Shakesthegrounds Rumblings

[Shakesthecoffecan]

I have seen the fuscia, and it looks like pepto-bismol.

[Shakesthecoffecan]

Hey shakes!  Just droppin by to say howdy - we're up in the mountains and i only get the phone line for a couple of minutes     

Hope you're having a good evening - talk w/ya over the weekend sometime I hope!!     

Hey Bud, at least you got a phone line. My folks were on a party line until 1985.

You have a good weekend. Pass me the bottle.

[Shakesthecoffecan]

Lets do it:

http://messages.movies.yahoo.com/Movies/Films/threadview?bn=12172484-hv1808403312f0&tid=39583&mid=39583&tof=1&m=tm&rt=2

[Shakesthecoffecan]

Joe told me on the phone about the mural in the Riverton, Wyoming Post Office. When I found the picture of it he had posted I was floored. There, about the time they would have been born, was Jack and Ennis, tending the sheep.

Annie Proulx does not mention in her essay ever visiting the post office or seeing the mural. We do know the production crew traveled thru the area scouting location and getting a feel for the place. Perhaps someone of them saw this, and it galvanized the characters appearence in their minds.

But what if none of the above happened?

According to http://www.wpamurals.com/wyoming, the artist was one George Vander Sluis, who acording to other sources lived 1915-1984. Askart.com says of him:
"George Vander Sluis was a painter in acrylics of figure, portrait and landscape, a muralist, and an art educator, who spent much of his career in Syracuse, New York. There he was a Professor of Painting and Drawing at Syracuse University beginning 1947. Between 1940 and 1942, and 1945 to 1947, he was a teacher at the Colorado Fine Arts Center in Colorado Springs.

He studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art and the Colorado Fine Arts Center and from 1951 to 1952, had a Fulbright Scholarship."
A google image search turns up many posters and other works by him. I am real curious as to what his life was like, how he came to Riverton, Wyoming to paint a mural in a post office.

[Wayne]

The mural really is stunning.

So so much

was


stunning

[Shakesthecoffecan]

Remember the scene where Jack is cutting up an ear of corn into a pot of water? He look up and here comes Ennis with them horses and his kreel case, price tag still on it after five years. They are so happy in the scene.

My partner called me at lunch Friday and told me Southern States had fresh corn. Ah hell, its summertime.

The actual reason for the call was to acertain if I could EAT corn. I can't eat popcorn. That's another story. I have no problem eating corn. I enjoy a food that the body obviously has no use for.

We both came up eating corn on the cob. A lot of time we had it boiled, the ears shucked and cleaned of all the silk.
My Mamma told me once that in the days of slavery the white people ate the yellow corn and left the white corn to the slaves. The moral of the story being the white corn was actually better for you, to which I have no research. All I know about corn, I have stated above.

Now we rememoried the reunions, the fish frys, the midsummer parties of our parents, the ears of corn roasted on coals, sometimes after roasting a pig for 24 hours. Sometimes in Aluminun foil, often as not just in the shuck.

"Those Northern Europeans didn't know about corn" I told him. "That's what come from the Indians".  We smiled and tosted in recognition, something from our raisin' had transfered from "what we knew to what we believed". We had been taught "we", being largely white people, learned about corn from the Indians. Now "we" has come to include the Indian ancestors my family would not talk about for years. We didn't so much learn it as we inherited it. 

But as for the corn, I like to rub it in butter and spice it with mint pepper and wrap it back up in the shuck and roast it on the gas grill on low 5-10 minutes. Corn don't give us much, but it is a good delivery system for flavor. We tore into those ears of corn like we hadn't ate in a month, thankful for the bounty, and the teeth to eat it with.

And then, we also had the first tomato of the season. I only eat home grown tomatos. There are indeed only two things that money can but, that's true love and home grown tomatos. Plus Dan Quayle would have a hard time with them. I especially love Yellow Tomatos, but enough of that.

[Shakesthecoffecan]

I go on record: My friend Mouk is not crazy. There IS a varmit outside the kitchen door as Alma is scrubbing cloths on a worsh board. I think it is a rat, I cannot see it very well but it is there, about half way betwixt the concrete stoop and where Ennis is de-trucking the hourses. It moves just a little bit.

[Wayne]

     I seen it too! Here at the Fox last week. It was a sizable animal, don't know what sort.

Funny, I don't think we saw it on the DVD in Wyoming, but here at the moving picture show, sure enough, there it was....   

[Shakesthecoffecan]

Sixty Five years ago this morning my father asked his brother it he could borrow his car.

He took a bath, put on his suit, and grabbed his grip from under his bed and snuck out of his parents house. He drove up the hill to the house where I now live. Knocked on the front door and gathered up my Mother and my Granny, both dressed for the ocassion. They road in my uncles car to Martinsville, to the small home of a Baptist preecher and his wife, and were married.

Upon leaving they stopped at the grocery story so my Granny could do some shopping. Daddy carried the groceries in the house for her and they were off, into the Valley of Virginia, to Luray Caverns.

About dark my uncle came up to Granny's house and asked her if she knew where his car was.

On this day I don't think about the 44 years that followed, I think only of two happy young people with nothing to their names and the whole world before them. I am grateful to be part of the world they created.

[Wayne]

Awww. That's a sweet story, Shakes!