This place is made for kids.
There are no sharp edges, nothing to scrape or cut, no nails, splinters, burrs or broken glass. The brightly colored posts can be walked around but are not easily climbed, colors are primary, and water falls from the triangular sails like a cool rain. The shapes here are organic and you can hide behind,or touch to your heart’s content.
Children’s voices are amplified and they are involved in their play, walking and running, under, and through the water. Their voices make a soothing melody. Besides the sails that give shade,there is a green sea serpent in the middle of this installation and a maroon lighthouse that gives the park its nautical theme.
The kids are happy this morning, inquisitive, co-operative, playful.
Temperatures will rise into the nineties with no rain forecast for the next several weeks, and, if I’m a kid, I can’t think of a better place to be while my adults are acting like bigger kids somewhere else.
The need to make music is a human one.
By the Fountain Hills Park lake is an outside music area. In a tight circle are eight different music makers, You can hammer tubes, strike bells, bang on cans, waggle ropes that move noisemakers, make sounds to call the cows home.
All the instruments are unattended this morning, so, having the area, all to myself, I pick up a mallet and take a turn at one of them.
This must have been how these instruments were discovered. Some cave man hit a mastodon skull with a rib bone, and, to his delight, the first melody in the world was composed.
Hitting a small piece of metal with a mallet to get noise is easy.
What is hard is to make a combination of noises, in the right order, with the right rhythm, that sound like music.
Musicians have been wrestling with this conundrum since the dawn of time.
I make myself a little melody and have fun.
That is, I’ve heard many learned musicians say, ” the point of music.”
In the front courtyard of a vacant home for sale in Fountain Hills, Arizona, a bird has made her nest in a God’s flowing locks..
She, quietly, doesn’t move as I peek through the house windows into sad, empty rooms where someone used to live.
By the time this house is sold, her eggs will be hatched, her babies will try their wings and fly away to start their own families, build or find their own nests.
God’s, some believe, write our scripts and they write them intentionally with miscues, forgotten lines, improbable entrances and exits, all at the Director’s discretion.
Personally, I would prefer a long boring script instead of a short intense one, but God’s have a manner and method all their own. I’m sure I have been given what I need instead of what I want.
If I could fly, I’d nest in this God’s gentle locks too and take my parenting as serious as this Mom.
Golf, as invented in the Scottish countryside, started with sticks and a ball.
Those old guys hit the little hand made wood ball for a distant hole dug in the ground, added traps and water later to make the game harder. They created a rule book and came up with tournaments and prizes to keep competition interesting and playing the game seem more noble than it is. Hitting a small ball with a stick with a club head, and getting it to go where you want it to, is a devilishly difficult skill.
Frisbee golf has recently become popular with the younger crowd. There is a frisbee golf course around this Fountain Hills Lake and it features eighteen designated holes. There are no traps but the goal is the same – get the frisbee around the course in the fewest amount of strokes, or throws.
These guys are practicing this morning for their Sunday tournament today, and, by empty picnic benches, competitors are stretching, taking their frisbees out of Wal Mart tote bags and wiping them down with a clean rag.These two contestants tell me there are different sized frisbees for the different shots they have to make in a round. They let me try my hand and toss one of their plastic plates at a close by practice hole they are using to warm up before their tournament begins. I give a toss and manage to land the frisbee inside the little upright basket where it is supposed to go.
There is room in this world, I believe, for ” frisbee golf. ”
After a round of ” frisbee golf ” I expect all these ” golfers” will easily be found at their ” nineteenth hole ” just as we go there after our rounds on our local courses.
Drinking predates golf by thousands of years, and explaining why your score was so high is always easier with a cold beer, chips and dip.
Whether it is real golf, or frisbee golf, GOLF is still, since it was made up, a four letter word.
Even if golf tests your temper and ego, it easily beats work, still another four letter word we all LOVE to HATE.
This morning, the Fountain goes off at nine sharp, the same time as all the local businesses open. Ducks cruise past it like little feathered boats as a steady geyser of water is propelled several hundred feet into the air.
I film the eruption from several directions and barely get it all into my camera viewfinder.
