No wonder I'm exhausted! - Walk at Pennypack and other adventures

Was up until 4 am finishing the first draft of "WildChild in the Orange 'Vette'"


I'll tell you right now, Scott thought it was one of my best stories.

Frankly, I was shocked!

I wanna submit it to a lit mag that wants stories of at least 4,000 words, which is long for me. So I took my time writing it, listening to YouTube vids of

Dave Van Ronk singing Old Dog Blue - blues singers John Lee Hooker and Furry Lewis - Son House.

Many vids have frequent ads, so I don't watch them.

Right now, the music you hear in the background is Jimi Hendrix singin the blues. Must be the blues show with Jonny Meister.

Here's..... Jonny!  My visualization of him was totally incorrect.

 I brewed some coffee

How I love my coffee!

This morning I had a Pennypack Trust Walk with the director David Robertson.

Was there on time - 10:30 am - but where was David?

Forgot to mention that last nite I attended a Bird Talk at PERT given by Ruth Pfeffer.

Full house! Should I invite her to speak at New Directions?

So about 8 of us began our walk  this morning w/o David. I emailed him later - he apologized profusely, tho it was our fault for assuming where he'd be - and he said...

The walk started at the Welsh Road trailhead in Bethayres.  I knew that none of the Pennypack sign-ups showed for the walk (we had about 30 people from the Huntingdon Valley Library), but the telephone in the Trust's Visitor Center doesn't work, so I couldn't call to check to see if people had gone to the wrong spot. 

The 8 of us began our walk. But a woman I was walking with - Judy - stopped to talk to a man who looked terribly familiar.

Turned out to be Marvin Clymer, who worked as the Trust's naturalist years ago.

He reminded me I'd written a newspaper article about him.

He's married to Wendy, who just retired from Briar Bush Nature Center.

Marvin now works at the Bryn Athyn Library

Holy cow! Look what I just found


Richard Neutra's Pitcairn House | Home + Architecture | Pinterest

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Property Libraries Ideas, 1962 Pitcairn, Paper Mills, Windows Seats, Bookshelf Windows, House Libraries, Bryn Athyn, Richard Neutra, 2860 Paper

Richard Neutra yet!  

2. 
   
3. Born: April 8, 1892, Vienna, Austria
4. Died: April 16, 1970, Wuppertal, Germany
5. Spouse: Dione Neutra (m. 1922–1970)

 Okay, let's find the Bryn Athyn Library with the azure-blue roof. My Intelligencer colleague was writing a story about the library, had done a phone interview, but had never seen the building.

Azure-blue roof I told her.


Marvin works in the basement as a librarian. Loves his job.

The belicosity of these geese.

lesser celendine flowers

It's in the buttercup family.

 We can pretend The Above Blur is, oh, by Arshile Gorky, whose art work and death is informed by the Armenian Genocide.


His real name is Vosdanig Manoug Adoian, Armenian: Ոստանիկ Մանուկ Ատոյեան; April 15, 1904 – July 21, 1948)

Judy and I continued walking and came to what was perhaps a tumbledown old schoolhouse.

Judy is retired from the telephone company, Ma Bell, Bell of Pennsylvania, now Verizon. I asked if she knew Gregory Hodges.

She laffed and said, "There were 2,000 people who worked downtown."

Like me, she loved the sound of the rushing water.

Some of these images relate to the controversial poem I'm gonna publish in Part 2.

 A lovely woman named Doris lived here. She died a couple of years ago, joining her husband in eternity (I learned that phrase just now online) two years after his death on I-95, killed by a drunk driver.

Is this considered a spring house or a cellar?

 Creek-smooth assortment of rocks.

 We stopped to talk to 44-yo Scott and his dog, part Shepherd, part Lab, named....

I just remembered. Finished  watching  "Escape from a Nazi Death Camp" on PBS. One Howard Tuck has been studying Sobibor for 20 yrs.

The camp was located on the grounds of occupied Poland.

So Scott's dog is named "Tucker."

Judy asked Scott about the Bats in the attic of this barn.

 Are they hanging upside down from the ceiling? I asked excitedly.

Not there yet, said Scott. Apparently they....

 Besides being nocturnal, some bat species are known to pack it in during the winter as well. Not all bats hibernate, but those that do usually live at high latitudes where insect prey becomes scarce during cold months.

HIDE YOUR EYES, Dear Reader

Scott, in background with Tucker. A perfect day to be outside and playing with your dog. Tucker loved chasing a thrown stick. Scott was hired to clean out the barn. His wife left him a couple of years ago, just up and left, but he sees their children.

A bank of mail boxes.

The below flowers are scilla.

At first I thought they were

Being between Scylla and Charybdis is an idiom deriving from Greek mythology, meaning "having to choose between two evils". Several other idioms, such as "on the horns of a dilemma", "between the devil and the deep blue sea", and "between a rock and a hard place" express the same meaning.

How did I ever scrape the cellar of my cerebrum to remember Scylla and Charybdis? 

I plucked up this daisy-like plant which had a root like a carrot. David Robertson later wrote me that it's a native bloodroot.

As I was huffin n puffin up the hill, who should bike by but Pastor Ken Barkley from the Willow Grove Bible Church.

He was on an 11-mile bike ride to lose weight. You think I have a fat belly? Ken is determined to lose weight. I asked him what he had for breakfast. Leftover chicken noodle soup.

I just shook my head. I told him I was in a hurry this a.m. so I had two eggs sauteed with garlic. I just love those eggs. He told me to try Tabasco sauce - the jalapeno pepper variety - as it wasn't all that spicy.

Mushroom onion omelet with green Tabasco.

I was sure happy to see this sign. It meant I was almost in the parking lot. I was extremely tired. I crawled under a three-tiered wooden fence to hasten my way to my car.

Back at the death camp, they orchestrated their escape to crawl through barbed wire.