Daily Doses of Blogshine Brightens Lifes

Yesterday, Saturday, was an unusual day. In the morning, I found that Kaye Barley, down in Boone, North Carolina, had sent me E-mail. I was running late for a meeting and didn’t take time to read the message.

At the meeting, I had a chance to talk with a retired schoolteacher who once worked with my wife. I learned that she became a widow some eight months ago. From that point our conversation turned to the reasons why neither of us have moved when all the members of our respective families reside at out-of-town locations. It is a complicated situation. One that many folks do not understand. And we both agreed that it is hard to explain why we continue to live in a situation that can become rather lonely at times.

When I arrived home and read Kaye Barley’s E-mail, I discovered she had pegged cobbledstones as one of five Blog sites to receive The Dardos Award.

It is passed on for “recognition of cultural, ethical, literary, and personal values transmitted in the form of creative and original writing. These stamps were created with the intention of promoting fraternization between bloggers, a way of showing affection and gratitude for work that adds value to the Web."

After my experience of talking with the widow, and reading the explanation of the award, the words in Kaye’s E-mail struck a special note. She said, “You know, sometimes we just don't know how blessed we are. Sometimes we need to stop and remember the people in our lives who are special to us and thank them for being there. And for the gifts they bring us.”

That made me stop and realize the role that Blogs now play in my life. I no longer read the daily newspaper. Nothing changes except the names. The types of white-color crimes, political shenanigans, and celebrity scandals remained the same. The Blogs I read present a much more pleasant view of the world.

So, I spent a goodly amount of time thinking about the Blogs I read, and why, before I picked five to recognize with a Dardos Award. By doing so, I am not just echoing the quoted meaning of the award, but more importantly, I am saying a big thank you for what each of the Blogs contribute to my life these days.

The only significance to the order is that they are alphabetical by surname. If you are not a reader of these five, stop by and see what they can add to your life.


Susan Whittig Albert: The world of Academia lost a great asset when the first vice president of Southwest Texas State University walked away to become a novelist. But as one who loves her novels I’m glad she did. China Bayles is the kid sister I never had.

Chester D. Campbell: He is a fellow Tennessean. We both earned our sheepskins by hiking up and down The Hill in Knoxville. We both have printer’s ink in our veins from newspaper days. He spends his golden years by writing mystery novels, which is an incentive for me to keep plugging.

Vicki Lane: With words and photographs, she takes me back to a part of the country where I was raised. I capture her photos and add them to my “Day in the Mountains” screen saver. It’s a slide show with the Ken Burns affect that lets me sit back and watch a world I love glide by.

Louise Penny: During winter days her Blog is a source of warmth. When I start thinking it is cold here in Virginia, I read her “weather reports” from north of the forty-eighth and start feeling warmer immediately. However, during the other three seasons, I have this urge to move to Three Pines.

Vicki Stiefel: Not only is this lady an award-winning writer, she is a superb photographer of the New England scene and shares her photos generously. I also can add that her husband, William Tapply, is a super guy and excellent author himself, but I don’t think he’s a blogger. If he were, it might have been a hard choice. But then he does not do photography.

Readers Want Authors to Have a “Voice,” But Do We Always Listen As We Should?

One of the benchmarks for judging the success of a creative writer is a unique style, or as it is referred to among aficionados of the novel, having a unique “voice.” But do we always “listen?”

We are all taught, as a part of growing up, to listen, to pay attention when someone is speaking. Is that piece of practical advice applicable to books when reading?

This question came to mind after The Old Cobbler finished one book and turned to another one, written in a totally different style, or “voice.” I had been playing catch-up on C. J. Box’s series featuring Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett. WINTERKILL was my third Joe Pickett read in a row.

Anyone who is familiar with this series knows that Box tells the story in a “voice” that does not allow much time to breath. One gulps down the story a page at a time, like eating a bowl of chuck wagon stew and hot biscuits after a long hard day.

After these three quick reads, I turned to Louise Penny’s A RULE AGAINST MURDER. If Box’s “voice” is stew to be gobbled down, Penny’s “voice’ is an entrée that must be eaten slowly.

Her stories are so laden with layered flavoring that a hasty approach will miss much of the story. This I learned from her first three novels. But it was a lesson I did not remember until I was some twenty pages into A RULE AGAINST MURDER and found myself not following the story.

The “listening” portion of my brain was still set on warp speed from following Box’s “voice” as he took Joe Pickett through the final scenes of WINTERKILL, set in the midst of a Wyoming winter.

I took a break, reminded my brain that I was “hearing” a vastly different “voice,” that I needed to slow down and pay closer attention. Going back to page one and doing that produced a quantum leap in my understanding of what was going on.

This experience made me again aware that some writers, like Louise Penny and Jane Haddam have a “voice” that demands a disciplined approach, demands full attention to every word if significant facts of the story are not to be missed.

This also made me start thinking about the words readers use when describing their experiences with a book. Such descriptions as “zipped,” “sped,” “rushed,” read hastily,” and “flew threw” seem to appear more often than their antonyms.

It is not that I would expect readers to say they read a book slowly. Right after being told we should listen came the admonition that being a slow reader was not a good thing. So who would admit it in today’s society if their fate were to be a slow reader?

All of which leads me to a second thought. A traditional published book goes through a process that puts more emphasis on events and roles being clearly spelled out than an edit to check the correctness of every colon, comma, and semi-colon.

Yet I never ceased to be amazed at the number of comments from readers who say after having read a book that they didn’t understand what happened, or what role a character played in the story.

All of which leads to this question. While we insist that authors develop a “voice,” do we sometimes not “listen,” take enough time to read and understand what that “voice” is saying?

Country Boy Learned Lessons for Life From An Evening Of Square Dancing

The idea that the Internet being a window through which one could relive a half-century old experience never occurred to The Old Cobbler until I discovered two photographs recently. The first one was among hundreds of family snapshots in an old box that had not been opened in many years.

It took a moment to remember that it was a photograph from the first out-of-town trip I took with my parents when we did not spend the night at the home of a relative. We went to what is now called the Cumberland Falls State Resort Park.

Today, the resort is a short, hour and a half drive along Interstate 75 north from Knoxville, Tennessee. But the trip we took back in the early 1950s, as I remember it, was a drive along curvy and hilly two-lane roads that took most of the day.

We stayed at the Dupont Lodge, a rustic structure built in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps,the group that developed the entire area around a waterfall on the Cumberland River. The river, 125-feet wide, plunges sixty feet into a rocky gorge.

Called the “Niagara of the South,” the falls are the site of a phenomenon that exists nowhere else in the Western Hemisphere. On a clear night with a full moon, a moon bow can be seen in the mist of the falling water.


It’s not the moon bow I remember, but a long forgotten event,dredged from memory by the photograph below.
It’s the dining room at the Dupont Lodge, an older photograph, showing the room very much as I remember it from over a half century ago.

The first night we stayed at the lodge, it was announced that after the dinner period ended, a square dance would be held in the dinning room. I had heard of such, but never seen one, and wanted to watch.

My parents told me I could stay until the dance was over, but they were going back to their room. The rooms at the lodge were small, had only one bed, and I was staying by myself next door to my parents.

When the tables were cleared, everyone began to move the tables and chairs back against the walls, clearing the floor. I was a kid in a room full of strangers, didn’t know what was going to happen, and I remember feeling very uncomfortable as I stood in a corner and watched what was going on.

The man I later learned was the “caller,” the one who told the dancers what to do, said he wanted everybody to join in, if anyone saw folks who weren’t with the group, then grab them and get them out on the floor.

I don’t remember who did the grabbing, but I ended up with a large group of people in a circle out on the floor. The caller said it wasn’t that hard, that all we had to do was listen to him and watch the other folks. As it turned out, I wasn’t the only one who didn’t know how to square dance.

The details during the rest of the evening are beyond recall, except that it was a lot of fun. Everybody seemed to laugh and joke about making mistakes, having as much fun doing that as doing things correctly.

I grew up to have a working career that quite often put me in front of groups of people I didn’t know. I never felt self-consciousness. And I didn’t worry about making a mistake. I knew the strangers would laugh with me, not at me.

No thought had ever been given to how things worked out until I found those two photographs. In retrospect, I suspect that a big part of that self-confidence came from that one night in the life of a young country boy who learned as much about people he did not know as he did about square dancing.