I’m not sure I would come to Fountain Hills just to see this fountain, but, being here, it is icing on the Fountain Hills cake.
In the desert, you see lots of things that don’t seem to fit.
Why, in the middle of a desert that sees less than ten inches of rain a year, would there be a lake? Who, in their right mind, would build a fountain that shoots up several hundred feet in the air?
Regardless of the fountain’s history, I’m duly impressed with the ability of the human race to come up with engineering marvels that still can’t out do what Mother Nature routinely does, even without putting her make-up on.
Playing Alto Sax is no easy affair.
Playing solo, in public, with no supporting team, is similar to shooting a game winning basketball free throw, in a championship series, with everything on the wire.
Parmenio plays with spirit.
There is room, in music, for all of us.
Even though our two playing styles and melodies are different, we alto sax addicts have to deal with intonation, technique, and what goes on between our ears when we throw sheet music away and play from our hearts.
Hearing another alto sax player who plays because he wants to is a joy.
We all play because we love it, but there are times I want to put my horn up for sale.
Melodies, like words, don’t always come easy.
It rains in the Caribbean. This rain has blown in this afternoon and sends me sheltering under a roof overhang on one of the main streets in the Zona Colonia.
People, on motorcycles, wrapped in large plastic trash bags, zip through the streets and get out of the weather in nearby parking garages. Security guards have a leisurely smoke and dogs are nowhere to be seen as water puddles, rain droplets hit your outstretched hands like little needle pricks.
Afternoon rains here are regular in March.
When we were little, in Albuquerque, we would go out after a rain like this and make little dams in the street gutters to stop the flow of runoff. Our efforts were not always successful. We would go home soaked to the bone and leave our clothes on the back porch before we went inside to change and have dinner.
While I love the rain, I love it the most when I can watch it and stay dry.
Building dams in street gutters is kid stuff but kid stuff takes a long time to rub off.
Games of choice on the neighborhood streets seem to be dominoes and chess but I have also seen checkers and card games with money on the table.
This street corner game, in progress,even has an official scorekeeper who shouts out the score at the end of each game and visits his cell phone often. Some of us pedestrians stop to watch. This is likely an ongoing game between friends who have money and/or bragging rights involved.
The men don’t talk much. They slap their dominoes on the board when they make a play. When they shuffle the dominoes to start each new game in the series, it sounds like feet hitting the floor in a salsa dance.
It is quitting time, with darkness starting to move in, and the most conspicuous thing missing is rum.
When this tournament is over, the players and onlookers will go into the nearby colmado and take care of drinking business.
It doesn’t cost much to sit on this corner. When one tournament is over, different players take seats at the table and start another. There is luck involved as well as skill. You can have good dominoes but it you don’t play them right they aren’t worth a damn
No one says anything about my picture taking, and, I wouldn’t expect them too.
These guys wives, and girlfriends, know where they are.
The last police band i saw was in Cuenca, at a celebration for ex-pats and foreign business development in that Ecuadorian city.
This Santo Domingo events aim is to support women and fight domestic violence in Latin America.This police band provides some of the entertainment. There are uniformed officers patrolling all the tourist destinations in this ” old City.”. and, except for getting hustled to buy things you don’t want or solicited to take a guided tour from one of the many guides in the area, the Zone is very safe.
The police band’s music is contagious, in a good way.
It is good for the police to show their gentle side since most of their job deals with locking up family, friends, and strangers who choose not to follow rules.
Police are still humans, we sometimes forget, who wear guns, handcuffs, badges, drive official vehicles. play in the police band, and put people in jail.
They can never lose their humanity no matter how much bad they have to clean up.
When public servants and institutions lose their humanity, we all lose.
We listen to a lot of talking heads but this guy actually makes sense.
As an employer, you don’t have to pay his wages, retirement, medical benefits or deal with his personal issues that cost you money. Fred stays where you put him and does as he is programmed. He won’t steal from you, misrepresent what your business does, and always dresses appropriately.
As a traveler, Fred gives me information I can use, and, he is easy to walk away from.
As a watcher of trends, Fred seems, to me, to be a harbinger of our coming dystopian future.
When we listen to ” fake people ” we have already been positioned where someone else wants us.
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