Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost

From a magnolia tree at that most southern of Southern Mansions, Bayou Bend….

On March 27, the VietNam Buddhist Center here in Houston hosted the 8th Day of Prayer and Pilgrimage honoring Quan Am, the Bodhisattva of Compassion. It would have probably been much more interesting had I the slightest clue what I was seeing, and I’d certainly be able to tell you much more about it, but I hadn’t and I’m not… but the visual aspects of it are striking anyway.

I’m currently working my way through several hundred photographs, winnowing them down to a manageable essay for my website. I will, in due course, link to it here. In the meantime…

Beautiful weather out. Go shoot.

Update: Essay is here. Depending on your screen rez, you may have to scroll down. There are a lot of thumbnails but they’re small, so it should load cleanly.

Wound up parked outside a small cemetery the other morning, so I went for a walk. It was a cool and misty morning, peaceful, and not at all an unpleasant place to spend some time.

New years should be celebrated with parties… and dancing. But, as it happens, I seem to have been born without a sense of rhythm, and I haven’t ever managed to beg, borrow, or steal one, so I leave the dancing to other folks.

I just shoot the pictures.

“Jasmines in Bloom,” performed by one of Mitsi Shen’s students, a young lady named Tiffany.

Happy Year of the Ox… just a few days late.

This afternoon found me at Thai Spice, a restaurant in west Houston.

The healthy stuff was on the next shelf down.

All good things come to an end, or some such.

Headed home about, oh, 2:00 Saturday afternoon, “rolling along past houses, farms and fields” — which aren’t terribly photogenic from ground level. I’ve been rolling up and down I35 for decades, and the traffic was light, so cruising from A. to B. wasn’t terribly fascinating. I wound up reading billboards, looking for story ideas, new things to see, or just something to do.

“Best Kolaches in West – Next Exit” seemed worth a try. Breakfast was a few hours ago, dinner still a couple hundred miles ahead, and the stomach seemed somewhere in between.

Thanks to some confusion with a trio of motorcyclists, who seemed a little confused that a civilian was giving them right-of-way, I wasn’t able to get to the kolache shop mentioned on the billboard without a bit of radical route changing, so I headed for another one — there’s no shortage of Kolache Shops in West, which bills itself as the Czech Point of Texas.

Note to self: when stopping for kolaches in West, try to get there early in the morning. Kolaches need to be fresh from the oven; otherwise they’re just ordinary. 3:30 in the afternoon is well into “ordinary” hours. They weren’t BAD, by any means… just not “write home” good.

After lunch I noticed that the light had turned the corner and become pleasant for photographs, so I cruised slowly around West, looking for something to do with it. And it found me.

This is the First United Church of West, 310 Pine. According to the historical marker, it was built more than a hundred years ago and has been home to a number of congregations since then. It’s currently home to a small UCC congregation, the First United Church of Christ of West.

Someday I’ll go back on a Sunday morning; I’d love to see the inside.

But the light was still calling, places to go and people to see, and assignments waiting in Houston, even if there was a very friendly tomcat trying to curl up in my lap as I sat on the curb….

Had decent if not extremely friendly light from then until just before sunset, when as expected things got very pretty. Happily for me, I was even then approaching one of my favorite places to stop and stretch legs along this stretch of road. Just south of Marlin on SH 6 is this recently constructed rest stop…

So I parked for a while there, walked around for a bit, wrote a bit in my journal and drank the last dregs of coffee from my thermos while I watched the sun drop out, and headed for home. On the whole it was a good trip. I have a few pix still waiting for scanning (yes, on film….) but they’re mostly record shots; they’ll keep.