Tag Archives: dilapidated

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July 14, 2015

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Excursion 40 (10/11/2014)

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Excursion 40, Part 1 (Shorter Days, Longer Memories)

Ohio is a state with four seasons and, arguably, three of them suck.  But even the grumpiest Buckeye would admit that Ohio is wonderful in the fall.  This is the Ohio of the Calvin and Hobbes Sunday strips.  Cool, comfortable weather; the exciting smell of that first true fall day; the leaves, oh, those glorious leaves.  Couple all that with the human excitement of back to school, football season, Halloween and Thanksgiving, and you just have a swell old time.

Each October I spend a lot of time in the Cleveland area, on my other money-wasting hobby.  These past few years I have not driven straight back to Columbus, but rather used the fact of being in Cleveland to launch an excursion into some area of northeast Ohio.  That is what I did in October 2014 as I began my 40th formal photographic excursion across my beloved home state.

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May 25, 2015

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Excursion 38 (9/19/2014)

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Excursion 38, Part 2 (Unease among the Truffula Trees)

This is the continuation of my recounting of my 38th excursion across Ohio in September 2014.  The first half of my trip consisted primarily of an exploration of the southern Ohio town of Chillicothe.  After I had my fill of the Chill, I headed southeast out of town into the rural Appalachian woods of Ohio, always a treat for me.

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May 22, 2015

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Excursion 38 (9/19/2014)

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Excursion 38, Part 1 (Brick, Brick, O Beautiful Brick)

We humans are a social species, which I guess why one of the most comforting feelings we can experience is the feeling of belonging.  I’ll give you an example of what I mean.  I was born in northeastern Pennsylvania, where my father is from, but my parents moved our family to El Paso, Texas, where my mother is from, when I was only four years old.

From the time I was four until the time I was sixteen years old, I never saw any of my father’s family:  my grandmother, my aunt and various uncles, their spouses and children, not to mention a variety of cousins, great-uncles and great-aunts, godparents, and the like.  We simply couldn’t afford a cross-country trip like that.  But when I was a teenager, I had an opportunity to go to West Point, New York, for what was essentially a week-long attempt by the USMA to recruit national merit scholars.  We arranged the trip so that I could travel first to Wilkes-Barre and spend time with the family there.

I was nervous about that, as my only contact with any of these folks was through scratchy long-distance phone calls and the occasional holiday card.  But to my relief, surprise, joy, call it what you will, from the moment I landed and reconnected with these long-lost relatives, I felt like they were family.  I felt like I belonged.  Is that DNA?  Luck?  Maybe we Pitcavages simply have charisma oozing out of our pores.  In any case, it was a wonderful feeling.

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May 9, 2015

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Excursion 37 (9/8/2014)

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Excursion 37 (The Seven Deadly Scenes)

In 2014, I made many trips to Chicago for work and, when possible, tried to bring along a camera in order to take photographs during the Ohio portion of the trip.  In early September 2014, I made one such trip.  Time pressures allowed me little time for back-roads journeying on the trip, but I did manage to take a precious few shots, most centered around an interesting abandoned homestead.   I present them here, without any thematic or pseudo-philosophic commentary.  Count your blessings.

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May 2, 2015

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Excursion 36 (9/5/2014)

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Excursion 36 (The Greenhouse Effect)

One of the easiest ways to spot when a historian does not know something is to look for the language they use to try to hide that fact.  For example, the sentence “Undoubtedly, George Washington was angry when he got the letter” actually means “I have no idea whatsoever how Washington felt, but I’m going with ‘mad.’”  Undoubtedly is one of the most common ways historian admit ignorance, but they have many similar stock phrases, all of which basically boil down to “this is my guess.”  The fact is, though, that it is hard to know stuff.  Any historian worth his or her salt will be painfully aware of all the little (or not so little) gaps of knowledge in anything they write.  Sometimes the line beyond the gaps goes pretty straight, so it is not too hard to leap the gap and still be on the right path.  But sometimes you just fall into the gap.

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April 26, 2015

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Excursion 35 (8/22/2014)

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Excursion 35 (Cottages, Cabins, and Schools, Oh My!)

