The Hammock Papers: Beautiful.

30 July 2024

Beautiful.

From the late sixties to the mid-eighties, "the very best station on the radio dial" was always playing in my Uncle Fred's cottage Up North.

Uncle Fred ... Borkum Riff tobacco in his pipe and the faintest scent of bay rum. His daily uniform consisted Bean khakis, Bermudas, or corduroys, white canvas Top-Siders, gingham button-downs in every color imaginable, Izod cardigans, and an ancient Timex dive watch. He drove a navy blue Jeep woody Wagoneer with a huge glass pipe ashtray on the console. He sailed, fished, and knew every snowmobile trail within a 50-mile radius around Higgins Lake.

His cottage had a bar in the kitchen that fascinated me as a kid, not because I wanted to get at the Crown Royal and Kessler's ("for first-aid purposes on the snowmobile"), but because of all of the other treasures it held: vacuum-sealed glass containers of Planters dry-roasted peanuts, Cheez-Its, and Schuler's rye chips, with accompanying bar cheese in the 'frig, next to the Vernor's, Faygo rock and rye, and the pull-top Budweiser (put the tab in the can after you pull it).

I'm certain that my life-long love of Gordon Lightfoot's music came from the magical time with my family spent enjoying the wondrous woods and water Up North at Uncle Fred's place (don't run on the dock) playing softly in the background on WGER.

Blue-jay screams.

It's sandwich time. Make mine hard salami and mayonnaise on rye.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL