Singing to soothe my sons
I have three sons – a stepson grown and gone, a teen, and an almost teen. I was there when the younger two came into the world. I did my best to be a good dad to my baby boys, though I freely admit I enjoy parenting more and more the older they get! Naturally, my fatherly duties included soothing them when they were unhappy or sick. Like most kids, they’re unmistakably like their mother and father but night-and-day different from each other. But when they were in distress, they both calmed down when I sang to them.
The older son was good natured from the start. It’s as if he awoke every morning and said to himself, “I think I’m going to have a happy day,” and then set about making it so. He filled his days with big smiles for everyone who caught his gaze. He encountering everything – toy, television show, meal, our dog, other children – with such joy and delight you’d think it was long lost and beloved.
The colic that plagued him the first nine months of his life stood out in stark relief. Things started going south for him each day by late afternoon. By the time I came home from work he was fully miserable and wailing like an air raid siren. His frazzled mother immediately handed him off to me and and disappeared into the kitchen to seek relief (and make dinner). Now, I cared about my poor son’s suffering. But honestly, I mostly just wanted his eardrum-piercing shrieks to end. Seriously, you could hear the boy out in the yard even when all the windows and doors were closed. I quickly figured out that holding him to my chest as I paced through the house calmed him some. I tried singing to him as I paced and found that some songs calmed him a little while others had no effect. I tried every song in my repertoire. When I sang this obscure Paul McCartney and Wings song to him, he went limp and silent in my arms. So I sang it to him over and over, pacing the length of our ranch-style home every night for hours at a time. Finally, blessedly, the colic ended.
My younger son, on the other hand, approached life with steely determination. Think Chuck Norris out to get the bad guys. The boy quickly sized up a situation, identified his goal, and set about achieving it. His first conquest was the couch. It was cute at first to watch him grunt and struggle to pull himself up off the floor and onto the seat cushions. But after he achieved that, he set his sights on the arm and then the side-table lamp, which was not going to end well. We had to keep an eagle eye on that kid!
But with each new objective his desires at first outpaced his abilities. He would try and fail, and try and fail, and try and fail, getting angrier and angrier all the way. Soon his frustration would consume him and he’d just cry in hard fury, turning brick red and gasping through his sobs. I’d collect him into my arms, fall back into the big comfy recliner, and rock while I sang to him just hoping he’d catch a breath! At first this would make him cry harder, as if he was determined to stay angry. But soon he’d start to relax, and the crying would ebb, and finally he’d breathe easy. This gentle Paul Simon song was easy to sing quietly to him and soon I sang it habitually. After a while, just hearing me sing it calmed him.
I’m reflecting on this today because tomorrow my older son, still the good-natured optimist, turns 15.
Do you have children? What songs did you sing to them?
I’ve always loved to sing. It soothes me and lifts my spirits. Read that story.
Crooked little bridges, well preserved
Snow is on the ground as I write this and my next road trip is months away. To slake my road-trip thirst during these cold months, I’ve slowly been writing a full trip report of last spring’s tour of Ohio’s National Road. (You can see my other long-form trip reports here). In the process, I’ve found photos from a few great places that I overlooked when I blogged about the trip last summer. Two of those sites are well-preserved S bridges, a few miles apart from each other on either side of the Guernsey and Muskingum county line in eastern Ohio.
These bridges were built in S shapes because it allowed the bridges to cross their respective creeks at right angles, which made them less expensive to build and maintain. In those days, traffic moved along the road at essentially a walk. But traffic speed increased considerably in the automobile age, and cars had to slow way down to negotiate these bridges. They were both bypassed by the early 1930s in the interest of speed and safety.
The first of these bridges stands almost exactly between Cambridge and New Concord and is known as the Cassell S Bridge. You can see its lithe S shape on the left in the aerial image below. I would not be surprised to find that Township Highway 4174, in the upper right, is part of the road’s original alignment leading up to the bridge.
Imagery © 2011 Digital Globe, GeoEye, USDA Farm Service. Map data © 2011 Google.
Here’s the bridge on the ground. It is original to the road, built in about 1828 when the National Road was extended through Ohio. It was restored in 2006.
The brick deck was probably originally laid in the 1910s.
Someone needs to come out here with some Roundup and a weed whacker.
The Fox Creek S Bridge, which stands on the west end of New Concord, was also built in about 1828. It’s easy to miss. I was looking for it, and I only caught it out of the corner of my eye as I sped past. I had to turn around and come back to it.
Imagery © 2011 Digital Globe, GeoEye, USDA Farm Service. Map data © 2011 Google.
Isn’t it a beauty? I think I like this one a little bit more than the Cassell bridge.
This photo from the Historic American Engineering Record shows the bridge in the early 1930s. Notice how US 40 already bypasses it on the left.
Here’s the deck. A short segment of the brick road extends west beyond the bridge, and you can drive on it to access a small parking area.
This bridge’s restoration added a narrow path that lets you get close and even walk under the bridge.
It’s not very often you can get personal with the underside of an old bridge!
This milestone, probably a reproduction, stands nearby.
I encountered two other S bridges on my Ohio National Road trip – a fabulous three-span S bridge at Blaine, and a crumbling S bridge near Old Washington that still carries traffic.