I’ve always been interested in foreign words that have no equivalent in English—unless English decides to appropriate them, such as schadenfreude.  If you think about it, without a word to express a concept, we don’t even really have that concept, do we?  Our culture is the poorer for it, in most cases.  Take the French concept of esprit de l’escalier—literally, “wit of the staircase.”  Imagine leaving the apartment of your significant other after he or she has just cruelly broken up with you.  As you trudge down the stairs, you suddenly begin to think of all the retorts and responses you should have made—only you didn’t think of them until just now.  That is the wit of the staircase.  It is a perfect concept—why is there no English word for it?

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April 20, 2015

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Excursion 34 (8/11/2014)

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Excursion 34 (Eight Easy Pieces)

This is such a short blog entry that a long introduction would be misleading.  Those who hate random binges of nostalgia can rejoice.  During 2014, I had to make a number of work trips to Chicago and on August 11, I made one of them.  During the Ohio portion of my drive, I managed to take a few photographs.  Some of those I have included here.  That’s all she wrote.

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April 11, 2015

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Excursion 33 (7/28/2014)

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Excursion 33 (The Fire Lurks Below)

Artists, they say, can become fascinated with certain subjects, returning to them over and over again because the subjects are so compelling.  Of course, the same is true for stalkers.  I am no artist, but I do confess that certain sights I see on my excursions manage to exert a certain hold on me, sending out their siren call long after I have departed the premises.  Though I always want to explore and see new things, in the time I have been engaging in this little hobby, a few places have so intrinsically interested me that I have returned to them, sometimes more than once.

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April 10, 2015

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Excursion 32 (6/7/2014)

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Excursion 32, Part 2 (In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions)

Once upon a time, before thumb drives and smart phones, people actually had to remember things.  Do you remember that?  No?  Look it up on your smart phone; I’ll wait.  The ancient Greeks and Romans sometimes used a technique called the Method of Loci (i.e., places).  It’s more commonly called a memory palace.  The idea behind a memory palace—an idea stolen by the movie Inception—is that you create in your mind some sort of reality, like a house or museum or row of shops—or a palace.  When you want to remember something, you “store” it in a particular place in this mindscape.  For example, you may remember your locker combination by “storing” it inside the disgustingly pink vase on the mantel over the fireplace in the living room of your mind mansion.  It is the combination of the item and its virtual surroundings that create a memory connection for you.  It’s kind of like a mnemonic only in space rather than via words or sounds.

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April 2, 2015

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Excursion 32 (6/7/2014)

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Excursion 32, Part 1 (Mosaic of the Past)

I have such an odd memory.  I remember things that I read or write extremely well, and I have a historian’s command of the irrelevant detail.  But when it comes to my personal life, my memory is such an odd jumble.  I can’t really compare it with someone else’s memory, of course, having experienced only my own, but it is so fragmentary, so impressionistic.  My oldest memories are all just a few seconds long, if that:  my mother outside the house trying to use a broom to keep water from the basement, rolling a Hot Wheel down a table (I don’t know if our house was completely level), pedaling a Big-Wheel-like contraption around my grandmother’s store/house, seeing something weird (a bat?) flying around in my bedroom, being in the back seat of our car when my parents spelled the word “i-c-e-c-r-e-a-m.”  Things like that.  Concrete or sequential memories are much rarer.  I do remember one, perhaps because I learned a lesson.  I remember watching “I Love Lucy” on television, then us turning off the tv and going somewhere.  When I got back, I turned the tv on to finish watching “I Love Lucy” only to discover some other program was on.  That was when I discovered that when you turned the tv set off, tv programs kept going.  Well, they used to, my young on-demand, streaming darlings, they used to.

That is what you might expect for memories of someone 3-4 years old, but the thing is, that is the way all my memories are.  That is the way my high school memories are—momentary, fragmentary, mixed up.  That is the way my college memories are.  Oh, I remember more things, but what is amazing to me is how much I have not remembered—whereas I can tell you with certainly the most obscure details about World War II, something I never came close to experiencing.  In some respects I know more about the world I did not live in than the world I lived in.  That’s reality giving me an atomic wedgie, that is. Continue reading →