for me as Pam is busily spinning off new DVD's for me back home.

Yesterday, Ray and I took my dad's golf cart to the post office, and there was an old guy there with a couple of Pomeranians in his golf cart.  They were possibly the smallest dogs I've ever seen, and the old guy let us take a picture of them.  When Ray gets the pictures developed, I'll make sure to post them on this journal.  I guess I wanted to take a picture of them because my parents had miniature poodles when I was growing up, and even though I haven't thought of them in years, there's about a hundred pictures of them all around my dad's house.  You can't walk into a room without seeing pictures everywhere of Alex and Giddy, who were famous back in Rochester as being "the dogs in the window;" we lived on the corner of Dewey Avenue and Seneca Parkway, and we had a big bay window thatwe put a sofa in front of, and Alex and Giddy would sit on top of the back of the sofa and look out the window, and of course everyone would be able to see them.  My mother and father loved those dogs, and it was pretty heartbreaking when they got old and had to be put to sleep.

My dad also has a great picture of SnaxTheCat when he was little...you could see how fit and trim he was when we let him outside to run around.  Now he's a fixed indoor cat, and he's gotten fat.  He's fast when he wants to be, but clearly, he doesn't really want to be fast that often.

I realize now why I don't enjoy picture taking that much...I prefer to look forward rather than backwards.  My father has a lot of picture of me when I was younger, and many of them are not very flattering, and remind me of a time when I was much less stable and not very happy.  And I wonder why I turned to drugs and alcohol...especially with that haircut...what was I thinking?

I'm going to go now...I'll check in from the road as the spirit or opportunity moves me.  Enjoy the Summer and the good outdoor activities it allows.

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY