Try to Remember

 ,,,a time in September...

With that song playing in the background, welcome to September 2026.

Memory is increasingly an interesting topic.

Try to Remember. A thing about aging is its constantly morphing casual relationship to time. Yesterday I watered everything, teeny tiny back yard in the morning in two waves of automated sweeping fans of water, relocated between their iterations. Then in the afternoon, the front, with just one and a personal session with the hose and its stream and a little struggling lilac bus in the corner of its even smaller footprint. I set a "Hey Google" reminder for each session, 45 minutes each, knowing that the odds were solid that I would forget and let the deluge continue most of the day if I did not. Contrary to intuition, water is not free.

Whilst watering, I painted. Painting is interesting these days, actually always has been for me. I lose sense of time, but I yesterday I relied on my trusty turntable and record collection to regulate the efforts I make to bring my (or others') photographs to the canvas. I listened to three full albums of Linda Ronstadt's justifiably legendary recording catalogue. I painted under coatings and some initial layers of color in fledgling efforts to bring this photograph to its acrylic life:

It's one I took with my little wide angle iPhone lens, looking out to the Bay of Alaska across Otto Kilcher's hayfield. If you know anything about the television series "Alaska: The Last Frontier" from Discovery Channel, you know that they are clearly his--he is the Yule Kilcher homestead family member who doesn't hunt. Yes, he consumes his protein and supports his life and that of his own family with products from his cattle, but he doesn't hunt like his brother Atz, now passed, and his nephews and their families. It's about the sanctity of life for him, and he's okay with the process of domesticating animals, giving them a protected life, and killing those when their time is up. To do that he needs hay, and those fields are definitely his. The summer breeze was lovely that July day, and I had just had a long chat with him, he sitting aperch his four wheeler, while exploring with my own son Colin. We parted with a hug and promises to stay in touch. 

Here's my progress so far:

It'll change. Oh, it'll change. I suspect that I'll spend days brushing and highlighting strands of hay with tones of green with yellow, and I'll experiment with techniques, and I'll do much of it with a background consisting of that golden voice of Linda--I have four more albums to listen to from my total of 11. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Ronstadt#Discography, she recorded 29, though further inspection results in only 18 that were issued on LP vinyl, not counting compilations and such. Guess a trip to The Great Escape is in order. Just 7 more to a full collection? Likely a quest.

Sometimes when I'm painting my work is informed by rhythms or other energies in the music I am listening to. I do use the Spotify, and often, but when, behind my desk chair, there are 500+ vinyl records, most in primo condition, I feel compelled to pick and choose from the tangible. This Linda journey was initially informed by the addition of ten or so new albums from her catalog I came into possession of through my work to clear out a dead friend's home after she was found on its bedroom floor over a week after her flame of creativity and pain snuffed out for the final time. As such, the grooved slabs of plastic feel a bit magical. And the voice issuing off the spinning vinyl is nothing short of magic with or without that subtext. I have Marcia in my heart when I listen. I have Otto guiding my brushes. I indulge my own flame.

Be well.

Alaska, 2026, with Colin!

 Wow what a trip!

It's the end of the first week of August, coming up on a month since I boarded a plane here in Nashville to fly to Seattle, connecting to a flight to Anchorage, where I planned to meet up with my favorite son Colin for 12 days in south central Alaska.

Just to clarify, Colin is my only son. I also have a favorite daughter, Miranda.

This will be brief, because that journey lives in my heart and I want to honor its place there. My quick answer is that it was good to be able to reach out and touch my boy. I usually tear up a little when I say that. I'm a sentimental sap. I am not ashamed of that.

Colin and me on the twin engine floatplane piloted by Captain Carl, Beluga Airlines, Homer, AK

I'm not going to summarize here, because I can link to the planning document, begun September 3, 2025, at 8:15 AM. We had been talking about it 'way earlier than that, having had our similarly planned 3 week trip planned for June 2, 2020. One word: Covid19. Like nearly every trip, there were changes, both disappointment and unexpected lagniappe, but it was one of the very best trips in my life.

In some ways, it was a journey into my original experiences in Alaska, when I traveled there with my high school friend, Steve Bettis, both of us 25 years old and both disenamored with lasting relationships through divorce from wives acquired too young. In brief, we drove the ~4,000 miles intending to visit a third leg of our high school tripod, Geoff Feiler at Rainbow Valley, 16 miles south of Anchorage. Almost 6 years later, after years of playing music for my main source of income, and as Steve was about to acquire ownership of the architectural firm he had worked for several years, I left for other adventures. He remained for his own. My experiences in those late '70s have sustained me powerfully over the years. Ah, memories.