I’ve driven the National Road from end to end, across six states, and have documented it extensively. Read everything I’ve written about it.
Captured: Bug light
I’ve adored the original Volkswagen Beetle ever since I saw the movie Herbie the Love Bug as a small boy. I’ve always wanted one! They were common as pennies until about 20 years ago, which was about the time I came close to buying a Karmann Ghia – a Beetle with an Italian body. I couldn’t scrape together the cash at the time. I wouldn’t have that trouble today, but the supply of these cars has all but dried up.
I had loaded my Minolta Hi-Matic 7 with some Fujicolor 200 last autumn and was out wandering the parking lot at work looking for things to shoot when I came upon this Beetle. I liked how the shadow curved with the fender. The tail light’s size and shape dates this car to 1968-1972.
I photographed another green Beetle earlier in the year. Check it out, along with all the other old cars I shot in 2011.
Preserving the old bridge abutment
I’ve made many, many trips down US 31 between South Bend (my hometown) and Indianapolis (where I live now). It’s a dreadfully boring 4-lane affair all the way. This hasn’t always been the case, as until about 40 years ago US 31 was a two-lane highway, much of it on a different alignment. 45 miles of that earlier alignment between Rochester and South Bend followed the old Michigan Road. Until 1982, a one-lane truss bridge carried traffic over the Tippecanoe River just north of Rochester. It is said to have dated to the late 1800s. This abutment is all that remains.
This is how it looked in 2007 when my friend Brian and I explored US 31′s old alignments in northern Indiana. (That’s Brian walking away on the old road bed.) I wrote about the trip; read about it here. Some time later I received an e-mail from a woman who read my report. Jean owns the property around this abutment and was worried that the abutment’s stones were loose and falling out. She wondered if I knew of anyone who would take up the preservation mantle for this landmark. I didn’t. But that didn’t stop Jean. She found an Eagle Scout candidate looking for a service project and convinced him to take it on. He mortared the stones to secure them, and laid some pavers down where the old road bed had crumbled away.
The Eagle Scout finished his work in late 2010, but it took me until late 2011 to drive by here with my camera in hand. I’m glad to see this old abutment preserved for another generation.
175 miles south of here on the Michigan Road, a stone bridge built in the early 1900s still carries traffic. Check it out!
Why I collect cameras
From a very young age I’ve been fascinated with anything that has buttons or knobs. I love to figure out how things work.
The summer I turned 9, my brother and I took our first annual summer trip to visit our grandparents at the little Michigan lake to which they had retired. We spent a couple weeks with them, fishing and relaxing and watching late-night TV. We spent one hot afternoon visiting garage sales and at one I found a little Kodak Brownie Starmite II, a plastic fixed-focus camera from the early 1960s. I turned it over and over, very curious. Grandma saw me looking at it, noticed the 25-cent price tag, and silently handed me a quarter. And so I got my first camera.
I played with the camera quite a bit the rest of the time I was at Grandma’s. I figured how to wind and shoot it. I removed the film transport, pressed my eye to the camera’s open bottom, and pressed the shutter to see light flash into the camera for a fraction of a second. I was fascinated by how the camera functioned and by all the thought and work that had gone into designing and building it.
When I returned home I loaded the camera with film. The neighborhood kids made me the center of attention – they all wanted to be in a picture. I shot the roll in an afternoon. When I brought the developed photos home from the drug store I was the center of attention again, as everyone wanted to see themselves. I must have given most of the photos away, because I have only four left. Here’s a picture from that first roll of film, from August, 1976.
An early-1950s Brownie Reflex found its way into my hands and I enjoyed it, too. So I started buying other old cameras at garage sales, spending many happy hours learning their intricacies. Old cameras were often available for pocket change and few that I found cost more than $5, which made this hobby affordable. By the time I was a young adult I had more than 100 cameras. The majority of them were common snapshot cameras; probably a third of them were broken. My collection did contain some gems – a Stereo Realist that took 3D photos, a Minolta 16-II subminiature camera, an Polaroid Model 95 that had belonged to my dad’s father, a Polaroid Super Shooter my grandparents gave me one Christmas (read that story), and a Kodak Automatic 35F that took some great photos on a trip to the Tennessee hills.
I displayed my favorite cameras in my home as an adult. My young sons were curious about my cameras, and we spent many pleasant hours on the living room floor playing with them. When I loaded film into one, they clamored to be in the photos just like the children in my old neighborhood. Then my marriage fell apart. In the process I sold or gave away a great number of things, and other things were simply lost. My entire first collection is gone.
Five years ago I started buying old cameras again and was delighted to find that even after 30 years I had not lost my fascination with things that require careful design and construction. Prices are naturally higher, but this hobby remains affordable with many interesting cameras available for as little as $10. I typically pay $20 to $40 for my cameras with a soft upper limit of $50, which I have broken on rare occasion. And so once again the fireplace mantle and many spare shelves in my home are lined with cameras. But this time, instead of collecting whatever cameras I find, I generally limit myself to working cameras that use film that can still be purchased. I shoot with as many of them as I can, writing about the experience and sharing some of the results here. I am enjoying this hobby even more this second time around.
Some photos from cameras in my first collection can be found in this post and in this post.
