Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I’ve never been a real photography buff. I mean, I had a couple of cameras when I was a kid, and I’m glad that I had them to document my early life (like this). But I haven’t really gotten into it as a hobby, although I have bought at garage sales a number of tripods for some reason.

However, there is one photograph I’ve wanted to take for a number of years

A couple hills over, a white barn sits partway up the slope. As you drive down the farm road, you can see it in a small window in the trees. Trees climb a hill behind the barn, and trees lie long the intervening hillsides so that the barn is surrounded by the leaves. You can only see it from a spot on the corner before it is again obscured by the trees. It’s especially beautiful in the autumn, with the vivid colors.

So in past autumns, I’ve tried to take the picture with my phone, and it didn’t work. I tried a couple of times with a digital camera, including putting it on a tripod, but it lacked a zoom. Other years, we have only had a single fall color, brown, after dry summers. Some autumns, we’ve had windstorms that denuded the trees right after they turned and I didn’t get a chance.

This year, someone built a large house on a corner lot on the farm road. I gamed out an encounter with a suspicious homeowner as I tried the photo this year, but as I slowed down when driving by, I found the foreground trees had grown so that they overlaid the barn, and the opportunity for my perfect shot had passed.

Ah, well. I took it for granted that one autumn day I would get the shot I wanted even as the years passed and the landscape changed. The house on the corner lot has planted a boundary for trees. In another ten years, I won’t be able to see the new house–or the barn on the hill beyond.

So I guess I will enjoy the vista while I can and only occasionally mourn the photo that never was.

When I was in late middle school and high school, which is to say the time when I lived in the trailer park and down the gravel road in the valley, a lot of family members died. I lost my grandfather, my grandmother, my cousin, a number of great aunts, my great-grandmother by marriage, and then my step-grandfather. Some were far off, but I attended between one and three funerals a year in that span. The older generation, those great aunts, were in their eighties, my grandparents died young, and my cousin was shot at 21.

Suddenly, I’m acutely aware of how those things are aligning again.

The autumn started with notices of death around us. Shortly thereafter, I learned that my aunt has cancer pretty badly, which has spurred a couple of trips to the St. Louis area.

I have since learned that my stepmother with whom I had a rocky relationship also has cancer pretty badly. I learned this from my grandmother, who let me know that fifteen people in the family have health issues of some sort or another.

So my aunts and uncles are getting into their sixties and seventies now. My mother-in-law is closing in on eighty. My grandmother is in her nineties, but you wouldn’t know it. And, who knows, maybe one of these random pains and little coughs I get might actually be the innocent symptom of Something Worse as I fear.

You know, you can recognize mortality and deal with it in one of two ways: You can appreciate every day what you have now and actively treasure those relationships, or you can dread the loss that you know is coming.

Me, I’m making more effort to see my family that lives outside Springfield (which is to say, all of them but my immediate family). I’m trying to live life with better experiences than the simple day-to-day maintenances (although now that St. Louis Blues Hockey games are $80 a ticket, they will be memorable because they’re scarce). I’m going to send more frequent notes and letters to my grandmother who has told me she loves them and reads them multiple times.

Still, even as I do these things, I am pretty sure I’ll dread the future losses. I said you can deal with it in one of two ways. I will do both and let my impulses battle it out in my psyche.

More than 100 vegetable products recalled over listeria concerns

Also not affected, fortunately: Coffee, wine.

So basically my diet remains unaffected.

We were just talking about mixtapes, and I earlier today searched this blog for “Didde” to see if I could find the picture of me with my printer from the middle 1990s.

Instead, I found an old blog post about a mixtape I made for my then-girlfriend, now-wife called the Lil Didde Mix.

So apparently I did do that in the 1990s.

It’s amazing the details one forgets.

Which is why it’s nice to have the blog and the personal relics to jog my memory.

So as I was laying up the Halloween costumes in the closet, I noticed I had some old grey socks in a bin with some overflow underwear I culled from a crowded drawer at some point or another.

How old are those socks, you might ask (but probably not). Over thirty years old, gentle reader. Over thirty.

From 1996 to 1998, before I began my career in computers, I operated a Didde-Glaser 175 two color offset printing press in O’Fallon, Missouri.

One of the second shift printer operators nicknamed me “Inky,” as I might have been a little messy. I learned to wear black jeans and black sneakers as reflex blue ink does not stand out on them, and I bought grey athletic socks to tone down the flash of white between the jeans and the shoe. I’m pretty sure that’s the only time I’ve bought socks like that, so these would indeed be getting into their third decade.

I recently bought a couple pairs of athletic pants to replace some old ones that I’d worn out with frequent trips to the gym. However, the current style seems to be a little form fitting. To the point that I feel like I’m going to stand out of them whilst doing squats. So I was going to turn this into an object lesson for my oldest child who is really into name brands as, I suppose, youth often are.

“These are Michael Strahan’s,” I said, pointing to the athletic pants. I had prepared my lecture about how the fact that they were a premium brand meant little since they wouldn’t actually serve my athletic needs, that I should have just gone to Walmart.

But he sidetracked my planned life lesson when he didn’t know who Michael Strahan is. I explained a couple of things: New York Giants defensive end. Today Show co-host. Apparently, a clothing magnate.

I did say that as a “premium” brand, it was probably of better quality than what I would buy at Walmart and wear out in a couple of years.

I got to my final point, and the knowledge that brings this whole post together:

“When my grandchildren come to a sleepover with Grandma and Grandpa, I’ll wear these pants to bed.”