Images from Columbus

Here are some last images from my visit in the summer to Columbus:

A pedaling bar vehicle downtown.  I think the cyclists are pedaling away their inebriation.  I hope the driver is the designated non-drinker.

The Orthodox Christian Church downtown.

A bridge over the Scioto.

Hangin' with my nephews.

Sundown downtown.

The Confederate Cemetery at Camp Chase.

The food truck festival downtown one evening.

St. James Episcopal Church in Upper Arlington, my sister's church.

Images

In Columbus, I tried to capture some beautiful photographic images. I always love to capture mirror images of bridges or structure on the water; here I got a picture of a bridge reflected on the Scioto River underneath as a boatman paddled up to it.

Here's the city's namesake outside City Hall.  I wonder when the groundswell of removing Columbus' statue will grow to a volume that can't be ignored because after all, his arrival in the New World (can I still say that?) initiated the genocide of indigenous peoples due to the introduction of urban diseases like smallpox and the disparity of technologies like guns versus spears.

I enjoyed spending time with my sister and her family.  Here I enjoyed a libation with her and her middle child, a graduate student in Columbus.

Later we were joined by her youngest son, who also lives downtown and is an engineer who works for a foreign car company.  These young men apparently didn't get the memo from my three children about how terrible I am, actually, these blood relatives of mine haven't heard from those lads in over 15 years.

Columbus

In Columbus, I hung out with my sister, her husband, and my nephews.  One of my sister's sons lives downtown while he attends classes to get a Master's degree, and I met them downtown.

We went to the location of the big POW camp in Columbus during the Civil War and in the Confederate cemetery there, I noted that the Rebel sentinel was standing guard over the graves again.  During the murderous Neo-Nazi riots in Charlottesville a couple of years ago, the sentry was vandalized and sent out for repair; I thought he might never return but he is back.

We attended a food truck festival downtown and enjoyed a beautiful sunset.  The city has created a river walk along the Scioto River in the heart of the city.

The next morning I went out early and tried to capture a beautiful sunup at a nearby park.  There is a lot to do in Columbus, Ohio's capital and its largest city.

Food on my summer trip

After I visited the 9/11 Memorial near Shanksville in western Pennsylvania, I had lunch at a hotdog restaurant, Hot Dog Shoppe Brighton, on a local highway north of Pittsburgh in Mars that was fabulous.  Inside as I was waiting for my order, I encountered a man waiting for a pickup order who was visiting his gravely ill brother in a hospital in Pittsburgh who asked him, as a last favor in his short time left, to bring him two hotdogs from this very restaurant when he came.

I had the loaded dog (chili, cheese and diced onions for about $1.69 each), which I consumed in my car without creating a mess because it was assembled so well in addition to being so good.  Then, satiated, I drove to Columbus where I stayed for a couple of days at my sister's house.

My sister and I went out the next day for lunch at a great barbecue restaurant, City Barbeque in Arlington, where I had as good a pulled pork sandwich as I have ever had.  The baked beans weren't bad either.

I think my sister liked her sandwich as well.  Her husband is an OSU professor who did deep research on burnt ends barbecue in Columbus and came up with this restaurant s being the best, which he subsequently and often confirmed by in-person trials.

What I did during my summer vacation

I toured the South by car during July, getting out of town over the July 4th week rather that watch the spectacle of our president bringing tanks onto the Mall to shore up his lilliputian affect.  In August I toured the midwest by car for a few days.

In western Pennsylvania I drove by a beer distributorship on a back road that just begged me to come on in.  It was a time machine that transported me back to the decade when I was an adolescent standing in line at the corner candy store, buying sugar daddies and Mad Magazines, and the next decade when I was making midnight runs to the supermarket to lay in a six-pack of beer for the late movies on TV, which, when they ended, the station played the national anthem and then went to a hissing snow field for the rest of the wee hours of the morning.

This place had the register alcove stacked with bubble gum cigars, candy cigarette packs, boston baked beans and best of all, those tiny wax bottles of colored fruit nectar that you would bite off the top and drain the 1 ounce of syrupy colored sugar water for refreshment on hot summer days.  But they also had beer in that vast warehouse space, brands that I knew well as a young man in New York where the drinking age was 18 then and that I hadn't seen in decades since then.

Schaeffer, Schmidt, Knickerbocker, Rheingold and Schlitz.  I happily laid in a case of Schmidt and thought that perhaps I would come back next year and maybe they would have Ballentine and Valley Forge beer.

Ruminations of a sad man

We moved into 42 Boulevard in Westerleigh, Staten Island, NY in 1964 where in the attic of this 3-story house, left behind by the former owners, was a treasure trove of American history, which I as a 12-year-old happily delved into.  Many an idle hour was spent by me in that dusty old attic going through boxes there. 

Jim Lovett was a WWI vet who had left behind his experience Over There in those boxes (maybe he was dead by then and nobody in his family thought there was anything of value in those boxes of books and clothes).  There were several WWI battle books, all with brittle pages that crumbled as I turned the pages through acid leaching, because then paper was processed with no regard to posterity. I remember one title called Cannoneers Have Hairy Ears, and several books on WWI arial combat.  

I also secured a campaign DI hat, and a German sawtooth 18 inch bayonet in a sheath that was straight out of Erich Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front.  I had that bayonet, truly a war trophy, till I gave it to my middle child, Johnny, when he was 12. because he was the most like me in growing up, fascinated by the wartime experiences of men at arms.

Don't you know that the German bayonet commanded center-stage in a hearing in my quarter million dollar divorce from my, in my opinion, covert narcissistic wife because their point was that this showed how unfit I was to be a father.  After almost twenty years of not seeing any of my children through the extrajudicial but real process of Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS), this post reflects on my middle child Johnny, a most somber and sober child who would have turned his parents in to the Gestapo if they were reading banned books.

The Flight 93 Memorial

About twenty minutes north of the Pennsylvania Turnpike west of the Allegheny Tunnel, exit 110, is the rural field where United Flight 93 crashed at maximum speed on September 11, 2001 and disintegrated in a huge fireball of thousands of gallons of jet fuel, vaporizing all persons on board.  Up until that moment, a life and death struggle had been going on for many long minutes inside that plane as the heroic crew and passengers battled four murderous terrorists locked in the cockpit for control of the plane.

By forcing the plane to crash, the heroes aboard the plane lost their lives but won a bigger stake, causing the destruction of the flying missile before it could crash into the Capitol in DC, its intended target.  There was no air cover over Washington at the time, as the two jets scrambled, the only at-the-ready airiel defense for the entire east coast, were streaking east over the Atlantic looking for incoming Russians, their presumed enemies in the confusion of the moment.

The Flight 93 National Memorial at the tragic field is a somber and subdued place where the Visitor Center, set atop the last low ridge the screaming jet passed over before it burrowed into the field beyond, has an overlook that looks upon the field below where the impact crater was before it was filled in at the conclusion of the forensic investigation of the ground surrounding it.  A low retaining wall skirts the actual field, which still contains human remains too small to recover so it is considered to be a cemetery filled with heroes, and is off-limits for all visitors except for the family members of the victims of Flight 93, every September 11th.

The Visitor Center has displays explaining the day as it unfolded, tape recordings of doomed passengers calls from the plane to their loved ones, artifacts recovered from the field and gear worn by the heroic first responders who rushed in to try to salvage the unsalvageable.  The memorial is a sad but peaceful place, well worth a visit.