Catching up …

It’s election day in Georgia, or Election Day, I guess, which means it’s time to get out and vote. I missed early voting for this particular primary election (back off; I’m a busy man), which covers races for at least one state Supreme Court judge, some lesser judges, a county clerk here and there, a sheriff, I believe, perhaps an animal control specialist, a voting machine oiler, someone to clean up all the campaign signs that are littering the lawn of the local library, and several other elected posts of which I am equally, and very probably more clueless about than the ones I’ve listed. Hey, that’s voting in America. It’s not easy.

Still, voting is not yet a responsibility that I’m willing to renounce. So I’ve done a little research, kind of the bare minimum, and Mary Jo helped out by writing down some names this morning on a little cheat sheet. This afternoon, I’ll head over to the Crabapple Government Center to do my American duty, on Election Day. It’s kind of the least I can do.

This election is, I’m reasonably sure, the last big one in Georgia before the Big One this November. Early voting for that baby, at least here in Georgia, starts in October. It seems like the run-up for that one, the General Election, the one where the president is decided, has been going on for years. It seems like it’s got years to go. It seems, sometimes, as if it’ll never end.

That’s one reason I’ve avoided posting about Decision 2024 on JDB. (Or, as Jon Stewart has tabbed it, “Decision 2024: Antiques Roadshow.”) I mean, it’s just too much. Way too much. Again.

(Another reason that I haven’t posted anything on Trump-Biden II, of course, is that I haven’t been posting much of anything on JDB. That’s on me.)

For posterity’s sake, though, and just for my own sanity, my posting pause on politics is about to end. Trump has been convicted of sexual abuse (and, depending on the vernacular, rape). His tawdry felony hush-money case — money alleged to have been paid to cover up stories of an alleged hook-up with a porn star and a Playboy model — is about to go to jury. And Trump faces several other criminal charges.

It’s too much. I can’t not say something. It’s unnatural. I gotta post. It’s kind of my civic duty.

Just not yet.

****

The little girl, maybe 5 years old, was somewhere close to a 10 on the precociousness scale, which is super high, even for little girls. Everyone around her was sufficiently delighted. Her parents were fawningly proud. The little girl was all smiles.

Then, of course, she had to go and ruin it by asking questions.

It is a Saturday afternoon in Roswell, Georgia, one of the affluent suburbs (along with Sandy Springs, Dunwoody, Johns Creek, Alpharetta, and Milton) directly north of Atlanta. A few of us are walking along the banks of the only real source of drinking water in the metro Atlanta area, the Chattahoochee River. We’re on a beautiful new boardwalk, a private one, that is part of the revamped Chattahoochee Nature Center (^). The young girl is, naturally, the center of attention. Her littler sister is asleep in a stroller. Her parents are busy with their doting. A quiet older couple is along for the stroll. A volunteer docent at the CNC named David leads.

And I’m there, in the back. A docent-in-training. A DIT.

I love nature. Always have. Nature hasn’t always loved me back; somewhere along the line, Claritin and fluticasone propionate have become spring necessities. I’m not a big fan of bees, as much good as I understand they do. Snakes, I can probably do without. I burn pretty easily, too.

But nature, being outside in the great outdoors, taking in vast and varied landscapes, beaches and mountains and meadows, the steady whoosh of a good sea breeze, the quiet of a deep forest, the smells, the earthiness … I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again here, now: Being out in nature is not only good for the soul. It’s necessary for the soul. For survival.

(We have friends who differentiate being “Outdoorsy” and “Outsidey.” I’m not sure I buy completely into the idea, but certainly there are those who enjoy a nice walk in a park and those who have to spend five days in the utter wilderness with nothing but C-rations and a piece of flint to enjoy nature. There are those who stay in primitive National Park lodges and those who’d much rather lie on the ground under the stars. There are those who fork over tens of thousands of dollars to pull a veritable home along with them when they leave the house. And those who want their Marriott points. They’re all after the same thing. They all want to get out.)

I love nature. But, in all honesty, I know very little about it. I don’t know a pine from an oak, a snake from a lizard, or a Great Blue Heron from a Blue-Gray Gnatcatcher. But in my brief work as a DIT, I’ve already seen all of those things.

I already know more about beavers (<) than I thought I ever would. Way more than I probably need to know. I have a pretty good idea of what poison ivy looks like. I know that a raptor, at least at the Chattahoochee Nature Center, is not a dinosaur (even though, in a nest in a pine ((I think)) high above the Center, baby Great Blue Herons sound alarmingly like pterodactyls). I am learning, the point is.

But the thing about being a DIT is that you never know enough. You never know when some precocious punk of a 5 year old — honestly, she was adorable — is going to make you look like a veritable shut-in by asking a question you just can’t answer. The other day, the CNC’s Naturalist on Duty was showing off one of the Center’s resident animals, a barred owl, and asked if anyone had any questions. A 6-year-old girl — that’s prime precociousness — jutted a skinny arm into the air and said, “I don’t have a question; I have a statement.”