So Colin and I, he 30 and me 76, explored Anchorage, Rainbow Valley, Seward, and Homer, along with parts in between, for our 12 days. I have described them in comments at an online album distilled from my mostly daily photo dump. Here's the link if you are of a mind tuh. If you follow that link, be sure to view the photo information link for my comments/narration. And don't hesitate to leave a comment here or at the album itself!

Thank you, Colin. Thank you Steve. And thank you most of all to my love, Lee Ann, for manning the home front whilst I indulged my urge to travel. Finally, thank you for your interest. Stay well and safe.

Some thoughts about belonging

 A little departure here. Click away if you don't want a little meditation on aging. This post began May 17, 2026. Updates noted and dated...

Contrary to what you've maybe expected, the title up there was written first thing. I may get a little self-deprecating or a little self-appreciating. I have no idea. But this post is the result of some old retired man introspection and who knows? I may just delete it after I write it. 

Note: I just connected headphones to my streaming player and put on "Sonus Choir" to play while I write. Let's consider that the soundtrack to this post. My affection for this group is biased largely upon my beautiful and talented daughter's membership in it.

So, night before last, my wife noted in conversation in between one of our nightly journeys into entertainment media on the big flatscreen over our mantel (yes, this has been festering a few hours) that I have been cancelling memberships and appointments with healers over the past week, and that I have not enrolled in my art studio class with friend and mentor Charles Brindley for nearly half a year now. Well, 5 months. All valid.

Here are my thoughts:

Yes, it has daily approached the 76th anniversary of my birth, here where we now live and love, in Nashville, Tennessee. 

Yes, a recent x-ray indicates the cause of my current dominating local pain may well be a torn meniscus tendon in my right knee. There are a lot of pains one must bear as one ages, but maybe one of my biggest is reading or hearing about old people discussing their pains. I will say that anyone my age has at very least a few, and at an average many. Also, let's get this out of the way: Anyone my age, and likely a decade younger, or older, who claims they do not have thoughts about mortality and some moments of despair over that upcoming inevitable and closing-in-too-fast condition is either 1) lying, 2) minimizing, or 3) very very lucky or very very ignorant. Mortality thoughts are about common sense, and I am clearly aware that if I had a faith or subscribed to a religious belief those musings might be a bit relieved, assuaged, at least to some degree.

Well, I don't. Have either.

And the reason that I don't may be that all my life, since early childhood, I have been wary of belonging. 

There. Cat's out of the bag. Be it church, social media, military, professional organization, political community or office, choir, school administration, or workout group, that's my take: Nah. Thanks but no thanks. My work environments have all been so central to my identity, and those disappeared, evaporated, passed, upon my retirement May 27, 2022.

I LOVE the little community that Charles has built around art and artistry, and I always enjoyed being there and interacting with other humans in its group of them, but committing to actually continuing to be one of them is something I have, eventually and perhaps temporarily, shied away from. When that mystical human addresses a room as "artists" he means it, and the ongoing work and conversation with the members has been so natural and welcoming that being amongst them has been unfalteringly lovely. I have made friends. Why not keep going on a weekly basis? Why put visits to my incredible Tai Chi master at Osher Center, Vanderbilt Hospital, or my brilliant acupuncture therapist there, on hold? 

Perhaps the answer goes back to my infancy, when as a second child I was left in a playpen for hours at a time. A memory that sticks with me is peering through playpen bars at my passed out paternal grandmother, a lit cigarette still streaming smoke from between her fingers on a hand draped down from her drunken body on the sofa across the room in our little Cadillac Drive bungalow. Maybe it's the time I was enrolled in Sunday school as a 4th-5th grader when I was in 3rd grade and bullied because of my size, never to return. Maybe it's the abuse inflicted on me by older scouts in the hallway outside the community meeting room of the Belle Meade Methodist Church, when they held me stretched out on the floor while another slammed a packed fluorescent light fixture into my groin like a post-hole digger. Or the resulting retracted testicle hernia repair, without which I would not have fathered our two young creative miracles. Heck, who am I to say?