At least, I thought, I wouldn’t need an answer for that.

So the precocious little girl, the first one, comes up to me on our boardwalk walk with a sticky looking thing and sticks it in my face. She is asking, without words, what it is that she’s holding. And I’m stalling. For all I know, it’s a rare piece of stick poison ivy. I want no part of that.

I could fake an answer. Instead, I do the next best thing. I ignore the little bugger.

The tiny girl, though, as 5 year olds can be, is persistent. She sticks the stick closer to my face. I can feel my cheeks beginning to itch. I wonder if the CNC sells calamine lotion. I smile. Her parents dote. The little girl wants to know. Everybody wants to know. I freeze.

“David,” I call, instantly passing the buck to an honest-to-god docent, albeit a volunteer one.

Turns out the stick was something called river cane (or rivercane), a bamboo-looking thing prevalent in this area of the country. It’s relatively harmless.

Now I know. I’ll be a full-fledged docent in no time.

****

I don’t understand people who can’t handle retirement. You hear it all the time. “I got bored, so I went back to work.”

I just don’t get it. Bored? Seriously? Bored? Go back to work?

When I was a kid, my folks used to kick me out of the house whenever I complained of being bored. (And I whined plenty. Not much going on in Willow Grove, Delaware.) “Go outside and find something to do,” they’d say. Whatever you want. Just go.

I’m not fully into retirement yet. But I’m telling you, that’s what retirement is to me. Find something to do. Whatever you want. Whenever. Take up knitting. Binge all umpteen seasons of “Survivor” or “The Simpsons.” Perfect your smashburgers. Help at the old folks’ home (Mary Jo does). Become a docent-in-training. Volunteer at the polls. Learn how to spell mahjong. Sign up for Spanish lessons. Quit your Spanish lessons. Take up pickleball. Travel. Dance. Read. Watch movies. Write a damn blog post.

Any of those, or a million more, will work. Finding something to do is easy. Retirement should be easy. Getting there’s the hard part.

****

A few weeks ago, Mary Jo and I zipped up to New York City to see a Broadway show and ended up seeing two of them. Some background: Mary Jo is, and always has been, a huge Huey Lewis and the News fan.

Oh. Well. Hmm. I guess that’s all the background you need.

We went up to NYC, mid-week, to see The Heart of Rock and Roll, a new musical based on Huey’s songs. If you don’t know Huey Lewis, you’re either too young or too stuck-up to admit you know him. For a time in the 1980s and even into the ’90s, everybody knew Huey Lewis. “Sports” was a huge album for the band in the early ’80s. Huey did “The Power of Love” and “Back in Time” for the soundtrack of “Back to the Future.” He did “I Want a New Drug” and “Bad is Bad.” “Hip to Be Square.” There’s a million of them. Certainly enough to carry a Broadway show.

We stayed at a place in the heart, as it were, of the city’s Theatre District. Just around the corner from our hotel, at the Winter Garden Theatre, the Broadway adaptation of “Back to the Future” was playing. So we saw that, too.

It was a Huey few days. It was marvelous. (Too lowbrow for you? Whatever. Maybe we’ll do “Hamilton” or “Wicked” or “The Book of Mormon” next time.) The experience wasn’t without some adjustments, though.

We were maybe five minutes into the opening song of “BTTF,” still recovering from our taxi ride from LaGuardia, when it occurred to Mary Jo and I (we talked about it in our post-revue review) that, hey, we had forgotten. This is musical theatre.

Broadway takes some getting used to, for sure. The big numbers. The big gestures. The “acting.” Someone breaking into song, live, loudly, like 30 feet from your face. It’s kind of odd. Maybe a tad unnatural. And I’m a musical enthusiast.

Still, after that first song, after we were reminded of the art form, after realizing that it’s not really rock and roll but that’s OK, we settled in and enjoyed the spectacle. The staging. The lighting. The talent on stage and off. Just the overall coolness of being in a couple of theatres (the James Earl Jones was the other one) that sat only 1,500 or so patrons each, with dozens, maybe more than a hundred people working their butts off to put on a good show for you. Plus, given the past few years, simply being in an audience filled with appreciative, like-minded people was a welcome, affirming feeling.

In between shows, we explored Central Park, parts of which (it may surprise some to know) are so wooded that you can’t tell you’re literally in the middle of a city of more than 8 million people. I had some shawarma off a food cart. The last morning in town, after a lox bagel at my favorite bagel place, we walked the city, 8 miles on the pavement from the Theatre District down to Little Italy and back. We watched NYU students taking their graduation pictures by the arch in Washington Square (^). We sat on a bench on a brisk late-April day as a homeless man fed pigeons. We darted across intersections. We marveled at the buzz of life on every corner.

It’s not nature, granted. Maybe it’s not even natural. But it’s living.