Different perspective: What formal and informal groups have I belonged to? Let's bullet this:

• Cub and Boy Scouts
• Explorer Scouts
• a high school fraternity, Sigma Phi Omega
• an apprentice program team for a regional theatre company
• school classrooms, both attending and teaching
• a church
• jobs and work communities, including a magazine staff, restaurant/bar staffs, and various and sundry school faculties
• musical bands, as singer, guitarist, and /or mandolinist
• an artist community
• community organizer, The International Society for Technology in Education

Lemon

Aaaaaaaaand, May

 Hi y'all. May 6th here. Up in the morning and dedicated to getting something online for this month so here:

Up at 6:30 a.m. after sleeping like a proverbial baby last night. My sister-in-law Amy is sleeping, Lee Ann is at work, and here I be. Outside, past my computer monitor, the open blinds, the window, and the thriving Red Maple in our little yard, it's 50 degrees Fahrenheit with unblemished blue sky and a forecast of more of the same and a high of 80. Cool. Then warm. I camped again this past Sunday and Monday nights, bailing Tuesday morning to pick up Amy at BNA and forge home from what is normally a 20 minute airport commute to nearly an hour and a half in (ahhhhh) Nashville traffic. 

A little traffic was irritating, but not so much in the light of "news" announcements this week that more than half of "AI experts" believe there is now a more than one in ten chance that artificial intelligence will end human existence. 

Amy flew in to take her sister to Nissan Stadium to attend the Bruno Mars concert that filled the place night before last. That is so close to 40,000 humans in one place it's not worth arguing; and though the weather was threatening and drizzly, they both were still a-gaga with bright shiny fan eyes all day today. They were adorable in their evening selfies and snapshots:

Just for the record, I love these two.

As usually happens when our Denver seester is in Music City, we have eaten out twice so far, and Frankie's won the ratings war, far outdoing Bad Idea, which was aptly named. Our server at the latter was charming, but we found the food ridiculously overpriced and underwhelming. I won't go into detail, because it would be too easy and fun and I don't like to cut any restaurant a new backside, honoring the hard working service workers who are trying their best in an increasingly challenging time. I will note that the "sin tax" on liquor by the drink in Tennessee combines with standard appx. ten percent sales tax levied on everything to achieve a whopping 24.5% tax on any alcoholic beverages one might imbibe.  That makes it hard for everyone wanting to have a nice glass of wine with dinner. Five dollars tax on a 20 dollar glass of wine? I'm swearing off. Good job, fascist state government/buzzkill. 

Tonight is Friday, and we'll once again be calling Lyft or Uber to get downtown, this time to a concert featuring the inimitable Sonus Choir, to hear and see my dear dear daughter Miranda sing with this most impressive and enjoyable a 'Capella choir. 

Amy flies home to Denver tomorrow, but we get to attend a premier of symphonic rock genius Cody Fry's new documentary short film "The Unlikely Mariner", which highlights his new symphony in four movements. Why? Because Sonus performs in it, and because Miranda's much loved husband/drummer genius, Tim Buell, is also in it! Tim joined Michael W. Smith's band full-time this year, and he's on the road with Smith's 2026 tour currently. Life overfloweth.

I did another couple nights camping this past week, up at my favorite spot on the mighty Cumberland. Gonna slap a link in here to the pic album from that time. It was, as always, the schizzzzzz.

See the album

Last week in April 2026

 Well, well, here we are, the last week of April, Saturday the 25th, and I did not post in March and have almost let this one of a dozen slip by without a word. 

There have been words, though, and I'll share some of them. There has been a three night camping jaunt, some fishing, some music, a great puzzle, gardening aplenty (or meadow-tending, as may more accurately been the case), significant amounts of planning for travel in July, grown children making lives, paint applied to canvas, and if there were a god I'd say god knows what else.

I made the painting below, and shared it at my scottmerrick.me website and in Second Life at the scottmerrickdotnet gallery. It's the largest I've so far completed, and that because I found a castaway canvas from art.com in one of the alleys my Lemon walks with me and drove back to fetch it. I picked up a fresh jar of white gesso at Michael's art supply store and slathered layer after layer on it to overpaint its mass produced image and ready it for painting, then I began throwing ideas and textures at it, knowing I would find images in the resulting mess. When I think of sculpture, in particular the sort that involves some carving, I often remember the description I read somewhere in my past about an artist bringing out the embedded life within a piece of wood or stone or clay. Most bronze work is created with casts made of carved other material, I do think, and so there you go with my criterion for this painting. 

At the end of it, when my senses said it was almost done, I saw three shapes that suggested candles, and my final act was painting three black shapes indicating wicks. Though I had intended to paint candle flames, I stopped just short of that, opting for the unfulfilled, the thing the viewer can add, completing the piece her or himself, or themselves. I call this, at 36"x48", "candlesinthemaelstrom". 

I spent some time a couple weeks ago at my favorite camping spot. For me, it's ideal, open, shady with hundred year old pecan trees, close to home, and riverside. It's at Lock-A, Cheatham Dam Campground, an Army Corps of Engineers getaway just the other side of Ashland City. That is all for now. Excepting: 

Take a look at my little Google Photos album of the 3 nights camping at Lock-A in Cheatham County.